On the Index of Forbidden Books
An Unrecommended Reading List
Few things are more anathema to the American mind (in principle if not practice) than the idea of banning books. It’s an assault on one of the country’s foundational notions—freedom of speech—and brings to mind images of frenzied mobs armed with torches and pitchforks, or totalitarian regimes across the Atlantic, or plotlines in dystopian science fiction. Book bans are about as un-American as it gets.1
And yet, while the Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal, it doesn’t say the same for books.
As the many parents who read, with righteous indignation, the sexually obscene contents of their children’s public school library bookshelves can attest, some books—at least in certain contexts and for certain audiences—should be banned.
As Americans, the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights ensures we can say whatever we want. But as Christians, the Second of the Ten Commandments states unequivocally otherwise.2
When push comes to shove, the libertarian who daydreams about “free speech absolutism” will invariably be rudely awakened by the reality that both the left and the right side of the political aisle have their own laundry lists of books they would happily blacklist. In the end it comes down to a matter of degree.
All the books shouldn’t be banned, lest we devolve into society of illiterate, intellectually bankrupt midwits.
No books shouldn’t be banned, lest we wantonly warp the minds of the youth and promote a trashy and decadent culture.
So the question we’re left with is this: which books get thrown in the bonfire, and which get placed on the bookshelf?
In the 16th century, a hundred years after the sea-change enacted by the invention of the printing press—and decades after the start of the Protestant Revolution that was largely enabled by it—the Catholic Church decided to answer that question.
The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was implemented to protect both clergy and laity from books which were deemed harmful to faith and morals. Perhaps if it was presented as just that—a helpful guide on which books to avoid for the sake of one’s own spiritual health—the list wouldn’t have gained such a notorious reputation. But with its ominous-sounding title of INDEX OF FORBIDDEN BOOKS—and the fact that the printing or reading of said books were acts declared punishable by penalty of EXCOMMUNICATION (another scary word)—the INDEX has earned a spot alongside the INQUISITION and the CRUSADES as the stuff of what secular historian nightmares are made of.
In reality, the implementation of the Index wasn’t some arbitrary power flex by the Catholic Church for its own sake, but rather a genuine attempt by ecclesiastical authorities to shepherd the flock away from danger. Being a matter of prudential judgement, however—based on periods in time and not eternally binding laws part of the deposit of faith—the contents of the Index changed over the years, with various texts being added and removed, subject to changing circumstances and partial censorship, until eventually the Index was abolished altogether in 1966.
Regardless of one’s personal opinion on the Index, it remains a fascinating part of church history. As an avid reader and faithful Catholic, I’m personally very interested to see what books made it onto the list over the years, and in the following section of this article I’ll give some brief thoughts on various authors whose inclusion stood out to me (after a cursory glance at the Index’s Wikipedia page).3
This should not be seen as thumbing my nose at the authority of Church or dancing on the grave of the Index. I respect the Church’s decision to implement the Index, and if it were to make a comeback, I would fully submit to canon law and avoid these books at all cost. I also take the fact that these books have been deemed by the Church as potentially dangerous very seriously, and do not research them lightly. The end of the Index does not make these books retroactively “good” or mean that the Church has changed its mind in regards to their value—they should still be read, if at all, with caution.
As stated in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Notification regarding the abolition of the Index of books:
[T]he Index remains morally binding, in light of the demands of natural law, in so far as it admonishes the conscience of Christians to be on guard for those writings that can endanger faith and morals. But, at the same time, it no longer has the force of ecclesiastical law with the attached censure.
In this matter, the Church trusts in the mature conscience of the faithful, and especially the authors, the Catholic publishers, and those concerned with the education of the youth.
So while I respect the Pope Paul IV’s decision to establish the Index, I also respect Pope Paul VI’s decision to abolish it.4
A happy alternative to the Index was conceived in the form of the nihil obstat and imprimatur—seals of approval by local ecclesiastical authorities that declare a book free from doctrinal error and grant it permission to be printed.
For easier reading, I’ve subdivided notable entries into the broader categories of Faith, Science, History, Philosophy, Literature, and (glaring) Omissions.
FAITH
Martin Luther & John Calvin - the inclusion of these two pillars of Protestantism, (along with the rest of the reformers) should go without saying, considering the mass proliferation of their various printed heresies was in many ways the impetus for the Index’s institution in the first place
Maimonides - the Rabbinic version of Thomas Aquinas5—just as Aquinas synthesized the philosophy of Aristotle with Catholic thought, so too did Maimonides apply Aristotelianism to Jewish teachings; his work was banned alongside a plethora of other Hebraic works; ironically, Aquinas read and was influenced by the writings of Maimonides in the time before the Index, but perhaps had Aquinas lived when it was banned he would have been granted a scholarly dispensation from his Bishop to read it
SCIENCE
Copernicus & Galileo - whereas Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was banned due to concerns that its heliocentric thesis was at odds with literalist interpretations of Sacred Scripture, Galileo’s proscription had more to due with personal politics6, and while the works of both authors were eventually removed from the Index, their initial inclusion dealt the Church a reputational blow in regards to science from which it’s never fully recovered7
Francis Bacon - the proto-prophet of the scientism and materialism that has infected so much of modern thought; his popularization of skepticism and anti-supernaturalism shows that the Index could be quite prescient at highlighting offenders of the faith, if ultimately unsuccessful in silencing them8
HISTORY
Daniel Defoe - centuries before Willem Dafoe committed silver screen blasphemy in The Last Temptation of Christ—an adaptation of the novel that was itself added (understandably so) to the Index—Daniel Defoe’s anti-Catholic book The Political History of the Devil was (also understandably) banned by the Church9
Edward Gibbon - this critic of Christianity penned the opus The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, considered by many to be the definitive (or at least the most widely read) history of Rome; with one of its theses being that the rise of Christianity was to blame for the fall of Rome, it’s apparent that Gibbon didn’t get Saint Augustine’s memo in The City of God, which had already laid waste to that erroneous assertion a millennium-and-a-half earlier
PHILOSOPHY
Machiavelli & Casanova10 - men whose notorious reputations turned their names into bywords for scheming and womanizing, respectively; it’s telling that the very traits for which the Church condemned them have made them iconic in the eyes of the world
Blaise Pascal - while his reputation has undergone a bit of a rehabilitation in the centuries since his death—especially by Catholic apologists fond of his helpful wager—Pascal’s unorthodox musings and Jansenist leanings led his posthumous work Pensées being blacklisted by the Church
Descartes (Meditations); Rousseau (The Social Contract); Spinoza (Theologico-Political Treatise); Kant (Critique of Pure Reason); Diderot (Encyclopédie); Locke (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding); Voltaire (various works); Hume (complete works) - a rogues gallery of Enlightenment thinkers, all of whom espoused various forms of skepticism, secularism, liberalism, progressivism, deism, and other -isms altogether anathema to the Catholic worldview
John Stuart Mill - even economics didn’t escape the purview of the Index; the farrago of semi-socialism and proto-feminism presented by Mill stood in stark contrast to Catholic social teaching and the theory of subsidiarity espoused by Pope Leo XIII in Rerum novarum
Jean Paul Sartre - one of the premier atheists of the 20th century whose existentialist philosophy tweaked Aleister Crowley’s infamous dictum “do what thou wilt” into the even more pernicious “be what thou wilt”, making him the mad prophet of modernity’s current identity crisis
LITERATURE
Alexandre Dumas - everyone knows The Three Musketeers as stock characters of swashbuckling adventure, but as a personal anecdote I was somewhat shocked at the lewd sexuality and anti-clerical characterizations prevalent in the audiobook version of the classic novel; granted, this was a partial dramatization by a full cast of voice actors and not a verbatim reading of the prose, but if the adaptation was anywhere close to accurate to the source material I can see why it (along with the rest of Dumas’ bibliography) made the list
Victor Hugo - the Index showed a general aversion toward what it deemed “love stories” or “romances,” presumably for the nascent genre’s inherent hints of indecency; thus the fate of Alexandre Dumas was shared by his fellow Frenchmen Honoré de Balzac and Victor Hugo, though the pro-Revolution political leanings of the latter no doubt played a part in the temporary banning of Les Misérables
Gustave Flaubert - getting closer toward turn of the century, romance writers like Flaubert pushed the boundaries of acceptable innuendo even further, becoming more “realistic” in the depiction of sins only hinted at previously; whereas John Milton wrote beautifully but with bad theology11 (Paradise Lost was also added to the Index), Flaubert wrote beautifully but with bad morals (if not in its author than certainly in its characters) not the least of these being the adulterous Madame Bovary, whose extramarital affairs scandalized both secular and religious audiences alike
OMISSIONS
James Joyce & D.H. Lawrence - omission is by no means endorsement; given the highly-publicized obscenity trials, in the latter days of the Index’s existence, against both Ulysses in the United States and Lady Chatterley's Lover in the United Kingdom, an official ban by ecclesial authorities might have felt somewhat redundant12
Friedrich Nietzsche & Sigmund Freud - if anyone deserved a place on the Index, surely it was the prophet of nihilism and forefather of the sexual revolution; but it seems even the institutional bureaucracy of the Roman Catholic Church was no match for the relentless tidal wave of modern madness13 of which these two Germans played no small part
Karl Marx - the most glaring omission of all, as communism (alongside freemasonry) has been and continues to be a perennial enemy of the Church; The Communist Manifesto’s lack of inclusion on the list has been explained as the result of the Church’s purview being more concerned with religious heresy than political novelty, but the demonic history of Marxism has proven it to be an ideology far more spiritual (in the darkest sense of the term) than material
Some may accuse Pope Paul VI of compromising with the culture by abolishing the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, but in hindsight I think it was a prophetic necessity: because the culture was shifting so rapidly by the midpoint of the twentieth century, the faithful desperately needed a means to fight back against the avalanche of bad ideas, without the intellectual constraint the Index imposed.
How can a Catholic apologist properly refute the errors of Martin Luther if he’s banned from reading the Ninety-five Theses? How can a Catholic English professor point her students toward the good, true, and beautiful found in works of great literature if she’s not allowed to read them, despite all their flaws?
Whether we like it or not, Pandora’s box has long since been opened, and at a time when access to information is unlimited, Catholics of goodwill need to be informed—with prudence, prayer, and proper discernment14—of opposing viewpoints and perspectives.
Look for no further proof of this than the disastrous rise of the so-called “new atheists” in the early 2000s—men whose arguments, specious and silly as they were, caught many Catholics off guard at the time. Surely if the Index were still around in 2005, the works of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens would have made the list—and added to fuel to their accusations that the Church is some backward institution that can’t stand up to intellectual scrutiny.
This applies to the realm of fiction as well. Some Catholics may argue we should avoid secular media altogether due to its immorality—and I certainly agree that if the reading of a novel or watching of a movie acts as a near occasion of sin then one should avoid them all cost! But not all vocations are the same, and what may be a temptation to one can be fruitful for another.
Part of my personal return to the Church was largely thanks to the work of Bishop Barron and his Word on Fire apostolate. Seeing a Catholic priest speak openly and honestly about media I loved, using movies like Fargo and TV shows like The Sopranos as launching pads to preach the Gospel—meeting me where I was—planted seeds in my mind that would eventually bring me back to the faith I had long since abandoned for sterile agnosticism.
All that being said, there surely are some works of art are just so vile and repugnant that they contain nothing of redeeming value. Each individual’s mileage may vary on this point, but for me examples include hideous and pornographic works like those of the Marquis de Sade (despite The 120 Days of Sodom’s endorsement by Penguin Classics) or intrinsically blasphemous books like Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ.
But these things exist whether we like them or not, and as Christians we must boldly proclaim Christ in the culture, depraved as that culture oftentimes is.
So should an elderly church lady read Game of Thrones? Probably not! But whatever you read, “or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
They are Scriptural, however
Even in so-called secular America, laws against blasphemy were enforced as recently as 1928
Given that the number of books added to the Index over the centuries numbers somewhere in the several thousands (and a complete list is surprisingly hard to come by) it would be beyond the scope of this article to provide commentary on each and every entry
An act which, it should be noted, was made primarily for logistical reasons, as the Holy Office found itself unable to keep up with the rapidly accelerating number of books being printed in the 20th century
The Muslim version is Averroes, whose writings were condemned by the Church (and critiqued by Aquinas) in the time before the Index
Ironically, St. Robert Bellarmine, one of Galileo’s major critics during the affair, almost found himself on the list after his Disputationes raised the ire of Pope Sixtus V for its theory on papal power
Surprisingly, Charles Darwin was never placed on the Index; perhaps the church didn’t want another Galileo affair on its hands
Those in search of a better Bacon can perhaps turn to Catholic priest and scientist Roger Bacon
The work for which history remembers him, Robinson Crusoe, was never banned, and rightfully so, as despite its Presbyterian errors it’s a wonderfully Christian work
No, Giacomo Casanova’s scandalous memoir Histoire de ma vie is by no means a work of philosophy in the academic sense (though perhaps an argument could be made for it espousing a philosophy of fornication, with Casanova as a kind of Enlightenment-era pickup artist) but I couldn’t resist grouping him together with The Prince’s Niccolò Machiavelli
It’s unclear if the magnum opus of Milton’s Catholic counterpart, Dante Alighieri, was ever officially on the list (it wouldn’t be surprising given that he had the audacity to place certain popes in hell in The Inferno!) but the Spanish version of The Divine Comedy did have certain passages redacted by Inquisition; Dante’s treatise De Monarchia most definitely was on the Index though
Somewhat controversial Catholic novelist Graham Greene never officially made it on the Index, but he was publicly censured by the Vatican at one point
At least until the Second Vatican Council, which took modernity head-on in the form of the pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes
As Elrond says of Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring: "It is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the Enemy, for good or for ill."