Again an attempt was made to find a way out of the difficulty by declaring that "usury is interest greater than the law allows." This, too, was condemned, and so also was the declaration that "usury is interest on loans not for a fixed time."
Still the forces of right reason pressed on, and among them, in the seventeenth century, in France, was Richard Simon. He attempted to gloss over the declarations of Scripture against lending at interest, in an elaborate treatise, but was immediately confronted by Bossuet. Just as Bossuet had mingled Scripture with astronomy and opposed the Copernican theory, so now he mingled Scripture with political economy and denounced the lending of money at interest. He called attention to the fact that the Scriptures, the councils of the Church from the beginning, the popes, the fathers, had all interpreted the prohibition of "usury" to be a prohibition of any lending at interest; and he demonstrated this interpretation to be the true one. Simon was put to confusion and his book condemned.
There was but too much reason for Bossuet's interpretation. There stood the fact that the prohibition of one of the most simple and beneficial principles in political and economical science was affirmed, not only by the fathers, but by twenty-eight councils of the Church, six of them general councils, and by seventeen popes, to say nothing of innumerable doctors in theology and canon law. And these prohibitions by the Church had been accepted as of divine origin by all obedient sons of the Church in the government of France. Such rulers as Charles the Bald in the ninth century, and St. Louis in the thirteenth, had riveted this idea into the civil law so firmly that it seemed impossible ever to detach it.(455)
(455) For the declaration of the Sorbonne in the seventeenth century
against taking of interest, see Lecky, Rationalism, vol. ii, p. 248,
note. For the special condemnation by Innocent XI, see Viva, Damnatae
Theses, Pavia, 1715, pp. 112-114. For consideration of various ways of
escaping the difficulty regarding interest, see Lecky, Rationalism,
vol. ii, pp. 249, 250. For Bousset's strong declaration against taking
interest, see his Oeuvres, Paris, 1845-'46, vol. i, p. 734, vol. vi,
p. 654, and vol. ix, p. 49 et seq. For the number of councils and popes
condemning usury, see Lecky, as above, vol. ii, p. 255, note, citing
Concina.
As might well be expected, Italy was one of the countries in which the theological theory regarding usury—lending at interest—was most generally asserted and assented to. Among the great number of Italian canonists who supported the theory, two deserve especial mention, as affording a contrast to the practical manner in which the commercial Italians met the question.
In the sixteenth century, very famous among canonists was the learned Benedictine, Vilagut. In 1589 he published at Venice his great work on usury, supporting with much learning and vigour the most extreme theological consequences of the old doctrine. He defines usury as the taking of anything beyond the original loan, and declares it mortal sin; he advocates the denial to usurers of Christian burial, confession, the sacraments, absolution, and connection with the universities; he declares that priests receiving offerings from usurers should refrain from exercising their ministry until the matter is passed upon by the bishop.
About the middle of the seventeenth century another ponderous folio was published in Venice upon the same subject and with the same title, by Onorato Leotardi. So far from showing any signs of yielding, he is even more extreme than Vilagut had been, and quotes with approval the old declaration that lenders of money at interest are not only robbers but murderers.
So far as we can learn, no real opposition was made in either century to this theory, as a theory; as to PRACTICE, it was different. The Italian traders did not answer theological argument; they simply overrode it. In spite of theology, great banks were established, and especially that of Venice at the end of the twelfth century, and those of Barcelona and Genoa at the beginning of the fifteenth. Nowhere was commerce carried on in more complete defiance of this and other theological theories hampering trade than in the very city where these great treatises were published. The sin of usury, like the sin of commerce with the Mohammedans, seems to have been settled for by the Venetian merchants on their deathbeds; and greatly to the advantage of the magnificent churches and ecclesiastical adornments of the city.
By the seventeenth century the clearest thinkers in the Roman Church saw that her theology must be readjusted to political economy: so began a series of amazing attempts to reconcile a view permitting usury with the long series of decrees of popes and councils forbidding it.
In Spain, the great Jesuit casuist Escobar led the way, and rarely had been seen such exquisite hair-splitting. But his efforts were not received with the gratitude they perhaps deserved. Pascal, revolting at their moral effect, attacked them unsparingly in his Provincial Letters, citing especially such passages as the following: "It is usury to receive profit from those to whom one lends, if it be exacted as justly due; but, if it be exacted as a debt of gratitude, it is not usury." This and a multitude of similar passages Pascal covered with the keen ridicule and indignant denunciation of which he was so great a master.