Anti-Catholic Textbook

This is an appalling amd ignorant libel on the Church. Thank you for making it known.

Happy Advent and God bless!

Yeah, that was the textbook used in my European history class in high school. There’s other snarky stuff throughout, I remember–the coverage of the Reformation was decidedly one-sided, and the Church was definitely understood as the thing blocking peace and progress when the Enlightenment struck–that sort of thing. The teacher also at one point said the reason for the Church’s ban on birth control was so that they’d have more Catholics and hence more power.

I realize the text is Western Heritage, but I wonder if Islam gets mentioned and what kind of trreatment it receives.

1. Totally opposite to what “history of ideas” scholars have traced happening. When the Church expanded into pagan and semipagan areas, it was adamant that there were no such thing as special magical or pagan powers. To falsely accuse anyone of being a witch or making a curse that worked was punishable by death, in many countries. Why? Because accusing each other of witchcraft and killing the supposed witches was a big pagan social problem, particularly in Germanic and Slavic countries. (As it still is among Apaches, certain African countries, etc.)

In the late Middle Ages, the more openminded/frightened types thought that there might be something scientific behind all this magic, alchemy, and optics stuff, and that maybe the Devil had more power than they thought. So they investigated witchcraft accusations instead of executing the accuser, and witchcraft accusations did multiply somewhat. However, almost all investigations concluded that the person was not guilty (though secular governments took it dimly if someone was attempting to hurl non-working death spells, at least if you were hired to do it or part of a conspiracy). Still, that German loony Sprenger catalogued all the traditional German fears and legends of witches as if it were reliable. This came into play later, with Protestants.

2. Most prosecutions of magic happened in Protestant countries, because they stopped having a hierarchy cracking down on false accusations, and let the people give way to their native witchcraft fears. Since the climate had grown colder, crops and people had diseases, and there was war and disorder everywhere, people had lots of issues to blame on witches. But lots of people were getting killed for treason, heresy, and so forth by the Protestant kingdoms also; witchcraft trials were just one tiny bit of the general craziness and injustice.

3. That’s not what “high magic” means, either. Sheeeeeeesh. I think I remember that it was a style of ceremonial magic which used Latin (and sometimes Greek and Hebrew) words and freaky diagrams, and proposed to communicate with and/or command mighty powers of the vasty deep, and to wreak one’s will upon the world. As opposed to low magic, which was the stuff that uneducated people did without all the freaky robes and supposedly magical words and names, which also proposed to communicate with and/or command mighty beings, and to wreak one’s will upon the world.

(Or just to pray to God in a semi-occult way while doing various things — which generally came down the generations in various ritual forms, much like folk poetry or songs. But most people didn’t think of this as magic per se, and most churchmen didn’t frown on it too hard if it didn’t get out of hand.)

I’m currently in a Medieval Studies MA program at Columbia and I’m actually gathering research to write an end-of-term paper on exactly this topic. Maureen is right; the Church treated witchcraft accusations a lot harsher than the practice itself as it expanded in the early Middle Ages. She viewed magical practice as mere pagan superstition that required better catechesis, not legal persecution. There was the general attitude that the practice would die out as paganism became more and more a distant memory. It was only treated harshly when done for the purpose of seriously injuring another (and hey, even today we prosecute people for attempted murder; just because it was ineffective, doesn’t mean it wasn’t malicious). Even then, the punishment was usually banishment or excommunication, not execution.

Most of this magic was the sort of “common” magic that Maureen mentioned. It was rarely for personal gain. Most of it consisted of charms and incantations that were intended to aid in daily life or heal the sick. Some authorities viewed these practices with suspicion, but they were so common that even someone who condemned one such practice would himself participate in a different one. It’s important to note that for ordinary people, their intention was not really to perform magic. They had an integrated view of the universe; the line between the physical and spiritual realms were not nearly as distinct as we consider them. Thus, a farmer who recites some form of Christianized incantation over his field didn’t think of himself as performing magic. It was simply good husbandry to bless one’s crops. On a related note, the common image of the Church viciously descending upon some poor old midwife with knowledge of herbal remedies is simply false–that was the greater part of medieval medicine! Even the use of medicinal stones–today somewhat a New Agey practice–was not considered immoral because received medical wisdom told medieval people that they had the same potential for healing that plant and animal products did. Bl. Hildegard von Bingen wrote an entire manual cataloguing plants, animals and stones and their various healing properties.

The later medieval period, however, saw the rise of several factors that influenced the development of “elite” magic, the two biggest being the development of the university and the importation of more classical learning from Jewish and Arabic sources, especially arithmetic and astrology.

The rise of the university system was significant because it a) caused a greater divorce of learning from the supervision of the Church and b) created a class of clerics (as university students were considered) that were disproportionate to the actual numerical needs of the priesthood and monastic orders. This class of clerics had no real function, so in some cases they created one. They themselves didn’t see invoking demons as particularly wrong or harmful (at least some of them didn’t; sometimes consecrated wafers were used in the rituals, which became pretty hard to justify). They thought that their clerical “power” protected them and that they were free to “command” demons to do good against their will. Naturally, most orthodox theologians were suspicious of this claim and asserted that there was no way one could “command” a demon: at some implicit level, there was a submission and a “pact” being made.

Astrology itself was a debated “science” in the Middle Ages. Such notables as Albertus Magnus defended as legitimate and not necessarily contrary to human free will. In there defense, the issue was not as immediately clear as we see it. The sun caused life to grow on Earth and the Moon affected the tides, so why, they reasoned, shouldn’t other heavenly bodies affect terrestrial life? Nevertheless, arithmetic and astrology began to be used in elite magic to create elaborate rituals for invoking demons.

Obviously, this form of magic cannot be counted as mere superstition. Elite magicians were usually clerics who should have known perfectly well the immorality of what they were doing. This alone would have made the Church and secular governments more likely to increase their legal condemnation of such practices. Starting in the twelfth century however, a number of heretical groups arose and became very successful. The Church, not unnaturally, saw a connection between a rejection of its authority and sacraments on a theological grounds to a subversion of its authority and manipulation of its sacraments for personal power as two sides of the same coin. Boniface VIII produced a canon law book–Liber sextus–that allowed the prosecution of magic deemed heretical and several works after that dealt with the legal prosecution of elite magic, especially necromancy.

Unfortunately, as Maureen pointed out, a fanatic named Sprenger made this sensible approach to a real social problem into a text that allowed for the widespread persecution of all sorts of “common magic” as well. Though produced it the twilight of the Middle Ages, the effect Malleus Maleficarum had was not a medieval one. Rather, it was the Ren/Ref period–and well into the so-called Enlightenment–that the book was used to create a climate of terror and a tool for casting suspicions upon one’s neighbors.

I teach AP Euro using the 9th edition of the textbook, and that particular text is the same. Fortunately, I used a separate document for that particular section and my students weren’t subjected to that particular idiocy.

I’m somewhat surprised by it, given the treatment of the Church elsewhere in the book. For example, it’s the only textbook I’ve seen that doesn’t give a one-sided account of Galileo or even attempt a hagiography of him. It addresses the personal conflict between Galileo and Urban VIII, saying it was “much more complicated than a simple case of conflict between science and religion,” which is more than most APEH textbooks will grant.

Seems to me it’s mostly a desperate attempt to keep everyone, including the neo-pagans who claim their origins in some way to the 17th c. witch-hunts, happy with some sort of “equal playing field”. Hopefully I’ve taught my students well enough that, if they did happen to browse that section, they’d tear it apart with their critical thinking and analysis.

As a public-school teacher (Oh, don’t boo; I was in Viet-Nam and was voting Republican before you were born) I can assure you that many of my students come to class with bizarre anti-Catholic prejudices learned at home. One year I gave all my students cheap little wooden Celtic crosses for Christmas. One student asked, suspiciously, “Is this a Catholic thing?” Another, a professing witch, bit off the arms, leaving the circle, and said “Now it’s the rightful symbol of Lugh again!’

And so it goes.