A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4

by Henry Charles Lea

In December 1571, de Castro and Medina presented formal denunciations of Fray Luis, Grajal and Martínez, to the Salamanca commissioner of the Valladolid tribunal, charging them with denying the authority of the Vulgate and preferring the interpretations of the rabbis to those of the fathers, while the circulation of Canticles in the vernacular was not forgotten. Other accusers, including students, joined in the attack, making thirteen in all, with a formidable body of denunciations. Grajal was soon afterwards arrested and Fray Luis, warned of the impending danger, presented himself, March 6, 1572, to Diego González, the former inquisitor of Carranza, then on a visitation at Salamanca, with a copy of his lecture on the Vulgate and the propositions drawn from it, and also his work on Canticles. He asked to have them examined and professed entire submission to the Church, with readiness to withdraw or revoke anything that might be found in the slightest degree objectionable.[339]

In any other land, this would have sufficed. The inculpated works would have been expurgated or forbidden, if necessary. Luis would have retracted any expressions regarded as erroneous, and the matter would have ended without damage to the faith. Under the Inquisition, however, the utterance of objectionable propositions was a crime to be punished, and the submission of the criminal only saved him from the penalties of pertinacious heresy. On March 26th the warrant for the arrest of Fray Luis was issued and, on the 27th he was receipted for by the alcaide of the secret prison of Valladolid. He was treated with unusual consideration, in view of his infirmities and delicate health for, on his petition, he was allowed a scourge, a pointless knife to cut his food, a candle and snuffers and some books.[340] The trial proceeded at first with unusual speed. By May 15th the fiscal presented the formal accusation, in which Fray Luis was charged with asserting that the Vulgate contained many falsities and that a better version could be made; with decrying the Septuagint and preferring Vatable and rabbis and Jews to the saints as expositors of Scripture; with stating that the Council of Trent had not made the Vulgate a matter of faith and that, in the Old Testament, there was no promise of eternal life; with approving a doctrine that inferred justification by faith, and that mere mortal sin destroyed faith; with circulating an exposition of Canticles explaining them as a love-poem from Solomon to his wife—all of which was legitimately based on the miscellaneous evidence of the adverse witnesses.[341] This, as required, Fray Luis answered on the spot, article by article, attributing the charges to the malice of his enemies, denying some and explaining others clearly and frankly.

It was a special favor that he was at once provided with counsel and allowed to arrange his defence—a favor which brought upon the tribunal a rebuke from the Suprema, January 13, 1573, as contrary to the estilo, which must be followed, no matter what might be the supplications of the accused. Fray Luis identified many of the witnesses—out of nineteen he recognized eight—and he drew up six series of interrogatories, mostly designed to prove his allegations of mortal enmity. Of these the inquisitors threw out three as “impertinent” and the answers to the others were, to a considerable extent, unsatisfactory, as was almost inevitable under a system which made the accused grope blindly in seeking evidence. As time wore on in this necessarily dilatory business, Fray Luis grew impatient at the stagnation which seemed to preclude all progress, not being aware that in reality it had been expedited irregularly.[342]

It would be wearisome to follow in detail the proceedings which dragged their slow length along. Additional witnesses came forward, whose depositions had to go through the usual formalities; Fray Luis presented numberless papers as points occurred to him; he defended himself brilliantly and, through the course of the trial there were few of the customary prolonged intervals, for his nervous impatience kept him constantly plying the tribunal with arguments and appeals which it received with its habitual impassiveness. At length, after two years, early in March, 1574, it decided that there was no ground for suspicion against him in the thirty articles drawn from the testimony of the witnesses, while he could not be prosecuted criminally on the seventeen propositions extracted from his lecture on the Vulgate, seeing that he had spontaneously presented them and submitted himself to the Church. The fiscal, however, appealed from this to the Suprema and his appeal must have been successful, for the trial took a fresh start.[343]

LUIS DE LEON

After some intermediate proceedings, Fray Luis, on April 1st was told to select patrones theólogos to assist in his defence. He at once named Dr. Sebastian Pérez, professor in the royal college which Philip II had founded at Párraces, in connection with San Lorenzo del Escorial, and two days later he added other names.

In place of accepting them the tribunal endeavored to compel him to take men of whom he knew nothing and who, in reality, were the calificadores who had already condemned his propositions. The struggle continued until, on August 3d, the Suprema wrote that he could have Pérez, but his limpieza must first be proved and Philip’s consent to his absence be obtained. We have seen how prolonged, costly and anxious were investigations into limpieza and, as Fray Luis remarked, this was to grant and to refuse in the same breath. At last, after endless discussions, in October he despairingly accepted Dr. Mancio, a Dominican and a leading professor of theology at Salamanca. Mancio came in October, again towards the end of December, and finally on March 30, 1575, while Fray Luis meanwhile was eating his heart in despair. At length, on April 7th Mancio approved of Fray Luis’s defence, declaring that he had satisfied all the articles, both the series of seventeen and that of thirty, which had been proved against him or which he had admitted having uttered.[344]

If Fray Luis imagined that this twelve months’ work to which such importance had been attributed, had improved his prospects, he was speedily undeceived. We hear nothing more of Dr. Mancio or of his approval. The propositions, with the defence, were submitted again to three calificadores (men who had been urged upon him as patrones) and it illustrates the uncertainties of theology and the hair-splitting subtilties in which the doctors delighted, that not only were the original seventeen articles declared to be heretical for the most part, but five new ones, quite as bad, were discovered in the defence which had elicited Dr. Mancio’s approval, and these five thenceforth formed a third category of errors figuring in the proceedings.[345] It is not easy for us to comprehend the religious conceptions which placed men’s lives and liberties and reputation at the hazard of dialectics in which the most orthodox theologians were at variance.

When Fray Luis was informed that five new heretical propositions had sprouted from the hydra-heads of the old ones, he was dismayed. Sick and exhausted, the prospects of ultimate release from his interminable trial seemed to grow more and more remote. Arguments and discussions continued and were protracted. New calificadores were called in, who debated and opined and presented written conclusions on all three series of propositions. It would be useless to follow in detail these scholastic exercises, of which the chief interest is to show how, in these infinitesimal points, one set of theologians could differ from another and how completely the enmity of the two chief witnesses, Leon de Castro and Bartolomé de Medina, was ignored. Thus wore away the rest of the year 1575 and the first half of 1576. There was no reason why the case might not be continued indefinitely on the same lines, but the inquisitors seem to have felt at last that an end must be reached, and a consulta de fe was finally held, in which Dr. Frechilla, one of the calificadores who had condemned the propositions, represented the episcopal Ordinary.[346]

The case illustrates one incident of these protracted trials. During its course it had been heard by seven inquisitors, of whom Guijano de Mercado was the only one who served from the commencement to the end, and his colleague in the consulta, Andrés de Alava, had appeared in it only in November, 1575, and had not been present in any audiences after December. There was, moreover, an unusual feature in the presence of a member of the Suprema, Francisco de Menchaca, indicating perhaps that the case was regarded as one of more than ordinary importance. There were five consultors, Luis Tello Maldonado, Pedro de Castro, Francisco Albornoz, Juan de Ibarra and Hernando Niño, but the two latter fell sick, when the examination of the voluminous testimony was half completed, and took no further part in the proceedings.