Page 13 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

IANUS n. 29-2024 ISSN 1974-9805

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already defined in the late Christian Middle Ages» . Shifting from a social state
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of ‘tribal brotherhood’ to that of a ‘universal otherhood’ , money itself, as absolute
medium, changed its status by symbolizing the new interest(-s) underlying risk-
perception, and then moved from risk-sharing (Gemeinschaft) to risk-shifting
(Gesellschaft). As a couple of two-faced Janus, the self-interest to protect now
oneself equalled the risk to experience a future loss in a bilaterally interest(-ed)-
based risk-shifted social relation that was embodied by modern money. In other
terms, this relation mirrored on the other side the risk to cause a future loss to the
other party, combined with the interest to have a gain now, while economic actors
started conceiving themselves as impersonal players of the transaction. The (self-
)interest(-ed)(-based) money of modern capitalism (symbolizing a multitude of
singular and secular lives disintegrated both in the space and time of their
sociological landscape and horizon) was born.
Accordingly, the notion of credit was soon radically transformed into the de-
personalized and de-materialized economy of ‘nominal values’, where «credit-
based honesty [cast] two incongruent textualities (personal reputation,
impersonal paper) into discursive reciprocity» . «Derived from the Latin credere
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(to believe or to trust) and originally a reference to the quality of the person who
could be trusted, the word [credit] now served to endow the untrustworthy thing
– the loan – with the qualities of the person who could be trusted. Buttressed by
the personal word of an individual and public acknowledgment of that bond,
credit acquired substance, and only when trust failed would a borrower be obliged
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to pledge his plate or jewels…» . All these disintegrated finite credit lives combined
in bilateral impersonalities, where money as absolute medium symbolized «the
possibility of all values as the value of all possibilities» . Correspondingly, they
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also found an infinite counterparty in the absolute value of human Life in Christian
thought. «Over and above all the details, relativities, particular forces and
expressions of his empirical being stands ‘man’, as something unified and
indivisible whose value cannot be possibly measured by any quantitative standard
and cannot be compensated for merely by more or less of another value» .
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On the interconnection between man’s Life (as a secular and spiritual
experience) and life (as a worldly enterprise), and the dynamics of money both in
the finite and the infinite, further considerations will be advanced in the last section
of this article (n. 5). What is important to note at this point is that, as highlighted

35 CATTELAN, “Equal for equal, hand to hand”: comparing Islamic and Western money, op. cit., 91.
36 NELSON, The idea of usury, op. cit.
37 SHERMAN (1997), Promises, promises: credit as contested metaphor in early capitalist discourse, in
Modern Philology, 94 (3), 1997, 330.
38 HOWELL, Commerce before capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600, Cambridge, 2010, 28.
39 SIMMEL, The philosophy of money, op. cit., 221.
40 SIMMEL, The philosophy of money, London - Boston, 1978 (original version 1900), 362, as
quoted by SINGH, Speculating the subject of money: Georg Simmel on human value, in Religions, 7 (80),
2016, 4.

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