The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index. (Reviews).
Peters, Edward
Peter Godman, The Saint as Censor: Robert Bellarmine between Inquisition and Index.
(Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, 80.) Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 2000. xviii + 503 pp. n.p. ISBN: 90-04-11570-6.
The much understudied, but also much polemicized practice of censorship could not have found a keener historian than Peter Godman, nor at a more auspicious moment. In January, 1998, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger quietly announced the opening of the archives of the Roman Inquisition (founded in 1542), including the archives of the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books (1571-1917), for purposes of scholarly research. In an appendix to his study, From Poliziano to Machiavelli (Princeton, 1998: 303-333) Godman already cited material from the archives for the record of Machiavelli-censorship. The Poliziano study was followed in 2000 by Godman's splendid, detailed, and highly original study of medieval ecclesiastical censorship, The Silent Masters: Latin Literature and its Censors in the High Middle Ages (Princeton), and that study is followed by the present study of Bellarmine's thought and activities as censor. Yet another book by Godman on the subject is announced as forthcoming. As he points out, the archiv es offer plenty of work for many scholars to do for a very long time. Their work may not end the polemics, but it will certainly explain in detail precisely how the Holy Office, the Congregation of the Index, several religious orders, and a series of differently-minded popes worked, sometimes in tandem but more often at loggerheads.
In both The Silent Masters and The Saint as Censor Godman has struck textual and archival gold. The former book adds a chronological dimension to the fine study by Paul Grendler of 1977, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press (Princeton: 63-127). The latter, Godman's ballon d'essai, "considers questions raised by the Inquisition and the Index during their first, formative years from the standpoint of Galileo's judge" (p.xi). It is a spectacular trial balloon. Godman disclaims any intent to revise in favorem the Holy Office, the Congregation of the Index, or Bellarmine's role as censor from the hasty and partisan conclusions of sixteenth-century confessional and various later liberal polemics, but he does mean to explain them on their own terms, which is the historian's proper business (p. xiii). And he does so with a careful reading of new texts and the world of papal Rome at the turn of the seventeenth century that they disclose. The volume is made even more attractive than Godman's masterful scholarsh ip and sparkling prose would ordinarily make it by his inclusion of thirty-one hitherto unedited censurae by Bellarmine (Part II) and ninety items edited from the records of the Holy Office and other sources (Part III); in all, 170 pages of entirely new documentary material, only recently made available, that is meticulously keyed sequentially to and supports impressively and eloquently the 233 pages of Godman's text.
Godman's first chapter deals with the growing papal and curial anxiety over the circulation of heretical and other suspicious books and the utterly disorganized preparations for the Index of 1559, which were characterized by "intimidation... combined with incompetence.... So were engendered the durable progeny of Roman censorship: improvisation and severity, tempered (or compounded) by muddle and mess" (pp. 6, 11), often devoid of both a coherent policy and adequate linguistic skills. The early days of the Congregation had also made little allowance for expertise of any kind. The second chapter deals with the most expert and complex of all censors, Bellarmine, one of whose own works was placed on the Index three years after he was appointed to the Congregation (Chapter 3). Subsequent chapters treat the case of the writings of James VI & I and "The Mind of the Censor." Godman's conclusion makes painfully clear that, "at the centre of the bastion of orthodoxy in the Counter-Reformation, there was little coheren ce and less coordination of policy on censorship. Rival instances of control pursued their own aims, often in ignorance of one another. The image is not the traditional one of authoritarianism -- planned and effective -- but of improvisation -- random, slapdash, and (judged in terms of its own objectives) counterproductive. For the model of the proro-totalitarian enterprise directed against the enemies of the Church is substituted the analogy of a civil war conducted between competing organisms of surveillance within the Roman Curia" (p. 228). This is hardly the stuff of polemic, but it is emphatically the stuff of history.
