A Usurious Reading of Dante and Marx

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.