The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [79]
I have already said that Christians are rare in the world; therefore the world needs a strict, hard temporal government that will compel and constrain the wicked not to steal and rob and to return what they borrow, even though a Christian ought not to demand it [the principal], or even hope to get it back. This is necessary in order that the world may not become a desert, peace may not perish, and trade and society may not be utterly destroyed: all which would happen if we were to rule the world according to the Gospel and not drive and compel the wicked, by laws and the use of force, to do and suffer what is right. We must, therefore, keep the roads open, preserve peace in towns, and enforce law in the land, and let the sword hew briskly and boldly against the transgressors … Let no one think that the world can be ruled without blood; the sword of the ruler must be red and bloody; for the world will and must be evil, and the sword is God’s rod and vengeance upon it.
Luther is hardly speaking up for brotherhood here, nor does he sanction civil law in order to affirm gift and grace. Moreover, his language is the one that has always been connected to the alienation of property, the language of separation and war. (Luther was the first since Saint Ambrose to feel aggression in the Old Testament permission: “The Jews do well obediently to yield themselves to God as instruments and to fulfill His wrath on the Gentiles through interest and usury.”) But more important than the bellicose tone, what Luther does here and elsewhere is to affirm a scarcity of grace and gift. We shall feel this more clearly if we pause and contrast the sense of scarcity in Luther with an earlier sense of bounty. Recall these lines from the fourteenth-century monk, Meister Eckhart:
Know then that God is bound to act, to pour himself out into thee as soon as ever he shall find thee ready … Finding thee ready he is obliged to act, to overflow into thee; just as the sun must needs burst forth when the air is bright and clear, and is unable to contain itself. Forsooth, it were a very grave defect in God if, finding thee so empty and so bare, he wrought no excellent work in thee nor primed thee with glorious gifts.
Thou needest not seek him here or there, he is no further off than at the door of thy heart; there he stands lingering, awaiting whoever is ready to open and let him in … He longs for thee a thousandfold more urgently than thou for him: one point the opening and the entering.
Such intense feeling of an attainable grace and the overwhelming confidence in its bounty seem to disappear sometime during the fifteenth century. Certainly they are not present in Luther. What Luther feels on all sides are dis-grace and scarcity. The spirit is no longer lingering by the door of the heart but set apart like the Protestant pulpit raised above the heads of the congregation. The laws of Moses are “most beautiful and fair” but hardly practical anymore, and the Gospels are utopian and not much good for ruling the world. Power has left the common assumption of generosity and lies with the legions of trade.
In postulating the scarcity of goodwill and in dissociating the Gospels from the everyday world, Luther sets both the Lord and the possibility of gift farther and farther away, a spiritual form of the scarcity economics that always accompanies private property. Now Christians are rare, grace is unusual, and moral conscience is private and without worldly weight.
In one sense the reemergence of ancient usury bespeaks a decline in faith. Gift exchange is connected to faith because both are disinterested. Faith does not look out. No one by himself controls the cycle of gifts he participates in; each, instead, surrenders to the spirit of the gift in order for it to move. Therefore, the person who gives is a person willing to abandon control. If this were not so, if the donor calculated