Indulgences and Simony.
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 with genuine 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 broad and 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.
CHAPTER VI
THE GENTLE ART OF WHITEWASHING
If the 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 his European 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 with personal 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 owe the 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 “the command 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 the State, 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 argued that 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. His Letters to a Russian Gentleman on the Spanish Inquisition are 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 the secular 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 being mercilessly 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 Inquisition did 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 they extenuate 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 this was 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 a word 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 the Catholic 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 its will. 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. The Catholic Encyclopædia palliates torture by saying that it was not intended as a punishment, but as a method of eliciting truth. The person 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 authoritative Encyclopædia, the Inquisition 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; perhaps they 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!
No more summary verdict on the Inquisition can be given than the concluding words of its chief historian: “It introduced a system of jurisprudence which infected the criminal law of all the lands subjected to its influence, and rendered the administration of penal justice a grim mockery for centuries. It furnished the Holy See with a powerful weapon in aid of political aggrandizement. It tempted secular sovereigns to imitate the example, and it prostituted the name, of religion to the vilest temporal ends. It stimulated the morbid sensitiveness to doctrinal aberrations until the most trifling dissidence was capable of arousing insane fury and of convulsing Europe from end to end. On the other hand, when Atheism became fashionable in high places, its thunders were mute. Energetic only in evil, when its powers might have been used on the side of virtue, it held its hand and gave the people to understand that the only sins demanding reparation were doubt as to the accuracy of the Church’s knowledge and attendance on the Sabbath. In its long career of blood and fire the only credit which it can claim is the suppression of the pernicious dogmas of the Cathari; and in this its agency may be regarded as superfluous, for those dogmas carried in themselves the seeds of self-destruction, and higher wisdom might have trusted to their self-extinction. Thus the judgment of impartial history must be that the Inquisition was the monstrous offspring of mistaken zeal, utilized by selfish greed and lust of power to smother the higher aspirations of humanity and stimulate its baser appetites.�[60]
This is a severe, but perhaps not unjust, verdict. Some allowance, however, must be made for the customs of an intolerant and semi-barbarous epoch. Catholic apologists are justified in claiming that the Inquisition should be judged in relation to the times in which it flourished. But this does not explain how it was that many men, both in the Church and out of it, were so much in advance of the Inquisition as to disapprove of people being put to death for their religious opinions. If Thomas Aquinas advocated the death penalty for heresy, several eminent Fathers of the Church deprecated it, holding persuasion to be the better method. Why was not the milder and more ancient view adopted? It is suicidal to admit that the Church held back from torture and death for centuries on the ground that they were inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity. The assertion clearly implies a recognition of the incompatibility of the spirit of Christianity with calculated cruelty, and if this recognition was confined to a few superior minds so much the worse for the Church which paid no heed to them. There is obvious insincerity in the plea that the Church adopted only with reluctance the fatal policy of persecution. It insisted on that policy, often against the remonstrances of the State. It claimed to be superior to the spirit of the age, yet, on its own admission, yielded to the inferior influence. In reality it did more; it actively and spontaneously made persecution a fine art, and coerced the State to carry out its behests. When the Church excuses its cruelty by pointing to the equal cruelty of the medieval State it omits to mention that the State did not persecute opinion as such. The Christian Church did.
Let it be admitted that the Inquisitors—at least originally—were well-intentioned men, who sought to promote religion as they understood it. The question arises, Did they understand religion rightly? To them religion was a complete and final revelation of a Divine will; the true faith could be one only as God was one; all who sought to disturb that faith, however good their intentions might be, were guilty of a sin worse than temporal rebellion. Have we nothing to learn from their awful error? If we may judge from the Catholic Encyclopædia, the Church of Rome has not learned much. The attitude of the Inquisitors is not in the least surprising when in the twentieth century we find persecution defended as a religious duty. Another of its writers, Father Guiraud, echoes De Maistre’s contention that the Church of Rome alone possesses the truth, and therefore has a right to be intolerant.[61] The spirit of orthodox clericalism unmistakably appears in the tendency common to all these Romanist apologists to gloss over with a few smooth and casuistical phrases the most appalling deeds of cold-blooded cruelty which the world has ever seen. The commonwealth, says Father Guiraud, “can no more recognize the maxim of unlimited and unbridled religious freedom than it can adopt the suicidal principle of irreligion.â€�[62] This implies that there is no via media between the rejection of all religion and a blind acceptance of dogmatic authority, and involves a claim practically identical with that of the Inquisition. If religious persecution is excusable when the spirit of the age permits it, what are we to think of those who justify persecution in an age which deems it a blunder and a crime?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Achilli, Dr. G. G. Dealings with the Inquisition. 1851.
Addis and Arnold. A Catholic Dictionary.
Balmez, Rev. J. European Civilization. 1868.
Buckle, H. T. History of Civilization in England. 3 vols.
De Maistre, J. M. Letters to a Russian Gentleman on the Spanish Inquisition. 1851.
Douais, C., Bishop of Beauvais. L’Inquisition. Paris, 1906.
Draper, J. W. History of the Intellectual Development of Europe.
Langlois, C. V. Histoire de l’Inquisition d’aprés des travaux récents. Paris, 1902.
Lea, H. C. History of the Inquisition in the Middle Ages. 3 vols. 1906.
—— History of Sacerdotal Celibacy. 2 vols. 1907.
Lecky, W. E. H. History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe.
Limborch, P. van. History of the Inquisition. 1816.
Milman, Rev. H. H. History of Latin Christianity. 9 vols.
Motley, J. L. The Rise of the Dutch Republic.
Pastor, L. Lives of the Popes. 12 vols. 1891-1912.
Prescott, W. H. History of the Reign of Philip II.
Puigblanch, A. The Inquisition Unmasked. 1816.
Ranke, L. von. History of the Popes. 3 vols. 1908.
Rule, W. H. History of the Inquisition. 2 vols. 1874.
Tanon, L. Histoire des Tribunaux de l’Inquisition en France. Paris, 1893.
Vacandard, E. The Inquisition. 1908.
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Encyclopædia Britannica.
Jewish Encyclopædia.
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LONDON, E. C.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, p. 776.
[2] H. C. Lea, History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, vol. iii, p. 630.
[3] Lea, p. 639.
[4] Ibid, p. 642.
[5] Ibid, p. 644.
[6] Ibid, p. 648.
[7] Lea, p. 643.
[8] Lea, p. 645.
[9] H. C. Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy, vol. ii, p. 347.
[10] Ibid., p. 319.
[11] L. Tanon, Histoire des Tribunaux de l’Inquisition en France (1893), pp. 290, 306.
[12] Lea, Inquisition of Middle Ages, vol. ii, p. 344.
[13] Ibid., p. 330.
[14] Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol. ix, p. 36.
[15] Lea, Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 644.
[16] Ibid., vol. ii, p. 346.
[17] Lea, Inquisition in Middle Ages, vol. i, p. 70.
[18] Lea, Inquisition, vol. i, p. 85.
[19] Lea, Inquisition of Middle Ages, vol. i, p. 225.
[20] The organization of the Medieval Inquisition was practically the same as, though less efficient than, that of the Spanish institution, which is explained in the author’s Spanish Inquisition.
[21] Lea, op. cit., vol. i, p. 228.
[22] At a later date the Dominicans became known as Domini canes, or “dogs of the Lord.�
[23] Hastings, Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics; art. “Inquisition.�
[24] Addis and Arnold, A Catholic Dictionary; art. “Inquisition.�
[25] Lea, Inquisition, vol. i, p. 430.
[26] History of Latin Christianity, vol. v, p. 316.
[27] Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, p. 459.
[28] Lea, Inquisition, vol. i, p. 240.
[29] Ranke, Lives of the Popes, vol. i, p. 144.
[30] Motley, Rise of the Dutch Republic, part ii, ch. i.
[31] Motley, part ii, ch. iii.
[32] Ibid, part ii, ch. v.
[33] Motley, part ii, ch. viii.
[34] Motley, part ii, ch. v.
[35] Motley, part ii, ch. x.
[36] Lea, Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 204.
[37] Lea, Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 318.
[38] Lea, Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 472.
[39] Lea, Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 530.
[40] Lea, p. 534.
[41] Lea, Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 544.
[42] Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism, vol. i, p. 3.
[43] Lea, Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 625.
[44] Balmez, European Civilisation (London, 1855), p. 186.
[45] Buckle, History of Civilisation, vol. i, p. 187.
[46] Buckle, p. 189.
[47] Lea, Inquisition, vol. i, p. 228.
[48] Balmez, European Civilisation, p. 185.
[49] Balmez, p. 181.
[50] Pastor, Lives of the Popes, vol. iv, pp. 403-405.
[51] Ibid, p. 402.
[52] Inquisition, vol. i, p. 385.
[53] C. Langlois, L’Inquisition, p. 65.
[54] L. Tanon, Histoire des Tribunaux de l’Inquisition en France, p. 377.
[55] Douais, L’Inquisition, p. 265 et seq.
[56] Ibid, p. 273.
[57] See The Popes and their Church, by J. McCabe, page 211.
[58] See Dealings with the Inquisition, by Dr. G. G. Achilli (London, 1851).
[59] Ibid, p. 392.
[60] Lea, Inquisition, vol. iii, p. 650.
[61] Catholic Encyclopædia; art. “Toleration.�
[62] Ibid.