Study of the discussion of witch-burning in the “Golden Bough” suggests the idea that heretics were burned, as witches were, because it was believed that fire was the one adequate means of purifying the community from the pollution which they had brought upon it. If this is so, then heretic- and witch-burning is connected with the most primitive superstitions, not only long before Christianity, but before the possibility of any systematized religion.
On the other hand, burning alive conformed after a grisly fashion to the letter of an old saying that “the Church abhors bloodshed.”
Cardinal Newman has left us an interesting passage combining extreme hatred for the heretic, or rather for the heresiarch (i.e., the active preacher of heresy and corrupter of the faithful), with the typical modern sensitiveness to the sight of physical pain:
“Contrasting heretics and heresiarchs I had said: the latter should meet with no mercy; he assumes the office of the Tempter; and so far as his error goes, must be dealt with by the competent authority, as if he were embodied evil. To spare him is a false and dangerous pity. It is to endanger the souls of thousands, and it is uncharitable toward himself. I cannot deny that this is a very fierce passage; but Arius was banished, not burned; and it is only fair to myself to say that neither at this nor at any other time of my life, not even when I was fiercest, could I have even cut off a Puritan’s ears, and I think the sight of a Spanish auto-da-fé would have been the death of me.”[21]
It would be a study in itself to work up the evidence as to the toughness of the mediæval mind with respect to disagreeable ideas and to the actual infliction of pain. To-day, in America, we have our lynchings, and we have the ugly stories of torture inflicted in revolutionary Russia. But, on the other hand, we have a crew of drivellers against capital punishment, and many people can hardly bear the idea of hell. As Zarathustra puts it, of the God of the Christians:—
“When he was young, that God out of the Orient, then was he harsh and revengeful, and built himself a hell for the delight of his favourites.”
“At last, however, he became old and soft and mellow and pitiful, more like a grandfather than a father, but most like a tottering old grandmother.”
“There did he sit shrivelled in his chimney corner, fretting on account of his weak legs, world-weary, will-weary, and one day he suffocated of his all too great pity.”[22]
Whereas in the Middle Ages—
“The twelfth century men” (as Henry Adams puts it with his unfailing instinct and sympathy) “troubled themselves about pain and death much as healthy bears did in the mountains.”[23]