Editorials - The Jubilee and the remission of debt
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 09/06/2024
This article went to press in a shortened version – here we are publishing it in full.
In Christian Europe, debt has been fought and discouraged for a very long time. That criticism is related to the great theme of interest on money, condemned in both the Old and New Testament. In more than a thousand years, between the 4th and 14th centuries, there were about seventy Councils with declarations against usury (i.e. interest greater than zero), which continued until the eve of the industrial revolution (1745). Capitalism then stopped criticising usury and made it its prime motor. The Church has continued to view debt and interest with suspicion, even if her voice is not always loud enough to be heard.
The roots of this fight against usury are many and going deep. The central one is a problem of power asymmetry and therefore a phenomenon of passive income: someone who is stronger possesses a scarce and often essential resource that others live on (money) and therefore has the incentive to use that power asymmetry to his or her own advantage and therefore against those who are weaker. Those who lend do not have the same moral and economic responsibility as those who borrow: those who lend have more power, more freedom than those who get indebted, because of the radical difference between the starting position of creditors and debtors. This is why the condemnation was directed at those who lend at interest, much less at those who get into debt – this is also why the prodigal Basssanio in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice shouldn’t be less guilty than the usurer Shylock.
Pope Francis recently revived the strong call for the remission of the foreign debt of the poorest countries that was made by Pope John Paul II on the eve of the Great Jubilee of 2000: ‘I would like to echo this prophetic appeal, which is more urgent now than ever, bearing in mind that ecological debt and external debt are two sides of the same coin that mortgages the future’ (5 June 2024).
In the Bible, the jubilee was also and above all a social and economic affair. It recurred every 49 years, and was based on the wonderful institution of the shabbat (‘Saturday’) and the sabbatical year: ‘You must count off seven weeks of years, seven times seven years’ (Leviticus 25:8) The jubilee was about the people's relationship with their God, but in biblical humanism, faith in God is immediately ethical, religion immediately becomes society and economy, hence debt, land, property, justice: ‘In this Year of Jubilee you must each return to your property.’ (Leviticus 25:12). And slaves were freed (Isaiah 61:1-3a), a liberation of those who had become slaves for their unpaid debts. No wonder, then, that the cancellation of debts was the jubilee act par excellence.
That different seventh day, that special seventh year, that greatly different jubilee are the vocation and calling of all the days of all the normal years. Giving animals and the land a rest, not working, freeing slaves and giving back land, even though they only happen on a single day, in a single year, have infinite value. Even if on many days and in many years we are under the ordinary iron laws of markets and force, even if on almost every day of almost every year we are not capable of equality, freedom and cosmic fraternity, that ‘almost’ enshrined in the Bible tells us something decisive: we are not condemned forever to the laws of the strongest and the richest, because if we are capable of imagining and proclaiming a ‘different day of the Lord’ (Isaiah 61:1), then that promised land can become our land. The shabbat is not the exception to a rule, it is its fulfilment; the Jubilee is not the special year, it is the future of time: it is the shabbat of shabbats. That ‘almost’, that difference between all and many days, is the door through which the Messiah can arrive (or return) at any moment, it is the window from which to look and see the new heavens and the new earth.
So there is no more opportune jubilee request than that of John Paul II and Francis, there is no time (kairos) more propitious than today to make it. Knowing well that it is almost certain – another ‘almost’ – that no one will take it up; but knowing even more that the ethical temperature of human civilisation rises for prophetic questions even when no one answers them. The Jubilee is not a utopia: it is prophecy. Utopia is a non-place; prophecy, on the other hand, is an ‘already’ that indicates a ‘not-yet’, it is a dawning of a day that is yet to come and has already begun. It is Eschaton anticipated, a journey to the end of the night, a dance to the end of love.
The prophetic questions of the “not-yet” were the ones that changed the world; because these questions become stakes driven into the rock of the mountain of human rights and freedoms and of the poor. And tomorrow someone else will be able to use yesterday's question to hoist themselves up and continue the climb to a higher heaven of justice. When we wrote, ‘Italy is a democratic republic founded on work’, Italy was still neither truly democratic nor yet founded on work, because the privileges of non-workers were great and too many. Yet as we were writing this, the era of Article 1 was beginning. When we read in the courts that Justice is equal for all, we know that we are looking at the promised land of the “not-yet”, but looking into its eyes we see it getting closer every day.
For that prophetic question to become a strong spire, however, it is important to imagine, think up different financial institutions and then bring them about, on a local and international level. The great and the powerful of the earth will never take up that different ‘new international financial architecture’ for the benefit of the poor and the weak, because, quite simply, those institutions are conceived, desired and managed by the great and the strong.
However, the history of the Church tells us that it is possible. While popes and bishops were writing bulls and documents against usury, bishops and charismas were creating anti-usury financial institutions, whose examples from Italy range from Monti di Pietà to Monti Frumentari, from Casse Rurali (rural savings banks – the tr.) to Banche Cooperative (Cooperative Banks – the tr.). They did not limit themselves to criticising bad institutions, nor to expecting them from the powerful: they did different works. Co-operators, trade unionists, citizens made sure that the words of the documents were accompanied with other, embodied words that were made of banks, cooperatives, anti-usury institutions.
Finally, the usury of our time is not just a financial matter, it is not just about banks, or the old and new usurers. We are inside a whole culture of usury, which does not listen to the first principle of every anti-usury civilisation: 'you cannot draw profit from the future, because that is the time of the children, the land and the descendants'. Our generation is a usurer generation, because a usurer is anyone who speculates on the time of the sons and daughters. The ‘ecological debt’ Pope Francis speaks about is usurer debt. We are behaving like Mazzarò, the main character of Verga's La roba. After accumulating stuff all his life, one day Mazzarò realises that he will have to die and cannot take his beloved things with him. First, in despair, he hits a boy with a stick, ‘out of envy’; then ‘he rushed out into the courtyard like a madman, staggering, and went round killing his own ducks and turkeys, hitting them with his stick and screaming: »You’re my own property, you come along with me!« We have built a civilisation based on possessions, and all that possessed stuff has created its institutions to increase stuff endlessly. The culture of possessions knows no gift, much less the remission of debt – it knows only amnesties, which are the anti-gift for the poor.
But let us leave the last word to the Bible, let us be consoled by the beauty of those ancient notes of hope and agape, to try to dream of its land of the “not-yet”: ‘If your brother who dwells near you becomes poor and sells himself to you... He shall serve you until the Year of Jubilee. And then he shall depart from you, both he and his children with him, and he shall return to his own family and to the possession of his fathers.’ (Leviticus 25:39-41).
