Debt (55 page)

The fact that Medieval money took such abstract, virtual forms—checks, tallies, paper money—meant that questions like these (“What does it mean to say that money is a symbol?”) cut to the core of the philosophical issues of the day. Nowhere is this so true as in the history of the word “symbol” itself. Here we encounter some parallels so extraordinary that they can only be described as startling.

When Aristotle argued that coins are merely social conventions, the term he used was
symbolon
—from which our own word “symbol” is derived. Symbolon was originally the Greek word for “tally”—an object broken in half to mark a contract or agreement, or marked and broken to record a debt. So our word “symbol” traces back originally to objects broken to record debt contracts of one sort or another. This is striking enough. What’s really, remarkable, though, is that the contemporary Chinese word for “symbol,” fu, or
fu hao
, has almost exactly the same origin.
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Let’s start with the Greek term
“symbolon.”
Two friends at dinner might create a symbolon if they took some object—a ring, a knucklebone, a piece of crockery—and broke it in half. Any time in the future when either of them had need of the other’s help, they could bring their halves as reminders of the friendship. Archeologists have found hundreds of little broken friendship tablets of this sort in Athens, often made of clay. Later they became ways of sealing a contract, the object standing in the place of witnesses.
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The word was also used for tokens of every sort: those given to Athenian jurors entitling them to vote, or tickets for admission to the theater. It could be used refer to money too, but only if that money had no intrinsic value: bronze coins whose value was fixed only by local convention.
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Used for written documents, a symbolon could also be passport, contract, commission, or receipt. By extension, it came to mean: omen, portent, symptom, or finally, in the now-familiar sense, symbol.

The path to the latter appears to have been twofold. Aristotle fixed on the fact that a tally could be anything: what the object was didn’t matter; all that mattered was that there was a way to break it in half. It is exactly so with language: words are sounds we use to refer to objects, or to ideas, but the relation is arbitrary: there’s no particular reason, for example, that English-speakers should choose “dog” to refer to an animal and “god” to refer to a deity, rather than the other way around. The only reason is social convention: an agreement between all speakers of a language that this sound shall refer to that thing. In this sense, all words were arbitrary tokens of agreement.
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So, of course, is money—for Aristotle, not only worthless bronze coins that we agree to treat as if they were worth a certain amount, but all money, even gold, is just a symbolon, a social convention.
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All this came to seem almost commonsensical in the thirteenth century of Thomas Aquinas, when rulers could change the value of currency simply by issuing a decree. Still, Medieval theories of symbols derived less from Aristotle than from the Mystery Religions of Antiquity, where “symbolon” came to refer to certain cryptic formulae or talismans that only initiates could understand.
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It thus came to mean a concrete token, perceptible to the senses, that could only be understood in reference to some hidden reality entirely beyond the domain of sensory experience.
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The theorist of the symbol whose work was most widely read and respected in the Middle Ages was a sixth-century Greek Christian mystic whose real name has been lost to history, but who is known by his pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite.
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Dionysius took up the notion in this latter sense to confront what was to become the great
intellectual problem of the age: How is it possible for humans to have knowledge of God? How can we, whose knowledge is confined to what our senses can perceive of the material universe, have knowledge of a being whose nature is absolutely alien to that material universe—“that infinity beyond being,” as he puts it, “that oneness that is beyond intelligence”?
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It would be impossible were it not for the fact that God, being all-powerful, can do anything, and therefore, just as he places his own body in the Eucharist, so can he reveal himself to our minds through an endless variety of material shapes. Intriguingly, Dionysius warns us that we cannot begin to understand how symbols work until we rid ourselves of the notion that divine things are likely to be beautiful. Images of luminous angels and celestial chariots are only likely to confuse us, since we will be tempted to imagine that that’s what heaven is actually like, and in fact we cannot possibly conceive of what heaven is like. Instead, effective symbols are, like the original symbolon, homely objects selected apparently at random; often, ugly, ridiculous things, whose very incongruity reminds us that they are
not
God; of the fact that God “transcends all materiality,” even as, in another sense, they are God.
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But the notion that they are in any sense tokens of agreement between equals is gone entirely. Symbols are gifts, absolute, free, hierarchical gifts, presented by a being so far above us that any thought of reciprocity, debt, or mutual obligation is simply inconceivable.
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Compare the Greek dictionary above to the following, from a Chinese dictionary:

FU. To agree with, to tally. The two halves of a tally.

The evolution is almost exactly the same. Like
symbola, fu
can be tallies, contracts, official seals, warrants, passports, or credentials. As promises, they can embody an agreement, a debt contract, or even a
relation of feudal vassalage—since a minor lord agreeing to become another man’s vassal would split a tally just as he would if borrowing grain or money. The common feature seems to be a contract between two parties that begin as equal, in which one agrees to become subordinate. Later, as the state became more centralized, we mainly hear about fu presented to officials as a means of conveying order: the official would take the left half with him when posted to the provinces, and when the emperor wished to send an important command, he would send the right half with the messenger to make sure that the official knew it was actually the imperial will.
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We’ve already seen how paper money seems to have developed from paper versions of such debt contracts, ripped in half and reunited. For Chinese theorists, of course, Aristotle’s argument that money was simply a social convention was hardly radical; it was simply assumed. Money was whatever the emperor established it to be. Though even here there was a slight proviso, as evidenced in the entry above, that “fu” could also refer to “the mutual agreement between heaven’s appointment and human affairs.” Just as officials were appointed by the emperor, the emperor was ultimately appointed by a higher power, and he could only rule effectively as long as he kept its mandate, which is why propitious omens were called “fu,” signs that heaven approved of the ruler, just as natural disasters were a sign that he had strayed.
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Here Chinese ideas did grow a bit closer to the Christian ones. But Chinese conceptions of the cosmos had one crucial difference: since there was no emphasis on the absolute gulf between our world and the one beyond it, contractual relations with the gods were by no means out of the question. This was particularly true in Medieval Taoism, where monks were ordained through a ceremony called “rending the tally,” ripping apart a piece of paper that represented a contract with heaven.
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It was the same with the magical talismans, also called “fu,” which an adept might receive from his master. These were literally tallies: the adept kept one; the other half was said to be retained by the gods. Such talismanic fu took the form of diagrams, said to represent a form of celestial writing, comprehensible only to the gods, which committed them to assist the bearer, often giving the adept the right to call on armies of divine protectors with whose help he could slay demons, cure the sick, or otherwise attain miraculous powers. But they could also become, like Dionysius’ symbola, objects of contemplation, by which one’s mind can ultimately attain some knowledge of the invisible world beyond our own.
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Many of the most compelling visual symbols to emerge from Medieval China trace back to such talismans: the River Symbol, or, for
that matter, the yin-yang symbol that seems to have developed out of it.
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Just looking at a yin-yang symbol, it is easy enough to imagine the left and right (sometimes, too, called “male” and “female”) halves of a tally.

A tally does away with the need for witnesses; if the two surfaces agree, then everyone knows that the agreement between the contracting parties exists as well. This is why Aristotle saw it as a fit metaphor for words: word A corresponds to concept B because there is a tacit agreement that we shall act as if it does. The striking thing about tallies is that even though they might begin as simple tokens of friendship and solidarity, in almost all the later examples, what the two parties actually agree to create is a relation of inequality: of debt, obligation, subordination to another’s orders. This is in turn what makes it possible to use the metaphor for the relation between the material world and that more powerful world that ultimately gives it meaning. The two sides are the same. Yet what they create is absolute difference. Hence for a Medieval Christian mystic, as for Medieval Chinese magicians, symbols could be literal fragments of heaven—even if for the first, they provided a language whereby one could have some understanding of beings one could not possibly interact with; while for the second, they provided a way of interacting, even making practical arrangements, with beings whose language one could not possibly understand.

On one level, this is just another version of the dilemmas that always arise when we try to reimagine the world through debt—that peculiar agreement between two equals that they shall no longer be equals, until such time as they become equals once again. Still, the problem took on a peculiar piquancy in the Middle Ages, when the economy became, as it were, spiritualized. As gold and silver migrated to holy places, ordinary transactions everywhere came to be carried out primarily through credit. Inevitably, arguments about wealth and markets became arguments about debt and morality, and arguments about debt and morality became arguments about the nature of our place in the universe. As we’ve seen, the solutions varied considerably. Europe and India saw a return to hierarchy: society became a ranked order of Priests, Warriors, Merchants, and Farmers (or in Christendom, just Priests, Warriors, and Farmers). Debts between the orders were considered threatening because they implied the potential of equality, and they often led to outright violence. In China, in contrast, the principle of debt often became the governing principle of the cosmos: karmic
debts, milk-debts, debt contracts between human beings and celestial powers. From the point of view of the authorities, all these led to excess, and potentially to vast concentrations of capital that might throw the entire social order out of balance. It was the responsibility of government to intervene constantly to keep markets running smoothly and equitably, thus avoiding new outbreaks of popular unrest. In the world of Islam, where theologians held that God recreated the entire universe at every instant, market fluctuations were instead seen as merely another manifestation of divine will.

The striking thing is that the Confucian condemnation of the merchant, and the Islamic celebration of the merchant, ultimately led to the same thing: prosperous societies with flourishing markets, but where the elements never came together to create the great merchant banks and industrial firms that were to become the hallmark of modern capitalism. It’s especially striking in the case of Islam. Certainly, the Islamic world produced figures who would be hard to describe as anything but capitalists. Large-scale merchants were referred to as
sĀhib al-mĀl
, “owners of capital,” and legal theorists spoke freely about the creation and expansion of capital funds. At the height of the Caliphate, some of these merchants were in possession of millions of dinars and seeking profitable investment. Why did nothing like modern capitalism emerge? I would highlight two factors. First, Islamic merchants appear to have taken their free-market ideology seriously. The marketplace did not fall under the direct supervision of the government; contracts were made between individuals—ideally, “with a handshake and a glance at heaven”—and thus honor and credit became largely indistinguishable. This is inevitable: you can’t have cutthroat competition where there is no one stopping people from literally cutting one another’s throats. Second, Islam also took seriously the principle, later enshrined in classical economic theory but only unevenly observed in practice, that profits are the reward for risk. Trading enterprises were assumed to be, quite literally, adventures, in which traders exposed themselves to the dangers of storm and shipwreck, savage nomads, forests, steppes, and deserts, exotic and unpredictable foreign customs, and arbitrary governments. Financial mechanisms designed to avoid these risks were considered impious. This was one of the objections to usury: if one demands a fixed rate of interest, the profits are guaranteed. Similarly, commercial investors were expected to share the risk. This made most of the forms of finance and insurance that were to later develop in Europe impossible.
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