THE ROMAN INDEX

When Pope Sixtus V. determined to bring out an Italian Bible, Philip II. sent his ambassador to say that, if it were published, he would forbid it in his own Italian States. Sixtus was silent for so long a time that Olivares said, "Your Holiness does not answer me, I cannot tell what you think." "I am thinking," replied the Pope, "of throwing you out of window that you may learn respect for the Sovereign Pontiff." Nevertheless the very Bible, opposition to whose publication drove a Pope into threats of personal violence, was placed, in 1590, in the Index, and figures in the list of prohibited books.

It is a vulgar notion to identify the authorities of the Church of Rome with the Pope and the priests. They are only its officials; its real authorities are those who are most in harmony with the current public opinion of its members and have most power to wield it. Thus, in the present age of journalism, a newspaper editor named Louis Veuillot was for many years one of the most powerful authorities in the Catholic Church, far more powerful, probably, than all the bishops of France put together. In the seventeenth century this sort of loyalty was actually exercised by men who wore crowns; kingcraft was an art profoundly studied, and it chiefly consisted in being in harmony with, and so retaining the management of public opinion.

The fact that not only the ecclesiastical authorities, but the theology and policy of the Church of Rome, are the creation of its public opinion is most manifestly brought out in the history of the establishment of the Index as a permanent institution in the Roman Catholic Church. It is well known that when it became clear that Luther's movement was a popular success in Germany, and was oven carrying away the best minds in Italy, it was for some time a question at Rome whether the Church should not adopt the Reformation and the doctrine of justification by faith. A council of cardinals was appointed by Paul VII. to give their advice as to the reformation of the Church. Its corruptions and abuses were unsparingly denounced, and the Pope was plainly told that he ought no longer to exert arbitrary power. This council was appointed in 1537, and one of its leading members was the Caraffa who ascended the Papal throne in 1535, as Paul IV. He was still fiery for reform, but of a character so different that he transferred his own advice to the list of prohibited books. What had happened? Ignatius Loyola had founded his Society, and was obtaining a success which bid fair to balance that of Luther. The Iberian and Italian peninsulas, both purely Catholic lands, had given themselves in something like a national manner to its teaching. At Loyola's death, in 1550, the Society had fourteen provinces. Seven belonged to Spain and Portugal with their colonies, while Italy was divided into three. Thus it was clear that Jesuitism exactly harmonised with public feeling in the Roman Catholic Church at that time, and the minds of its officials recognised the fact and guided themselves by its light.

What was the first, and last idea of the Jesuit-craft?  "Obedientia caeca" : blind obedience. This state of mind was absolutely incompatible with free-examination and free discussion. It could only be produced by an act similar to that attributed to the ostrich when pursued by the hunter; the Iberian and Italian peoples placed their heads under the dry sands of a literature labelled orthodox, by their ecclesiastical pedagogues, and their consciences and their intellects seemed safe from the attacks of the German and Swiss heretics. I say the peoples, for it is manifest that a single man, be he called Charles V. or Philip II., could not have had power to compel a whole nation to this, unless he were its real representative. Now the establishment of the institution known to history as the Index, and which has ever since become an important part of the discipline of the Roman Church, exactly synchronises with the moment when the Jesuit body, immediately after the death of its founder, had reached a dominant position in that Church. Not of course that it was a new idea to suppress books objectionable to dominant popular opinion. In 1408 a Roman Synod had forbidden the reading of Wiclif's works, and in 1490 Torquemuda made a great bonfire of Bibles and manuscripts in Seville. But with printing a new era had come, requiring more organised methods of suppression. Here, as on other occasions, action did not begin with the Pope or the priests, but commenced when public opinion was most powerfully represented. In  1546 the Faculty of Louvain, by the order of Charles V., prepared a list of the works calculated to overturn the faith. The same prohibitory action had previously been pursued in Venice in 1543, and in France at the instance of the Faculty of Theology in 1544. Thus the Court of Rome was almost last in the field, its first prohibitory Index appearing in 1559.

But this was in accordance with its astute policy. It waited to understand public opinion, and finding it universally in favour of the suppression of all ideas contrary to the dominant ones—in favour, in fact, of religious tyranny, it made the utmost use for its own advantage of this state of the public mind. Thus, among the books the Roman Court indexed were not only the works of Hus, Luther, Calvin, Zwingle, Melanchthon and the rest of the reformers, but all works which defended the temporal authority against the spiritual, or the authority of Councils against that of Popes. This sign of Papal aggressiveness created so much discussion that the matter was brought before the Council of Trent, which in 1502 appointed a commission of inquiry; but the vast number of books struck rendered it impossible to arrive at a decision before the Council closed, and so the question was finally left in the hands of the Pope. On the 24th of March, 1564, Pius IV. published a Bull under, the title "Index of the Council of Trent," which announced ten rules for guidance in the work. This Bull laid heavy penalties on the trade of bookselling, left to bishops and inquisitors complete authority to interdict even books not comprehended in the ten rules, and pronounced excommunicated whoever should possess prohibited works.

The right of examining books was in the hands of the Inquisition until 1586, when Sixtus V. founded the Congregation of the Index, whose duty it became to examine all new works, to say what were entirely forbidden, what were permitted after correction, and to grant permission to learned and pious persons to read works otherwise prohibited.

The eighteenth century came with its immense impetus in favour of free thought, and Rome again bowed to public opinion, Pope Benedict XIV. publishing a Bull, in 1753, in which he blamed the Congregation of the Index for suppressing opinions free in the Church, and ordered them for the future to proceed more gently against Catholic writers. Papal authority has generally displayed more toleration than its supporters. The nuncio at Paris sold so freely permissions to read forbidden books that, in 1739, the Parliament of Paris issued an edict against the practice.

Nowhere was the Index more rigorously carried out than in Spain. In 1539 Charles V. obtained from the Pope a list of works forbidden; this may be considered the real starting point of the Index. The first Index in Spain is said to have been published in 1540, and from 1550 every book published had to bear a certificate stating that it was not on the Index. In 1662 it had become an immense folio. Under Philip II., confiscation of goods and pain of death was decreed against whosoever sold, bought, or had in his possession, a prohibited book. Up to 1640 the authorisation of the civil authority was required to publish the Index, but after this period the Inquisition acted as a sovereign power, and prohibited books without any control.

A list of the works which have been prohibited, even of the more important, is clearly impossible here; but it will serve to show how ineffectual has been this effort of the Church of Rome to hide its eyes and its ears from those pressing questions which follow us all, if I conclude this short account by quoting the names of some authors and of certain works which figure in the Index.

Philosophy has been forbidden in the persons of Machiavelli, Bacon, Grotius, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Malebranche, Bayle, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, the French Encyclopaedists "en masse," Kant, Jeremy Bentham, Comte and Stuart Mill.

History has been ostracised in the persons of Guicciardi one of the earliest of Italian historians, in Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Volney, Sismondi, Hallam, Mignot, Michelet, Quinet, and in Botta, one of the latest of Italian historians.

Among other great writers such names appear as Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Montaigne, Milton, La Fontaine, Pascal, Fenelon, Swift, de Lamennais, and Victor Hugo.

Dante is condemned as an anti-Papal politician, rather than as a poet; but it is for writing "Paradise Lost" that Milton's name appears in the Index. So the "German Bible," the "Provincial Letters," the "Maxims of the Inner Lives of the Saints," the "Essay on the Human Understanding," "Emile," "The Words of a Believer," and the "Positive Philosophy," have been, one after the other, forbidden. "With what result? To cut Roman Catholic society up into two sharp divisions, one, ever increasing, which regards the Inquisition as the best proof that a book is worth reading, while the other, ostrich-like, thinks to find peace and safety by hiding its eyes and ears from the hunter. For the human mind is insatiable as Nimrod, and nothing will stop its career. A decree of the Index is as impotent for it as the command of King Knut to the ocean. All it can do is to emasculate the minds of those who receive it, render them weak and feeble, and an easy prey on the first occasion they take the liberty to pull their head out of the bush and try to run alone.

Nobody who is acquainted with the history of Europe during the last 300 years, but must feel that when the Inquisition established the Index, it did its best to reduce the intellect of Christendom to a poor, blind Samson, ready

"At once both to destroy and be destroyed."

How fruitless have been these efforts to put a gag on the mouth of the heretic or the infidel ! In Roman Catholic countries the man whose works the Index has prohibited more frequently than any others remains master of the popular mind.

When we reflect on the ever-increasing influence of Voltaire, and see that an Index prohibitory or expurgatory is only successful in reducing to silence that reverent thought which is most capable of meetings doubts, it would not be surprising to learn that Rome itself is beginning to question the efficacy of the Index, and that this is the meaning of its present rather spasmodic and perfunctory action.

In the sepulchral chapel of the Medici at Florence is a figure which fitly emblems the condition to which the greatest national intelligence in Europe has been reduced by such a policy as that of the Index. The statue represents a man seated on a tomb; his head loaded with a heavy casque rests on his elbow; he seems wrapt in silent thought, and that silence has now continued for three centuries. Michael Angelo wrote concerning this statue: "To see nothing, to feel nothing, this is the best of all possessions. Do not wake me! Hush!" What can be more touchingly true concerning the state of mind of those countries in which the Index has been most triumphant!

R. HEATH in the "Sunday at Home."

Watchman (Sydney, NSW : 1902 - 1926), Saturday 1 December 1906, page 3