God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

  There is a celebrated passage by Frances Yates, the biographer of Giordano Bruno, in her book The Art of Memory:

  In Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris a scholar, deep in meditation in his study . . . gazes at the first printed book which has come to disturb his collection of manuscripts. Then . . . he gazes at the vast cathedral, silhouetted against the starry sky . . . “Ceci tuera cela,” he says. The printed book will destroy the building.

  It is not clear that people at the time were as prescient as Hugo’s scholar, any more than those who saw the first automobile understood that it would hollow out the hearts of great cities, put vast power in the hands of tribal sheikhs, and make the oceans rise. Elizabeth Eisenstein, a distinguished historian of printing and its consequences, notes that even Martin Luther, when he tacked his famous ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, in 1517 (“if indeed they were ever placed there”), claimed not to have anticipated the furor that his challenge to a debate, when harnessed to the printing press, would ignite. Luther wrote defensively to the pope a few months later, “It is a mystery to me how my theses, more so than my other writings, indeed those of other professors, were spread to so many places. They were meant exclusively for our academic circle here.” Yes, how could that possibly have happened? Luther was being somewhat disingenuous, but the rapidity with which his ideas gained circulation could never have been anticipated and certainly took him by surprise.

  As Eisenstein points out, Luther’s theses were known throughout Europe within a few months, “competing for space with news of the Turkish threat in print shop, bookstall, and country fair.” She goes on to note that because of the printing press, gifted preachers who posed a threat to the Church could no longer be effectively dealt with by simple consignment to the flames; religious dissidents “were able to send their messages from beyond the grave, as editions of their collected sermons continued to be published long after their deaths.” The writer James Carroll recalls that as a young seminarian in the 1960s, he once had to surrender a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason because, the rector declared, it was “on the Index.” Carroll goes on to say, “What really seemed amazing was that books on the Index were available in paperback.”

  This was a state of affairs that gravely troubled the Church. The realization did not dawn immediately, when Gutenberg’s first printed Bibles made their appearance in the 1450s, but it dawned eventually. Looking back from a vantage point of more than four centuries—and with the explosive reality of another new technology, the Internet, so vividly in the foreground—it may seem that any attempt to exert control was doomed to failure. The way things turn out is often interpreted as the way things had to turn out. But the experience of China, where the Internet, along with the media and the educational system, are for the time being under significant control, suggests that attempts at censorship are not completely unworkable even in the digital age.

  In 2010, Google became engaged in a battle with the Chinese government on this very issue, when the company announced that it would end the practice of limiting the topics that Chinese users could search for. This put Google into direct collision with Chinese law and practice, and the government threatened retaliation. An uneasy compromise was reached. Google continued to display censored results on its main page but was allowed to include a link to an uncensored version based in Hong Kong; the results of searches on the Hong Kong site can be monitored or suppressed by Chinese filters as information returns to the mainland. Earlier, in the age of print, the experience of the Soviet Union showed that strict controls on information could be maintained for decades on end, even in a modern industrial state. To get around the controls, Russian writers and intellectuals had to revert to medieval methods, creating so-called samizdat, or “self-published” literature, by means of physical copying and hand distribution. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (the title comes from the temperature at which paper burns) conjures a fictional world in which literature is preserved by a pre-medieval method—the oral tradition. In the novel, books are banned but survive in the minds of dissidents who commit entire works to memory.

  In the nonfictional United States, controversy erupts with disturbing regularity when activists seek to remove books they deem offensive from schools and libraries. The incidents run into the hundreds every year: the American Library Association has recorded some 4,600 challenges since 2001. The objections are wide-ranging. A school board on Long Island ordered the removal from a reading list of Jodi Picoult’s The Tenth Circle and James Patterson’s Cradle and All because of what was seen to be inappropriate sexual content. A school in Alabama ordered the temporary removal of a book called Diary of a Wimpy Kid from its library because of concern that it might harm the self-esteem of some students. A book called And Tango Makes Three, about two male penguins who adopt an egg, was banned from schools in Charlotte, South Carolina, because of implicitly gay subject matter. A Kentucky statute still in force bans the use in schools of any book of “infidel” character. Within the past several years, Fahrenheit 451 has been challenged in schools in Stillwater, Minnesota, and Conroe, Texas.

  In terms of seriousness, none of these incidents comes close to the fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 against Salman Rushdie and his book The Satanic Verses. The fatwa called for the author’s execution, and Rushdie was forced into hiding for many years. As the free-speech advocate Nat Hentoff has observed, “The lust to suppress can come from any direction.” In the sixteenth century, it came heavily from Rome.

  “Absolutely Absurd!”

  Attempts at censorship were not new. If the Church wanted biblical precedent for the destruction of forbidden knowledge, it needed to look no further than the Acts of the Apostles, which records the results of a missionary visit by Saint Paul to the city of Ephesus: “And many of those who practiced magic brought their books together and began burning them in the sight of everyone; and they counted up the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So the word of the Lord was growing mightily, and prevailing.” As an act of punishment, the philosopher Peter Abelard in 1121 A.D. was made to destroy one of his own works—compelled “with my own hand to cast that memorable book of mine into the flames.” Cathar books were burned by the Dominicans during the Albigensian Crusade. Jewish books were repeatedly burned in Spain. In his several Bonfires of the Vanities, in Florence in 1497 and 1498, the reforming zealot Savonarola consigned hundreds of books to the pyre (along with paintings, musical instruments, cosmetics, and mirrors). He himself was cast into the fire a year later. Some 10,000 books were burned by a determined cardinal in Rome on a single day in 1559. But book-burning could never be a systematic approach to the problem—it was too crude, too chancy. Books always seemed to get away. Michael Servetus went to the stake with what was believed to be the last existing copy of his offending book, The Restitution of Christianity, chained to his leg. It turned out, however, that three other copies had survived.

  If book-burning was not the answer, perhaps preemption was —heading off the threat before it arose. At the Vatican, the task of examining books prior to publication fell to the Master of the Sacred Palace, who was typically a Dominican, and who often held the rank of cardinal. The role had developed gradually over several centuries. When Martin Luther published his ninety-five theses, it was the Master of the Sacred Palace who was given responsibility for “crisis management.” Within his jurisdiction, he examined all books before publication and issued or withheld the official stamp of Church approval, known as an imprimatur (Latin for “Let it be printed”), a term that long ago entered English metaphorically as a synonym for “permission.” Those concerned about the potential incursion of censorship on the Internet speak of the advent of a “digital imprimatur.” Local bishops to this day are expected to affix an imprimatur to certain categories of Catholic books, and can withhold approval if they see fit—or be made to withdraw it. In 1998, the Vatican ordered the bishop of East Anglia, in England, t
o revoke his imprimatur from the book Roman Catholic Christianity, because it was judged to be “not in full conformity with the Catholic faith.” The bishop did as he was told. In 2011, a committee of U.S. bishops, citing doctrinal issues, condemned the popular book Quest for the Living God, by Sister Elizabeth Johnson. Johnson had not sought an imprimatur in the first place, a fact that the bishops emphasized.

  In 1542, with the formal establishment of the Inquisition as an organ of the Holy See, censorship became more pervasive and more deeply institutionalized. The Congregation of the Inquisition took the lead. The first Index of Forbidden Books was issued in 1559, under the Inquisition’s auspices; it would be followed by revised and expanded versions. The Index was distributed widely, not just in the Papal States but abroad. In much of Italy, booksellers were expected to be familiar with its contents. In 1572, the censorship effort was placed under its own administrative arm, the Congregation of the Index, which always worked closely with the Inquisition itself. The Master of the Sacred Palace, the Vatican’s original censor, served as a member of both congregations.

  As time went on, and the prosecutorial efforts of the Inquisition began to wane, the work of the Index continued, and censorship became the main public face the Inquisition presented to the world. In 1907, when the first Catholic Encyclopedia was published, the editors were unapologetic about censorship by the Church. It was just something that had to be done, as any fool could see: “As soon as there were books or writing of any kind, the spreading or reading of which was highly detrimental to the public, competent authorities were obliged to take measures against them.” The Holy See’s powerful secretary of state at the time, Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, defended this approach: the Church must protect the faithful so that “their lips do not brush up against the tempting cups of poison.” The Catholic Encyclopedia itself became an object of attempted censorship when, in 1923, the Catholic Daughters of America donated an edition to a public high school in Belleville, New Jersey, and competent authorities took legal steps to remove it (without success).

  It will be decades before a truly comprehensive history of the Index of Forbidden Books can be written. The Congregation of the Index existed for more than four hundred years, adding sedimentary layers from its deliberations every day, but scholars have had access to its records for less than a generation. Ever since the Inquisition archives were officially opened (in fact, beginning somewhat before then), a team headed by a priest named Hubert Wolf, a professor of history at Münster University, in Germany, has been engaged in describing, summarizing, and cataloguing the contents of every Vatican dossier relating to the Index. It is the kind of project for which Teutonic scholarship was invented. The endeavor will take years to complete.

  The scope of the Inquisition’s censorship project is simple enough to lay out in broad brushstrokes. The Church had responded slowly and ineffectually to the challenge of Luther and other critics, and the situation in northern Europe, especially Germany, was profoundly unsettled. There would be wars over religion for a long time to come. Many regions had already been “lost” as the Reformation took hold and Protestant movements found political protection. But (the argument went) it was perhaps possible to stave off Protestant inroads not only in Italy, where the papacy exercised sovereign power over its own ample territories, but also in any domains where papal writ enjoyed some measure of influence. Because it was all too easy for ideas to cross borders, ideas had to be attacked at every stage of their life cycle. The inquisitors knew nothing about the germ theory of disease, but they approached the task as if it were a problem of epidemiology, as indeed it was: an outbreak of freethinking.

  The Inquisition’s response took many forms. To begin with, inquisitors could discourage certain people from even taking up their pens. They could read manuscripts before publication, insisting on changes or prohibiting printers from publishing certain works at all. They could collect dangerous books after they were published and remove them from circulation, often by burning. Teams of visitors were sent out from Rome to pay stern calls on publishers and to scour the contents of private libraries. Expurgators examined books that had already been published, line by line, marking deletions and alterations that would have to be made if the book was ever published again. Agents traveled to the Frankfurt Book Fair, held twice a year, to keep track of new and shocking titles as they flew off Europe’s presses. Inspectors were on hand at major ports and border crossings to search cargo and belongings for contraband. Those who could argue that they had a need to be aware of the contents of certain books—including highly placed officials in the Vatican—had to apply for a license to read them.

  It was an ambitious effort. The control of intellect and conscience on such a vast scale had never been attempted before. The poet Ariosto refers in one passage to the printing press as having been invented by a monachus, a monk; it’s symptomatic of Church attitudes toward this technology that the censors ordered “monachus” to be crossed out. That satanic device could hardly have been a monk’s doing. “What we need,” one sixteenth-century censor wrote privately, “is a halt to printing, so that the Church can catch up with this deluge of publications.”

  That wasn’t possible. Instead, the Church sought to create its own version of what George Orwell, four hundred years later, in his novel 1984, would call “memory holes”—incineration chutes at the Ministry of Truth where ideas and information could be sent for disposal. The censor’s various tools were not wielded with equal fervor at every moment, nor was their application uniform from place to place. The administration of the Inquisition was never a paragon of competence. It was rent by divisions between what today might be called soft-liners and hard-liners, the “wets” and the “dries.” Bureaucracies—religious, secular—acquire internal characteristics peculiar to the organism. Each is a living thing, and those inside a bureaucracy exist in relationship to the host. Mental outlooks are shaped accordingly.

  Sometimes the results are ludicrous. The bureaucracy itself can become personified: the historian Timothy Garton Ash cites a typewritten memo from the British embassy in Moscow, in the 1940s, that begins, “Dear Department” and ends with the words “yours ever, Chancery.” Activities are pursued for no reason other than that they have customarily been pursued: some decades ago, in Milwaukee, the local bishop bestowed his imprimatur on a book consisting of blank calendar pages—perhaps simply because he could, or was expected to. The historian Francisco Bethencourt notes that some two hundred registers a year, detailing searches of thousands of ships for contraband books in one major Portuguese port, survive from a period in the eighteenth century. Virtually no such books were ever found, and yet the searches went on, and the Inquisition’s records were faithfully kept. “The maintenance of a structure which produced nothing beyond repetitive and meaningless reports,” Bethencourt writes, “is in itself informative with regard to the operating logic of the inquisitorial bureaucratic machine.”

  In the archives, dossier after dossier yields examples of bureaucratic bungling and administrative idiocy. The archives also offer glimpses of internal resistance, when independent-minded cardinals and other clerics did what they could to deflect the Church’s attention or mitigate its wrath. The Jesuit Robert Bellarmine, a cardinal-inquisitor who played a central role in the Galileo controversy, did not question the need for censorship. But he was a more thoughtful and reasonable man than some of his colleagues. A marginal notation in his hand survives in the Archivio—it is his reaction to a particular edict of condemnation issued by the Master of the Sacred Palace. Bellarmine wrote: “This is absolutely absurd!”

  The Church’s regulatory effort was never a ruthlessly efficient machine. How could it be? There were so many books—more all the time—and the work was labor-intensive. If a book was on the list for expurgation, local inquisitors first had to discover who in the area owned it, collect all the copies, cross out the offending lines, and then return the books to their owners. Think of the manpower requi
red to find every reference to coitus, a term that was regarded as obscene; blot it out; and replace it with the more demure copula. There was no universal “find and replace” function.

  The inquisitorial censors were often myopic, childish, capricious, or daft. Over the years, they would proscribe Descartes, Voltaire, Pascal, and Locke—but not Darwin or Freud. In many books, woodcuts of proscribed writers such as Erasmus and Luther were clumsily blotted out, as if by a schoolboy—and as if that would somehow do the trick. An inquisitor in Padua, with a large stockpile of confiscated books taking up space on his shelves, simply sold them off to secondhand-book dealers. The censors generally could read only Latin and Italian (and sometimes French); books published in German or English tended to escape prohibition until someone had the audacity to publish them in translation. Uncle Tom’s Cabin came under scrutiny when it was published in Italian, but in the end the book was left alone. (It was a close call, however. The offensive aspect of the book was the positive portrayal of Quakers.) Because they were written in German, the works of Hegel and Kant avoided condemnation for years. Das Kapital and Mein Kampf escaped completely. Peter Godman, pointing one day to the Teutonic College, which sits inside the Vatican just a few hundreds yards from the Inquisition’s palazzo, and has been filled with Germans since well before the Inquisition, wondered aloud, “Couldn’t they have just walked over there and asked for help?”