by Félicité Schuler-Lagier, Interpreter and Lecturer at the Centre international du Vitrail
courtesy of Chartres Sanctuaire du Monde
(Suite)
Three illicit trades: Money changers
With the diversity of currencies in use in medieval times, their two traditional and indispensable functions were the exchange of coins and the trade in precious metals. Goldsmithing was also part of their business, and consequently, the clergy were among their customers. The moneychangers, future merchant-bankers and lenders, practiced a trade that the Church had a duty to condemn and moralize, because they made money from the work of others. But to become rich from work you don’t do yourself is literally to steal from others and rob them of the fruits of their labor. So it’s immoral. The usurer is considered to be a thief of God: he earns money simply by letting time go by, which is considered to be a gift from God. In moralized Bibles, the images of moneychangers express disdain for the profession; moneychangers represent vices and a guilty desire for earthly things. They are avaricious, greedy and want to dominate through their material power. All they think about is getting rich.
The presence of scales and various weights in the moneychangers’ scenes is explained by the fact that it was an elementary precaution to estimate the value of coins by weighing them, as it frequently happened that a cunning and unscrupulous moneychanger would file the coins, recovering a little filings which he could then remelt for his own profit. Scales and weights were also sometimes counterfeited, and many passages in the Bible remind us that God holds counterfeiters in abomination. Scales, the attribute of money-changers, are not necessarily a measuring instrument whose presence would lead to the conclusion that those who use them are honest.
Fig.12 : The money-changers’ scales are in perfect balance: in the right-hand pan, three gold coins, good money, stamped with the cross; in the other, a very large number of small coins, not so good money, and yet the scales don’t move, detail of stained glass 41.
Fig. 13 : The eleven gold coins, a number symbolizing the transgression of divine law, placed on the green felt of the moneychangers’ table, evoke the sale of the holy patriarch, considered by the Fathers as a prefigure of Christ, by his eleven brothers, to passing merchants. The silver coins also announce the thirty pieces of silver paid by the Sanhedrin to Judas for his betrayal, detail of stained glass 41.
The presence of images of moneychangers in the choir’s lancets is surprising. Didn’t Jesus expel the money-changers from the Temple? “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves”. But it can be explained by the Church’s concern to remind us, in a very didactic and repeated way, that we must do good and avoid evil.
The gold and silver coins and silverware placed on the moneychangers’ table in the lower register of two choir windows (bay 105, St. Peter, and opposite, bay 104, St. John the Baptist), display immense wealth and stand in stark antithetical opposition to the poverty preached by Christ, poverty and destitution that characterize the lives of his disciples and his apostle St. Peter, who, before healing a poor paralyzed man expecting an obolus from him, says to him: “I have neither silver nor gold, but what I have I give you: in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk!“ (Acts 3:6).
Fig. 14 : The green and red of the clothes worn by the figure on the left express his power and wealth. He is pointing with his right index finger at the hooded figure who is weighing a golden vase on one of the scales, using the weights on the other. The third figure, on the right, in profile and dressed in yellow and green, the colors of infamy, emptying gold coins from a large white bag, seems to have something to reproach himself for, detail of stained glass 106.
In yet another passage in Acts (5:1-6), St. Peter announces an untimely death to a couple who had brought in alms only part of the price of the sale of their goods, condemning the attitude of those who only give the appearance of generous generosity. Further on (19:24-26), a goldsmith who was making pagan idols in gold and silver for the temple of Diana, stirs up against St. Paul the other workers who were making a considerable profit from this trade.
In many passages, the Bible recommends that we always prefer Wisdom, the Law of God and God himself, to gold and silver, which represent the world and its sinful riches.
To be continued…
Original article published in the Lettre de Chartres Sanctuaire du Monde (December 2021)