That for each thing we think, we are accountable, responsible, and damnable to a higher power.

And though these higher powers and these hells and these sins themselves do not actually exist, the religions that they belong to do.

And so today I want to talk about forbidden thoughts.

It's a crazy concept.

One that many of us in today's day and age with the internet, the ease of accessibility to information, can't grasp.

Not fully at least.

But for over 400 years, that is exactly what the Catholic Church did.

They kept a list.

A black list of banned books, banned people, banned ideas, banned knowledge.

This was official church policy from 1559 until, get this, 1966.

And the influence of that list still hovers over much of the religious schools and churches and teaching, etc.

Of course they said it was about protecting souls, but the truth is obvious.

It was about protecting power.

Their power.

Regardless of your spiritual position right now, the fact that this happened so recently and for so long should be a warning to us all.

What kind of ideas are so dangerous that they must be buried?

What truths were they so afraid that people would read?

Should the truth even have anything to fear?

What happens when a single institution claims the authority to decide what you get to know?

And of course, what does it say about that institution and their confidence in their doctrine if they have to be afraid of a book, of an idea, of a thought?

So this is going to be our focus for today.

We're going to talk about the Index of Forbidden Books.

We'll talk about why the Index was created specifically.

We'll talk about what books and thinkers and people were on that list.

We'll talk about how the Index itself worked, what the penalties were, the censorship, the fear, the control.

We'll talk about the pushback, these wonderful rebels who read anyways.

And we'll talk about the legacy, what we lost and what we learned.

But first, I just want to talk about why we are talking about this subject today.

This isn't fear-mongering.

This isn't political.

This is just truth.

Censorship is not a relic of the past.

We can see so much of it in the past.

In fact, I've already covered the Library of King Ashurbanipal.

I've already covered a bit of the Library of Alexandria or the murder of Hypatia, what happened to Spinoza, etc.

But it's not just those things in the past.

It is a clear and present danger.

And specifically, we're giving an example today of a book ban, although there's a lot more to it than that, that really reduces it.

But it's an information ban in general, censorship.

And it can happen from churches, from school boards, from governments or political ideologues.

It doesn't matter if you are in Florida or Iran.

Ideas are still being outlawed.

That's so crazy.

Faith versus freedom is a timeless battle here.

And though this index today was done by Catholicism, we're not really focusing so much on that part.

It's about the battle against free thought, because free thought leads to rebellion, because rebellion reduces power.

And furthermore, when you see the books that were on this list, these are books that shaped our world.

Books and ideas and thinkers that without, we would be in a very different place.

And then there's the loss of what could have been.

How many thinkers were silenced?

How many people didn't write that idea that could have changed the world?

How many people actually did write it, and it was suppressed or snuffed out?

And this isn't to say that every idea that has ever been censored is this amazing, perfect, world-shaping idea.

But much of them were.

The Enlightenment, human rights, science, democracy.

These kinds of things were banned.

So much of what we now cherish came from these books that were blacklisted.

This control of knowledge is something that I think we should all be fighting against all the time, because it is truly the first tool of authoritarianism.

And again, just so everybody's invited here, that can be religion, nationalism, or political dogma.

So, I apologize for my preaching.

Let's get into it.

Why was this particular list that we're talking about today created?

Well, there was a perfect storm going on.

I think this part of history is fascinating, and I want to give you this context.

A major piece at play here is the Gutenberg Press, which happens in the 1440s.

Before that, all books were hand-copied, and this was a very slow process.

It was also expensive, which made it limited.

And the people with the power were the ones with the money who could afford to do this, and thus they could control a great deal of the written word, of the knowledge.

But after the press, you could have a single work being copied hundreds of times a week.

With that, literacy began to rise, private libraries became a thing, and knowledge spread beyond the church, which was previously the keeper of knowledge, at this time, in this place.

Although it's not dissimilar to what we see in other times and places.

But think about this.

I mean, in Europe, for almost a thousand years, the Catholic Church had near total control over what the average person could read, or even hear, and thus think, or know.

And suddenly, that control was slipping away.

I always think it's funny, just side point here, people tell me all the time, obviously mainly coming from Catholics, when I make some point against Christianity, about their multiple denominations, and what that says, and they're like, No, it's just Protestantism.

We were fine.

We were united.

No, you weren't.

You were controlling.

People disagreed.

They just couldn't.

People wrote other things.

It was just banned and demolished.

Being so powerful in your authority, that you excommunicate and execute anyone and anything that disagrees with you, is not unity.

But I digress.

Let's jump forward to the next important part here, which is the Reformation.

Martin Luther, in 1517, hangs up those 95 theses in Wittenberg.

Again, thanks to the printing press, now this information is being distributed.

Within weeks, copies are flooding Europe.

Luther's message is that the Church is corrupt, amongst other things.

The result is this Protestant wildfire that spread, and a publishing boom.

To give you an idea, Luther wrote over 60 pamphlets in his lifetime.

We know that over a million copies were circulating in Europe by 1525.

The Catholic Church, Rome, is now facing, for the first time, a major theological challenge by way of a publishing revolution.

So, the printing press, the Reformation, and a third player here is the scientific revolution.

The scientific method is beginning to emerge.

You have thinkers like Copernicus and Vesalius and Galileo.

They begin describing the cosmos in an entirely different way than what was previously thought or known from scripture.

Earth's not at the center.

We are not the most special thing in the universe.

Celestial bodies governed by natural forces, not angels and demons.

You're telling me disease is not caused by sin, but by anatomy and contagion?

Every new discovery was chipping away at the truth claims and thus the power of the Catholic Church.

So, of course, the Church has to react.

And one of the most popular reactions that people know about is the Council of in 1545, though it lasted till 1563.

People picture it as this one day event of people getting together.

The Council is a direct response to Protestantism and the rising secular challenges.

It's time to reaffirm church authority, clarify good Catholic doctrine, and suppress dissent.

So they reaffirm the Vulgate, the Latin Bible, as the only true official version.

They condemn that whole sola scriptura principle.

They declare themselves, essentially, the Church, sole interpreter of scripture.

They institute censorship as a doctrine.

And in so doing, the Church is no longer just a spiritual institution.

It was a gatekeeper of acceptable thought.

And to that end, by 1559, we have our first index.

Pope Paul IV creates the Index Librorum Prohibitorium.

No appeals here, no nuance at all, just wholesale banning, the definition of censorship.

And I always think it's so funny, the formality of it.

They create a committee, the Congregation of the Index.

Its sole purpose is to create this list, to update this list, and to police intellectual material across Europe.

The idea here is that a dangerous book is like a disease.

It can infect your very soul.

At least that's how they are framing it with their propaganda.

Of course, it is about maintaining power.

But when described to the common folk, they're protecting your soul from demonic ideas that will take you straight to hell.

And so they even get a vast amount of support from the people.

Not that they really had a say in the matter, other than revolution.

But in this way, it's like they got them to vote against their own interest by fear.

Sound familiar?

A quick quote from the Council of Trent Decree.

Books which deal with, narrate, or teach things that are against faith or morals shall be utterly condemned and removed from the hands of the faithful.

Another quote from the Council of Trent.

It is clear that if books of this kind are not prohibited, they will do more harm than the weapons of our enemies.

So again, they're not just fighting heretics, they're fighting irrelevance.

If they don't control the information, if they don't control you through fear, if they're not playing a part in your eternal fate, they'll evaporate.

This ban allows that to continue, allows them to continue, allows the power to continue.

And it is amazing.

Again, I feel like we need 14 episodes just to cover all of this properly.

But in that short time when books and knowledge were able to spread before the church starts squashing it, you had real, everyday, ordinary people forming ideas.

Political ideas, spiritual ideas, ethical ideas, scientific ideas, all without the church's permission or oversight.

The printing press brings this rain, up come the flowers, and then here comes the church just to mow it all down.

But as we might see here in a second, the more that you try to ban something, the more people are going to want it.

In fact, there's a great quote around that concept from Michel de Montaigne, which is, to forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.

But let's move on to our next point here, which is, what was banned exactly?

What was the scale of this suppression?

I think oftentimes people have an idea that this was just like a few rogue philosophers that the church really didn't like, that were actively speaking out against them specifically.

No, this was a systemic erasing of ideas.

So there were many additions to this list.

Again, the first one is in 1559, and at that time, there were 550 works on the list.

By the 1948 edition, again, so crazy how modern this was, the list had grown to over 4,000 titles.

The reasons that books were listed fell into a few categories.

Heresy, blasphemy, immorality, scientific contradiction, political sedation, anti-clericalism, even other biblical translations that weren't approved by the church.

And even owning a single title on this list could lead to imprisonment, excommunication, or even execution.

And for sure, being the writer of one of these could put you in danger, or publishing them as well.

I'm going to give you some of my personal favorites.

Obviously, that first list had 550.

I'm not going to give them all for you, but I will put in the description a link where you can see all banned books from all of the different iterations of this list.

So if you're looking for a good reading list, here it is for you.

Galileo's Dialogue on Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was banned, mainly for defending heliocentrism.

Galileo was tried by the Inquisition and forced to recant.

We'll talk about Galileo in its own Thinking Thursday episode, I promise you.

Copernicus had On the Revolution of Celestial Spheres.

Again, we cannot have the sun at the center, it must be the earth.

Meditations on First Philosophy, one of my favorites by Descartes, was deemed too skeptical and too independent from religious authority.

It's amazing, back then they weren't hiding their reasons all that well.

Don't think for yourselves.

Don't question.

Don't not rely on us for information.

Another favorite who we just covered, Spinoza, is banned on this list as well.

He did one of the worst things someone at this time could do.

He argued that Scripture was a human text, and also that religion should be separate from politics, the nerve of that guy.

They dealt with him, though.

Giordano Bruno, who is someone else we will absolutely cover, wrote On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, which proposed an infinite cosmos, and denied the uniqueness of Christ.

Of course, he was burned alive in 1600 for this, and all of his works banned.

I think I mentioned Luther, but all Luther's works were banned, and his Vernacular Bible was especially feared here.

John Calvin was also banned.

His Institute of the Christian Religion was too Protestant.

It denounced Catholic rituals specifically, and tore down papal power.

Candide by Voltaire, another future episode.

We can't have any satirical works mocking church dogma, now could we?

Rousseau's The Social Contract, which everyone here should read.

This idea that man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

Oh, too radical.

Too revolutionary.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason simply promoted rationalism and autonomy.

Well, that's incompatible with church dogma.