You Could Look It Up (62 page)

The planners resolved to embark on their encyclopedia at a meeting on December 8, 1904. They found models in a few comparable works, including the recent
Jewish Encyclopedia
(12 vols., 1901–6). On January 11, 1905, five editors—all Catholic educators with editorial experience—came together: Latin professor and CUNY librarian Charles G. Hebermann, Catholic University philosophy professor Edward A. Pace,
Catholic World
editor Condé B. Pallen, Catholic University professor of church history the Rt. Rev. Thomas J. Shahan, and
Messenger
editor John J. Wynne. The German-born Hebermann took the helm. The
team gathered on Sixteenth Street in New York City, the offices of
The Messenger
, and over the next few years met a total of a hundred thirty-four times to plan the encyclopedia and monitor its progress.

They signed a contract on February 25, 1905, and issued a specimen of their planned encyclopedia containing the text of the preface and a few sample entries and illustrations.
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Printing was to be overseen by the Robert Appleton Company—even though there was no such company at the time. The publisher was incorporated in February 1905 specifically to print
The Catholic Encyclopedia
, and that was the only job it handled.

This project, unlike so many, moved at a brisk clip. The first volume,
Aachen
–
Assize
, appeared in March 1907, just two years after work began, and the final volumes of the main text, covering
Simony
–
Tournely
and
Tournon
–
Zwirner
, followed five years after that, right on time. A master index was added in 1914. It took less than a decade to get from the initial meeting to the last volume, a pace that puts many other reference editors to shame. As is only fitting for a work on Roman Catholic doctrine,
The Catholic Encyclopedia
received a thumbs-up from the Church: Remy Lafort issued the
nihil obstat
, permitting it to be printed, and Archbishop John Murphy Farley issued the imprimatur.

The
Encyclopedia
makes no pretense to treating most subjects even-handedly: this was an avowedly Catholic book. Look up a term like
sola scriptura
, the Protestant notion that reading the Bible unaided is enough for salvation, and the
Catholic Encyclopedia
will explain that “The belief in the Bible as the sole source of faith is unhistorical, illogical, fatal to the virtue of faith, and destructive of unity.” Look up
Reformation
in
Britannica
(1911) and you will read that it was “the religious and political revolution of the 16th century, of which the immediate result was the partial disruption of the Western Catholic Church and the establishment of various national and territorial churches.” For the
Catholic Encyclopedia
, though, it was “the religious movement which … while ostensibly aiming at an internal renewal of the Church, really led to a great revolt against it, and an abandonment of the principal Christian beliefs.” To be fair,
Britannica
was not always a model of impartiality. In
Britannica
, the entry for
confession
starts with an overview of the place of confession in Judaism, then says that “In the Gospels confession is
scarcely mentioned.” A history of bitter controversy among early Christians follows, riddled with contradictions and scandals and petty rivalries.
Britannica
gives a condescending account of the origins of the Catholic sacrament, noting that “the constant repetition of confession and reconciliation, together with the fact that the most tender consciences would be the most anxious for the assurance of forgiveness, led to the practice being considered a normal part of the Christian life.” Contemporary Catholic practice is brushed off, suggesting that even the priests do not take the idea too seriously: “As confession is now administered in the Roman Church, the disciplinary penance is often little more than nominal, the recitation of a psalm or the like.” Thus it is not hard to see where the charge of “anti-Catholic bias” came from.

In
The Catholic Encyclopedia
, the reader is told that “Penance is a sacrament of the New Law instituted by Christ in which forgiveness of sins committed after baptism is granted through the priest’s absolution to those who with true sorrow confess their sins and promise to satisfy for the same.” In discussing the Inquisition,
Britannica
invokes the terms “reign of terror,” “burning at the stake,” “terrible measures of repression,” “massacre,” and “persecution”; the
Catholic Encyclopedia
explains that “Christian Europe was so endangered by heresy … that the Inquisition seemed to be a political necessity” and says that the many deaths were merely “the occasional executions of heretics [that] must be ascribed partly to the arbitrary action of individual rulers, … and in no wise to ecclesiastical law or the ecclesiastical authorities.”

Not all the entries are so parti pris, and most of the encyclopedia is learned and balanced. On subjects that did not prompt Protestant-Catholic quarrels—entries such as
Kabbala
and
oratorio
and
dome
and
Septuagint
—
The Catholic Encyclopedia
is a superb source for everyone. Many biographical entries—on popes, bishops, priests, even minor abbots and scholars—and historical entries are models of clarity and sometimes without rival even today, more than a century after they were written. Of course, on questions of Catholic doctrine and tradition—
faith, rule of
;
Purgatory
;
natural law
;
extreme unction
—there is no better place to turn for official policy. Even entries on subjects with which we might expect the Church to be uncomfortable—
evolution
,
Galileo
,
Copernicus
—are often balanced and frank.

Most Catholics were happy with the encyclopedia, but some critics emerged. The United States was not friendly to Roman Catholics in the 1910s. Only about 16 percent of Americans were Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant United States, and many of them were immigrants from what many considered “undesirable” countries—Ireland and Italy above all. In the 1920s, the recently refounded Ku Klux Klan had Roman Catholics high on their list of enemies. A legal struggle therefore ensued over whether the U.S. Constitution’s separation of church and state permitted public libraries to spend money on
The Catholic Encyclopedia
. Virtually no one had complained about public money buying works that reflected a Protestant worldview, but nativist bigotry viewed Roman Catholicism as a particular threat. The
Encyclopedia
triumphed in the lawsuits, and it remains a triumph as a monumental work of scholarship.

Not all doctrine is grounded in religious belief. Noah Webster’s dictionaries and spellers, for instance, were all about a different kind of doctrine, one grounded in American nationalism. Legal compilations such as the
Code Napoléon
(1804) were both reference sources and definitive statements, in this case of the emperor’s conception of the law. In 1839–40, Pierre Leroux and Jean Reynaud served up their own variety of doctrinal document in their three-volume
Encyclopédie nouvelle
, a party-line socialist account of the contemporary world.

One of the most engaging of the doctrinal reference books, though, came out of a nation-state that did not even exist when Webster, Napoleon, Leroux, and Reynaud were writing. On July 17, 1918, Czar Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, was executed. Not long afterward, in December 1922, the Russian Empire collapsed and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics took its place. A new nation had come into being.

Reference books abounded in czarist Russia. The
Dictionary of the Russian Academy
appeared in six parts in St. Petersburg from 1789 to 1794, with editions through the nineteenth century. Although German and French encyclopedias were popular in Russia, local versions could also be had. Late czarist Russia divided the encyclopedic field with two
works bearing the same title:
Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar
, or “encyclopedic dictionary.” One, based on the German
Konversations-Lexikon
published by Brockhaus, came to be known as the
Brockhaus-Efron
; the other took the name of the two brothers who published it,
Granat
.

After the Russian Revolution, the works of the previous regime became deeply suspect. They reflected an old-fashioned conception of the world and had to be replaced. Since reference books often help to create a coherent national and cultural identity, the new USSR demanded a new set of reference works to cement its identity. More than that: the Russian Revolution was not only a political revolution but an intellectual one as well, operating on the premise that society ran on different principles than the world had assumed. New models of economics, history, linguistics, religion, even evolutionary biology were introduced. Dialectical materialism was the order of the day, and Marxism-Leninism was the lens through which the entire world was to be seen: the editors of the Soviet encyclopedias said as much in their prefaces.

Through the Soviet period, the
Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia
(
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
) was the most important work of general
reference. The publication history is notoriously complicated. The first edition was begun in 1926, with four volumes appearing that year. The volumes came out serially, but not in alphabetical order. By the time it was finished, its sixty-five volumes, 65,000 articles, 12,000 illustrations, and 1,000 maps covered a tremendous range of subjects, virtually all of them seen through a Marxist-Leninist lens. The fifteen-page entry for
encyclopedia
, for example, features a prominent tribute to Diderot and d’Alembert, who are credited with sparking the French Revolution—explicitly identified as a precursor to the Russian Revolution.
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The
Entsiklopediia
was forward looking. It was a new era, and the sooner the past was forgotten, the better. All of Russian history from the beginning to 1917 got three pages of text; the entry on the Russian Soviet Federated Republic got a hundred twenty. Recent accomplishments, such as the Moscow Canal, were celebrated in rapturous terms; czarist accomplishments were often passed over in silence. Coverage of scientific accomplishments is one of the weaknesses, but the biographies and historical entries are strong. Considerable attention is devoted to the major figures in Soviet history. The entry on
Leninism
took up more than eighty pages, and
Stalin
got forty to himself. Lenin and Stalin were themselves credited with contributing to the forty-page entry on
Marxism
.

But the nature of the coverage shifted over the time it took to produce the book. As one reviewer wrote, the encyclopedia “took more than twenty years to complete, a long time by any encyclopedic standard, but an even longer and more eventful period when viewed through the prism of Soviet history.”
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The period between the first volume and the last, 1926 through 1947, was one of almost unimaginable turmoil in the Soviet Union. In 1926, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo, and eventually from the Communist Party; Nikolai Bukharin would follow in 1929. Stalin began his five-year plans in 1928. The Moscow Trials of sixteen dissidents took place in 1936. Stalin’s constitution went into effect in 1936, and the Great Purge of 1937 rooted out anti-Soviet elements. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia were incorporated into the Soviet Union; Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia were invaded.