In which the pond takes an elaborate detour through the Index before landing with the bromancer in Afghanistan and taking in the standard Tuesday groaning ...

 

Before getting on to the reptiles, the pond would like to recommend another article, this time a review in the NYRB by Erin Maglaque of a book by Robin Vose, The Index of Prohibited Books: Four Centuries of Struggle Over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God. 

The lede provided the temptation: Robin Vose’s new history of the Index of Prohibited Books shows how Catholic censorship was, despite its totalizing ambitions, often incoherent and contradictory. (Sorry, possible paywall).

Then came the great temptation, currently afflicting the Ron DeSanctus's of the world:

In the beginning was the Word. The trouble came afterward. How to teach the Word of God, how to translate Scripture, how to gloss and explain it: these were problems of grave concern to premodern Christians, and getting them wrong was beyond life-and-death. A bad reader’s soul was endangered for eternity. Angels didn’t have this problem. As Dante put it, angels “make themselves…completely known to each other,” communicating directly from divine spirit to divine spirit: a kind of transcendental laser beamed between celestial heads. But humans misunderstand; we grope for meaning; we struggle to be understood. From the beginning of the Catholic Church as an institution, churchmen sought to control the power of words—to shape good readers and eliminate bad ones. This meant censorship.

Oh the many and varied ways of the temptations:

At first, Catholic censorship was a relatively straightforward matter: all Protestant books, and all Protestant authors, were banned. So were books printed anonymously or without specifying a printer, date, or place of publication: these were too suspicious. It didn’t actually matter what books said; there were already too many for the Roman censors and theologians even to skim them all. By the end of the sixteenth century censors were simply copying titles from the Frankfurt Book Fair catalog into the Index. Soon, most regions—and many individual cities—had created their own indexes of prohibited books. They each had their own local persecutory flavor: in Spain, for example, the inquisitor general banned Islamic and Jewish writings, especially the Talmud. Local inquisitors in Mexico City banned books that inquisitors in Madrid found permissible...

Then the temptations widened ...

As the initial upheavals of the Reformation settled, the congregation widened the scope of its censorship. The Index transformed from a catalog of heresies (in Oxford, librarians used the Index as a collector’s guide to the best Protestant scholarship) into an attempt to censor everything everywhere across the early modern Catholic world: literature, politics, art, history, and science. All came under the purview of the overworked and understaffed censors. In 1575 one Vatican official wrote in a letter that he wished “that for many years nothing be printed” so that he could catch up. Crushed under the tide of new books, censorship could be scattershot: books were censored when they happened to be translated into Italian or Spanish or French, when they happened to be sent to the congregation by an offended reader in Brussels or Paris or Lima, or when the censors happened to have a spare moment to look over the title page. Many books escaped unnoticed: the censors missed the conniving Moll Flanders, the outrageous exploits of Fanny Hill.
The church did, famously, take an interest in the new experimental science. In The Index of Prohibited Books, Vose traces the gradual hardening of scientific censorship across the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, even as Rome itself became a home for scientific experiment. Copernicus was not placed on the Index until 1616, more than seventy years after he died. Galileo was both a victim of these more stringent attitudes and an example of the church’s leniency toward elite thinkers. (He was placed under house arrest, not burned at the stake like a common witch.) Throughout, Vose—a professor of history at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada—laments the unguessable damage done to the history of human thought by Catholic censorship, while also showing that the church’s theologian-inquisitors sometimes took more moderate, scholarly approaches to the suppression of knowledge.
Censors concerned themselves with all genres of reimagining the world, from science and political ballads to vernacular literature. Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s novel The Year 2440: A Dream If There Ever Was One (1771) tells of a Parisian who wakes up in a future society ruled by a philosopher-king, with no priests or monks, no slavery, no pastry chefs, no dance teachers, and no tobacco. (There is no accounting for utopian tastes.) It was, of course, included on the Index; Charles III of Spain was said to have burned a copy with his own hands. Other such fantasies, from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Tommaso Campanella’s Città del sole (written in 1602 and printed in 1623)—which imagined a city whose walls were painted with all of human knowledge in images that “render learning easy” to its citizens—were banned too.

The promise of learning without mediation was as utopian as free love. Early modern works of transgressive fiction, from Ariosto’s Satire (1534) to Richardson’s Pamela (1740), often used sex to imagine new ways of living, and they too fell afoul of the censors. Sometimes the censors’ choices are not easily explained. Several of Nicolas Restif’s erotic works were banned, but Le pied de Fanchette (1769)—a kind of extended foot-fetish fantasy in which a pretty orphan girl with shapely feet gets into all kinds of sexy scrapes—was not. Narrative literature, chivalrous romance, the erotic stories of Boccaccio: all were seized by authorities from ordinary Italians’ homes and stored in inquisitorial archives until they could be appropriately emended. The Florentines were so reluctant to trespass against their beloved Boccaccio that it took them until 1573 to come up with a copy that satisfied the censors: monks who smuggled girls into their cells were replaced with students sneaking girls into dormitories.

Pamela!? As dull and tedious a book as ever written ...

The pond could go on quoting all day, it's a ripper read, and likely the source book is too, but the obvious question comes. Why does the pond ban some reptiles and not others?

It's easy. The pond can afford to be fickle. Anyone wanting to stew in the cesspool of a Dame Slap column can do it at their leisure, but sometimes the pond prefers the charms of a decent groaning ...

There was Dame Slap this day acting as both reporter - often with a sidekick to help with the dirty work - and commentator, and the pond could feel nothing but contempt ...

The pond might avert eyes, but it doesn't insist on plucking or gouging out the eyes of others, in classic biblical style  ...

The closing couple of pars ...

More difficult to account for is the toll of self-censorship: the art and literature that was never made, the religious and scientific ideas that remained unwritten—unthought, even—because of the existence of the Index, the congregation, and the Inquisition tribunal. This counterfactual European history is a history of the obscure, the impracticable, the unrecorded. It is so elusive as to remain nearly unimaginable. But for every erotic novella or psalm-inscribed jewel on the Index, a crack appears in the edifice of our historical imagination. Some light gets in. The censor is crowded out by the apparition of what might have been.
In 1574 inquisitors came to the door of Domenico, a cobbler in Spilimbergo, in the far northeast of Italy. They seized and destroyed the only three books that Domenico owned: Orlando Furioso, the Decameron, and the New Testament. Domenico responded: “I swear I shall never read again.” This was the tragedy of censorship, an unbearable narrowing of the spiritual and cultural lives of ordinary people. But I also hear in Domenico’s words his own intolerance: an intolerance of suppression, a disobedience of power. Domenico would not be told how to read. He would rather not read at all.

Some days the pond would rather not read at all, and when it comes to the bouffant one blathering about the Voice in classic reptile doomsaying style ...

... the pond is inclined to pass. There's only so many times the pond can be bothered with the Catholic Boys' Daily, and the ritual cant of "creeping uncertainty".

How much religion has to answer for, whether it's the role of the Russian patriarch in the war on Ukraine, easily bought and steady in support of a sociopath, or the rise in suicides of women and girls in Afghanistan ... (the pond woke up to the news from the BBC).

Speaking of Afghanistan, and before doing its routine duty with a Tuesday groaning, the pond couldn't help but note that the bromancer was out and about and offering excuses ...

Ah the wonders of moral equivalence and moral relativism, as the bromancer wonders if his crack squad is going to be up to his war with China by Xmas.

As to suffering in Afghanistan and the comprehensive mess that was left behind? Don't you worry about any of that, it's the bromancer's suffering that counts and should be attended to ...

Around this time the pond is usually inclined to do a trawl through the past, and that's how the pond landed on Jeff Sparrow's One pundit's deadly war: from Afghanistan to Vietnam ...

Oh that's so dispiriting, please sir, could the pond have another ...

There's more, but the pond couldn't resist adding this tidbit ...

...it’s less that Sheridan’s changed his mind, and more that he’s changed his history, brazenly ignoring the very arguments with which he once bludgeoned everyone else.

Politicians, by and large, do not have a good reputation. But for all their faults, they are mostly held accountable for what they say and what they do. Think of Julia Gillard and how her feet have been held to the fire for her changing statements on the carbon tax.

But what about journalists?

Well, being a pundit evidently means that you never have to say you are sorry. You don’t have to stand for election; you don’t have to justify your positions. Instead, you have a bully pulpit from which you can agitate for a particular policy – and, then, when everything you say turns out to be nonsense, you can tip-toe away without even the pretence of a mea culpa.

And so here we are again, with the bromancer blaming everybody else, but never ever beginning even the pretence of a mea culpa ...

Some days the gorge rises in the pond, and the feeling of contempt for the reptiles, individually and collectively, is palpable. A correspondent has already noted this story, Poland: hundreds of thousands march against rightwing populist government, but the pond was waiting for the chance to run it cheek by jowl with an actual bromancer story. Just a reminder he's always at it, comprehensively getting it wrong and never a mea culpa in sight ...

That's why it was a relief to turn to Dame Groan and a standard groaning. All she was doing was playing Jeremiah (or perhaps the bullfrog), and doing her usual jeremiad, as expected of a "weeping prophet" ... or perhaps to mix metaphors and references, she's doing a John O'Brien and channeling Hanrahan as she announces yet again we'll all be rooned ... (won't someone keep Santos shares on the surge?)

Here there was no need to worry about Dame Groan's groaning sounding remarkably like nattering "Ned", with the pair both inclined to run about in Chicken Little circles announcing the sky was falling in ...

The pond could instead opt for a cartoon-led recovery ...

Back to the suffering of Dame Groan, and her deep anxiety ...

Ah, the usual talk of coal-fired planets and so on and so forth.

As for the planet? Well for that the pond must turn to the infallible Pope for an update ...

Oh sheesh, we are doomed, though Dame Groan can be relied upon never to mention items outside her narrow purview ...

Difficult economic times? How about difficult planetary times? Is it as tough for Dame Groan as for those living in Ukraine, Afghanistan and sundry other places?

Never mind, instead of censoring the reptiles, the pond will turn to the immortal Rowe for solace and a closing thought ...