Index Librorum Prohibitorum - Some notable writers on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum

A list of books which members of the Roman Catholic Church were forbidden to read. It originated with the Gelasian Decree (496), and was frequently revised, the last revision being published in 1948. Although the Roman Catholic Church still claims the right to prevent its members reading material harmful to their faith or morals, it was decided in 1966 to publish no further editions.

The Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("List of Prohibited Books") is a list of publications which the Catholic Church censored for being a danger to itself and the faith of its members. The aim of the list was to prevent the reading of immoral books or works containing theological errors and to prevent the corruption of the faithful. The list was not simply a reactive work.

The first list of that kind was not published in Rome, but in the Netherlands (1529). The work of the censors was considered too severe and, after the Council of Trent had remodeled the church legislation on the prohibition of books, Pope Pius IV promulgated in 1564 the so called Tridentine Index, the basis of all later lists until Pope Leo XIII, in 1897, published his Index Leonianus. The very first lists were the work of the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church (the Holy Office, later the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith).

In 1571 a special congregation was erected, the Sacred Congregation of the Index, which had the specific task to investigate those writings that were denounced in Rome as being not exempt of errors, to update the list of Pope Pius IV regularly and also to make lists of corrections in case a writing was not in itself damnable but only in need of correction and put on the list with a mitigating clause (e.g., donec corrigatur (forbidden if not corrected) or donec expurgetur (forbidden if not purged)). This sometimes resulted in very long lists of corrections, published in the Index Expurgatorius. Prohibitions made by other congregations (mostly the Holy Office) were simply passed on to the Congregation of the Index, where the final decrees were drafted and made public, after approval of the Pope (who always had the possibility to condemn an author personally—only a few examples, such as Lamennais and Hermes). Among the notable writers on the list were Desiderius Erasmus, Edward Gibbon, Giordano Bruno, Laurence Sterne, Voltaire, Daniel Defoe, Nicolaus Copernicus, Honoré de Balzac, Jean-Paul Sartre, Nikos Kazantzakis, as well as the Dutch sexologist Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde, author of the sex manual The Perfect Marriage. A complete list of the authors and writings present in the subsequent editions of the index are listed in J. Almost every modern Western philosopher was, or is, included on the list — even those that believed in God, such as Descartes, Kant, Berkeley, Malebranche, Lamennais and Gioberti. That some atheists, such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, are not included is due to the general (Tridentine) rule that heretical works (i.e., works that contradict Catholic dogma) are ipso facto forbidden. The Index as an official list having force of law was abolished in 1966 under Pope Paul VI, following the end of the Second Vatican Council and largely due to practical considerations.

Some notable writers on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum

Joseph Addison Francis Bacon Honoré de Balzac George Berkeley Giordano Bruno John Calvin Giacomo Casanova Nicolaus Copernicus Daniel Defoe René Descartes Denis Diderot Alexandre Dumas, père Alexandre Dumas, fils Desiderius Erasmus Gustave Flaubert Anatole France Galileo Galilei Edward Gibbon André Gide Vincenzo Gioberti Thomas Hobbes Victor Hugo David Hume Immanuel Kant Nikos Kazantzakis Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais John Locke Martin Luther Niccolò Machiavelli Maurice Maeterlinck Nicolas Malebranche Karl Marx John Milton Montesquieu Rudolf Novotny Blaise Pascal François Rabelais Samuel Richardson Jean-Jacques Rousseau George Sand Jean-Paul Sartre Baruch de Spinoza Laurence Sterne Emanuel Swedenborg Jonathan Swift Theodoor Hendrik van de Velde Voltaire Émile Zola Gerard Walschap