CENSORSHIP
520
CENSORSHIP
course of time the application was modified according
to conditions and circumstances. The censorship of
books, as well as the press-laws of states or of church-
communities other than Catholic, can here be men-
tioned for the sake of comparison only.
Historical Development. — As soon as there were books or writings of any kind the spreading or read- ing of which was highly detrimental to the public, competent authorities were obliged to take measures against them. Long before the Christian Era, there- fore, we find that heathens as well as Jews had fixed regulations for the suppression of dangerous books and the prevention of corruptive reading. From nu- merous illustrations quoted by Zaccaria (pp. 248-256) it is evident that most of the writings condemned or destroyed offended against religion and morals. Everywhere the books declared dangerous were cast into the fire — the simplest and most natural execu- tion of censorship. When at Ephesus, in consequence of St. Paul's preaching, the heathens were converted, they raised before the eyes of the Apostle of the Gen- tiles a pile in order to burn their numerous supersti- tious books (Acts, xix, 19). No doubt, the new Christians moved by grace and the Apostolic word did so of their own accord; but all the more was their action approved of by St. Paul himself, and it is re- corded as an example worthy of imitation by the author of the Acts of the Apostles. From this burn- ing of books at Ephesus, as well as from the Second Epistle of St. Peter and the Epistles of St. Paul to Timothy and Titus, it clearly appears how the Apos- tles judged of pernicious books and how they wished them to be treated. In concert with the Apostle of the Gentiles (Tit., iii, 10), St. John most emphatically exhorted the first Christians to slum heretical teach- ers. To the disciples of the Apostles it was a matter of course to connect this warning not only with the persons of such teachers, but first and foremost with their doctrine and their writings. Thus, in the first Christian centuries, the so-called apocrypha (q. v.), above all other books, appeared to the faithful as libri non recipiendi, i. e. books which were on no ac- count to be used. The establishment of the Canon of Holy Writ was, therefore, at once an elimination and a censuring of the apocrypha. The two documents re- ferring to this, both from the latter half of the second century, are the Muratorian Canon (q. v.) and the Apostolic Constitutions (see Hauler, Didascalia? Apos- tolorum fragmenta, Leipzig, 1900, p. 4).
When the Church, after the era of persecution, was given greater liberty, a censorship of books appears more plainly. The First (Ecumenical Council of Ni- csea (325) condemned not only Arius personally, but also bis book entitled "Thalia"; Constantine com- manded that the writings of Arius and of his friends should everywhere be delivered up to be burned; con- cealment of them was forbidden under pain of death. In the following centuries, when and wherever her- esies sprang up, the popes of Rome and the oecumen- ical councils, as well as the particular synods of Af- rica, Asia, and Europe, condemned, conjointly with tin' false doctrines, the bunks and writings containing them. (Cf. Hilgers, Die BUcherverbote in Papst- briefen.) The latter were ordered to be destroyed by fire, and illegal preservation of them was treated as a heinous criminal offence. The authorities intended
to make (lie reading of such writings simply impos- sible. Pope St. innocent I , enumerating in a letter of 4ii") a number of apocrypha] writings, rejects them as non solum repudianda sed eiiam damnanda. It is the first attempt at a catalogue of forbidden books. The so- called "Decretum Gelasianum" contains many more, not only apocryphal, but also heretical, or otherwise objectionable, writings. It is not without reason thai this catalogue has been called the firs! "Roman In dex" of forbidden books. The books in question were not unfrequently examined in the public sessions
of councils. There are also cases in which the popes
themselves (e. g. Innocent I and Gregory the Great)
read and examined a book sent to them and finally
condemned it. As regards the kinds and contents of
writings forbidden in ancient times, we find among
them, besides apocryphal and heretical books, forged
acts of martyrs, spurious penitentials, and supersti-
tious writings. In ancient times information about
objectionable books was sent both from East and
West to Rome, that they might be examined and, if
necessary, forbidden by the Apostolic See. Thus at
the beginning of the Middle Ages there existed, in all
its essentials, though without specified clauses, a pro-
hibition and censorship of books throughout the
Catholic Church. Popes as well as councils, bishops
no less than synods, considered it then, as always,
their most sacred duty to safeguard the purity of
faith and to protect the souls of the faithful by con-
demning and forbidding any dangerous book.
During the Middle Ages prohibitions of books were far more numerous than in ancient times. Their his- tory is chiefly connected with the names of medieval heretics like Berengarius of Tours, Abelard, John Wyclif, and John Hus. However, especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there were also issued prohibitions of various kinds of superstitious writings, among them the Talmud and other Jewish books. In this period, also, the first decrees about the reading of translations of the Bible were called forth by the abuses of the Waldenses and Albigenses. What these decrees (e. g. of the svnods of Toulouse in 1229, Tarragona in 1234, Oxford in 1408) aimed at was the restriction of Bible-reading in the vernacular. A general prohibition was never in existence. Dur- ing the earlier Christian centuries, and till late hi the Middle Ages, there existed, as compared with our times, but few books. As they were multiplied by handwriting only, the number of copies to be met with was very small ; moreover none but the learned could make use of them. For these reasons preven- tive censorship was not necessary until, after the in- vention of the printing press and the subsequent large circulation of printed works, the harm done by perni- cious books increased in a manner hitherto unknown. Nevertheless, a previous examination of books was not altogether unknown in more remote times, and in the Middle Ages it was even prescribed in some places. St. Ambrose sent several of his writings to Sabinus, Bishop of Piacenza, that he might pass his opinion on them and correct them before they were published (P. L., XVI, 1151). In the fifth century Gennadius sent his work "De Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis" to Pope Gelasius for the same purpose. The chronicler, Godfrey of Viterbo, applied expressly to Urban III (1186) for examination and approbation of his "Pan- theon" which he dedicated to the pope. These are, of course, examples of a merely private preventive censorship. Yet in the most flourishing period of the Middle Ages we find censorship of that kind estab- lished by law in the very centres of scientific life. According to the papal statutes of the University of Paris (1342), the professors were not allowed to hand any lecture over to the booksellers before it had been examined by the chancellor and the professors of
theology. (In the pn ding century the booksellers
were bound by oath to offer for sale only genuine and "corrected copies.) A similar censorship occurs in the fourteenth century at all universities.
Down to more recent times forbidden hooks were got out of the way in the simplest manner, by de- stroying or confiscating them. It is worthy of note that «hen the Roman synod of 745 ordered the burn- ing of the superstitious writings sent by St. Boniface to the Vpostolic See, Pope Zachary ordered then, to
be preserved in the pontifical archives (Mansi, XII, 380). Again, while the provincial synod of Paris (1210) strictly forbade certain works of Aristotle as
