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CHRISTIANITY, COPYRIGHT & CENSORSHIP IN ENGLISH-SPEAKING CULTURE
Harry Hillman Chartrand ©
Culture and Democracy: Social and Ethical Issues
in Public Support for the Arts and Humanities
Andrew Buchwalter, (ed), Westview, Boulder, 1992
Abstract
In the paper, it is demonstrated that the origin of censorship is found in the twin roots of
western civilization - the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome, from which censorship of the
spoken and written word emerged, and the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world from which censorship of the
visual image evolved. The history of censorship through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation is
traced. Use and abuse of art for political and religious purposes in Tudor England is explored and the
common law origins of a unique English concept of artists' rights called copyright are founded at this
time. It is shown that this concept emphasizes the rights of printers, publishers and producers and
protection of the public from the power of the artist. This is contrasted with the inalienable rights of
the creator emerging from the democratic revolutions of the late 18th and 19th centuries and
embodied in the Civil Code. It is shown that despite a revolutionary heritage, the United States
maintains an English concept of artists' rights, or rather limitation and censorship of them.
It is
demonstrated that ongoing controversy concerning censorship is rooted in incomplete separation of
Church and State. The spirit of the law including copyright remains Christian even
though Christian sin
may be Islamic or Buddhist virtue in a multicultural secular society.
Introduction
As the winds of reaction rise once more off some mythic sea to buffet the coast line of the
arts, it is appropriate to step back and consider the origins of an ongoing threat to artistic freedom -
censorship. To do so, I begin with the twin roots of western civilization the classical world of ancient
Greece and Rome from which censorship of the spoken and written word began, and the
Judeo-Christian-Islamic world from which censorship of the visual image evolved.
From these twin roots, I trace censorship through the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
Shifting attention to Tudor England, I outline the use and abuse of art for political and religious
purposes; I explore the triangular tension between Roman Catholicism, the Church of England and
Protestantism. I show that it was from these tensions that the Puritans fled to America to escape
art. Later, these same tensions caused dissenters from the Church of England, unable to attend
university because of their faith, to initiate the Industrial Revolution. And I will show that it was
from Protestant values that modern economics, emerging in the late 18th century, adopted its
hostile attitude to the arts.
I show that the common law origins of a unique English concept of artists' rights
called
copyright were founded in this period of English history. I demonstrate that copyright emphasizes
the rights of printers, publishers and producers as well as protection of the public from the power of
the artist. This tradition is contrasted with the inalienable rights of the creator emerging from the
democratic revolutions of the late 18th and 19th centuries and embodied in the Civil Code.
I
demonstrate that the United States, despite its revolutionary heritage, maintains the English
tradition of artists' rights, or rather limitation and censorship of them.
Finally, I argue that ongoing
controversy concerning censorship is rooted in incomplete separation of Church and State.
The spirit
of the law remains Christian even though Christian sin may be Islamic or Buddhist virtue in a
multicultural secular society.
This re-ligio, or linking back, is intended to raise collective awareness of the direction and
position of the problem in space and time (Jantsch 1975). This pilgrim's progress might even compel
advocates of censorship to acknowledge, if not repent, what is a deeply rooted cultural prejudice.
One cannot escape history; it follows every step we take into the future, whether we know of its
presence or not. But, as the Japanese might say:
An obligation not felt, is not an obligation!
(Kahn 1971: 47-54)
English-speakers pride themselves on individualism, democracy and freedom of expression.
Yet art has always troubled 'the powers that be'. Art is the technology of the heart; it moves and
motivates people - individually and en masse; it therefore threatens rational order.
Thus, near the very beginnings of western civilization, Plato warned:
we must remain firm in our conviction that hymns to the gods and praise of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State.
For if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic
or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent
have ever been deemed best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State (Plato, Book X, 1952: 433-434).
Thus, long before science became accountable for nuclear terror and pollution, our
civilization feared art; feared feeling; feared perhaps the mnemonic matriarchal murmurings
and memory of Adam's
first wife, Lilith - Mother of All Witches - made equal and at the same time, but who fled Paradise
when God decided a submissive Eve was better for the patriarchy (Koltuv 1986).
In fairness to the
ancient Greeks, while sexual apartheid (separate but equal) and slavery were practiced, they
attained a harmony between Appolonian Logic and Dionysian Ecstasy not attained
by Rome or medieval Christendom and not yet attained in the modern world - a creative balance of nature, humanity and the gods
remembered as the Golden Age of western civilization.
Fear of art was reinforced, not diminished, with the rise of Christianity.
As one of the three
great world religions subscribing to the Ten Commandments (Judaism and Islam being the other
two), Christianity prohibits worship of 'graven images'. Among all three 'peoples of the book',
censorship of the image traces back to Moses and the Golden Calf. In the book (the meaning of
Bible), the
Word is sacred but the image, at best, is profane and at worst is evil incarnate.
Like their religion's founder and brother Jews of the Diaspora (the son of the Emperor
Vespasian, Titus, destroyed the Temple of Solomon in 79 C.E. exiling the Jew to the farthest
reaches of the Empire), early Christians suffered persecution and martyrdom for 300 years at the
hands of pagans and, forever after, at the hands of opposing Christians and non-Christians resisting
conversion and/or colonization. Their ideas and beliefs were violently suppressed; their bodies
burned and tortured; their souls, in passionate martyrdom, sacrificed to a God who
had no form, no name and no graven image - to the bewilderment of peoples around the world.
Confiscated Christian property was, however, returned in 313 C.E. by the
Edict of Milan
(Langer 1952: 119). Soon afterwards Christianity was declared the official religion of the Roman Empire.
But the same Christians who had called for respect, tolerance and understanding then began to
pillage and burn pagan temples and libraries; to destroy or deface what might have been
a much fuller
inheritance from the classical world. To be fair, the First Emperor of China - Ch'in Shih Huang Ti
-
who built the Great Wall, the only human structure visible to the naked eye from the moon,
conducted a great book burning in 213 B.C.E. Essentially he believed:
Before Me, No
History! One of
the few books to survive, from a literature continuous for almost 3,000 years, was the I Ching - The
Book
of Changes (Wilhelm, 1950: xlvii). These artistic and cultural tragedies, taken together with
20th century updates by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Admin, show that more than rain forests can
be lost forever due to intolerance and human arrogance.
As early as the first Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., the Church (invested with authority by
the Emperor) began banning the written word. This event was key to the future.
The Patriarch of
Alexandria, Athanasius, contended Christ was of one substance divine.
Arius, remembered as an
Alexandrian priest, contended Christ was of two parts
and the divine did not die on the Cross but was raised up into heaven. Athanasius won: Arianism
was declared heresy. Arian missionaries, however, were the first to reach and convert the German
tribes bordering the Empire.
With Christian ascendance, the geopolitical centre of power shifted from the Latin West to
the Greek East, from Rome to a new Christian capital - Constantinople - in 330
C.E. And with this
shift, according to some, artistic expression rapidly declined (Langer 1952: 123).
The changing
status of art can be demonstrated by contrasting the Athens of Pericles (490 - 429
B.C.E.)
with
Constantinople (330 C.E. to 1453 C.E.).
Athens was the artistic and cultural capital of ancient Greece. Sports played an important
role, but was balanced by the Athenian ideal of a healthy mind in a healthy body.
The polis is the place of art
....
The magus, the poet who, like Orpheus and Arion is
also a supreme sage, can make stones of music. One version of the myth has it that
the walls of Thebes were built by songs, the poet's voice and harmonious learning
summoning brute matter into stately civic forum. The implicit metaphors are far
reaching: the "numbers" of music and of poetry are cognate with the proportionate
use and division of matter and space; the poem and the built city are exemplars both
of the outward, living shapes of reason. And only in the city can the poet, the
dramatist, the architect find an audience sufficiently compact, sufficiently informed to
yield him adequate echo. Etymology preserves this link between
"public," in the
sense of the literary or theatrical public and the "republic" meaning the assembly in
the space and governance of the city. (Steiner 1976: 322)
In Constantinople, the balance was different. Built as a new Christian capital of an ancient
empire, Constantinople banned the gladiatorial games of pagan Rome, a form of human sacrifice as
savage as the Aztec. But the Roman passion for blood sports (sublimated into human/animal
contests) continued and was fueled as a matter of public policy. The passion and riots associated
with contemporary competitive sports, e.g. British soccer hooligans or Michigan football fans, have
their institutional origin in the
factions
of the new Christian capital (Constantinople) called the Blues
and the Greens. They did not simply play, or bet, on sports. Victory was not just victory, it was the
Will of God fulfilling itself in games of deadly political power.
While [Constantinople] inherited from her elder sister the passion for chariot races,
the Byzantine hippodrome [loosely translated as race track] acquired a political
significance which had never been attached to the Roman circus. It was here that
on the accession of a new Emperor the people of the capital acclaimed him and
showed their approval of his election... The hippodrome was again and again
throughout later Roman history the scene of political demonstrations and riots which
shook or threatened the throne... It may be said that the hippodrome replaced,
under autocratic government, the popular Assembly of the old Greek city-state (Bury
1958: 86).
Meanwhile in the West, St. Jerome (331- 420 C.E.), reacting to the growing Greek
influence in Christian affairs, translated the Bible - Old and New Testaments - into
Latin.
He then
made it public, i.e. he published a Bible to be read by all, not just by the clergy.
This Latin Bible was
therefore called the 'Vulgate'. But translation from Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek was not the only
Bible-building exercise. Certain gospels were included, i.e. those of Luke, John, Mark and Matthew;
others were excluded, e.g. the Gnostic gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Philip and the gospel of
Truth (Hoeller 1982).
The Latin Bible maintained continuity of the Catholic faith in the West during occupation by
Germanic tribes. As an aside, the word 'German' derives from the old Celtic meaning 'neighbor'.
These Germanic tribes began their reign as ethnic overlords with little cultural affinity with their Latinized subjects and who, with the exception of the Franks - but
including Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Vandals - subscribed to heretical Arian Christianity separating
themselves, yet again, from their Catholic subjects. Clovis, king of the Franks, alone among the
German leaders, chose Roman Catholicism and founded the first modern European nation - France.
His name was later corrupted to 'Louis'.
With the growing influence of the Greek language and culture, a new civilization emerged
in the East - the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire. And,
In the East arose the great heresies that troubled the Church in the fourth
and fifth centuries: Arianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism - all the complex
arguments in which the Greek spirit, reveling in subtle theological
metaphysics, clashed with the sober, lucid genius of the Latin world, and
from which violent conflict arose between the Eastern episcopate - that
supple servant of the Crown - and the haughty obduracy of the Roman
pontiffs. (Diehl 1957:7)
But in both East and West, the clergy and the educated caste knew the One God to be
invisible and ineffable, but they also realized to be governable the illiterate masses
needed objects
of veneration - not
for worship but to focus faith. Many Greek and Roman gods and their graven
images became venerated, reflecting the 'double faith' theory - one faith for the literate, and
another - artistic images - for the ignorant, i.e. illiterate (Cantor 1969: 78).
There is another side to the 'double faith' theory, i.e. retention of ancient images and pagan
ideas by the educated elite themselves. It has been argued that the Renaissance - a thousand
years later - was not a 'rebirth' of ancient learning and art. Rather, it was a 'coming out' by the elite
class who had retained aesthetic and intellectual contact with the classical world through an
aesthetic and philosophic underground (Seznec 1972) involving alchemy, astrology and necromancy
(Jung 1958).
By the 8th century icons had become a characteristic religious feature of both Western and
Eastern Roman Empires. Icons, i.e. works of art, became such powerful tools in the hands of the
Church that the Eastern Emperors began a campaign for their elimination. This inquisition, the
Iconoclastic Controversy, lasted for over a century and a half (Diehl 1957:
167).
It failed. Icons and
other objects of veneration remained an integral part of Catholic and Orthodox Christian worship
even after the great schism of the 9th century between the Petrine Doctrine of the Church of
Rome claiming the Pope as successor of St. Peter versus the Caesaropapism Doctrine of the
Byzantine Church claiming the Emperor as God's Vicar on earth (Cantor 1969: 55, 90).
Following the schism and paralleling the success of the Arians in converting the German
tribes, brother Saints Cyrus and Methodius, on behalf of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of
Constantinople, reached the Slavic tribes in the 9th century converting them to the Eastern rite
and, in the process creating a new alphabet - Cyrillic script still used in most of eastern Europe
including Russia. This rivalry between east and west Christendom continued during the Middle Ages
with catholic Teutonic Knights taking lands in the East - Drang nach Osten - from pagan and later
orthodox Slavs until 1400 C.E. when they were stopped after taking Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia -
less than 100 years before Columbus 'discovered' America. Soon after, the Russian Orthodox Church
assumed supremacy in eastern Christendom with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453
C.E. Moscow became the 'Third Rome' founded on seven hills.
Thus traditional differences between Eastern, Central and Western Europe are not just
political or linguistic, they are also alphabetic. Marshall McLuhan, following the lead of his mentor,
Harold Innis (Innis 1950, 1951) noted we recognize the fundamental difference between
perception of literate and preliterate peoples but that we do not appreciate the impact of
alphabets. It is possible, even today, to encounter highly educated people who are quite
unaware that only phonetically literate man lives in a 'rational' or 'pictorial' space.
The
discovery or invention of such space that is uniform, continuous and connected was
an environmental effect of the phonetic alphabet in the sensory life of ancient
Greece. This form of rational or pictorial space is an environment that results from no
other form of writing, Hebrew, Arabic, or Chinese (McLuhan, Fiore 1968: 7).
The schism between Pope and Byzantine Emperor concerning who was the Vicar of Christ
played itself out in the West in the medieval struggle known as the Investiture Controversy
between the Holy Roman Emperors (the Western Emperor, successors to Charlemagne) and the
Pope. Did the Emperor receive His Authority directly from God, or was it invested by the Pope?
In
response, the Church hierarchy essentially decided there was too much interference by the laity in
its internal affairs, and therefore they (emperors, kings and princes) would be shut out.
But the church itself, from the time of the investiture controversy, became more
and more interested in secular affairs, and so the papacy of the high middle ages
competed successfully for wealth and power with kings and emperors. The church
itself became a great superstate by the papal administration (Cantor l969: 273).
But in the 7th century, Islam swept out of the Arabian peninsula taking away the Holy
Land and much of Africa from Christendom. Islam accepted Christ as prophet but only as the last
prophet before Mohammed, Blessed Be His Name, last in the line, or Seal of
the Prophets stretching from Abraham and his two sons Isaac and Ishmael to Moses, Solomon and Christ.
Like the
Arian heresy, Islam contended Christ did not die on the Cross. He was uplifted into heaven to
return to the Temple of Solomon, in Jerusalem, on the last day when he will sit, at the right hand
of Mohammed, and together with Solomon, judge the quick and the dead.
Islam also reaffirmed humankind had been created in God's image and therefore no representation
of
the human form was permissible. Thus geometric art became highly
developed in Islamic culture, but representational art languished. Many Christians in
Syria, Egypt and North Africa, who resented objects of veneration welcomed Islam as a
purification of a church that had betrayed its own teachings. The book of Islam, almost a
third testament to the Christian Bible, is called the Koran: The Recitation.
For more than a
thousand years, the entrance examination to the University of Cairo has been recitation
of the
Koran,
by memory - from beginning to end.
In fairness, despite practicing sexual apartheid and slavery, Islam's treatment of
both Christians and Jews contrasts with the treatment of Jew and Moslem in
Christendom. A highly cultured and intellectual Jewish community flowered in Moorish
Spain between the 10th and 11th centuries. For the first time since the great Jewish
scholar Philo and the Diaspora in the first century C.E. (and not again until the 18th
century) a large community of Jews was accepted into western society and given the
opportunity to participate in all aspects of life (Cantor 1969: 397). This community did
much to re-link Latin Christendom with the classical world lost to barbarian invasion and
book burning.
The great 12th century Jewish scholar, Maimondes (Rabbi Moses ben
Maimon, 1135-1204 C.E.) contributed. This attempted reconciliation between Aristotle and Judaism
was
preceded by 11th century Islamic scholars such as Avicenna striving to reconcile
Islam with, among others, Neoplatonism (Corbin 1980) to be followed by Thomas
Aquinas' 13th century struggle to reconcile Christianity with knowledge so long lost.
Jewish scholars who translated Greek and Latin classics, preserved in Arabic, into Latin were a major
force in revivifying classical learning. Alas, fundamentalism overtook Islam in 13th
century Spain and persecution of the Jew became common.
It was not, however, until King
Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, just before Columbus' voyage of discovery, that the Jewish
community was expelled from Spain.
In the 12th and 13th centuries the position of the Jew in Europe deteriorated rapidly.
The Fourth Lateran Council in 1213 C.E. prescribed absolute ghettoization and
ordered all Jews to wear a yellow label as sign of their status. By the middle of the twelfth
century the concept of 'blood libel' - the myth that Jews had a propensity for the ritual
murder of Christian children had become established in Western Europe. Repeated
pogroms followed (Cantor 1969:
393-394). In the 1290's, the kings of England and France expelled the Jew; many fled east to lands recently colonized by the Teutonic Knights and
created a distinct and vibrant Yiddish culture that all but died during the
1940s.
In addition to militant conversion, colonization of heathen lands and persecution of the Jew,
there existed a pervasive suspicion of art. This atmosphere is chillingly captured in Umberto Eco's
novel, The Name of
the Rose, in which Brother Jorge's fear of the power of comedy to endanger
the authority of the Church feeds a medieval tale of murder and the destruction of a great library -
the collected enlightenment of an age - by the fires of censorship (Eco 1980).
But, in fact, the chief instrument of repression in the West was the Inquisition against
heretics. This came in three waves, none of them very pleasant: the Medieval, Spanish and Roman
Inquisitions. Its origins lay in Roman law which:
advocated a
judge-centred court with absolute powers... There was nothing,
therefore, very novel about the procedure used by the famous papal
Inquisition... The Inquisition was a special ad hoc court commissioned by the
papacy to deal with heretics. It basically followed civil-law procedure,
and there was certainly nothing original in its use of torture as far as the
history if Roman law is concerned. (Cantor 1969:
343)
After crushing Arianism, there was no serious heresy in Western Christendom between the
6th and 11th centuries. In the 11th century, however, a major heresy Catharism - emerged in
southern France and northern Italy. First, the civil authorities took notice of the artistic license and
lifestyles of these heretics and then the Church asked the State to take action.
Pope Innocent
proclaimed a fourth crusade, not against Islam, but against heretics in southern France.
The northern French barons enthusiastically responded... They looked upon
it as a heaven-sent opportunity to carve out fiefs for themselves ...(it) took on
the
qualities of a land grab (Cantor 1969: 453)
Censorship and prohibition were normal, if informal, practices throughout the
so-called Middle
Ages,. Finally, during the Counter-Reformation, in 1571, Pope Pius V formally established the Sacred
Congregation of the Index and created the Index
Librorum Prohibitorum, i
.e. the list of
prohibited books. This special Congregation carefully reviewed books and issued new indexes
whenever needed (Colliers 1956: 391). Finally, in 1592, the revised Counter-Reformation, politically
correct edition of the Vulgate was issued - just in time for national languages to displace Latin as
the principal medium of literary and scientific expression.
But every cloud has a silver lining; even theology. The end of sexual apartheid in
Christendom began - theologically speaking - in 1950 with declaration of the papal dogma of the
Assumption of
the Virgin (Jung 1958: 170-171). This was the theological root of feminism.
Mary was accepted into Heaven - in physical form, i.e. dirty earth was finally accepted as of divine
origin and therefore capable of redemption. This is a high point in Christian theology - acceptance of
the material world as capable of salvation. Alas, application of the dogma in the real world leaves
much to be desired.
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