Page 16 - Valentino Cattelan - Credere is credit and creed: trust, money, and religion in western and islamic finance

VALENTINO CATTELAN

It was the forgetfulness of this inescapable dialectics between credit as finite
relation and Credit (i.e. credere as belief in a transcendental unity, hence creed) as
infinite value (which belong to the notion of redemption, grace, beyond
quantitative calculus) that has led modernity, according to Simmel, «in need of a
religion that no longer situates transcendence in an autonomous sphere, cut off
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from mundane life» , that is to say in a tension where Western societies become
more individualized (i.e. composed of self-interested individuals) in social
interaction.
The morality underlying this hyper-finitization of individualized bonds can be
easily seen in modern capitalism motto: «all are ‘brothers’ in being equally
‘others’» , as well represented by Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
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In The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare depicts a microcosm of economic
interactions between merchants, usurers, and landlords that mirrors the cultural
anxieties surrounding the birth of modern capitalism. The play, written in the
1590s, shortly after usury was legalized in England, adopts the setting of Venice
as a disguised London, with the mercantile activity of the Italian city symbolizing
the rise of the free market. At that time an autonomous social system emerged
that was increasingly detached from ethics and religion where, beyond the
(il)legitimacy of usury (Shylock), even the interactions between property (Portia)
and profit (Antonio) were governed by self-referential norms. In this way, since
its origins modern capitalism adopted its own religiosity where the triumph of the
individual substitutes the community, sacredness is disintegrated into a myriad of
market exchanges (a pound of flesh is demanded as the surety for a loan), and the
legitimacy of the economic system is increasingly dis-embedded from ethical and
religious values.
Hence, in a society where all are brothers in being equally others, not only the
practice of interest as evaluation of risk-shifting among (social) strangers becomes
moral, but credit becomes itself impersonal, i.e. detached from the person: «the
word [credit] now served to endow the untrustworthy thing – the loan – with the
qualities of the person who could be trusted» .
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At the same time, embracing the concept of Simmel’s religiosity, in the
Christian Western society the experience of social unity does persist today in a
God whose infinite grace has been credited on humanity’s account. Without this
certainty – the Western story of redemption and grace –, modern capitalism
would have not safely reigned in economic affairs for centuries. In other words,
it is the Christian God, as infinite Debtor of grace, to foster social unity in the
religiosity of Western society, over the finite credits (social bonds) of modern
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capitalism.

51 LAERMANS, The ambivalence of religiosity and religion…, op. cit., 479.
52 NELSON, The idea of usury…, op. cit.
53 HOWELL, Commerce before capitalism in Europe, 1300-1600, op. cit., 28.
54 The present description of God in the West as infinite debtor (of grace) takes inspiration from
SINGH, Sovereign debt, in Journal of Religious Ethics, 46 (2), 2018, 239-266. As explained by Singh in

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