Gottesblog

In the preceding part of our series, we dealt with several prominent medieval theologians on the subject of usury, spanning the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries. We will now back up in order to quote the canons of certain relevant church councils, as well as some papal decrees. 

Second Lateran Council (1139), Canon 13: “Furthermore, we condemn that practice regarded as vile and reprehensible by both divine and human law, and denounced by Holy Scripture in both the Old and New Testaments, namely, the rapacious greed of usurers. We exclude them from every comfort of the church, forbidding any archbishop, bishop, abbot of any order, or anyone in clerical office whatsoever to dare to receive them, except with the utmost caution. Let them, moreover, be held infamous throughout the whole of their lives and, unless they repent, be deprived of Christian burial.” 

Pope Leo the Great’s epistle Nec hoc quoque (c. 443) was the first prohibition of all lending at interest for both clergy and laity issued with supreme ecclesiastical authority. Several centuries later, around 774, this text was incorporated into the Hadriana, the official collection of canon law presented by Pope Adrian I to Charlemagne. From that point onward, there emerged an ever-greater consensus among both church and state in Christian lands that all lending at interest is inherently sinful and thus forbidden. (Note: the capitularies of Charlemagne cited Nicaea in addition to Leo’s epistle.) And significantly, in Nec hoc quoque, Psalm 15 is cited as definitive proof of the universal moral prohibition against charging interest. It seems that for many in the first millennium of the church’s history, this psalm served as the most glaring evidence that the Old Testament prohibition was not just civil law, but moral, and is therefore still binding on the Christian.