The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [81]
Another way of describing what happened during this period, therefore, is to say that Luther brought the war home: he located the enemies of faith near at hand rather than seeing them in the alien Muslim or Jew. He reminded us of the dark side of the Lord, his wrath. It seems as if the attempt to universalize the feeling of charity had only allowed mercenaries to grow up in the back room. In this odd way there is a connection between a universal brotherhood and universal alienation. Many people, when they try to love all mankind, feel a rising contempt for their neighbors. Toward the end of his book on usury, Benjamin Nelson has this pessimistic remark: “It is a tragedy of moral history that the expansion of the area of the moral community has ordinarily been gained through the sacrifice of the intensity of the moral bond.” Luther tried to speak to this—to the looseness of that bond and the scarcity of grace that he felt all around him. He reported the situation, and, moreover, he tried to imagine the shape that faith must now take to survive. It was still his belief that brothers do not take usury from one another, but he found few brothers left for whom this was a concern.
III • Relative Strangers
The final portion of our story narrows the circle of gift even further, for the dualities of Luther, who opposed usury in conscience though not in effect, were soon to be superseded by a universalization of usury (in both conscience and effect) worked out by churchmen such as John Calvin and philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham.
In 1545 a friend of John Calvin’s asked him for his views on usury and Calvin replied in a letter. After briefly wishing “that all usury and even the name, were banished from the earth,” Calvin gets down to brass tacks, saying that “since this is impossible, it is necessary to concede to the common good.” This “common good” requires that interest not be taken from the poor, but beyond that Calvin can see no sense in restraining usury. In fact, “if all usury is condemned, tighter fetters are imposed on the conscience than the Lord himself would wish.”
The first part of Calvin’s letter applies common sense to the scriptural prohibitions on usury and lays them all aside. When Christ says that one should lend hoping for nothing in return, for example, he is obviously referring to loans to the poor; “he does not mean at the same time to forbid loans being made to the rich with interest.”
Calvin’s analysis of the law of Moses is central to the letter. The law “was political,” he says, and since the politics have changed, so have the rules:
It is said that today … usury should be forbidden on the same grounds as among the Jews, since there is a bond of brotherhood among us. To this I reply, that in the civil state there is some difference; for the situation in which the Lord had placed the Jews … made it easy for them to engage in business among themselves without usury. Our relationship is not at all the same. Therefore I do not consider that usury is wholly forbidden among us, except in so far as it is opposed to equity or charity.
Calvin concludes “that usury must be judged, not by any particular passage of Scripture, but simply by the rules of equity.”
The idea of equity is crucial to Calvin’s approach, as one additional passage will show. In his commentaries on the laws of Moses, Calvin again maintains that the political situation has changed since ancient times; therefore
usury is not now unlawful, except in so far as it contravenes equity and brotherly union. Let each one, then, place himself before God’s judgment seat, and not do to his neighbor what he would not have done to himself, from whence a sure and infallible decision may be come to … In what