Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The God of Cosmic Debt

Payback is a literary anthropology, not of the concept or practice of debt but of the relationship between debtor and creditor from ancient Greece to modern Europe and North America. Consequently, it will have little interest to economists or lawyers or ethicists to the extent that any of these is looking for evidence or exposition of a theory of debt. The facts Atwood presents are attitudes and judgements found almost exclusively in fictional writing. On the face of it, the book has little relevance to either governmental policy or personal finance. Atwood’s rather disconnected final chapter simply states her view, unsupported by any other material in the book, that modern industrial /consumer society has created a worsening ecological debt which is owed to Nature and for which Nature is about to seek payback, that is punitive retribution for the failure to honour the purported terms of this debt. Her literary exegesis is interesting and stimulating. Her ecological conclusions are pedestrian and boring.

One of her literary observations I find particularly interesting however: the driving force of mid-19th C English literature – she cites George Eliot, Dickens, and Thackeray primarily – is debt, particularly its corrupting effect on the institutions of society. This is obvious once stated but having been stated it is an insight that changes one’s outlook profoundly. Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss for example becomes not a tale of familial love and loyalty lost and found but one of debts perceived and disputed in a search for an equilibrium between debits and credits. The only winner is Lawyer Wakem who survives with a mere beating. Everyone else dies. And of course ‘death wipes the slate clean’ in the manner of an unpaid bar tab.

Atwood recognises the connection between religious belief and attitudes toward debt. But she doesn’t develop that connection nearly far enough. For example, she somewhat facilely comments on the Protestant Reformation as breaking the traditional Christian taboo on lending at interest. This is misleading at best. More significantly it misses the real significance of her observation about the importance of debt in English fiction.

Christianity, following the lead of Judaism and in parallel with Islam, has consistently condemned usury, the lending of money at any interest at all, from the time of the 2nd and 3rd C Church Fathers and the early Councils. The last explicit prohibition was contained in the encyclical Vix Prevenit of 1745 to the Italian bishops and generalised to the entire Catholic Church by Pope Gregory XVI in 1836. Since that date there has been, well, utter silence on the subject by the Church, no encyclical, no apostolic exhortation, no informal greetings to either promote or retract the ancient ecclesial displeasure with any form of debt. And this at the same epochal moment that the ‘debt crisis’ of the Industrial Revolution was reaching its literary peak?

It is of course tempting to attribute this silence to a pragmatic acceptance by the Church of a fait accompli that had become a central aspect of modern society. But the Catholic Church hasn’t been known for its cultural sensibilities in other areas like politics and sex. Or it could have occurred to Church policy-makers that the various technical subterfuges – the so-called three contract solution for example which converted debt into an interest free loan with insurance premiums attached, or which treated money as land that could be ‘rented’ through payment up front, or the various ‘greening’ ploys of Islamic finance – made the matter a legal maze that they didn’t want to get lost in. But of course the Catholic Church has rarely demurred from simplifying other complex situations like marriage or sacramental access into unshakeable canon law. And the fact that a significant portion of the 19th C world, at least those who spoke and read English, had adopted an increasingly negative view of creditors, credit law, penalties connected with that law and the social impact of debt, was encouraging a stand by the Church that was a pillar of its tradition. Why then did the Church decline, as it were, the invitation, to engage the world on its own turf?

I offer a suggestion, the only evidence for which is the abrupt but apparently permanent silence of the Church on the matter. The reason could well be a logical one involving the recognition that the profoundest and most central doctrine of the Church – the Atonement by Christ for the sin as well as sins of the world – is in fact undermined by the arguments traditionally presented against debt. These arguments imply that God the Father is a usurer, that his calculation of the debt owed by creation to himself as the Creator is of a magnitude which cannot be paid back by his creatures. In fact, according to the doctrine first formulated by St. Anselm in the 11th C, developed by Aquinas in the 13thC and taught by the Church since, this debt is an infinite imbalance in the moral universe, that is the debt is far greater than the ‘credit’ created in the material universe. Therefore, only the sacrifice of an infinite being, Christ, can compensate or atone for this imbalance between debits and credits. The formulation from the 1928 encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor reads as follows: "The creature's love should be given in return for the love of the Creator, another thing follows from this at once, namely that to the same uncreated Love, if so be it has been neglected by forgetfulness or violated by offense, some sort of compensation must be rendered for the injury, and this debt is commonly called by the name of reparation"

It is this Substitution Theory of Atonement (as opposed to the previous prevailing Ransom Theory in which it is Satan who is paid to leave the world alone) that is directly attacked by the various medieval theories against lending at interest. Despite their disparate technicalities and arcane logics, all these theories are grounded in exactly the issue that Atwood identifies – not debt per se but the relationship created between debtor and creditor. This is a relation of power not simply obligation. Obligation is a moral force which free will (another central Christian doctrine) may choose to respond to or not. Power on the other hand is a material relationship of subjugation which by definition limits free will and implies coercion. Payback, revenge for failure to repay the debt according to the rules, is the purpose of Hell. Theories of usury were therefore implicit judgements of God the Father as usurious, as coercive in his demands of his creation.

It might be noted that in church-time Anselm’s doctrine is relatively recent; it takes centuries for dogmatic formulation to take place in the Catholic Church. The politics involved are at least as intense as in any other large organisation. Vix Prevenit and its 19thC re-statement might well be the last gasps of a faction intent on preserving the myth of un-changeability in Catholic doctrine if nothing else. Is it only coincidence that literature – liberal, politically independent literature – blossomed in a leading democratic society like Britain to adopt the stand historically taken by a now passive Church? And is it also possible that good theological reason for that passivity were being recognised, even if only intuitively by the denizens of the Church curia? Finally is it possible that Atwood has been so acculturated into the Atonement Theory of Anselm that she has applied it unwittingly to her ecological conclusion about Nature's impending revenge? Who knows, but I wish there were time in my life for another doctoral thesis.

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