## Usury in Dante's Inferno

Canto 11 of *The Inferno* marks an important excursus in the first canticle of Dante's *Comedia* when the writer deems it important to halt the narrative and schematize the logic of the subsequent levels of hell for the reader (11.16-111). In the midst of Virgil's explication, Dante (the character) stops his guide to shed light on a very specific sinner and their place in hell: the usurer (11.94-111). This raises an important question for the reader: why was it necessary for Dante as author to foreground this specific sin? We can infer, at the least, that in his historic context, Dante considered it necessary to add additional context and explanation for this sin's *contrapasso*. Either because the nature of this sin would not be entire clear to his readers, his understanding of the nature of this sin may have been distinct from prevailing consideration of it, or, likely, some combination of both.

It is helpful to (re)frame the narrative's build up to the usurers on the the edge of the seventh circle of hell, at the precise middle of the canticle, in order to draw attention to some peculiarities in the text. This aids in identifying the context for the concerns at play in relationship to the text itself. First and foremost, Dante's treatment of usury in *Inferno,* leaves the sin shrouded with ambiguity regarding its nature and relationship to Dante's contemporary world. As a result, some consideration of trends in Florentine political economy during the 12th and 13th century will lay the groundwork for reading Dante against Marx. By introducing the dynamics of late medieval Europe, it is possible to read Dante's condemnation of usury against Marx's own conceptualization of usurious lending as an embryo of modern capitalism. Accepting this, and Dante's indebtedness to scholastic criticism of usury, a potential metaphysical reading unfolds of Dante's usurers in hell which corresponds with Marx's critique of "the capitalist" as a vacant phantasm who has taken up the very fantastic emptiness of capital itself.

From the time usury is introduced there is something abstruse about it. The reader is shown in Canto 11 that Dante the character is not entirely confident in his understanding of what makes usury a sin. He is confused enough that he asks Virgil to circle back and further explain. As a result, usury acts as a dubious focal point which encapsulates Dante and Virgils journey through the circle of violence. The author emphasizes the sin by bringing it into focus in Canto 11, and further emphasizes it by its placement at the very edge of Malebolge, a dramatic turning point in the descent into Hell. However, the narrative's treatment of usury is textured by obscurities regarding the sin. On one hand, Virgil seems to explicate it sufficiently in Canto 11 despite Dante's confusion. On the other hand, the reader is confronted with distinct obstacles regarding how the usurer's placement in Hell helps to define the particularities of the sin itself.

For one, this is the first circle the reader encounters that is broken down into specific classifications of sin. Additionally, those who are considered violent "against God" are further categorized (which is unique only to this part of hell). Due to the intricacies of the narrative, the nature of the thread that unites this schematic of sinners is brought into focus for the reader (whether with clarity or without)—is there a deeper relationship between the murderers and homosexuals besides "violence?" *How* does the order of descent imply an escalation in the gravity of the sin?[^1] Some commentators have rightly noted in various ways that it would not be a stretch for usury to *also* be understood as a form of theft (e.g. of the fruits of one's labor) and consequently, violence against others.[^2] Virgil specifically underlines violence aimed at one's neighbor " *or their possessions* " (11.31-33).[^3] The reader is also reminded, by the time we have reached the usurers, that we have already encountered a corresponding *contrapasso* for the avaricious (7.49-54); that is, the eroded identity. In this regard, usury is commensurable with corresponding sins in a way that others do not readily appear.

Not only is it made ambiguous by its relation to sins above it but it is insinuated strongly to the sins of fraud below it: "Thus, on the seventh circle's edge, / still farther out, I went alone / to where the downcast souls were seated" (17.43-45). In this poetic pirouette the reader is faced with a crucial ambiguity: does Dante find the usurers *at* the edge of the seventh circle, or are the cliff faces (17.36) *beyond* "the edge" itself? Furthermore, it can hardly be underemphasized that the dominating presence of Geryon, a symbol of fraud, looms over all of Canto 17. As a result, the usurious are set narratively in space which either joins violence and fraud, or exists in-between them.

These ambiguities regarding the relationship between the usurer's place in hell, and the nature of the sin should leave us with two primary considerations. First, it is evident from both its connections to other sins and the explicit way in which the nature of the sin is underscored (11.94-111) that usury is elaborate. It exists as a part of a network of sins that requires precise explication of various layers and their relationship to one another. Second, Dante's willingness to depict the sin of usury as a subject of his own character's confusion, and poetically encapsulate it in ambiguities, calls attention to the author's lack of a hard and fast system for explication the precise nature of the usury he condemned. To put it mildly, despite Virgil's creative blending of Aristotle, Aquinas and Genesis, it is not entirely clear whether Dante, the author, has completely "untied the knot" of usury for himself. Certainly Dante was not the first to observe the potential for money itself to command an unhealthy fascination from its users. This goes as far back as Aristotle, who, in a moment of uncharacteristic hyperbole, singles out the usurer from others in the retail trade: "The most hated sort [of retail trade], and with greatest reason, is usury" ( *Politics*, 1258b2-3).[^4] In *The Great Transformation*, Karl Polanyi, the 20th-century Hungarian political economist, applauds Aristotle:

> Looking back from the rapidly declining heights of a worldwide market economy, we must concede that his famous distinction of householding proper and money-making, in the introductory chapter of his Politics, was probably the most prophetic pointer ever made in the realm of the social sciences [...] Only a genius of common sense could have maintained, as he did, that gain was a motive peculiar to production for the market, and that the money factor introduced a new element into the situation *.*[^5]

Although neither Aristotle nor Dante comprehensively explicated the sociological mechanisms at play with the introduction of money they both gesture toward a shared concern, "namely," Polanyi continues, "the divorce of the economic motive from all concrete social relationships which would by their very nature set a limit to that motive." Marx's explication of the mechanisms of use-value and exchange-value are consonant with Aristotelian economics. The commodification of capital and its effects on circulation and the augmentation of value follows economically from Aristotle's ethical critique of "the birth of money from money" as unnatural. Although for different reasons, both Marx's and Aristotle's writings on political economy converge at interest-bearing practices.

Nevertheless, Dante is inarguably indebted to the Scholastic tradition in his criticism of usury, particularly with regard to Virgil's explication in Canto 11.[^6] Both Aristotle and Aquinas show usury to be an offense against the structure of the natural world.[^7] However, the structuring of Dante's Inferno into an eternal onto-logical schematic of the consequential continuity of finite and infinite existence, expands the sin of the usurer beyond that of Aristotle and Aquinas. For Dante, usury is not only a sin against the ethical obligation to "act naturally" (i.e. in compatibility with the self-evident laws of "God's child," nature) by working ("God's grandchild") for sustenance (11.103-105).[^8] Nor is it limited by, as we see in Thomas of Chobham for example, an upending of sanctified rules of labor as God's gift to man (11.106-108).[^9] For Dante it is, at its ground level, the kenosis of self into money as God. For as Virgil says, "The usurer [...] elsewhere sets his hopes" (11.109-111). And having elevated the power of the coin to the power of the divine as such, the individual is subsumed into the spirit of the fetish itself. It is this unique addition to the conversation regarding money that provides us a link from Aristotle, through Dante, to Marx.

## Usury and early capital

In her 1979 article, "Capital in Hell: Dante's Lesson on Usury," Koffler provides an extensive investigation into the dynamics of the economic practices of the wealthy Florentine families that Dante puts in Hell as usurers. She shows convincingly that not only are these practices far more complex than those of the Cahorsines, but that the political economy which had developed hand in hand with these families' power should be considered "proto-capitalist."[^10] For the sake of brevity, it is not practical to reproduce all of the historical or conceptual components at play. Suffice to say, that for Dante, the Florentines depicted in Canto 17 represented a new kind of political threat. They were an oligarchical force with the power and wealth to exploit the ideals of communal life for personal gain. And Dante observed this force being continually buttressed by social changes that enabled this system of usurious economic exploitation.[^11] As Koffler writes:

> Aristotelian doctrine alone was not sufficient for Dante's purpose, which was arguably to denounce usury as a manifestation of a new world order. To him, the Cahorsines heralded the corrosion of natural communal relations by unnatural capitalistic ones: instead of production based upon labor and a social order held together by exchange of just equivalents, the usurious practices bring about productivity without personal labor and exchange without equivalent.[^12]

It is conceivable, following Koffler, that the ambiguity which shrouds Dante's portrayal of the usurers was, at least in part, a result of fears and a lack of precedent with which to elucidate the potential future society that may take root from the seed Dante observed.

By giving money the metaphysical significant of the coin purse in the usurer's punishment, and ostensibly (and signficantly) removing the identity of the individual's by the nature of their burnt flesh, Dante locates the *eternal* identity of these usurers in their "coin-purse" and their attachment to it.[^13] While the misers and spendthrifts make an unhealthy evaluation of money, they use it in "a natural way." That is, though their fascination is unhealthy, it does not dissove them from, as Polanyi puts it, "the concrete social relationships which would by their very nature set a limit to that motive." Misers and spendthrifts are eternally bound to a loss of identity as well, but their *contrapasso* exists as part of circulation *within* a restricted economy.

The usurer, on the other hand, is subsumed by the coin purse in its perceived potential for infinite power, dissolving himself not only from the network of "concrete social relationships," but from God's natural laws. For this reason, Dante's usurers are not punished with the miser's and the spendthrifts. Instead they are punished with the violent against God. Not only for the unnatural use of money, but arguably also for the fetishizing of money into something of eternal value and consequently, the subsumption of their own identity *into* the money as fetish. Which is a sin deeper in hell than the rest of those of the blasphemers and homosexuals, for example—while the others invert the natural laws of God and sin against them, the usurers invert the law of God, and attempt to become God by the accumulation of money. As Freinkel writes, "the usurers have folded circulation back in on itself. They have themselves become the source and destination of value; they have filled their purses with coins their own *segni* have stamped."[^14] The usurers assign eternal value to the money, and attempt to exploit this eternal value, that is, through the exploitation of God's natural laws in the finite realm. As a result, having emptied themselves into the spirit of the money itself, their eternal identity is subsumed by an object of finite worth.[^15] And when the usurer who speaks "twisted his mouth and stuck out his tongue / like an ox that licks its nose," we become sickeningly aware, that in trying to become like God, these sinners have become less than man.

## Dante's usurer and Marx's capitalist

This is precisely where Dante's critique of usurers, in part because of the onto-logical schematic which composes the very essence of Dante's metaphysical explication of sin through *Inferno* intersects with Marx. Throughout *Capital*, Marx makes reference to money lending as not simply a *pre*-Capitalistic, but a *proto*-Capitalistic phenomenon. This comes through in some cogent statements in the unedited third volume:

> What distinguishes interest-bearing capital in so far as it forms an essential element of the capitalist mode of production, from usurer's capital is in no way the nature or character of this capital itself. It is simply the changed conditions under which it functions, and hence also the totally transformed figure of the borrower who confronts the money-lender.[^16]

To be more precise, "usurer's capital has capital's mode of exploitation without its mode of production."[^17] Nevertheess, Marx indicates throughout *Capital* that there is an essential difference between pre-capitalist forms of usury, and modern capitalism.[^18] Yet this difference is not incommensurable. To put it simply: capitalism is the systemization of the spirit of usury.[^19]

In a deep sense of Derridean irony, Dante's usurers are recognizable only through family seals, which have certainly only been given meaning (like modern day brand symbols) by the exploitation of a system of unrestricted, general "economy" where "interest is acquired and nothing is used up."[^20] That is, the identity of Dante's usurers are simulacrum on top of simulacrum: a "valuable" family name, built on the propagation of "value" from "value," that is utterly, and infernally, exposed as emptiness upon emptiness. It is not far gone from Marx's conceptualization of capital:

> Capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, [...] and thus valorizes itself independently. [...] its valorization is therefore self-valorization. *By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs*.[^21]

This mysterious character of capital is what Marx identifies as the mechanism resulting from commodity fetishism. Commodities which were originally based in concrete social relations take on a mystical quality bound up in supra-sensible "autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race."[^22] It is not a far stretch to say that Dante's usurers fetishize money in precisely this way—or conversely, that Marx's capitalist fetishizes money in a precisely Dantean way. Although they would diverge on the precise ontological explanation of what is occurring, in both cases, the usurer and the capitalist assign a mystical value to money which it does not possess. For Dante, the fetishization of the coin subsumes the individuals soul for eternity. For Marx, the fetishization subsumes the system of concrete social relations. Significantly, for Marx, it also subsumes the individual in a poignantly Dantean *contrapasso* so to speak.

Marx's castigation of the capitalist can now be read in striking congruity with Dante's damnation of the usurer. Towards the end of the first volume of capital Marx writes: Except as capital personified, the capitalist has no historical value, and no right to that his-

> torical existence which, to use Lichnowsky's amusing expression, 'ain't got no date. [...] But, in so far as he is capital personified, his motivating force is not the acquisition and enjoyment of use-values, but the acquisition and augmentation of exchange-values. He is fanatically intent on the valorization of value; consequently he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production's sake. [...] Only as a personification of capital is the capitalist respectable.[^23]

Within the framework of historical materialism, "the capitalist" is, for Marx, a vacant phantasm; an individual with no real value. His entire existence is predicated on the empty accumulation of value for value sake, the perpetual augmentation of value. Seen from an eternal perspective, this, too, is the damnation of the usurer: a soul who's value has been completely emptied into his now meaningless coin purse; it bears his meaningless "seal" of value. Dante, in his poetic brilliance, paints the only colors we experience in *Inferno* as devoid of vividness. The colors are so one-dimensional that they vanish beyond the horizon of any meaning that colors can possibly carry with them from the natural world (17.58-65). They are consumed into the void of each usurer's now infinite valuelessness. All the while, the usurer is stuck in an eternal liminal void between comings and goings because his own historical life was completely subsumed by the empty spirit of his fetish (17.67-73). It would appear that what Marx attempted to explicate with the benefit of a historical perspective, Dante may have prophetically illuminated from his own.

Dante's punishment for usurers serves as a historic conceptual link between the ethics of Aristotelian-Thomistic Scholasticism, and Marx's socio-economic critique of capitalism. The actions of Dante's usurers are certainly immoral primarily within the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition, and with regard to scholastic critiques for the immoral basis of exploiting the theologically prescribed labor of man for selfish reasons. However, the significance of Dante's metaphysical logic, and his poetic rendering of the eternal damnation of the usurers is not exhausted by the existing traditions from which he draws on. Instead, he makes a valuable addition to the millennia old debate concerning the ethics of usury. Although they occupy different ontological position, many of the theological tropes found in Marx's critique of capital, can be identified explicitly in the metaphysical logic of Dante's usurers in Hell. The goal of this reading was not to prove that Dante evinces explicitly Marxist critiques of capital as such, but rather to show, in part because of his historic socioeconomic context, that Dante's *Inferno* is arguably a proto-Marxian critique of the detrimental effects of economic systems based on capital lending and the accumulation of wealth. In this way, Dante's condemnation of usury in the nascent capitalist economy of twelfth and thirteenth century Europe can be read as a transitional work in the critique of capitalism. And conversely, that Marx should be read in the shadow of Dante himself.

[^1]: Cf. Dante Alighieri, *The Inferno,* trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2002)., 213 n. 28-33.

[^2]: See Simon Ravenscroft, “Usury in the Inferno: Auditing Dante’s Debt to the Scholastics,” *Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies* 42, no. 1 (2011)., 106-111.

[^3]: Alighieri, *The Inferno*., 207;

[^4]: Aristotle, *The Basic Works of Aristotle,* trans. W. D. Ross (New York: Random House, 1941)., 1141.

[^5]: Karl Polanyi, *The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time* (Beacon Press, 2001)., 56, ( *emphasis added);* cf. Judith Schenck Koffler, “Capital in Hell: Dante’s Lesson on Usury,” *Rutgers Law Review* 32 (1979)., 616f.

[^6]: See Ravenscroft, “Usury in the Inferno: Auditing Dante’s Debt to the Scholastics.” for a comprehensive parsing of the various theological and social principles at play in Dante's critique of usury and their connections to Aristotle, Aquinas and Thomas of Chobham.

[^7]: Cf. Karl Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1,* trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990)., 267: Not unlike Marx's criticism of the usurer: "In usurer's capital the form M–C–M' is reduced to the unmediated extremes M–M', money which is exchanged for more money, a form incompatible with the nature of money and therefore inexplicable from the standpoint of the exchange of commodities."

[^8]: See Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1*., 253 n. 6, 267: Marx offers extended commentary on Aristotle's discussion in Politics (1258a.18–1258b.8) viz. his dicussion on the circulation of commodities. Here we find the most extended discussion on the function of usury as an example of different modes of circulation and it is in conversation with Aristotle. In large part, there is strong coherence between Aristotle's critique of wealth getting, and Marx's use of Aristotle in his explication of the circulation of money.

[^9]: See Ravenscroft, “Usury in the Inferno: Auditing Dante’s Debt to the Scholastics.”, 101-106.

[^10]: Koffler, “Capital in Hell: Dante’s Lesson on Usury.”, 645: Koffler's entire history of the Florentine families, in addition to her explication of the dynamics of the Florentine economy along Marxist lines is thorough and cogent; cf. Ravenscroft, “Usury in the Inferno: Auditing Dante’s Debt to the Scholastics.”, esp. 94f; where Ravenscroft corroborates a similar understanding of medieval Florentine political economy.

[^11]: See Joseph Persky, “Retrospectives: From Usury to Interest,” *Journal of Economic Perspectives* 21, no. 1 (2007)., 227: The abstruseness of Persky's definition of "interest" highlights the way in which payments on loans were essentially laundered into the socio-economic fabric, and were a subject of debate and ambiguity for many centuries: "Over time, 'interest' became the generic term for all legitimate and accepted payments on loans." He goes on to highlight mechanisms which lenders used to collect "interest" through payments that were not explicitly condemned by usury laws. He also offers a helpful breviary on how money-lending came to be valorized through the divergence of Bentham from Smith; cf. Ravenscroft, “Usury in the Inferno: Auditing Dante’s Debt to the Scholastics.”, 92f.

[^12]: Koffler, “Capital in Hell: Dante’s Lesson on Usury.”, 647.

[^13]: Lisa Freinkel, “Inferno and the Poetics of Usura,” *MLN* 107, no. 1, Italian Issue (1992)., 7: Freinkel makes the striking connection between Virgil's metaphor in 11.49 (that "the smallest ring stamps its *segno* ") and the *segni* on the coin-purses of the usurers: "A parody perhaps of Paul's assurance: 'ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise, which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchases possession, unto the praise of his glory' (Eph. 1:13-14). [...] The entire scene stands as a base corruption of the divine promise: instead of awaiting their Lord and Savior, these usurers await a prominent Florentine money-lender. (17.72-3) [...] There is no room in Hell for anyone beyond their own circle—no room for our pilgrim, and certainly no room for Christ."

[^14]: Freinkel, “Inferno and the Poetics of Usura.”, 8.

[^15]: Freinkel, “Inferno and the Poetics of Usura.”, 8: "[...] they have usurped (and *usura* is related to *usurpare* ) the place of God."

[^16]: Karl Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3,* trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin Classics, 1991)., 735.

[^17]: Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3*., 732.

[^18]: See Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1*., 1023: Marx's uses his contemporary example of India to show this most lucidly here; also "Pre-Capitalist Relations" in Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3*., 728-748.

[^19]: See Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 3*., 735f: "Instead of anathema against interestbearing capital in general, the founders of the modern credit system proceed from its express recognition;" cf. Persky, “Retrospectives: From Usury to Interest.”, 230-233: Persky would identify this turning point in the divergence of Bentham from Smith with his *Defence of Usury*; cf. Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1*., 758f for Marx's (post-editorial!) lambasting of Bentham.

[^20]: Freinkel, “Inferno and the Poetics of Usura.”, 9.

[^21]: Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1*., 255; cf. Aristotle, *The Basic Works of Aristotle*., 1141, ( *Politics*, 1258b5-7).

[^22]: Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1*., 165.

[^23]: Marx, *Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1*., 739.