So much for the documents. The tradition is that the Saint secured the release of a certain heretic who had been convicted and sentenced to be burnt, acting on the strength of his own personal belief that this particular culprit would eventually repent. Twenty years after, the tradition goes on to say, the man did repent, and died in the odour of sanctity, clad in Dominican habit.
For our purposes, the point of all three pieces of evidence is that the power to loose implies an intimate connection with the power to bind. The President of the United States and the Governors of States, who have the pardoning power, are themselves the chief executive officers of the nation and the States, and it is their sworn duty to see that the laws are enforced. In St. Dominic’s case, the verdict is conclusive. Virtually every reputable scholar of the present day is agreed upon the point, including Roman Catholics writing under the nihil obstat and imprimatur of Cardinals and Archbishops.
Among these last, Giraud sums up the verdict neatly: “Comparing with all these documents the canon of the Council of Verona, renewed in 1208 by the Council of Avignon, which orders that apostates who, after being convicted of heresy by their Bishops or their representatives, should obstinately persist in their errors, should be delivered over to the secular arm, it would seem that it must be concluded that, by virtue of the delegated authority of the Cistercian monks, St. Dominic was to convict the heretics; and that, in convicting them he delivered them up, indirectly but surely, to execution, unless he suspended, by an act of clemency, the action of that docile instrument of the Church, the secular arm. Doubtless he did not himself pronounce the fatal sentence; but during their trial he played the part of an expert in the matter of orthodoxy, or even of a juror, transmitting to the court a verdict of guilty while capable at the same time of signing a recommendation to mercy.”
It is, of course, true that the “bloody-minded Dominic,” that favourite scarecrow of old-fashioned Protestant historians, never existed. Not only the Bollandists and Lacordaire but also the whole weight of modern scholarship agree on this point. Even Lea, almost always accurate on points of fact even when he is most exasperating in his utter lack of the realizing imagination so necessary to a modern historian of the Middle Ages; even Lea, I say, admits that the miracles ascribed to St. Dominic are almost all kindly ones, and that the Saint was by no means notable among his contemporaries for ferocity against heretics. Nor was he the “founder of the Inquisition,” although he was a worker in it. It was the force of circumstances and, in particular, the fact that both mendicant orders were particularly dependent upon the Pope (and correspondingly independent of the local clergy) that afterwards pushed forward first the Dominicans and then the Franciscans into prominence as Inquisitors.
The Albigensian struggle brought the Papal, as distinguished from the Episcopal, Inquisition into being. Formerly the bishops had had sole jurisdiction in matters of faith. Naturally, their policy against heretics varied widely, so that, as we have seen in Chapter II, the secular government and even the local mob often acted on their own responsibility. Evidently the bishops were not in a position to deal with heresy on a large scale. Attempts to hold them to their work, such as the Imperial-Papal decree issued from Verona in 1184 (see Chapter II), remained dead letters. In Languedoc, where both local government and mob were unwilling to act, the local bishops did not even try to do anything. Accordingly, as we have seen, Arnaut Amalric and the other legates whose activities we have followed, were sent by Innocent III to deal with the situation by virtue of authority derived directly from himself as Pope without reference to the local bishops—quite in the spirit in which President Cleveland sent federal troops to quell the Chicago riots in 1894.
Besides the need for a strong hand in Languedoc—the chief cause of the establishment of the Papal Inquisition—there was a second cause which helped to keep alive the newly founded institution even after military and political support of heresy in Languedoc had ceased. This second cause was the need felt for order and regularity. We have seen, in the first chapter, how order and right reason in all things were the goals of the fresh, buoyant spirit of the time, and how vast an event was the rediscovery of the Roman law, with its enormous logic. The intellectual appetites of newly-awakened Europe seized eagerly upon law as an object of study, at the same time that the practical necessities of an expanding, intensely “progressive,” society made the regular administration of law one of the chief concerns of statesmen. To such a generation, it was intolerable that so weighty a matter as that of variations from the faith should be dealt with haphazard. In justice to those accused of heresy, and to the Christian commonwealth as a whole—which our forefathers considered much more—the serious business of judgment in such cases deserved to be entrusted to the best qualified persons who could be found. Here were the Dominicans, and after them the Franciscans, learned in theology, independent of local prejudice, not apt to be terrified by local influence, men who had given up everything so that they might better serve the Church. Even though they shrank, as they sometimes did, from the heavy responsibilities, fatigues, and personal danger of acting as Inquisitors, the higher authorities of State and Church combined to draft them into the service.
In one sense, then, it was a high desire for justice, for the replacement of lynch law in heresy cases by a regular system of procedure, which dictated the establishment of the Inquisition (that is the Inquisition as a new instrument largely separate from the older Church courts of canon law administered by the bishops). At the same time, there are three facts which seem to show a baser mind in those who co-operated in the gradual formation of the new institution. The modern man is struck by the fact that the manner of examination seems to offer insufficient guarantee against the possibility of grave injustice to the accused; second, the use of torture to compel confession. Finally, the modern man is appalled at the extreme penalty by fire.
The main feature of the legal processes of the Inquisition is the wide power of the Inquisitor. Instead of acting, as our judges do, merely as referee between opposite sides, with a separate government official for prosecutor, the Inquisitor was the prime mover of the whole proceeding. Of his own motion he sought evidence and examined witnesses and accused. In this there is some resemblance to modern French procedure, and in a slighter degree, to the procedure in American courts-martial which makes the judge-advocate at once prosecutor and guarantor of the rights of the accused. The method is derived from the Roman law. It was practised, in the times with which we are concerned, by the “advanced” secular governments of the day such as the Capetian and Plantagenet monarchies. Certain Italian municipalities also seem to have made use of it. Besides being known to contemporary secular justice, it was familiar to the educated men of the time who were steeped in classical memories.
Under the Inquisition, matters went somewhat as follows: The Inquisitors travelled about through the territories committed to their charge preaching sermons against heresy, especially in places where it was known to exist. In these sermons a “time of grace” was promised, during which time all heretics who should come in and confess their fault were to be admitted to mercy and reconciled with the Church. Meanwhile, the faithful were asked to give information as to local heretics. When the time of grace was up those accused of heresy were arrested by armed servants of the Holy Office and examined by the Inquisitor.
The evidence for the prosecution was usually furnished to the accused, but in most cases the names of the witnesses who had given it were concealed. This was a departure from the contemporary procedure at canon law before the bishops. The argument in favour of concealment was that it was the one way of protecting the witnesses against reprisal by the friends of the accused in case of conviction. Public security, it must be remembered, was not what it is to-day. The best chance of having the indictment quashed was for the accused to prove that the witnesses were his mortal enemies. The inquisitor would, therefore, ask him whether he had any such, and if he had anyone who (unknown to him of course) had testified, then the evidence in question was stricken out and the whole case against him received a damaging blow.