Pegna has a good deal more to say on the same subject, and all of it is extremely interesting.
He propounds the questions: “May an inquisitor employ this ruse to discover the truth? If he enters into such a promise is he not obliged to keep it?” By this latter question he means, of course, the promise to pardon which the prisoner was given to understand was made him.
He proceeds to tell us that Dr. Cuchalon decided the first of these questions by approving the use of dissimulation, justifying it by the instance of Solomon’s judgment between the mothers.
It really seems as if there is nothing that theologians cannot justify by inversion, subversion, or perversion of some precedent (more or less apocryphal in itself) to suit their ends.
The scholiast himself agrees with the reverend doctor, and considers that although jurisconsults may disapprove of such methods in civil courts, it is quite fit and proper to use them in the courts of the Holy Office; explaining that the inquisitor has ampler powers than the civil judge [which seems to be an extraordinary reason for justifying his abuse of them].
Thus, Pegna pursues, in this edifying treatise upon the uses of hypocrisy, provided that the inquisitor does not promise the offender absolute impunity, he may always promise him “grace” (which by the offender is taken to signify “absolute impunity”) and keep his promise by diminishing somewhat the canonical pains that depend upon himself.
In actual practice this would mean that a heretic who has incurred the stake may be promised pardon if he will confess to the sins of which it is necessary to convict him before he can be burnt. And when, having confessed and delivered himself into the hands of the inquisitor, he claims his pardon, he is to be satisfied with the answer that the pardon meant was pardon for his sins—absolution, that his soul may be saved when they burn his body.
On the score of the second question propounded by the scholiast—“If the inquisitor enters into such a promise is he not obliged to keep it?”—he answers it by telling us that many theologians do not consider there is any such obligation on the part of the inquisitor. This attitude they explain by urging that such a fraud is salutary and for the public good; and, further, that if it is licit to extract the truth by torture, it is surely much more so to accomplish it by dissimulation—verbis fictis.
This is the general but by no means the universal opinion, we gather. There are some writers who are opposed to it. And now the scholiast becomes more extraordinary still. Hear him:
“These two divergent opinions may be reconciled by considering that whatever promises the inquisitors make, they are not to be understood to apply to anything beyond the penalties whose rigour the Inquisition has the right to lessen—namely, canonical penances, and not those by law prescribed.”