Such severity, nay, such cruelty, shown to what we would call "a crime of opinion," is hard for men of our day to understand. "To comprehend it," says Lea, "we must picture to ourselves a stage of civilization in many respects wholly unlike our own. Passions were fiercer, convictions stronger, virtues and vices more exaggerated, than in our colder and self-contained time. The age, moreover, was a cruel one…. We have only to look upon the atrocities of the criminal law of the Middle Ages to see how pitiless men were in their dealings with one another. The wheel, the caldron of burning oil, burning alive, tearing apart with wild horses, were the ordinary expedients by which the criminal jurist sought to deter men from crime by frightful examples which would make a profound impression on a not over-sensitive population."[1]
[1] Lea, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 234, 235.
When we consider this rigorous civil criminal code, we need not wonder that heretics, who were considered the worst possible criminals, were sent to the stake.
This explains why intelligent men, animated by the purest zeal for good, proved so hard and unbending, and used without mercy the most cruel tortures, when they thought that the faith or the salvation of souls was at stake. "With such men," says Lea,—and he mentions among others Innocent III and St. Louis,—"it was not hope of gain, or lust of blood or pride of opinion, or wanton exercise of power, but sense of duty, and they but represented what was universal public opinion from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries."[1]
[1] Lea, op. cit., vol. i, p. 234.
It was, therefore, the spirit of the times, the Zeitgeist, as we would call it to-day, that was responsible for the rigorous measures formerly used by both Church and State in the suppression of heresy. The other reasons we have mentioned are only subsidiary. This is the one reason that satisfactorily explains both the theories and the facts.
But an explanation is something far different from a defence of an institution. To explain is to show the relation of cause to effect; to defend is to show that the effect corresponds to an ideal of justice. Even if we grant that the procedure of the Inquisition did correspond to a certain ideal of justice, that ideal is certainly not ours to-day. Let us go into this question more thoroughly.
It is obvious that we must strongly denounce all the abuses of the Inquisition that were due to the sins of individuals, no matter what their source. No one, for instance, would dream of defending Cauchon, the iniquitous judge of Joan of Arc, or other cruel Inquisitors who, like him, used their authority to punish unjustly suspects brought before their tribunal. From this standpoint, it is probable that many of the sentences of the Inquisition need revision.
But can we rightly consider this institution "a sublime spectacle of social perfection," and "a model of justice?"[1]
[1] The Civiltà Cattolica, 1853, vol. i. p. 595 seq.