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.