The cruelty of the Inquisition appears most in the use of torture and in the executions by fire. Questions as to the form of procedure and withholding names of witnesses are subordinate. It is well enough for a modern civilized government, strong in the perfection of communications and of all public powers, to safeguard elaborately those accused of crime. Mediæval conditions were in many ways like those of frontier regions where the criminal can easily slip away. When this is so, justice must make herself swift and terrible by “rough and ready” methods. Otherwise she does not exist. In their franker moments, lawyers will usually admit that nine-tenths of the clients they defend are “as guilty as hell.” The elaborate safeguards of our procedure are defensible only on the theory that it is better to err by letting many culprits escape rather than by punishing one innocent man. And this theory, in turn, is tenable only on the assumption that no serious harm is done the community by the escape from punishment, through the legal safeguards aforesaid, of a considerable proportion of criminals. Where, on the other hand, the life or death of the community is felt to be at stake, then matters must take a different course. Perhaps as good an example as our own time can furnish is that of military justice. Clearly it is supremely important to keep up the discipline of an army. Accordingly, courts martial are given wide latitude. And yet the almost unanimous opinion of those competent to judge is that, when administered by experienced officers, miscarriages of justice under the court-martial system are exceedingly rare, and that, on the other hand, such a procedure as that followed in the civil courts would be destructive of all proper discipline; the maintenance of which, after all, is the necessary end sought. With reference to the Inquisition, besides the temporal welfare of the community, there is also the doctrine of exclusive salvation to be considered, as we shall see in a moment. The wide latitude allowed Inquisitors undoubtedly produced cases of injustice, but probably no system permitting the “disputatious wrangling of lawyers” (as the Inquisitorial manuals put it) could have answered the purpose.
In accusing the Inquisition of physical cruelty in examinations and executions, the modern world does not come into court with absolutely clean hands. Even leaving out of account Russia and Asia does not altogether mend matters. For instance, cruelty appears, more or less frankly, when the white man is in contact with those he considers lower races.
With respect to the examination of prisoners, Kipling’s fictitious hero, the lovable Mulvaney, flogging his captured Burman with a cleaning rod to find out the whereabouts of the bandit-friends of the sufferer, may serve as a fictitious example of the sort of cruelty frequently practised by civilized armies operating against savages. The American Army in the Philippines, instead of falling back on such primitive methods as flogging, took over the water torture from the natives there, who in turn had learned it from the Spaniards. In fact, it was one of the favourite tortures of the Spanish Inquisition of late mediæval and early modern days. The officer who introduced the “water cure” into the American Army happens to be known to the writer, who can warrant him a most kindly man who would not hurt so much as an insect, except in line of duty. It is a well-known fact that the American mind is more hospitable than the British to new and unfamiliar ideas. Even in the great modern cities, in which (by a curious reversion) degraded, criminal, types analogous to the savage appear, torture in the examination of prisoners is not altogether unknown. I refer to the police “third degree.” Here the facts are not public property, but there is good reason to believe that torture in various forms is used in examining prisoners to force them to confess and to name their accomplices. Into the merits and demerits of these practices it is unnecessary to enter here. The point is merely that the world has not yet found a way to dispense altogether with the use of torture in the examination of prisoners.
A real difference, nevertheless, remains between the modern and the mediæval use of torture in examinations. To-day it is furtive, then it was an acknowledged, customary thing. And while this difference is partly a matter of our greater security, and partly a matter of hypocrisy born of our characteristic, almost feminine, modern disinclination to face disagreeable facts; still it is true that there has been a real change in the minds of men of European stock with reference to this matter of torture. We are revolted by cruelties which not so very long ago seem to have been taken almost as a matter of course, so much so that, as we have seen, they permitted even priests to be present in the torture chamber. Our nerves are more sensitive than those of our ancestors, as Nietzsche and Huysmans have pointed out, but that does not altogether account for the moral change involved.
With respect to burning alive the position is somewhat similar. Here also we have a conspicuous modern example occurring in a region where the white man finds himself confronted with great numbers of men of a race which he feels to be inferior to his own. I refer to the lynching of negroes, usually those accused of rape upon a white woman, in the Southern States. Here the combination of rape and race feeling has produced a condition very like that found in Western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries when heretics, instead of negro rapists, were similarly burned by mobs. Here again, together with striking resemblances, there are also important differences. The practice shows no signs of becoming a formal written law. On the contrary, there is formidable, organized protest against it, even in the communities concerned. Whereas in the early Middle Ages only a part of the higher clergy can be found in opposition, and even then not in particular opposition to burning alive, but opposed in general to any death penalty for heretics.
The striking contrast between the mediæval attitude, after burning alive had become written law, and modern feeling on the subject, has been discussed in the second chapter. Belloc uses the fact of this contrast as an illustration of one of the chief difficulties of history, that is the elusiveness of the “time spirit” of past ages, the fact that they took for granted certain primary assumptions which seemed to them too obvious even to be worth recording. Considering it, he remarks upon the distortion which this unseizable spirit of the time ... “appears to produce in morals when one is looking at it through the medium of another spirit belonging to another time, our own.”[32] His first illustrations of this truth are drawn from the French Revolution, from which he proceeds to a discussion of burning alive in the Middle Ages and early modern period, which has, in part, been quoted elsewhere in this book.
Frazer in the “Golden Bough” has a passage reinforcing Belloc’s contention as to the symbolic and quasi-sacramental spirit in which burning alive was regarded. Fire was the sovereign remedy against witchcraft. It was customary to burn objects to prevent their being bewitched, or objects or animals which had been bewitched, so that the contagion might not spread, or, finally, to burn the witches themselves. Our contemporary Southern lynchings by fire should warn us against over-subtlety. Further, it is true that burning alive had been the Roman punishment for high treason as well as for sorcery, and was in grisly conformity with the Church’s traditional abhorrence of bloodshed—it shed no blood. Still it is possible that the Middle Ages saw relationship between witchcraft and heresy, since both were connected with ideas of intensely harmful spiritual forces—were, in short, favourite offspring of the devil himself.
Certainly, later on, the burning of criminals became a solemn ceremony by no means accompanied by hatred of the victim. This is proved by the examples of those strangled before burning, like Savonarola. It is proved even more strongly by the celebrated case of Gilles de Rais. This case has been referred to in the second chapter, but it is so pertinent here that it merits fuller repetition. Gilles was a Breton nobleman and had been one of the lieutenants of Joan of Arc, but later fell into sorcery, sexual perversion, and all sorts of refinements of cruelty. When the Inquisition condemned him to be hung and burned alive, on charges of worshipping demons, he suffered a violent change of heart. Among other edifying signs of contrition, he begged the people whose little boys he had kidnapped, then debauched, and then tortured to death by hundreds, to pray for his soul. Whereupon they marched in procession, vehemently praying for the eternal salvation of this monster with his taste for extremes in both directions of the spiritual life. After which he was duly executed. “We are far from American lynch law here,”[33] as M. Huysmans remarks in recounting this scene. It is possible, in the light of such case, to believe with Belloc and Frazer that what seems to us the atrocious cruelty involved in burning alive may have been merely incidental to other considerations uppermost in the minds of those who ordered such things. To himself, man is an inscrutable mystery.
Finally, we come to the question of the claims of the Church. It is not my purpose to debate the propositions involved, but merely to state them as they affect the moral problem of the Inquisition. Obviously, the Church’s sole reason for being is the belief that she has, in the Christian revelation, something of supreme and unique value for mankind. The Athanasian creed, whether or not it is to be taken as pronouncing the damnation of the heathen and of “heretics in good faith,” certainly must be interpreted to mean that those who “culpably persist” in heretical belief cannot be saved. In the Middle Ages, Christian scholars expanded this irreducible minimum so as to make the Church’s teaching include the damnation of both the heathen and of all heretics, more especially as the possibility of heresy existing without a definite renunciation of the Catholic faith by the individual heretic hardly occurred to people in a society universally Catholic. As we have seen, the Church was the cement of that society. Marriage was one of her sacraments and had nothing to do with any civil ceremony. Break the Church, therefore, and you broke up family life. To deny her right to sanction an oath was to destroy the all-important feudal oath of allegiance. Therefore men accepted without hesitation the idea that to counterfeit the faith was worse than to counterfeit earthly coin, to betray God through heresy was viler than to betray an earthly sovereign by committing treason. This note is sounded again and again in the grim formulas establishing torture and the stake. Since human justice fiercely punished the lesser crimes against men, how much the more it ought to punish the greater crimes against God. Given the savage criminal law of the time, given also the Athanasian creed tracing back to our Lord saying: “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; and he that believeth not shall be condemned” (St. Mark xvi), and the logical sequence is complete.
Nevertheless, even in times of clear, logical thinking such as the Middle Ages, men seldom act from logic alone. To act so is the mark of the fanatic, and although the fanatic often is powerful, still most men are not fanatics, and no society can long be ruled by fanaticism pure and simple. After some years of study and reflection upon the point, my own conclusion is that the Church and the Governments of the thirteenth century were determined in their action not only by the formal logic of the situation but also by the peculiarly repulsive nature of the Albigensian (“Catharan,” or Manichean) heresy, the leading heresy of the age.