[2] Nicolai, Ep. ad Albinum archiepiscop., in the Decretum, Causa xxxiii, quæst. ii, cap. Inter hæc.
[3] Celestine, according to the criminal code of his day, declared that a guilty cleric, once excommunicated and anathematized, ought to be abandoned to the secular arm, cum Ecclesia non habeat ultra quid faciat. Decretals, cap. x, De judiciis, lib. ii, tit. i. This was the common teaching.
[4] Salvatore di Bartolo. Nuova expozitione dei criteri teologici, Roma, 104, pp. 303, 314. The first edition of this work was put upon the Index. The second edition, revised and corrected, and published with the approbation of Father Lepidi, has all the more weight and authority.
Indeed, to maintain that the Church should use material force, is at once to make her subject to the State; for we can hardly picture her with her own police and gendarmes, ready to punish her rebellious children. Every Catholic believes that the Church is an independent society, fully able to carry out her divine mission without the aid of the secular arm. Whether governments are favorable or hostile to her, she must pursue her course and carry on her work of salvation under them all.
. . . . . . . .
"Heresy," writes Jean Guiraud, "in the Middle Ages was nearly always connected with some antisocial sect. In a period when the human mind usually expressed itself in a theological form, socialism, communism, and anarchy appeared under the form of heresy. By the very nature of things, therefore, the interests of both Church and State were identical; this explains the question of the suppression of heresy in the Middle Ages."[1]
[1] Jean Guiraud, La répression de l'hérésie au moyen âge, in the Questions d'archéologie et d'histoire, p. 44.
We are not surprised, therefore, that when Church and State found themselves menaced by the same peril, they agreed on the means of defence. If we deduct, from the total number of heretics burned or imprisoned the disturbers of the social order and the criminals against the common law, the number of condemned heretics will be very small.
Heretics in the Middle Ages were considered amenable to the laws of both Church and State. Men of that time could not conceive of God and His revelation without defenders in a Christian kingdom. Magistrates were considered responsible for the sins committed against the law of God. Indirectly, therefore, heresy was amenable to their tribunal. They felt it their right and duty to punish not only crimes against society, but sins against faith.
The Inquisition, established to judge heretics, is, therefore, an institution whose severity and cruelty are explained by the ideas and manners of the age. We will never understand it, unless we consider it in its environment, and from the viewpoint of men like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Louis, who dominated their age by their genius. Critics who are ignorant of the Middle Ages may feel at liberty to shower insult and contempt upon a judicial system whose severity is naturally repugnant to them. But contempt does not always imply a reasonable judgment, and to abuse an institution is not necessarily a proof of intelligence. If we would judge an epoch intelligently, we must be able to grasp the viewpoint of other men, even if they lived in an age long past.