Usury and Revelation (but really just revelation)

I read an interesting article on Catholic doctrine on usury lately.

Here.

To summarize, there was a Catholic law in medieval times against charging interest on loans (“usury”) that went way back, all the way to some passages in the Old Testament.  St. Thomas Aquinas came up with a logical explanation for it (I can’t make head nor tails of it, which is no reflection on the saint) and then later thinkers developed and articulated his rationale in a way that legitimately undercut the rules on usury, so the rules on usury largely went away.

This is a story that generalizes.  There are two morals you can take from this story; they cut in opposite directions.

First, the tendency to come up with explanations and rationales for commandments can be dangerous.  Catholics in particular but basically everybody have a real tendency to decide that the explanation is the Thing, not the commandment it attempts to explain.  So the commandment can be modified or abandoned when it conflicts with the explanation.   This can be bad.  It is one of the main tools of casuistry and Pharisaism, and its in the form of historicism, of liberal theology.

But second, commandments that are generally phrased were still often implicitly modified and contextualized by the situation that existed when they were given.  It is often a mistake (not to mention contrary to agency) to refuse to think about *why* a commandment might exist at all.

The only solution is to get light.  Revelation is the answer.

On usury, one suspicion I have is that the thinking looks different if you do not implicitly assume that humans can’t create.  Just a suspicion.