Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

296 DEBT
sublimated, romanticized image of the traveling merchants themselves:
men who did, after all, set off on lonely ventures through wilds and
forests, whose outcome was anything but certain.142
And what of the Grail, that mysterious object that all the knightserrant
were ultimately seeking Oddly enough, Richard Wagner, composer
of the opera Parzifal, first suggested that the Grail was a symbol
inspired by the new forms of finance.143 Where earlier epic heroes
sought after, and fought over, piles of real, concrete gold and silverthe
Nibelung's hoard-these new ones, born of the new commercial
economy, pursued purely abstract forms of value. No one, after all,
knew precisely what the Grail was. Even the epics disagree: sometimes
it's a plate, sometimes a cup, sometimes a stone. (Wolfram von Eschenbach
imagined it to be a jewel knocked from Lucifer's helmet in a battle
at the dawn of time.) In a way it doesn't matter. The point is that
it's invisible, intangible, but at the same time of infinite, inexhaustible
value, containing everything, capable of making the wasteland flower,
feeding the world, providing spiritual sustenance, and healing wounded
bodies. Marc Shell even suggested that it would best be conceived as a
blank check, the ultimate financial abstraction.144
What, Then, Were the Middle Ages
Each of us is a mere symbolon of a
man, the result of bisection, like the
flat fish, two out of one, and each of
us is constantly searching fo r his corresponding
symbolon.
-Plato, The Symposium
There is one way that Wagner got it wrong: the introduction of financial
abstraction was not a sign that Europe was leaving the Middle
Ages, but that it was finally, belatedly, entering it.
Wagner's not really to blame here. Almost everyone gets this
wrong, because the most characteristic Medieval institutions and ideas
arrived so late in Europe that we tend to mistake them for the first
stirrings of modernity. We've already seen this with bills of exchange,
already in use in the East by 700 or 8oo AD, but only reaching Europe
several centuries later. The independent university-perhaps the quintessential
Medieval institution-is another case in point. Nalanda was
founded in 427 AD, and there were independent institutions of higher