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By Root 828 0

their enemies. Around 1555 Melanchthon distinguished between two kinds of loan, one officiosa and the other damnosa. When a man loans his neighbor an amount he can easily spare for a short time, the loan is officiosa and should be free. A damnosa loan, on the other hand, is any forced loan, any loan with no fixed time for repayment, or “sums freely invested with merchants in the form of a partnership.” As the creditor risks a loss in all such contracts, Melanchton wrote, “the rule of equality demands that he receive a compensation, which is called interesse, amounting to no more than five percent.” Luther himself made similar discriminations, condemning usuries of 60 percent, for example, but allowing an 8 percent return on annuities. By the end of the Reformation a new double language had been firmly established for the new double standard. In the eyes of the Lord, usury is still a sin and rightly condemned. But in the everyday world, interest is both necessary and just. Interest is civil usury; now we have capitalism.

There is a way in which these distinctions—between interest and usury, between moral and civil law—revive the dichotomy the Middle Ages had tried to lay aside. Moses, Saint Ambrose, and Luther all recognize two laws. However, though it is related to its predecessors, the distinction that Luther makes is radically different.

In the first place, it is a different thing that is divided in two. In the Old Testament, mankind as a whole is seen as either Brother or Other, and an Israelite conducts himself differently depending on whom he is with. Now each man is divided. The church and the state may be separate but each man partakes of both. When each man has a civil and a moral part, the brother and the stranger live side by side in his heart. Now when I meet someone on the street he is either alien or kin, depending on his business. As each man may participate in a universal brotherhood, so he may partake in an unlimited foreignness. He may be an alien anytime he chooses and without leaving home. He may justify the calculations of his heart as a necessary check to the calculations of others, just as Luther justifies the sword.

Luther’s dichotomy differs from that of Moses in yet another way. When the stranger and the brother live side by side, it is not only each man’s heart that is divided, but the local population as well. Rather than a new tribalism we find the seeds of social class in Luther’s formula. Here is a passage from Deuteronomy with Annotations in which the stranger of old ends up as the poor man of today:

Why is it that [Moses] permits repayment of a loan to be demanded from a stranger … but not from a brother …?

The answer is that this … is according to a just principle of public order, that by some privilege citizens are honored beyond outsiders and strangers, lest everything be uniform and equal … The world has need of these forms, even if they appear to have a show of inequality, like the status of servants and maids or workmen and laborers. For not all can be kings, princes, senators, rich men, and freemen in the same manner … While before God there is no respect of persons, but all are equal, yet in the world respect of persons and inequality are necessary.

Luther is not just speaking of the ancient world here. When social policy is called into question, he does not feel it should be decided by “the common herd, which is insolent anyhow,” but prefers to place his trust in the princes. To my knowledge, he does not develop the idea directly, but his tone certainly leads one to feel that Christians, though rare, are probably more numerous among the landowners and that the new aliens may well be the lower classes.

One could almost argue that the new formulations of the Reformation are an attempt to reclaim space for the spirit of the gift. Luther tried to free the Church of its empire. Even in his ceding of power to civil rulers there can be seen a desire to reclaim the proper sphere of the spirit in a neo-Mosaic fashion. But when we listen closely to Luther’s tone, we do not hear