on land, but places in the sea; thus he shows where Jonah was swallowed by the whale, and “where St. Peter caught one hundred and fifty-three fishes.”
As to the Dead Sea miracles generally, he does not dwell on them at great length; he evidently felt that Quaresmio had exhausted the subject; but he shows largely the fruits of Quaresmio’s teaching in other matters.
So, too, we find the thoughts and words of Quaresmio echoing afar through the German universities, in public disquisitions, dissertations, and sermons. The great Bible commentators, both Catholic and Protestant, generally agreed in accepting them.
But, strong as this theological theory was, we find that, as time went on, it required to be braced somewhat, and in 1692 Wedelius, Professor of Medicine at Jena, chose as the subject of his inaugural address The Physiology of the Destruction of Sodom and of the Statue of Salt.
It is a masterly example of “sanctified science.” At great length he dwells on the characteristics of sulphur, salt, and thunderbolts; mixes up scriptural texts, theology, and chemistry after a most bewildering fashion; and finally comes to the conclusion that a thunderbolt, flung by the Almighty, calcined the body of Lot’s wife, and at the same time vitrified its particles into a glassy mass looking like salt.[437]
[437] For Zvallart, see his Tres-devot Voyage de Ierusalem, Antwerp, 1608, book iv, chapter viii. His journey was made twenty years before. For Father Boucher, see his Bouquet de la Terre Saincte, Paris, 1622, pp. 447, 448. For Heidmann, see his Palaestina, 1689, pp. 58-62. For Belon’s credulity in matters referred to, see his Observations de Plusieurs Singularitez, etc., Paris, 1553, pp. 141-144; and for the legend of the peas changed into pebbles, p. 145; see also Lartet in De Luynes, vol. iii, p. 11. For Rauwolf, see the Reyssbuch, and Tobler, Bibliographia. For a good acoount of the influence of Montaigne in developing French scepticism, see Prevost-Paradol’s study on Montaigne prefixed to the Le Clerc edition of the Essays, Paris, 1865; also the well-known passages in Lecky’s Rationalism in Europe. For Quaresmio I have consulted both the Plantin edition of 1639 and the superb new Venice edition of 1880-’82. The latter, though less prized by book fanciers, is the more valuable, since it contains some very interesting recent notes. For the above discussion, see Plantin edition, vol. ii, pp. 758 et seq., and Venice edition, vol. ii, pp. 572-574. As to the effect of Quaresmio on the Protestant Church, see Wedelius, De Statua Salis, Jenae, 1692, pp.6, 7, and elswehere. For Eugene Roger, see his La Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664; the map, showing various sites referred to, is in the preface; and for basilisks, salamanders, etc., see pp. 89-92, 139, 218, and elsewhere.
Not only were these views demonstrated, so far as theologico-scientific reasoning could demonstrate anything, but it was clearly shown, by a continuous chain of testimony from the earliest ages, that the salt statue at Usdum had been recognised as the body of Lot’s wife by Jews, Mohammedans, and the universal Christian Church, “always, everywhere, and by all.”
Under the influence of teachings like these–and of the winter rains–new wonders began to appear at the salt pillar. In 1661 the Franciscan monk Zwinner published his travels in Palestine, and gave not only most of the old myths regarding the salt statue, but a new one, in some respects more striking than any of the old–for he had heard that a dog, also transformed into salt, was standing by the side of Lot’s wife.
Even the more solid Benedictine scholars were carried away, and we find in the Sacred History by Prof. Mezger, of the order of St. Benedict, published in 1700, a renewal of the declaration that the salt statue must be a “PERPETUAL memorial.”
But it was soon evident that the scientific current was still working beneath this ponderous mass of theological authority. A typical evidence of this we find in 1666 in the travels of Doubdan, a canon of St. Denis. As to the Dead Sea, he says that he saw no smoke, no clouds, and no “black, sticky water”; as to the statue of Lot’s wife, he says, “The moderns do not believe so easily that she has lasted so long”; then, as if alarmed at his own boldness, he concedes that the sea MAY be black and sticky in the middle; and from Lot’s wife he escapes under cover of some pious generalities. Four years later another French ecclesiastic, Jacques Goujon, referring in his published travels to the legends of the salt pillar, says: “People may believe these stories as much as they choose; I did not see it, nor did I go there.” So, too, in 1697, Morison, a dignitary of the French Church, having travelled in Palestine, confesses that, as to the story of the pillar of salt, he has difficulty in believing it.
The same current is observed working still more strongly in the travels of the Rev. Henry Maundrell, an English chaplain at Aleppo, who travelled through Palestine during the same year. He pours contempt over the legends of the Dead Sea in general: as to the story that birds could not fly over it, he says that he saw them flying there; as to the utter absence of life in the sea, he saw small shells in it; he saw no traces of any buried cities; and as to the stories regarding the statue of Lot’s wife and the proposal to visit it, he says, “Nor could we give faith enough to these reports to induce us to go on such an errand.”
The influence of the Baconian philosophy on his mind is very clear; for, in expressing his disbelief in the Dead Sea apples, with their contents of ashes, he says that he saw none, and he cites Lord Bacon in support of scepticism on this and similar points.
But the strongest effect of this growing scepticism is seen near the end of that century, when the eminent Dutch commentator Clericus (Le Clerc) published his commentary on the Pentateuch and his Dissertation on the Statue of Salt.
At great length he brings all his shrewdness and learning to bear against the whole legend of the actual transformation of Lot’s wife and the existence of the salt pillar, and ends by saying that “the whole story is due to the vanity of some and the credulity of more.”
In the beginning of the eighteenth century we find new tributaries to this rivulet of scientific thought. In 1701 Father Felix Beaugrand dismisses the Dead Sea legends and the salt statue very curtly and dryly–expressing not his belief in it, but a conventional wish to believe.
In 1709 a scholar appeared in another part of Europe and of different faith, who did far more than any of his predecessors to envelop the Dead Sea legends in an atmosphere of truth–Adrian Reland, professor at the University of Utrecht. His work on Palestine is a monument of patient scholarship, having as its nucleus a love of truth as truth: there is no irreverence in him, but he quietly brushes away a great mass of myths and legends: as to the statue of Lot’s wife, he treats it warily, but applies the comparative method to it with killing effect, by showing that the story of its miraculous renewal is but one among many of its kind.[438]
[438] For Zwinner, see his Blumenbuch des Heyligen Landes, Munchen, 1661, p. 454. For Mezger, see his Sacra Historia, Augsburg, 1700, p. 30. For Doubdan, see his Voyage de la Terre- Sainte, Paris, 1670, pp. 338, 339; also Tobler and Gage’s Ritter. For Goujon, see his Histoire et Voyage de la Terre Saincte, Lyons, 1670, p. 230, etc. For Morison, see his Voyage, book ii, pp. 516, 517. For Maundrell, see in Wright’s Collection, pp. 383 et seq. For Clericus, see his Dissertation de Salis Statua, in his Pentateuch, edition of 1696, pp. 327 et seq. For Father Beaugrand, see his Voyage, Paris, 1701, pp. 137 et seq. For Reland, see his Palaestina, Utrecht, 1714, vol. i, pp. 61-254, passim.
Yet to superficial observers the old current of myth and marvel seemed to flow into the eighteenth century as strong as ever, and of this we may take two typical evidences. The first of these is the Pious Pilgrimage of Vincent Briemle. His journey was made about 171O; and his work, brought out under the auspices of a high papal functionary some years later, in a heavy quarto, gave new life to the stories of the hellish character of the Dead Sea, and especially to the miraculous renewal of the salt statue.
In 172O came a still more striking effort to maintain the old belief in the north of Europe, for in that year the eminent theologian Masius published his great treatise on The Conversion of Lot’s Wife into a Statue of Salt.
Evidently intending that this work should be the last word on this subject in Germany, as Quaresmio had imagined that his work would be the last in Italy, he develops his subject after the high scholastic and theologic manner. Calling attention first to the divine command in the New Testament, “Remember Lot’s wife,” he argues through a long series of chapters. In the ninth of these he discusses “the impelling cause” of her looking back, and introduces us to the question, formerly so often treated by theologians, whether the soul of Lot’s wife was finally saved. Here we are glad to learn that the big, warm heart of Luther lifted him above the common herd of theologians, and led him to declare that she was “a faithful and saintly woman,” and that she certainly was not eternally damned. In justice to the Roman Church also it should be said that several of her most eminent commentators took a similar view, and insisted that the sin of Lot’s wife was venial, and therefore, at the worst, could only subject her to the fires of purgatory.
The eleventh chapter discusses at length the question HOW she was converted into salt, and, mentioning many theological opinions, dwells especially upon the view of Rivetus, that a thunderbolt, made up apparently of fire, sulphur, and salt, wrought her transformation at the same time that it blasted the land; and he bases this opinion upon the twenty-ninth chapter of Deuteronomy and the one hundred and seventh Psalm.
Later, Masius presents a sacred scientific theory that “saline particles entered into her until her whole body was infected”; and with this he connects another piece of sanctified science, to the effect that “stagnant bile” may have rendered the surface of her body “entirely shining, bitter, dry, and deformed.”
Finally, he comes to the great question whether the salt pillar is still in existence. On this he is full and fair. On one hand he allows that Luther thought that it was involved in the general destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and he cites various travellers who had failed to find it; but, on the other hand, he gives a long chain of evidence to show that it continued to exist: very wisely he reminds the reader that the positive testimony of those who have seen it must outweigh the negative testimony of those who have not, and he finally decides that the salt statue is still in being.
No doubt a work like this produced a considerable effect in Protestant countries; indeed, this effect seems evident as far off as England, for, in 172O, we find in Dean Prideaux’s Old and New Testament connected a map on which the statue of salt is carefully indicated. So, too, in Holland, in the Sacred Geography published at Utrecht in 1758 by the theologian Bachiene, we find him, while showing many signs of rationalism, evidently inclined to the old views as to the existence of the salt pillar; but just here comes a curious evidence of the real direction of the current of thought through the century, for, nine years later, in the German translation of Bachiene’s work we find copious notes by the translator in a far more rationalistic spirit; indeed, we see the dawn of the inevitable day of compromise, for we now have, instead of the old argument that the divine power by one miraculous act changed Lot’s wife into a salt pillar, the suggestion that she was caught in a shower of sulphur and saltpetre, covered by it, and that the result was a lump, which in a general way IS CALLED in our sacred books “a pillar of salt.”[439]
[439] For Briemle, see his Andachtige Pilgerfahrt, p. 129. For Masius, see his De Uxore Lothi in Statuam Salis Conversa, Hafniae, 1720, especially pages 29-31. For Dean Prideaux, see his Old and New Testament connected in the History of the Jews, 1720, map at page 7. For Bachiene, see his Historische und geographische Beschreibung von Palaestina, Leipzig, 1766, vol. i, pp. 118-120, and notes.
But, from the middle of the eighteenth century, the new current sets through Christendom with ever-increasing strength. Very interesting is it to compare the great scriptural commentaries of the middle of this century with those published a century earlier.
Of the earlier ones we may take Matthew Poole’s Synopsis as a type: as authorized by royal decree in 1667 it contains very substantial arguments for the pious belief in the statue. Of the later ones we may take the edition of the noted commentary of the Jesuit Tirinus seventy years later: while he feels bound to present the authorities, he evidently endeavours to get rid of the subject as speedily as possible under cover of conventionalities; of the spirit of Quaresmio he shows no trace.[440]
[440] For Poole (Polus) see his Synopsis, 1669, p. 179; and for Titinus, the Lyons edition of his Commentary, 1736, p. 10.
About 1760 came a striking evidence of the strength of this new current. The Abate Mariti then published his book upon the Holy Land; and of this book, by an Italian ecclesiastic, the most eminent of German bibliographers in this field says that it first broke a path for critical study of the Holy Land. Mariti is entirely sceptical as to the sinking of the valley of Siddim and the overwhelming of the cities. He speaks kindly of a Capuchin Father who saw everywhere at the Dead Sea traces of the divine malediction, while he himself could not see them, and says, “It is because a Capuchin carries everywhere the five senses of faith, while I only carry those of nature.” He speaks of “the lies of Josephus,” and makes merry over “the rude and shapeless block” which the guide assured him was the statue of Lot’s wife, explaining the want of human form in the salt pillar by telling him that this complete metamorphosis was part of her punishment.
About twenty years later, another remarkable man, Volney, broaches the subject in what was then known as the “philosophic” spirit. Between the years 1783 and 1785 he made an extensive journey through the Holy Land and published a volume of travels which by acuteness of thought and vigour of style secured general attention. In these, myth and legend were thrown aside, and we have an account simply dictated by the love of truth as truth. He, too, keeps the torch of science burning by applying his geological knowledge to the regions which he traverses.
As we look back over the eighteenth century we see mingled with the new current of thought, and strengthening it, a constantly increasing stream of more strictly scientific observation and reflection.
To review it briefly: in the very first years of the century Maraldi showed the Paris Academy of Sciences fossil fishes found in the Lebanon region; a little later, Cornelius Bruyn, in the French edition of his Eastern travels, gave well-drawn representations of fossil fishes and shells, some of them from the region of the Dead Sea; about the middle of the century Richard Pococke, Bishop of Meath, and Korte of Altona made more statements of the same sort; and toward the close of the century, as we have seen, Volney gave still more of these researches, with philosophical deductions from them.
The result of all this was that there gradually dawned upon thinking men the conviction that, for ages before the appearance of man on the planet, and during all the period since his appearance, natural laws have been steadily in force in Palestine as elsewhere; this conviction obliged men to consider other than supernatural causes for the phenomena of the Dead Sea, and myth and marvel steadily shrank in value.
But at the very threshold of the nineteenth century Chateaubriand came into the field, and he seemed to banish the scientific spirit, though what he really did was to conceal it temporarily behind the vapours of his rhetoric. The time was propitious for him. It was the period of reaction after the French Revolution, when what was called religion was again in fashion, and when even atheists supported it as a good thing for common people: of such an epoch Chateaubriand, with his superficial information, thin sentiment, and showy verbiage, was the foreordained prophet. His enemies were wont to deny that he ever saw the Holy Land; whether he did or not, he added nothing to real knowledge, but simply threw a momentary glamour over the regions he described, and especially over the Dead Sea. The legend of Lot’s wife he carefully avoided, for he knew too well the danger of ridicule in France.
As long as the Napoleonic and Bourbon reigns lasted, and indeed for some time afterward, this kind of dealing with the Holy Land was fashionable, and we have a long series of men, especially of Frenchmen, who evidently received their impulse from Chateaubriand.
About 1831 De Geramb, Abbot of La Trappe, evidently a very noble and devout spirit, sees vapour above the Dead Sea, but stretches the truth a little–speaking of it as “vapour or smoke.” He could not find the salt statue, and complains of the “diversity of stories regarding it.” The simple physical cause of this diversity–the washing out of different statues in different years–never occurs to him; but he comforts himself with the scriptural warrant for the metamorphosis.[441]
[441] For Mariti, see his Voyage, etc., vol. ii, pp. 352-356. For Tobler’s high opinion of him, see the Bibliographia, pp. 132, 133. For Volney, see his Voyage en Syrie et Egypte, Paris, 1807, vol. i, pp. 308 et seq.; also, for a statement of contributions of the eighteenth century to geology, Lartet in De Luynes’s Mer Morte, vol. iii, p. 12. For Cornelius Bruyn, see French edition of his works, 1714 (in which his name is given as “Le Brun”), especially for representations of fossils, pp. 309, 375. For Chateaubriand, see his Voyage, etc., vol. ii, part iii. For De Geramb, see his Voyage, vol. ii, pp. 45-47.
But to the honour of scientific men and scientific truth it should be said that even under Napoleon and the Bourbons there were men who continued to explore, observe, and describe with the simple love of truth as truth, and in spite of the probability that their researches would be received during their lifetime with contempt and even hostility, both in church and state.
The pioneer in this work of the nineteenth century was the German naturalist Ulrich Seetzen. He began his main investigation in 1806, and soon his learning, courage, and honesty threw a flood of new light into the Dead Sea questions.
In this light, myth and legend faded more rapidly than ever. Typical of his method is his examination of the Dead Sea fruit. He found, on reaching Palestine, that Josephus’s story regarding it, which had been accepted for nearly two thousand years, was believed on all sides; more than this, he found that the original myth had so grown that a multitude of respectable people at Bethlehem and elsewhere assured him that not only apples, but pears, pomegranates, figs, lemons, and many other fruits which grow upon the shores of the Dead Sea, though beautiful to look upon, were filled with ashes. These good people declared to Seetzen that they had seen these fruits, and that, not long before, a basketful of them which had been sent to a merchant of Jaffa had turned to ashes.
Seetzen was evidently perplexed by this mass of testimony and naturally anxious to examine these fruits. On arriving at the sea he began to look for them, and the guide soon showed him the “apples.” These he found to be simply an asclepia, which had been described by Linnaeus, and which is found in the East Indies, Arabia, Egypt, Jamaica, and elsewhere–the “ashes” being simply seeds. He looked next for the other fruits, and the guide soon found for him the “lemons”: these he discovered to be a species of solanum found in other parts of Palestine and elsewhere, and the seeds in these were the famous “cinders.” He looked next for the pears, figs, and other accursed fruits; but, instead of finding them filled with ashes and cinders, he found them like the same fruits in other lands, and he tells us that he ate the figs with much pleasure.
So perished a myth which had been kept alive two thousand years,–partly by modes of thought natural to theologians, partly by the self-interest of guides, and partly by the love of marvel-mongering among travellers.
The other myths fared no better. As to the appearance of the sea, he found its waters not “black and sticky,” but blue and transparent; he found no smoke rising from the abyss, but tells us that sunlight and cloud and shore were pleasantly reflected from the surface. As to Lot’s wife, he found no salt pillar which had been a careless woman, but the Arabs showed him many boulders which had once been wicked men.
His work was worthily continued by a long succession of true investigators,–among them such travellers or geographers as Burckhardt, Irby, Mangles, Fallmerayer, and Carl von Raumer: by men like these the atmosphere of myth and legend was steadily cleared away; as a rule, they simply forgot Lot’s wife altogether.
In this noble succession should be mentioned an American theologian, Dr. Edward Robinson, professor at New York. Beginning about 1826, he devoted himself for thirty years to the thorough study of the geography of Palestine, and he found a worthy coadjutor in another American divine, Dr. Eli Smith. Neither of these men departed openly from the old traditions: that would have cost a heart-breaking price–the loss of all further opportunity to carry on their researches. Robinson did not even think it best to call attention to the mythical character of much on which his predecessors had insisted; he simply brought in, more and more, the dry, clear atmosphere of the love of truth for truth’s sake, and, in this, myths and legends steadily disappeared. By doing this he rendered a far greater service to real Christianity than any other theologian had ever done in this field.
Very characteristic is his dealing with the myth of Lot’s wife. Though more than once at Usdum,–though giving valuable information regarding the sea, shore, and mountains there, he carefully avoids all mention of the salt pillar and of the legend which arose from it. In this he set an example followed by most of the more thoughtful religious travellers since his time. Very significant is it to see the New Testament injunction, “Remember Lot’s wife,” so utterly forgotten. These later investigators seem never to have heard of it; and this constant forgetfulness shows the change which had taken place in the enlightened thinking of the world.
But in the year 1848 came an episode very striking in its character and effect.
At that time, the war between the United States and Mexico having closed, Lieutenant Lynch, of the United States Navy, found himself in the port of Vera Cruz, commanding an old hulk, the Supply. Looking about for something to do, it occurred to him to write to the Secretary of the Navy asking permission to explore the Dead Sea. Under ordinary circumstances the proposal would doubtless have been strangled with red tape; but, fortunately, the Secretary at that time was Mr. John Y. Mason, of Virginia. Mr. Mason was famous for his good nature. Both at Washington and at Paris, where he was afterward minister, this predominant trait has left a multitude of amusing traditions; it was of him that Senator Benton said, “To be supremely happy he must have his paunch full of oysters and his hands full of cards.”
The Secretary granted permission, but evidently gave the matter not another thought. As a result, came an expedition the most comical and one of the most rich in results to be found in American annals. Never was anything so happy-go-lucky. Lieutenant Lynch started with his hulk, with hardly an instrument save those ordinarily found on shipboard, and with a body of men probably the most unfit for anything like scientific investigation ever sent on such an errand; fortunately, he picked up a young instructor in mathematics, Mr. Anderson, and added to his apparatus two strong iron boats.
Arriving, after a tedious voyage, on the coast of Asia Minor, he set to work. He had no adequate preparation in general history, archaeology, or the physical sciences; but he had his American patriotism, energy, pluck, pride, and devotion to duty, and these qualities stood him in good stead. With great labour he got the iron boats across the country. Then the tug of war began. First of all investigators, he forced his way through the whole length of the river Jordan and from end to end of the Dead Sea. There were constant difficulties–geographical, climatic, and personal; but Lynch cut through them all. He was brave or shrewd, as there was need. Anderson proved an admirable helper, and together they made surveys of distances, altitudes, depths, and sundry simple investigations in a geological, mineralogical, and chemical way. Much was poorly done, much was left undone, but the general result was most honourable both to Lynch and Anderson; and Secretary Mason found that his easy-going patronage of the enterprise was the best act of his official life.
The results of this expedition on public opinion were most curious. Lynch was no scholar in any sense; he had travelled little, and thought less on the real questions underlying the whole investigation; as to the difference in depth of the two parts of the lake, he jumped–with a sailor’s disregard of logic–to the conclusion that it somehow proved the mythical account of the overwhelming of the cities, and he indulged in reflections of a sort probably suggested by his recollections of American Sunday-schools.
Especially noteworthy is his treatment of the legend of Lot’s wife. He found the pillar of salt. It happened to be at that period a circular column of friable salt rock, about forty feet high; yet, while he accepts every other old myth, he treats the belief that this was once the wife of Lot as “a superstition.” One little circumstance added enormously to the influence of this book, for, as a frontispiece, he inserted a picture of the salt column. It was delineated in rather a poetic manner: light streamed upon it, heavy clouds hung above it, and, as a background, were ranged buttresses of salt rock furrowed and channelled out by the winter rains: this salt statue picture was spread far and wide, and in thousands of country pulpits and Sunday-schools it was shown as a tribute of science to Scripture.
Nor was this influence confined to American Sunday-school children: Lynch had innocently set a trap into which several European theologians stumbled. One of these was Dr. Lorenz Gratz, Vicar-General of Augsburg, a theological professor. In the second edition of his Theatre of the Holy Scriptures, published in 1858, he hails Lynch’s discovery of the salt pillar with joy, forgets his allusion to the old theory regarding it as a superstition, and does not stop to learn that this was one of a succession of statues washed out yearly by the rains, but accepts it as the originaL Lot’s wife.
The French churchmen suffered most. About two years after Lynch, De Saulcy visited the Dead Sea to explore it thoroughly, evidently in the interest of sacred science–and of his own promotion. Of the modest thoroughness of Robinson there is no trace in his writings. He promptly discovered the overwhelmed cities, which no one before or since has ever found, poured contempt on other investigators, and threw over his whole work an air of piety. But, unfortunately, having a Frenchman’s dread of ridicule, he attempted to give a rationalistic explanation of what he calls “the enormous needles of salt washed out by the winter rain,” and their connection with the Lot’s wife myth, and declared his firm belief that she, “being delayed by curiosity or terror, was crushed by a rock which rolled down from the mountain, and when Lot and his children turned about they saw at the place where she had been only the rock of salt which covered her body.”
But this would not do at all, and an eminent ecclesiastic privately and publicly expostulated with De Saulcy–very naturally declaring that “it was not Lot who wrote the book of Genesis.”
The result was that another edition of De Saulcy’s work was published by a Church Book Society, with the offending passage omitted; but a passage was retained really far more suggestive of heterodoxy, and this was an Arab legend accounting for the origin of certain rocks near the Dead Sea curiously resembling salt formations. This in effect ran as follows:
“Abraham, the friend of God, having come here one day with his mule to buy salt, the salt-workers impudently told him that they had no salt to sell, whereupon the patriarch said: `Your words are, true. you have no salt to sell,’ and instantly the salt of this whole region was transformed into stone, or rather into a salt which has lost its savour.”
Nothing could be more sure than this story to throw light into the mental and moral process by which the salt pillar myth was originally created.
In the years 1864 and 1865 came an expedition on a much more imposing scale: that of the Duc de Luynes. His knowledge of archaeology and his wealth were freely devoted to working the mine which Lynch had opened, and, taking with him an iron vessel and several savants, he devoted himself especially to finding the cities of the Dead Sea, and to giving less vague accounts of them than those of De Saulcy. But he was disappointed, and honest enough to confess his disappointment. So vanished one of the most cherished parts of the legend.
But worse remained behind. In the orthodox duke’s company was an acute geologist, Monsieur Lartet, who in due time made an elaborate report, which let a flood of light into the whole region.
The Abbe Richard had been rejoicing the orthodox heart of France by exhibiting some prehistoric flint implements as the knives which Joshua had made for circumcision. By a truthful statement Monsieur Lartet set all France laughing at the Abbe, and then turned to the geology of the Dead Sea basin. While he conceded that man may have seen some volcanic crisis there, and may have preserved a vivid remembrance of the vapour then rising, his whole argument showed irresistibly that all the phenomena of the region are due to natural causes, and that, so far from a sudden rising of the lake above the valley within historic times, it has been for ages steadily subsiding.
Since Balaam was called by Balak to curse his enemies, and “blessed them altogether,” there has never been a more unexpected tribute to truth.
Even the salt pillar at Usdum, as depicted in Lynch’s book, aided to undermine the myth among thinking men; for the background of the picture showed other pillars of salt in process of formation; and the ultimate result of all these expeditions was to spread an atmosphere in which myth and legend became more and more attenuated.
To sum up the main points in this work of the nineteenth century: Seetzen, Robinson, and others had found that a human being could traverse the lake without being killed by hellish smoke; that the waters gave forth no odours; that the fruits of the region were not created full of cinders to match the desolation of the Dead Sea, but were growths not uncommon in Asia Minor and elsewhere; in fact, that all the phenomena were due to natural causes.
Ritter and others had shown that all noted features of the Dead Sea and the surrounding country were to be found in various other lakes and regions, to which no supernatural cause was ascribed among enlightened men. Lynch, Van de Velde, Osborne, and others had revealed the fact that the “pillar of salt” was frequently formed anew by the rains; and Lartet and other geologists had given a final blow to the myths by making it clear from the markings on the neighbouring rocks that, instead of a sudden upheaval of the sea above the valley of Siddim, there had been a gradual subsidence for ages.[442]
[442] For Seetzen, see his Reisen, edited by Kruse, Berlin, 1854- ’59; for the “Dead Sea Fruits,” vol. ii, pp. 231 et seq.; for the appearance of the sea, etc., p. 243, and elsewhere; for the Arab explanatory transformation legends, vol. iii, pp. 7, 14, 17. As to similarity of the “pillars of salt” to columns washed out by rains elsewhere, see Kruse’s commentary in vol. iv, p. 240; also Fallmerayer, vol. i, p. 197. For Irby and Mangles, see work already cited. For Robinson, see his Biblical Researches, London,1841; also his Later Biblical Researches, London, 1856. For Lynch, see his Narrative, London, 1849. For Gratz, see his Schauplatz der Heyl. Schrift, pp. 186, 187. For De Saulcy, see his Voyage autour de la Mer Morte, Paris, 1853, especially vol. i, p. 252, and his journal of the early months of 1851, in vol. ii, comparing it with his work of the same title published in 1858 in the Bibliotheque Catholique de Voyages et du Romans, vol. i, pp. 78-81. For Lartet, see his papers read before the Geographical Society at Paris; also citations in Robinson; but, above all, his elaborate reports which form the greater part of the second and third volumes of the monumental work which bears the name of De Luynes, already cited. For exposures of De Saulcey’s credulity and errors, see Van de Velde, Syria and Palestine, passim; also Canon Tristram’s Land of Israel; also De Luynes, passim.
Even before all this evidence was in, a judicial decision had been pronounced upon the whole question by an authority both Christian and scientific, from whom there could be no appeal. During the second quarter of the century Prof. Carl Ritter, of the University of Berlin, began giving to the world those researches which have placed him at the head of all geographers ancient or modern, and finally he brought together those relating to the geography of the Holy Land, publishing them as part of his great work on the physical geography of the earth. He was a Christian, and nothing could be more reverent than his treatment of the whole subject; but his German honesty did not permit him to conceal the truth, and he simply classed together all the stories of the Dead Sea–old and new–no matter where found, whether in the sacred books of Jews, Christians, or Mohammedans, whether in lives of saints or accounts of travellers, as “myths” and “sagas.”
From this decision there has never been among intelligent men any appeal.
The recent adjustment of orthodox thought to the scientific view of the Dead Sea legends presents some curious features. As typical we may take the travels of two German theologians between 1860 and 1870–John Kranzel, pastor in Munich, and Peter Schegg, lately professor in the university of that city.
The archdiocese of Munich-Freising is one of those in which the attempt to suppress modern scientific thought has been most steadily carried on. Its archbishops have constantly shown themselves assiduous in securing cardinals’ hats by thwarting science and by stupefying education. The twin towers of the old cathedral of Munich have seemed to throw a killing shadow over intellectual development in that region. Naturally, then, these two clerical travellers from that diocese did not commit themselves to clearing away any of the Dead Sea myths; but it is significant that neither of them follows the example of so many of their clerical predecessors in defending the salt-pillar legend: they steadily avoid it altogether.
The more recent history of the salt pillar, since Lynch, deserves mention. It appears that the travellers immediately after him found it shaped by the storms into a spire; that a year or two later it had utterly disappeared; and about the year 1870 Prof. Palmer, on visiting the place, found at some distance from the main salt bed, as he says, “a tall, isolated needle of rock, which does really bear a curious resemblance to an Arab woman with a child upon her shoulders.”
And, finally, Smith’s Dictionary of the Bible, the standard work of reference for English-speaking scholars, makes its concession to the old belief regarding Sodom and Gomorrah as slight as possible, and the myth of Lot’s wife entirely disappears.
IV. THEOLOGICAL EFFORTS AT COMPROMISE.– TRIUMPH OF THE SCIENTIFIC VIEW.
The theological effort to compromise with science now came in more strongly than ever. This effort had been made long before: as we have seen, it had begun to show itself decidedly as soon as the influence of the Baconian philosophy was felt. Le Clerc suggested that the shock caused by the sight of fire from heaven killed Lot’s wife instantly and made her body rigid as a statue. Eichhorn suggested that she fell into a stream of melted bitumen. Michaelis suggested that her relatives raised a monument of salt rock to her memory. Friedrichs suggested that she fell into the sea and that the salt stiffened around her clothing, thus making a statue of her. Some claimed that a shower of sulphur came down upon her, and that the word which has been translated “salt” could possibly be translated “sulphur.” Others hinted that the salt by its antiseptic qualities preserved her body as a mummy. De Saulcy, as we have seen, thought that a piece of salt rock fell upon her, and very recently Principal Dawson has ventured the explanation that a flood of salt mud coming from a volcano incrusted her.
But theologians themselves were the first to show the inadequacy of these explanations. The more rationalistic pointed out the fact that they were contrary to the sacred text: Von Bohlen, an eminent professor at Konigsberg, in his sturdy German honesty, declared that the salt pillar gave rise to the story, and compared the pillar of salt causing this transformation legend to the rock in Greek mythology which gave rise to the transformation legend of Niobe.
On the other hand, the more severely orthodox protested against such attempts to explain away the clear statements of Holy Writ. Dom Calmet, while presenting many of these explanations made as early as his time, gives us to understand that nearly all theologians adhered to the idea that Lot’s wife was instantly and really changed into salt; and in our own time, as we shall presently see, have come some very vigorous protests.
Similar attempts were made to explain the other ancient legends regarding the Dead Sea. One of the most recent of these is that the cities of the plain, having been built with blocks of bituminous rock, were set on fire by lightning, a contemporary earthquake helping on the work. Still another is that accumulations of petroleum and inflammable gas escaped through a fissure, took fire, and so produced the catastrophe.[443]
[443] For Kranzel, see his Reise nach Jerusalem, etc. For Schegg, see his Gedenkbuch einer Pilgerreise, etc., 1867, chap. xxiv. For Palmer, see his Desert of the Exodus, vol. ii, pp. 478, 479. For the various compromises, see works alredy cited, passim. For Von Bohlen, see his Genesis, Konigsberg, 1835, pp. 200-213. For Calmet, see his Dictionarium, etc, Venet., 1766. For very recent compromises, see J. W. Dawson and Dr. Cunningham Geikie in works cited.
The revolt against such efforts to RECONCILE scientific fact with myth and legend had become very evident about the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1851 and 1852 Van de Velde made his journey. He was a most devout man, but he confessed that the volcanic action at the Dead Sea must have been far earlier than the catastrophe mentioned in our sacred books, and that “the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah had nothing to do with this.” A few years later an eminent dignitary of the English Church, Canon Tristram, doctor of divinity and fellow of the Royal Society, who had explored the Holy Land thoroughly, after some generalities about miracles, gave up the whole attempt to make science agree with the myths, and used these words: “It has been frequently assumed that the district of Usdum and its sister cities was the result of some tremendous geological catastrophe….Now, careful examination by competent geologists, such as Monsieur Lartet and others, has shown that the whole district has assumed its present shape slowly and gradually through a succession of ages, and that its peculiar phenomena are similar to those of other lakes.” So sank from view the whole mass of Dead Sea myths and legends, and science gained a victory both for geology and comparative mythology.
As a protest against this sort of rationalism appeared in 1876 an edition of Monseigneur Mislin’s work on The Holy Places. In order to give weight to the book, it was prefaced by letters from Pope Pius IX and sundry high ecclesiastics–and from Alexandre Dumas! His hatred of Protestant missionaries in the East is phenomenal: he calls them “bagmen,” ascribes all mischief and infamy to them, and his hatred is only exceeded by his credulity. He cites all the arguments in favour of the salt statue at Usdum as the identical one into which Lot’s wife was changed, adds some of his own, and presents her as “a type of doubt and heresy.” With the proverbial facility of dogmatists in translating any word of a dead language into anything that suits their purpose, he says that the word in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis which is translated “statue” or “pillar,” may be translated “eternal monument”; he is especially severe on poor Monsieur De Saulcy for thinking that Lot’s wife was killed by the falling of a piece of salt rock; and he actually boasts that it was he who caused De Saulcy, a member of the French Institute, to suppress the obnoxious passage in a later edition.
Between 1870 and 1880 came two killing blows at the older theories, and they were dealt by two American scholars of the highest character. First of these may be mentioned Dr. Philip Schaff, a professor in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at New York, who published his travels in 1877. In a high degree he united the scientific with the religious spirit, but the trait which made him especially fit for dealing with this subject was his straightforward German honesty. He tells the simple truth regarding the pillar of salt, so far as its physical origin and characteristics are concerned, and leaves his reader to draw the natural inference as to its relation to the myth. With the fate of Dr. Robertson Smith in Scotland and Dr. Woodrow in South Carolina before him–both recently driven from their professorships for truth-telling– Dr. Schaff deserves honour for telling as much as he does.
Similar in effect, and even more bold in statement, were the travels of the Rev. Henry Osborn, published in 1878. In a truly scientific spirit he calls attention to the similarity of the Dead Sea, with the river Jordan, to sundry other lake and river systems; points out the endless variations between writers describing the salt formations at Usdum; accounts rationally for these variations, and quotes from Dr. Anderson’s report, saying, “From the soluble nature of the salt and the crumbling looseness of the marl, it may well be imagined that, while some of these needles are in the process of formation, others are being washed away.”
Thus came out, little by little, the truth regarding the Dead Sea myths, and especially the salt pillar at Usdum; but the final truth remained to be told in the Church, and now one of the purest men and truest divines of this century told it. Arthur Stanley, Dean of Westminster, visiting the country and thoroughly exploring it, allowed that the physical features of the Dead Sea and its shores suggested the myths and legends, and he sums up the whole as follows: “A great mass of legends and exaggerations, partly the cause and partly the result of the old belief that the cities were buried under the Dead Sea, has been gradually removed in recent years.”
So, too, about the same time, Dr. Conrad Furrer, pastor of the great church of St. Peter at Zurich, gave to the world a book of travels, reverent and thoughtful, and in this honestly acknowledged that the needles of salt at the southern end of the Dead Sea “in primitive times gave rise to the tradition that Lot’s wife was transformed into a statue of salt.” Thus was the mythical character of this story at last openly confessed by Leading churchmen on both continents.
Plain statements like these from such sources left the high theological position more difficult than ever, and now a new compromise was attempted. As the Siberian mother tried to save her best-beloved child from the pursuing wolves by throwing over to them her less favoured children, so an effort was now made in a leading commentary to save the legends of the valley of Siddim and the miraculous destruction of the cities by throwing overboard the legend of Lot’s wife.[444]
[444] For Mislin, see his Les Saints Lieux, Paris, vol. iii, pp. 290-293, especially note at foot of page 292. For Schaff, see his Through Bible Lands, especially chapter xxix; see also Rev. H. S. Osborn, M. A., The Holy Land, pp. 267 et seq.; also Stanley’s Sinai and Palestine, London, 1887, especially pp. 290-293. For Furrer, see his En Palestine, Geneva, 1886, vol. i, p.246. For the attempt to save one legend by throwing overboard the other, see Keil and Delitzsch, Biblischer Commentar uber das Alte Testament, vol. i, pp. 155, 156. For Van de Velde, see his Syria and Palestine, vol. ii, p. 120.
An amusing result has followed this development of opinion. As we have already seen, traveller after traveller, Catholic and Protestant, now visits the Dead Sea, and hardly one of them follows the New Testament injunction to “remember Lot’s wife.” Nearly every one of them seems to think it best to forget her. Of the great mass of pious legends they are shy enough, but that of Lot’s wife, as a rule, they seem never to have heard of, and if they do allude to it they simply cover the whole subject with a haze of pious rhetoric.[445]
[445] The only notice of the Lot’s wife legend in the editions of Robinson at my command is a very curious one by Leopold von Buch, the eminent geologist. Robinson, with a fearlessness which does him credit, consulted Von Buch, who in his answer was evidently inclined to make things easier for Robinson by hinting that Lot was so much struck by the salt formations that HE IMAGINED that his wife had been changed into salt. On this theory, Robinson makes no comment. See Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine, etc., London, 1841, vol. ii, p. 674.
Naturally, under this state of things, there has followed the usual attempt to throw off from Christendom the responsibility of the old belief, and in 1887 came a curious effort of this sort. In that year appeared the Rev. Dr. Cunningham Geikie’s valuable work on The Holy Land and the Bible. In it he makes the following statement as to the salt formation at Usdum: “Here and there, hardened portions of salt withstanding the water, while all around them melts and wears off, rise up isolated pillars, one of which bears among the Arabs the name of `Lot’s wife.'”
In the light of the previous history, there is something at once pathetic and comical in this attempt to throw the myth upon the shoulders of the poor Arabs. The myth was not originated by Mohammedans; it appears, as we have seen, first among the Jews, and, I need hardly remind the reader, comes out in the Book of Wisdom and in Josephus, and has been steadily maintained by fathers, martyrs, and doctors of the Church, by at least one pope, and by innumerable bishops, priests, monks, commentators, and travellers, Catholic and Protestant, ever since. In thus throwing the responsibility of the myth upon the Arabs Dr. Geikie appears to show both the “perfervid genius” of his countrymen and their incapacity to recognise a joke.
Nor is he more happy in his rationalistic explanations of the whole mass of myths. He supposes a terrific storm, in which the lightning kindled the combustible materials of the cities, aided perhaps by an earthquake; but this shows a disposition to break away from the exact statements of the sacred books which would have been most severely condemned by the universal Church during at least eighteen hundred years of its history. Nor would the explanations of Sir William Dawson have fared any better: it is very doubtful whether either of them could escape unscathed today from a synod of the Free Church of Scotland, or of any of the leading orthodox bodies in the Southern States of the American Union.[446]
[446] For these most recent explanations, see Rev. Cunningham Geikie, D. D., in work cited; also Sir J. W. Dawson, Egypt and Syria, published by the Religious Tract Society, 1887, pp. 125, 126; see also Dawson’s article in The Expositor for January, 1886.
How unsatisfactory all such rationalism must be to a truly theological mind is seen not only in the dealings with Prof. Robertson Smith in Scotland and Prof. Woodrow in South Carolina, but most clearly in a book published in 1886 by Monseigneur Haussmann de Wandelburg. Among other things, the author was Prelate of the Pope’s House-hold, a Mitred Abbot, Canon of the Holy Sepulchre, and a Doctor of Theology of the Pontifical University at Rome, and his work is introduced by approving letters from Pope Leo XIII and the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Monseigneur de Wandelburg scorns the idea that the salt column at Usdum is not the statue of Lot’s wife; he points out not only the danger of yielding this evidence of miracle to rationalism, but the fact that the divinely inspired authority of the Book of Wisdom, written, at the latest, two hundred and fifty years before Christ, distinctly refers to it. He summons Josephus as a witness. He dwells on the fact that St. Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Hegesippus, and St. Cyril, “who as Bishop of Jerusalem must have known better than any other person what existed in Palestine,” with St. Jerome, St. Chrysostom, and a multitude of others, attest, as a matter of their own knowledge or of popular notoriety, that the remains of Lot’s wife really existed in their time in the form of a column of salt; and he points triumphantly to the fact that Lieutenant Lynch found this very column. In the presence of such a continuous line of witnesses, some of them considered as divinely inspired, and all of them greatly revered–a line extending through thirty-seven hundred years–he condemns most vigorously all those who do not believe that the pillar of salt now at Usdum is identical with the wife of Lot, and stigmatizes them as people who “do not wish to believe the truth of the Word of God.”
His ignorance of many of the simplest facts bearing upon the legend is very striking, yet he does not hesitate to speak of men who know far more and have thought far more upon the subject as “grossly ignorant.” The most curious feature in his ignorance is the fact that he is utterly unaware of the annual changes in the salt statue. He is entirely ignorant of such facts as that the priest Gabriel Giraudet in the sixteenth century found the statue lying down; that the monk Zwinner found it in the seventeenth century standing, and accompanied by a dog also transformed into salt; that Prince Radziwill found no statue at all; that the pious Vincent Briemle in the eighteenth century found the monument renewing itself; that about the middle of the nineteenth century Lynch found it in the shape of a tower or column forty feet high; that within two years afterward De Saulcy found it washed into the form of a spire; that a year later Van de Velde found it utterly washed away; and that a few years later Palmer found it “a statue bearing a striking resemblance to an Arab woman with a child in her arms.” So ended the last great demonstration, thus far, on the side of sacred science–the last retreating shot from the theological rear guard.
It is but just to say that a very great share in the honour of the victory of science in this field is due to men trained as theologians. It would naturally be so, since few others have devoted themselves to direct labour in it; yet great honour is none the less due to such men as Reland, Mariti, Smith, Robinson, Stanley, Tristram, and Schat.
They have rendered even a greater service to religion than to science, for they have made a beginning, at least, of doing away with that enforced belief in myths as history which has become a most serious danger to Christianity.
For the worst enemy of Christianity could wish nothing more than that its main Leaders should prove that it can not be adopted save by those who accept, as historical, statements which unbiased men throughout the world know to be mythical. The result of such a demonstration would only be more and more to make thinking people inside the Church dissemblers, and thinking people outside, scoffers. Far better is it to welcome the aid of science, in the conviction that all truth is one, and, in the light of this truth, to allow theology and science to work together in the steady evolution of religion and morality.
The revelations made by the sciences which most directly deal with the history of man all converge in the truth that during the earlier stages of this evolution moral and spiritual teachings must be inclosed in myth, legend, and parable. “The Master” felt this when he gave to the poor peasants about him, and so to the world, his simple and beautiful illustrations. In making this truth clear, science will give to religion far more than it will take away, for it will throw new life and light into all sacred literature.
CHAPTER XIX.
FROM LEVITICUS TO POLITICAL ECONOMY
I. ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF HOSTILITY TO LOANS AT INTEREST.
Among questions on which the supporters of right reason in political and social science have only conquered theological opposition after centuries of war, is the taking of interest on loans. In hardly any struggle has rigid adherence to the letter of our sacred books been more prolonged and injurious.
Certainly, if the criterion of truth, as regards any doctrine, be that of St. Vincent of Lerins–that it has been held in the Church “always, everywhere, and by all”–then on no point may a Christian of these days be more sure than that every savings institution, every loan and trust company, every bank, every loan of capital by an individual, every means by which accumulated capital has been lawfully lent even at the most moderate interest, to make men workers rather than paupers, is based on deadly sin.
The early evolution of the belief that taking interest for money is sinful presents a curious working together of metaphysical, theological, and humanitarian ideas.
In the main centre of ancient Greek civilization, the loaning of money at interest came to be accepted at an early period as a condition of productive industry, and no legal restriction was imposed. In Rome there was a long process of development: the greed of creditors in early times led to laws against the taking of interest; but, though these lasted long, that strong practical sense which gave Rome the empire of the world substituted finally, for this absolute prohibition, the establishment of rates by law. Yet many of the leading Greek and Roman thinkers opposed this practical settlement of the question, and, foremost of all, Aristotle. In a metaphysical way he declared that money is by nature “barren”; that the birth of money from money is therefore “unnatural”; and hence that the taking of interest is to be censured and hated. Plato, Plutarch, both the Catos, Cicero, Seneca, and various other leaders of ancient thought, arrived at much the same conclusion–sometimes from sympathy with oppressed debtors; sometimes from dislike of usurers; sometimes from simple contempt of trade.
From these sources there came into the early Church the germ of a theological theory upon the subject.
But far greater was the stream of influence from the Jewish and Christian sacred books. In the Old Testament stood various texts condemning usury–the term usury meaning any taking of interest: the law of Moses, while it allowed usury in dealing with strangers, forbade it in dealing with Jews. In the New Testament, in the Sermon on the Mount, as given by St. Luke, stood the text “Lend, hoping for nothing again.” These texts seemed to harmonize with the most beautiful characteristic of primitive Christianity; its tender care for the poor and oppressed: hence we find, from the earliest period, the whole weight of the Church brought to bear against the taking of interest for money.[448]
[448] On the general allowance of interest for money in Greece, even at high rates, see Bockh, Public Economy of the Athenians, translated by Lamb, Boston, 1857, especially chaps. xxii, xxiii, and xxiv of book i. For a view of usury taken by Aristotle, see his Politics and Economics, translated by Walford, p. 27; also Grote, History of Greece, vol. iii, chap. xi. For summary of opinions in Greece and Rome, and their relation to Christian thought, see Bohm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest, translated by Smart, London, 1890, chap. i. For a very full list of scripture texts against the taking of interest, see Pearson, The Theories on Usury in Europe, 1100-1400, Cambridge (England), 1876, p. 6. The texts most frequently cited were Leviticus xxv, 36, 37; Deuteronomy xxiii, 19 and 26; Psalms, xv, 5; Ezekiel xviii, 8 and 17; St. Luke, vi, 35. For a curious modern use of them, see D. S. Dickinson’s speech in the State of New York, in vol. i of his collected writings. See also Lecky, History of Rationalism in Europe, vol. ii, chap. vi; and above all, as the most recent historical summary by a leading historian of political economy, Bohm-Bawerk, as above.
The great fathers of the Eastern Church, and among them St. Basil, St. Chrysostom, and St. Gregory of Nyssa,–the fathers of the Western Church, and among them Tertullian, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome, joined most earnestly in this condemnation. St. Basil denounces money at interest as a “fecund monster,” and says, “The divine law declares expressly, `Thou shalt not lend on usury to thy brother or thy neighbour.'” St. Gregory of Nyssa calls down on him who lends money at interest the vengeance of the Almighty. St. Chrysostom says: “What can be more unreasonable than to sow without land, without rain, without ploughs? All those who give themselves up to this damnable culture shall reap only tares. Let us cut off these monstrous births of gold and silver; let us stop this execrable fecundity.”
Lactantius called the taking of interest “robbery.” St. Ambrose declared it as bad as murder, St. Jerome threw the argument into the form of a dilemma, which was used as a weapon against money-lenders for centuries. Pope Leo the Great solemnly adjudged it a sin worthy of severe punishment.[449]
[449] For St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nyssa, see French translation of their diatribes in Homelies contre les Usuriers, Paris, Hachette, 1861-’62, especially p. 30 of St. Basil. For some doubtful reservations by St. Augustine, see Murray, History of Usury. For St. Ambrose, see De Officiis, lib. iii, cap. ii, in Migne, Patr. Lat., vol. xvi; also the De Tobia, in Migne, vol. xiv. For St. Augustine, see De Bapt. contr Donat., lib. iv, cap. ix, in Migne, vol. xliii. For Lactantius, see his Opera, Leyden, 1660, p. 608. For Cyprian, see his Testimonies against the Jews, translated by Wallis, book iii, article 48. For St. Jerome, see his Com. in Ezekiel, xviii, 8, in Migne, vol. xxv, pp. 170 et seq. For Leo the Great, see his letter to the bishops of various provinces of Italy, cited in the Jus. Can., cap. vii, can. xiv, qu. 4. For very fair statements of the attitude of the fathers on this question, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, London, 1884, and Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, London, 1875-’80; in each, under article Usury.
This unanimity of the fathers of the Church brought about a crystallization of hostility to interest-bearing loans into numberless decrees of popes and councils and kings and legislatures throughout Christendom during more than fifteen hundred years, and the canon law was shaped in accordance with these. At first these were more especially directed against the clergy, but we soon find them extending to the laity. These prohibitions were enforced by the Council of Arles in 314, and a modern Church apologist insists that every great assembly of the Church, from the Council of Elvira in 306 to that of Vienne in 1311, inclusive, solemnly condemned lending money at interest. The greatest rulers under the sway of the Church–Justinian, in the Empire of the East; Charlemagne, in the Empire of the West; Alfred, in England; St. Louis, in France–yielded fully to this dogma. In the ninth century Alfred went so far as to confiscate the estates of money-lenders, denying them burial in Consecrated ground; and similar decrees were made in other parts of Europe. In the twelfth century the Greek Church seems to have relaxed its strictness somewhat, but the Roman Church grew more severe. St. Anselm proved from the Scriptures that the taking of interest is a breach of the Ten Commandments. Peter Lombard, in his Sentences, made the taking of interest purely and simply theft. St. Bernard, reviving religious earnestness in the Church, took the same view. In 1179 the Third Council of the Lateran decreed that impenitent money-lenders should be excluded from the altar, from absolution in the hour of death, and from Christian burial. Pope Urban III reiterated the declaration that the passage in St. Luke forbade the taking of any interest whatever. Pope Alexander III declared that the prohibition in this matter could never be suspended by dispensation.
In the thirteenth century Pope Gregory IX dealt an especially severe blow at commerce by his declaration that even to advance on interest the money necessary in maritime trade was damnable usury; and this was fitly followed by Gregory X, who forbade Christian burial to those guilty of this practice; the Council of Lyons meted out the same penalty. This idea was still more firmly fastened upon the world by the two greatest thinkers of the time: first, by St. Thomas Aquinas, who knit it into the mind of the Church by the use of the Scriptures and of Aristotle; and next by Dante, who pictured money-lenders in one of the worst regions of hell.
About the beginning of the fourteenth century the “Subtile Doctor” of the Middle Ages, Duns Scotus, gave to the world an exquisite piece of reasoning in evasion of the accepted doctrine; but all to no purpose: the Council of Vienne, presided over by Pope Clement V, declared that if any one “shall pertinaciously presume to affirm that the taking of interest for money is not a sin, we decree him to be a heretic, fit for punishment.” This infallible utterance bound the dogma with additional force on the conscience of the universal Church.
Nor was this a doctrine enforced by rulers only; the people were no less strenuous. In 1390 the city authorities of London enacted that, “if any person shall lend or put into the hands of any person gold or silver to receive gain thereby, such person shall have the punishment for usurers.” And in the same year the Commons prayed the king that the laws of London against usury might have the force of statutes throughout the realm.
In the fifteenth century the Council of the Church at Salzburg excluded from communion and burial any who took interest for money, and this was a very general rule throughout Germany.
An exception was, indeed, sometimes made: some canonists held that Jews might be allowed to take interest, since they were to be damned in any case, and their monopoly of money-lending might prevent Christians from losing their souls by going into the business. Yet even the Jews were from time to time punished for the crime of usury; and, as regards Christians, punishment was bestowed on the dead as well as the living–the bodies of dead money-lenders being here and there dug up and cast out of consecrated ground.
The popular preachers constantly declaimed against all who took interest. The medieval anecdote books for pulpit use are especially full on this point. Jacques de Vitry tells us that demons on one occasion filled a dead money-lender’s mouth with red-hot coins; Cesarius of Heisterbach declared that a toad was found thrusting a piece of money into a dead usurer’s heart; in another case, a devil was seen pouring molten gold down a dead money-lender’s throat.[450]
[450] For an enumeration of councils condemning the taking of interest for money, see Liegeois, Essai sur l’Histoire et la Legislation de l’Usure, Paris, 1865, p. 78; also the Catholic Dictionary as above. For curious additional details and sources regarding mediaeval horror of usurers, see Ducange, Glossarium, etc., article Caorcini. T he date 306, for the Council of Elvira is that assigned by Hefele. For the decree of Alexander III, see citation from the Latin text in Lecky. For a long catalogue of ecclesiastical and civil decrees against taking of interest, see Petit, Traite de l’Usure, Paris, 1840. For the reasoning at the bottom of this, see Cunningham, Christian Opinion on Usury, London, 1884. For the Salzburg decrees, see Zillner, Salzburgusche Culturgeschichte, p. 232; and for Germany generally, see Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland, Halle, 1865, especially pp. 22 et seq; also Roscher, National- Oeconomis. For effect of mistranslation of the passage of Luke in the Vulgate, see Dollinger, p. 170, and especially pp. 224, 225 For the capitularies of Charlemagne against usury, see Liegeois, p. 77. For Gregory X and the Council of Lyons, see Sextus Decretalium liber, pp. 669 et. seq. For Peter Lombard, see his Lib. Sententiarum, III, dist. xxxvii, 3. For St. Thomas Aquinas, see his works, Migne, vol. iii, Paris 1889, quaestio 78, pp. 587 et seq., citing the Scriptures and Aristotle, and especially developing Aristotle’s metaphysical idea regarding the “barrenness” of money. For a very good summary of St. Thomas’s ideas, see Pearson. pp. 30 et seq. For Dante, see in canto xi of the Inferno a revelation of the amazing depth of the hostility to the taking of interest. For the London law of 1390 and the petition to the king, see Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, pp. 210, 326; also the Abridgment of the Records in the Tower of London, p. 339. For the theory that Jews, being damned already, might be allowed to practice usury, see Liegeois, Histoire de l’Usure, p. 82. For St. Bernard’s view, see Epist. CCCLXIII, in Migne, vol. clxxxii, p. 567. For ideas and anecdotes for preachers’ use, see Joannes a San Geminiano, Summa de Exemplis, Antwerp, 1629, fol. 493, a; also the edition of Venice, 1584, ff. 132, 159; but especially, for multitudes of examples, see the Exempla of Jacques de Vitry, edited by Prof. T. F. Crane, of Cornell University, London, 1890, pp. 203 et seq. For the canon law in regard to interest, see a long line of authorities cited in Die Wucherfrage, St. Louis, 1869, pp. 92 et seq., and especially Decret. Gregor., lib.v, lit. 19, cap. iii, and Clementin., lib. v, lit. 5, sec. 2; see also the Corpus Juris Canonici, Paris, 1618, pp. 227, 228. For the position of the English Church, see Gibson’s Corpus Juris Ecclesiastici Anglicani, pp. 1070, 1071, 1106.
This theological hostility to the taking of interest was imbedded firmly in the canon law. Again and again it defined usury to be the taking of anything of value beyond the exact original amount of a loan; and under sanction of the universal Church it denounced this as a crime and declared all persons defending it to be guilty of heresy. What this meant the world knows but too well.
The whole evolution of European civilization was greatly hindered by this conscientious policy. Money could only be loaned in most countries at the risk of incurring odium in this world and damnation in the next; hence there was but little capital and few lenders. The rates of interest became at times enormous; as high as forty per cent in England, and ten per cent a month in Italy and Spain. Commerce, manufactures, and general enterprise were dwarfed, while pauperism flourished.
Yet worse than these were the moral results. Doing what one holds to be evil is only second in bad consequences to doing what is really evil; hence, all lending and borrowing, even for the most legitimate purposes and at the most reasonable rates, tended to debase both borrower and lender. The prohibition of lending at interest in continental Europe promoted luxury and discouraged economy; the rich, who were not engaged in business, finding no easy way of employing their incomes productively, spent them largely in ostentation and riotous living. One evil effect is felt in all parts of the world to this hour. The Jews, so acute in intellect and strong in will, were virtually drawn or driven out of all other industries or professions by the theory that their race, being accursed, was only fitted for the abhorred profession of money-lending.[451]
[451] For evil economic results, and especially for the rise of the rate of interest in England and elsewhere at times to forty per cent, see Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Cambridge, 1890, p. 189; and for its rising to ten per cent a month, see Bedarride, Les Juifs en France, en Italie, at en Espagne, p. 220; see also Hallam’s Middle Ages, London, 1853, pp. 401, 402. For the evil moral effects of the Church doctrine against taking interest, see Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, lib. xxi, chap. xx; see also Sismondi, cited in Lecky. For the trifling with conscience, distinction between “consumptibles” and “fungibles,” “possessio” and “dominium,” etc., see Ashley, English Economic History, New York, pp. 152, 153; see also Leopold Delisle, Etudes, pp. 198, 468. For the effects of these doctrines on the Jews, see Milman, History of the Jews, vol. iii, p. 179; also Wellhausen, History of Israel, London, 1885, p. 546; also Beugnot, Les Juifs d’Occident, Paris, 1824, pt. 2, p. 114 (on driving Jews out of other industries than money-lending). For a noted mediaeval evasion of the Church rules against usury, see Peruzzi, Storia del Commercio e dei Banchieri di Firenze, Florence, 1868, pp. 172, 173.
These evils were so manifest, when trade began to revive throughout Europe in the fifteenth century, that most earnest exertions were put forth to induce the Church to change its position.
The first important effort of this kind was made by John Gerson. His general learning made him Chancellor of the University of Paris; his sacred learning made him the leading orator at the Council of Constance; his piety led men to attribute to him The Imitation of Christ. Shaking off theological shackles, he declared, “Better is it to lend money at reasonable interest, and thus to give aid to the poor, than to see them reduced by poverty to steal, waste their goods, and sell at a low price their personal and real property.”
But this idea was at once buried beneath citations from the Scriptures, the fathers, councils, popes, and the canon law. Even in the most active countries there seemed to be no hope. In England, under Henry VII, Cardinal Morton, the lord chancellor, addressed Parliament, asking it to take into consideration loans of money at interest. The result was a law which imposed on lenders at interest a fine of a hundred pounds besides the annulment of the loan; and, to show that there was an offence against religion involved, there was added a clause “reserving to the Church, notwithstanding this punishment, the correction of their souls according to the laws of the same.”
Similar enactments were made by civil authority in various parts of Europe; and just when the trade, commerce, and manufactures of the modern epoch had received an immense impulse from the great series of voyages of discovery by such men as Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, and the Cabots, this barrier against enterprise was strengthened by a decree from no less enlightened a pontiff than Leo X.
The popular feeling warranted such decrees. As late as the end of the Middle Ages we find the people of Piacenza dragging the body of a money-lender out of his grave in consecrated ground and throwing it into the river Po, in order to stop a prolonged rainstorm; and outbreaks of the same spirit were frequent in other countries. [452]
[452] For Gerson’s argument favouring a reasonable rate of interest, see Coquelin and Guillaumin, Dictionnaire, article Interet. For the renewed opposition to the taking of interest in England, see Craik, History of British Commerce, chap. vi. The statute cited is 3 Henry VII, chap. vi; it is found in Gibson’s Corpus Juris Eccles. Anglic., p. 1071. For the adverse decree of Leo X, see Liegeois, p. 76. See also Lecky, Rationalism, vol. ii. For the dragging out of the usurer’s body at Piacenza, see Burckhardt, The Renaissance in Italy, London, 1878, vol. ii, p. 339. For public opinion of similar strength on this subject in England, see Cunningham, p. 239; also Pike, History of Crime in England, vol. i, pp. 127, 193. For good general observations on the same, see Stephen, History of Criminal Law in England, London, 1883, vol. iii, pp. 195-197. For usury laws in Castile and Aragon, see Bedarride, pp. 191, 192. For exceedingly valuable details as to the attitude of the mediaeval Church, see Leopold Delisle, Etudes sur la Classe Agricole en Normandie au Moyen Age, Evreux, 1851, pp. 200 et seq., also p. 468. For penalties in France, see Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, in the Rolls Series, especially vol. iii, pp. 191, 192. For a curious evasion, sanctioned by Popes Martin V and Calixtus III when Church corporations became money-lenders, see H. C. Lea on The Ecclesiastical Treatment of Usury, in the Yale Review for February, 1894. For a detailed development of interesting subordinate points, see Ashley, Introduction to English Economic History and Theory, vol. ii, ch, vi.
Another mode of obtaining relief was tried. Subtle theologians devised evasions of various sorts. Two among these inventions of the schoolmen obtained much notoriety.
The first was the doctrine of “damnum emergens”: if a lender suffered loss by the failure of the borrower to return a loan at a date named, compensation might be made. Thus it was that, if the nominal date of payment was made to follow quickly after the real date of the loan, the compensation for the anticipated delay in payment had a very strong resemblance to interest. Equally cogent was the doctrine of “lucrum cessans”: if a man, in order to lend money, was obliged to diminish his income from productive enterprises, it was claimed that he might receive in return, in addition to his money, an amount exactly equal to this diminution in his income.
But such evasions were looked upon with little favour by the great body of theologians, and the name of St. Thomas Aquinas was triumphantly cited against them.
Opposition on scriptural grounds to the taking of interest was not confined to the older Church. Protestantism was led by Luther and several of his associates into the same line of thought and practice. Said Luther. “To exchange anything with any one and gain by the exchange is not to do a charity; but to steal. Every usurer is a thief worthy of the gibbet. I call those usurers who lend money at five or six per cent.” But it is only just to say that at a later period Luther took a much more moderate view. Melanchthon, defining usury as any interest whatever, condemned it again and again; and the Goldberg Catechism of 1558, for which he wrote a preface and recommendation, declares every person taking interest for money a thief. From generation to generation this doctrine was upheld by the more eminent divines of the Lutheran Church in all parts of Germany. The English reformers showed the same hostility to interest-bearing loans. Under Henry VIII the law of Henry VII against taking interest had been modified for the better; but the revival of religious feeling under Edward VI caused in 1552 the passage of the “Bill of Usury.” In this it is said, “Forasmuch as usury is by the word of God utterly prohibited, as a vice most odious and detestable, as in divers places of the Holy Scriptures it is evident to be seen, which thing by no godly teachings and persuasions can sink into the hearts of divers greedy, uncharitable, and covetous persons of this realm, nor yet, by any terrible threatenings of God’s wrath and vengeance,” etc., it is enacted that whosoever shall thereafter lend money “for any manner of usury, increase, lucre, gain, or interest, to be had, received, or hoped for,” shall forfeit principal and interest, and suffer imprisonment and fine at the king’s pleasure.[453]
[453] For Luther’s views, see his sermon, Von dem Wucher, Wittenberg, 1519; also the Table Talk, cited in Coquelin and Guillaumin, article Interet. For the later, more moderate views of Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli, making a compromise with the needs of society, see Bohm-Bawerk, p. 27, citing Wiskemann. For Melanchthon and a long line of the most eminent Lutheran divines who have denounced the taking of interest, see Die Wucherfrage, St. Louis, 1869, pp. 94 et seq. For the law against usury under Edward VI, see Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, vol. i, p. 596; see also Craik, History of British Commerce, chap. vi.
But, most fortunately, it happened that Calvin, though at times stumbling over the usual texts against the taking of interest for money, turned finally in the right direction. He cut through the metaphysical arguments of Aristotle, and characterized the subtleties devised to evade the Scriptures as “a childish game with God.” In place of these subtleties there was developed among Protestants a serviceable fiction–the statement that usury means ILLEGAL OR OPPRESSIVE INTEREST. Under the action of this fiction, commerce and trade revived rapidly in Protestant countries, though with occasional checks from exact interpreters of Scripture. At the same period in France, the great Protestant jurist Dumoulin brought all his legal learning and skill in casuistry to bear on the same side. A certain ferretlike acuteness and litheness seem to have enabled him to hunt down the opponents of interest-taking through the most tortuous arguments of scholasticism.
In England the struggle went on with varying fortune; statesmen on one side, and theologians on the other. We have seen how, under Henry VIII, interest was allowed at a fixed rate, and how, the development of English Protestantism having at first strengthened the old theological view, there was, under Edward VI, a temporarily successful attempt to forbid the taking of interest by law.
The Puritans, dwelling on Old Testament texts, continued for a considerable time especially hostile to the taking of any interest. Henry Smith, a noted preacher, thundered from the pulpit of St. Clement Danes in London against “the evasions of Scripture” which permitted men to lend money on interest at all. In answer to the contention that only “biting” usury was oppressive, Wilson, a noted upholder of the strict theological view in political economy, declared: “There is difference in deed between the bite of a dogge and the bite of a flea, and yet, though the flea doth lesse harm, yet the flea doth bite after hir kinde, yea, and draweth blood, too. But what a world this is, that men will make sin to be but a fleabite, when they see God’s word directly against them!”
The same view found strong upholders among contemporary English Catholics. One of the most eminent of these, Nicholas Sanders, revived very vigorously the use of an old scholastic argument. He insisted that “man can not sell time,” that time is not a human possession, but something which is given by God alone: he declared, “Time was not of your gift to your neighbour, but of God’s gift to you both.”
In the Parliament of the period, we find strong assertions of the old idea, with constant reference to Scripture and the fathers. In one debate, Wilson cited from Ezekiel and other prophets and attributed to St. Augustine the doctrine that “to take but a cup of wine is usury and damnable.” Fleetwood recalled the law of King Edward the Confessor, which submitted usurers to the ordeal.
But arguments of this sort had little influence upon Elizabeth and her statesmen. Threats of damnation in the next world troubled them little if they could have their way in this. They re-established the practice of taking interest under restrictions, and this, in various forms, has remained in England ever since. Most notable in this phase of the evolution of scientific doctrine in political economy at that period is the emergence of a recognised difference between USURY and INTEREST. Between these two words, which had so long been synonymous, a distinction now appears: the former being construed to indicate OPPRESSIVE INTEREST, and the latter JUST RATES for the use of money. This idea gradually sank into the popular mind of Protestant countries, and the scriptural texts no longer presented any difficulty to the people at large, since there grew up a general belief that the word “usury,” as employed in Scripture, had ALWAYS meant exorbitant interest; and this in spite of the parable of the Talents. Still, that the old Aristotelian quibble had not been entirely forgotten, is clearly seen by various passages in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. But this line of reasoning seems to have received its quietus from Lord Bacon. He did not, indeed, develop a strong and connected argument on the subject; but he burst the bonds of Aristotle, and based interest for money upon natural laws. How powerful the new current of thought was, is seen from the fact that James I, of all monarchs the most fettered by scholasticism and theology, sanctioned a statute dealing with interest for money as absolutely necessary. Yet, even after this, the old idea asserted itself; for the bishops utterly refused to agree to the law allowing interest until a proviso was inserted that “nothing in this law contained shall be construed or expounded to allow the practice of usury in point of religion or conscience.” The old view cropped out from time to time in various public declarations. Famous among these were the Treatise of Usury, published in 1612 by Dr. Fenton, who restated the old arguments with much force, and the Usury Condemned of John Blaxton, published in 1634. Blaxton, who also was a clergyman, defined usury as the taking of any interest whatever for money, citing in support of this view six archbishops and bishops and over thirty doctors of divinity in the Anglican Church, some of their utterances being very violent and all of them running their roots down into texts of Scripture. Typical among these is a sermon of Bishop Sands, in which he declares, regarding the taking of interest: “This canker hath corrupted all England; we shall doe God and our country true service by taking away this evill; represse it by law, else the heavy hand of God hangeth over us and will strike us.”
II. RETREAT OF THE CHURCH, PROTESTANT AND CATHOLIC.
But about the middle of the seventeenth century Sir Robert Filmer gave this doctrine the heaviest blow it ever received in England. Taking up Dr. Fenton’s treatise, he answered it, and all works like it, in a way which, however unsuitable to this century, was admirably adapted to that. He cites Scripture and chops logic after a masterly manner. Characteristic is this declaration: “St. Paul doth, with one breath, reckon up seventeen sins, and yet usury is none of them; but many preachers can not reckon up seven deadly sins, except they make usury one of them.” Filmer followed Fenton not only through his theology, but through his political economy, with such relentless keenness that the old doctrine seems to have been then and there practically worried out of existence, so far as England was concerned.
Departures from the strict scriptural doctrines regarding interest soon became frequent in Protestant countries, and they were followed up with especial vigour in Holland. Various theologians in the Dutch Church attempted to assert the scriptural view by excluding bankers from the holy communion; but the commercial vigour of the republic was too strong: Salmasius led on the forces of right reason brilliantly, and by the middle of the seventeenth century the question was settled rightly in that country. This work was aided, indeed, by a far greater man, Hugo Grotius; but here was shown the power of an established dogma. Great as Grotius was–and it may well be held that his book on War and Peace has wrought more benefit to humanity than any other attributed to human authorship–he was, in the matter of interest for money, too much entangled in theological reasoning to do justice to his cause or to himself. He declared the prohibition of it to be scriptural, but resisted the doctrine of Aristotle, and allowed interest on certain natural and practical grounds.
In Germany the struggle lasted longer. Of some little significance, perhaps, is the demand of Adam Contzen, in 1629, that lenders at interest should be punished as thieves; but by the end of the seventeenth century Puffendorf and Leibnitz had gained the victory.
Protestantism, open as it was to the currents of modern thought, could not long continue under the dominion of ideas unfavourable to economic development, and perhaps the most remarkable proof of this was presented early in the eighteenth century in America, by no less strict a theologian than Cotton Mather. In his Magnalia he argues against the whole theological view with a boldness, acuteness, and good sense which cause us to wonder that this can be the same man who was so infatuated regarding witchcraft. After an argument so conclusive as his, there could have been little left of the old anti-economic doctrine in New England.[454]
[454] For Calvin’s views, see his letter published in the appendix to Pearson’s Theories on Usury. His position is well- stated in Bohm-Bawerk, pp. 28 et seq., where citations are given. See also Economic Tracts, No. IV, New York, 1881, pp. 34, 35; and for some serviceable Protestant fictions, see Cunningham, Christian Opinion on Usury, pp. 60, 61. For Dumoulin (Molinaeus), see Bohm-Bawerk, as above, pp. 29 et seq. For debates on usury in the British Parliament in Elizabeth’s time, see Cobbett, Parliamentary History, vol. i, pp 756 et seq. A striking passage in Shakespeare is found in the Merchant of Venice, Act I, scene iii: “If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not as to thy friend; for when did friendship take a breed for barren metal of his friend?” For the right direction taken by Lord Bacon, see Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland, Halle, 1864, pp. 497, 498. For Salmasius, see his De Usuris, Leyden, 1638, and for others mentioned, see Bohm-Bawerk, pp. 34 et seq.; also Lecky, vol. ii. p. 256. For the saving clause inderted by the bishops in the statute of James I, see the Corpus Juris Eccles. Anglic., p. 1071; also Murray, History of Usury, Philadelphia, 1866, p. 49.
For Blaxton, see his English Usurer, or Usury Condemned, by John Blaxton, Preacher of God’s Word, London, 1634. Blaxton gives some of Calvin’s earlier utterances against interest. For Bishop Sands;s sermon, see p. 11. For Filmer, see his Quaestio Quodlibetica, London, 1652, reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, vol.x, pp. 105 et seq. For Grotius, see the De Jure Belli ac Pacis, lib. ii, cap.xii. For Cotton Mather’s argument, see the Magnalia, London, 1702, pp. 5, 52.
But while the retreat of the Protestant Church from the old doctrine regarding the taking of interest was henceforth easy, in the Catholic Church it was far more difficult. Infallible popes and councils, with saints, fathers, and doctors, had so constantly declared the taking of any interest at all to be contrary to Scripture, that the more exact though less fortunate interpretation of the sacred text relating to interest continued in Catholic countries. When it was attempted in France in the seventeenth century to argue that usury “means oppressive interest,” the Theological Faculty of the Sorbonne declared that usury is the taking of any interest at all, no matter how little; and the eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel was cited to clinch this argument.
Another attempt to ease the burden of industry and commerce was made by declaring that “usury means interest demanded not as a matter of favour but as a matter of right.” This, too, was solemnly condemned by Pope innocent XI.
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.
But even the genius of Pascal could not stop such efforts. In the eighteenth century they were renewed by a far greater theologian than Escobar–by him who was afterward made a saint and proclaimed a doctor of the Church–Alphonso Liguori.
Starting with bitter denunciations of usury, Liguori soon developed a multitude of subtle devices for escaping the guilt of it. Presenting a long and elaborate theory of “mental, usury” he arrives at the conclusion that, if the borrower pay interest of his own free will, the lender may keep it. In answer to the question whether the lender may keep what the borrower paid, not out of gratitude but out of fear–fear that otherwise loans might be refused him in future–Liguori says, “To be usury it must be paid by reason of a contract, or as justly due; payment by reason of such a fear does not cause interest to be paid as an actual price.” Again Liguori tells us, “It is not usury to exact something in return for the danger and expense of regaining the principal.” The old subterfuges of “Damnum emergens” and “Lucrum cessans” are made to do full duty. A remarkable quibble is found in the answer to the question whether he sins who furnishes money to a man whom he knows to intend employing it in usury. After citing affirmative opinions from many writers, Liguori says, “Notwithstanding these opinions, the better opinion seems to me to be that the man thus putting out his money is not bound to make restitution, for his action is not injurious to the borrower, but rather favourable to him,” and this reasoning the saint develops at great length.
In the Latin countries this sort of casuistry eased the relations of the Church with the bankers, and it was full time; for now there came arguments of a different kind. The eighteenth century philosophy had come upon the stage, and the first effective onset of political scientists against the theological opposition in southern Europe was made in Italy–the most noted leaders in the attack being Galiani and Maffei. Here and there feeble efforts were made to meet them, but it was felt more and more by thinking churchmen that entirely different tactics must be adopted.
About the same time came an attack in France, and though its results were less immediate at home, they were much more effective abroad. In 1748 appeared Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. In this famous book were concentrated twenty years of study and thought by a great thinker on the interests of the world about him. In eighteen months it went through twenty-two editions; it was translated into every civilized language; and among the things on which Montesquieu brought his wit and wisdom to bear with especial force was the doctrine of the Church regarding interest on loans. In doing this he was obliged to use a caution in forms which seems strangely at variance with the boldness of his ideas. In view of the strictness of ecclesiastical control in France, he felt it safest to make his whole attack upon those theological and economic follies of Mohammedan countries which were similar to those which the theological spirit had fastened on France.[456]
[456] For Vilagut, see his Tractatus de Usuris, Venice, 1589, especially pp. 21, 25, 399. For Leotardi, see his De Usuris, Venice, 1655, especially preface, pp. 6, 7 et seq. For Pascal and Escobar, see the Provincial Letters, edited by Sayres, Cambridge, 1880, Letter VIII, pp. 183-186; also a note to the same letter, p. 196. For Liguori, see his Theologia Moralis, Paris, 1834, lib. iii, tract v, cap. iii: De Contractibus, dub, vii. For the eighteenth century attack in Italy, see Bohm-Bawerk, pp. 48 et seq. For Montesquieu’s view of interest on loans, see the Esprit des Lois, livre xxii.
By the middle of the eighteenth century the Church authorities at Rome clearly saw the necessity of a concession: the world would endure theological restriction no longer; a way of escape MUST be found. It was seen, even by the most devoted theologians, that mere denunciations and use of theological arguments or scriptural texts against the scientific idea were futile.
To this feeling it was due that, even in the first years of the century, the Jesuit casuists had come to the rescue. With exquisite subtlety some of their acutest intellects devoted themselves to explaining away the utterances on this subject of saints, fathers, doctors, popes, and councils. These explanations were wonderfully ingenious, but many of the older churchmen continued to insist upon the orthodox view, and at last the Pope himself intervened. Fortunately for the world, the seat of St. Peter was then occupied by Benedict XIV, certainly one of the most gifted, morally and intellectually, in the whole line of Roman pontiffs. Tolerant and sympathetic for the oppressed, he saw the necessity of taking up the question, and he grappled with it effectually: he rendered to Catholicism a service like that which Calvin had rendered to Protestantism, by shrewdly cutting a way through the theological barrier. In 1745 he issued his encyclical Vix pervenit, which declared that the doctrine of the Church remained consistent with itself; that usury is indeed a sin, and that it consists in demanding any amount beyond the exact amount lent, but that there are occasions when on special grounds the lender may obtain such additional sum.
What these “occasions” and “special grounds” might be, was left very vague; but this action was sufficient.
At the same time no new restrictions upon books advocating the taking of interest for money were imposed, and, in the year following his encyclical, Benedict openly accepted the dedication of one of them–the work of Maffei, and perhaps the most cogent of all.
Like the casuistry of Boscovich in using the Copernican theory for “convenience in argument,” while acquiescing in its condemnation by the Church authorities, this encyclical of Pope Benedict broke the spell. Turgot, Quesnay, Adam Smith, Hume, Bentham, and their disciples pressed on, and science won for mankind another great victory.[457]
[457] For Quesnay, see his Observations sur l’Interet de l’Argent, in his Oeuvres, Frankfort and Paris, 1888, pp. 399 et seq. For Turgot, see the Collections des Economistes, Paris, 1844, vols. iii and iv; also Blanqui, Histoire de l’Economie Politique, English translation, p. 373. For an excellent though brief summary of the efforts of the Jesuits to explain away the old action of the Church, see Lecky, vol. ii, pp 256, 257. For the action of Benedict XIV, see Reusch, Der Index der Vorbotenen Bucher, Bonn, 1885, vol. ii, pp 847, 848. For a comical picture of the “quagmire’ into which the hierarchy brought itself in the squaring of its practice with its theory, see Dollinger, as above, pp. 227, 228. For cunningly vague statements of the action of Benedict XIV, see Mastrofini, Sur l’Usure, French translation, Lyons, 1834, pp. 125, 255. The abbate, as will be seen, has not the slightest hesitaion in telling an untruth in order to preserve the consistency of papal action in the matter of usury– e.g., pp. 93, 94 96, and elsewhere.
Yet in this case, as in others, insurrections against the sway of scientific truth appeared among some overzealous religionists. When the Sorbonne, having retreated from its old position, armed itself with new casuistries against those who held to its earlier decisions, sundry provincial doctors in theology protested indignantly, making the old citations from the Scriptures, fathers, saints, doctors, popes, councils, and canonists. Again the Roman court intervened. In 1830 the Inquisition at Rome, with the approval of Pius VIII, though still declining to commit itself on the DOCTRINE involved, decreed that, as to PRACTICE, confessors should no longer disturb lenders of money at legal interest.
But even this did not quiet the more conscientious theologians. The old weapons were again furbished and hurled by the Abbe Laborde, Vicar of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Auch, and by the Abbe Dennavit, Professor of Theology at Lyons. Good Abbe Dennavit declared that he refused absolution to those who took interest and to priests who pretend that the sanction of the civil law is sufficient.
But the “wisdom of the serpent” was again brought into requisition, and early in the decade between 1830 and 1840 the Abbate Mastrofini issued a work on usury, which, he declared on its title-page, demonstrated that “moderate usury is not contrary to Holy Scripture, or natural law, or the decisions of the Church.” Nothing can be more comical than the suppressions of truth, evasions of facts, jugglery with phrases, and perversions of history, to which the abbate is forced to resort throughout his book in order to prove that the Church has made no mistake. In the face of scores of explicit deliverances and decrees of fathers, doctors, popes, and councils against the taking of any interest whatever for money, he coolly pretended that what they had declared against was EXORBITANT interest. He made a merit of the action of the Church, and showed that its course had been a blessing to humanity. But his masterpiece is in dealing with the edicts of Clement V and Benedict XIV. As to the first, it will be remembered that Clement, in accord with the Council of Vienne, had declared that “any one who shall pertinaciously presume to affirm that the taking of interest for money is not a sin, we decree him to be a heiretic fit for punishment,” and we have seen that Benedict XIV did not at all deviate from the doctrines of his predecessors. Yet Mastrofini is equal to his task, and brings out, as the conclusion of his book, the statement put upon his title-page, that what the Church condemns is only EXORBITANT interest.
This work was sanctioned by various high ecclesiastical dignitaries, and served its purpose; for it covered the retreat of the Church.
In 1872 the Holy Office, answering a question solemnly put by the Bishop of Ariano, as solemnly declared that those who take eight per cent interest per annum are “not to be disquieted”; and in 1873 appeared a book published under authority from the Holy See, allowing the faithful to take moderate interest under condition that any future decisions of the Pope should be implicitly obeyed. Social science as applied to political economy had gained a victory final and complete. The Torlonia family at Rome to-day, with its palaces, chapels, intermarriages, affiliations, and papal favour–all won by lending money at interest, and by liberal gifts, from the profits of usury, to the Holy See–is but one out of many growths of its kind on ramparts long since surrendered and deserted.[458]
[458] For the decree forbidding confessors to trouble lenders of money at legal interest, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, as above; also Mastrofini, as above, in the appendix, where various other recent Roman decrees are given. As to the controversy generally, see Mastrofini; also La Replique des douze Docteurs, cited by Guillaumin and Coquelin; also Reusch, vol. ii, p. 850. As an example of Mastrofini’s way of making black appear white, compare the Latin text of the decree on page 97 with his statements regarding it; see also his cunning substitution of the new significance of the word usury for the old in various parts of his book. A good historical presentation of the general subject will be found in Roscher, Geschichte der National- Oeconomie in Deutschland, Munchen, 1874, under articles Wucher and Zinsnehmen. For France, see especially Petit, Traite de l’Usure, Paris, 1840; and for Germany, see Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland, Halle, 1865. For the view of a modern leader of thought in this field, see Jeremy Bentham, Defence of Usury, Letter X. For an admirable piece of research into the nicer points involved in the whole subject, see H. C. Lea, The Ecclesiatical Treatment of Usury, in the Yale Review for February, 1894.
The dealings of theology with public economy were by no means confined to the taking of interest for money. It would be interesting to note the restrictions placed upon commerce by the Church prohibition of commercial intercourse with infidels, against which the Republic of Venice fought a good fight; to note how, by a most curious perversion of Scripture in the Greek