The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Several centuries later, St. Bernard of Siena, in a statement of which the sanctity seems as doubtful as the logic, takes St. Ambrose's argument even further.

Temporal goods are given to men for the worship of the true God and the Lord of the Universe. When, there­fore, the worship of God does not exist, as in the case of God's enemies, usury is lawfully exacted, because this is not done for the sake of gain, but for the sake of the Faith; and the motive is brotherly love, namely, that God's enemies may be weakened and so return to Him; and further because the goods they have do not belong to them, since they are rebels against the true faith; they shall therefore devolve upon the Christians.

The majority, however, starting from the Gospel, command that we are to treat all men, even our enemies, as brothers, held that the Deuteronomic permission was no longer valid, so that under no circumstances was usury permissible. Thus,

^XN.B. For the quotations which follow, I am indebted to Benjamin Nelson's fascinating book The Idea of Usury,

Princeton University Press.

St. Thomas Aquinas, who was also, no doubt, influenced by Aristotle's condemnation of usury, says:

The Jews were forbidden to take usury from their brethren, i.e., from others Jews. By this we are given to understand that to take usury from any man is simply evil, because we ought to treat every man as our neighbor and brother, especially in the state of the Gospel whereto we are called. They were permitted, however, to take usury from foreigners, not as though it were lawful, but in order to avoid a greater evil, lest to wit, through avarice to which they were prone, according to Isaiah LVI, VII, they should take usury from Jews, who were worshippers of God.

On the Jewish side, talmudic scholars had some interesting interpretations. Rashi held that the Jewish debtor is forbidden to pay interest to a fellow Jew, but he may pay interest to a Gentile. Maimonides, who was anxious to prevent Jews from being tempted into idolatry by associating with Gentiles, held that a Jew might borrow at usury from a Gentile, but should not make loans to one, on the ground that debtors are generally anxious to avoid their creditors, but creditors are obliged to seek the company of debtors.

Had Shakespeare wished to show Shylock the usurer in the most unfavorable light possible, he could have placed him in a medieval agricultural society, where men become debtors through misfortunes, like a bad harvest or sickness for which they are not responsible, but he places him in a mercantile society, where the role played by money is a very different one.

When Antonio says:

I neither lend nor borrow By taking or by giving of excess

he does not mean that, if he goes into partnership with an­other merchant contributing, say, a thousand ducats to their venture, and their venture makes a profit, he only asks for a thousand ducats back. He is a merchant and the Aristotelian argument that money is barren and cannot breed money, which he advances to Shylock, is invalid in his own case.

This change in the role of money had already been recog­nized by both Catholic and Protestant theologians. Calvin, for example, had come to the conclusion that the Deuteronomic injunction had been designed to meet a particular political situation which no longer existed.

The law of Moses is political and does not obligate us beyond what equity and the reason of humanity suggest. There is a difference in the political union, for the situa­tion in which God placed the Jews and many circum­stances permitted them to trade conveniendy among themselves without usuries. Our union is entirely differ­ent. Therefore I do not feel that usuries are forbidden to us simply, except in so far as they are opposed to equity and charity.