Page 12 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

VALENTINO CATTELAN

With the birth of modern capitalism in the Western world (see also here,
section 3), the ‘society’ of Gesellschaft replaced the ‘community’ of Gemeinschaft as
central model of credit provision. The birth of banks as credit institutions at the
end of the Middle Ages, as described by French historian Jacques Le Goff ,
31
marked this revolution by moving from usury as a sin to credit management as a
work. In this frame, Benjamin Nelson has underlined the role of the Catholic
32
church, as well as of Martin Luther’s and John Calvin’s doctrinal elaborations, in
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this cultural revolution (following Weber on the point ).
Hence, if originally the lack of profit derivable from the temporal impossibility
of using one’s money (lucrum cessans) or the risk of possible losses from lending
this money (damnum emergens) were perceived (and were conceivable) only
towards people external to the ‘community’, the Protestant reformation radically
reshaped this conceptual universe. In its original paradigm, the need to guarantee
the loan by asking a mortgage or a pledge to the stranger was legitimised by the
(reasonable) lack of trust towards the other (not a member of the community).
According to the same logic, the (self-)interest of asking for a reward in relation
to the risk of not receiving back the money (the idea of ‘credit risk’) could be easily
justified by the fact that trust (of course!) cannot be given blindly to foreigners.
Moving away from this paradigm, the theological universalism that fostered
Christian theology at the end of the Middle Ages and later the Protestant doctrine
by Martin Luther and John Calvin reversed the ethical value of the prohibition of
interest in the Bible, since any other became, in this elaboration, a potential brother.
It was this inversion that led to the removal of the prohibition of interest as moral
interdiction and its radical change of meaning: in a universal community
composed of others that are potentially brothers, modern capitalism became a space
of economic interactions where «all are ‘brothers’ in being equally ‘others’» .
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Correspondingly, morality and economics became detached one from the other
in singular credit relations located in the secular space and time (the new
sociological landscape and horizon of modern capitalism) – although being
reconciled, as we are going to see in a while, in the whole of Christian Credit
(‘creed’).
In this way, «the embryonic nature of the contemporary financial system was

togetherness, where the single individual act in the perspective of a common goal (e.g. family,
neighbourhood), while Gesellschaft refers to impersonal ties, individualism and self-interest, for
which it is the group to become instrumental to the individual’s aim (e.g. business company or the
modern state and its impersonal bureaucracy). On the matter, in relation to Islamic finance, see
CATTELAN, “Equal for equal, hand to hand”: comparing Islamic and Western money, in GIMIGLIANO (ed.),
Money, payment systems and the European Union: the regulatory challenge of governance, Newcastle Upon
Tyne, UK, 2016, 77-101.
31 LE GOFF, La bourse et la vie. Economie et religion au Moyen Age, Paris, 1986; LE GOFF, Le Moyen
Age et l’argent. Essai d’anthropologie historique, Paris, 2010.
32 NELSON, The idea of usury. From tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood, Princeton, 1949.
33 WEBER, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, op. cit.
34 NELSON, The idea of usury, op. cit.

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