The “Monstrous Offspring”: A Brief History of Interest

The “Monstrous Offspring”: A Brief History of Interest

By Andrea Falco Profili

From:  https://www.grece-it.com/2025/10/30/la-progenie-mostruosa-breve-storia-dellinteresse/

Aristotle called it “the most hated trade,” an activity against nature in which money, by its sterile essence, reproduced monstrously from itself. For millennia, the act of lending at interest was a moral taboo, repulsive and unacceptable. In medieval folklore, demons filled the mouth of the deceased lender with glowing coins—a punishment deemed appropriate for such an abomination as usury. The ancient world was well aware of the socially destructive power of debt: it devised a mechanism of cancellation, the institution of the Jubilee. A sacred year serving as a legal reset in which lands returned to their original owners and, above all, liberation from debt slavery was proclaimed. This was the ultimate attempt to curb a hated practice.

These echoes of an ancient moral repugnance were buried by history. The long march of credit transformed the deadly sin into a respectable financial practice. But, with method, it is necessary to trace how this was possible.

As we said, in the ancient world, interest was perceived as a repulsive and unacceptable act; they spoke of “giving birth” to money—an act Aristotle immediately condemned in the first book of Politics, declaring money’s sterility. The usurer, by making coins “give birth” to other coins, created an unnatural offspring, a tokos (interest, in Greek also means “offspring”), which is a monstrosity. The practice of lending was odious because it was the main tool of subjugation. In the Greco-Roman world and the Near East, a farmer whose harvest failed was forced to pledge his land, then his tools, then his children, and finally himself. This was the reality of credit: debt slavery. Entire populations were uprooted and enslaved not by an invading army, but by an accounting record. The creditor saw his wealth grow not through labor but through others’ despair. It was a system that devoured society from within, concentrating land and power in the hands of an oligarchy, while the masses sank into permanent servitude.

Accumulated debt, left to itself, becomes social entropy and concentrates until it destroys the very fabric of the community, creating an irreparable fracture between creditors and debtors. This repulsion was not limited to philosophical paganism or Catholic culture. It was universal, so much so that the early Christian Church, following the Gospels (“Lend without expecting anything in return”), was relentless. The Church Fathers, from Saint Thomas Aquinas onward, were unanimous in condemning usury as a mortal sin, defined as theft without half-measures. Charging for the use of money, Thomas said, was charging for time. Ecclesiastical councils prohibited usurers from receiving the sacraments and even from burial in consecrated ground. Islam, in the Quran, is perhaps even more definitive, comparing the usurer to someone “touched by Satan” and declaring literal war on God and His prophet for those who continue this practice.

For over two thousand years, the three major intellectual and moral traditions of Europe and the Near East—Greek philosophy, Christian law, and Islamic law—agreed unanimously on the absolute evil of usury.

The question then is how it was possible to arrive at the current situation, how such a moral pariah could integrate into ordinary administration while hiding its repulsive past. It is, in fact, a masterpiece of sophistry, a slow collective brainwashing that lasted centuries, beginning with small details and terminological games. Late-medieval theologians and jurists began to create cracks in the wall, starting to postulate the rights of money lenders. If the creditor suffered damage or lost a profit opportunity, it became appropriate and justifiable for him to receive compensation, an “interest.” The very term “interest” was deliberately chosen to distance itself from the word “usury,” laden with hatred. Later, the Monts de Piété (Monti di Pietà) were established, officially created to fight usury; these were Franciscan institutions that lent money to the poor, asking only for a small interest—just enough to cover operational costs. It seemed charitable, but the taboo had been broken, and for the first time, a Christian institution legitimized interest. The dam had broken.

The final blow came with the Protestant Reformation. Besides Luther, John Calvin provided the theological justification that the emerging capitalism was waiting for. Calvin distinguished between lending to the poor (still a sin) and lending to entrepreneurs, arguing that interest was the legitimate profit of those who enabled another to profit by starting an enterprise. From that point onward, the coordinates of money in society irreversibly changed: no longer sterile money, but capital, and the usurer, a parasite, changed name to “investor,” becoming a partner in progress.

From that moment, the march of credit was unstoppable. The Enlightenment secularized the issue (Bentham, Adam Smith), dismissing old prohibitions as medieval superstitions hindering free markets. Banks, once marginal and disreputable activities, became temples of the new economy. Today, the system that Europeans once saw as a social cancer is now the circulating system itself. The resemantization has allowed replacing the fear of debt with the fear of not having enough (“bad credit rating”). Governments do not seek to cancel debts but go into debt to pay interest on previous debts. Even the institution of the Jubilee only survives spiritually in a waning Catholicism, while its economic and social value is forgotten and ridiculed as an economic impossibility. Instead, we have its opposite: the bailout, where the bankrupt debts of the powerful are not erased but transferred onto the shoulders of the public. The apotheosis of this transformation arrived with the 2008 financial crisis. When the house of cards built on mortgages collapsed, a return to sanity was expected. Instead, the definitive triumph of debt logic occurred. Worldwide bank bailouts reached astronomical figures. It was not the debts of the desperate that were canceled but those of financial sharks that were socialized. Speculators who bet and lost were saved with public money, while millions of families lost their homes. It was decided to reward those who caused the catastrophe; those who suffered its consequences soon learned the meaning of “austerity.”

The circle is closed, Aristotle’s “monstrous progeny” has multiplied to the point of devouring its own parents. And the world, without even realizing it, has become its adoptive child.

Andrea Falco Profili