I am going to do a magic trick for you — take a look at the two photos here: one is a 15th century painting of a Locust, and the other is Ernie Chambers, the longest-serving state senator of Nebraska (46 years and counting). And my hocus pocus will be to show how these two are connected– by the supernatural.
Bugs like locusts were considered a type of vermin in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. And in these centuries, the Catholic Church decided that such pests were causing so much harm that they needed to be held accountable — and so the Church put them on trial in actual legal courts. For instance, in 1478, the inhabitants of Berne, Switzerland, “sued some ‘ingers’ — a species of beetle — for ‘creeping secretly in the earth devastat[ing] the fields, meadows and all other kinds of grain’. Apparently, if the Church won the case, the beetles would be excommunicated. The hope of local people was that this most serious consequence would alarm the pests and make them stay away.
Ernie Chambers went the opposite route. In 2007, he decided to sue God. An avowed atheist, Chambers nevertheless put forth a lawsuit seeking “a permanent injunction ordering God to cease certain harmful activities and the making of terrorist threats.” The presiding judge dismissed the suit because the deity could not be properly summoned, even though Chambers countered that since God was omnipresent, He ought to be in court.
Both cases involve the supernatural, and both were absurd. However, there is a twist to each. Historian Peter T. Leeson makes the case that the Church vermin trials were a way for the Church to publicly demonstrate its power — such trials reinforced in witnesses’ minds the efficacy of ecclesiastical injunction. Chambers, on the other hand, was deliberately pressing his case to make a point that the courts must be open to hear all trials — at the time, a notorious rape trial in Nebraska was being dismissed as frivolous.
The interplay of absurdity, the supernatural, and the rational is my grand denouement linking these photos.
Source(s): “Vermin Trials,” Peter T. Leeson, 2013, _Journal of Law and Economics,_ vol 56, August, Univ of Chicago, pp 814-815. _Mental Floss_, “The Politician Who Sued God” Lucas Reilly, Oct 27, 2018.
