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The Index of Prohibited Books
Four Centuries of Struggle Over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God
By: Robin Vose
352 Pages
- Hardcover
- ISBN: 9781789146578
- Published By: Reaktion Books
- Published: November 2022
$35.00
Do we need experts to regulate human knowledge? Who today would welcome Catholic priests, backed by considerable power, as censors? In The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle over Word and Image for the Glory of God, a judicious and well-written history, Robin Vose offers a 400-year survey of the Index of Prohibited Books that raises critical questions about the legitimation and production of knowledge. The Index may have fizzled out in 1966, he notes, but censorship remains with us. Consider internet algorithms and even the peer-review process at our own scholarly journals and university presses. Remember the Index next time you serve as the dreaded “Reviewer 2” for an article manuscript. Think about it when you shoot down a mediocre grant proposal. Vose makes the important case that the Index is a highly modern endeavor—one thoroughly bureaucratized and professionalized—that serves as a forerunner to our own multifarious methods of curation.
Vose makes the provocative claim that censorship has its benefits. The case is difficult to stomach but he has a point. Index theologians and philosophers prevented the spread of their own time’s “Fake News.” These priests also shut down the publication of books that failed to meet minimal standards of sound research. The Index employed university professors to protect the integrity of information. These highly trained analysts, Vose writes, could “distinguish between art and trash.” These are all aspects of censorship that we might be able to tolerate. “It could even be argued that the Index served as a positive force in some contexts,” he concludes (7).
Vose is well aware that religious projects like these are highly ambivalent. We moderns want to live in a marketplace of ideas in which reasonable concepts gain traction as a result of their lucidity and quality. Yet we are also aware of how dangerous ideas can become: for example, conspiracy theories. Why not strive to create a centralized system of scholars and clerks capable of assessing all written words and images? It would depend on whether or not the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
The costs are considerable. The issue with the Catholics who ran the Index, of course, is that they attempted to suppress ideas deemed heretical. The project came to life in response to the threat Protestantism posed to the “One True Faith.” Catholic reviewers might have had good intentions, but they possessed little faith in normal people. They believed many minds did not have the strength to filter out bad ideas. While we have disconnected heresy from the quality of the idea, the proposition that institutionally powerful experts ought to have a say in which ideas can be permitted to find adherents remains persuasive. “Not all communications have equal value,” as he puts it (15). “Not all censorship,” he writes, “is totalitarian” (17).
There is a lesson at the heart of this book that might apply to global Catholicism more generally. It is an extraordinarily ambitious project and therefore doomed to fail, at least insofar as the Church strives for universality and totality. The Index, an instance of this boldness, was an attempt to review hundreds of thousands of books and images. Some of the “best and brightest” churchmen dedicated their careers to maintaining the Index. They endeavored, Vose writes, to offer “classification and correction of all human knowledge” (99). But, in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, regulation proved impossible due to the industrialization of print. The process of appraising texts presented another difficulty: Index priests often did not agree on the insidiousness of the text in question. Sometimes scholars allowed the publication of a book but removed particular sentences and paragraphs. They believed that every single book should be met with this intense level of scrutiny. The sheer ambition of the Index is flabbergasting. This standard would be impossible to sustain.
Enforcement of the Index presented insurmountable difficulties. Localities and bishops adopted their own standards, and national lists in places like France, Spain, and Italy were unfurled at different paces. A book might be listed on a French Index for a century before Spain got around to placing on their edition. Cornelius Jansen’s followers simply ignored the condemnation of their leader’s teachings and carried on reading, discussing, and printing his works. Thomas James, director of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, used the Index as a bibliography. He reasoned that condemned works were important enough to be condemned, and therefore should be read. Catholics had done Oxford dons a favor: they put all the influential texts on one single list. Early modern librarians might well have rejoiced. Italian bookmakers threatened to rebel if their bishops did not lift certain texts from the Index. They could not obtain, much less sell, blacklisted books. Then there is the question of why some books make the Index while others go seemingly unnoticed by Church censors. Ovid was suppressed but tons of erotic poetry never caught the Indexers’ eyes. Positivist Augustus Comte ended up on the Index but Karl Marx’s name never appeared on the docket. Maybe there was no reason to place Marx on the Index because Catholics already knew the Church’s position on Communism.
While Vose sets about showing the limitations of the Index he also demonstrates its intimate connection to imperial violence. In the colonial context the Index contributed to cultural genocide. The Index banned publication of the bible in indigenous languages. Rendering non-Christian and schismatic texts anathema clearly contributed to the reduction of diversity and plurality. Copernicus and Galileo made the Index and it ruined their careers. Though the numbers were minimal, the Index helped to send some heretics, like cosmologist Giordano, to death at the hands of an open flame.
As moderns we value two contradictory things. While we celebrate diversity and plurality in viewpoints, we also rate highly the quality of an idea. Value is, of course, subjective. But poorly supported arguments, esoteric rambling, and dangerous lies present good candidates for suppression. Does the tolerance of diversity and plurality necessarily entail allowing all ideas, even bad ones, to flourish? With this well-crafted and highly entertaining book, Vose makes us aware that we have more in common with the Indexers than we would like to admit.
Peter Cajka is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Peter CajkaDate Of Review:July 5, 2023
Robin Vose is professor of history at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. He is the author of Dominicans, Muslims and Jews in the Medieval Crown of Aragon and has served as a National Geographic expert on expeditions to Spain and Morocco.