Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

THE MIDDLE AGES 299
Let's start with the Greek term "symbolon." Two friends at dinner
might create a symbolon if they took some object-a ring, a knucklebone,
a piece of crockery-and broke it in half. Any time in the future
when either of them had need of the other's help, they could bring
their halves as reminders of the friendship. Archeologists have found
hundreds of little broken friendship tablets of this sort in Athens, often
made of clay. Later they became ways of sealing a contract, the object
standing in the place of witnesses.149 The word was also used for
tokens of every sort: those given to Athenian jurors entitling them to
vote, or tickets for admission to the theater. It could be used refer to
money too, but only if that money had no intrinsic value: bronze coins
whose value was fixed only by local convention.150 Used for written
documents, a symbolon could also be passport, contract, commission,
or receipt. By extension, it came to mean: omen, portent, symptom, or
finally, in the now-familiar sense, symbol.
The path to the latter appears to have been twofold. Aristotle fixed
on the fact that a tally could be anything: what the object was didn't
matter; all that mattered was that there was a way to break it in half.
It is exactly so with language: words are sounds we use to refer to objects,
or to ideas, but the relation is arbitrary: there's no particular reason,
for example, that English-speakers should choose "dog" to refer
to an animal and "god" to refer to a deity, rather than the other way
around. The only reason is social convention: an agreement between all
speakers of a language that this sound shall refer to that thing. In this
sense, all words were arbitrary tokens of agreement.151 So, of course, is
money-for Aristotle, not only worthless bronze coins that we agree to
treat as if they were worth a certain amount, but all money, even gold,
is just a symbolon, a social convention.152
All this came to seem almost commonsensical in the thirteenth
century of Thomas Aquinas, when rulers could change the value of
currency simply by issuing a decree. Still, Medieval theories of symbols
derived less from Aristotle than from the Mystery Religions of Antiquity,
where "symbolon" came to refer to certain cryptic formulae or
talismans that only initiates could understand.153 It thus came to mean
a concrete token, perceptible to the senses, that could only be understood
in reference to some hidden reality entirely beyond the domain
of sensory experience.154
The theorist of the symbol whose work was most widely read
and respected in the Middle Ages was a sixth-century Greek Christian
mystic whose real name has been lost to history, but who is known
by his pseudonym Dionysius the Areopagite.155 Dionysius took up the
notion in this latter sense to confront what was to become the great