Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition

Thomas Aquinas, John Noonan, and the Usury Prohibition Jeremy Bell Introduction The Catholic Church's longstanding usury prohibition is today widely considered defunct. In contemporary capitalist societies a certain opprobrium attaches to "usury," in the popular sense of charging excessive interest on a loan, but lending at interest is otherwise accepted as a normal and necessary feature of economic life. Few within or without the Church (except Muslims) object to "usury" in the original sense of charging even low interest on a loan, absent any title beyond the mere act of lending.1 Recent popes have sometimes condemned "usury," but it is unclear whether they have used the word in its popular or in its original sense.2 While the End Page 469 Catechism of the Catholic Church denounces "usurious and avaricious dealings" that lead to "hunger and death," it nowhere prohibits usury as such.3 The 1983 Code of Canon Law is silent about it. On the whole, John T. Noonan Jr.'s observation in the introduction to his classic 1957 study The Scholastic Analysis of Usury remains valid: "Usury today is a dead issue, and except by a plainly equivocal use of the term, or save in the mouths of a few inveterate haters of the present order, it is not likely to stir to life."4 Yet the Church has never rescinded its usury prohibition; nor could it do so, given the prohibition's history.5 The grave sinfulness of usury was clearly and forcefully taught over many centuries by Church Fathers, local and ecumenical councils, Scholastic theologians, and popes,6 often in the face of widespread, flagrant disregard for the teaching on the part of lay Catholics.7 Even if one were to argue that it has never been solemnly End Page 470 defined in an exercise of the Church's extraordinary magisterium,8 one could not plausibly deny that usury's sinfulness has been infallibly taught by the universal and ordinary magisterium. As Elizabeth Anscombe observes, though the Church has largely "fallen silent" about usury, its condemnation of the practice is "unretractable."9 Noonan himself acknowledged, in 1957, that the sinfulness of usury "was and is a dogma of the Catholic Church."10 Less than ten years later, however, he had apparently changed his mind. In a series of publications beginning shortly after the close of the Second Vatican Council and spanning nearly four decades, he argued that the modern Church has abandoned the usury prohibition. Moreover, it is clear that he found the Scholastic natural-law arguments in its support unpersuasive. Despite describing his 1957 study as no more than "a simple history" of Scholastic thought about usury and its post-medieval reception,11 he is more than willing to criticize the Scholastics' arguments. He speaks of their "inconsistencies"12 and End Page 471 of their analysis of usury "floundering in severe difficulties" by the early modern period.13 He has high praise for Aquinas's major natural-law argument against usury and even goes so far as to say that no other Scholastic argument "survived the test of time and criticism,"14 yet he claims that the Angelic Doctor abandoned the principles of this argument when discussing contracts other than loans, because "the promptings of natural justice are stronger than his theory."15 (The implication, of course, is that "natural justice" tells against these principles, hence against the "theory" based on them.) Most tellingly of all, when discussing post-medieval developments, he says that "the later writers cannot bear the piecemeal theory and illogical exceptions that made the early teaching tolerable."16 Though in 1957 he accepted that the Church had never rescinded its prohibition, he believed that the classic natural-law arguments against usury were either incoherent or else "intolerable" and against "natural justice" when rigorously thought out. The post-medieval theological innovations that he would later claim led the Church to rescind the prohibition were, in fact, attempts to remedy the putative difficulties inherent in "the early teaching." In short, Noonan came to believe that it was because natural-law objections to usury were at bottom untenable that the Church finally ceased to teach that usury is intrinsically...