Certain authorities possessed a hair-trigger sensitivity. Robert Bellarmine came close to having one of his own major works—a defense of Catholicism—condemned by the Index even as he served on its congregation. The pope, Sixtus V, detested his views on papal power in temporal affairs. (Bellarmine thought it was limited.) Because Bellarmine had taken on the Church’s critics by name, some censors argued, he was also complicit in spreading their ideas. Only the timely death Sixtus got Bellarmine off the hook.
John Tedeschi was one of the first historians to take a close look at Vatican correspondence relating to the Index of Forbidden Books. Long before the Inquisition archives were opened, Tedeschi found a deposit of documents from Florence in the state archives of Belgium—part of the material taken away by Napoleon and never returned. He traced the growing severity of the Index as works once tolerated, such as those by Boccaccio and Machiavelli, were subjected to harsher restrictions or prohibited altogether. As time went on, the grounds for censorship expanded, moving beyond “heresy,” properly understood, to encompass passages that were simply critical of the Church or perhaps merely lascivious. Tedeschi took note, for instance, of the expurgations demanded in a historical work by Philipp Camerarius. The names of Protestant leaders and thinkers must of course be removed. But, Tedeschi writes, there was more:
Also to be excised are Robert Gaguin’s insinuation that in France the public good had invariably suffered when clergy became embroiled in affairs of state; a reflection by the historian of the early Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, that the persecutions suffered by Christians under Diocletian were the result of strife and jealousy among bishops; an allegation of papal avarice attributed to a distant patriarch of Constantinople; and the ancient tale that a hairy monster had been born to the mistress of Pope Nicholas III. The four pages that are to be deleted at the end of chapter 58 are an eloquent plea for religious toleration, containing a reminder that men of different faiths have successfully co-existed, as well as Augustine’s pronouncement that only God is lord over the consciences of men.
Looked at from one perspective, the Church’s regime of censorship was a systemic failure. Much of Europe was simply beyond the Vatican’s reach. The Church’s moral authority, such as it was, did not apply. Even where the Index was a power to be reckoned with, it was often possible to get books published by shopping for printers in freer locales. This is the same approach that would be taken centuries later in (for instance) the United States. Throughout the mid twentieth century, Catholic writers in America, unable to secure a bishop’s imprimatur in one diocese, would seek the services of a friendly bishop in another. Thus, in 1962, New York’s Francis Cardinal Spellman denied his imprimatur to a collection of essays from the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal; the editors eventually received approval from the bishop of Pittsburgh. The Catholic publishing house Sheed & Ward long made a practice of publishing its books in Vermont, because it could rely on the good graces of the bishop of Burlington.
So the Inquisition’s defenses were porous even where they existed. But that does not mean they did not have a widespread and lasting effect. “Historians are divided . . .” is one of the most common sentiments you’ll come across in assessments of the Inquisition. Historians are certainly divided on the full extent of censorship’s impact—but not on whether it had one. The writings of Erasmus, to give one important example, largely disappeared from Italy. For about two hundred years, starting in the mid sixteenth century, no new editions of his work were published there. Volumes by Erasmus were widely confiscated, and more or less vanished from collections. In Spain, whose Inquisition mounted its own censorship effort, paralleling Rome’s, a comparison of titles banned by the Index with titles that could subsequently be found in major libraries shows that confiscation and censorship could be damaging indeed.
Vernacular Bibles were a target everywhere. Although the Latin version of the Bible was translated into Italian at a very early stage, and for a long time tolerated, the Inquisition’s eventual campaign against the vernacular—to limit the “unmediated” experience of ordinary people, now able to read these fundamental religious texts for themselves—was unrelenting, and on the whole successful. To this day, Catholics have far less direct experience of the biblical text than other Christians do. (The director Dino De Laurentiis, interviewed during the filming of his 1966 epic, The Bible, recalled, “Five years ago I had never read the Bible, because in Italy we learn everything about religion from priests.”) Some censored books were virtually annihilated. In the mid sixteenth century a tract titled the “Beneficio di Cristo” sold some 40,000 copies in Italian, and went on to appear in French, English, Castilian, and Croat translations. Almost all the books disappeared. A few copies were eventually rediscovered, but not until the nineteenth century.
Works of science were also targeted, to significant effect in many places. Inventories of books confiscated in Spain suggest that Inquisition censors could be surpassingly diligent, removing scientific books regardless of whether they were officially proscribed. Compared with that of other European countries, Spain’s political and intellectual development proved to be sluggish. Historians are divided, but the Inquisition may be among the reasons why.
The most pervasive consequence of Inquisition censorship cannot be quantified. “The ‘books never written,’ and the importance of self-censorship,” writes one scholar, remain “major imponderables.” The anecdotal evidence, the statistical data from here and there, offer only a meager indication of the “opportunity costs” of the Inquisition, the sheer chilling effect of any regime of intellectual manipulation, no matter how petty and haphazard. Within the Church, intellectual restrictions continue to the present day.
Writing about the limits on intellectual freedom in contemporary China, the journalist James Fallows notes that the country’s censorship regime simply cannot be all-pervasive—there isn’t the manpower, there isn’t the technology—but that it takes a considerable toll nonetheless. The Chinese government, through its Golden Shield Project—often referred to as “the Great Firewall”—has put a variety of obstacles in place to limit what Internet users can get access to, and to slow down their searches. It can monitor sites that are being navigated to and pages that are being viewed, and it can arrange for connections to be automatically severed or for sites to become “temporarily” unavailable. The mechanisms are various, and they change continually. Moreover, people who persist too ambitiously in their searches can be identified and tracked down. These are capabilities that the Master of the Sacred Palace could scarcely have imagined, and might devoutly have wished for. At the same time, anyone in China with a laptop and a little bit of knowledge, money, and time can get around the controls. As Fallows writes, “What the government cares about is making the quest for information just enough of a nuisance that people generally won’t bother.”
And they don’t. References to the Tiananmen Square massacre or to the non-Party-line version of Tibetan history will generally draw a blank from ordinary Chinese. To the Internet restrictions one must add the controls on such things as school and university curricula, and the daily reality that a person’s neighbors may be alert to his curiosity—plus the fact that foreign businesses operating in China, mindful of their precarious status, have every incentive to enforce the rules. The result is that in China, official censorship is underpinned by a thick stratum of self-censorship.
So we are back to that—self-censorship. As Peter Godman observes, “Neither confined to the Catholic Church nor restricted to Italy, that most terrible, because most insidious, of ghosts has never been laid to rest.”
Scientist Versus Simpleton
The remains of Galileo Galilei—physicist, astronomer, philosopher, and tactical self-censor—lie entombed in marble at the Church of Santa Croce, in Florence. Or, rather, most of Galileo lies there. In 1737, as his body was being transferred from the place where it had been secretly kept (ecclesiastical authorities for years would not permit its inte
rment in a consecrated church) to the monument in Santa Croce, a group of admirers removed one of Galileo’s vertebrae, one of his teeth, and three of his fingers. The vertebra—specifically, the fifth lumbar vertebra—is today preserved at a medical school in Padua. One of the fingers has long been on display in a glass orb at a science museum in Florence that was renovated and in 2010 rechristened the Museo Galileo. The remaining body parts—a thumb, the index finger of the right hand, and an upper left premolar—were missing for more than a hundred years. To general astonishment, they turned up not long ago at auction, and have now joined the finger on display in Florence.
Some visitors to the Museo have professed consternation that the body parts of a man of science should be exhibited as if they were the relics of a saint. Perhaps the response should be that other men of science have at least now been able to have a go at him. An analysis of Galileo’s upper left premolar by the surgical dentist Cesare Paoleschi suggests that Galileo suffered from gastric reflux and also that he ground his teeth.
He had plenty of reason to worry, caught up as he was in protracted negotiations with the Inquisition over what he could or could not say on the matter of heliocentrism—the contention, first advanced by Copernicus, and at odds with scripture, that the Sun was stationary and the planet Earth in orbit around it. A vast amount of scholarship has been devoted to the Galileo case, scrutinizing every moment, every fact, every motivation and interpretation. As with the Kennedy assassination or the Alger Hiss prosecution, the documentation and theorizing can seem impenetrable, though the essence of the story is simple: Galileo’s views posed a challenge, and the Church set out to contain it. The Vatican would eventually admit, in 1992, that it had erred in the matter; the pope called the episode a “sad misunderstanding that now belongs to the past.” Over the centuries, the Galileo affair has been mined by historians and polemicists for its lessons. One lesson has to do with the way dishonesty becomes routine: how a regime of orthodoxy and censorship forces all parties into a game of winks and nods.
Galileo’s ordeal must be seen against the backdrop of what had happened to Giordano Bruno. Bruno was born in 1548, not far from Naples, and entered the Dominican Order at the age of seventeen. An iconoclast by nature, he never wore the Dominican habit easily, and eventually shed it altogether. He was renowned at an early age for his capacious recall, which had been trained in a system known as artificial memory; at the age of twenty-one he demonstrated his skills to Pope Pius V, reciting Psalm 86 forward and backward, in Hebrew. But his tastes ran to forbidden literature (he was once disciplined for keeping a book by Erasmus hidden in a privy), and his intellectual interests came to encompass mathematics, cosmology, magic, and the various illicit speculations that the Reformation had unleashed. Bruno embraced the ideas of Copernicus but went further, broaching the concept of a universe without end, with an infinity of stars and planets, and continuously unfolding acts of Creation. Why should there have been only one Adam and Eve—and if there were many, why should they all make the same mistake? Ideas like that make for good science fiction but bad Catholic theology.
Bruno spent most of his life moving from place to place throughout Europe, his peremptory personality and sharp tongue exhausting the patience of one protector after another. Oxford took him in; he repaid the favor by describing the university as a “constellation of the ignorant, pedantic, and obstinate, and a mass of donkey and swine.” The Inquisition had its eye on him very early, and at last took him into custody when he returned to Italy, in 1592. The original interrogation and trial transcripts have been lost, but summaries survive, and it is clear that Bruno was willing to recant on some matters. On others he proved adamant. The issues were mainly theological rather than scientific. His interactions with the formidable Robert Bellarmine, one of the judges, proved particularly intense. The two men were intellectual equals and implacable antagonists, each believing that he carried a torch for truth. Positions hardened on both sides. In the end, Bruno was sentenced to death. Bellarmine concurred in the judgment, but was haunted ever afterward by the outcome. How could he have failed to persuade the man?
The Bruno case may have influenced the way he dealt with Galileo sixteen years later. Bellarmine, a Jesuit, was the most brilliant theologian of his age—five feet, three inches tall, but a towering figure. His remains, in a cardinal’s red robes, lie in state behind glass under a side altar at Rome’s Church of Sant’Ignazio. Bellarmine was intimately familiar with the advanced scientific thinking of his time. He had even viewed celestial objects through that new device, the telescope. Bellarmine was a cardinal-inquisitor, but he had waged his own battles with the Index, which he had the misfortune to head. Its methods taxed his patience, and could be acidic in his reactions. He certainly understood the challenge to scripture if Copernicus was right, but he also understood that there were two ways out of the box: heliocentrism could be condemned, or scripture could be reinterpreted (“with great caution”). Bellarmine and Galileo agreed on one thing: the Copernican theory had not yet been irrefutably proved. Given that fact, Bellarmine would continue to rely primarily on scripture. Galileo, for his part, knew where the evidence pointed. But he was no Bruno. He was a meticulous scientist, not an irascible dreamer. He enjoyed the support of loyal friends and powerful patrons. He was on good terms with popes.
Both men labored within a system whose redlines were clear but also subject to change; indeed, many in the Church wanted the lines drawn tighter. It is possible to see Bellarmine and Galileo as complicit in temporizing—pushing freedom to the nearest boundary and no further. In the famous settlement of 1616, Bellarmine denounced the Copernican system as false but allowed it to be discussed as a hypothesis; Galileo conceded for the record that this was all he had ever meant to do. It was a pragmatic accommodation, the kind made throughout history: minds seek room to maneuver in a dangerous environment. Robust and outspoken opinion is replaced by oblique suggestion or calculated silence, by trimming and feinting. It was the strategy of writers in the Soviet Union. It was the path Thomas More sought to take in his contest with his king. Galileo thought the accommodation a victory.
It would fall apart in 1632, when Galileo published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. By then, Bellarmine was dead, and Galileo crossed a line in his book, perhaps without intending to. The two world systems were the Ptolemaic (the Sun revolves around Earth) and the Copernican (the other way around), and although the dialogue was set up as a discussion of hypotheses, the character arguing the geocentric case was given the name Simplicio, which can be interpreted as “Simpleton.” The pope, Urban VIII, took this hard. He had in fact encouraged Galileo to write the book, and to include his own papal views on the matter; now he saw them advanced none too adroitly, in the mouth of a figure who seemed never to get the best of the argument. The Dialogue had been provisionally approved by censors in Florence, but the action moved quickly to Rome, where Galileo was made to stand trial. This time there would be no accommodation. As one historian has noted, the trial was not about science but about obedience: “Concern for truth had evolved into concern for authority and power.” Old and sick, Galileo abjured any belief in the Copernican system, and lived out the rest of his days under house arrest. The story is told that after submitting to the judgment that Earth is stationary, Galileo muttered under his breath, “And yet it moves!” There is no evidence that he did so. However, the item under glass in the Museo Galileo is without question a middle finger.
The Cheese and the Worms
For obvious reasons, the cases of Galileo and Bruno have been a focus of debate for centuries. But they were in many ways exceptional episodes. Most of those who came to the attention of the Inquisition did not have to defend themselves over the course of many decades. Most did not have a constellation of powerful prelates taking a very personal interest in their cases. The statistics are arguable, but in the two centuries after its establishment, the Roman Inquisition conducted, at a minimum, some 50,000 formal tria
ls. The number of people investigated but never tried runs to several times this figure. Italy’s population in 1600 was about 13 million, so the Inquisition’s footprint would have been highly visible.
And the number executed? There was a charitable organization in Rome, the Arciconfraternita di San Giovanni Decollato, whose members took it upon themselves to escort the condemned to the stake. In the Roman Inquisition’s first two centuries, they performed this service for ninety-seven people. But that’s just Rome. Throughout the peninsula, the total number executed by the Inquisition over this same period is around 1,250.
Trials by the Roman Inquisition followed the usual pattern in certain ways, but departed from it in others. The proceedings were secret, and the accused was never told the source of the accusations or the identity of the witnesses against him. (Accounts of reprisals suggest that the accused sometimes discovered their identity anyway.) But the person on trial was made aware of the specific charges—in writing, and in the vernacular—and could hire a lawyer. “Public defenders” were available for the indigent. The position of the lawyer was in some ways awkward. As John Tedeschi writes, “If the lawyer became convinced that his client was indeed guilty and could not be persuaded to abandon his error, he was obliged to discontinue the defense or fall under suspicion himself.” Just as inquisitors learned correct procedure from handbooks, so did defense lawyers who practiced before the Inquisition bar. Heresy, they were reminded, was a crime of the intellect, and allowances might be made if a defendant could show a lack of intentionality—it was a slip of tongue, he was drunk, he was sleepwalking.
God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World Page 14
