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The Market and the Temple/6 - Analysis. The devaluation of labour and the market is the result of archaic and Greco-Roman cultures and erroneous "theological" ideas.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  13/12/2020
The "treasurer-traitor" became the image of those who sell to earn, of every shameful form of trade, and while uniting the image of three different women of the Gospels, Mary became the symbol of pious waste for worship and the common good.
Associating the figure of Judas with the ethics of European economy is not something that comes naturally, but we must do so if we really want to understand it. Judas Iscariot is the traitor, he is the "treasurer" of the community of the twelve, but he is also a "bad merchant" for the very small sum, thirty denarii, which he asked for in exchange for his betrayal. An infamous and low sum when compared with other famous amounts of money in the Bible (Sarah's tomb, Jeremiah's field in Anathoth). In the Middle Ages, Judas the economist, Judas the traitor and Judas the bad merchant eventually intertwined, giving life to the popular legends of Judas. In "Saint Brendan’s epic voyage"/"La Navigazione di San Brentano" (10th century), after his father dreamed that his son would kill him, Judah, the new Oedipus, is abandoned in Jerusalem where he enters Herod's court, where he becomes a thief, then kills his father and marries his mother, finally ending up in the community of the apostles.
As historian Giacomo Todeschini showed us in his essential work "Like Judas"/"Come Giuda" (2011), the figure of Judas became the icon of the medieval Jew in European cities, when the semantic ambivalence between Judas/Jews ended up associating Jews as such to the sin of Judas as well, (European anti-Semitism also developed and matured in the economic and financial spheres). In the second millennium, in the eyes of popular piety, of art and a lot of theology, Judas also became the face of every economic operator who worked for a profit. Not just the usurer, but every person who acted to make a profit; hence, the merchants, the artisans, the employees, all associated to the treasurer of the twelve because, like him, they sold something to get money.
There are many factors behind the ethical and spiritual devaluation of labour and work in the Middle Ages, some inherited from the Greco-Roman world, (manual work is an activity reserved for slaves), and from archaic cultures, (whoever touches matter is impure). However, the menacing shadow of Judas lurking over every job aimed at earning money was also important (Amintore Fanfani, "History of work in Italy"/“Storia del lavoro in Italia”). A distrust that included both the community economists and the custodians of the monasteries. Judas thus became a sort of backward "patron saint" to those who sold anything in exchange for money, an activity not too different from that of prostitutes, (meritrici in Italian, from merere: to earn). It was in fact, within this religious context that the expression "mercenary work" was born, applied for all forms of wage or monetary compensation.
This ethical form of suspicion would then run across all the Middle Ages and modernity. In the influential "Manual for confessors"/“Manuale per i confessori” by Abbot Gaume (I’m referring to the fourth edition which I own: Naples, 1852), we read the following: «This last recommendation is interesting, based on the idea that asking for a price that is higher than the initial cost is a sin, a theft. As if to say: any increase in the price of goods by those who trade them is undue, because trade does not create added value and therefore does not justify any form of profit. A bizarre idea, which for centuries has led to consider traders as usurpers of the wealth of their customers. A "theological" idea, and not just a consequence of a primitive theory of value (linked to the thing itself) or of a still static economic structure, where trade is seen as a "zero-sum game" (if the seller earns + 1, whoever buys loses -1)».
At the same time, although assimilated to the figure Judas, "mercenary" traders and workers were still tolerated and (with the grave exception of the Jews) allowed to live their lives and work, in the name of the same tolerance that Jesus and the eleven had had for Judas, even knowing that he was a "thief". This tolerance also inspired the "Golden Legend" ("La Leggenda Aurea") of Jacobus de Varagine, where Judas Iscariot, who finds himself in hell, has his conviction being temporarily condoned and suspended on some holidays (Christmas, All Saints...). The underlying theological interpretation is the association between the betrayal of Judas and the paradoxical benefit wrought by his sin: the salvation of the cross. In the cycle by Pietro Lorenzetti in the lower basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, Jesus is represented in the double gesture of both moving away from Judas while blessing what is happening. The same paradoxical benefit of mercenary workers. A theological reading also supported in the Gospel by the parable of the unjust steward praised by Jesus - which is also the only place where the Greek word oikonomia appears in the Gospels (Luke 16, 1-9). Jesus does not praise Judas, but Judas is the only apostle whom Jesus calls «friend» in the Gospels: «Do what you came for, friend!» (Matthew 26,50). Even in these unique words, something of great importance is hidden in the Bible.
Medieval civilization therefore generated a negative idea of ​​paid work and earnings. The services that some men did for others in exchange for money were despised, they were not seen as an expression of mutual assistance or mutual benefit, but as a form of servitude, which in this case, however, did not belittle the master, but the servant. How is it possible this contempt for work ended up producing capitalism in modern times? We may find a first clue in another, even more unlikely, evangelical protagonist of European economic ethics: Mary Magdalene. A much loved figure in the Gospels, very central in the Gnostic apocryphal ones (the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip). The Mary Magdalene of popular piety and medieval Christian traditions is not however only the Mary of Magdala of the Gospels. She is rather a "construction", the result of a combination of several women: the one properly called Mary Magdalene, out of whom Jesus «had driven seven demons» (Mark 16,9), Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus, and the sinner, present in the four Gospels, who enters a house in Bethany where Jesus found himself and pours a jar of perfume on his head (or feet). At a certain point in the history of the Church, the Magdalene became the fusion of these three women - an important role was played in this by Gregory the Great, in Homily 33, in Rome in 593.
In John's version of the episode with the sinner, we find Judas at the scene. John takes up the account of the Synoptic Gospels (where the sinner of the house of Bethany remains anonymous: Mark 14,1-9), and transforms that woman into Mary, sister of Lazarus: «Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet... but one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it» (John 12,3-6). Judas a traitor, a thief, a miser; Mary, the good prodigal woman, who squanders a sum ten times greater than what Judas will eventually ask for, to honour Jesus. Over the centuries the polar contrast between Judas and Mary, who in the meantime had become Mary Magdalene, would prove to be decisive. Judas would become the image of someone who sells to earn, an icon of every shameful trade and mercenary work; the Magdalene, a symbol of the good use of wealth, of pious waste, of expenditure for worship, and therefore for the church and for the common good. The money earned by working is that of Judas; the money invested in order to be spent in worship is instead pious and holy. Magdalene becomes the anti-Judas, in part due to her relationship with money. As Todeschini once again shows us, over the centuries the Magdalene would be increasingly represented in popular piety and in great art as a rich, luxurious, noble woman, a holy sinner because she had decided to use her past wealth for a holy purpose. The money of the former harlot became holy, while the worker's money became a form of prostitution.
Hence, we arrive at the very centre of this story. Wealth from being bad becomes good if used for worship, for ecclesiastical and public works: the economy of magnificence is thus born. The money earned to live and provide for one's family live is like that of Judas, while that spent on public worship is like that of Magdalene. It does not even matter if this money comes from debt: «All happiness together combine to make a man happy, who, having nothing of his own, knows how to live with that of others» ("The happy Debtor"/"Il Debitor felice", Nuzio Petroni da Trevi, late sixteenth century). Similarly, Francesco Berni: «Do, my kinsman, even loans, often take, at an interest, and let others worry about it: because one will always design the cloth, while another will weave it» ("In praise of the debt"/"In lode del debito", 1548). These theological stories are also behind the present tensions over the debt between the countries of the North and those of the South of Europe. Private wealth and profit can be transformed into good and civil wealth if one leaves the economy of Judas behind and chooses the economy of the Magdalene instead. A vision that we also find in the foundation of the Monti di Pietà. Bernardine of Feltre said: «You thought that the Monte was useful only to the poor. I, on the other hand, say that it is necessary for the poor for their material needs, as it is necessary for the rich for their souls" (Sermons II).
One last thought. The great merchant, the banker, and therefore the great actors of the economy and finance, do not incur the condemnation of Judas, because they earn enough wealth to donate a part of it to worship, to the church, to the Common Good, in life or at least in death... Hence, Judas has increasingly become the image of the small merchant, the artisan and the small entrepreneur. The bad reputation with which the concept of "profit" was passed down to us was not earned by the big economic operators, because the shameful profit became the small one of our fellow citizens. Many centuries have passed, capitalism and its new Protestant work-vocation ethic has arrived. But are we sure that that old stigma about "normal" earnings has been cancelled? When Adam Smith wanted to give a face to those who did not act in business out of "benevolence", perhaps not by chance, he found it in the image «of the butcher, the brewer and the baker» (1776), not in those of the administrators of the East India Company nor of the great English and Dutch bankers. In this economy "small is bad". Today as in the past, when the enemy of the Common Good is not the large multinational but the local merchant, "salvation" is entrusted to a "lottery receipt" that transforms, in spite of them, private vices into public virtues. Thus, the face of Judas did not become that of the great capitalist, but that of the worker-entrepreneur next door. Until when?
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The Market and the Temple/6 - Analysis. The devaluation of labour and the market is the result of archaic and Greco-Roman cultures and erroneous "theological" ideas.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  13/12/2020
The "treasurer-traitor" became the image of those who sell to earn, of every shameful form of trade, and while uniting the image of three different women of the Gospels, Mary became the symbol of pious waste for worship and the common good.
Associating the figure of Judas with the ethics of European economy is not something that comes naturally, but we must do so if we really want to understand it. Judas Iscariot is the traitor, he is the "treasurer" of the community of the twelve, but he is also a "bad merchant" for the very small sum, thirty denarii, which he asked for in exchange for his betrayal. An infamous and low sum when compared with other famous amounts of money in the Bible (Sarah's tomb, Jeremiah's field in Anathoth). In the Middle Ages, Judas the economist, Judas the traitor and Judas the bad merchant eventually intertwined, giving life to the popular legends of Judas. In "Saint Brendan’s epic voyage"/"La Navigazione di San Brentano" (10th century), after his father dreamed that his son would kill him, Judah, the new Oedipus, is abandoned in Jerusalem where he enters Herod's court, where he becomes a thief, then kills his father and marries his mother, finally ending up in the community of the apostles.
As historian Giacomo Todeschini showed us in his essential work "Like Judas"/"Come Giuda" (2011), the figure of Judas became the icon of the medieval Jew in European cities, when the semantic ambivalence between Judas/Jews ended up associating Jews as such to the sin of Judas as well, (European anti-Semitism also developed and matured in the economic and financial spheres). In the second millennium, in the eyes of popular piety, of art and a lot of theology, Judas also became the face of every economic operator who worked for a profit. Not just the usurer, but every person who acted to make a profit; hence, the merchants, the artisans, the employees, all associated to the treasurer of the twelve because, like him, they sold something to get money.
There are many factors behind the ethical and spiritual devaluation of labour and work in the Middle Ages, some inherited from the Greco-Roman world, (manual work is an activity reserved for slaves), and from archaic cultures, (whoever touches matter is impure). However, the menacing shadow of Judas lurking over every job aimed at earning money was also important (Amintore Fanfani, "History of work in Italy"/“Storia del lavoro in Italia”). A distrust that included both the community economists and the custodians of the monasteries. Judas thus became a sort of backward "patron saint" to those who sold anything in exchange for money, an activity not too different from that of prostitutes, (meritrici in Italian, from merere: to earn). It was in fact, within this religious context that the expression "mercenary work" was born, applied for all forms of wage or monetary compensation.
This ethical form of suspicion would then run across all the Middle Ages and modernity. In the influential "Manual for confessors"/“Manuale per i confessori” by Abbot Gaume (I’m referring to the fourth edition which I own: Naples, 1852), we read the following: «This last recommendation is interesting, based on the idea that asking for a price that is higher than the initial cost is a sin, a theft. As if to say: any increase in the price of goods by those who trade them is undue, because trade does not create added value and therefore does not justify any form of profit. A bizarre idea, which for centuries has led to consider traders as usurpers of the wealth of their customers. A "theological" idea, and not just a consequence of a primitive theory of value (linked to the thing itself) or of a still static economic structure, where trade is seen as a "zero-sum game" (if the seller earns + 1, whoever buys loses -1)».
At the same time, although assimilated to the figure Judas, "mercenary" traders and workers were still tolerated and (with the grave exception of the Jews) allowed to live their lives and work, in the name of the same tolerance that Jesus and the eleven had had for Judas, even knowing that he was a "thief". This tolerance also inspired the "Golden Legend" ("La Leggenda Aurea") of Jacobus de Varagine, where Judas Iscariot, who finds himself in hell, has his conviction being temporarily condoned and suspended on some holidays (Christmas, All Saints...). The underlying theological interpretation is the association between the betrayal of Judas and the paradoxical benefit wrought by his sin: the salvation of the cross. In the cycle by Pietro Lorenzetti in the lower basilica of St. Francis in Assisi, Jesus is represented in the double gesture of both moving away from Judas while blessing what is happening. The same paradoxical benefit of mercenary workers. A theological reading also supported in the Gospel by the parable of the unjust steward praised by Jesus - which is also the only place where the Greek word oikonomia appears in the Gospels (Luke 16, 1-9). Jesus does not praise Judas, but Judas is the only apostle whom Jesus calls «friend» in the Gospels: «Do what you came for, friend!» (Matthew 26,50). Even in these unique words, something of great importance is hidden in the Bible.
Medieval civilization therefore generated a negative idea of ​​paid work and earnings. The services that some men did for others in exchange for money were despised, they were not seen as an expression of mutual assistance or mutual benefit, but as a form of servitude, which in this case, however, did not belittle the master, but the servant. How is it possible this contempt for work ended up producing capitalism in modern times? We may find a first clue in another, even more unlikely, evangelical protagonist of European economic ethics: Mary Magdalene. A much loved figure in the Gospels, very central in the Gnostic apocryphal ones (the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip). The Mary Magdalene of popular piety and medieval Christian traditions is not however only the Mary of Magdala of the Gospels. She is rather a "construction", the result of a combination of several women: the one properly called Mary Magdalene, out of whom Jesus «had driven seven demons» (Mark 16,9), Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus, and the sinner, present in the four Gospels, who enters a house in Bethany where Jesus found himself and pours a jar of perfume on his head (or feet). At a certain point in the history of the Church, the Magdalene became the fusion of these three women - an important role was played in this by Gregory the Great, in Homily 33, in Rome in 593.
In John's version of the episode with the sinner, we find Judas at the scene. John takes up the account of the Synoptic Gospels (where the sinner of the house of Bethany remains anonymous: Mark 14,1-9), and transforms that woman into Mary, sister of Lazarus: «Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet... but one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, who was later to betray him, objected, “Why wasn’t this perfume sold and the money given to the poor? It was worth a year’s wages.” He did not say this because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief; as keeper of the money bag, he used to help himself to what was put into it» (John 12,3-6). Judas a traitor, a thief, a miser; Mary, the good prodigal woman, who squanders a sum ten times greater than what Judas will eventually ask for, to honour Jesus. Over the centuries the polar contrast between Judas and Mary, who in the meantime had become Mary Magdalene, would prove to be decisive. Judas would become the image of someone who sells to earn, an icon of every shameful trade and mercenary work; the Magdalene, a symbol of the good use of wealth, of pious waste, of expenditure for worship, and therefore for the church and for the common good. The money earned by working is that of Judas; the money invested in order to be spent in worship is instead pious and holy. Magdalene becomes the anti-Judas, in part due to her relationship with money. As Todeschini once again shows us, over the centuries the Magdalene would be increasingly represented in popular piety and in great art as a rich, luxurious, noble woman, a holy sinner because she had decided to use her past wealth for a holy purpose. The money of the former harlot became holy, while the worker's money became a form of prostitution.
Hence, we arrive at the very centre of this story. Wealth from being bad becomes good if used for worship, for ecclesiastical and public works: the economy of magnificence is thus born. The money earned to live and provide for one's family live is like that of Judas, while that spent on public worship is like that of Magdalene. It does not even matter if this money comes from debt: «All happiness together combine to make a man happy, who, having nothing of his own, knows how to live with that of others» ("The happy Debtor"/"Il Debitor felice", Nuzio Petroni da Trevi, late sixteenth century). Similarly, Francesco Berni: «Do, my kinsman, even loans, often take, at an interest, and let others worry about it: because one will always design the cloth, while another will weave it» ("In praise of the debt"/"In lode del debito", 1548). These theological stories are also behind the present tensions over the debt between the countries of the North and those of the South of Europe. Private wealth and profit can be transformed into good and civil wealth if one leaves the economy of Judas behind and chooses the economy of the Magdalene instead. A vision that we also find in the foundation of the Monti di Pietà. Bernardine of Feltre said: «You thought that the Monte was useful only to the poor. I, on the other hand, say that it is necessary for the poor for their material needs, as it is necessary for the rich for their souls" (Sermons II).
One last thought. The great merchant, the banker, and therefore the great actors of the economy and finance, do not incur the condemnation of Judas, because they earn enough wealth to donate a part of it to worship, to the church, to the Common Good, in life or at least in death... Hence, Judas has increasingly become the image of the small merchant, the artisan and the small entrepreneur. The bad reputation with which the concept of "profit" was passed down to us was not earned by the big economic operators, because the shameful profit became the small one of our fellow citizens. Many centuries have passed, capitalism and its new Protestant work-vocation ethic has arrived. But are we sure that that old stigma about "normal" earnings has been cancelled? When Adam Smith wanted to give a face to those who did not act in business out of "benevolence", perhaps not by chance, he found it in the image «of the butcher, the brewer and the baker» (1776), not in those of the administrators of the East India Company nor of the great English and Dutch bankers. In this economy "small is bad". Today as in the past, when the enemy of the Common Good is not the large multinational but the local merchant, "salvation" is entrusted to a "lottery receipt" that transforms, in spite of them, private vices into public virtues. Thus, the face of Judas did not become that of the great capitalist, but that of the worker-entrepreneur next door. Until when?
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    [title] => Time is a common good, even if we have forgotten it
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The Market and the Temple/4 - Analysis - In biblical humanism there is the «Sabbath» and yet all days belong to God, then «mixed time» came and today...
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  29/11/2020
"Time is a child playing. The kingdom belongs to a child".
Heraclitus, Fragments
We began to sell and buy time when Purgatory entered the religious discourse and with it the bargaining on the time of the dead and therefore also of the living. We can clearly see the effects of the destruction of time in the environmental issue, where the destruction of the future takes place in an economy entirely focused on the present.
Time belongs to God. So the usurer, who sells time, profits from a good that is not really his in the first place. This was also one of the oldest arguments against interest-bearing loans. However, in this divine nature of time there is something else that is very important in order to understand the birth of capitalism: «The usurer acts against the universal natural law, because he sells time, which is a common good of all creatures. Hence, since the usurer sells what actually belongs to all creatures, he harms all creatures in general; even rocks and stones, whence it appears that even if men stayed silent in front of the usurers, stones would cry out». In his "Summa Aurea", William of Auxerre (1160-1229) adds an important dimension to this, an expression of biblical humanism. Time really belongs to God, and so it is «common to all creatures». It is a common good, and as such, it cannot be traded for profit. It would be private appropriation of a common good. Time, would hence not only be a divine good, but also a global and cosmic common good («the stones»).

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Biblical humanity learned of the nature of time especially during the Babylonian exile. That is where the concept of the Sabbath really matured, a day with a time of a different quality that with its mere presence makes all time not appropriable. Because if there is a day of the week not available to man, as it finds itself outside his domain and empire, then there is also a chrism of gratuitousness on all time that firmly places it outside any acquisitive and commercial area. This is also the reason why the ban on interest-bearing loans matured in Israel during that same exile. Biblical time is a gift and the whole earth is a never reached promised land. Perhaps the most important biblical legacy is this non-predatory relationship with time and the earth. Furthermore, biblical time carries the sign of sin inscribed in it. The exit from the cyclic time of Eden and the entry into historical time is the result of a disorder in the relationship between humans, between humans and creation (the snake) and between creation and God. The time of men was born wounded, even if that wound generated the blessing of the Covenant and a different salvation. Biblical humanism also invented historical and linear time, because history moves towards an end, it has a beginning and constantly looks forward. In short, the Bible invented the future, and therefore the past. Its time is not cyclical, mythical or circular. The Covenant and the expectation of the Messiah have given time a direction, effectively placing an arrow, a sense, at the tip of the time line. Then Christianity further strengthened and radicalized this linear nature of time, through the incarnation and resurrection.
However, there is a necessary tension between linear time and the idea of time as a common good. As long as the world remained static and intrinsically slow, the Church managed to keep them both together, with the help of different tools. First of all in the monasteries, with the organization of liturgy. Liturgical time is a mechanism that traps the linear flow of time within a circular rhythm, where ritual time overcomes historical time. Time-quantity flows and passes, but time-quality, marked by the liturgy, gives human time a divine and therefore eternal stamp. Monasteries enchanted people because they promised eternal life, to defeat death. In the life of the laity, calendars, feasts, bells, the rhythm of life and seasons, the cyclical times of the liturgical year, then tried to bend linear time to contain it within the constant and perennial cycle of religion. Space was marked and underlined by images and sacred signs, shrines, tabernacles, and distances measured in "Ave Maria". Hence, time continued to pass, yet on a deep level it remained the same. It was as if time had two levels: a more superficial one that flowed linearly, and a deeper one that remained unchanged because it was divine. In this humanism, therefore, there were no cultural and concrete pre-conditions to make loans at interest legitimate. Therefore, whoever asked for compensation for a time that did not change in depth, was committing an act against nature - against the very nature of time.
When did all this go awry? When it began to change the world. As in the case of art, and the first attempts, back in the days of Giotto, to introduce depth and real space within frescoes, producing a perspective where time and movement entered the paintings. The days of William of Auxerre were also those of Joachim of Fiore and his theology of the near advent of the "age of the Spirit", which would follow that of the Father (the Old Testament) and that of the Son (the New Testament ). His was a qualitative vision of time, guided by a dynamic mechanism. The end of Joachim's life (1202) intersects with the beginning of that of Francis. The Franciscans left the walls of the monasteries and went back to being nomads and beggars in the streets. Pilgrimages also picked up again during those same years. And with this movement, the sense of time began to change.
The merchants were yet another group of great walkers and crossers of space: «All humans must aspire to the purchase of Virtues, from which Glory is born; and among the many paths which lead to it, three in particular are the most common. One, weapons, the other, letters, and the third, shops. The first is dangerous, the second is quiet and the third is tiring» (Giovanni Domenico Peri, "The Merchant"/"Il Negoziante", 1672). The advent of the merchants was in fact decisive for the revolution of the concept of time. Merchants travel across cities and regions, organize complex operations, and create a new relationship with time. They lives on time: they have to foresee market fluctuations, inflation, wars, and famines. They must speculate (word that comes from specula, specere: look far) on the differentials of the prices of coins, which at that time were many indeed, including the "imaginary currency" present on European markets between Charlemagne and the French revolution. The merchants invented new contracts (exchange letters, commenda), they created the first forms of insurance, learning to live with risk. Even farmers depended on time and risk, but time in the countryside and of the seasons was once something that was merely "suffered", unmanageable, free and master of itself. Not so for the merchants: they anticipate time, control it, and enslave it, making it the first element of their business. Becoming time experts. In their profession, the present becomes the future (bills of exchange) and the future becomes the present (discount). For a farmer, time is a constraint, for a merchant it is his first opportunity. The farmer will continue to measure distances in "Ave Marias", the merchant with the help of maps and astrolabes. The farmer lives in a place, the merchant inhabits space.
The merchant hence trades with time, and thus economic time ceases to be the time of the Church. It was the Church itself, however, that made time trading lawful, or at least possible. It did so with the creation of Purgatory. In this same period, in fact, the reality of Purgatory exploded in Europe (already present in the early Christian centuries), which played a central role in changing the notion of time (Jacques Le Goff). With Purgatory, the binary structure that had dominated the first millennium - hell/heaven, city of God/city of man, virtue/vice... - evolves into a ternary one. Before time began to be sold by merchants and bankers with the legitimacy of the interest rate, time had already began being sold with the concept of Purgatory. Because, seen from this perspective, Purgatory is nothing more than the possibility of buying time on earth for the benefit of the dead. Praying and paying indulgences for the dead means making time an object of exchange. In a binary and polar vision of heaven/hell, time cannot ever be for sale, because there is no way on earth to influence the heavens. With the introduction of the "third way" of Purgatory, actions on earth began to change the time of the dead. And if we can haggle the time of the dead, we can trade with that of the living as well.
The transition from a world "of two" to a world "of three" then developed, within Christianity itself, a space for imperfection, of intermediate realities, of a middle ground, of compromises, of amnesties, of the orange colour in traffic lights; mediations between prohibition and lawfulness, and between divine time and mercantile time. Cases, distinctions, and differences sprang up or amplified further: those between emerging damage and loss of profit, between interest-profit and interest-annuities. Time left the exclusive domain of God and religion. At first, it became a shared and contested domain between God and man. The ancient divine and common good nature of the time did not disappear; it became partial but remained alive and operative, and allowed during many centuries to distinguish between licit and illicit use of time, between good interests and usurious interests, between virtuous and dishonest merchants, between entrepreneurs and speculators. The merchants had gotten hold of a few threads of the rope of time but at the other end the hand of God and therefore of the community remained firm. This time with mixed ownership has allowed the development of the European economy, and, at the same time, has kept it anchored to the communities.
And with this form of "mixed time" we have hence reached the threshold of modernity, when time has become a mere human affair, and therefore completely and only a commodity. By losing its link with the divine, time has also lost its nature as a common good. And by erasing time as a common good, we have also effectively lost the sense of the common Good itself. Nevertheless, even if we treat it as a private commodity, time remains a common good and therefore subject to the "tragedy of the commons": by using it with a privatist logic, we are destroying it, without realizing it. We can clearly see the destruction of time through the issue of the environment, where the destruction of time is becoming the destruction of the future in an economy entirely focused on the present. A time that was not yet entirely a commodity and still a common good, helped to bind generations together, giving children time to become better than their fathers and mothers. We must immediately reinvent a non-predatory relationship with time and space together. Young people must help us, without them we will not make it, because our generation has forgotten what a good relationship with time and with the earth truly is. We can ask this of the young, we must ask it of the children.
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The Market and the Temple/4 - Analysis - In biblical humanism there is the «Sabbath» and yet all days belong to God, then «mixed time» came and today...
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire  29/11/2020
"Time is a child playing. The kingdom belongs to a child".
Heraclitus, Fragments
We began to sell and buy time when Purgatory entered the religious discourse and with it the bargaining on the time of the dead and therefore also of the living. We can clearly see the effects of the destruction of time in the environmental issue, where the destruction of the future takes place in an economy entirely focused on the present.
Time belongs to God. So the usurer, who sells time, profits from a good that is not really his in the first place. This was also one of the oldest arguments against interest-bearing loans. However, in this divine nature of time there is something else that is very important in order to understand the birth of capitalism: «The usurer acts against the universal natural law, because he sells time, which is a common good of all creatures. Hence, since the usurer sells what actually belongs to all creatures, he harms all creatures in general; even rocks and stones, whence it appears that even if men stayed silent in front of the usurers, stones would cry out». In his "Summa Aurea", William of Auxerre (1160-1229) adds an important dimension to this, an expression of biblical humanism. Time really belongs to God, and so it is «common to all creatures». It is a common good, and as such, it cannot be traded for profit. It would be private appropriation of a common good. Time, would hence not only be a divine good, but also a global and cosmic common good («the stones»).

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The Market and the Temple/2 - Monti di Pietà and Monti Frumentari speak of an original plural finance and the equity action of the Church.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 15/11/2020
"It is forbidden for appraisers to accept gifts or courtesies from pawn owners, or from other people in order to give effects a higher or lower estimate, but they must be loyal, just, and sincere in their duties, under penalty of ten Scudi for each altered estimate".
From the Archives of the Monte di Pietà of Imola
In the Middle Ages, divine mystery was contemplated in the mystery of the human condition and the poor, not the Pope, were the real first representatives of Christ on earth.
The Renaissance, a golden age in Italian history, was not only the time of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Leon Battista Alberti, Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli and the Medici. It was also an extraordinary age for the work of the many Franciscan builders of the Monti di Pietà. Without taking this charismatic humanism into consideration, we cannot really understand modern Italy and Europe, and we cannot really understand what the Catholic Church really represented between the Middle Ages and modern times. These various credit institutions radically changed Italian finance from the mid-fifteenth century until at least the nineteenth century, when those seeds flourished into rural banks and savings banks. The bank in Italy was born plural, and not just for profit.

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Let us dwell on these images of the Monti di Pietà. First of all, piety, that is, the image of the dead Christ in the arms of Mary. Why piety as an image of the buildings, chapels, banners of the Monti di Pietà? That image was already used by aid agencies and medieval hospitals. It symbolized one of the central moments of the Christian faith, much loved by the people of those centuries who knew the pain of life especially well, in particular the mothers and women who came to experience the death of so many, too many, sons and husbands. It was represented in almost all churches and by the greatest artists (Titian, Rubens, Michelangelo). A meeting between Christian piety and what was inherited from the Romans (the "pious" Aeneas), which linked it above all to children caring for their elderly parents. Its symbol in the icons was the pelican or the stork: the Roman civilization called the law that obliged children to take care of their parents, lex ciconiaria, as legend had it that storks did just that, take care of their parents. Popular piety is always greater than the theologies and dogmas of religions.
In those centuries, that central scene of faith was therefore translated as a form of piety-love towards one's neighbour, in particular for those who suffered: «The other wept, so that - because of pity - I fainted, as if I had met my death. And then I fell as a dead body falls» (Dante, Inferno, 5). Theology immediately became anthropology, Christianity itself revealed the face of God together with the face of the poor. Those believers, much more interested back then than we are today in heaven and hell, were able to give the name of "piety" to the most intimate embrace between man-God and his Mother. The divine mystery was eagerly contemplated and the mystery of man was beloved. In this aspect, the Middle Ages were all light. For the Franciscans, teachers of piety and charity, it was so natural to see a fruit of the same root of piety and mercy in the birth of those different Monti - piety, charity and mercy, three different words for theology, deeply intertwined and superimposed in popular piety.
The most popular effigy of Bernardino da Feltre, which represents him next to a mountain and holding two drapes with two phrases from the New Testament (in Latin) on them, is stupendous. The first: «Do not love the world» (1 John 2,15), the second: «Look after him» (Luke 10,35). Two phrases that together express the humanism of the Monti di Pietà. They did not love or follow the logic of the world (which in John is a symbol of evil), yet they took care of it. «Look after him» is in fact one of the sentences with which the parable of the Good Samaritan concludes, when he entrusts the half-dead man to the innkeeper: «‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have’». A perfect phrase for the Monti, because in it the Gospel of Luke associates an entrepreneur (the innkeeper) with the most beautiful act of piety in the New Testament. The Samaritan does not ask the innkeeper to host the victim for free - according to a certain logic he could have and should in fact have done so. No, instead he recognizes a fair price to be paid to those who were doing their job. And those "two pieces of silver" served to reconcile piety with economy - if money in the Gospels had only been represented by the thirty coins paid to Judas, it would have been a terrible message for all those who have to use money to live and let live. Perhaps it was not intentional, but those two sentences also represent the distillation of the battle of the Franciscans in favour of the payment of an interest rate on the loans of the Monti.
Other details help to enrich the story of that first spring season of solidarity finance. After a long period of preparation - the process often began with the preaching of the friar in time of Lent – the day the Bank was finally inaugurated, the community made a procession from the Franciscan church to the seat of the bank. With girls cheering and with children dressed in white holding the banner of the Monte. Wondrous. Pietro Avogadro described one of them, which took place in Verona in 1490: «An image created with such artistic skill and admirable genius as to be estimated among only the rarest masterpieces, was carried in procession to the sound of trumpets and flutes, towards the Monte di Pietà. The work was set on a broad base made up of canvases. The sides contained the symbols of all the virtues, of admirable splendour: in the centre, the Pietà, the inanimate body of Jesus in the arms of his mother, and then his favourite apostle. This sacred rite was overseen by thirty men assigned to worship, who, while carrying the image from the Monte itself, showcased this highly sacred moment, with the greatest of commitment and edification». Sacred, beautiful and solemn processions such as those in honour of the patron saint, the Madonna and Corpus Domini. For those Franciscans and the people a procession to honour the foundation of a bank was no less sacred than other functions - let us not forget that in the Middle Ages the first representative of Christ in the world was not the Pope: it was the poor. Even a different kind of bank can become a piece of heaven. The processions to celebrate the Eucharist and the Saints, which are never alternated with processions that celebrate the poor, too often end up losing the scent of the Gospel. This too speaks of the prophetic force of Francis' charism.
All this in the Centre-North part of the country. What about the South? The Monti had the greatest diffusion especially from the beginning of the seventeenth century (although Monte de l'Aquila was among the first, in 1466) in the Kingdom of Naples, also following a difficult and long economic crisis. With two characteristics: they were not always born from Franciscans or from ecclesiastics at all, and they were almost all free loan institutions, despite the Church having made the interest rate lawful with the Decree of Pope Leo X in 1515 regarding the Monti di Pietà. Being small institutions in general, most often housed in Convents and in parishes, they did not have large expenses, and were often supported by philanthropic institutions. This absolute "gratuitousness" did not help the duration and growth of the Monti di Pietà in the South, on the contrary, it complicated it. Antonio Genovesi wrote the following on the matter: «Around the beginning of the 16th century, the so-called Monti di Pietà were born in some parts of Italy... To relieve these bloody wears, a group of men who loved humanity established private entities with little funding, in which small sums were lent for free and larger sums with not much interest at all. These Monti were first administered with unscrupulous fidelity, since they are all the very first human establishments made in the fervour of virtue» (Lessons in Civil Economy, 1767).
However, what really developed the most in the South, also given its particular economic-productive structure, were the Frumentari Monti (also called wheat or numerary banks, and other similar names, in Sardinia, and in other Catholic countries of Europe). They were rural credit institutions, which also grew thanks to the great incentive provided by Pope Orsini (Benedict XIII), born in Gravina di Puglia, (the first one was founded when he was still the bishop of Benevento, in 1678). Even Lucerne Franciscan St. Francesco Antonio Fasani (1681 -1742), dedicated himself to the birth of credit for the poor. This wheat was honoured with the same care as the manna and the Eucharistic bread, because even this grain provided to give life.
The Frumentari Monti used wheat as a numerary. Sometimes they were born as complementary entities to the Monti di Pietà (which provided monetary credit). In fact, credit piety took many different forms in that civil and economic renaissance in Italy. Among these, the Monti of the dowry, Monti of the damsels or matrimonial Monti that were born with the main purpose of guaranteeing a dowry to the poorest girls.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, there were over 500 Frumentari Monti in the Kingdom of Naples, encouraged and supported by the main theorists of civil economy (A. Broggia, G.M. Galanti, J.B. Jannucci and D. Terlizzi de Feudis). The Wheat Banks were not free of charge, in part because interest paid in kind had always been less controversial than interest paid in money. The farmers estimated the grain "at level" (with the container) and returned it "full", the difference between the two quantities constituted the interest, estimated on average to around 5%.
The Frumentari Monti developed as a way of overcoming a type of agrarian contract, called “alla voce”, which was very widespread in the South since the Middle Ages. This contract was particularly vexatious and usurious for peasants, and fuelled the development of veritable parasitism and exploitation against the workers of the land. Trojano Odazi, a pupil of Genovesi and editor of the Milanese edition of his "Lessons" (1768), helped to demonstrate that the "alla voce" contract was a halter contract. In fact, in those contracts the merchant, who possessed the precious required liquidity, advanced money to the farmer at the time of sowing. The farmer then had to deliver a certain amount of wheat (or oil, wine, cheese) at the time of harvest to the merchant. The contract did not actually mention an established price, because that would have been established "verbally" (alla voce), that is the price announced in the square (the most important ones were Crotone, Gallipoli and Potenza) during the time of harvest. Obviously, however, the price of a product is lower at harvest time, as there is an excess of supply; and so the farmer ended up paying an interest of around 100% (per semester) on the cash advance received.
The observation of these injustices led those Franciscans, bishops, and men of good will to imitate the prophets: to observe, denounce, and act. Today there is no lack of new "alla voce", verbal contracts in our post-modern financial system. Unlike in past centuries, these oppressive contracts are not visible to the naked eye. But there are there. What is lacking are new Franciscans, new bishops, and men and women of good will to create new Frumentari Monti, wheat banks. There are some, but they are few and far between.
One of the places that will host the "Economy of Francesco" from November 19 to 21 will be the old Monte Frumentario in Assisi. A sign, a hope, and still the same call: «Take care of him».
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The Market and the Temple/2 - Monti di Pietà and Monti Frumentari speak of an original plural finance and the equity action of the Church.
By Luigino Bruni
Published in Avvenire 15/11/2020
"It is forbidden for appraisers to accept gifts or courtesies from pawn owners, or from other people in order to give effects a higher or lower estimate, but they must be loyal, just, and sincere in their duties, under penalty of ten Scudi for each altered estimate".
From the Archives of the Monte di Pietà of Imola
In the Middle Ages, divine mystery was contemplated in the mystery of the human condition and the poor, not the Pope, were the real first representatives of Christ on earth.
The Renaissance, a golden age in Italian history, was not only the time of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Leon Battista Alberti, Pico della Mirandola, Machiavelli and the Medici. It was also an extraordinary age for the work of the many Franciscan builders of the Monti di Pietà. Without taking this charismatic humanism into consideration, we cannot really understand modern Italy and Europe, and we cannot really understand what the Catholic Church really represented between the Middle Ages and modern times. These various credit institutions radically changed Italian finance from the mid-fifteenth century until at least the nineteenth century, when those seeds flourished into rural banks and savings banks. The bank in Italy was born plural, and not just for profit.

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