A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4

by Henry Charles Lea

To produce and preserve this torpor, by repressing all dangerous intellectuality, Spain was carefully kept out of the current of European progress. In other lands the debates of the Reformation forced Catholics as well as Protestants to investigations and speculations shocking to Spanish conservatism. The human mind was enabled to cast off the shackles of the Dark Ages, and was led to investigate the laws of nature and the relations of man to the universe and to God. From all this bustling intellectual movement Spain was carefully secluded. Short-sighted opportunism, seeing the turmoil which agitated France and England and Germany, might bless the institution which preserved the Peninsula in peaceful stagnation, but the price paid for torpidity was fearfully extravagant, for Spain became an intellectual nonentity. Even the great theologians and mystics disappeared from the field which they had made their own, and were succeeded by a race of probabilistic casuists, who sought only to promote and to justify self-indulgence. How intellectual progress fared under these influences may be estimated by a single instance. When, in England, Halley was investigating the periodicity of the comet which bears his name, in Spain learned professors of the universities of Salamanca and Saragossa were publishing tracts to reassure the frightened people, by proving that the dreadful portent boded evil only to the wicked—to the Turk and the heretic.[1178] The perfect success of the Inquisition in its work is manifested in the contrast between the eighteenth and the early sixteenth century, as illustrated by the statement of Juan Antonio Mayans y Siscar, that a cartload of the precious MSS. bestowed by Ximenes on his University of Alcalá was sold to the fire-works maker Torrecilla, for a display in honor of Philip V, and that several other similar collections had shared the same fate.[1179] Even after half a century of Bourbon effort to revitalize the dormant intellect of Spain, Father Rábago, the royal confessor, grudged the money spent on historiographers and academies; it was a pure gift, he says, for it yields no fruits.[1180] In fact, the awakening from intellectual stupor was slow, for Dom Clemencin tells us that there was less printing in Spain at the commencement of the nineteenth century than there had been in the fifteenth under Isabella.[1181]

It is impossible not to conclude that the Inquisition paralyzed both the intellectual and the economic development of Spain and it is scarce reasonable for Valera to complain that, when Spain was aroused from its mental marasmus, it was to receive a foreign and not to revive a native culture.[1182]

That science and art and literature should thus be submerged was a national misfortune, but even more to be deplored were the indirect consequences. Material progress became impossible, industry languished, and the inability to meet foreign competition assisted the mistaken internal policy of the government in prolonging and intensifying the poverty of the people. Nor was this the chief of the evils that sprung from keeping the mind of the nation in leading-strings, from repressing thought and from excluding foreign ideas, for the people were thus rendered absolutely unfitted to meet the inevitable change that came with the Revolution. To this, in large measure, may be attributed the sufferings through which Spain has passed in the transition from absolutism to modern conditions.

We have thus followed the career of the Spanish Inquisition from its foundation to its suppression; we have examined its methods and its acts and have sought to appraise its influence and its share in the misfortunes which overwhelmed the nation. The conclusion can scarce be avoided that its work was almost wholly evil and that, through its reflex action, the persecutors suffered along with the persecuted. Yet who can blame Isabella or Torquemada or the Hapsburg princes for their share in originating and maintaining this disastrous instrument of wrong? The Church had taught for centuries that implicit acceptance of its dogmas and blind obedience to its commands were the only avenues to salvation; that heresy was treason to God, its extermination the highest service to God and the highest duty to man. This grew to be the universal belief and, when Protestant sects framed their several confessions, each one was so supremely confident of possessing the secret of the Divine Being and his dealings with his creatures that all shared the zeal to serve God in the same cruel fashion.

Spanish Inquisition was only a more perfect and a more lasting institution than the others were able to fashion—as regards witchcraft, indeed, a more humane and rational one, for no one can appreciate the service which in this matter it rendered to Spain who has not realized the horrors of the witchcraft trials in which Catholic and Protestant Europe rivalled each other. The spirit among all was the same, and none are entitled to cast the first stone, unless we except the humble and despised Moravian Brethren and the disciples of George Fox. The faggots of Miguel Servet bear witness to the stern resolve of Calvinism. Lutheranism has its roll-call of victims. Anglicanism, under Edward VI, in 1550 undertook to organize an Inquisition on the Spanish pattern, which burnt Joan of Kent for Arianism, and the writ De hæretico comburendo was not abolished until 1676.[1183] Much as we may abhor and deplore this cruelty, we must acquit the actors of moral responsibility, for they but acted in the conscientious belief that they were serving the Creator and his creatures. The real responsibility can be traced to distant ages, to St. Augustin and St. Leo the Great and the fathers, who deduced, from the doctrine of exclusive salvation, that the obstinate dissident is to be put to death, not only in punishment for his sin but to save the faithful from infection. This hideous teaching, crystallized into a practical system, came, in the course of centuries, to be an essential feature of the religion which it distorted so utterly from the love and charity inculcated by the Founder. To dispute it was a heresy subjecting the disputant to the penalties of heresy, and not to enforce it was to misuse the powers entrusted by God to rulers for the purpose of establishing his kingdom on earth.

RETRIBUTION

In Spain, under peculiar conditions, this resolve to enforce unity of belief, in the conviction that it was essential to human happiness here and hereafter, led to the framing of a system of so-called justice more iniquitous than has been evolved by the cruellest despotism; which placed the lives, the fortunes and the honor, not only of individuals but of their posterity, in the hands of those who could commit wrong without responsibility; which tempted human frailty to indulge its passions and its greed without restraint, and which subjected the population to a blind and unreasoning tyranny, against which the slightest murmur of complaint was a crime. The procedure which left the fate of the accused virtually in the hands of his judges was rendered doubly vicious by the inviolable secrecy in which it was enveloped—a secrecy which invited injustice by shielding its perpetrators and enabling them to make a parade of benignant righteousness. It was the crowning iniquity of the Inquisition that it thus afforded to the evil-minded the amplest opportunity of wrong-doing. History affords no parallel to such a skilfully organized system, working relentlessly through centuries.

The inquisitors were men, not demons or angels, and when injustice and oppression were rife in the secular courts it would be folly not to expect them in the impenetrable recesses of the Holy Office. If we have occasionally met with instances of kindliness and genuine desire to do right, we have incidentally encountered the opposite too often for us to doubt its frequency. That the rulers of the Inquisition recognized the danger of this and sought to diminish it by moral influences is evident from the admirable prayer the utterance of which, by a carta acordada of April 13, 1600, was ordered daily after mass at the opening of the morning session. This implored the Holy Spirit to fill their hearts and guide their judgements, so that they might not be misled by ignorance or favor, or be corrupted by gifts or acceptance of persons; that their decisions might be in unison with His will, so that in the end they might earn eternal reward by well-doing.[1184] Yet we might feel more confidence in the sincerity of this attempt to curb by moral influence the evil tendencies fostered by the system if there had been stern repression and punishment of official wrong-doing, instead of the habitual mercy which served as an encouragement.

After all, the great lesson taught by the history of the Inquisition is that the attempt of man to control the conscience of his fellows reacts upon himself; he may inflict misery but, in due time, that misery recoils on him or on his descendants and the full penalty is exacted with interest. Never has the attempt been made so thoroughly, so continuously or with such means of success as in Spain, and never has the consequent retribution been so palpable and so severe. The sins of the fathers have been visited on the children and the end is not yet. A corollary to this is that the unity of faith, which was the ideal of statesman and churchman alike in the sixteenth century, is fatal to the healthful spirit of competition through which progress, moral and material, is fostered. Improvement was impossible so long as the Holy See held a monopoly of salvation and, however deplorable were the hatred and strife developed by the rivalry which followed the Reformation, it yet was of inestimable benefit in raising the moral standards of both sides, in breaking down the stubbornness of conservatism and in rendering development possible. Terrible as were the wars of religion which followed the Lutheran revolt, yet were they better than the stagnation preserved in Spain through the efforts of the Inquisition. So long as human nature remains what it is, so long as the average man requires stimulation from without as well as from within, so long as progress is the reward only of earnest endeavor, we must recognize that rivalry is the condition precedent of advancement and that competition in good works is the most beneficent sphere of human activity.