He writes this knowing that these promises are understood by the prisoner to mean something very different—that the prisoner is desired so to understand them, made so to understand them.
The honesty of Pegna’s reasoning is not to be suspected. He is not an apologist of the Holy Office writing for the world in general, and employing bad arguments perforce because he must make the best of the only ones available, even though he should lapse into suspicion of bad faith. He is writing, as a preceptor, for the private eye of the inquisitor. Therefore we can only conclude that these learned casuists who plunge into such profundities of thought and pursue such labyrinthine courses of reasoning had utterly failed to grasp the elementary moral fact that falsehood does not lie in the word uttered, but in the idea conveyed.
“However little,” he continues, in the course of polishing this gem of casuistry, “may be the remission granted by the inquisitor, it will always be sufficient to fulfil his promise.”
You see what a stickler he is for the letter of the law. You shall see a good deal more of the same sort of thing before we have gone much further.
But here the scholiast begins to labour. His conscience is stirring; possibly a ray of doubt penetrates his gloomy confidence that right is wrong and wrong is right. And so, we fancy, to quiet these uneasy stirrings comes the last paragraph on this subject:
“However, for greater safety of conscience, inquisitors should make no promises save in very general terms, and never promise more than they can fulfil.”[104]
There is one more of Eymeric’s ruses for combating the guile of stubborn heretics:
Let the inquisitor obtain an accomplice of the accused, or else a person esteemed by the latter and in the inquisitor’s confidence, and engage him to talk often to the accused and extract his secret from him. If necessary, let this person pretend to be of the same heretical sect, to have abjured through fear, and to have declared all to the inquisitor.