Page 15 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

IANUS n. 29-2024 ISSN 1974-9805

German Society for Sociology, serving as a member of its first executive body.
While it is difficult to judge how much Simmel’s personal contacts with
Tönnies and Weber influenced his scholarship, one can elaborate on the role of
Christian religion – through the acknowledgement of the absolute, infinite, value
of the human being (as dispersed in finite credit relations though money) – in the
conceptualization of his Philosophy of money (1900). Better, within Simmel’s
Lebensphilosophie, it is not religion but religiosity, as an existential and social form,
the basic form in which the «entire existence [Dasein] expresses itself in a
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particular tonality» to explain his understanding of money as incorporating any
value (i.e. anything potentially object of reciprocal trust) as «pure energy», «pure
relation» .
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In fact, Simmel pays particular attention to the two basic social forms of
religiosity, and namely: (1) belief or social trust, and (2) the experience of social
unity.
(1) As already argued in this article, credere (‘to believe’, ‘to trust’ in the Latin
language) belongs to the essence of money as well as of religion: believing in
somebody means giving them personal/economic credit, which reflects the trust
that they will return what has been lent; to believe in God corresponds to the faith
in afterlife salvation. «In social relations, we time and again believe in the validity
of someone’s judgment or in another person’s sincerity… This belief implies that
one relies on someone without further questions, convincing reasons or proofs of
evidence» .
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(2) At the same time, this finite bond in social relations necessarily lies in the
experience of social unity, through an «ambivalent feeling of belonging and not–
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belonging» , where each single «story of (personal) credit» and risk melts in a
spiritual «story of infinite faith» in the social unity to which one belongs, and then
hope that is also expressed in the spirituality of religion. «The individual feels
connected to something general, higher, from which he flees and in which he
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flees, […] from which he differs and that yet he is also identical with» .

46 SIMMEL, Gesammelte Schriften zur Religionssoziologie, Berlin, 1989 (originally published in
1906/1912), 113, as quoted by LAERMANS, The ambivalence of religiosity and religion: a reading of Georg
Simmel, in Social Compass, 53 (4), 2006, 482.
47 Although Simmel’s writings on religion and religiosity cover only a small part of his total
scholarship, they certainly offer deep insights into his approach to sociological research. «His
Gesammelte Schriften zur Religionssoziologie [Collected Writings on the Sociology of Religion…], edited
and published in 1989 by Horst Jürgen Helle, do not count more than 140 pages and contain several
speculative essays and paragraphs that go against the grain of empirical sociology as it is practised
today. The most important text is beyond any doubt the lengthy essay “Die Religion” [Religion]
(Simmel, 1989: 110-171). Actually, there are two versions of this score text, the original one published
in 1906, and the expanded definitive version published in 1912 and written at the request of the famous
Martin Buber» (LAERMANS, The ambivalence of religiosity and religion…, op. cit., 480).
48 LAERMANS, The ambivalence of religiosity and religion…, op. cit., 484.
49 ID.
50 SIMMEL, Gesammelte Schriften zur Religionssoziologie, op.cit, 125, as quoted by Laermans, The
ambivalence of religiosity and religion…, op. cit., 484.

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