The Merchant's Tale Important Quotes

How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors, and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it’s a chimera, there’s no such thing, everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants.

That a member of the clergy took an interest in double-entry bookkeeping was important, because Pacioli’s method helped the merchants overcome the church’s disdain for usury. The merchants had to prove to the church that their businesses were not, in fact, sinful, that they provided a benefit to mankind. During the Middle Ages, writes author James Aho, “the very thought that a person might be profit-hungry and yet Christian was an outrage.” Double-entry accounting, completely unintentionally, provided a way around this. How? The answer lies in the Book of Revelations, Christianity’s tale of a final reckoning, where it is said: And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. Interpretation: The dead stand before God and open their book. Then God opens his book. The second book. You might call this, oh, double bookkeeping. “Whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” Through a simple method of accounting, the merchant class was able to perform a trick that had eluded them for a millennium: making it acceptable to engage in the business of making loans. Double-entry bookkeeping, Aho writes, “was itself complicit in the invention of a new ‘field of visibility’: the Christian merchant.