Such reasoning is not very convincing. Why would not the life imprisonment of the heretic safeguard the faithful as well as his death? Will you answer that this penalty is too trivial to prevent the faithful from falling into heresy? If that be so, why not at once condemn all heretics to death, even when repentant? That would terrorize the wavering ones all the more. But St. Thomas evidently was not thinking of the logical consequences of his reasoning. His one aim was to defend the criminal code in vogue at the time. That is his only excuse. For we must admit that rarely has his reasoning been so faulty and so weak as in his thesis upon the coercive power of the Church, and the punishment of heresy.
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St. Thomas defended the death penalty without indicating how it was to be inflicted. The commentators who followed him were more definite. The Animadversio debita, says Henry of Susa (Hostiensis + 1271), in his commentary on the bull Ad Abolendam, is the penalty of the stake (ignis crematio). He defends this interpretation by quoting the words of Christ: "If any one abide not in me, he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither, and they shall gather him and cast him into the fire, and he burneth."[1] Jean d'Andre (+ 1348), whose commentary carried equal weight with Henry of Susa's throughout the Middle Ages, quotes the same text as authority for sending heretics to the stake.[2] According to this peculiar exegesis, the law and custom of the day merely sanctioned the law of Christ. To regard our Saviour as the precursor or rather the author of the criminal code of the Inquisition evidences, one must admit, a very peculiar temper of mind.
[1] John, xv, 6; Hostiensis, on the decretal Ad Abolendum, cap. xi, in Eymeric, Directorium inquisitorum, 2a pars, pp. 149, 150.
[2] On the decretal Ad Abolendum, cap. xiv, in Eymeric, ibid., pp. 170, 171.
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The next step was to free the Church from all responsibility in the infliction of the death penalty—truly an extremely difficult undertaking.
St. Thomas held, with many other theologians, that heretics condemned by the Inquisition should be abandoned to the secular arm, judicio sæculari. But he went further, and declared it the duty of the State to put such criminals to death.[1] The State, therefore, was to carry out this sentence at least indirectly in the name of the Church.
[1]Summa, IIa, IIae, quæst. xi, art. 3.
A contemporary of St. Thomas thus meets this difficulty: "The Pope does not execute any one," he says, "or order him to be put to death; heretics are executed by the law which the Pope tolerates; they practically cause their own death by committing crimes which merit death."[1] The heretic who received this answer to his objections must surely have found it very far-fetched. He could easily have replied that the Pope "not only allowed heretics to be put to death, but ordered this done under penalty of excommunication." And by this very fact he incurred all the odium of the death penalty.