A Usurious Reading of Dante and Marx

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.