The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [70]
The primitive connection between gift-increase and usury may also be seen in Roman law, where usura originally meant a charge for the loan of a fungible (i.e., any perishable and nonspecific good whose use consists of its consumption). The examples given of fungibles are almost always organic goods, such as grain, which, like gifts, increase through use: if a man borrows a bushel of seed grain, his use of the loan consumes the loan, but if he is prudent, his use will also increase it—the grain he harvests will be more than the grain he plants. And when he returns the bushel he borrowed, he includes with it the usura, the fruit of its use. If both sides of the exchange are gifts, the usura is the expression of gratitude.
But I must stop here. This connection between usury and gifts is a fable I have invented to speak of ancient history. Perhaps I am right—the earliest senses of “usury” may well derive from the increase attendant upon gift exchange; but as we all know, the term does not in fact refer to that increase. When it first appears, “usury” is already distinct from gift-increase, for in pure gift exchange there is no need to speak of the increase in this intentional manner. The man who gives a gift drops the shells on the ground, saying, “Take this food I cannot eat,” and keeping silent as to the matter of any return. He certainly does not say, “The usura will be ten percent per annum.” To ask for interest on loaned wealth is to reckon, articulate, and charge its increase. The idea of usury therefore appears when spiritual, moral, and economic life begin to be separated from one another, probably at the time when foreign trade, exchange with strangers, begins.* As we saw in an earlier chapter, wherever property circulates as a gift, the increase that accompanies that circulation is simultaneously material, social, and spiritual; where wealth moves as a gift, any increase in material wealth is automatically accompanied by the increased conviviality of the group and the strengthening of the hau, the spirit of the gift. But when foreign trade begins, the tendency is to differentiate the material increase from the social and spiritual increase, and a commercial language appears to articulate the difference. When exchange no longer connects one person to another, when the spirit of the gift is absent, then increase does not appear between gift partners, usury appears between debtors and creditors.
Islamic laws concerning usury support the intuition that the idea of usury originally appeared in order to mark the distinction between gift giving and the market. I spoke earlier of increase as having a vector or direction: in a gift society, the increase follows the gift and is itself given away, while in a market society the increase (profit, rent, interest) returns to its “owner.” The material quantity of the increase could be the same in both cases, but the social and spiritual increase cannot, for the feeling-bond—and all that is attendant upon it—does not appear when the increase does not circulate as a gift. The Koran distinguishes in essentially these terms between lawful increase, which comes of gift giving (gifts to the poor, in particular) and unlawful increase, usury (riba). “God shall blot out usury, but almsgiving shall bring increase,” reads a verse in the second Sûra. “What ye put out at usury to increase it with the substance of others, shall have no increase from God,” says a later verse. The Koran permits a man who has given a gift to receive a return gift of greater worth. But they must both be gifts: to loan a thing under condition that it be returned with increase is usury. Increase borne of a gift