Note on an index worth shelving.

It was in 1966 that the Catholic Church ceased publication of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books), the list of banned books that began with an Index of Forbidden Works promulgated by Gelasius in Rome in the year 496. The Christian habit of attempting to regulate the reading of the faithful went even further teal to the Ephesian converts of Saint Paul, who made bonfires of books they considered superstitious (books valued, I note with a bibliophile's attention to cost, at "fifty thousand pieces of silver"). But the Index was the most consistent and longest-lasting censorship effort in Western civilization, and just over 30 years after its death, it deserves a memorial in these pages, if only to salute such diligent and well-intentioned folly.

Folly it was. The final edition of the Index featured some 4,000 works, many of them deservedly obscure and banned for doctrinal reasons, but many of them some of the greatest prose compositions in history: Michel de Montaigne's Essais, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, the travel books of Laurence Sterne and Joseph Addison, John Milton's State Papers, Daniel Defoe's History of the Devil, Edward Gibbon's immense and wonderful Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the complete works of Emile Zola. Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume, among others. Some of these, like Addison's Remarks on Several Parts of Italy, were banned because of their irreverent portrayal of Vatican City; others, like Montaigne's essays--from which the modern essay genre takes its form and spirit--were banned because of their dangerous relativism and individualism.

The Index did not begin in a purely condemnatory vein. Its first incarnation had three parts: a list of the authentic books of scripture, a list of recommended readings, and a list of heretical and apocryphal books that the faithful were forbidden to study. The Index was a resounding success in its first millennium, largely because printing hadn't been invented and keeping an eye on the few books in the world wasn't difficult. Gutenberg's neat idea threw the church into a tizzy, though, and in 1467 Pope Innocent VIII decreed that all new books had to be reviewed by authorities before general issuance. Thus came into being a phrase familiar to many readers of this magazine: Imprimatur, "it may be printed," the permission granted by the local authority, usually a bishop.

The Index, with many other aspects of ancient Catholicism, died at the hands of Catholicism's revolutionary Second Vatican Council, and I cannot imagine that it is mourned by many, even among the most conservative Catholics. One may admire, at this remove, its paternal intent to protect readers from "immorality"; but one may also excoriate its restriction of freedom, its anti-intellectual stance and tone, and its employment of an enduring evil, censorship, as a tool to encourage faith, which is the search for love amid evil. A vibrant, dense, joyous faith of any stripe is one which punctures immorality and bad theology, not flees from it or locks it away in cages (as was done with Indexed books in the library of the university where I work).

Evil is beaten not by retreat, but by battle; and one of the most powerful tools readers and writers have against evils of all sort, including censorious religious monoliths, is their affection and respect for the word. "In the beginning was the Word," as John the Evangelist says so famously in his gospel, and that is, like so many striking lines in the New Testament, a phrase rich in layered meaning and metaphor.

So rest in peace, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, for we are glad to see you gone, and do not wish you well.

Brian Doyle is the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland, and the author, with his father Jim Doyle, of Two Voices, a collection of their essays.