A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4

by Henry Charles Lea

SUPERFICIAL DEVOUTNESS

Yet practically the religion which was so sensitive as to purity of faith was of a very superficial character. External observances were strictly enforced, and the Inquisition was ever on the watch to punish any irreverence in act or word, yet Alfonso de Castro tells us that, in the mountainous provinces, such as Asturias, Galicia and elsewhere, the word of God was so rarely preached to the people that they observed many pagan rites and many superstitions.[1120] To labor on Sunday or feast-day was a serious offence, involving suspicion of heresy, yet Carranza says that more offences against God were committed on Sundays than in all the week-days combined; those who went to mass mostly spent the time in business or in talking or sleeping; those who did not go, gratified their vanity or their appetites; the ancient Jews used to say that, on their feast-days, the demons left the cities for refuge in the mountain caves, but now it would seem that on week-days the demons avoided the people who were busy with their labors and, on feast-days, came trooping joyfully from the deserts, for then they find the doors open to all kinds of vices.[1121]

Paolo Tiepolo, in 1563, observes that, in all external signs of religion, the Spaniards are exceedingly devout, but he doubts whether the interior corresponds; the clergy live as they choose, without any one reprehending them, and he is scandalized by the buffooneries and burlesques performed in the churches on feast-days.[1122] The churches, in fact, seem to have been places for everything save devotion. Azpilcueta describes the profane observances during divine service, the inattention of the priests, the processions of masks and demons, the banquets and feastings, and other disgraceful profanations, so that there are few of the faithful who do not sin in church, and few who do not utter idle, vain, foul, evil or profane words; in hot weather, the coolness of the churches made them favorite lounging-places for both sexes, including monks and nuns, and much that was indecent occurred; they were moreover places for the transaction of business, and more bargaining took place there than in the markets.[1123] This was not a mere passing custom. A century later Francisco Santos pictures for us a church crowded with so-called worshippers, where the services could scarce be heard for the noise; beggars crying for alms and wrangling among themselves; two men quarrelling fiercely and on the point of drawing their swords; a group of young gallants chattering and maltreating a poor man who had chanced to touch them in passing; people leaving one mass that had commenced to follow a priest, who had the reputation of greater despatch in his sacred functions; in a chapel a bevy of fair ladies drinking chocolate, discussing fashions and waited on by their admirers—all is worldly and the religious observance is the merest pretext.[1124] This irreverence was shared by the priests. A brief of Urban VIII, January 30, 1642, recites complaints from the dean and chapter of Seville concerning the use of tobacco in the churches, both in smoking and snuffing, even by priests while celebrating mass, and of their profanation of the sacred cloths by using them and staining them with tobacco, wherefore he decrees excommunication latæ sententiæ for the use of the weed within the sacred precincts.[1125] It is evident that the Inquisition, while enforcing conformity as to dogma and outward observance, failed to inspire genuine respect for religion.

RESULTS OF INTOLERANCE

It will thus be seen how little really was gained for religion by the spirit of fierce intolerance largely responsible for the material causes of decadence which we have passed rapidly in review. The irrational resolve to enforce unity of faith at every cost spurred Ferdinand and Isabella to burn and pauperize those among their subjects who were most economically valuable, to expel those who could not be reduced to conformity and to institute a system of confiscation of which we have seen the destructive influence on industry and on the credit on which commerce and industry depend, while the application of this to the condemnation of the dead not only brought misery on innocent descendants but unsettled titles and involved all transactions in insecurity. This sanctified the ambition of Charles V with the halo of religion. This was the motive which underlay the suicidal policy of Philip II, leading to the endless wars with the Netherlands, to the rebellion of Granada and to the wasteful support of the Ligue. This was at the bottom of the Morisco disaffection, culminating in the expulsion of 1610, just after Philip III had practically accepted the loss of Holland by the truce of 1609. The land was robbed of its most industrious classes, it was drained of its bravest soldiers, its trade and productiveness were fatally crippled, and it was reduced to the lowest term of financial exhaustion, all for the greater glory of God, and in the belief that it was avenging offences to God. To meet the exigencies arising from this, and from the thoughtless extravagance of the monarchs, the labor, on which rested the resources of the State, was crushed to earth and subjected to burdens that defeated their own ends, for they drove the producer in despair from the soil. Productive industry and commerce, enfeebled by the expulsions, were so handicapped that they dwindled almost to extinction and passed virtually into the hands of foreigners, who dealt under the mask of testas ferrias—of Spaniards who lent their names to the real principals, for the most part the very heretics whom Spain had exhausted herself to destroy. Trade and credit were hampered, not only through the vitiation of the currency but through the ever-impending risk of sequestration and confiscation, and the impediments of the censorship as developed in the visitas de navios. The blindness and inefficiency of the Government intensified in every way the evils created by its mistaken policy but, at the root of all, lay the prolonged and relentless determination to enforce conformity, at a time when the industrial and commericial era was opening, which was to bring wealth and power to the nations wise enough and liberal enough to avail themselves of its opportunities—opportunities which Spain was invited virtually to monopolize through its control of the trade of the Indies and the production of the precious metals. There is melancholy truth in the boast of Doctor Pedro Peralta Barnuevo, in his relation of the Lima auto of 1733, that the determination to enforce unity of faith at all costs had rendered Spain rather a church than a monarchy, and her kings protectors of the faith rather than sovereigns. She was a temple, in which the altars were cities and the oblations were men, and she despised the prosperity of the State in comparison with devotion to religion.[1126]

Isabella and her Hapsburg descendants were but obeying the dictates of conscience and executing the laws of the Church, when they sought to suppress heresy and apostasy by force, and they might well deem it both duty and good policy at a time when it was universally taught that unity of faith was the surest guarantee of the happiness and prosperity of nations. Spain, with accustomed thoroughness, carried out this theory for three centuries to a reductio ad absurdum, through the Inquisition, organized, armed and equipped to the last point of possible perfection for its work. The elaborate arguments of its latest defender only show that it cannot be defended without also defending the whole policy of the House of Hapsburg, which wrought such misery and degradation.[1127] It was the essential part of a system and, as such, it contributed its full share to the ruin of Spain.

INFLUENCE ON THE PEOPLE

That occasionally even an inquisitor could have a glimmer of the truth appears from a very remarkable memorial addressed to Philip IV by a member of the Suprema, with regard to the Portuguese Jews. He states that they consider the rigor of the Inquisition as a blessing, since it drives them from Spain to other lands, where they can enjoy their religion and acquire prosperity. He wishes to prevent this exodus, which is depriving Spain of population and wealth and exposing it to peril, and to win back those who have expatriated themselves, to which end he proposes greatly to soften inquisitorial severity in regard to confiscation, imprisonment and the wearing of the sanbenito, except in the case of hardened impenitents. He would welcome them back and, even if their Catholicism were merely external, he argues that their children would become good Catholics, even as has proved to be the case with the descendants of the Castilian Jews. Indeed, he goes so far as to urge that foreigners in general should be encouraged to bring their capital to Spain, to settle and be naturalized, to marry Spanish wives and thus minister to the wealth and prosperity of the land.[1128] The worldly wisdom of this was too oppugnant to the prejudices of the time, which clamored, as we have seen, for extermination and isolation, and its sagacious counsels were unheeded. The Judaizers were driven forth, to aid in building up Holland with their wealth and intelligence, and Spain, in ever deepening poverty, continued to cherish the ideals which she had embodied in the Inquisition.

There was one service the performance of which it was never tired of claiming for itself and is still claimed for it by its advocates—that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it preserved Spain from the religious wars which desolated France and Germany. This service may well be called in question, for the temperament and training of the Spanish nation render ludicrous the assumption that a couple of hundred heretics, among whom but half a dozen had the spirit of martyrdom for their faith, could cause such spread of dissidence as to endanger peace; yet even should we admit this service, its method, in causing intellectual torpor and segregating the nation from all influences from abroad, only postponed the inevitable, while intensifying the disturbance when the change should come from medievalism to modernism. The nineteenth century bore, in an aggravated form, the brunt which should have fallen on the sixteenth. When the spirit of the Revolution broke in, it found a population sedulously trained to passive obedience to the State and submissiveness to the Church. It had been so long taught, by theocratic absolutism, that it must not think or reason for itself, that it had lost the power of reasoning on the great problems of life. It was without reverence for law, for it was accustomed to see the arbitrary will of an absolute sovereign override the law, and it was without experience to choose between the sober realities of responsible government and the glittering promises of ardent idealists. Yet the Revolution passed away leaving matters as they were before. The habit of unquestioning submission, inherited through generations, has become so fixed a part of the national character that, as we are told, the people fail to recognize that they are as completely under bondage to Caciquism as erstwhile they were to monarchy—that in fact the nation is still in its infancy and is unfit to govern itself.[1129]

As in temporal, so it has been in the spiritual field. In the turmoil of the Revolution the Inquisition died a natural death, but the Church filled the vacancy. It had grown so accustomed to the acceptance, on all hands, of its divine mission, it had so long enjoyed unassailable wealth and power, that it could not adapt itself to the necessities of the new situation and, when it could not rely upon the brute force of the State, it called into play the popular passions which it had fostered. As an irreconcileable, it provoked the attacks made on its overgrown wealth and numbers; it was uncompromising and would listen to no adjustment, for it claimed the full benefit of the canon law under which it was exempted from all interference by the State; its attitude was of immovable hostility to the new order of things, and it suffered the rough handling that inevitably resulted, courting martyrdom rather than tamely to permit profane hands to be laid upon the ark. It has thus continued to be an unassimilable element in the political situation, its policy directed from Rome and the vast influence of its perfect organization employed to retard rather than to stimulate progress in good government and material prosperity.[1130] What may be the outcome of the pending struggle between Church and State, aroused by the recognition of civil marriage, it is too early to predict.