Classic quest

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

"Terrance F. Flaherty" wrote:


This section quoted from: 'The Political Vision of the
Divine Comedy'

Chapter 06, "Exchange and Communication, Commerce and
Language in the Comedy" 
by Joan Ferrante

 


> 
> Medieval thinking, in theology as well as in law, went well
> beyond Aristotle's views in these matters. Aristotle had
> acknowledged the importance of private property and the need
> for money in the functioning of the state, but he condemned
> retail trading as unnatural and usury as worst of all. The
> same mistrust of merchants and their work is found in Peter
> Lombard's Sentences, where he says that soldiers or
> merchants unwilling to give up their professions should not
> be received as penitents because they could not exercise
> those professions without sin (4, d.16, q.4, a.2). But the
> major thirteenth-century commentators on the Sentences,
> Albert, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, modify his position
> considerably. They recognize that countries are not
> necessarily more self-sufficient than individuals and must
> rely on the services of those who can procure supplies for
> them, that in a complex society one cannot always
> buy directly from the producers. Now I'll turn to Dante:
> Dante's attitude towards commerce is essentially a moderate
> one, accepting it as a fact of life, a potential benefit to
> society, as long as it serves the common good and does not
> harm the community in order to advance individuals. He
> presents the distribution of wealth as the result of divine
> providence in the passage on fortune  and justifies craft
> and manufacture hence, implicitly, trade in his description
> of art as the daughter of nature and granddaughter of God.
> The importance he accords both to personal property and to a
> stable currency is manifest in his treatment of their
> abuses; he discusses in some detail a variety of economic
> and monetary sins, not just greed, but plunder, squandering,
> usury, fraudulent buying and selling of different kinds of
> goods, theft, and counterfeiting. Each one appears in a
> separate section of Hell,and several are attacked in
> Purgatory and Paradise as well. He employs the technical
> language of commerce literally, in connection with the
> abuses, and metaphorically, applying it to spiritual
> treasures and moral debts. The technical language and
> commercial details would have been a particularly effective
> means of reaching the members of the audience attuned to
> them and would presumably have added a whole other sphere of
> application to Dante's message. The metaphorical use of the
> same language seems to be Dante's way of countering
> "corporal usury," which is forbidden, with "spiritual
> usury," which multiplies the benefits of God's gifts, a
> distinction made by canonists and theologians.