It's well known that theologians such as Copernicus, a church canon (senior cleric attached to a cathedral), gave birth to modern science. Less acknowledged is the role of clerics in launching the science of economics. Most scholars claim the Enlightenment as the parent. But the real history of paternity reaches farther back.
Church fathers in the early years of Christianity had embraced the economics of Aristotle and Cicero rather than that of the Bible. Their reasons for doing so have been lost, but it may have been due to the tendency of churches suffering persecution to elect young converts from the nobility as bishops for their political power. The sons of nobility had a high regard for the great philosophers of antiquity and tended to baptize their economics. The chief economic errors of antiquity included a contempt for commerce, the prohibition of charging interest on loans, a value theory that said things had intrinsic value, and a theory of a “just price” that made profits immoral. The condemnation of commerce was so strong that some church fathers thought it impossible for merchants to enter heaven. So merchants who became wealthy tended to give half their wealth to the Church as a means of buying their way into heaven and to use the remainder to buy land and titles of nobility to protect their wealth from other aristocrats.
