The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle Over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God
Robin Vose
Reaktion Press, £25, 296 pages
This history of the Catholic Church’s modern attempt to control literary culture is not quite the secularist polemic that one might expect. This is partly because the author emphasises the messy complexity of this history, and the impossibility of the task of censorship, once print culture took off. The attempt to proscribe new works as they poured from the presses was such an uphill struggle that the reader almost sympathises with the hapless authorities.
Also, Robin Vose repeatedly suggests that censorship in some form is more or less inevitable. When a library chooses which books to buy, or a journal chooses which articles to print, it is in a sense censoring the ones not chosen. The Index can be seen as akin to the work of today’s cultural gatekeepers: “distinguishing between art and trash, debunking ‘junk’ science and charlatans, muting ‘fake news’ and so on. At its best, when directed by some of the world’s most brilliant scholars, this censorship was in fact much less arbitrary or heavy-handed than is often supposed.”
From its beginnings, the Church had condemned unauthorised scriptures and heretical writings as the need arose. Only in the 13th century was a body formed to monitor heresy – the investigation, or “Inquisition”, but at first it seldom produced lists of heretical books as books were so scarce. The book seen as most dangerous was the Talmud, for its supposed anti-Christian blasphemies. Vigilance was stepped up just before the Reformation, especially in Spain, where there were large populations of Jews and Muslims who had been pressured to convert to Christianity. This is largely how “Spanish” and “Inquisition” became linked.
Then came the print-powered wave of Protestant heresy: by the 1530s, lists, or indexes, of banned books were regularly issued, usually by universities acting with royal approval. Rome first attempted a central Index Librorum Prohibitorum at the Council of Trent in the 1560s, but the local ones remained more effective, being geared to the local threats to orthodoxy. The task was far more complicated than listing heretical books by Protestants.
Catholic authors offering new theories had to be carefully vetted, and new science often overlapped with magic and theology. It was because he strayed into this ambiguous territory that Girodano Bruno’s works were listed, leading to his burning at the stake in Rome in 1600. His statue now stands in the Campo de Fiori, just around the corner from the Venerable English College. Meanwhile Vose presents the silencing of Galileo a few decades later as an unsurprising reflection of the orthodoxy of the day, much like peer-reviewing today.
Pragmatism meant that popular books with a few dubious passages were allowed in expurgated form. Books dealing with “lascivious or obscene things” were banned, but ancient classics were largely excused. For example, Bocaccio’s Decameron was put on the Index in the 1550s, but was impossible to suppress completely, so an amended version was approved: in one story, immoral behaviour is attributed to students rather than monks. Machiavelli’s Prince was also sanitised, but discerning readers continued to seek out the original, so new attempts at an approved version were made. In practice, educated clergy wanted a lot of vagueness and inconsistency, especially around immoral content, so that they could go on reading their favourite authors.
The translation of scripture was a minefield: the Church was wary of the vernacular as a door to Protestantism, but literate Catholics wanted to read the Bible in translation. So Catholic translations were approved in countries where Protestant translations would otherwise be used, but not in Spain, Portugal or Italy, where the Latin Vulgate was strongly defended. This intransigence was exported to the New World: “Despite its lack of formal appearance in the Indexes, censorship of both Indigenous spiritual texts and translations into Indigenous languages would be one of the most long-lasting harms ever inflicted by the Catholic Church upon the New World.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most consistently proscribed literature was that which criticised or mocked the Church, or urged fuller toleration of dissent. Thomas More’s Utopia was banned on the latter grounds – ironically, he might have approved. With the rise of the novel, there were far too many books to list that were simply immoral; only those with anticlerical content were sure to be included.
The Index only made sporadic attempts to censor art, with the emphasis on popular devotion. So there were occasional demands that only authorised saints should be depicted with full reverence, and warnings against semi-pagan amulets and suchlike. The high-end art that popes had a tendency to patronise was quietly ignored. In the age before the mechanical reproduction of images, such art was unlikely to be widely known.
The final chapter is a useful account of Catholic censorship since the 1860s. The local Indexes of Spain, Portugal and Venice were wound down as liberal politics advanced, but the central Roman Index became more important as Pius IX, shaken by the revolutions of 1848, renewed the Church’s opposition to modern culture. But by the early 20th century the project of listing banned books began to lose steam and no real attempt was made to address the issue of new technologies, including cinema.
The last Roman Index was issued in 1948, and Vatican II officially ended the practice, though it lingered in certain universities where sections of libraries were cordoned off or even placed inside cages. But the end of the Index did not mean the end of censorship: the Church, through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, continues to practise the “internal” censorship of errant theologians. In theory Catholic theologians are still expected to seek formal permission (the imprimatur) before publishing.
In his conclusion, Vose repeats the claim that the negative aura of the Index is commonly overstated, for all cultures engage in censorship, and he points to cancel culture as the latest evidence. This is an interesting corrective to liberal assumptions, but it rather evades the question of why most Protestant cultures took a different approach, valuing freedom of expression over the attempt to uphold orthodoxy. Though Vose tries to mix his scholarship with topical concerns, and to tell some engaging stories, this is more of an academic tome than a book for the general reader – but maybe in saying that I am trying to do some censoring of my own.
Theo Hobson is a journalist and Anglican theologian
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