Book-Burning: The St. Brendan Story in the Light of Christian Tradition

Summary

Among modern readers, the term “book-burning” will automatically evoke images of Nazis throwing books on flaming pyres, as this outrage occurred in May of 1933 when “thousands of books were burned in Germany in universities all over the country.” Fifty years later, in a commemorative speech delivered at the Zurich Schauspielhaus, the great German humanist Hans Mayer characterized the events of 1933 as a manifestation of a “Gesamtsystem aus Terror und Propaganda, Hexengeist, Folter und spektakulärer Schaustellung,” and as a return to the psychotic mentality of the Malleus Maleficarum of the late fifteenth century. Book-burning has a long tradition, indeed, and in Europe the phenomenon was shaped by Christian concepts and rituals. Such conflagrations fed and still feed on humankind's dangerous obsession with the alleged cleansing power of fire and some individuals' unshakable conviction that beliefs other than those upheld by a majority should not be tolerated — as books reflecting such beliefs have become symbols of pernicious otherness. Fundamentalist believers practice such oppressive practices even today. The website of the Landover Baptist Church, demonstrating this point, wishes to persuade browsers that on October 31st of 2001 (Halloween Day, or, in their parlance, “Satan's Birthday”) more than 150,000 American Christians burned over three million books, foremost among them the popular Harry Potter series. “Burning a book is one of the most loving things a Christian could do,” the website proclaims and declares that “oftentimes the media paints a terrible image of book burners. ‘They make us out to look like fanatics or Germans,’ said one Christian.”