Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [38]
The Dialectics of Casuistry and Tolerance
Usury has continued to proliferate in Rome and more generally throughout the country. Because it necessarily entails the timing of interest payments, the church condemned it as especially heinous on the grounds that time, as a common good, was the property of God, and, as such, could not legitimately be appropriated for human use.27 Usurers' precision in recalling debts parodies the theological calculus of the confessional but extorts redemption instead of bestowing it. Moreover, usurers measure the amount of interest in proportion to the lapse of time, but are-in practice and by reputationopportunistically willing to compromise that precision and relax their stranglehold just sufficiently to force debtors to find some way of paying them off, usually by going into further debt to other usurers.
People who fell into usurers' hands directly confronted the imperfections both of their own souls and of the social world in which they lived. Rome is not only the capital of the church and of the Italian state; it is also, for many, the capital of usury.28 The state's internal divisions and structural weaknesses are perhaps most clearly illustrated by its spectacular failure to curb this evil, the wages of a collective original sin. By comparison with usury, the state's own practice of forgiving fines in exchange for a partial payment is more redemptive than punitive (although it was also advantageous to a system of government that was, and is, chronically strapped for ready cash. But the failure of the state to control the banks and their operators in an effective way has driven many a poor merchant and artisan into the hands of the usurers, making the state and the banks complicit in the perpetuation of a practice that is also the source of profound and unending distress. If, as James Aho has argued, the emergence of precise bookkeeping in the form of double-entry accounting was an extension of the careful accounting of sins in the confessional, leading to the emergence of post-Reformation idioms of accountability in civic management, an equally careful but socially and theologically pernicious form of calculation insidiously reasserts temporality through the downward spiral of debt that characterizes the practice of usury.29
While Italy, a predominantly Catholic country, nevertheless later turned to post-Reformation models of civic virtue as these have been articulated in powerful countries to the north, real life offers alternatives that are more compatible with the intimate needs and religious practices of local society. This is what produces the sometimes cynical, and always practical, recognition of divergence between civic ideals and social practice. People watch the activities of supposedly civic-minded authorities with an eye jaundiced by experience, for they know that bureaucrats, like priests in the confessional, do not always practice what they preach, and that the call for ethical self-examination is no guarantee of compliance. In this, too, the church's earthly regime serves as a template for people's understanding of the modern secular state that has succeeded it.
While usury is formally a mortal sin, because it represents an antisocial act tantamount to cannibalism according to many of the medieval preachers, its social utility and the professions of friendship that accompany it effectively render it more like the redeemable features of fallen humanity-that is, the consequences of original sin. The casuistry of exceptions opened up vast possibilities for those willing to risk their souls in the pursuit of profit. By the end