325 · Ecumenical council
First Council of Nicaea
Canon 17
on clergy who lend at interest
States no thesis; simply uses a judicial text as live authority.
The point at which patristic teaching on usury first becomes enforceable law — and the point at which the Mosaic judicial statutes drop out of the citation. It binds clergy only, and cites a Psalm.
Forasmuch as many enrolled among the Clergy, following covetousness and lust of gain, have forgotten the divine Scripture, which says, “He has not given his money upon usury”, and in lending money ask the hundredth of the sum [as monthly interest], the holy and great Synod thinks it just that if after this decree any one be found to receive usury, whether he accomplish it by secret transaction or otherwise… he shall be deposed from the clergy and his name stricken from the list.
Comment
The citation pattern is the finding. Basil, Gregory, and Chrysostom preach against usury from Ezekiel, the Psalms, the gospels — and, in Basil’s case, squarely from Ex. 22:25 and Deut. 23:19. When that teaching finally hardens into an enforceable canon, the Mosaic statutes are gone. Nicaea 17 cites Psalm 15:5 and nothing else.
That is the opposite of what a philonomic reading predicts. If the judicial law were understood to bind, the moment of legislating against usury is precisely when one would expect Exodus and Deuteronomy to appear. They do not. The council reaches instead for the text describing the man who may ascend the holy hill — a description of righteous character, not a civil provision.
It binds clergy only. The penalty settles it: deposition from the clergy and erasure from the roll is meaningless against a layman. This is internal church discipline. Compare [[elvira-canon-20]], which reaches laity two decades earlier but still by excommunication rather than any civil penalty.
It targets the legal rate. “The hundredth of the sum” is the centesima, the rate Roman law permitted. The council forbids its own ministers to take what the empire allowed every subject to take — and asks the empire for nothing.
A gap worth noting: the standard commentators on this canon (Percival’s notes, Hefele, the Byzantine scholia of Balsamon and Zonaras) could not be retrieved in usable form, so there is no evidence here on whether later canonists read canon 17 as extending to the laity by implication. That question is open.