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.