CANTO XI gain their life and advance.'1 In other words, man must get his livelihood from Nature: 'The Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it'; and he must get it by means of Art or work: 'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.' But the usurer 'takes another way,' and 'elsewhere puts his hope.' That is to say, he evades the Divine law of work laid down for man at the beginning. Disdaining work or Art, he disdains Nature of which it is the imitator; disdaining Nature, he disdains God whose child she is. Hence it is that Blasphemers, Sodom, and Cahors are all placed in the same Circle: Blasphemers do direct violence to God, defying Himself; Sodomites do violence to Nature, which is the child of God; and Caorsines or Usurers to Art, which is, so to speak, His grandchild. And of the three Dante regards the last as the worst, for, as we shall see, he sets the Usurers on the very edge of the precipice which overhangs the next Circle, as if morally they almost belonged to it. Mediæval Into the question of the Ethics of Usury, recently revived by Ruskin, there is no need to enter further than is necessary to show how it looked to the mediæval mind. We apply the word Usury now to the taking of exorbitant interest, but the original idea was undoubtedly the taking of any. The ground for this was Scriptural; in Leviticus it is written: 'If thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee, then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though 1 It is somewhat strange to find Virgil quoting Scripture. Probably the reason is that the passage refers to a truth which lies within the knowledge of the natural man, he be a stranger, or a sojourner, that he may live CANTO XI with thee. Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.' This prohibition is repeated in Deuteronomy, where, however, the taking of usury from strangers is expressly allowed.1 The wisest of the heathen take the same view. Plato in his Laws says: 'No one shall lend money upon interest; and the borrower shall be under no obligation to repay either capital or interest'; and in the Republic he describes usurers in these scornful words: 'The men of business, stooping as they walk, and pretending not even to see those whom they have already ruined, insert the sting—that is, their money --into some one else who is not on his guard against them, and recover the parent sum many times multiplied into a family of children: and so they make drone and pauper to abound in the State.' This reference to 'the parent sum multiplied into a family of children,' recalls Aristotle's view which was undoubtedly in Dante's mind when he declares that Usury is—at least indirectly-a violation of Nature. Aristotle argues from the Greek name for Usury, TÓKOS, which means offspring. The very name is its condemnation, for it implies that money breeds money; and money being in itself a barren thing, he argues that to cause it to produce 'offspring' is a violation of Nature. In his Politics he writes: 'Of all bad forms of Finance there is none which so 1 Lev. xxv. 35-37; Deut. xxiii. 19, 20. CANTO XI Well deserves abhorrence as petty usury, because in it it is money itself which produces the gain instead of serving the purpose for which it was devised. For it was invented simply as a medium of exchange, whereas interest multiplies the money itself. Indeed it is to this fact it owes its name (Tókos or offspring), as children bear a likeness to their parents, and interest is money born of money. It may be concluded, therefore, that no form of money-making does so much violence to Nature as this.' From this passage, the barrenness of money became proverbial in the Middle Ages, and of course Dante was perfectly familiar with it. The Church passed severe laws against the taking of interest: a cleric was suspended, a layman excommunicated. The change in economic conditions which has come over the world has compelled the Church to take up a different attitude to this question, allowing the taking of interest for ordinary commercial purposes, and confining the name of usury to the exaction of excessive and extortionate interest. In justice to the Church, it can scarcely be held with fairness that this change involves any real inconsistency, or proves that her mediæval attitude was an error. In those days, and under the conditions of life then prevailing, there was very little lending of money for commercial purposes. The borrower as a rule was not a solvent man who sought money to extend a prosperous business and increase his profits: he was usually a man in need, who asked a 1 Politics, i. 10. Comp. The Merchant of Venice, Act I. Scene 3: 'For when did friendship take A breed for barren metal of his friend?' loan to stave off impending ruin, and whose very CANTO XI necessity placed him at the mercy of unscrupulous lenders. Even if the Church overshot the mark somewhat in declaring all interest sinful, it was an error which leant to virtue's side in face of the conditions of the age, the notorious cruelties of moneylenders, and the widespread poverty and ruin which followed their operations. On the whole we shall not be greatly in error if we accept the conclusion of a Roman Catholic political economist of our time: 'In reality the essential wrongfulness of making profit without labour, risk, or responsibility from the property of others, of claiming an increase from what is essentially barren, of turning the simplicity or distress of others to one's own gain, has been maintained by the Church from her foundation to this day; and the resort of usurers, whether in the Temple of Jerusalem, the drinking shops of Poland, or the loan offices of England, she has ever looked on as a den of thieves. Usury is just as unlawful now as in the middle ages; but many transactions bearing the same name or appearance, which were usurious then, are now innocent; the Church rightly forbade them then, and as rightly permits them now.'1 1 Devas' Political Economy, p. 328. For an interesting discussion of Usury from the standpoint of the R. C. Church, see Father Rickaby's Moral Philosophy, pp. 255-263. CHAPTER XII CIRCLE VII.—THE VIOLENT AGAINST NEIGHBOURS CANTO XII THE pilgrims now begin the descent to the Circle of Violence. The time is indicated in Dante's usual astronomic fashion: The Great 'The Fishes are quivering on the horizon, that is, Caurus being the North-west wind, the Wain or Great Bear is right upon the North-west line. The hour is between four and five on the Saturday morning. As we saw, the path downward is the wild and broken precipice in the middle of that central valley to which the City of Dis slopes, cuplike, on every side. Dante compares it to a great landslip, known as the Slavini di Marco, on the left bank of the Adige between Verona and Trent, caused, he says, by an earthquake or some 'defective prop.' Virgil informs him that when he passed this way on his former journey through Hell, this cliff stood unbroken, and that its fall had been caused by the Earthquake of earthquake which took place at the time of the Crucifixion, when, he says, the Cruci fixion. 'Upon all sides the deep and loathsome valley Was thrilled with love, by which there are who think |