The Lies and Fallacies of the Encyclopedia Britannica

THE POPE’S EUNUCHS

A few years ago I had occasion to refer in one of my books to the male soprani of the papal chapel at Rome. These castrated males, sexually mutilated, as every priest and every Italian knew, for soprani in the choir of the Sistine Chapel, were the amusement of Rome when it developed a large degree of skepticism, but a grave scandal to the American and British Catholics who began to arrive about the middle of the last century. One of the vices which the Spaniards had brought to Italy in the 16th century along with the Borgia family and the Spanish Roman Emperors was the falsetto singer. There were artists who could sing falsetto with distinction, but as the opera gained in popularity in Italy, the practice began of emasculating boys with good voices and retaining them as male soprani or, as the Italians, with their usual lack of Christian reticence about sex called them, the castrati. They were in every opera in the 18th century, but foreign visitors were never reconciled to them. The famous English weekly, The Spectator, wrote about “the shrill celestial whine of eunuchs,” and by the end of the 18th century they began to fade out of the opera house.

But, as the word “celestial” indicates, they were found also in the choir of all churches that were proud of their music, particularly in the chapel of the Vatican Palace, the Sistine Chapel, one of the greatest shrines of art as well as of virtue and piety in Rome. And the churches clung to their eunuchs when public opinion almost drove them out of opera. The plea seems to have been that there was some indelicacy, or risk of it, in having females in the church choir, so the priests chose to ignore the rather indelicate nature of the operation of emasculation. The fact was as well known as the celibacy of the clergy. Grove’s standard Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1927) says in a section titled “Castrati”:

“Eunuchs were in vogue as singers until comparatively recent times; they were employed in the choirs of Rome.”

So Macmillan’s and all other leading dictionaries of music, and English and American visitors to Rome before 1870 who wrote books, rarely failed to mention, with smirks of humor or frowns of piety, how the beautiful music of the papal choir was due in large part to manufactured soprani. In the later years of the last century I talked with elderly men who had, out of curiosity, dined or lunched with these quaint servants of God.

An American reader wrote me that a Catholic friend, who had doubtless, as is usual, consulted his pastor, indignantly denied the statement. It was one of the usual “lies of Freethinkers.” For an easily accessible authority, reliable on such a point, I referred him to the Encyclopædia Britannica. In all editions to 1928 the article “Eunuchs,” after discussing the barbaric African custom of making eunuchs for the harem, said:

“Even more vile, as being practiced by a civilized European nation, was the Italian practice of castrating boys to prevent the natural development of the voice, in order to train them as adult soprano singers, such as might formerly be found in the Sistine Chapel. Though such mutilation is a crime punishable with severity, the supply of soprani never failed as long as these musical powers were in demand in high quarters. Driven long ago from the Italian stage by public opinion, they remained the musical glory and the moral shame of the papal choir till the accession of Pope Leo XIII, one of whose first acts was to get rid of them.”

My correspondent replied, to my astonishment, that there was no such passage in the Britannica, and I began the investigation of which I give the results in the present writing. I found at once that in the 14th edition, which was published in 1929, the passage had been scandalously mutilated, the facts about church choirs suppressed, and the reader given an entirely false impression of the matter. In this new edition the whole of the above passage is cut out and replaced by this:

“The Italian practice of castrating boys in order to train them as adult soprano singers ended with the accession of Pope Leo XIII.”

The reader is thus given to understand that the zealous Pope found the shameless practice lingering in the opera houses and forbade it. The fact, in particular, that the Church of Rome had until the year 1878 not only permitted this gross mutilation but required it for the purpose of its most sacred chapel—that Pope Pius IX, the first Pope to be declared infallible by the Church, the only modern Pope for whom the first official stage of canonization was demanded, sat solemnly on his throne in the Sistine Chapel for 20 years listening to “the shrill celestial whine of eunuchs”—was deliberately suppressed. Those facts are so glaringly inconsistent with the claims of Catholic writers in America that the suppression was clearly due to clerical influence, and I looked for the method in which it had been applied.

The Encyclopædia is, as its name implies, an ancient British institution inspired by the great French Encyclopédie of the 18th century. As the American reading public increased, it served both countries, but the special needs of American readers and the great development of science and technique made it necessary to prepare an entirely recast edition. It now had an American as well as a British staff and publishing house, and it was dedicated to King George and President Hoover. The last trace of the idealism of its earlier publishers disappeared. What bargains were secretly made to secure a large circulation we do not know; but when the work was completed in 1928, the Westminster Catholic Federation, which corresponds to the Catholic Welfare organization in America, made this boast in its annual report:

“The revision of the Encyclopædia Britannica was undertaken with a view to eliminate matter which was objectionable from a Catholic point of view and to insert what was accurate and unbiased. The whole of the 28 volumes were examined, objectionable statements noted, and the reasons for their deletion or amendment given. There is every reason to hope that the new edition of the Britannica will be found very much more accurate and impartial than its predecessors.”

This blazing indiscretion seems to have struck terror into the publishing offices at London and New York—later reprints of this emasculated edition have the imprint of “The University of Chicago,” which seems to have taken over the responsibility—for on August 9, 1929, a singular public notice appeared in what is called the Agony Column of the London Times. I should explain to American readers that the first page of this famous paper is given up to advertisements and public and private notices, and the two central columns are so much used by separated and broken-hearted lovers (“Ethel. Where are you? I suffer agony for you. Your adoring George,” etc.) and ladies who have lost their pets or are in need of money, etc., that many frivolous folk take the paper for the humor of those two columns. One of the longest notices that ever appeared in it was that of August 9. It runs:

“WESTMINSTER CATHOLIC FEDERATION. On behalf of the Westminster Catholic Federation we desire to state that it has been brought to our attention that the wording of the second paragraph of the report of the Vigilance Sub-Committee of the Federation (page 18 of the Federation’s 21st Annual Report) concerning the forthcoming edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica has apparently given rise to a misunderstanding. We therefore wish to make it clear that it was far from our intention in the above-mentioned report to suggest that the Federation has exercised any influence whatever upon the editing of the Encyclopædia. Such a suggestion would be devoid of any vestige of foundation. The facts are that the Federation offered to the Editor of the Encyclopædia its assistance in checking statements of fact appearing in articles in the previous edition dealing with the Catholic Church in its historical, doctrinal, or theological aspects. This offer was accepted, and the Federation was thus enabled to draw attention to certain errors of date and other facts regarding the teaching and discipline of the Catholic Church. Beyond this the Federation has had no hand whatever in the preparation or editing of articles for the new edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica on whatever subject, and any suggestion to the contrary is, as we have said, without the slightest foundation. A. J., London, W.C.2.”

I have italicized the essential part of this singular message so that the reader will bear in mind that Catholic authorities gave the public their solemn assurance that they had requested—demanded might be a better word—only alterations of wrong dates and statements about the teaching and discipline of the Church.

Penitence is a familiar and beautiful practice in the Catholic world, but we common folk like to have truth even in penitence. The example I have already given of the suppression of material facts and a natural comment on them in regard to eunuch singers, and the entirely false impression conveyed by the sentences which Catholics substituted, gives the lie at once to this apology. Undisputed facts which are strictly relevant to an examination of Catholic claims have been suppressed. They have nothing to do with dates or the teaching and discipline of the Church. It is an axiom of Catholic moral theology that “suppression of the truth is a suggestion of untruth,” and the substituted passage goes beyond this. I propose to show that this introduction of a painfully familiar Catholic policy has been carried right through the Encyclopædia.

Naturally the immense majority of its articles do not in any way relate to the church, and I do not claim that I have compared every short notice or every sentence in longer articles in the 11th and 14th editions of the Britannica. Even these short explicit notices, referring to such matters as popes and saints, have been falsified, and I give a few examples. But I am mainly concerned with important alterations. There are still passages in the Encyclopædia which the Catholic clergy do not like. Writers who are still alive may have objected to the adulteration of their work, or the facts may be too notorious for the editors to permit interference. But I give here a mass of evidence of the corrupt use of the great power which the Catholic Church now has: a warning what the public may expect now that that Church has, through its wealth and numbers, secured this pernicious influence on publications, the press, the radio, and to an increasing extent on education and even the cinema.

CASTRATING THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

It will be useful to give first the outcome of a somewhat close survey, page by page, of the first few volumes of the Encyclopædia. More important—in their bearing on the Church—articles in later volumes commonly have the initial X at the close, which seems to be the cloak of the Catholic adulterator. This will enable any reader to compare for himself passages in the 11th and the 14th editions, but the conspirator shows his hand even in large numbers of short, especially biographical, notices. It is, of course, understood that the work had to be considerably abbreviated to accommodate new developments of science and life in the 14th edition, but when you find that the curtailing consists in suppressing an unpleasant judgment or a fact about a Pope while unimportant statements of fact are untouched, and when you find the life of a saintly man or the flattering appreciation of his work little affected while the life or work of a heretic is sacrificed, you have a just suspicion.

An example is encountered early in the first volume in the short notices of the Popes Adrian I and Adrian II. Adrian I was the Pope of Charlemagne’s time, and every historian knows that the emperor came, as he shows in his letters, to despise the Pope and to defy him on a point of doctrine; for at that time the use and veneration of statues in the churches was made a doctrinal issue between East and West. The notice of Adrian in the older edition of the Encyclopædia was one of those inexpert paragraphs by some man who knew nothing about the importance of the quarrel, but a priestly hand has untruthfully inserted in the new edition:

“The friendly relations between Pope and Emperor were not disturbed by the difference which arose between them on the question of the veneration of images.”

Here, instead of abbreviating, the editor gratuitously inserts new matter, and it is untruthful. The Pope, whose safety depended upon the favor of Charlemagne, said little, it is true, but at a time when “the veneration of images”—as historians persist in calling statues—was the greatest issue in the Church, Charlemagne put his own name to a book in which Roman practice and theory were denounced as sinful, the whole Gallican Church was got to support him, and the timid protests of the Pope were contemptuously ignored.

The touch in the notice of Pope Adrian II has just as little to do with dates and discipline and is just the suppression of a fact which the Church does not like. The real interest of the Pope is that he presided over the Church in the latter part of the 9th century, the time when it was sinking into its deepest degradation. The appalling coarseness of life is seen in the fact that the Pope’s daughter was abducted by the son of a bishop and brother of a leading cardinal, and when the Pope got the Emperor to send troops, he murdered them. The notice of the Pope in the 11th edition adds that “his (the noble abductor’s) reputation suffered but a momentary eclipse,” which is perfectly true, for the abducting family were high both in church and nobility and the Romans in large part supported them. But the sentence has been cut out of the new edition. Little touches of that sort, not always condensing the text but always—and generally untruthfully—in the interest of the Church, occur repeatedly.

Such articles as “Agnosticism” and “Atheism” did not concern the Catholic Church in particular and were left to more honest but hardly less bigoted clerical writers. I need say of them only that they reflect the cloudy ideas of some theologian and tell the reader no more about the situation in these matters today than if they had been written by a Hindu swami. A different procedure is found when we come to “Alban.” The old notice said that he is usually styled “the protomartyr of Britain,” and added “but it is impossible to determine with certainty whether he ever existed, as no mention of him occurs till the middle of the 6th century”; which is correct. But these zealots for correctness of dates and discipline have, in the new edition, turned him into an indisputably real saint and martyr. He is now “the first martyr of Britain” and all hints of dispute about his historicity are cut out.

We pass to “Albertus Magnus”—why an Encyclopædia in English should not say Albert the Great is not explained; possibly the epithet is less offensive to the eye in Latin—and this article is condensed (as the whole new edition had to be) in a peculiarly clerical manner. The original writer had never properly informed the reader that Albert was so much indebted to Aristotle for his “science” that he was known to Catholic contemporaries as “the Ape of Aristotle” and that he was apt to be so inaccurate that he described Plato (who lived a century before the Stoic school was founded) as a Stoic. These things are sacrificed in the sacred cause of abbreviation, but new compliments, such as that Bacon called Albert “the most noted of Christian philosophers,” are inserted to fill the gaps.

The article “Albigensians” is one in which a modern student would most surely expect a modern encyclopedia to replace the conventional old article by one in line with our historical knowledge. Instead of this we get a page article reduced to half a page, and this is done chiefly by cutting out 25 lines in which the older writer had honestly explained that the Pope turned the brutal Knights of France upon the Albigensians only when 20 years of preaching failed to make the least impression on them, and 10 lines showing what “vast inquests” of the Inquisition were still needed after years of slaughter by the Pope’s savage “crusaders.” We therefore recognize the anointed hand of the abbreviator. And it is clear that the editor or sub-editor cheated the public of a most important truth by entrusting this article to Catholic “correctors of dates and discipline.” We now fully realize the importance, from the angle of the history of civilization, of this brilliant but anti-Christian little civilization in the South of France (close to Arab Spain) and what Europe lost. Of the brutality of the massacre and the Pope’s dishonesty in engineering it the reader is, of course, given no idea, though these are found in the Pope’s extant letters.

Even such articles as that on “Alembert”—the famous French skeptic and scientist D’Alembert—seem to have been handed over to the clerical shearer, for the proper appreciation of his character and ability and his work against the Jesuits are the chief material that has been abbreviated, but we turn with more interest to the “Alexander” Popes. I need not say that anybody who expects an up-to-date account of the great Alexandrian schools of science and of the splendor of life under the early Ptolemies will be deeply disappointed, but it is chiefly the name of Pope Alexander VI which here catches the eye.

Catholics long ago abandoned their attempts to whitewash the historical figure of that amazingly erotic and unscrupulous Spaniard, and especially after the work of the Catholic historian Dr. L. Pastor, it is impossible to suggest outside the Sunday School that there has been any libeling of this Pope. What the clerical retouchers have mainly done is to remove sentences in which the older writer correctly, though only casually and incidentally, let the reader know that such a Pope was possible only because the Church was then extraordinarily corrupt. He admitted, for instance, that Alexander had been notoriously corrupt for years, as a cardinal, when he was elected Pope:

“Although ecclesiastical corruption was then at its height his riotous mode of life called down upon him a very severe reprimand from Pope Pius II.”

This is cut out, of course, though we still have the letter in which the Pope—himself a rake in his early years, by the way—describes the cardinal’s scandalous life. Cut out also (for abbreviation) is this passage:

“A characteristic instance of the corruption of the papal court is the fact that Borgia’s daughter Lucrezia lived with his mistress Giulia, who bore him a daughter, Laura, in 1492 (the year of his consecration as Pope).”

In short, while it would have elicited the scorn of historians to attempt to suppress all mention of Alexander’s mistresses and children, the article of the 11th edition, which was correct as far as it went, is so manipulated that the reader has no idea that the Cardinal was brazen in his conduct at the actual time of his election and entertained his mistress, who was painted on one of the walls of the Vatican Palace as the Virgin Mary, and his children in the “Sacred Palace”; and that this was due to the general sordid corruption of the Church. Sexual looseness was the least pernicious of Borgia’s vices, but where the old article noticed that his foreign policy was inspired only by concern to enrich his children and “for this object he was ready to commit any crime and to plunge all Italy into war,” this Catholic stickler for accuracy has cut it out.

Soon after Alexander we come to Antonelli. This man was Cardinal Secretary of State to Pope Gregory XVI and Pope Pius IX, who is counted a saint by American Catholics. He was the son of a poor woodcutter and he died a millionaire: he left $20,000,000—leaving a bastard daughter, a countess, to fight greedy relatives for it. He had refused to take priestly orders because he wanted freedom. His greed, looseness, and complete indifference to the vile condition of the Papal States were known to everybody. In the 11th edition we read of him:

“At Antonelli’s death the Vatican finances were found to be in disorder, with a deficit of 45,000,000 lire. His personal fortune, accumulated during office, was considerable and was bequeathed almost entirely to his family. . . . His activity was directed almost exclusively to the struggle between the Papacy and the Italian Risorgimento, the history of which is comprehensible only when the influence exercised by his unscrupulous grasping and sinister personality is fully taken into account.”

The last part of this now reads “is comprehensible only when his unscrupulous influence is fully taken into account.” Apart from the one word “unscrupulous,” the reader is totally misled as to his character.

The article on Aquinas was already written favorably to the Church and only a few light touches were needed. But the eagle eye caught a sentence, perfectly accurate but offensive to Catholics, in the short notice of the noblest figure of the 12th century, Arnold of Brescia. It said:

“At the request of the Pope he was seized by order of the Emperor . . . and hanged.”

Out goes the reference to the Pope, who had tried for years to catch Arnold before he acted on a perjured passport from the Emperor; and no idea is given of the remarkable position of the premature democrat in the history of European thought.

More amusing is the manipulation of the notice of “Arthur” of Britain. In the 11th edition he is frankly presented to the reader as a myth, as the popular conception of him certainly is. All that we can say with any confidence is that there seems to have been a sort of captain named Arthur in the ragged military service of one of the half-civilized and wholly brutal British “kings” after the departure of the Romans. In this new compendium of modern scholarship (now sponsored by the University of Chicago) Arthur has been converted into an undisputed and highly respectable reality; a “King of Britain” who led his Christian armies against the pagan Anglo-Saxons. And this is done on the authority of a monk who wrote two and a half centuries later! There is no proof that this fine achievement is due to the Catholic Federation, but just as detectives look for the trademark of a particular burglar when a bank has been robbed. . . .

“Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria” becomes, by the same process, “Athanasius the Great, saint, and bishop of Alexandria,” and so important to us moderns that, in spite of the needs of space for new thought, the long article (by a cleric) is lengthened in the new edition. The short article on Atheism, which follows closely upon it, is, as I said, quite worthless. A British royal chaplain writes on it as if it were a point in dispute in some Pacific Island, instead of a burning question of our time. He seems to have been totally unaware of, or indifferent to, the fact that a few years earlier the majority of American scientists had (in Leuba) declared themselves Atheists, and that in the seven years before he wrote his article tens of millions of folk, from Annam across Europe to Chile, had abandoned the churches to embrace Atheism. Naturally a learned staff which announces in the preface to the Encyclopædia that it considers that the wicked materialistic philosophy of the 19th century has been slain by the new science thinks such things beneath its notice.

Early in the B’s we get the same light touches of the clerical brush. The long and appreciative article on the great jurist and Atheist Jeremy Bentham—that he was an outspoken Atheist is, of course, not stated—one of the most powerful idealists of the post-Napoleonic period, is mercilessly cut, while the old notices of the insignificant Pope Benedicts remain. At least, I notice only one cut. It is said in the old article that Benedict IX, perhaps the vilest man who ever wore the tiara—his almost immediate successor spoke of his “rapes, murders, and other unspeakable acts”—“appears to have died impenitent.” That is cut out. It saves so much space.

A long article is inserted in the new edition on “Birth Control”: a subject that had no article in the old edition. This consists of the findings of a series of conferences on the subject, mostly overshadowed by church influence. These fill several pages while the elementary grounds for seeing the necessity of it—the rapid multiplication of population in modern times—are barely noticed. A section on the religious attitude is written by the Rev. Sir James Marchant, a parson of the Church of England who is fanatically Catholic in sex matters. It begins with the plump untruth that “it is now recognized that the objections on religious grounds to birth control must be fully heard,” and it consists mainly of a sort of sermon by the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, whose views are “shared by many other religious communities.” We should like to hear of one which as a body has condemned birth control. Then the mysterious X appears at last with a tendentious summary of the whole article—against birth control. Strange stuff for a modern encyclopedia.

Even the article on Bismarck is retouched, mainly in the section which describes his great struggle with the Catholics of Germany, and the article “Body and Mind” is as modern as the Athanasian Creed. No evidence appears that this new article, so profoundly important in view of the advanced condition of American psychology—four manuals out of five refuse to admit “mind”—was written by a Catholic, so I will be content to say that it is an affront to American science. Later appears another new article, “Bolshevism.” But there was, naturally, no article with that title in the 11th edition, so that the Catholic censor knew nothing about it until it appeared in print. Its accuracy and coldness must have pained him. It is written by Professor Laski.

I say the Catholic censor, but there was obviously teamwork on both sides of the Atlantic, though Gildea is the only sophist mentioned on the American side. And the next item to catch the clerical eye and raise the clerical blood pressure was the fair article on “Giordano Bruno” in the 11th edition. You can almost see the fury with which the three columns are reduced to less than a column in the 14th edition, and this is done by cutting out about 100 lines of sober appreciation of the great ex-monk and scholar’s ability and character. Cutting out flowers is not enough. A new paragraph informs the innocent reader:

“Apart from his disdainful, boasting nature and his attack on contemporary Christianity, the chief causes of Bruno’s downfall were his rejection of the Aristotelian astronomy for the Copernican . . . and his pantheistic tendencies.”

The undisputed truth is that he was burned alive by the Papacy, which came to a corrupt agreement with the Venetians in order to get hold of him and satisfy its bitter hatred of the critic.

“Buddha and Buddhism” are mangled in the new edition in the most extraordinary fashion. Twelve pages of sound, useful matter are cut down to three, as if Buddhism had meantime died in the East and ceased to be of any interest to westerners. Between the publication of the two editions of the Encyclopædia a good deal has been written on the creed of Buddha, and it is quite generally agreed by experts on the religion or on India that he was an Atheist. Not a single word is said about the question, and the reader is left at the mercy of every pamphleteer who talks about the “religious genius” of the man.

More definitely and recognizably Catholic is the tampering with the notice of St. Catherine. There are two saints of that name, Catherine of Alexandria and Catherine of Siena, and the 11th edition rightly said:

“Of the former history has nothing to tell . . . that St. Catherine actually existed there is no evidence to disprove, and it is possible that some of the elements in her legend are due to confusion with the story of Hypatia.”

This was moderate enough. We do not have to “disprove” the existence of martyrs, and the supposed evidence in favor of her historicity is now rejected even by some Catholic experts on martyrs, while the details are often comical and the general idea is certainly based upon Hypatia. Yet in this severely examined and up-to-date compendium of knowledge we find the first sentence of the above changed to: “Of St. Catherine of Alexandria history has little to tell.” The rest is cut out and we are brazenly told that “her actual existence is generally admitted.” The article on Catherine of Siena was already inaccurately favorable to Catholic claims in the 11th edition, so it was allowed to stand. The masterful Sienese nun had nothing like the political influence ascribed to her, and it was not she but the threats of the Romans that brought the Popes back from Avignon to Rome.

In the article “Church History,” to which in the new edition the ominous X is appended, there are just slight changes here and there in the generally orthodox article. The treatment is as far removed from modern thought as Alaska is from Florida. It is much the same with the string of Popes who had the name Clement. The reader is still not told that many historians refuse to admit “Clement I” as the first of the Popes—he is completely ignored in the Letter of the Romans to the Corinthians of the year 96 A.D.—and many of the other Clements, who were notoriously of disreputable character, are discreetly retouched, though the earlier notices let them off lightly. Clement V, an adventurer who sold himself to the French King on vile conditions in order to get the Papacy, has the words “in pursuance of the King’s wish he summoned the Council of Vienne” (to hold a trial of the monstrous vices of his predecessor and the still more scandalous vices of the Knights Templar, as we shall see) changed to: “Fearing that the state would proceed independently against the alleged heresies he summoned the Council of Vienne”; which is one sort of abbreviation and leaves the reader entirely ignorant of the character of the Pope. Clement VI, a notoriously sensuous and dissipated man, is left in his Catholic robes. Of Clement VII the earlier edition said: “Though free from the grosser vices of his predecessors he was a man of narrow outlook and interests.” The whole of this is cut out, suppressing both his vices and those of his predecessors. Clement XIV is said to have suppressed the Jesuits only because he thought it necessary for the peace of the Church. This is a familiar Jesuit claim and an audacious lie. In the bull of condemnation Clement endorses all the charges against the Jesuits.

The article “Conclave” sounds like one that was ripe for the shearer, but even in the 11th edition it was written by a priest. And it had a Jesuit touch that the censor is careful not to correct. As the leading authority it names a Catholic work which, in any case, few have any chance to consult, while it does not mention the standard of Papal Conclaves, that of Petrucelli della Gattina (four volumes of amazing disclosures), of which there is now an English version (V. Petrie’s Triple Crown, 1935). But of little tricks of this, especially in pressing “sound” authorities upon the reader and concealing from him that there are good critical works that he ought to read, there is so much that it would be tiresome to trace it all. We will consider larger matters.

THE TAMING OF HISTORY

The short and worthless note under “Chivalry” in the old Encyclopædia would, in any new edition that frankly aimed to give the reader summaries of modern knowledge, have been replaced by some account of the present general agreement of historians that the alleged Age of Chivalry (1100–1400 A.D.) is sheer myth. No leading historical expert on France, Germany, England, Italy, or Spain during that period recognizes it. They all describe such a generally sordid character in the class of knights and nobles, particularly in what are considered by romantic writers the specific virtues of chivalry—chastity and the zeal for justice—that the student of general history feels justified in concluding that, on our modern idea of chivalry, this was precisely the most unchivalrous section of civilized history. Of this truth not a syllable is given, not even a hint that the myth is questioned. So editors, moral essayists, and preachers, who take their history from the Encyclopædia, continue to shame our age with reminders of the glorious virtues of the later Middle Ages. However, we will return to this when we come to “Knighthood” and “Troubadours,” where we shall find a little more satisfaction.

The article on “Confucius” in the 11th edition was written by a Protestant missionary, Dr. Legge, and he was not only a fine scholar of Chinese but a singularly honest type of missionary. In the 14th edition his excellent five pages are cut to three. One recognizes the need for abbreviation, though when one finds a four-page article on Falconry, which is really rather rare today, 16 pages on football, etc., one feels that the work of condensing might have been done differently. However, in the case of a great Atheist like Confucius, an encyclopedia that would please the clergy must not pay too many compliments, and the Catholic X, who probably knows as little about Chinese as about biochemistry, valiantly cuts the work of the expert to three pages, adding his X to Legge’s initials at the foot. One illustration of the way in which it is done will suffice. Confucius so notoriously rejected belief in gods and spirits that Legge’s statement of this has to remain. But there is one point on which Christians hold out desperately. Legge told the truth about it, and X cuts it out.

It is whether Confucius anticipated Christ by many centuries in formulating the Golden Rule, or, to meet the better-informed apologists, whether Confucius recommended it only in a negative form. As nothing is more common, and probably has been since the Stone Age, than to hear folk say, “Do as you would be done by,” or some such phrase, which is the Golden Rule in fireside English, the fuss about it is amusing. However, the champions of Christ’s unique moral genius will have it that Confucius gave it only in the negative form: “What you do not like when done to yourself, do not do to others.” As the Christian decalogue consists almost entirely of negations, that is not bad. But in the 11th edition, Legge goes on to explain that when a disciple asked the master if it could be expressed in a word, he used a compound Chinese word which means “As Heart” (or Reciprocity), and Legge says that he conceived the rule in its most positive and most comprehensive form. The Rev. Mr. X suppresses this to save space and inserts this pointless sentence:

“It has been said that he only gave the rule in a negative form to give force to a positive statement.”

So the preacher and pamphleteer continue to inform folk on the authority of J. Legge in the Encyclopædia Britannica that Confucius knew the Golden Rule only in the inferior negative form.

There was no need to let X loose with his little hatchet upon the article “Constantine.” It was, like “Charlemagne,” “Justinian,” and most such articles, already subservient to piety and an outrage on historical truth. Constantine’s character is falsified by suppressing facts. For instance, in profane (and ancient Roman) history you will read that Constantine was driven from Rome by the scorn of the Romans because he had had his wife and his son murdered, probably in a fit of jealousy. Here his quitting Rome and founding Constantinople is represented as a matter of high strategy and a care for the interests of religion. Not a hint about the “execution” of his wife, bastard son, and nephew. The Romans compared him to Nero.

In 20 pages on “Crime” we do not get any statistical information whatever about the relation of crime to religious education, which after all is of some interest to our age, so, skipping a few minor matters, we come to “Crusades.” Again the article in the old Encyclopædia was so devout and misleading that X could not improve upon it. It admits that Europe had become rather boorish owing to the barbaric invasions, but claims that it did provide the Church with the grand force of knighthood to use against the wicked Moslem:

“The institution of chivalry represents such a clerical consecration, for ideal ends and noble purposes, of the martial impulses which the Church had endeavored to check. . . .”

And so on. A lie in every syllable. The knights of Europe were, with rare exceptions, erotic brutes—their ladies as bad—as all authoritative historians describe them. The Pope—his words are preserved—dangled the loot of the highly civilized East before their eyes in summoning the First Crusade; and the story, almost from beginning to end, is a mixture of superstition, greed, and savagery. The only faint reference to the modern debunking of the traditional fairy tale is:

“When all is said, the Crusades remain a wonderful and perpetually astonishing act in the great drama of human life.”

Even a cleric must be 150 years old and ignorant of history to write honestly like this article.

Pope “Saint” Damasus I retains his nimbus in the new great Encyclopædia, though he is now known to have been an unscrupulous Spanish adventurer and, as contemporary priests said, a “tickler of matrons’ ears.” A few remarks that were made in the short article in the 11th edition about the incredible massacres at his election and the impeachment of him later (for adultery) in the civil court are cut out. But while “Damasus” is abbreviated thus by cutting out references to his misdeeds, the article “Darwin” is shortened by suppressing whole paragraphs of Professor Poulton’s fine appreciation of his character and work and the world-honors he received. “David” is in this modern Encyclopædia treated as much more important than Darwin, and, while even theologians now often reject him as a myth or a dim shapeless figure, almost the whole biblical account of him is given as history.

But I have overlooked the short article on the “Dark Age,” which is nauseous. There was no article in the 11th edition on it, so an obscure professor at a third-rate British university has been commissioned to write one. The phrase was, he says, “formerly used to cover the whole period between the end of classical civilization and the revival of learning in the 15th century.” Bunk. No historian extended it beyond the end of the 11th century. In short, he copies certain American professors of history who cater to Catholics and who give no evidence that they can even read medieval literature. The period is only dark “owing to the insufficiency of the historical evidence,” yet “great intellectual work was done in unfavorable conditions.” No one except an expert today reads any book written between 420 and 1100 A.D.; and if that doesn’t mean a Dark Age, we wonder what the word means. The writer does not even know that it was “the Father of Catholic History,” Cardinal Baronius, who coined the phrase.

Even worse, from the historical angle, is the article “Democracy.” It is said that “there was no room” for the idea of democracy in the Dark Age, but “Christianity, with its doctrine of brotherhood and its sense of love and pity, had brought into being an idea unknown to the pagan world: the idea of man’s inherent dignity and importance.” We resent this dumping of the sermons of priests into a modern encyclopedia, but it is even worse when the emancipation of the serfs and the granting of charters to cities are traced to that source. The purely economic causes of those developments are treated in every modern manual. What is worse, the writer conceals, or does not know, that when the democratic aspiration did at length appear in Italy, the Papacy fought it truculently for two centuries. I find only one scrap of virtue in the article. American Catholics had not yet invented the myth that Jefferson got the idea of democracy from the Jesuit Suarez, so it makes no appearance here; but the writer, not anticipating it, says:

“The revolt of the colonies was not, strictly speaking, inspired by a belief in democracy, though it resulted in the establishment of a republic.”

How many times have I pointed that out against the Jesuits!

The article “Education” is another beautiful piece of work—from the Catholic angle. The historical part of it was written for the earlier edition by a strictly orthodox Christian schoolmaster, Welton, and was a sheer travesty of the history of education as it is now written in all manuals; yet the article in the new edition is signed “K and CB” (Cloudsley Brereton, a British inspector of schools with not the least authority, but with the virtue of faith). In point of fact, it is Welton’s original article a little condensed but little altered. They could not well have made it worse from the historical point of view. The abridgment has cleared away most of the few good points about Roman education, because any reference to the system of universal free schooling in Roman days clashes with the clerical slogan, which is the theme of this article, that the new religion “gave the world schools.” “It was,” says the writer, “into this decaying civilization that Christianity brought new life.” Although only a few catechetical schools are mentioned, the reader is given the impression that the new religion inspired a great growth of schools in an illiterate world. The undisputed truth is that by 350 A.D., before Christianity was established by force, there were free primary and secondary schools everywhere, and by 450 A.D. they had all perished; that in 350 the majority of the workers were literate, and by 450—and for centuries afterward—probably not 1 percent of them could read. Of course it is all put down to the barbarians. “Most of the public schools disappeared, and such light of learning as there was was kept burning in the monasteries and was confined to priests and monks.” The monks were, as I have repeatedly shown from Christian writers from Augustine to Benedict, mostly an idle, loose, and vagrant class, and the few regular houses later established were interested only in religious education. Pope Gregory I forbade the clergy to open secular schools.

The article proceeds on these totally false lines through the whole of the Middle Ages. The work of Charlemagne, which is now acknowledged to have been paltry and to have perished at his death, is grossly misrepresented, and the fact that he was inspired in what educational zeal he had by the school system of the anti-Papal Lombards is concealed. Not a word is said about the Lombard system. It is almost as bad in explaining why at last—six centuries after the Papacy took over Roman rule—schools did begin to spread. There is just one line of reference to the Spanish Arabs who inspired it by their restoration of the Roman system of free general education. Not a word is said about the fact that in Arab Spain there were millions of books, finely written on paper and bound, while no abbey in Europe had more than a few hundred parchments. The origin of the universities is similarly misrepresented. It is all covered by this monstrous statement:

“On the whole it may be concluded that in medieval times the provision of higher instruction was adequate to the demand and that relatively to the culture of the time the mass of the people were by no means sunk in brutish ignorance.”

“Brutish” is, of course, part of the trick. Read it simply as a denial that the mass of the people were totally illiterate, and then ask yourself how it is that, even after all the work of the Jesuits and the Protestants, still by the middle of the 18th century between 80 and 90 percent of the people of Europe were illiterate.* The writer is so reckless in clerical myths that he even says that the Age of Chivalry greatly helped:

* I don’t agree with McCabe on that. “Protestant nations generally have higher literacy rates than Catholic ones, with studies indicating that countries composed entirely of Protestants have literacy rates nearly 20 percentile points higher than those that are all Catholic. This trend is attributed to Protestantism’s encouragement of direct reading of scripture, which fostered greater literacy and education.” – Source: https://novellearning.blog/2022/09/05/protestantism-raised-literacy/

“The education of chivalry aimed at fitting the noble youth to be a worthy knight, a just and wise master, and a prudent manager of an estate.”

You might just as well pretend that Cinderella is a true account of certain events in the Middle Ages. The whole long article which is signed X is an outrage when it is presented to the 20th century. The falsehood is carried on over the Reformation period and into the supposed account of the real beginning of education of the people in the 19th century.

I should have to write another encyclopedia if I proposed to analyze the hundreds of articles in the Britannica which are, like this, just tissues of clerical false claims. It might be said that, like the religious literature in which these myths still flourish, the Encyclopædia has to cater to the religious public. That plea is in itself based upon an anachronism and on untruth. There is abundant evidence that today the majority of the reading public, whatever they think about God, do not accept the Christian religion.* In Britain and France the clergy frankly acknowledge this, and it is concealed only by sophistry in America.

* I sure don’t agree with that. Research tells me 60% of university graduates in America today call themselves Christians. The majority of the “reading public” reads the Bible.

But I am not suggesting that an encyclopedia that professes to have been rewritten to bring it into harmony with modern life and thought ought to exclude religious writers. I say only that when they are entrusted with articles which are wholly or in part historical, they must conform to modern historical teaching. These articles, judged not by atheistic but by ordinary historical works, are tissues of untruth; and a good deal of this untruth, the part which chiefly concerns me here, has been inserted in the new edition by the Catholic “revisers” who lurk behind the signature X.

As this mark X is in the new edition added to the initials of Mark Pattison at the foot of the article “Erasmus,” we look for adulterations. As, however, the original article softened the heresies of the great Dutch humanist, there is not much change. Just a few little touches make him less important and nearer to orthodoxy, and passages reflecting on the foul state of the Church at the time are excised. With the subject “Evolution,” on the other hand, no modern editor would dare to allow a Catholic writer to insert his fantastic views in a publication that professes to be up-to-date in science. But a place is found for reaction. The British Professor Lloyd Morgan is commissioned to write for the new edition a special article on the evolution of the mind, and it is based upon the eccentric theory of “emergent evolution” worked out by him in support of religion, which was dying when he wrote the article and is now quite dead in the scientific world. Next is added a section on ethics and evolution by Sir Arthur Thomson, a Unitarian whose peculiar twists of the facts of science to suit his mysticism have no place whatever outside religious literature.

The article “Galileo” would be examined eagerly by most critics for evidence of this clerical “reviser.” But even in the 11th edition the article was written by a Catholic astronomer, Miss Agnes Clerke, and X seems to have been given the task of cutting her five pages down to two (while 16 are devoted to football); that gives him opportunities. He leaves untouched the statement that at the first condemnation Galileo was ordered to write no more on the subject and “he promised to obey,” which is seriously disputed and rests on poor evidence. Both Catholic writers refuse to insert the actual sentence of condemnation, which pledged the Roman Church to the position that it is “formal heresy” to say that the earth travels round the sun. When he comes to the second condemnation, X suppresses Miss Clerke’s hint that Galileo had ridiculed the Pope in his Dialogue, which was the main motive of the Pope’s vindictive action, and attributes the procedure to Galileo’s supposed breaking of his promise. He saves a precious line by cutting out Miss Clerke’s perfectly true statement that he was detained in the palace of the Inquisition. In short, it is now a sound Catholic version of the condemnation of Galileo from first to last, and it does not warn the reader or take into account in the least the fact that since Miss Clerke wrote her article, Favaro has secured and published (in Italian) new and most important documents on the case, and they have made the character and conduct of the Pope more contemptible than ever.

The fine eight-page article on Gibbon by the learned Professor Bury in the earlier edition could not expect to escape. Space must be saved, though one would hardly realize this when one finds 60 pages devoted to Geometry, which no one ever learns from an encyclopedia. The reviser condenses the six and a half pages of Gibbon’s life and character to one page and then sublimely adds his X to Bury’s initials as the joint authors of the article. You can guess how much of Gibbon’s greatness is left.

On the other hand, the notice of Pope “St.” Gregory I, the Pope who forbade the opening of schools and made the Papacy the richest landowner and slave-owner in Europe by persuading the rich that the end of the world was at hand and they had better pass on their property to the church, remains as fragrant as ever in the new edition. So does the account of Gregory VII (Hildebrand), the fanatic who violently imposed celibacy upon the clergy (impelling mobs to attack them and their wives), who put the crown on Papal Fascism, who used forgeries and started wars in the interest of the Church, who hired the savage Normans to fall upon the Romans (who then drove him into exile), etc. Naturally, the modern reader must not know these things.

The article “Guilds” in the 11th edition, by Dr. Gross, is the source of the monstrous Catholic claim that the Church inspired these medieval corporations of the workers. It is preserved in all its untruthfulness in the new edition. After a short and disdainful notice of various profane theories of the origin of the Guilds, he says:

“No theory of origin can be satisfactory which ignores the influence of the Christian Church.”

It was, as usual, the sublime and unique Christian doctrine of the brotherhood of man; yet this had been the cardinal principle of Stoicism and Epicureanism 300 years B.C. The statement is, in the mouth of an expert on the Guilds, breathtaking in its audacity. The documents preserved in the Migne (Catholic) collection show clearly that the Guilds were pagan in origin—they were most probably relics of the old Roman trade unions—and that the Church fought them truculently for 100 years after their appearance in Germany. Gross shows that he has read these documents. He says that the Guilds were suspected of political conspiracy and opposed on that ground. On the contrary, they were denounced as pagan orgies (suppers like those of the Roman unions, at which priests got drunk and behaved improperly). X, of course, leaves this pious screed in all its purity.

(To be continued.)