Money, Debt, and Morals in Anselm of Canterbury

In this chapter, I reconstruct Anselm’s ethical outlook in such a way as to allow a closer examination of his view of the moral status of money. I take as my chief interpretative hypothesis his understanding of value, and of how the value of things relates to interactions between people or, in other words, the way in which he thinks about the relationship between the economical and the ethical. Anselm’s ethics centers on the notion of debt (debitum). According to him, sin is, at its most general level, “nothing other than not rendering to God what is owed him.” In order to clarify Anselm’s ethics and the theological foundations on which he grounds his ethics, we need to distinguish between two kinds of debt, one which arises in a context of gift-giving and one which is connected to a market economy. The two kinds of debt point to a distinction between two sets of moral norms which govern interactions with members of the in-group (friends) and with the out-group (strangers) respectively. His ethics is primarily an ethics of the in-group. However, by paying attention to how the “double standard” (between in-group and out-group) figures in his thinking, we can clarify the ways in which money is and is not, for Anselm, morally neutral.