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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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If the Inquisition was started to prevent witch hunts, then why is it that we now conflate Inquisitors with witch-hunters and torturers?

Because the actual history is messy and embarrassing to every-one.

The early medieval church was clear enough that belief in witch-craft-as-real-magic was superstition left over from the bad old days (think 800 AD). Witch-craft-as-baseless-superstition was heresy and subject to punishment, but you could get in trouble both ways. You committed heresy if you put yourself forward as a witch who could really do the magic. You committed heresy if you tried to protect society against some-one who you asserted was a threat because they could really do the magic.

Then, starting around 1400 AD (but slowly at first) mankind regressed, becoming afraid of witchcraft-as-real-magic.

This is obviously embarrassing to the Catholic Church, who knew the truth and lost it. But it is embarrassing to Enlightenment thinkers too. First, the deterioration happens late; the early stirrings of modernity are making people less rational. Second, the Enlightenment could have taken witch burning as showing the fragility of human knowledge and a case study in losing truths once known. But instead it just ignored the real and troubling story in favour of bashing the Church as always in error.

Recall the story that Columbus met opposition to sailing West to China from people who believed that the Earth was flat. It originated in a "biography" that changed the story to make it more dramatic. Then anti-Catholics took it up, because the flat earth myth was a convenient stick to beat the Catholics. There is a problem with anti-religious campaigners just making stuff up.

I find this disillusioning. As a young man I believed that the 18th Century Enlightenment guys were the good guys who were opposing the Catholic Church (who were the bad guys because they just made stuff up). Now I find that every-one is just making stuff up. And twisting the witch craft story to bash Catholics isn't the only example, so I cannot excuse it as "just once".

I'll caveat that this is a little more complicated than the quick summary -- you can find some Catholics being very skeptical and treating the accusers as heretics into the height of the early modern witch trials, and there's a controversial claim of an English witch-execution as early as the 900s. It's not clear how much the earlier Church was free of witch-hunting among the laity because they didn't believe in it (or were told to not believe in it), and how much because the records weren't made to start with.

Hunting heretics/Muslims/Jews gets conflated with hunting witches.

Because the sales pitch of the inquisition wasn't "we will stop witch hunts", it was "we will do witch hunts the proper way". Granted though, this did reduce insane witchery nonsense substantially, and it probably was the most pragmatic way of doing so.

Voltaire and anti-Catholic propaganda pervasive from the French Enlightenment through the Spanish Civil War, mostly.

I would have thought that Britain and the Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda, considerably preceeding the French Enlightenment, would have played an even larger part.

Oh sure. I'm just less familiar with that than with the French stuff.

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