A History of the Inquisition of Spain; vol. 4

by Henry Charles Lea

Francisca’s strange powers of fascination were manifested by the influence which she acquired over a man of infinitely higher character than Medrano. Fray Francisco Ortiz was the most promising member of the great Franciscan Order, who was rapidly acquiring the reputation of the foremost preacher in Spain. He was not fully a mystic, but his pulpit exhortations, stimulating the love of God, caused him to be regarded as wandering near to the dangerous border. In 1523 he made the acquaintance of Francisca and his feelings towards her are emphatically expressed in a defiant declaration to the Inquisition during his trial.—“No word of love, however strong, is by a hundredth part adequate to describe the holy love, so pure and sweet and strong and great and full of God’s blessing and melting of heart and soul, which God in his goodness has given me through His holy betrothed, my true Mother and Lady, through whom I hope, at the awful Day of Judgement, to be numbered among the elect. I can call her my love for, in loving her, I love nothing but God.” There can be no doubts as to the purity of his relations with her whom he thus reverenced, but they were displeasing to his superiors who viewed with growing disquiet the distraction of one whom they regarded as a valuable asset of the Order. It was in vain that he was ordered to break off all relations with her; he replied vehemently that God was to be obeyed rather than man and that if he was to be debarred from seeing that beloved one of God he would transfer himself to the Carthusians. To effect the separation the Franciscan prelates induced the Inquisition to arrest Francisca, but the unexpected result of this was that Ortiz, in a sermon before all the assembled magnates of the city April 7, 1529, arraigned the Inquisition for the great sin committed in her arrest. Such revolt was unexampled and he was forthwith prosecuted, not so much to punish him as to procure his retractation and submission, but he was obstinate and defiant for nearly three years. It was in vain that the Empress Isabel twice, in 1530, urged his liberation or the expediting of his case, and equally vain was a brief of Clement VII, July 1, 1531, to Cardinal Manrique, asking his discharge if his only offence was his public denunciation of the arrest of that holy woman, Francisca Hernández.[31] At length, in April 1532, Ortiz experienced a revulsion of feeling, and the same emotional impulsiveness that had led to his outbreak now prompted him to declare that God had given him the grace to recognize his errors and that he found great peace in retracting them. He escaped with public abjuration de vehementi, five years’ suspension from priestly functions, two years’ confinement in a cell of the convent of Torrelaguna, and absolute sundering of relations with Francisca. He betook himself to his place of reclusion and, although papal briefs released him from all restrictions and his prelates repeatedly urged him to leave his retreat, he seems never to have abandoned the solitude which he said had become sweet to him. Until his death, in 1546, he remained in the convent, the object of overflowing honor on the part of his brethren.[32]

CONNECTION WITH PROTESTANTISM

Francisca herself seems to have been treated with remarkable leniency, in spite of her previous trials and the evidence of Medrano. Her arrest had been merely with the object of separating her from Ortiz, and her trial seems to have been scarce more than formal for, in September 1532, we find her merely detained in the house of Gutierre Pérez de Montalvo, at Medina del Campo, with her maid María Ramírez in waiting on her.[33] Possibly this favor may have been earned by her readiness to accuse her old friends and associates, among whom were two brothers and a sister, Juan Cazalla, Bishop of Troy in partibus, Pedro Cazalla and María Cazalla, wife of Lope de Ruida.[34] The trial of the latter is worth brief reference as it throws some light on the confusion existing at the time between Illuminism and Protestantism.

María Cazalla was a resident of Guadalajara who visited Pastrana, where women assembled to listen to her readings and expositions of Scripture. When proceedings were commenced against the group, in 1524, she was arrested and examined but was discharged. For six years she remained undisturbed, when the testimony of Francisca Hernández caused a second prosecution, in which the heterogeneous character of the fiscal’s accusation shows how little was understood as to the heresies under discussion. She was a Lutheran who praised Luther, denied transubstantiation and free-will, ridiculed confession, decried scholastic theology and held indulgences as valueless; she was an Alumbrada who regarded Isabel de la Cruz as superior to St. Paul, who rated matrimony higher than virginity, who wrote letters full of Illuminism and taught the Alumbrados their doctrines from Scripture, decrying external works of adoration and prayer; she was an Erasmist who pronounced Church observances to be Judaism, despised the religious Orders and ridiculed the preachers of sermons.[35] She had been arrested about May 1, 1532, and her trial dragged on as usual. As a solvent of doubts she was tortured smartly and, on December 19, 1534, her sentence pronounced that the fiscal had not proved her to be a heretic but that, for the suspicions arising from the trial, she should abjure de levi and undergo solemn public penance in her parish church, she should avoid all intercourse with Alumbrados or other suspects and pay a fine of a hundred ducats.[36]

An affiliated group comes before us in Toledo, centering around Petronila de Lucena, an unmarried woman of 25, living with her brother, Juan del Castillo. She had a high reputation for sanctity and was credited with thaumaturgic powers; when the Duke del Infantazgo was mortally ill, she was sent for, but too late. We hear of María Cazalla, Bernardino de Tovar and Francisca Hernández; there are allusions to Erasmus, and Diego Hernández had included her in his denunciations of Lutheranism. Letters to her from her brother, Gaspar de Lucena, are mere mystical maunderings, showing the atmosphere in which they lived, but the other brother, Juan del Castillo, then on trial, admitted many Lutheran doctrines—works were not necessary, Church precepts were not binding, man had not free-will, indulgences were useless and a book by Œcolampadius had led him to disbelieve in transubstantiation. Both Juan and Gaspar were on trial, and we hear of another prisoner, Catalina de Figueredo. Petronila was arrested, with sequestration, May 7, 1534, and her trial pursued the ordinary course until March 20, 1535, when, as we have seen (Vol. III, p. 111), it was decided that, as the principal witness against her, Juan del Castillo, had revoked the evidence given under torture, she might be released on bail of a hundred thousand maravedís, which was promptly entered. In June she petitioned to be wholly discharged and that the sequestration be lifted; to this no attention was paid but a second application, October 20, 1536 procured the removal of the sequestration. Gaspar de Lucena was sentenced to reconciliation and this was presumably the fate of Juan del Castillo unless he was impenitent.[37]

PERVADING SUSPICION

These cases show that the prevalence of the mingled heresies of Illuminism and Lutheranism was calling for repression, nor was this confined to Castile. In 1533, Miguel Galba, fiscal of the tribunal of Lérida, in a letter to Cardinal Manrique, declared that only the vigilance of the Inquisition prevented both kingdoms from being filled with the followers of the two heresies.[38] There was of course exaggeration in this, but the fears of the authorities led them to see heresies everywhere. As Juan de Valdés, himself inclined to mysticism, says, when any one endeavored to manifest the perfection of Christianity, his utterances were misinterpreted and he was condemned as a heretic, so that there was scarce any one who dared to live as a Christian.[39] Many suffered from the results of this hyper-sensitiveness. When Ignatius Loyola, after his conversion, came in 1526 to Alcalá to study, he was joined by four young men; they assumed a peculiar gray gown and their fervor brought many to the Hôpital de la Misericordia, where they lodged, to consult with them and join in their spiritual exercises. This excited suspicion and invited investigation. What was the exact authority of Doctor Miguel Carrasco, confessor of Fonseca Archbishop of Toledo, and of Alonso Mexia, who bore a commission as inquisitor, does not appear, but they examined witnesses and the sentence rendered by the Vicar-general, Juan Rodríguez de Figueroa, was merely that the associates should lay aside their distinctive garments. After this the number who went to listen to Loyola continued to increase, and the women had a fashion of falling in convulsions, there was nothing of illuminism in his exhortations, but he was open to suspicion, and it was inadmissible that a young layman should assume the function of a director of souls. This time it was Vicar-general Figueroa who took the matter in hand and threw Loyola into prison, in 1527, finally sentencing him and his companions not to appear in public until they had assumed the ordinary lay garments, nor for three years to hold assemblages public or private and then only with permission of the Ordinary.[40] It was this experience that drove Loyola to complete his studies in Paris, where he was not subject to the intrusion of excitable devotees.

Carranza offered a mark too vulnerable to be spared. He was inclined to mysticism, and there were many passages in his unfortunate Comentarios which, separated from their context, afforded material for reprehension. The keen-sighted Melchor Cano was able to cite isolated texts to prove that he held the alumbrado doctrines of impeccability, of interior illumination, of the supreme merits of contemplation, of despising all exterior works and observances—in short that he defended the errors of the Begghards and Beguines, of Pedro Rúiz Alcaraz and of the Alumbrados who figured in the autos of Toledo.[41] It is significant of the advanced position of Spanish orthodoxy on the subject of mysticism that these accusations had no weight with the Council of Trent, which approved the Comentarios, nor with Pius V, when he permitted the publication of the book in Rome. When, at last in 1576, Gregory XIII yielded and condemned the book and its author, of the sixteen propositions which he was required to abjure only three bore any relation to mysticism, and these were on the border line between it and Protestantism—that all works without charity are sins and offend God, that faith without works suffices for salvation, and that the use of images and veneration of relics are of human precept.[42]

SANCTITY OR HERESY

In this inquisitorial temper it was a matter of chance whether a devotional writer should be canonized or condemned and mayhap both might befall him, as occurred to San Francisco de Borja, whose Obras del Cristiano was put on the Index of 1559, though it disappeared after that of Quiroga in 1583.[43] Santa Teresa herself, the queen of Spanish mystics and, along with Santiago, the patron saint of Spain, was confined in a convent by the Nuncio Sega, who denounced her as a restless vagabond, plunged in dissipation under pretext of religion, and an effort was made to transport her to the Indies, which were a sort of penal settlement. But for the accident that Philip II became interested in her, she would probably have come down to us as one of the beatas revelanderas whom it was the special mission of the Inquisition to suppress. When, in 1575, she founded a convent of her Barefooted Carmelites in Seville, they were denounced as Alumbradas; the inquisitors created a terrible scandal by going to the house with the guards to investigate, but they could substantiate nothing to justify prosecution. So, when in 1574 her spiritual autobiography was denounced to the Inquisition, it was held for ten years in suspense, and the Duchess of Alva, who possessed a MS. copy, was obliged to procure a licence to read it in private until judgement should be rendered—although finally, in 1588, it was printed by Fray Luis de Leon at the special request of the empress. Even after canonization her Conceptos del Amor divino, when printed with the works of her disciple Jerónimo Gracian, were put on the Index and remained there.[44] Her most illustrious disciple, San Juan de la Cruz, escaped prosecution, though repeatedly denounced to the Inquisition, and his writings were not forbidden, but he was most vindictively persecuted as an Alumbrado, first by his unreformed Carmelite brethren and then by the Barefooted Order, and he ended his days in disgrace, recluded in a convent in the Sierra Morena.[45] Yet Francisco de Osuna, the preceptor of Santa Teresa, although his writings are of the highest mysticism, escaped persecution himself, and his Abecedario Spiritual incurred only a single expurgation.[46]