God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (16 page)

For a long time, the archives just sat there. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII agreed to open the Archivio Segreto to a few outside scholars, most notably the historian Ludwig von Pastor. The Inquisition archives, however, would remain sealed for another century. In 1979, Carlo Ginzburg sent his letter to Pope John Paul II, and the Vatican’s resistance began to erode. By all accounts, the man who argued most forcefully that the archives should be opened, and eventually saw to it that they were, was Cardinal Ratzinger. In the five years after Ratzinger became pope, more attention was lavished on his sartorial choices—the designer sunglasses, the red Prada shoes—than on his scholarly credentials.
Ratzinger is not a liberal, but he is indeed an intellectual, and the values of the academy exercise a gravitational pull on some important part of him.
Even before the Inquisition archives were officially opened, in 1998, Ratzinger had begun allowing a handful of scholars to burrow in the stacks, under careful supervision.

One of those scholars was Peter Godman, a New Zealand–born historian who now teaches at the University of Rome, and who for many years divided his time between archival work at the Vatican and a professorship at the University of Tübingen. Tübingen is also the home of the liberal theologian Hans Küng, who for fifty years has played mongoose to the Vatican’s cobra (or, depending on one’s perspective, the other way around). Küng and Ratzinger were once like-minded colleagues in their role as
periti,
or advisors, at the Second Vatican Council, in the 1960s. In those early days, Küng in fact gave Ratzinger a job at Tübingen. Personally and theologically, the two men drifted apart. In 1979, Ratzinger played a role in stripping Küng of his
missio canonica
—his permission to teach as a Catholic theologian.

Peter Godman looks boyish for his fifty-five years. He has been haunting the Inquisition archives for a decade and a half. He knows the various sixteenth-century secretaries by their handwriting and speaks about the cardinal-inquisitors in the present tense, as if they were about to walk down the hall. He has a particular feeling for Giulio Antonio Santori, the inquisitor general who oversaw the condemnation of Giordano Bruno. Sometimes he uses the word “we” to refer to the blended world of historical Inquisition and modern archive, a locution that I am not sure he notices.

One afternoon, he led the way up the spiral staircase in the reading room and into the tight furrows among the shelves.
“You never know what you’re going to find,” he explained. “In this manuscript here”—he pulled down a volume—“I found the deliberations regarding the censorship of Descartes.” (His
Meditations
and his
Metaphysics,
along with some other works, were placed on the Index in 1663.) Godman moved along and pulled down another volume. “In this one are the preparations for the Syllabus of Errors”—a compendium of theologically noxious ideas, issued by Pope Pius IX in 1864. “The collections were formed arbitrarily—there was a system which was invariably chaotic. The system can be geographic. It can be thematic. Here you have things about animal magnetism and hypnotism.” His fingers lightly traced the spines.

Godman drew another register off the shelf. “Here’s an English case. Grately. Edmund Grately. We had him in prison here, upstairs. He claimed he was an ecumenical, trying to mediate between Roman and Anglican. They thought, of course, that he was a heretic. They found him with a considerable amount of money, and weapons, and also these bizarre writings in English. The inquisitors had the writings translated into Latin—very unusual for them to take the time to do that. Grately, it turned out, was a spy for Elizabeth I. And here—look—here is the sentence: life imprisonment. In practice, that typically means three years. The sentence is written out in the hand of Cardinal Santori—the grand inquisitor himself.”

We moved on a little farther. Godman opened one last register, from 1574. He said, “This case is of great interest because the accused—his name was Filippo Mocenigo—was an archbishop, in Cyprus. He was an important figure. What he didn’t know was that he’d been on trial for heresy for thirteen years—he had been denounced for remarks he had made about free will while on the journey to the Council of Trent.” This was the great reforming council that ushered in the Counter-Reformation and set Catholicism’s course for centuries. “Nor did he know,” said Godman, “that it would last for another nine. The proceedings go on and on. One of the main charges against him was that he wrote a book that no one’s ever heard of, because there was only one copy—and it’s here. It’s a work of simple and very stupid piety, written in Italian and intended for Mocenigo’s sister, who was a nun. It was never published. Two or three inquisitors are on the job.” They eventually brought Mocenigo in for questioning: What do you mean by this? What do you mean by that? At one place in the interrogation transcript is Mocenigo’s plaintive assessment: “It seems to me that
laboramus in equivocis”
—that is, “we labor in equivocation.”
And the archbishop’s fate? “In the end,” said Godman, “he was found innocent. But the book itself was condemned. Which is why it’s here. The only copy.”

The Gutenberg Challenge

The words “only copy” have a whiff of the medieval about them, a scent of the candle. They recall a time when every book was a unique object made with pen and ink and parchment, in a monastic scriptorium or the secretaries’ office at a university—and when every additional copy was indeed literally copied, letter by letter, laboriously and by hand. The Inquisition archive itself has a medieval flavor, in part because up until the modern period, all the record-keeping had to be done by notaries, who were priests. Their handwriting is beautiful to look at, and has aged wonderfully on the page.

But the medieval flavor is misleading. If the Roman Inquisition is about anything, it’s about the revolution ushered in by the printing press. The Medieval Inquisition and, in its earliest stages, the Spanish Inquisition were directed chiefly at people—that is, at the physical corpora of sentient beings. They were directed at heretics who inhabited a mainly oral culture. Word of mouth can be a powerful force, especially when growing networks of communication allow ideas to spread from valley to valley and port to port, but the personal physicality involved kept the inquisitorial focus on actual people. In Spain, of course, that focus was even more intense. Certain
classes
of people were the target—not just what they believed or the ideas they spread but who they were: Jews and Moors. The Roman Inquisition went after people too; it put a good number of them to death. But it was just as much about the published word.

Books in the codex form we know them had existed for a millennium, but most people couldn’t read, and in any case the making of books was a time-consuming process. Books were also expensive. Someone who had a “big” library had at most a few hundred volumes. Petrarch, who first applied the term “Dark Ages” to what we now think of as the medieval era, was one of the great book collectors of his age. He was in his library when he died, in 1374. Petrarch donated his books to the Republic of Venice—a collection numbering only about two hundred volumes.
Seventy years later, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, began distributing his library to Oxford; the gift, which became the basis for the university library, numbered only about three hundred volumes.
If heresy was thought of as a contagion, the most worrisome means of transmission was certainly not books.

The printing press, developed in the mid fifteenth century, changed all that—very suddenly, and by an order of magnitude. To give some idea, here’s a single example from very early in the history of printing: it concerns the Ripoli Press, an establishment in Florence that had added a printing press to its traditional scriptorium. The press was operated by nuns. Albinia de la Mare, one of the foremost authorities on the book trade, did the math: “In 1483, the Ripoli Press charged three florins per
quinterno
for setting up and printing Ficino’s translation of Plato’s
Dialogues.
A scribe might have charged one florin per
quinterno
for duplicating the same work. The Ripoli Press produced 1,025 copies; the scribe would have turned out one.”
(A
quinterno
was a unit of paper that, if folded and printed on both sides, yielded sixteen book-sized pages.) It is estimated that scribes copied out some 2.7 million books over the course of the entire fourteenth century; printers produced more than that number in the single year 1550.
Thanks to the revolution in typography wrought by the printer and publisher Aldus Manutius, more words could be squeezed onto smaller pages and yet still be read without difficulty; books became easier to carry (and easier to conceal).
Any town or city of any ambition had a printing shop. The printer’s establishment—which also served as publisher, marketer, and defender of copyright—was as central to the civic space as churches and markets.

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.