In spite of the prohibition to succour a heretic, a man would not be regarded as an abettor who gave food to a heretic dying of hunger, since it is possible that if spared the latter might yet come to be converted.
Excommunicates who remain in excommunication during a whole year, by which are to be understood not merely those who are excommunicate as heretics, or abettors of heretics, but excommunicate upon any grounds whatsoever. In fact, the indifference to excommunication renders them suspect of heresy.
Apostates.—Apostate Christians who become Jews or Mohammedans (these religions not being heresies), even though they should have apostatized through fear of death. The fear of torture or death not being one that can touch a person who is firm in the Faith, no apostasy is to be excused upon such grounds.[84]
With the “Directorium” of Eymeric before him, Torquemada set to work to draw up the first articles of his famous code. Additions were to be made to it later, as the need for such additions came to be shown by experience; but no subsequent addition was of the importance of these original twenty-eight articles. They may be said to have given the jurisprudence of the Spanish Inquisition a settled form, which continued practically unchanged for over three hundred years after Torquemada’s death.
A survey of these articles and of the passages from Eymeric that have a bearing upon them, together with some of the annotations of the scholiast Francesco Pegna,[85] should serve to convey some notion of the jurisprudence of the Holy Office and of the extraordinary spirit that inspired and governed it—a spirit at once crafty and stupid, subtle and obvious, saintly and diabolical, consistent in nothing—not even in cruelty, for in its warped and dreadful way it accounted itself merciful, and not only represented but believed that its aims were charitable. It practised its abominations of cruelty out of love for the human race, to save the human race from eternal damnation; and whilst it wept on the one hand over the wretched heretic it flung to the flames, it exulted on the other in the thought that by burning one who was smitten with the pestilence of heresy it saved perhaps a hundred from infection and from purging that infection in an eternity of hell-fire.
They are rash who see hypocrisy in the priestly code that is to follow. Hypocrites there may have been, there must have been, and many; such a system was a very hotbed of hypocrisy. Yet the system itself was not hypocritical. It was sincere, dreadfully, tragically, ardently sincere, with the most hopeless, intolerable, and stupid of all sincerity—the sincerity of fanaticism, which destroys all sense of proportion, and distorts man’s intellectual vision until with an easy conscience he makes of guile and craft and falsehood the principles that shall enable him to do what he conceives to be his duty by his fellow-man.
The doctrine of exclusive salvation was the source of all this evil. But that doctrine was firmly and sincerely held. Torquemada or any other inquisitor might have uttered the words which an inspired poet has caused to fall from the lips of Philip II.:
“The blood and sweat of heretics at the stake
Is God’s best dew upon the barren field.”[86]
And he would have uttered them with a calm and firm conviction, assured that he did no more than proclaim an obvious truth which might serve him as a guide to do his duty by man and God. For all that he did he could find a commandment in the Scriptures. Was burning the proper death for heretics? He answered the question out of the very mouth of Christ, as you shall see. Should a heretic’s property be confiscated? Eymeric and Paramo point to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden as a consequence of their disobedience—the first of all heresies—and ask you what was that but confiscation. Is it proper to impose a garment of shame upon those convicted of lesser heresies, or upon penitents who are reconciled? Paramo will answer you that Adam and Eve wore skins after their fall, and implies that this is a proper precedent for the infamous sanbenito.