I am reading a historical fiction book about Katherine of Aragon called “The Constant Princess”. One statement about Catholicism during Katherine’s time caught my eye: Katherine is yearning for a Moorish doctor for her husband, Prince Arthur, and decries the provincial English physicians. They are not as learned because, as the Church taught, “knowledge is a heresy”.
That’s a stupid calumny. Has the author ever heard of the Complutensian Polyglot, one of the great achievements of Renaissance Biblical scholarship? It was produced by Spanish Catholic scholars at a Catholic university at approximately the time she’s writing about, and the chief editor was (if I remember rightly) an Inquisitor, Cardinal Ximenes!
But my question remains: was there ever an understanding among Catholics that we were not to question, not to pursue knowledge?
There have certainly been anti-intellectual currents in Catholicism, but they have never dominated or been officially enforced, and they were always selective (i.e., certain kinds of knowledge might be frowned on). After about the 12th century, these currents were swamped by a wave of intellectual activity–medieval Catholicism invented the university system, for goodness’ sake!
Catholicism did historically reserve the right to declare certain ideas wrong (condemning not questions but incorrect answers), and it did forbid the faithful to read certain books without special permission (particularly from the sixteenth century up to Vatican II, during which time there was an official “Index”–but the general idea that you shouldn’t read certain books unless you really had to is older than the Index and is found in Orthodoxy and some forms of conservative Protestantism as well). So it’s certainly true that the Catholic Church has put some limits on intellectual activity, but this was never with the idea of declaring certain questions off limits or of curtailing intellectual activity per se. Rather, the idea was that the search for knowledge would be facilitated if you followed the Church’s guidelines, because that way you wouldn’t waste time chasing down false trails!
The idea that Catholicism is or ever has been (on the whole, at least since the 12th century) anti-intellectual is simply laughable. It’s one of those easy slanders that people repeat smugly without bothering to stir a muscle to find out the truth.
Furthermore, it’s not true that Moorish science (and other forms of intellectual activity) was that far ahead of Christendom in the early 16th century. That had been the case in the earlier Middle Ages, but by this point Christians had if anything begun to pull ahead.
Ms. Gregory simply doesn’t know what she is talking about here.
In Christ,
Edwin
