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?