In the eleventh canto of the Inferno, Dante and Virgil pause at the rim of a reeking cliff so the poet can get his bearings. Virgil lays out the architecture of lower hell, and Dante asks why the usurers are punished among the violent against God, nature, and art. Virgil’s answer is a compressed lecture in economics. Nature takes her course from the divine intellect; human art follows nature; and mankind was meant to earn its bread from the one or the other. The usurer scorns both. He makes money breed from money, and so he offends against the very order through which God provides.
I was reminded of the passage while talking with Erik Matson on the latest episode of Acton Line about his new book with Jordan Ballor, A History of Christian Political Economy: From the Patristics to the Present, and its companion volume, Sources in Christian Political Economy: A Reader. Dante was no economist, but he had absorbed the scholastic debates over usury and the just price thoroughly enough to put them in verse. That is precisely the point of Matson and Ballor’s project. For most of Christian history, reflection on money, markets, and work was not a separate science but a branch of moral theology, and traces of it turn up everywhere, even in hell.
Matson is deliberate about the term in the title. Economics in the modern sense presents itself as a value-free discipline, a technical study of means. Political economy, as it was understood from the eighteenth century, was a branch of moral philosophy with ethical, political, and jurisprudential dimensions. To recover the older term is to recover the older self-understanding: that questions of exchange are inseparable from questions of justice. The confessional manuals of the medieval Church, with their anxious casuistry over fair prices and interest, were doing political economy long before anyone had coined the phrase.
The authors divide nearly two millennia into seven periods: the patristic age through roughly 500; the early medieval era up to the high scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas; the late medieval centuries down to the Reformation; the early modern period to the early eighteenth century; the classical period of Smith and his successors through the mid-nineteenth century; the industrial era from 1848 to the First World War; and the twentieth century. The reader supplies seven texts from each, forty-nine in all.
Matson refused to tell a tidy story of progress. He and Ballor identify two broad visions running through the whole history. One is the vision of the limited good, in which economic life is a zero-sum contest and one man’s gain is another’s loss. The other is the vision of mutual benefit, in which exchange leaves both parties better off. It would be convenient to say the first gave way to the second. It did not. Both coexist in every period, and they coexist today. A second axis, whether a thinker’s attention falls chiefly on spiritual goods or on material well-being, cuts across the first.
The most interesting argument of the episode concerns divine providence. The classical political economists’ confidence that free exchange tended toward mutual benefit was not, Matson argues, a secular innovation smuggled into a Christian culture. It was grounded in the doctrine of providence: the conviction that God had so ordered creation that human beings pursuing their legitimate ends could serve one another’s. The invisible hand had a theological pedigree.
The book is full of figures who deserve to be better known. The late scholastics of Salamanca, Azpilcueta working out an early formulation of the quantity theory of money and Lessius analyzing the money markets of his day, were doing sophisticated economic analysis in the service of answering confessors’ questions. John Bates Clark, a founder of American neoclassical economics, understood the laws of price theory as an expression of divine law governing human interaction. And Philip Wicksteed, the Unitarian minister who gave the marginal revolution some of its most elegant exposition, was also a serious scholar of Dante.
The conversation turned at the end to the present. Matson argues that market liberalism cannot sustain itself on its own resources. It requires moral, philosophical, and theological presuppositions it did not invent, and which in the West it drew largely from Christianity. The twentieth century saw real efforts to keep theology and economics in conversation. Matson points to the exchanges between Reinhold Niebuhr and Kenneth Boulding, and I would add the work of the Acton Institute itself.
Which brings me back to Wicksteed and Dante. A man who spent his mornings on marginal utility and his evenings on the Paradiso did not think he was living two lives. He thought, as the whole tradition Matson and Ballor have assembled thought, that the order by which bread is earned and the order by which souls are saved issue from the same divine intellect. Virgil’s lecture at the cliff’s edge was not a digression from theology. It was theology.
The full conversation is available here: