The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [73]
II• A Scarcity of Grace
The property consciousness of the New Testament is like that of Saint Gertrude, who said, “The commoner property is, the holier it is.” When someone asks, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan. Compassion, not blood, makes one a brother. This spirit changes the boundary of the tribe. The house of Israel has no wall (except faith) after Jesus travels to Tyre and Sidon and is himself moved by the faith of the Canaanite woman.
Jesus continually separates the marketplace from the Kingdom. We all know the stories. He teaches that a person should “lend expecting nothing in return”; his prayer asks the Lord to “forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.”He drove out all “who sold and bought in the temple and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.” When Jesus is preparing himself for crucifixion and burial, a woman anoints his head with fine oil. This is the occasion upon which he says, “Ye have the poor always with you,” in reply to a suggestion by the disciples that they take the ceremonial oil and sell it to get some money to give to the poor. As usual, they have been a little slow to catch on. They are thinking of the price of oil as they sit before a man preparing to treat his body as a gift of atonement. We might take Jesus’s reply to mean that poverty (or scarcity) is alive and well inside their question, that rich and poor will be with them so long as they cannot feel the spirit when it is alive among them.
The Christians in the early Church lived in a kind of primitive communism, sharing their property. The problem of usury did not receive much attention until after the Church and the Empire had joined. Benjamin Nelson, in his book The Idea of Usury,* cites Saint Ambrose of Milan as one of the first of the Church Fathers to try to apply a Christian conscience to the Old Testament law. Ambrose addresses usury in his fourth-century De Tobia; he retains Moses’s double standard but he changes the terms. The “brother” is now anyone in the Church. “For every people which, first, is in the faith, then under Roman law, is your brother.” He is a brother who is “your sharer in nature and your co-heir in grace.”
Saint Ambrose also has a feeling for the effect of the original permission to charge usury to a foreigner, however, and he allows that Christians may collect usury from enemies of the Church:
Upon him whom you rightly desire to harm, against whom weapons are lawfully carried, upon him usury is legally imposed. On him whom you cannot easily conquer in war, you can quickly take vengeance with the hundredth. From him exact usury whom it would not be a crime to kill. He fights without a weapon who demands usury; without a sword he revenges himself upon an enemy, who is an interest collector from his foe. Therefore where there is the right of war, there is also the right of usury.
The charging of interest is an aggressive act whenever it goes beyond marking the boundary between peoples, and though in Deuteronomy this may not have been the intent of the permission to practice usury, it can clearly be the effect. Curiously enough, it does not seem to have occurred to Saint