The Reign of Anti-logos by David Hawkes

Author:David Hawkes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030559403
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

It is reasonable to hate what is irrational, and usury is irrational because it perverts money away from its natural telos. Concupiscent sexuality was also deemed unnatural to the degree that it departs from the natural telos of sex, which is reproduction. In the Laws Plato remarks: ‘when male unites with female for procreation the pleasure experienced is held to be due to nature, but contrary to nature when male mates with male or female with female’10 (1.636c). The end, purpose and final cause of money—the reason for its existence—is to serve as a common denominator facilitating the exchange of objects other than itself. Financial value is a medium, not a thing. But usury does not regard money as a medium for exchange; it treats money as an object of exchange. Usury treats money as a rei, a thing: it objectifies the medium of exchange. Once money becomes a commodity it necessarily attains a value. Yet in the traditional conception money is value. In Thomistic scholasticism, Aristotle’s argument is refracted into the observation that, since its telos was realized in consumption, money could not be separated from the ‘use’ of money. As St. Thomas Aquinas put it:… the use of money… is nothing other than its substance, therefore either the lender sells something which doesn’t exist, or he sells the same thing twice, namely the money itself whose use is its consumption, and this is manifestly against the principles of natural justice.11

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