The troubles became more and more serious, and at length culminated in open revolt. In 1567 the Duke of Alva arrived in Brussels with a well-appointed army of Spanish veterans, and at once began his career of blood and cruelty. When he left the country, six years later, a baffled man, he is said to have boasted that he hadcaused 18,600 persons to be executed during that period. On the 16th February, 1568, the Inquisition framed the most comprehensive death-warrant ever issued, and ten days later Philip confirmed it; the whole of the inhabitants of the Netherlands were regarded as heretics and condemned to death, a few persons only being excepted by name. Motley appears to have no doubt as to the authenticity of this appalling document, but Prescott states that he can find no Spanish record of it, and that it is related by only two Dutch historians. In 1568 the rebellion broke out in earnest, and led to that great and glorious war which lasted, with intervals, for eighty years, with the result that the Low Countries were delivered from the oppressor, and one of the noblest of nations secured its independence and religious freedom.
A section of the Mendicant Order founded by Francis of Assisi became known as the Spiritual Franciscans, whose adherence to their vows of poverty and purity was disapproved, as reflecting on the luxury and the moral apathy which prevailed in the Order generally. The Inquisition took up the task of showing the folly of being righteous overmuch, and in the fourteenth century the Spiritual Franciscans were very firmly handled. Twenty-five of them were severely tortured in 1318, and four were burnt at Marseilles for the criminal inconsistency of wearing flowing garments and having granaries and cellars. The lawfulness of possessing property was then one of the great questions that distracted the Church, and people ran the risk of being burnt whichever opinion they held. Encouraged by their success, the Inquisitors proceeded with increased vigour. At Narbonne the bishops tried to protect some accused persons, but were cowed by Inquisitorial threats.Three victims went to the stake in 1319, seventeen during the Lent of 1321, and several in the following year. At Lunel seventeen were burnt, at Beziers nine, and at Carcassonne 113 persons were executed between 1318 and 1350. All these fell victims to the Dominicans, but the orthodox Franciscans rivalled them in zeal, 114 persons being burnt by them in the year 1323. Having departed from their original moderation, the Franciscans had become energetic persecutors, who even went the length of burning a man for persistently refusing to break his vows of poverty and chastity.
In the latter part of the thirteenth century great unrest in religious matters prevailed throughout Europe, and credulity took strange forms. The expectation that the era of the Holy Ghost was about to begin was a common and harmless delusion which the orthodox felt in duty bound to extirpate. With little difficulty and by comparatively lenient methods and the use of a moderate amount of torture, the Inquisition put an end to a small sect called the Guillemites, named after a woman who was worshipped as an incarnation of the Holy Ghost, and whose resurrection after death was confidently looked for. Other eccentric modes of piety were suppressed with only a few burnings, but the episode of Dolcino in 1300 was a much more serious matter.
Apparently a man of commanding personality but holding a curious medley of religious opinions, Dolcino was soon recognized as the spiritual head of a community numbering several thousand persons, who called themselves the Apostles. The success of his mission being dangerous to the Church, the Pope Clement V proclaimed a crusade against him. He and his followers camped on a bleak mountain summit in the province of Vercelli, supporting themselves by raids for food into the neighbouring valleys. Three crusades failed, but a fourthwas successful; and after terrible sufferings, cannibalism being resorted to by the besieged, the mountain was captured with merciless slaughter on both sides, the fanatics were broken up, and their leaders handed over to the secular arm and punished with the utmost barbarity. The beautiful Margarita, Dolcino’s “sister in Christ,� refusing pardon and offers of marriage, was slowly roasted alive before his eyes, and Dolcino himself was taken on a cart through the district on a hot summer day, and gradually torn to pieces with red-hot pincers. Such was the man’s resolution that he bore this frightful treatment without even a change of countenance. Strange as were some of the tenets of these enthusiasts, they were harmless enough in a moral sense, their chief crimes being their protests against the evil lives of the clergy, their success in making converts, and their contention that Christ had forsaken the Church of Rome because of its wickedness. Believing purity of life to be the first essential to salvation, they scorned the formalities of priestly religion, and dedicated themselves to poverty, chastity, and humility.
In the fourteenth century the great question which divided the Church was that of the poverty of its founder, and to this all other questions had to give way. The Franciscans ventured to say that Jesus was very poor in worldly goods. The Dominicans, on the other hand, were confident that he possessed some property, though they could not say exactly how much. On this momentous question the good old Church was rent almost in twain. Regardless of Scripture, the Dominicans even hung on the walls of their monasteries pictures representing Jesus on the Cross, with one hand nailed and the other putting money in his pouch. The latter Order was favoured by the Pope, who persecuted the Franciscans with great persistency, and men wereburnt for holding heretical opinions on a subject of which no one possessed the smallest fragment of knowledge.
With the death of the chief defenders of comparative sanity in religion—Marsilio of Padua, William of Ockham, and others—the Spiritual Franciscans again underwent severe persecution, and controversy centred round the rights and privileges of the Church and the moral condition of the clergy. The well-known sect of the Fratricelli maintained that the real heretic was the Church, which by its evil conduct had created the heresies that it punished, and by its doctrines perverted the minds of simple believers. Popular sympathy in their favour was powerless to prevent punishment. The Popes commanded the Inquisitors to persecute, and about the middle of the century several persons were burnt in Italy and France, a number apparently in the presence of Pope Nicholas V. One of the leaders was burnt by instalments, and lingered for three days before death freed him from his torturers. Under this vigorous repression the Fratricelli became extinct towards the end of the fifteenth century.
Thecharge of heresy, being easy to make and hard to disprove, furnished a useful and efficacious means of attacking political enemies, especially as there was no other offence for which the penalty was so severe. Crusades against heretics were common. Prior to the great Albigensian war there were several crusades against the Stedingers of north-western Germany, a harmless sect of Waldensian tendencies, who were finally suppressed in the twelfth century. During the three following centuries the Papacy started or sanctioned crusades against Viterbo, Aix la Chapelle, Aragon, Ezzelin da Romano, Manfred of Sicily, Ferrara, Venice, the Visconti of Milan, the Hussites, the Maffredi, and others. During this period Italy was a scene of almost chronic disorder, turbulence, and war of the most ruthless character. At the capture at Cesena in 1376 the Papal Legate ordered that all the inhabitants should be put to the sword, “without distinction of age or sex, after they had admitted him and his bandits into the city under his solemn oath that no injury would be inflicted on them. The number of the slain was estimated at 5,000.�[36]In the early part of the fourteenth century many noble Italian families had sentencesof heresy pronounced against them by the Inquisition.
The earnest efforts of Savonarola to purify the Church and the freedom of his preaching induced the Papacy to proceed against him, though, as usual, political considerations also were influential. He was tried under a Papal commission and in accordance with the formulas of the Inquisition, though it does not appear that the proceedings were officially held by that body. At any rate, he was burnt in 1498, and after his death it was discovered that his writings contained no definitely heretical opinions.
A very important case in the fourteenth century was the trial of the Templars, which dragged on for over six years. Some of the accusations were of a trivial and ridiculous character, others implied traces of the Catharist heresy and dark practices at the initiation of neophytes, none of which could be proved, and the whole proceedings were a mockery of justice. The real motive was the desire of the King of France to seize the immense wealth of the Order, and grossly exaggerated charges were made with a view of giving a suitable colour to the course of “justice.â€� The Inquisition set to work, and secured many confessions, of course by the liberal use of torture; and that it was of a rigorous kind is shown by the fact that in Paris alone thirty-six Templars perished under their torments, at Sens twenty-five, and many more elsewhere. So untrustworthy and contradictory is the recorded evidence that there is little reason to doubt the innocence of the accused. Special Inquisitors were appointed all over Europe; the slow process of ecclesiastical law, which then sanctioned abuses from which the secular power shrank, was expedited by the Pope,the bishops were compliant, the State was greedy. The king and the Pope entered into an agreement defining the disposition of the victims’ property. In the clutches of the Inquisition the Order of the Temple was doomed. After a prolonged series of trials it was condemned, and its property confiscated. On May 12, 1310, fifty-four Templars were burnt in Paris, four more a few days later, and about twenty at other places. In Lorraine many of the Order suffered at the stake, while in Germany the victims were comparatively few, some in the diocese of Maintz being fortunate enough to secure an acquittal—a verdict highly displeasing to the Pope. In England the prosecution was greatly hampered by that peculiarity of English law which made torture illegal. The difficulty was got over by the express instructions of the Pope; but, in spite of a certain temporary success in that method of extracting evidence, no Templars were put to death, and the Inquisition failed to establish itself in this country. Results hardly more satisfactory attended its operations in Italy. The Templars were few; they strenuously avouched their innocence, and produced evidence highly favourable to their plea. They were, nevertheless, imprisoned, their property was confiscated, and the Pope in 1311 gave urgent instructions to have them tortured, but with what result is not known. In Castile and Aragon the Templars, notwithstanding another Papal command for their torture and the presence of special Inquisitors sent for the purpose, were declared innocent of the crimes attributed to them; but their Order was dissolved, and its property in Aragon handed over to the Hospitallers, who were burdened with their support. All over Europe repeated and urgent orders were received from Rome that the Templars were to be tortured, and the historian justly remarks that these Papal Bulls were “perhaps themost disgraceful that ever proceeded from a vicegerent of God.â€�[37]
The magnitude of the proceedings against the Templars may be estimated from the fact that when the Papal archives were by order of Napoleon transferred to Paris in 1810 the boxes of documents relating to the trial numbered 3,239; and many further records were, it is said, sold by Papal agents to grocers as waste paper. At the Council of Vienne convened in 1312, mainly to consider the case of the Templars, the Pope did his utmost to get them condemned without a hearing; and, though unsuccessful in this, the Order was formally abolished at his instigation, and the bulk of its property, as in Aragon, transferred to the Hospitallers, who did not relish the duty of supporting their unfortunate rivals. The rest of the booty was divided among the royal and other thieves who had long lusted for it. Many of the principal Templars were sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, in the course of which they rotted to death. The two chiefs, De Molay and De Charny, were slowly burned to death in Paris in March, 1314, as relapsed heretics, on the day after their declaration that they had confessed merely to save their lives. It would have been impossible thus to destroy the wealthiest and most powerful Order in Europe without the agency of the Holy Office.
When Joan of Arc was captured by John of Luxemburg in May, 1430, she was sold by him for 10,000 livres to the English, who desired to have her tried before the Inquisition. She was bitterly hated by them, and the University of Paris heartily joined in their ferocious pursuit of the heroic maid. Pierre Cauchon, the Bishopof Beauvais, another of her opponents, presided at the trial, which opened in February, 1431; and, as it was assumed that the proceedings would be invalid without the presence of an Inquisitor, though Cauchon himself was nominally one, Jean le Maitre, Vicar for Rouen, acted (reluctantly, be it said to his credit) as representative of the Inquisitor for France. The trial was a monstrously unjust one; evidence in Joan’s favour was suppressed, and a number of skilled lawyers and theologians worked hard to entrap her into confession. It is one of the marvels of history that this untaught peasant girl time after time baffled her persecutors by her simple and truthful answers to their cunningly framed questions. Worn out at last by their tireless persistence, she abjured, and received the customary sentence of perpetual imprisonment. The English were furious, and made desperate efforts to secure her death. It was not easy to find a pretext, but one was discovered in her change of clothing. Joan was tempted by having her usual man’s dress placed within her reach. She donned it; advantage was taken of her imprudence to treat it as a formal relapse into heresy, and two days later the noble and innocent deliverer of her country was burnt alive in the market place of Rouen, to the everlasting shame of France and England.
It is impossible to understand the life of the Middle Ages unless it is borne in mind that men and women everywhere held an implicit belief in the reality of the supernatural and of evil spirits, who were for ever tempting them to wrong. The idea of natural law being unknown, it was not perceived that this belief conflicted with the notion of an intelligible cosmos, or that it violated the idea of human responsibility by assumingthat man’s actions are attributable, not to himself, but to either good spirits or demons. It was man, however, who received the punishment. The air was believed to be thick with spirits; they might be seen as dust, as motes in the sunbeam, or in the falling rain. The sounds of the wind, of any clashing objects, of running streams and roaring cataracts, were the voices of spirits. From Scriptural texts, such as Genesis vi, 5, Luke iv, 7, and others, the logical deduction was drawn that intercourse between angelic and human beings was not merely possible, but continually took place.
At first the Inquisition neither had nor claimed jurisdiction over dealings with evil spirits. The Church, indeed, was sometimes more rational than the people, for in 1279 an Alsatian nun would have been burnt by the peasantry for sorcery had she not been rescued by some friars. The question of repressing this crime had been raised in 1257, and before many years elapsed it was generally recognized that the Inquisition had some sort of jurisdiction over it. Astrology soon attracted its attention, and was ranked as heresy. Peter of Abano seems to have been the first to be prosecuted, and he would have been burnt as a relapsed heretic had he not taken the precaution to die in the ordinary way first. In 1324 the astrologer, Cecco d’Ascoli, was forced to abjure, but, being imprudent enough to relapse, was burnt three years later. Several people were excommunicated for sorcery early in the fourteenth century, and the growing belief in the reality and gravity of the offence was greatly stimulated by Pope John XXII.
In Ireland a zealous Franciscan worked up a case against Lady Alice Kyteler, alleged to be one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world; and, though the lady escaped to England, her maid was mercilessly scourged until she confessed a tissue of absurdities, after which she wasburnt. Persecution diminished when, in 1330, the Pope withdrew sorcery from the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but the popular belief continued and extended, and the secular courts were sufficiently rigorous in their treatment of offenders. In 1390 two women, after being severely tortured two or three times without result, finally confessed to a charge of making a love-philtre, and were burnt. The early trials for sorcery in England were held in the civil courts, the leniency of which was disapproved by the Church; in 1407, therefore, Henry IV placed the offence under ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which naturally made the most of it, and prepared a congenial soil for the witchcraft delusion.
One of the most extraordinary cases in history is that of Gilles de Retz (or Rais), who in 1440 was accused of sacrilege, child murder, intercourse with demons, and other offences savouring of heresy. Gilles de Rais, Marshal of France, was a rich and powerful baron of Brittany, whose extravagance involved him in many difficulties. He was pious, as far as the observances of religion went, a man of unusual culture, with a passion for expensive books, paintings, music, the drama, and other forms of art. A dabbler in the occult, he sought perseveringly for the Philosopher’s Stone, by which he believed unlimited wealth would be gained, enabling him to keep up his lavish display and prodigality. But there was a very much darker side to his character. He was accustomed to employ agents, women as well as men, to entice children from their parents, by whom they were never seen again. These disappearances became so numerous that suspicion was aroused, and de Rais was at last arrested and tried before the Bishop of Nantes and the Vice-Inquisitor of the diocese. He was found guilty, but no sentence was pronounced. Immediately afterwards he was tried in a secular court, and sentenced to behanged and burnt, with two servants who had been accomplices in his ghastly crimes. Making allowance for popular exaggeration, which attributed countless victims to him, there is reason to believe that 140 children were outraged and murdered, their bodies being thrown into pits. It is said that “so depraved became his appetite that he found his chief enjoyment in the death agonies of his victims, over whose sufferings he gloated as he skilfully mangled them and protracted their torture. When dead he would criticize their beauties with his confidential servitors, would compare one with another, and would kiss with rapture the heads which pleased him most.�[38]Yet this monster died with words of godly exhortation on his lips and confident of salvation. Under the threat of torture he freely confessed to crimes enough to put 10,000 men to death. He was taken into church and granted absolution, and the execution was carried out on the following day. The extraordinary wickedness of this man made a deep impression on the superstitious people of Brittany, where he became, in later ages, identified with the Bluebeard of Perrault’s nursery story, of which some writers maintain that he furnished the original, possibly because he is said to have had seven wives, though he possessed only one. It is something to the credit of the Holy Office that it had a share in bringing this fiend to justice.
The growing belief in witchcraft and demonology in the fifteenth century gave additional strength to the long arm of the Inquisition, for witches were of necessity heretics. They were at first treated with comparative mildness, the secular courts being apparently the first to inflict the penalty of burning in such cases. But the Inquisition soon equalled this severity, and gave theaccused fewer chances of escape. Venice, however, was less energetic in this matter than most States, for in 1486 and 1521 it incurred the wrath of the Papacy by refusing to burn some witches condemned by the Inquisition. In 1474 several women were burnt in Piedmont for witchcraft, but two others, who were able to employ counsel of their own, had their case transferred to Turin, and presumably secured acquittals—a fact which seems to show the prudence of the Inquisitors in choosing the advocate for the defence, and excommunicating him if he was successful.
Of the Vaudois, or witches of Arras, several persons after being cruelly tortured, were burnt in 1460, a hermit being the first to suffer at Langres; and seven persons were put to death in oneauto de féin July of that year. Many of the leading and wealthiest men of Arras were arrested; confessions, some of them afterwards withdrawn, were wrung from them by torture, and twelve persons in all were burnt out of the thirty-four apprehended. The epidemic of credulity died away after a time, and the Inquisition stopped further prosecutions; but the prosperous city of Arras suffered enormous loss by the confiscations imposed and the panic which dislocated its trade. The return to sanity was chiefly due to the son of one of the victims succeeding in an appeal to the Parliament of Paris (previous appeals had been suppressed), which, after a brief inquiry lasting thirty years, issued a decree rehabilitating some of the accused, and caused the promoters of the prosecutions to be heavily fined. It was decreed that torture should be for the future prohibited. This is “probably the only case on record in which an Inquisitor was brought before a law court to answer for his official actions.�[39]Thus a healthy scepticism was beginning to enter the public mind. Several persons were charged before the Bishop of Amiens, who acquitted them; another was acquitted by the Archbishop of Besançon; while a third was tried by a tribunal consisting of the Archbishop of Rheims, the Bishop of Paris, the Inquisitor of France, and some theological experts. He was not only acquitted, but authorized to prosecute his accusers for reparation and damages. A poor man who went mad on the subject of witchcraft was burnt in August, 1460.
In its early stages the belief in witchcraft was artificially stimulated by the Church, and flourished in an atmosphere of ignorance and dread of the unseen. “Had the Church resolutely repressed the growing superstition in place of stimulating it with all the authority of the Holy See, infinite bloodshed and misery might have been spared to Christendom.â€�[40]Every Inquisitor was an agent for the spread of the belief, and the Church industriously taught it. An Italian Inquisitor in 1485 burnt forty-one people for witchcraft in one district in the Grisons—an exploit which gratified the historian Sprenger; and Innocent’s Bull of 1484 gave a perceptible impulse to the superstition, forty-eight persons being burnt in one small German town in five years by order of Sprenger and a fellow Inquisitor. To doubt the reality of the crime was to dispute the authority of the Church; to aid an accused person was to impede the Inquisition. A woman charged with witchcraft had little chance of escape, for if her defence made a favourable impression on the judges they also were considered to have been bewitched, and few of them cared to run that risk. Confessions made under severe torture were, of course, numerous, and were afterwards used as proving thereality of the crime. The small amount of incredulity which existed vanished before Sprenger’sMalleus Malficarum, which Lea terms “the most portentous monument of superstition which the world has produced.â€� With perfect good faith and absolute belief in the truth of demoniacal possession, Sprenger brought forward an overwhelming mass of evidence, which no one in those times was able to rebut or dared to dispute. This terrible book, which remained the recognized authority on the subject for more than a century, immensely stimulated a belief which, as Lea remarks, is “ a process of purely natural evolution from the principles which the Church had succeeded in establishing.â€�[41]For 200 years the Church had done all it could to promote this belief. Pope Calixtus, in 1457, ordered the repression of witchcraft, and towards the end of the century Alexander VI urged the Inquisitor of Lombardy to show greater zeal in his work. Early in the sixteenth century Julius II defined the powers of the Inquisitors, and issued to their helpers indulgences similar to those given to Crusaders. Thus persecution produced its natural effect in a great revival of superstition in Northern Italy. The Inquisitors burnt 140 persons at Brescia in 1510, and 300 at Como four years later.
The Witch Sabbaths were a well-known institution in the Middle Ages, and it is reported that more than 25,000 persons were sometimes present at these weird gatherings. In view of the danger incurred, such popularity seems unaccountable enough to suggest that the narratives spring from sheer delusion. In the district of Valcamonica an Inquisitor burnt seventy witches and sent as many more to prison, while those suspected or accused numbered 5,000, about one-fourth of the population of the valleys. The Venetian Senate thought this was going too far, but its protest only brought strong remonstrances from the Pope, Leo X, and fresh orders for persecution. The Senate replied by a dignified and rational document, laying it down that the accused were to have a fair trial with legal safeguards, that torture must be discontinued, that the Inquisition’s expenses were to be kept within moderate bounds, that greed for money was not to be the reason for prosecution, and that the excesses alleged against Inquisitors would have to be investigated. This document, “a monument of considerate wisdom and common-sense,â€� was ignored, and Christendom abandoned itself to a senseless, delirious orgy of superstition and cruelty. Between the madness of the Catholic and the madness of the Protestant there was little to choose. On one point at least they were in accord, and it is significant that Calvin used the arguments of the Inquisitors to justify persecution. In Geneva 500 persons are said to have been burnt within three months, at Toulouse 400 on a single occasion (some say 1,500), at Bamberg 600, at Wurzburg 900 in one year—all in the sixteenth century. The Senate of Savoy condemned 800 at one time. That a cold spring in 1586 was caused by witchcraft was proved by the confessions of the guilty parties, and for this crime 118 women and two men were burnt by the Archbishop of Treves. This city seems to have exceeded all others in its atrocities. According to Lecky, 7,000 persons were burnt there for sorcery, but he does not state over what period these figures extend. The Inquisitor Paramo, who wrote in the sixteenth century, boasts that since 1404 the Holy Office burnt as many as 30,000 persons, who, if let alone, would have “brought the whole world to destruction.â€�[42]This Paramo defended the secrecy of the Inquisition on the ground that God was the first Inquisitor, and that in secret Adam and Eve had been tried.
A religion which imagined that it was the repository of a full and final revelation, that it possessed the keys of the invisible world, and which regarded every doubt as a heresy born of the devil, naturally became in practice a vast machine for persecution. When mental activity was thus a crime, and any attempt to increase knowledge an act of rebellion against God, it was clear that human progress was brought to a standstill. No one can tell what progress would have been made had the Inquisition not existed; that it kept Europe for hundreds of years in mental torpor, and did what it could to make the reign of stupidity eternal, does not admit of question. What the magnificent brain of Roger Bacon could have achieved is matter for speculation. It has been disputed, but seems to be true, that he was imprisoned for his advanced opinions, and died a captive; but, however that may be, it is certain that the Church succeeded in preventing mankind from benefiting by his researches. Anything like modern Freethought was out of the question, but distinct approaches to it were made in the twelfth century by Averrhoes, whose particular tenets were that matter is uncreated and eternal, that the soul dies with the body, only collective humanity being immortal, and that all religions are of human origin and, though useful incentives to virtue, contain only relative truth. These doctrines, which were looked upon as deadly heresies, surprisingly anticipate some of the speculations of our own times. It is remarkable that under the rigorous conditions which prevailed Averrhoism should have spread so rapidly as it did, but it could havebeen only among the scholarly few; and in the thirteenth century, which was in certain respects more advanced than the fifteenth, these opinions made some slight impression on the popular mind. Had the impression been deeper, the results might have been in some respects more disastrous. The general ignorance was so great that a premature abandonment of the orthodox faith might have been made the occasion of even more flagrant moral licence than actually existed, and so have strengthened the hands of the persecutors. A system which held all religions to be untrue, especially the religion of the Christians, who daily ate their God, would naturally enough be thought to emanate from the bottomless pit, and it is an astonishing circumstance that for a long time the Inquisition left Averrhoism alone. Herman of Ryswick, the most famous successor of Peter of Abano, after being sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, continued to propagate his errors, and in 1512 was burnt at the Hague by order of the Inquisition. It is evident that at times considerable freedom of speech existed, or Laurentius Valla would scarcely have been able, in the middle of the fifteenth century, to assail the “Donation of Constantine,â€� or to declare that the Papacy should be deprived of its temporal power. Valla got off cheaply by a simple declaration that he believed as Mother Church believed, though Mother Church, he added, knew nothing about it. Ultimately this restless disputant obtained a clerical sinecure in Rome, and died in peace. Several other unbelievers escaped the customary doom of mental independence. It is one of the anomalies of ecclesiastical history prior to the Reformation that, while the most trifling variations from orthodoxy were relentlessly crushed, a philosophical humanism hardly distinguishable from downright Atheism was fashionable among the intellectualclasses, even those in clerical orders, and frequently went unpunished. The writings of the famous Raymond Lully—perhaps the most voluminous author on record, for he is credited with 321 volumes—brought him into conflict with the Inquisition; and long after his death in 1315 Eymeric, the Inquisitor of Aragon, sought to have his memory condemned. This was partially done in 1620, though the main object of Lully had been to suppress the heresy of Averrhoism, and many miracles wrought by his remains had evidenced his saintliness. Not many figures of the Middle Ages have had the doubtful honour of being both heretic and saint.
In 1331 Pope John XXII had imprisoned an English priest who maintained that the saints after death are at once admitted to the presence of God. This doctrine, known as the “Beatific Vision,� had aroused the Pope’s anger, but he was subsequently compelled by the strength of the general opinion in its favour to accept it, after a controversy which nearly cost him his tiara. Years of bitter dispute ensued on a subject about which no human being knew anything whatever, and it even became a question of grave political consequence, for the monarchs of the time ventured to differ from the Papal opinion. The Inquisition espoused the popular view, and made questions on the subject an important part of the interrogatories addressed to the unlucky persons brought before its tribunals.
About the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, a purely dogmatic development, a further mass of superstition spread, and gave rise to bitter controversies, the Franciscans and Dominicans quarrelling so fiercely that in 1482 popular tumults broke out in Italy on this mysterious topic, of which everybody was supposed to know something. The theory that the Virgin Mary never from the moment of her conception shared thesinful tendencies of ordinary mortals was something of a novelty, and the Dominicans who rejected it had tradition in their favour, but they were overborne by the increasing power of the new superstition. An Italian priest who in 1504 maintained that Christ was conceived in the Virgin’s heart was seized by the Inquisition, and had a narrow escape from death by fire. A special appearance of the Virgin herself, who expressed her annoyance at the doctrine, caused an immense sensation until it was discovered that the manifestation was a trick got up by the Dominicans, and four of the culprits were burnt. Not until 1854, after five centuries of struggle, was the doctrine officially proclaimed as a formal act of faith, when the Dominicans obediently began to find reasons in its favour. It would seem to be a logical sequence that the reputed father of the Virgin was no more concerned in her birth than Joseph was supposed to be in that of Jesus, but for maintaining this thesis a man was condemned so recently as 1876.
Notwithstanding the extent to which heresy was propagated by printed books, it was a long time before the Inquisition was recognized as the most convenient instrument for their supervision and suppression. The first Papal deliverance on the subject was a Bull by Gregory XI in 1376, instructing the Inquisition to examine and condemn suspected writings, but what were the results is not known. An Archbishop who burnt some writings of John Wycliffe at Prague was found to have exceeded his powers, and it was not till the beginning of the sixteenth century that a regular censorship was organized, and then in Germany only. However, the Inquisition was willing to undertake additional responsibilities, and at length made a rulethat any one possessing books of doubtful orthodoxy must within eight days deliver them to the Bishop or Inquisitor of his district, on pain of being under vehement suspicion of heresy. That the Church was more anxious to preserve its privileges than to promote religion may be inferred from the fact that translations into the vernacular of any parts of the Bible were prohibited. As it was found before long that books containing heretical doctrines were being circulated, it was deemed expedient to forbid anything being printed without previous examination by the Holy Office and the Papal and episcopal authorities. The religious world, however, became so disorganized by the Reformation that these precautions were of little avail, and it was not until the Church had regained much of its power in the counter Reformation that a really strict censorship could be established.
Although one Pope, Boniface VIII, issued a Bull decreeing that every human being, including the members of the Greek Church, was bound to obey the Roman Pontiff, a prudent and tolerant attitude was usually maintained towards that unsound but powerful rival. Stray members of the Greek communion who happened to be found in Western Europe were at times persecuted as heretics, and in 1351 all Greeks were ordered once a year to confess and take the sacrament according to the Latin usage. Any person who after this decree violated it was a relapsed heretic, and entitled to no mercy. But to coerce effectively a great religious organization, every member of which was in the eyes of Rome a heretic, proved too arduous a task for orthodoxy, and the Inquisition failed to utilize the glorious opportunities for persecution afforded by Eastern Europe, with its variety of races and religious ideas. The Church wastherefore prudent enough to follow a line of policy as mild and tolerant as it was novel.
The scandal to the cause of true religion which accompanied the sale of Indulgences was so notorious all over Europe that it is surprising to find that this abuse—deeply prejudicial to the Church and to public morals—was not considered to deserve vigorous repression. It is true that the practice was sometimes officially denounced, as when Pope Alexander IV gave the Inquisitors power to deal with the evil. But Lea asserts that, so far as he can discover, only one man was tried by the Inquisition for this prevalent offence. He admitted that he had been in the habit of telling monstrous falsehoods and filling the superstitious people with absurdities, but it is doubtful whether he was punished—if at all, it was by nothing more than a light penance. The remarkable lenity of the Church towards this traffic was, of course, due to the fact that it furnished a very substantial source of profit; but if the Popes had expended on the internal reform of the Church a hundredth part of the energy which they devoted to the suppression of minor differences of opinion the Reformation might conceivably have been averted. It was the Reformation that made imperative that moral renewal which prolonged the influence of the Church and still constitutes one of the chief elements of its strength.
It is a striking proof of human selfishness and of the extent to which it blinds mankind to its own failings that the Inquisition was never instructed to put down simony (which, as heresy, came within its jurisdiction), and that it never volunteered to do so—a fact which shows very clearly that, in the view of the Christian Church, morals were of trifling importance compared with belief. One or two of the Popes worked withgenuine zeal and immense energy to extirpate the evil, but without avail. The practice being highly profitable financially to the Church, its disastrous moral effects were ignored, the laudable desires of some Pontiffs being thwarted by others less scrupulous. Every clerical office, from the highest to the lowest, was virtually sold by auction. Pope John XXII even drew up a scale on which absolutions for simony could be granted at the lowest market rates. The prevalence of this offence was perhaps the chief of all the causes which contributed to the degradation of the Christian Church. In this connection it may be interesting to reproduce here a clever and daring satire which was popular in the thirteenth century:—
Here beginneth the Gospel according to the silver marks. In those days the Pope said to the Romans: When the Son of Man shall come to the throne of our majesty, first say to him: Friend, why comest thou? And if he continue to knock, giving you nothing, ye shall cast him into outer darkness. And it came to pass that a certain poor clerk came to the court of the lord pope, and cried out saying: Have mercy on me, ye gate-keepers of the pope, for the hand of poverty hath touched me. I am poor and hungry; I pray you to help my misery. Then were they wroth and said: Friend, thy poverty perish with thee; get thee behind me, Satan, for thou knowest not the odour of money. Verily, verily, I say unto thee that thou shalt not enter into the joy of thy Lord until thou hast given thy last farthing.Then the poor man went away, and sold his cloak and his coat and all that he had, and gave it to the cardinals and gate-keepers and chamberlains. But they said: What is this among so many? And they cast him beyond the gates, and he wept bitterly and could find naught to comfort him. Then came to the court a rich clerk, fat and broadand heavy, who in his wrath had slain a man. First he gave to the gate-keeper, then to the chamberlain, then to the cardinals; and they thought they were about to receive more. But the lord pope, hearing that the cardinals and servants had many gifts from the clerk, fell sick unto death. Then unto him the rich man sent an electuary of gold and silver, and straightway he was cured. Then the lord pope called unto him the cardinals and servants, and said unto them: Brethren, take heed that no one seduce you with empty words. I set you an example; even as I take so shall ye take.[43]
Here beginneth the Gospel according to the silver marks. In those days the Pope said to the Romans: When the Son of Man shall come to the throne of our majesty, first say to him: Friend, why comest thou? And if he continue to knock, giving you nothing, ye shall cast him into outer darkness. And it came to pass that a certain poor clerk came to the court of the lord pope, and cried out saying: Have mercy on me, ye gate-keepers of the pope, for the hand of poverty hath touched me. I am poor and hungry; I pray you to help my misery. Then were they wroth and said: Friend, thy poverty perish with thee; get thee behind me, Satan, for thou knowest not the odour of money. Verily, verily, I say unto thee that thou shalt not enter into the joy of thy Lord until thou hast given thy last farthing.
Then the poor man went away, and sold his cloak and his coat and all that he had, and gave it to the cardinals and gate-keepers and chamberlains. But they said: What is this among so many? And they cast him beyond the gates, and he wept bitterly and could find naught to comfort him. Then came to the court a rich clerk, fat and broadand heavy, who in his wrath had slain a man. First he gave to the gate-keeper, then to the chamberlain, then to the cardinals; and they thought they were about to receive more. But the lord pope, hearing that the cardinals and servants had many gifts from the clerk, fell sick unto death. Then unto him the rich man sent an electuary of gold and silver, and straightway he was cured. Then the lord pope called unto him the cardinals and servants, and said unto them: Brethren, take heed that no one seduce you with empty words. I set you an example; even as I take so shall ye take.[43]
Avaricious men were enabled by an incredibly bad system to make religion a public danger. Priests who led women astray on the plea that intercourse with holy men was not sinful, a depraved laity, religion severed from morals—these made up a state of society in which apprehensions existed that the wickedness of the clergy would provoke the people to rise against them, or perhaps even bring on the world the final visitation of Divine wrath. Good men asked why God did not intervene to save his Church from ruin. No intervention came.
Ifthe Inquisition really was the beneficent institution which some of its apologists represent, it is singular that their defences should be so weak and their admissions so damaging. The line taken is, in the main, that heresy is a crime against social order, that the Holy Office embodied the tendencies of the age, that its methods were no worse than those of the secular powers—were, indeed, an improvement upon them, and that no special reproach can be directed against the Church on the score of inhumanity. It is claimed that the practice of the Inquisition, though rigorous at the outset from the necessities of the case, was modified by experience in the direction of mildness and mercy, and that the frequent appeals to Rome implied the certainty of an indulgent hearing.
Thus the Rev. J. Balmez, a Spanish writer who, in hisEuropean Civilization, defends the Inquisition—on the whole in a fairly judicious and tolerant spirit—alleges that the Inquisitorial “rigour was the result of extraordinary circumstances—the effect of the spirit of the nations and the severity of customs in Europe at that time.â€�[44]No student of history will deny that there is some truth in this contention, though he would naturally expect the Christian Church to have made far greater efforts than it did to mitigate the “severity of customs.â€� Its conceptions of social order were incompatible withpersonal liberty. And it is curious that when in Southern France the majority of the people were heretics they showed no tendency to persecute, though they had the power. All the events, the movements, and the personages of human history are necessarily the consequences of their antecedents; but, unless we are to relieve all human beings from responsibility for their actions, we cannot exonerate the Inquisition from crimes of the greatest magnitude. It may have been established from the best and purest motives; yet, though experience made it fully aware of the terrible evils which resulted from its procedure, it deliberately increased them. All the actions of virtuous men are not good actions, and if, in putting into practice particular theories, they are found to produce mischievous effects, a sacred obligation rests upon the holders to revise their views in the light of the experience gained. Buckle, with justice, maintains that moral feelings alone are not equal to the task of preventing persecution. If the moral feelings are enlisted on the side of what is erroneously believed to be the truth, the sincerity of the persecutor only makes him the more dangerous to society. “That the Inquisitors were remarkable for an undeviating and incorruptible integrity may be proved in a variety of ways and from different and independent sources of evidence.â€�[45]In admitting the general truth of this remark, it must be borne in mind that the Inquisitorial system facilitated grave abuses by officials whose integrity was far from “undeviating.â€� Buckle adds: “The evidence decisively proves the utter inability of the moral feelings to diminish religious persecution.... The great antagonist of intolerance is not humanity, but knowledge. It is to the diffusion of knowledge, and to that alone, that we owethe comparative cessation of what is unquestionably the greatest evil men have ever inflicted on their own species. For that religious persecution is a greater evil than any other is apparent, not so much from the enormous and almost incredible number of its known victims as from the fact that the unknown must be far more numerous, and that history gives no account of those who have been spared in the body in order that they might suffer in the mind. We hear much of martyrs and confessors—of those who were slain by the sword or consumed in the fire; but we know little of that still larger number who, by the mere threat of persecution, have been driven into an outward abandonment of their real opinions, and who, thus forced into an apostasy the heart abhors, have passed the remainder of their lives in the practice of a constant and humiliating hypocrisy. It is this which is the real curse of religious persecution. For in this way, men being constrained to mask their thoughts, there arises a habit of securing safety by falsehood and of purchasing impunity with deceit. In this way fraud becomes a necessary of life; insincerity is made a daily custom; the whole tone of public feeling is vitiated, and the gross amount of vice and of error fearfully increased. Surely, then, we have reason to say that, compared to this, all other crimes are of small account; and we may well be thankful for that increase of intellectual pursuits which has destroyed an evil that some among us would even now restore.â€�[46]Notwithstanding the great improvement in knowledge, however, the main body of the Christian Church still holds that persecution of erroneous doctrines is not an evil, and still officially teaches that their propagation should be punished with death. A Dominican priest in 1782 ferociously argued that “thecommand in Deuteronomy xiii, 6-10, to slay without mercy all who entice the faithful from the true religion, is almost literally the law of the Holy Inquisition; and proceeded to prove from Scripture that fire is the peculiar delight of God, and the proper means of purifying the wheat from the tares.â€�[47]
It is perhaps going too far to affirm that all the Inquisitors were men of incorruptible integrity. From the first the motive of religious zeal was alloyed with the desire of personal or corporate profit, and an elaborate system of persecution and extortion was invented which permitted the exercise of both passions, whereby the many suffered to gratify the few.
Balmez remarks that “the Roman Inquisition has never been known to pronounce the execution of capital punishment ... the facts show the difference between the Popes and the Protestants. The Popes, armed with the tribunal of intolerance, have not spilt a drop of blood; Protestants and philosophers have shed torrents.�[48]The object of this impudent lie is simply to score a point against Protestantism. That Protestants persecuted vigorously when they had the power no one disputes; for a long time they failed to understand their own principles. But they had less power and fewer opportunities than the Church of Rome. The precise degrees of culpability in the two bodies cannot be determined here. No other Church but that of Rome has ever set up an Inquisition. The preceding pages will have shown that the Popes many times officially instituted crusades against Christians who rejected parts of their teaching; that they expressly commanded human beings to be tortured and put to death; that all through the Middle Ages the Church exerted a dominant influence over theState, and, while affecting scruples as to the actual shedding of blood, insisted on the secular power inflicting death in a form infinitely more painful than that of the sword. Thus an educated writer can actually maintain that, because a man does not murder with his own hand, but induces another to murder for him, he has no moral responsibility for the crime. What civil code would recognize such a doctrine? The subterfuge merely adds hypocrisy to cruelty. The admission will be noticed that the Popes were “armed with the tribunal of intolerance.� The “facts� show unmistakably who created that tribunal. They show with equal clearness how it was employed. It will also be observed that in this passage Balmez suppresses the fact that the Inquisition had been actively at work for 300 years before Protestantism was heard of, and that its most frightful excesses were committed against those whose moral sense was outraged by the conduct of the clergy.
It is true that the practice of the Inquisition became milder in the course of time. But to claim this as a merit is to falsify the plain historical record. There were two principal reasons for the diminished severity, neither of them reflecting special credit on the persecutors. In Languedoc and Spain the Inquisition succeeded in exterminating practically every heretic in the kingdom, so that the field of its operations became gradually narrowed. The Inquisition ceased to burn heretics only when there were no more heretics to burn. And a certain inclination to milder penalties was made inevitable by an improvement in secular morals which can hardly have been the work of the Church which had seriously retarded it. In other countries the diffusion of knowledge led even some ecclesiastics to perceive the futility of persecution, and when that point was reached they became convinced of its inhumanity. Balmez might as well have arguedthat the dying-out of the witchcraft mania was due to the benevolent spirit of the witch-hunters.
A significant admission made by Balmez may be noticed. “I see,� he remarks, “that from the earliest times, when the Church began to exert political influence, heresy began to figure in the codes as a crime; and I have never been able to discover a period of complete tolerance.�[49]This means that the spirit of intolerance, so rapidly developed in the Church, infected the State also. The fact is beyond dispute, but it simply furnishes an additional testimony to the evils of ecclesiasticism. Nor will any one deny that the Christian Church has never yet shown to the world “a period of complete tolerance.�
The further argument of Balmez, that the Inquisition preserved Spain from the “dangers� of Judaism and Protestantism, may also be admitted as representing facts, though it is necessary to draw from them conclusions other than his own. The material prosperity of Spain would have been incalculably greater if the Jews had been allowed the free exercise of their business abilities and the practice of their non-aggressive faith; while, if Protestantism had been permitted the freedom which it secured elsewhere, the cause of spiritual religion must have been promoted. As to the Inquisition having averted civil war, if the Church had grasped the idea of tolerance civil war over religious differences would have been impossible. But even that serious peril would have been a less evil than the extinction of liberty, the slow suffocation of the intellectual life, the neglect of science, and the decay of commerce, which actually resulted from the Inquisition’s policy. Civil war would have been at least an indication of life. The Inquisition meant death.
Perhaps the best-known and most thorough-going apologist for the Inquisition, so far as Spain is concerned, is Count Joseph De Maistre (1754-1821), a Romanist layman who adopted a strongly ecclesiastical point of view, and whose great ability was marred by a tendency to paradox and dogmatism. HisLetters to a Russian Gentleman on the Spanish Inquisitionare full of a vivacious special pleading, which perplexes without enlightening the reader. His main arguments group themselves round three points: (1) That the Spanish Inquisition was a purely secular institution; (2) that it did not condemn to death; (3) that it did not punish the expression of opinion on questions of religion.
With regard to the first point De Maistre says: “The Inquisition, by virtue of the Bulls of the Sovereign Pontiff, and the King, by virtue of his royal prerogative, constitute the authority which regulates, and has always regulated, the tribunals of the Inquisition—tribunals which are, at the same time, both royal and ecclesiastical; so that, if either of the two powers happened to withdraw, the action of the tribunal would necessarily be suspendedâ€� (p. 8). How this explicit admission that the Spanish Inquisition was both a State and a religious organization is reconcilable with the assertion that it was “entirely a royal institutionâ€� must be left to the reader’s ingenuity to discover. De Maistre effectively demolishes his own contention. It is still more effectively confuted by a later and better authority. Dr. Pastor admits that the Spanish Inquisition was “a mixed, but primarily ecclesiastical, institution. The fact that the condemned were handed over to the secular arm testifies to the correctness of this view. Had the Spanish Inquisition been a State Inquisition, a royal court of justice, there would have been no necessity for this. A court which invariably hands over those whom it finds guilty to thesecular arm for punishment cannot itself be a secular tribunal. It was precisely the ecclesiastical character of the new Inquisition which made its judges decline to execute capital sentences and follow the custom always observed by the ecclesiastical Inquisition, of requesting that the prisoner ‘might be leniently dealt with’—a formality prescribed by the canon law.â€�[50]The formula of mercy, of course, deceived no one. In another place Dr. Pastor says: “It is important to note, as a significant fact bearing on the character of this institution, that ‘not only the ecclesiastical authorization of the first Inquisitors, but also the first regulations as to the mode of procedure, emanated directly from the Pope.’â€�[51]Lea states that the Inquisition even claimed that all civil statutes of which it disapproved should be abrogated.[52]But if the responsibility for the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition rests only partially upon the Popes, there is no question of divided responsibility in the case of the institution with which the present essay is concerned. That was established, renewed, and supervised at every turn by the Papacy.
De Maistre’s second contention is that the Inquisition did not pass sentences of death, but that if it virtually did so it merely followed the practice of all other tribunals, which necessarily have the power to inflict death for serious crime. “All tribunals condemn to death,â€� he says, adding: “The Church so abhors blood that a priest cannot be a surgeon, lest his consecrated hand should shed the blood of the patientâ€� (p. 11). It is sheer superstition to argue that a tribunal notoriously prone to inflict excessive punishment is relieved of moral responsibility by omitting a particular form of words, while taking every possible precaution to ensure the punishment beingmercilessly inflicted. The argument is a dishonest shift, which “strains at a gnat and swallows a camel.â€� The “consecrated handâ€� was too holy to practise the art of saving life, but not too holy to employ an unconsecrated hand to destroy it. In this connection De Maistre enlarges on the lenity of Rome, which frequently protested against the severity of the laws against heresy. That mildness was occasionally shown is true, but it is forgotten that Rome itself—as the Papal Bulls ordering torture prove—was very largely responsible for the severity. That the tenderness was not due to an excess of humane feeling we may infer from the savage rigour which in the thirteenth century became a feature of the canon law. Had that law been a model of gentleness and love, ecclesiastics would have found no difficulty in making it an engine of cruelty and persecution, on the plea that concern for the heretic’s soul made it necessary and wholesome to punish his body. As it was, injunctions to deal mercifully with him were so systematically set at naught that very little importance can be attached to their face value. Inquisitors were seldom reproved for being zealous persecutors. De Maistre’s verdict that the Inquisition was “mild, tolerant, charitable, the bearer of consolation in every country of the world,â€� sounds like irony, but was probably his sincere conviction. Polemical writers sometimes empty words of all intelligible meaning.
In his third main argument De Maistre shows the cloven hoof. He maintains that people are rightly punished if they “strike deadly blows at the religion of their nation,� that “the propagator of heresy ought to be classed among the greatest criminals,� and that it is positively wicked to protest against the punishments of the Inquisition (p. 44). If these contentions are sound, it is a waste of time to argue that the Inquisitiondid not punish the expression of heretical opinions in religion. It was established for that very purpose.
The following specimen of De Maistre’s reasoning will probably be sufficient: “God has spoken; it is for us to believe. The religion which he established is one, even as He is Himself. Truth being essentially intolerant, to profess religious toleration is to profess scepticism; in other words, to exclude faith. Woe, a thousand times woe, to the stupid imprudence which accuses us of damning men. It is only God who damns; He alone has said to His messengers:Go, teach all nations! He that believeth shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned� (p. 72). This passage is reproduced merely as a curious example of the religious reasoning of a century ago. Fortunately for human happiness, the world has condemned this point of view by abandoning it. The day has gone by for arguments which seek to justify religious persecution, and for appeals to supernatural authority in support of irrational dogmas.
In our own time the Inquisition has found a far more reasonable and fair-minded apologist in the person of Monseigneur Celestin Douais, Bishop of Beauvais, who published in 1906 a scholarly examination of the Holy Office. The first sentence of this work is that “The Inquisition was established by the Papacy, which alone was qualified to do so,� and that “this fact is universally known and recognized.� The Bishop adds that the Inquisitor Eymerich expressly lays it down that an Inquisitor is not a secular judge, but a delegate appointed by the Pope. If, in his calm and restrained historical exposition, he nowhere condemns the organized barbarity of the system, he freely exposes its defects, and only incidentally defends its proceedings. He is a historian rather than an apologist. The few considerations he urges are of quite minor importance; if theyextenuate the guilt of the Inquisitorial practice, they by no means disprove the enormous mischief it produced. Thus he asserts, on the authority of Eymerich, that the names of witnesses were suppressed because, if mortal enmity to the accused could be proved against them, they were required to withdraw from the case. In practice the accused gained no advantage from this provision, for he could only guess at his possible enemy, and the Inquisitors were ingenious enough, if they so desired, to prove his guesses wrong. The handicap to the prisoner remained, and it is possible to assume that one reason for the extreme secrecy was the determination to render the concession useless.
Monseigneur Douais states that ecclesiastical law was in general milder than secular law, and that torture was interdicted by the canons until 1252. This may be so, but it was a Pope who in that year insisted on the employment of torture, and it was again expressly authorized by Innocent IV, Urban IV, and other Popes. In this, as in other matters, it is useless to rely on provisions which were habitually set at naught. The contention that torture was seldom used is perhaps the result of too implicit a trust in formulas. According to M. Langlois, torture became so much a part of the ordinary process that it was purposely left unrecorded.[53]The great thing was to extract confession; it was easy to preserve a discreet silence as to the means. In the civil records the same peculiarity is observable.[54]No institution has ever exhibited greater discrepancies between theory and practice than has the Inquisition.
That provision was made for the mitigation and even remission of penalties need not be doubted. But thiswas done in few and exceptional cases only; the decision being customarily left to the Inquisitors’ discretion, it became the practice to ignore everything that tended in favour of the persons accused.
That the co-operation of the Bishop of the diocese was necessary to give validity to the Inquisitorial sentence is assumed by Monseigneur Douais to have relieved the Inquisitors of some portion of their responsibility. Probably it did sometimes make the trial a little less serious for the accused, for the Bishops did not always share the inflexibility of the Holy Office. But the argument merely lifts a part of the responsibility from one department of the Church and places it on another. Undeniably the Inquisition was set up by the Church of Rome. The arrangement was, of course, no guarantee that justice would be done, nor does it disprove the charge that the Inquisition was a serious menace to civilization.
The point on which Bishop Douais lays most stress is that the delivery of the heretic to the secular arm was a matter quite distinct from his subsequent fate, with which neither Inquisition nor Church had any concern. It was regrettable that people should be burnt alive, but that was entirely the affair of the civil power. The Church could not carry out a sentence which it had not delivered; its own sentence was merely a harmless pronouncement that the heretic was cut off from the Church. And the Church always took particular care to plead for his gentle and merciful treatment. Now the formula, “Without shedding of blood,� was known to be a callous and cruel pretence. The Inquisition was perfectly aware of the result of its relinquishing the heretic to the secular arm. If it objected to men being burnt alive, if the civil power exceeded the intentions and wishes of the Church, why did the Church never raise aword of protest? What it did was usually to send a secretary to see that the burning was properly carried out, and if it was not the magistrate himself was liable to the penalties for heresy.[55]
Finally, Monseigneur Douais claims that the Inquisition, by its wise conformity with the social justice of the period, succeeded in reducing heresy, and “separated the secular power from the spiritual domain of the Church.�[56]Thus an arrangement by which the Church compelled the State to do its dirty work is termed a “separation.� An ecclesiastic sees separation where other people would see alliance. This is called “reconciling the interests of God and Cæsar.� The blasphemy appears to be quite unconscious.
An article on the Inquisition by a Jesuit priest, Joseph Blötzer, of Munich, which appears in theCatholic Encyclopædia, contains one or two statements which may be very briefly noticed. The assertion that the Church was more merciful than the State is true only in comparatively rare instances; but, considering the claims of the Church to a Divine origin and also the general spirit of its founder’s teachings, one would expect the difference to be very much more perceptible.
Heresy is said to have been primarily a political offence. On the contrary, it was primarily a religious offence, as would naturally be inferred from the flourishing condition of the Netherlands, the Albigensian and other heretical communities, the remarkable industry of whose members made them most valuable citizens. Throughout the shameful story of religious persecution it was usually the Church which goaded the sometimes reluctant State to suppress heresy; it was the Church that nagged and bullied rulers into compliance with itswill. They were fools to comply, but comply they did, frequently under threat of excommunication. Occasionally the Church and its favourite department, the Holy Office, did have a fit of compassion, but it was the exception that proved the rule. And the fit usually came on when there was money to be made by clemency.
The Church, it is claimed, enjoined excommunication, but not death, as the punishment of heresy. This is true of particular periods only; as applied to the whole career of the Inquisition it is part of the conventional hypocrisy. The Church disliked the term “blood,� but caused it to be shed freely enough; it seldom used the word “death,� but it handed over the heretic to the secular power with a perfectly clear understanding that death was to be the penalty.
According to Father Blötzer, the general lay opinion was that heretics should be severely punished, and the Church endeavoured to soften this feeling. If the Church is entitled to the credit of its rare attacks of tenderness, it must also take the discredit of its general barbarity. It cannot be allowed to “have it both ways.� And in the Middle Ages it was, of course, the clerical body that was the fount of lay opinion regarding heresy. Some doubt as to the softening process is natural enough in view of the Papal decree of 1184 previously referred to. Peter Cantor was ordered not to put the Cathari to death immediately after the ecclesiastical judgment had been delivered, for the significant reason that the Church might not be compromised. This shows that the Church was aware of its complicity in the proceedings and in the fate of its victims. In their language dealing with these matters the apologists of the Inquisition display no small skill in casuistry. TheCatholic Encyclopædiapalliates torture by saying that it was not intended as a punishment, but as a method of eliciting truth. Theperson on the rack failed to appreciate the distinction. As torture usually elicited error, the Inquisitors cannot be complimented on the rationality of their methods. Other Inquisitorial terms are juggled with in the same way by the apologists. Confiscation of a heretic’s goods was simply a mode of defraying the costs and expenses of his trial. Imprisonment, again, was not punishment; it was nothing more than a useful discipline which afforded an opportunity of repentance.
The Jesuit writer concludes that “the Inquisition marks a substantial advance in the contemporary administration of justice, and therefore in the general civilization of mankind.� If to prevent the honest expression of thought is to advance civilization, the claim is just. If the administration of justice is promoted by torture, when in the extremity of pain people will confess anything, the correctness of the assertion must be admitted. If to burn men and women alive is the way to increase human happiness, the apologist is not audacious. Evidently the Church has not yet repented of or profited by its own lurid past. It would not be ashamed to persecute in the twentieth century if it had the power. That power it still claims, and the right to exercise it even to death is still maintained by its defenders.[57]In the middle of the nineteenth century Rome was still able to imprison a vicar of the Apostolic College who had embraced Protestant opinions.[58]The Inquisitor-General of Ancona issued in 1843 a severe decree against Jews, not as relapsed Christians, but simply as Jews.[59]
According to this authoritativeEncyclopædia, theInquisition still preserves its official existence, and ranks as the “first among the Roman Congregations.� “When momentous decisions are to be announced� the Pope “always presides in person� over its deliberations; but in these days the necessity for his attendance cannot frequently arise. The Inquisition claims jurisdiction over all Christians, and even (as a matter of theory) over the Cardinals of the Church, though in practice the Cardinals are, as might be anticipated, exempt from any unwelcome surveillance.
. . . .
Readers who have thus far followed this brief account of the Inquisition will have little difficulty in forming an opinion about it. Is it the kind of institution they would like to see restored? Grant the extravagant supposition that all the Inquisitors were men of probity, kind, well-meaning, and conscientious—what we are chiefly concerned with are the effects produced by the system of repression which they so rigidly enforced. We have to judge whether it did or did not make for human happiness and the advance of civilization. Intellectual freedom is no less essential to progress than purity of morals. The Inquisition at least temporarily destroyed the one, and certainly did not promote the other. Knowledge grows by being shared; one idea leads, by association, to others; one gleam of truth broadens into clearer light as the dawn ushers in the day; one discovery affords a clue to another. For ever to suppress truth is beyond the wit of man, but attempts to suppress it have cumulative effects in prolonging the reign of ignorance. It is not from the ignorant that intellectual greatness may be expected, and in its effect upon public morals sheer ignorance is the mother of more crime than some persons are willing to admit. Perhaps the Inquisitors did not realize the evil of stifling thought for centuries; perhapsthey did not know that the assassination of ideas is a crime. But their twentieth-century apologists cannot plead this ignorance. They enjoy the blessings of liberty, and defend the persecutor! They profit by the heroism of those thousands of unknown faithful men and women who died for religious freedom, and they would hand the world back to intellectual slavery!