This unanimity of the fathers of the Church brought about a crystallization of hostility to interest-bearing loans into numberless decrees of popes and councils and kings and legislatures throughout Christendom during more than fifteen hundred years; and the canon law was shaped in accordance with these. At first these were more especially directed against the clergy, but we soon find them extending to the laity. These prohibitions were enforced by the Council of Aries in 314, and a modern church apologist insists that every great assembly of the Church, from the Council of Elvira in 306 to that of Vienne in 1311, inclusive, solemnly condemned lending money at interest. The greatest rulers under the sway of the Church—Justinian, in the Empire of the East; Charlemagne, in the Empire of the West; Alfred, in England; St. Louis, in France—yielded fully to this dogma. In the ninth century Alfred went so far as to confiscate the estates of moneylenders, denying them burial in consecrated ground; and similar decrees were made in other parts of Europe. In the twelfth century the Greek Church seems to have relaxed its strictness somewhat, but the Roman Church grew more severe. Peter Lombard, in his Sentences, a great source of orthodox theology, makes the taking of interest purely and simply theft. St. Bernard, reviving religious earnestness in the Church, took the same view. In 1179 the Third Council of the Lateran decreed that impenitent money-lenders should be excluded from the altar, from absolution in the hour of death, and from Christian burial. Pope Urban III reiterated the declaration that the passage in St. Luke forbade the taking of any interest whatever. Pope Alexander III declared that the prohibition in this matter could never be suspended by dispensation.
In the thirteenth century Pope Gregory IX dealt an especially severe blow at commerce by his declaration that even to advance on interest the money necessary in maritime trade was damnable usury. This idea was still more firmly fastened upon the world by the two greatest thinkers of the time: first, by St. Thomas Aquinas, who knit it into the mind of the Church by the use of the Scriptures and of Aristotle; and next by Dante, who pictured money-lenders in one of the worst parts of hell.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Council of
ix, in Migne, tome xliii. For Lactantius, see Lact., Opera, Leyden, 1660, p. 608. For Cyprian, see his Testimonies against the Jews, translated by Wallis, Book III, article 48. For St. Jerome, see his Com. in Ezekiel, xviii, 8, in Migne, tome xxv, pp. 170 et seq. For Leo the Great, see his Letter to the Bishops of various provinces of Italy, cited in Jus Can., cap. vii, can. xiv, qu. 4. For very fair statements of the attitude of the fathers on this question, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, London, 1884, and Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, Hartford, 1880, in each under article Usury.
