Catholic Encyclopedia

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The Catholic Encyclopedia is a fifteen-volume English-language reference work published in New York between 1907 and 1914, compiled under the editorship of Charles Herbermann and a board of Catholic scholars and intended to set out the teaching, history, and personnel of the Roman Catholic Church for an English-speaking readership. Its first volume, running from Aachen to Assize, appeared in March 1907; the last of the fifteen text volumes were issued in 1912, and a separate master index volume followed in 1914. Its full title announced its ambition without apology — An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church — and to distinguish it from the wholly recast New Catholic Encyclopedia of 1967, the original is now often called the Old Catholic Encyclopedia.

Title page of the first volume (1907), announcing the work as “An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Church.” — Internet Archive Book Images, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The making

The undertaking was the work of a publishing house created for it and nothing else. The Robert Appleton Company was incorporated in New York in February 1905 for the sole purpose of producing the encyclopedia; in 1912 it took the plainer name of The Encyclopedia Press, and the volumes remained its only business. Behind it stood a board of five editors, each a working scholar. Charles George Herbermann (1840–1916), professor of Latin and librarian at the College of the City of New York, gave the project its managing hand and lent his name to the title pages. Edward A. Pace, professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America, and Thomas J. Shahan, professor of church history at the same university and later its rector, supplied the academic spine. Condé Bénoist Pallen brought the trade of the professional editor. John J. Wynne, the Jesuit editor of The Messenger, had first proposed the venture and saw it through. The board met formally one hundred and thirty-four times between January 1905 and April 1913 to fix the plan, the scope, and the progress of the work, a count that says something about the scale of what was attempted: a controlled survey of nineteen centuries of doctrine, canon law, liturgy, the religious orders, the saints, and the controversies through which the Church had passed, assembled from the contributions of hundreds of specialists across several countries. The editors set down their own account of the venture in a preface to the first volume, the making of the encyclopedia, which records the meetings, the policy of signature, and the intended reach.

John J. Wynne (1859–1948), the Jesuit editor of The Messenger who first proposed the encyclopedia and saw it through. — Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The confessional method

Its purpose was confessional as much as informational. The editors aimed to give educated Catholics, and the curious outside the Church, an accurate account of doctrine, canon law, liturgy, the religious orders, the saints, and the controversies in which Catholicism had been involved across nineteen centuries. Two features fixed its method. First, every article was signed: a contributor put his name to his entry, so that the reader knew whose judgment lay behind a verdict and could weigh the specialist accordingly — a deliberate departure from the anonymity then usual in reference works, and a discipline that has kept the articles citable long after their theology dated. Second, the work carried the apparatus of ecclesiastical approval. A nihil obstat from the censor Remy Lafort and the imprimatur of John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York, stood at the front of every volume, certifying that nothing in it contradicted Catholic faith or morals. Its judgments on disputed matters therefore reflect the official position of the early-twentieth-century Church. That standpoint is part of what later readers must weigh. On questions of heresy, schism, and the occult, the encyclopedia reports both the historical record and the Church’s verdict on it, and the two are not always easy to separate.

The esoteric afterlife

For students of Western esotericism the work has had a particular afterlife. Its long, documented entries on subjects the Church had condemned or absorbed — Gnosticism, magic, alchemy, the Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, occultism, witchcraft, Hermes Trismegistus and the Hermetic books of the Corpus Hermeticum — gathered references that were otherwise scattered, and were consulted by scholars and occult writers alike. The signed system makes the deposit traceable. The article on Gnosticism, with its companion entries on Valentinus, Simon Magus, Basilides, Cerinthus, and the Cainites, was the work of John Peter Arendzen, an Arabist and Scripture scholar who set down the second-century schools with a heresiologist’s care for sources; Arendzen also wrote the long entry on Occult Art and Occultism, which marched through magic, astrology, the Kabbalah, alchemy, theosophy, and spiritism in turn. The entry on witchcraft came from Herbert Thurston, a Jesuit who contributed more than a hundred and fifty articles and later turned to the study of psychical phenomena; the entry on alchemy from Thomas O’Conor Sloane. Where heresy is narrated, it is narrated by name and by hand.

The articles are learned and frequently still useful for their citations; they are also written from the vantage of an institution that had spent centuries opposing much of what they describe, so that a heresy is narrated by its historic adversary, and a current the Church reckoned dangerous is summarized by the body that condemned it. The reader who keeps that frame in view gains rather than loses by it: the verdict is legible precisely because it is signed and dated, and the apparatus of references beneath it — the patristic citations, the editions, the cross-references to the figures and texts at issue — was assembled by people who had read widely in what they opposed. The line between gnosis as a historical movement’s self-understanding and gnosis as the encyclopedia’s adversary defined it runs visibly through these pages, and that visibility is itself a use. Read with the standpoint in mind, the entries remain a substantial source.

The text and its editions

The work itself is the primary document, and it now exists in several parallel forms. The complete original sits in research libraries and survives in scanned volumes through the major digital repositories, indexed for scholars at the Online Books Page. Two cooperative transcriptions opened the text to full-text search: the New Advent edition, and the Wikisource recension, where each article carries its signature and approval line, so that the long entry on Gnosticism can be read against its author and its date. For the historian of Western esotericism the encyclopedia functions less as authority than as a finding aid: a nineteenth-century-trained Catholic scholarship’s inventory of the figures, the sects, and the texts it had cataloged as adversaries, with the patristic and editorial references that catalog rests on. The standard caution applies to every entry on a condemned current — the account is shaped by the standpoint of the body that condemned it, and the framing of a heresy, an occult art, or a magical practice is the framing of its historic opponent, not a neutral one. What the apparatus preserves, even so, is the trail of citations beneath the verdict.

The recast and the survival

The work did not stay the Church’s reference of record. In 1967 a wholly new New Catholic Encyclopedia, prepared by the faculty of the Catholic University of America and issued by a commercial house, replaced it in fifteen fresh volumes with some seventeen thousand articles, rewritten to the standards and the theology of the mid-century Church. That recasting is what gave the original its retrospective name; the Old Catholic Encyclopedia became a period piece, a record of how Catholic learning understood itself before the changes of the following decades. But the older work outlasted its supersession by a route its editors could not have foreseen. Because the whole text had been published in the United States before 1923, it passed entire into the public domain, and with the rise of the internet it was transcribed and put online — most visibly through the New Advent edition begun by Kevin Knight in the mid-1990s and carried out by volunteers across several countries, and again through Wikisource and other digital libraries. It is now among the most readily available large religious reference works in English, free to anyone, searchable to the article. Its enduring value lies less in its theology, which is dated and openly partisan, than in its density of fact and reference — a record, made at a particular moment, of how the Catholic intellectual tradition understood its own history and the rival currents it had long defined itself against.

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Gnosticism · Corpus Hermeticum · Alchemy · Kabbalah · Occultism · Witchcraft · Magic · Heresy · Simon Magus · Valentinus