CHAPTER VI.THE MENDICANT ORDERS AND THEINQUISITION.
The political decision achieved by the Albigensian Crusade, in the hands of the French Crown, against the House of Toulouse, permitted the establishment of the Inquisition in Languedoc, the centre of thirteenth century heresy. Now the subject of this book is not so much the Inquisition itself as the forces which established it. Therefore the military and political struggle in which the House of Toulouse went under has been narrated at some length, as well as the events leading up to that struggle. But it is also necessary to our subject to note the workings of these forces when regular armed resistance had ceased.
That resistance had not been in the name of heresy against Catholicism, but only in defence of some measure of toleration from the State to the heretical bodies. Tolerance was not even expressly stated as the motive of those who resisted the Crusade, but only implied by their conduct. The point is worth noting. Not one of the southern lords who resisted the Crusade was himself a heretic. None of them, except Raymond Roger of Foix, was ever proved to have so much as taken any particular interest in heresy as a fad, an object of curiosity. Pedro of Aragon was the Pope’s vassal and “First Standard Bearer of the Church.” Raymond VI of Toulouse had been all his life a Catholic, and died with all the consolations of religion, having on the morning of his sudden death gone twice to the church of La Daurade in Toulouse to pray. After his death the honour of burying his remains was disputed for years between the Parish of St. Sernin and the Knights Hospitallers of Toulouse. Those who resisted the Crusaders fought so that they might not be compelled to suppress the hereticsamong whom they lived, and especially that they might not be deprived of power and possessions by North Frenchmen who came to seize their lands in perpetuity as a reward for bringing about suppression of heresy.
Nowhere else in Europe was there regular armed opposition. In Italy, which was (after Languedoc) the stronghold of mediæval Manicheanism, the heretics of Orvieto had caused a riot and the assassination of a zealous Catholic magistrate in 1199-1200. In Viterbo, a few years later, the citizens elected certain heretical magistrates, and it needed harsh words from Innocent before they would consent to disqualify them. But compared to the Albigensian business this was child’s play. In Languedoc the battle was fought and won.
But in order to hold a country it is necessary not only to conquer it, but also to organize it. After the conquest force is no longer needed on a large scale, it still plays its part, but only in the enforcement of decisions arrived at by some form of law. And although force plays a greater part in the conflicts of ideas than is theoretically admitted nowadays, nevertheless it is not the chief instrument of those conflicts. The chief instrument is, of course, persuasion. At the end of the Albigensian war there was no longer organized opposition in Europe to the enforcement of judicial decisions against heresy, and these judicial decisions were made by the Inquisition. Meanwhile, before the fighting had ceased, there were already in existence two powerful new bodies organized for the use of persuasion in the cause of the Church, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, who may be grouped as the Mendicant Orders.
From the beginning, Francis and Dominic agreed in this, that they uncloistered the monk. Instead of withdrawing their friars from the world, they launched them into the midst of it to strive, by precept and example, to win souls. In particular St. Dominic enlisted his “Friar Preachers” to preach against heresy, and St. Francis to preach the love of God after a fashion that did away with that grimness of early mediæval religion which had nourished the over-ascetic heresies such as the Manichean.
It is hard not to linger over St. Francis of Assisi. A true Italian and a child of his time, it is not surprisingthat he sometimes seems to us extravagant. When we hear of him rolling naked in a rose bush to drive away the temptations of sex, or having himself dragged through the streets and beaten, as penance for having eaten a morsel of chicken in Lent, we are as much puzzled as repelled. We may even lend an ear to doctors who tell us that there is a perversion of the lusts of the flesh called Masochism, in which the subject derives pleasure from pain. The saint himself repented at the end of having caused his body to suffer as he had done; “I have sinned against my brother the ass,” he said as he lay dying. And yet, all in all, he remains the most Christ-like of Christians. His tenderness to mankind was all-embracing, and went out beyond man to the beasts, and even to natural objects. To him all nature was a fascinating little sister, to be laughed at, petted and caressed. The sun was our brother: to him he wrote a canticle. The birds were our little brothers: to them he preached as they clustered around him. Even the wolf, whom the saint turned from his evil courses, was “Brother Wolf.” Death was but “our sister, the death of the body,” and the very devils were “God’s warders.”
This spirit was the precise opposite to that grimness in the religious feeling of a century before. To the men of the early twelfth century, for instance to Abelard, the claims of religion were inexorably stern. They could no more be reconciled with any sort of human affection, than could the unyielding round arch adjust itself to vault the irregular compartments of nave and ambulatory. In human feeling, as in architecture, the result was ugly distortion, and it was precisely this distorted feeling that produced Manicheanism. Clearly, if God was good and loving and the world utterly vile, then God had not made the world. The Devil had made it, and was by that act co-equal, if not for the time being, superior, in power to God Himself. Not so, said St. Francis, the earth is the Lord’s, and it is beautiful. Only pride, both pride of possessions and pride of intellect, stands in the way of happiness. So he joyously married his “Lady Poverty,” and once refused to let a hesitating novice possess so much as a breviary. Under the busy brushes of Giotto and the other painters of the Franciscan legend, the Holy Family, without ceasing tobe a symbol of the faith, became also the emblem of innocent and happy domestic life.
St. Francis did not begin the humanizing of religion. The change had already begun before the middle of the twelfth century with the cult of the Virgin. There is a legend that once, when St. Bernard was praying to her, and had come to the words, “Show that thou art the mother,” Our Lady appeared to him and from her breast dropped on his lips three drops of the milk that had nourished the Saviour. That is already far from the atmosphere of Abelard and Heloise. Already, in St. Bernard’s time, the north-French architects were beginning to break up the unyielding Norman and Lombard round arches into the pointed form, and the same period was evidently trying to resolve the distortion of religion and human love. St. Francis enormously enlarged and deepened the new current of religious thought. The climax was reached after his death in the story of the Miracle of Bolsena. Here, in 1263, a priest without faith in the Real Presence of our Lord in the Host, saw the wafer which he himself had just consecrated covered with drops of blood. About half a century before, in neighbouring Orvieto, a zealous Catholic magistrate had been murdered by the Manichees. Now the Church insisted that God gave His very self to be the food of all men, even to the poor, the serf, and the humble.
St. Dominic was of a different temper, and attacked the problem in a different way. Dante calls him—
“... the holy athlete,Benignant to his own and cruel to his foes,”
“... the holy athlete,Benignant to his own and cruel to his foes,”
“... the holy athlete,Benignant to his own and cruel to his foes,”
“... the holy athlete,
Benignant to his own and cruel to his foes,”
and praises him for wisdom, whereas he praises St. Francis for “seraphic ardour.” Instead of being above all a poet and mystic, like the Poverello of Assisi, St. Dominic was an organizer and statesman. There was a strain of ecclesiastical anarchism in the early Franciscan Order; certain “spiritual” Franciscans of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century rebelled against religious authority as no Dominicans have ever done. Where the Italian saint puts an example ahead of precept, the Spaniard put precept ahead of example. To him the weakness of the Church was that not enough of her clergyknew thoroughly her doctrine and were able to teach it. For him, as for the prophet Hosea, the “... people were destroyed for lack of knowledge.” His order was vowed to learning. Indeed, it was a Dominican, St. Thomas Aquinas, who has left us the most complete and harmonious of all human attempts to analyse the universe. Instead of attacking in flank by destroying the mood out of which the ultra ascetic, and in particular the Manichean heresies grew, St. Dominic attacked heresy in front by direct argument. His “Preaching Friars” observed strict poverty, not so much as a good in itself, as did St. Francis, but rather in the spirit of the soldier who lightens his pack the better to take the field. As they went to and fro, begging their bread, they escaped the poor man’s envy which dogged the footsteps of the wealthy bishops and the abbots of the older orders. Thus they were equally free to debate with the philosophers in the turbulent universities, or to set forth the Faith in words of one syllable to simple folk.
The organizers, those carpenters and stonemasons of history, are obscure by contrast with its artists and sculptors. Just so the personality of St. Dominic (at least in the Protestant world) has been overshadowed by that of St. Francis. Even the Church which they both served canonized Francis within two years after he was dead, and waited thirteen before canonizing Dominic.
But if the Poverello of Assisi had more poetry in him, the Spanish gentleman had more statesmanship. The organization of the Franciscan Order fluctuated violently and finally settled down into a copy of the Dominican. According to the first Franciscan Rule, that of 1221, a Friar is not bound to obey his superiors when that superior commands him to do something against the “life,” a proposition so impossible in practice that it survived only two years. On the other hand, down to 1240, the Head of the Franciscan Order was undisputed Cæsar, nominating lesser officers and legislating either without any Chapter (i.e., Assembly) or with a Chapter composed exclusively of officers appointed by himself. This again worked so badly that in 1240 the organization was changed so as to add elected representatives of the Chapter General, and to make the nomination of lesser officers a function of the Chapter General so constituted;both of which features were typically Dominican, and had been part of the first Constitution of that Order.
As with the constitution of their Order so with the Higher Learning. Here too the Franciscans found themselves compelled by force of circumstances to abandon their own founder’s distinctive teaching and follow the lead of the Dominicans. Whereas St. Francis himself feared and hated learning, even before his death some of the greatest scholars in Christendom wore the Franciscan habit.
To the subjects of representative government and of learning I shall return for a moment at the close of the chapter in the attempt to estimate the permanent value of the thirteenth century achievement. The point I now make is that, in both respects, St. Dominic builded so much better (at least for his generation) than St. Francis that the Franciscans themselves soon adopted Dominican methods. And this was true not only in regard to learning and representative government, but also with regard to the Inquisition.
Both of the mendicant orders were formed, as a modern would say, “for service.” They were democratic in constitution: the Dominicans had been so from their origin. Indeed it has been claimed with some show of reason that it was the Dominicans who first brought representative government from its original home near the Pyrenees into England. They addressed themselves particularly to the poorer and the less fortunate of mankind. Whereas the older orders of monks had retired to the wilderness, or at least to the country, the mendicants laboured chiefly in the fast growing towns characteristic of the new and sudden mediæval rise out of the Dark Ages. It is always in towns that the human struggle for life is sharpest and the results of defeat most provocative of pity.
Although the ministrations of the friars were often very different in kind from those of the “social worker” of to-day, inasmuch as they were concerned first of all to bear witness to the Faith whereas the average “social worker” is concerned chiefly with conferring material benefits (I suspect that is why he, or she, does not accomplish more), still social worker and mendicant friar have this essential in common in that the purposeof both was to “do things” for the poor. Alas! in the garden of “social service” a serpent lies in wait for poor erring humans, and his name is Tyranny. Those who are the objects of ministrations, being human, too often receive them unwillingly and prefer their own ways. And those who would minister, being equally human, when they see their good works (as they think them) rejected by those whom they would benefit, too often seek forcibly to compel acceptance.
Of course such people believe that they know better than the rejectors (who are, in practice, the more independent and self-respecting of the poor) what is good for the latter. But the student of history shakes his head sadly, in the knowledge that the innumerable oppressors of mankind have all believed that they could govern people better than those whom they oppressed could govern themselves.
The connection of St. Dominic himself with the Inquisition (using the word loosely to cover all legal and judicial action against heretics), although much disputed, is clear. The evidence consists of two documents of St. Dominic’s own, and a tradition, written down in its present form sixty-seven years after his death, which has been accepted by all students of his life, including those who hold that he had no connection with the Inquisition whatsoever. The first document is a licence to a citizen in Toulouse to board a certain converted heretic in his house until St. Dominic or the Cardinal Legate should give orders to the contrary. The second enumerates the provisions of the penance imposed upon another converted heretic.
Although this last has already been quoted in another chapter, nevertheless it may be well to repeat it here. “Until the Lord Legate (Arnaut Amalric) shall otherwise ordain” the unhappy man is to fast forever “from flesh, eggs, cheese and all which comes from flesh except at Easter, Pentecost and Christmas, when he shall eat some to protest against his former errors.” He is to keep three Lents each year, “fasting and abstaining from fish, unless from bodily infirmity or the heat of the weather he shall be dispensed.” As make-weights, he is to be beaten with rods upon his bare back, three Sundays running, by his village priest; he is forever to wear adistinctive dress marked with crosses to designate him as a former heretic, hear mass every day “if possible” and vespers as well on festival days, recite seventy paternosters a day and twenty in the middle of the night. How this last provision was to be enforced unless some almost equally unfortunate soul stayed awake to watch him is not stated. Finally, once a month he is to show the parchment on which all this is written to the village priest.
So much for the documents. The tradition is that the Saint secured the release of a certain heretic who had been convicted and sentenced to be burnt, acting on the strength of his own personal belief that this particular culprit would eventually repent. Twenty years after, the tradition goes on to say, the man did repent, and died in the odour of sanctity, clad in Dominican habit.
For our purposes, the point of all three pieces of evidence is that the power to loose implies an intimate connection with the power to bind. The President of the United States and the Governors of States, who have the pardoning power, are themselves the chief executive officers of the nation and the States, and it is their sworn duty to see that the laws are enforced. In St. Dominic’s case, the verdict is conclusive. Virtually every reputable scholar of the present day is agreed upon the point, including Roman Catholics writing under thenihil obstatandimprimaturof Cardinals and Archbishops.
Among these last, Giraud sums up the verdict neatly: “Comparing with all these documents the canon of the Council of Verona, renewed in 1208 by the Council of Avignon, which orders that apostates who, after being convicted of heresy by their Bishops or their representatives, should obstinately persist in their errors, should be delivered over to the secular arm, it would seem that it must be concluded that, by virtue of the delegated authority of the Cistercian monks, St. Dominic was to convict the heretics; and that, in convicting them he delivered them up, indirectly but surely, to execution, unless he suspended, by an act of clemency, the action of that docile instrument of the Church, the secular arm. Doubtless he did not himself pronounce the fatal sentence; but during their trial he played the part of an expert in the matter of orthodoxy, or even of a juror,transmitting to the court a verdict of guilty while capable at the same time of signing a recommendation to mercy.”
It is, of course, true that the “bloody-minded Dominic,” that favourite scarecrow of old-fashioned Protestant historians, never existed. Not only the Bollandists and Lacordaire but also the whole weight of modern scholarship agree on this point. Even Lea, almost always accurate on points of fact even when he is most exasperating in his utter lack of the realizing imagination so necessary to a modern historian of the Middle Ages; even Lea, I say, admits that the miracles ascribed to St. Dominic are almost all kindly ones, and that the Saint was by no means notable among his contemporaries for ferocity against heretics. Nor was he the “founder of the Inquisition,” although he was a worker in it. It was the force of circumstances and, in particular, the fact that both mendicant orders were particularly dependent upon the Pope (and correspondingly independent of the local clergy) that afterwards pushed forward first the Dominicans and then the Franciscans into prominence as Inquisitors.
The Albigensian struggle brought the Papal, as distinguished from the Episcopal, Inquisition into being. Formerly the bishops had had sole jurisdiction in matters of faith. Naturally, their policy against heretics varied widely, so that, as we have seen in Chapter II, the secular government and even the local mob often acted on their own responsibility. Evidently the bishops were not in a position to deal with heresy on a large scale. Attempts to hold them to their work, such as the Imperial-Papal decree issued from Verona in 1184 (see Chapter II), remained dead letters. In Languedoc, where both local government and mob were unwilling to act, the local bishops did not even try to do anything. Accordingly, as we have seen, Arnaut Amalric and the other legates whose activities we have followed, were sent by Innocent III to deal with the situation by virtue of authority derived directly from himself as Pope without reference to the local bishops—quite in the spirit in which President Cleveland sent federal troops to quell the Chicago riots in 1894.
Besides the need for a strong hand in Languedoc—thechief cause of the establishment of the Papal Inquisition—there was a second cause which helped to keep alive the newly founded institution even after military and political support of heresy in Languedoc had ceased. This second cause was the need felt for order and regularity. We have seen, in the first chapter, how order and right reason in all things were the goals of the fresh, buoyant spirit of the time, and how vast an event was the rediscovery of the Roman law, with its enormous logic. The intellectual appetites of newly-awakened Europe seized eagerly upon law as an object of study, at the same time that the practical necessities of an expanding, intensely “progressive,” society made the regular administration of law one of the chief concerns of statesmen. To such a generation, it was intolerable that so weighty a matter as that of variations from the faith should be dealt with haphazard. In justice to those accused of heresy, and to the Christian commonwealth as a whole—which our forefathers considered much more—the serious business of judgment in such cases deserved to be entrusted to the best qualified persons who could be found. Here were the Dominicans, and after them the Franciscans, learned in theology, independent of local prejudice, not apt to be terrified by local influence, men who had given up everything so that they might better serve the Church. Even though they shrank, as they sometimes did, from the heavy responsibilities, fatigues, and personal danger of acting as Inquisitors, the higher authorities of State and Church combined to draft them into the service.
In one sense, then, it was a high desire for justice, for the replacement of lynch law in heresy cases by a regular system of procedure, which dictated the establishment of the Inquisition (that is the Inquisition as a new instrument largely separate from the older Church courts of canon law administered by the bishops). At the same time, there are three facts which seem to show a baser mind in those who co-operated in the gradual formation of the new institution. The modern man is struck by the fact that the manner of examination seems to offer insufficient guarantee against the possibility of grave injustice to the accused; second, the use of torture to compel confession. Finally, the modern man is appalled at the extreme penalty by fire.
The main feature of the legal processes of the Inquisition is the wide power of the Inquisitor. Instead of acting, as our judges do, merely as referee between opposite sides, with a separate government official for prosecutor, the Inquisitor was the prime mover of the whole proceeding. Of his own motion he sought evidence and examined witnesses and accused. In this there is some resemblance to modern French procedure, and in a slighter degree, to the procedure in American courts-martial which makes the judge-advocate at once prosecutor and guarantor of the rights of the accused. The method is derived from the Roman law. It was practised, in the times with which we are concerned, by the “advanced” secular governments of the day such as the Capetian and Plantagenet monarchies. Certain Italian municipalities also seem to have made use of it. Besides being known to contemporary secular justice, it was familiar to the educated men of the time who were steeped in classical memories.
Under the Inquisition, matters went somewhat as follows: The Inquisitors travelled about through the territories committed to their charge preaching sermons against heresy, especially in places where it was known to exist. In these sermons a “time of grace” was promised, during which time all heretics who should come in and confess their fault were to be admitted to mercy and reconciled with the Church. Meanwhile, the faithful were asked to give information as to local heretics. When the time of grace was up those accused of heresy were arrested by armed servants of the Holy Office and examined by the Inquisitor.
The evidence for the prosecution was usually furnished to the accused, but in most cases the names of the witnesses who had given it were concealed. This was a departure from the contemporary procedure at canon law before the bishops. The argument in favour of concealment was that it was the one way of protecting the witnesses against reprisal by the friends of the accused in case of conviction. Public security, it must be remembered, was not what it is to-day. The best chance of having the indictment quashed was for the accused to prove that the witnesses were his mortal enemies. The inquisitor would, therefore, ask himwhether he had any such, and if he had anyone who (unknown to him of course) had testified, then the evidence in question was stricken out and the whole case against him received a damaging blow.
When the evidence was in and the prisoner had testified as to his mortal enemies, then the crucial point of the examination was reached. It was the business of the Inquisitor to satisfy himself as to the guilt or innocence of the suspected heretic. There being no organized jury system, the ideal way of establishing guilt was to get the accused to confess. Confession was therefore sought by all imaginable means, by prolonged theological discussion with those capable of it, by efforts to entrap an unwary prisoner into unintentional admissions, or by adjourning the inquiry in obstinate cases so that the passage of time, sometimes even of years, in prison might give the wretch full chance to think matters over.
The Inquisition differed from all secular justice in that it was penitential, that is, it aimed to persuade those who had committed certain sins to confess their fault and submit themselves to the loving chastisement of Mother Church. The Inquisitor was in the unique position of a judge who was always trying to turn himself into a father-confessor.
When there was a strong presumption, but no conclusive proof, against a prisoner who obstinately refused to confess, the Inquisitor was in difficulties. His responsibility was even more than that of a modern judge because only the germ of a jury system as yet existed. The Inquisitor could, and usually did, summon experts (periti) or “good men” (boni viri) to deliberate with him, and it was the custom for him to follow their verdict, except when he thought it too harsh. This rudimentary jury was made up of men learned in the civil or canon law, usually mendicant friars. Its weakness was that it was extremely difficult to get together qualified persons often enough to give real consideration in each individual case. Indeed it was physically impossible to do so when a large number of cases required review, as would happen in the centres of heresy where the peril to the Faith was greatest. Ignorance of the prisoners’ names lessened their usefulness, for, as Vacandard ably puts it, “... tribunalsare to judge criminals and not crimes, just as physicians treat sick people and not diseases in the abstract.” Therefore, to ease the conscience of the judge in deciding doubtful cases, torture was introduced to force confession when the evidence was not conclusive.
References to the use of torture are rare in the abundant records of the Inquisition. Whether this is because its use was so repugnant to the spirit of Christianity (and so unreliable a means for the discovery of truth) that the recorders shrank from mentioning it on paper, will never be known. Mediæval men in general were nothing if not frank, and yet the verbal equivocations of the Inquisition were many, as we shall see. Unfortunately, Roman precedents were in its favour, although the Roman law forbade torture to be used except against slaves. Roman freemen were liable to torture only in the case of a crime against the Emperor. The men of the Middle Ages seem to have thought of it as a substitute for the ordeal, which was going out of fashion, as we have seen. Torture was introduced late. Lea finds it mentioned in secular law, “... in the Veronese code of 1228 and in the Sicilian Constitutions of Frederick II in 1231,” and thinks that “... the references to it show how sparingly and hesitatingly it was employed.” In the Inquisition it was first recognized by Innocent IV in 1252.
A certain amount of restriction, to which secular courts were not liable, was placed upon the Inquisitors in their use of torture. No torture could be used by them which would imperil the life or limb of the victim, and this stipulation did amount to something, for the secular judge was free to invent and use any refinement of cruelty he could think of, and as often as he cared to. But it did not amount to much. The Inquisition was free to tear the joints of its victims from their sockets by means of the rack, or by the strappado. This last was a rope-and-pulley arrangement which was attached to the wrists of the victim. His wrists were bound behind his back, so as to dislocate the shoulder joints by raising him to the ceiling, letting him drop and then bringing him up with a jerk in mid-air. Fire and water were also permitted; the feet might be scorched after smearing them with fat; or the “water-cure” might be used until the stomach was horribly distended and the prisoner almost strangled.
At first there was reluctance about allowing the Inquisitors themselves to be present during torture. Priests, and the inquisitors were all priests, incurred “irregularity” by looking on at such scenes. But since this prohibition delayed business, it was virtually removed by the leave granted by Pope Alexander IV in 1260, and reaffirmed in 1262 by Pope Urban IV, for the Inquisitors to dispense one another from irregularity incurred by witnessing torture. Thenceforward it was the custom for the Inquisitor himself to be present during the torture.
Another check on the use of torture, the prescription that no prisoner should be twice tortured, was gotten around by equivocation. A second torturing was merely called a “continuation” instead of a “repetition” of the first. Furthermore, witnesses might be tortured indefinitely, and it was one of the chief objects of the inquisitors to get prisoners to denounce heretics still at large. Often mercy would be promised, on condition of giving evidence against others. In any case a heretic who denounced other heretics became at once a witness to their guilt and might be tortured as many times as was desired.
Another equivocation appears in the form in which confessions, made under torture or not, were drawn up. “Usually,” writes Lea, “the procedure appears to have been that the torture was continued until the accused signified his readiness to confess, when he was unbound and carried into another room, where his confession was made. If, however, the confession was extracted during the torture, it was read over subsequently to the prisoner, and he was asked whether it were true. In any case the record was carefully made that the confession was ‘free and spontaneous,’ without the pressure of ‘force or fear.’ In case a prisoner refused to confirm a confession made under torture, the learned doctors of the Inquisition differed as to what should be done with him. Some held that he should be set free, with a certificate that nothing had been proved against him, others that he should again be tortured until he again confessed!”
After conviction came sentence. Upon repentant heretics, erring children conscious of their fault and welcoming the loving chastisement of Mother Church, the inquisitor himself passed sentence in the form of penance. In theory, there was no difference between thepenances imposed by any confessor and those of the Inquisitors, and, in practice, the only penance peculiar to the Inquisition was the wearing of crosses. Even imprisonment—the extreme legal penalty for the rare heretics of the earlier Middle Ages—was a part of the monastic penitential system. As late as the thirteenth century, sentences of imprisonment were more common than any other form of punishment.
When the sentence was for life the theory that such severity was no more than a salutary measure of penance was certainly strained. If such a prisoner broke jail, his guilt was supposed to be that of rejecting the wholesome correction designed by the loving-kindness of the Church to effect his spiritual well-being! However, there are so many records of prisoners serving life sentences who were released for good behaviour while in prison that it is possible to argue that usually none but “hard cases” failed to have the balance of such sentences suspended.
Obviously, the idea of punishment as a penance did not apply to those who refused to repent. Therefore the Inquisition itself, being an institution of the Church, could not punish such cases. But it was the root of the whole matter that heresy was a crime not only against the Church but against the State. It was the business of the Inquisition merely to determine whether suspects were or were not heretics. If, after conviction, one repented, the State originally had nothing to say. The Inquisition, acting for the Church, would then impose penance, as we have just seen, as upon any other repentant sinner. With the obstinate heretic the Church could do nothing. Therefore such prisoners were “relaxed,” that is turned over to the secular authorities, with the formula that the justice of God could do nothing more for them, inasmuch as they persisted in rebellion against it, and that, therefore, only the justice of man had power over them. In many of the later sentences the formula goes on, in accordance with the canonical sanctions, to ask the State to impose only such punishment as will not endanger life or limb, or cause the shedding of blood. As a matter of law, the coercive power was recognized as belonging only to the State.
The State, on the other hand, recognized the exclusive power of the Church to determine what was heresy andwho was heretical, recognized the inquisitors as experts in such matters, accepted their verdict without question, and promptly proceeded to pass and execute sentence. It was a part of the formula of “relaxation” that heretics should be punished “as they deserved (animadversio debita).” This elastic phrase could be variously interpreted in accordance with the different local laws. Always it meant confiscation of the goods of the condemned. The Popes, from Alexander III, held that to confiscation banishment should be added. Confiscation was part of the penalty for treason which the Holy Roman Empire had copied word for word out of the old Roman law. Therefore, says Pope Innocent III, heretics deserve to have their goods confiscated even more than traitors, inasmuch as they betray the majesty of God Himself who is obviously greater than all earthly sovereigns. The great Pope mentions the fact that, under the Roman law, traitors lost their lives as well as their property, and that heresy involved treason against God, the King of Kings, but did not follow out his premises to their logical conclusion. Not until years after his death is there even a hint that the Church as a whole desired the death of a sinner, even when he was a heretic.
This comparative mildness was never universal in fact and gradually disappeared even from theory. We have noted, in the second chapter, the curious spectacle presented by the eleventh and twelfth century, on the one hand many of the higher clergy mindful of the Christian tradition of mercy, and on the other the laity and lower clergy insisting upon death for the impenitent heretic, and generally death by fire. We have now to note the slow progress by which lynch law became written law. Even before the Albigensian Crusade there had been at least two instances of burning alive formally set down as the penalty for heresy. One was the law enacted in 1194 by Count Raymond V, of Toulouse, at the very storm centre of the trouble. The other was the law of Pedro II, in nearby Aragon in 1197, against the Waldenses. Under Raymond V’s law, the Toulousains later claimed that they had “burnt many.” But even if their claim be accepted as true (whereas it seems doubtful) at any rate the practice was not continued. Pedro of Aragon decreed burning alive only for those Waldensians and other heretics whoshould fail to leave his dominions by a certain day, so that his reference to the stake was hardly more than a threat intended to enforce the real penalty, that of banishment. De Montfort himself, at the parliament he held in Pamiers in 1212 to consolidate his position in the south, decreed no more than banishment and confiscation as penalties for heresy. More important than any previous law is one enacted for Lombardy in 1224 by the Emperor Frederick II, by which heretics were either to be burnt or to have their tongues cut out, in the discretion of the judge.
It is quite in keeping with what we know of the subject in general that the first ecclesiastical recognition of death as the normal legal penalty for heresy should be an indirect one. A council sitting in Toulouse in 1229, the year of Raymond VII’s final surrender, after remarking as usual that “due punishment” is to be inflicted upon heretics, casually goes on to say that “... heretics,who, through fear of deathor any other cause except their own free will, return to the faith, are to be imprisoned by the bishop of the city to do penance, that they may not corrupt others” (Vancandard). After this, examples multiply, under the influence of Frederick II and Pope Gregory IX. It so happens, however, that not until 1252 did any Pope formally insist upon the death penalty for heresy throughout Latin Christendom. This was the act of Innocent IV in the same bull “Ad Extirpanda” which authorized torture. Thenceforward the Inquisition was virtually complete.
The institution spread rapidly throughout Europe. England was an exception, for curiously enough in view of the inveterate eccentricity of the English mind, there were no heretics there until much later. There was not even a provision for burning heretics until, in 1401, Parliament passed the statute “de heretico comburendo.” It is less surprising to find such regions as far off as Scandinavia without heretics, and consequently without inquisitors. In the mountains of Bosnia, Catharistic Manicheanism became the State religion and persisted until the coming of the Turks, when the heretics welcomed the newcomers and went over to Islam. Bosnia had been a backwater in Europe ever since the Roman roads from the Adriatic to the Danube decayed in the Dark Ages—even to-day it has many Mohammedans.
Outside of Bosnia, there was no place in Latin Christendom that harboured heretics where the inquisitors did not make an end of them. The Manicheans were completely uprooted, although their extraordinary hunger for martyrdom would have made them completely victorious if the crude folly of to-day on the subject of “making martyrs” had truth in it. In Languedoc they lingered until the fourteenth century. The Waldensians were reduced so low that the confiscations of their property were not even enough to pay the expenses of the Inquisitors, let alone any surplus for the State. For all practical purposes they too were wiped out.
Resistance never amounted to more than the murder of an inquisitor here and there—which affected the activities of the institution not at all, for new recruits filled every gap. The Inquisition thus completed the task begun by the Albigensian Crusade of preserving the moral unity of Europe. Seriously threatened in the early thirteenth century, that moral unity remained unbroken until the great cataclysm of the sixteenth.
The question posed by the Inquisition to the student is twofold. First, was the moral unity of Europe worth preserving or no, and second, were or were not the means by which the Inquisition helped to preserve it worse than the disease in the long run? Naturally, if it is decided that the end sought was of little value, then it is probable that anyone so deciding will also disapprove of the means used to attain it. But the contrary does not follow. It is by no means impossible that anyone experienced in life may decide in any given case that, although the end proposed was good, nevertheless the means by which it was attained were evil.
On the first point, the answer is prompt. Emphatically, the mediæval world was worth preserving. In fact, with Periclean Greece, the Empire under the Antonines, and possibly the world of the Victorian age, the thirteenth century marks one of the culminating points of human history. It is true that the word “mediæval” is still popularly used in derision. But, on the other hand, such usage is recognized as hasty and superficial by virtually all educated men acquainted with the period. The Middle Ages attract us by the excellence of their arts and handicrafts, by the vividness and picturesqueness of their life,their spontaneity of feeling, their absence of hypocrisy, the order and clarity of their intellectual life, above all by their freedom from serious internal strain. From our world of alternatively drab and garish machine-made ugliness, haphazard and inconsequent thinking, and torment of chronic industrial civil war, we look back upon them with regret. In the literature of the thirteenth century we see the European mind happy and creative ... as it is to-day uncertain and near despair. We see our typical institutions, such as representative government, sounder and more vigorous than they are to-day. Such eager worshippers of the spirit of our own time as H. G. Wells and Henry Adams, to name only two at random, bear their testimony. The confession of the volatile socialist Wells is interesting. In 1914 he casually wrote of “... the finished and enriched normal social life of Western European in the Middle Ages....” I have taken Wells as important merely because (with his human sensitive-plate of a mind capable of so many discordant impressions) he puts the thing so neatly. With such men as Chesterton and Belloc in England and Cram in America the appreciation of mediævalism is the very core of their thinking. It would be easy to weary the reader with examples. The Middle Ages draw us if we but look at them.
The weakness of the Middle Ages lay in four things. First, there was insufficient organization of public powers and of communications, a subject discussed elsewhere in this book. Second, there was very little “natural science,” i.e., detailed knowledge of the properties of the material world. Thus it was ignorance of medicine and sanitation that brought about the great fourteenth century calamity of pestilence, the “Black Death” which gave the mediæval system a shock from which it never fully recovered. Third, there was cruelty, and fourth, there was the contrast between the vast assumptions made by the Church and the shortcomings and weaknesses of man himself—layman and churchman alike. Both cruelty and the claims of the Church are intimately connected with our subject.
The cruelty of the Inquisition appears most in the use of torture and in the executions by fire. Questions as to the form of procedure and withholding names of witnessesare subordinate. It is well enough for a modern civilized government, strong in the perfection of communications and of all public powers, to safeguard elaborately those accused of crime. Mediæval conditions were in many ways like those of frontier regions where the criminal can easily slip away. When this is so, justice must make herself swift and terrible by “rough and ready” methods. Otherwise she does not exist. In their franker moments, lawyers will usually admit that nine-tenths of the clients they defend are “as guilty as hell.” The elaborate safeguards of our procedure are defensible only on the theory that it is better to err by letting many culprits escape rather than by punishing one innocent man. And this theory, in turn, is tenable only on the assumption that no serious harm is done the community by the escape from punishment, through the legal safeguards aforesaid, of a considerable proportion of criminals. Where, on the other hand, the life or death of the community is felt to be at stake, then matters must take a different course. Perhaps as good an example as our own time can furnish is that of military justice. Clearly it is supremely important to keep up the discipline of an army. Accordingly, courts martial are given wide latitude. And yet the almost unanimous opinion of those competent to judge is that, when administered by experienced officers, miscarriages of justice under the court-martial system are exceedingly rare, and that, on the other hand, such a procedure as that followed in the civil courts would be destructive of all proper discipline; the maintenance of which, after all, is the necessary end sought. With reference to the Inquisition, besides the temporal welfare of the community, there is also the doctrine of exclusive salvation to be considered, as we shall see in a moment. The wide latitude allowed Inquisitors undoubtedly produced cases of injustice, but probably no system permitting the “disputatious wrangling of lawyers” (as the Inquisitorial manuals put it) could have answered the purpose.
In accusing the Inquisition of physical cruelty in examinations and executions, the modern world does not come into court with absolutely clean hands. Even leaving out of account Russia and Asia does not altogether mend matters. For instance, cruelty appears, more orless frankly, when the white man is in contact with those he considers lower races.
With respect to the examination of prisoners, Kipling’s fictitious hero, the lovable Mulvaney, flogging his captured Burman with a cleaning rod to find out the whereabouts of the bandit-friends of the sufferer, may serve as a fictitious example of the sort of cruelty frequently practised by civilized armies operating against savages. The American Army in the Philippines, instead of falling back on such primitive methods as flogging, took over the water torture from the natives there, who in turn had learned it from the Spaniards. In fact, it was one of the favourite tortures of the Spanish Inquisition of late mediæval and early modern days. The officer who introduced the “water cure” into the American Army happens to be known to the writer, who can warrant him a most kindly man who would not hurt so much as an insect, except in line of duty. It is a well-known fact that the American mind is more hospitable than the British to new and unfamiliar ideas. Even in the great modern cities, in which (by a curious reversion) degraded, criminal, types analogous to the savage appear, torture in the examination of prisoners is not altogether unknown. I refer to the police “third degree.” Here the facts are not public property, but there is good reason to believe that torture in various forms is used in examining prisoners to force them to confess and to name their accomplices. Into the merits and demerits of these practices it is unnecessary to enter here. The point is merely that the world has not yet found a way to dispense altogether with the use of torture in the examination of prisoners.
A real difference, nevertheless, remains between the modern and the mediæval use of torture in examinations. To-day it is furtive, then it was an acknowledged, customary thing. And while this difference is partly a matter of our greater security, and partly a matter of hypocrisy born of our characteristic, almost feminine, modern disinclination to face disagreeable facts; still it is true that there has been a real change in the minds of men of European stock with reference to this matter of torture. We are revolted by cruelties which not so very long ago seem to have been taken almost as a matter ofcourse, so much so that, as we have seen, they permitted even priests to be present in the torture chamber. Our nerves are more sensitive than those of our ancestors, as Nietzsche and Huysmans have pointed out, but that does not altogether account for the moral change involved.
With respect to burning alive the position is somewhat similar. Here also we have a conspicuous modern example occurring in a region where the white man finds himself confronted with great numbers of men of a race which he feels to be inferior to his own. I refer to the lynching of negroes, usually those accused of rape upon a white woman, in the Southern States. Here the combination of rape and race feeling has produced a condition very like that found in Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when heretics, instead of negro rapists, were similarly burned by mobs. Here again, together with striking resemblances, there are also important differences. The practice shows no signs of becoming a formal written law. On the contrary, there is formidable, organized protest against it, even in the communities concerned. Whereas in the early Middle Ages only a part of the higher clergy can be found in opposition, and even then not in particular opposition to burning alive, but opposed in general to any death penalty for heretics.
The striking contrast between the mediæval attitude, after burning alive had become written law, and modern feeling on the subject, has been discussed in the second chapter. Belloc uses the fact of this contrast as an illustration of one of the chief difficulties of history, that is the elusiveness of the “time spirit” of past ages, the fact that they took for granted certain primary assumptions which seemed to them too obvious even to be worth recording. Considering it, he remarks upon the distortion which this unseizable spirit of the time ... “appears to produce in morals when one is looking at it through the medium of another spirit belonging to another time, our own.”[32]His first illustrations of this truth are drawn from the French Revolution, from which he proceeds to a discussion of burning alive in the Middle Ages and early modern period, which has, in part, been quoted elsewhere in this book.
Frazer in the “Golden Bough” has a passage reinforcing Belloc’s contention as to the symbolic and quasi-sacramental spirit in which burning alive was regarded. Fire was the sovereign remedy against witchcraft. It was customary to burn objects to prevent their being bewitched, or objects or animals which had been bewitched, so that the contagion might not spread, or, finally, to burn the witches themselves. Our contemporary Southern lynchings by fire should warn us against over-subtlety. Further, it is true that burning alive had been the Roman punishment for high treason as well as for sorcery, and was in grisly conformity with the Church’s traditional abhorrence of bloodshed—it shed no blood. Still it is possible that the Middle Ages saw relationship between witchcraft and heresy, since both were connected with ideas of intensely harmful spiritual forces—were, in short, favourite offspring of the devil himself.
Certainly, later on, the burning of criminals became a solemn ceremony by no means accompanied by hatred of the victim. This is proved by the examples of those strangled before burning, like Savonarola. It is proved even more strongly by the celebrated case of Gilles de Rais. This case has been referred to in the second chapter, but it is so pertinent here that it merits fuller repetition. Gilles was a Breton nobleman and had been one of the lieutenants of Joan of Arc, but later fell into sorcery, sexual perversion, and all sorts of refinements of cruelty. When the Inquisition condemned him to be hung and burned alive, on charges of worshipping demons, he suffered a violent change of heart. Among other edifying signs of contrition, he begged the people whose little boys he had kidnapped, then debauched, and then tortured to death by hundreds, to pray for his soul. Whereupon they marched in procession, vehemently praying for the eternal salvation of this monster with his taste for extremes in both directions of the spiritual life. After which he was duly executed. “We are far from American lynch law here,”[33]as M. Huysmans remarks in recounting this scene. It is possible, in the light of such case, to believe with Belloc and Frazer that what seems to us the atrocious crueltyinvolved in burning alive may have been merely incidental to other considerations uppermost in the minds of those who ordered such things. To himself, man is an inscrutable mystery.
Finally, we come to the question of the claims of the Church. It is not my purpose to debate the propositions involved, but merely to state them as they affect the moral problem of the Inquisition. Obviously, the Church’s sole reason for being is the belief that she has, in the Christian revelation, something of supreme and unique value for mankind. The Athanasian creed, whether or not it is to be taken as pronouncing the damnation of the heathen and of “heretics in good faith,” certainly must be interpreted to mean that those who “culpably persist” in heretical belief cannot be saved. In the Middle Ages, Christian scholars expanded this irreducible minimum so as to make the Church’s teaching include the damnation of both the heathen and of all heretics, more especially as the possibility of heresy existing without a definite renunciation of the Catholic faith by the individual heretic hardly occurred to people in a society universally Catholic. As we have seen, the Church was the cement of that society. Marriage was one of her sacraments and had nothing to do with any civil ceremony. Break the Church, therefore, and you broke up family life. To deny her right to sanction an oath was to destroy the all-important feudal oath of allegiance. Therefore men accepted without hesitation the idea that to counterfeit the faith was worse than to counterfeit earthly coin, to betray God through heresy was viler than to betray an earthly sovereign by committing treason. This note is sounded again and again in the grim formulas establishing torture and the stake. Since human justice fiercely punished the lesser crimes against men, how much the more it ought to punish the greater crimes against God. Given the savage criminal law of the time, given also the Athanasian creed tracing back to our Lord saying: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; and he that believeth not shall be condemned” (St. Mark xvi), and the logical sequence is complete.
Nevertheless, even in times of clear, logical thinking such as the Middle Ages, men seldom act from logicalone. To act so is the mark of the fanatic, and although the fanatic often is powerful, still most men are not fanatics, and no society can long be ruled by fanaticism pure and simple. After some years of study and reflection upon the point, my own conclusion is that the Church and the Governments of the thirteenth century were determined in their action not only by the formal logic of the situation but also by the peculiarly repulsive nature of the Albigensian (“Catharan,” or Manichean) heresy, the leading heresy of the age.
Whatever might have happened, it did happen that the laws repressing heresy were codified by the acute legal minds of the new time under the stress of a particular heresy of a most hateful sort. Symonds has recorded two Milanese epitaphs, dating from the mid-thirteenth century. In one an archbishop is praised for having “... cut the throats of the heretics (... jugulavit haereses).” In the other a Podesta (chief executive magistrate) of the city is also praised because “He did his duty and burned the Catharans (Catharos ut debuit ussit).”[34]Historians seem to have failed to notice the connection of the two sentiments. Whether or not heresy in general would have been as rigorously stamped out had the particular Manichean, Albigensian, or Catharan heresy never existed is mere speculation. The striking fact is that the time that could praise an archbishop for having cut heretical throats thought of heresy as typified by this particular sect. Another illustration is a well-known story of St. Thomas Aquinas. It seems that the greatest of Christian philosophers, one day seated at dinner with St. Louis and his court, suddenly rolled out (no doubt in a deep voice corresponding to his massive frame), “I have a conclusive argument against the Manicheans (Conclusum est contra Manicheos).”[35]Many students have smiled over the feeling of the courtiers; for our purposes the point is that no such contemporary anecdote has come down to us concerning Waldenses, Arnaldists, or any other of the numerous heresies of the time. Theologians taught that all heresy was sin, hence anti-hereticallegislation, and the corresponding task of enforcing it. The enormous force of the attack upon the Albigenses came because the average Christian, once face to face with them, decided that duty was pleasure.
It is true that the huge engine first set in motion by anger against this inhuman sect was soon turned against all heretics, and the fact will surprise no one who has the remotest knowledge of practical politics. The historian, when he plots the course of the ship of State, is at ease in his study. But the ship herself, when that run was made, was blown upon, this side and that, by the fiercest passions of man, and is so to-day. Rare, indeed, are the officers and crew that, when those gales are at their height, can hold the vessel steady. More often her course is as viciously jagged as that of lightning. It is not for the American, with our treatment of the South and the negro question since the Civil War before him, to cast a stone at the thirteenth century.
In thirteenth century Languedoc, as in nineteenth century America, war made an end of nice distinctions. At the time of the Conference of Pamiers, in 1207, before the Crusade had begun, Peter de Vaux-Cernay could distinguish clearly between Waldensians and “heretics” par excellence: that is Manicheans. In 1226, nineteen years later, we find a Cardinal-Legate of the Holy See persuading Louis VIII of France to attack the city of Avignon because there were many Waldenses there, and this in spite of the fact that it was a fief of the Empire. From the first the theory of the Church had been that heresy itself, and not any one particular kind of heresy, however repulsive, was the enemy. Before the Albigensian Crusade is ended, we find that this theory is being worked out in fact.
What, then, are we to say of the statesmen and their peoples who encouraged or permitted the adoption into law of this sweeping theory promulgated by the Church? Clearly the men of the thirteenth century saw no moral problem in the matter, but only the doing of a necessary task. No other assumption can account for the success with which the difficulties in the way of the new inquisitorial institution were gotten over. For instance, there was the exceedingly delicate question of the precise relation of inquisitors to the local bishops. Had therebeen the slightest desire on the part of the secular governments to hinder the Inquisition, it would have been easy to play off one against the other, for it was a poor mediæval ruler who could not get some of his bishops to support him on practically any proposition. We hear of nothing of the sort. On the contrary, the thorny point of Inquisitorial versus Episcopal authority is triumphantly solved, in practice, without any serious hitch whatsoever. It is the same with popular resistance. At long intervals we sometimes hear of little riots, or even of the murder of an inquisitor here and there. But such things are the rarest of exceptions to the rule. This is easier to understand when we realize that only in the few centres of heretical resistance were inquisitorial activities of a drastic nature. Thus in Roussillon, just over the border from Languedoc, the atmosphere changes altogether. Here the minute research of the indefatigable M. Brutails has brought to light only four sentences of the Inquisition.[36]All are directed against robber barons, of the pestilential tribe whose activities we have noted. What happened to two of these wretches is not clear. Those whose fate is known suffered only the penalty of having their dead bones dug up and solemnly burnt, forty years after death in one case. The severities of the Inquisition, enormous though they bulk on the voluminous pages of Lea, were infrequent and local throughout thirteenth century Christendom as a whole. Furthermore, these infrequent and local severities were normally exercised against the “Albigensian” heretics who were deservedly detested. Not until two hundred years later—in the fantastic and stagnant close of the Middle Ages—do we find anything like a reign of terror. Nevertheless, the underlying idea of the whole business is so alien from us that we can scarcely understand it.
Even to approach understanding of such a thing, it is necessary to speak in parables. Let us, therefore, imagine a scene among the shades. The ghost of a thirteenth century scholastic is in converse with other ghosts, an ancient Roman, a sage of Hindustan, a mandarin from China, and an American citizen.
“Government is government,” say these last four, “and religion is religion. For men to agree, in general, to live peaceably with each other and to obey law, they need not also agree concerning divine things, and this is proved by what we ourselves have seen and known. If anyone offend against law let him be punished. But let him worship any God, or no God, as pleases him, granted only that he offend not the religious feeling and sense of decency of his neighbours, particularly if a great majority of them be agreed upon such matters.”
To whom the scholastic: “From you of the East and of old Rome these words mean little. No law of natural right informed your States. When did any one of you maintain that there was a God in whose sight all men were equal? Instead, you held to slavery and to the deepest inequalities among men. We strove more greatly than you because we sought to build upon eternal justice. In our eyes, it was justice that every man should enjoy the whole fruit of his labours, saving only a tax, as it were, paid to those who fought, judged, or governed. And in order that such justice might prevail it was needful that the Church be strong to lay down, precept upon clear precept, what was every man’s duty to his neighbour.”
“The conquered Saracen, in Spain and Sicily, was but an exception, to tolerate him did no harm. A graver exception was the Jew, for the weakness of men made it convenient that he be permitted usuries anathema to Christians. Nevertheless he was a race apart. But that the sword of the gospel should lose its edge, being blunted and chipped away by the unblessed interpretations of men calling themselves Christians, was to us a thing intolerable. For among such a babel of tongues we feared that men would listen to none, but would follow their own greeds and lusts, wheresoever these last might lead, until the strife among them ceased only from weariness.”
After he had done speaking there is a little silence. Then the American answers and says: “It is true that men must agree, after a fashion, as to that what is right, and it is true that this is hard. But faith is faith and men are facts. Moreover, since we speak of faith, there is a civic faith which seeks to bind men together upon the earth, no matter whence they came there and whitherthey shall go. But faith or no faith, men as citizens must sink or swim together, and if they cannot agree about the things of this world, they will certainly perish. About God they can never agree, therefore let them differ as peaceably as they can.”
“But is it not true,” says the scholastic, “that you have failed? For shades lately come hither out of the sunlight, say that more and more, in the upper world, there is strife in the cities between rich and poor. There are so many, even in your own country, who are called free and yet own nothing.”
“That is so,” replied the American, “but a friend of mine came here only the other day, and he said that they had not failed yet.”