To contemporary readers, one of the more unusual lines in “On my First Son” is “seven years tho’ wert lent to me, and I thee pay, / Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.” The lines cast the son as a loan given by God to Jonson. When fate dictated that his son would die, the term of the loan was up, and Jonson had to pay the loan back. Jonson here attempts to convince himself that his son’s death was just, and hence he should not resent it: after all, it’s only right for someone who has been given a loan to pay it back. However, the lines also suggest an impersonal relationship between Jonson and God.
The language of debt and loan to refer to religious matters is not unique to Jonson. In fact, it’s a conventional aspect of Christian theology, which rears its head in several different contexts. In the Christian creation story, Adam and Eve disobey God and taste the fruit of the tree of knowledge. This establishes “original sin,” meaning that people are not born innocent, but rather are always tainted by that first mistake.
Early Christian philosophers framed original sin in terms of debt. God promised Adam and Eve eternal life only if they remained obedient. By failing to stick to these terms, they broke the contract, and no longer deserved life. In other words, death is a way we pay God back for Adam and Eve’s disobedience, returning to him what he is owed.
Jesus’s death and resurrection was an important part of this picture. In Christian theology, Jesus is born without “original sin”—because he’s the son of God, and the virgin Mary, he’s not tainted by Adam and Eve’s disobedience. Unlike everyone else, his death wasn’t owed to God. By dying anyway, he basically hands God a blank check, paying off everyone else’s sins, and winning eternal life for Christians.
Many early modern religious poems are made more interesting when we think about the relationships between theological ideas and seemingly unrelated realms like economics. In the early modern period, there was a growing economy of banks and loans, with many people beginning to make money by charging interest. When someone like Ben Jonson talks about his son’s life as a loan from God, he’s simultaneously drawing on a long intellectual tradition, and making an interesting connection between religion, grief, and money.
