The other Fathers of the later period do not throw very much light on the question of how usury was regarded by the early Church.  St. Hilary[1] and Jerome[2] still base their objection on the ground of its being an offence against charity; and St. Augustine, though he would like to make restitution of usury a duty, treats the matter from the same point of view.[3] On the other hand, there are to be found patristic utterances in favour of the legality of usury, and episcopal approbations of civil codes which permitted it.[4] The civil law did not attempt to suppress usury, but simply to keep it within due bounds.[5] The result of the patristic teaching therefore was on the whole unsatisfactory and inconclusive.  ‘Whilst patristic opinion,’ says Dr. Cleary, ’is very pronounced in condemning usury, the condemnation is launched against it more because of its oppressiveness than for its intrinsic injustice.  As Dr. Funk has pointed out, one can scarcely cite a single patristic opinion which can be said clearly to hold that usury is against justice, whilst there are, on the contrary, certain undercurrents of thought in many writers, and certain explicit statements in others, which tend to show that the Fathers would not have been prepared to deal so harshly with usurers, did usurers not treat their debtors so cruelly....  Of keen philosophical analysis there is none....  On the whole, we find the teachings of the Fathers crude and undeveloped.’[6]

[Footnote 1:  In Ps. xiv.]

[Footnote 2:  Ad Ezech.]

[Footnote 3:  Cleary, op. cit., p. 56.]

[Footnote 4:  Ibid. pp. 56-7.]

[Footnote 5:  Justinian Code, iv. 32.]

[Footnote 6:  Op. cit., pp. 57-9.  On the patristic teaching on usury, see Espinas, Op. cit., pp. 82-4; Roscher, Political Economy, s. 90; Antoine, Cours d’Economie sociale, pp. 588 et seq.]

The practical teaching with regard to the taking of usury made an important advance in the eighth and ninth centuries, although the philosophical analysis of the subject did not develop any more fully.  A capitulary canon made in 789 decreed ’that each and all are forbidden to give anything on usury’; and a capitulary of 813 states that ’not only should the Christian clergy not demand usury, laymen should not.’  In 825 it was decreed that the counts were to assist the bishops in their suppression of usury; and in 850 the Synod of Ticinum bound usurers to restitution.[1] The underlying principles of these enactments is as obscure as their meaning is plain and definite.  There is not a single trace of the keen analysis with which Aquinas was later to illuminate and adorn the subject.

[Footnote 1:  These are but a few of the enactments of the period directed against usury (Cleary, op. cit., p. 61; Favre, Le pret a interet dans l’ancienne France).]

Sec. 4. The Mediaeval Prohibition of Usury.