So in Inferno the usurers are in the seventh circle for violence against God, but why aren’t they in the fourth circle for avarice? Because they are picture eating about money bags around their necks, and usury is the sin of charging really high interest on loans, so shouldn’t that be considered avarice, since they really like money?
by Friendly_Magician349
4 Comments
It’s an odd intersection of Bible verses, law, and custom. In the early Christian church charging of any interest was seen as a sin. It was often illegal for Christians to do so. This is one reason why Jews got associated with banking and money lending in the Renaissance and Medieval Europe. They could charge interest and often did.
So the charging of any interest is usury and is a sin. It isn’t about greed but specifically charging interest.
Usurers are like credit card companies giving cards to students who don’t have income to pay them off.
Avarice is for billionaires like Bezos and Musk. If you won’t let people pee because it loses you money, you are an all new level of scumbag.
They are two different levels of the same thing.
Avarice is about spending or hoarding for personal benefit. This can be accomplished without deception or predatory practices if you had an income larger than needed and chose to, for example, not share with your less fortunate family members and instead buy luxury items or hoard to maintain a level of comfort you’re accustomed to. Usuary is inherently predatory. Usuary doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing anything luxurious, but you’re using whatever assets you have to take advantage of others and get more for yourself. Like, say you have 2 cows, you allow someone else down on their luck to have use of 1, but require 50% of the milk they put in the work to retrieve and then require them returning the cow along with another cow, so now you have 3 cows.
From what I remember from high school, the core reason for which usury is considered a far worse sin than avarice is that it consists in making money out of money and not through human industriousness as God willed, so usury is considered an insult against God himself and as such it is a form of blasphemy, so the usurers are “violent” against God, not only against other people or themselves as damned placed in higher circles are.