While in studying the origins of the Inquisition we are bound to examine, and to seek to understand, the point of view of those who were responsible for its inception, in estimating its character and results we need not, nay we ought not, to judge by any other criterion than that dictated by the highest conceptions of right and justice. The common, the accepted, standard of to-day both as regards justice and humanity is, happily, greatly higher than that of the Middle Ages. Much that has been written of the Inquisition has been vitiated by an attempt to read into the mind and conduct of men of mediæval times a humanitarianism which is the peculiar product of the modern world, and which they could not even have understood. Even more vitiated would be any thesis which, not satisfied with justifying the originators of the Inquisition, sought to justify the institution itself. Certainly the motive for such an attempt could not be impartiality. Only moral obliquity can be blind to the transparent abominations of inquisitorial procedure.
If its character as a tribunal was essentially evil, evil also were some of the Inquisition’s results. Secular princes discerned its remarkable potential utility to themselves and regarded it with envy and admiration. Its methods had a satisfactory efficiency found in no other court. By such methods conviction could be practically assured. The charge of heresy could therefore be preferred against political enemies with the happiest prospects of advantage. The destruction for purely political ends was achieved by the use of inquisitorial methods of the Templars, Jeanne d’Arc, Savonarola.[497]
Those are the most notorious, but there are other instances of this abuse of the sacred tribunal for purely secular, and sometimes base and immoral, purposes.
Worse still—and possibly this is the worst aspect of the whole story of the Inquisition—its pernicious methods of procedure were borrowed by the admiring secular princes for their courts, which did not pretend to have the double nature which was the explanation, if not the excuse, for the Inquisition’s adoption of its system. Thus civil courts in Europe came to be tarnished by the system of inquisitio, the secret enquiry, the heaping up of disabilities for the defence, the application of torture—all these abuses having the august sanction of ecclesiastical use. The lay authority could triumphantly vindicate such innovations, whereby justice became an unequal contest between authority, combining the two characters of prosecutor and judge, and the unhappy prisoner, by pointing to the example of the Church, the repository of the sublime truths of divine justice and Christian charity. To the fortunate fact that the Inquisition never secured a footing in the British Islands is largely due their maintenance, in contradistinction to Continental states, of the open trial and of the great maxim that no one is presumed to be guilty, that the onus of proof lies with the prosecution. It was not the fault of the Church that the secular power admired and imitated the methods of the Holy Office; but it is surely a calamity that it should have been able to find in an ecclesiastical tribunal a system which must seem to every fair-minded man to-day so abhorrent to the whole spirit and tenor of the Christian gospel.
No attempt has been made in these pages to present the heresies of the Middle Ages in any heroic light, to slur over the pernicious crudities of many of them. As between the spiritual and intellectual ideals represented by the mediæval Church and those represented by the majority of the sectaries the choice is self-evident. Wycliffites and Husites stand obviously on a far higher plane, but Petrobrusians, Cathari, Dolcinists, Flagellants and many others had no fertile ideas to bequeath to a later day and were, at best perhaps, a nuisance in their own. Yet it has to be remembered that not only noble-minded men like Hus and Jerome of Prague, whose creed, whether true or not, was in any case sane and pure and exalted, but also innumerable others, whom we know only as names in inquisitorial records, who whatever the faith they professed stood constant through physical and mental anguish, to perish perhaps at the last at the stake in a world barren of pity with no friendly faces to encourage them—these suffered for a great ideal, that of fidelity to the spirit of truthfulness, of intellectual integrity. All who have died rather than be false to themselves and their vision of truth, thus demonstrating to the world their conviction that belief is worth dying for—whether Catholics or Protestants or the most erring of mediæval heretics—have done service to the cause of human progress. For, if it be true that only through the tragic experience of centuries of religious persecution could mankind attain to the establishment of the principle of liberty of thought and conscience, then every one of us to-day who enjoys the benefits of such liberty owes a debt of gratitude to the men and women who for conscience’ sake braved obloquy, torture-chamber and fire.
NOTE ON AUTHORITIES
A full bibliography of the subject of Heresy and its Repression in the Middle Ages would be exceedingly lengthy. All that is attempted here is to give a select list of a few of the most useful, important and most easily accessible works. The most thorough bibliography for the subject available is that in T. de Cauzons, Histoire de l’Inquisition en France (q.v.), the list of books covering forty pages and including 850 works. This is for the history of the tribunal in France alone.