God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (4 page)

Why was there suddenly an Inquisition? Intolerance, hatred, and suspicion of “the other,” often based on religious and ethnic differences, had always been with us. Throughout history, these realities had led to persecution and violence. But the ability to sustain a persecution—to give it staying power by giving it an institutional life—did not appear until the Middle Ages. Until then, the tools to stoke and manage those omnipresent embers of hatred did not exist. Once these capabilities do exist, inquisitions become a fact of life—standard operating procedure. They are not confined to religion; they are political as well. The targets can be large or small. An inquisition impulse can quietly take root in the very systems of government and civil society that order our lives.

The tools are these: There needs to be a system of law, and the means to administer it with a certain amount of uniformity. There needs to be a well-defined process for conducting interrogations and extracting information. Procedures must exist for record-keeping, and for retrieving information after records have been compiled and stored. An administrative mechanism—a bureaucracy—is required, along with a cadre of trained people to staff it. There must be an ability to send messages across significant distances—and also some capacity to restrict the communications of others. And there must be a source of power, to ensure enforcement.

The source of power can vary. From the outset, the religious aims of the Inquisition were enmeshed with the might of secular rulers. The relationship was sometimes symbiotic and always complicated, and it changed over time. With the Medieval Inquisition, the Church sought to leverage secular power to achieve its ends (though the secular authorities had their own purposes in mind). The Spanish Inquisition threw this arrangement into reverse: the crown made the Inquisition an official component of the Spanish state. During the Roman Inquisition, the tribunal was controlled directly by the papacy, and within its own territories church and state were the exact same thing. (Outside the Papal States, the Inquisition operated on terms laid down by local governments.) The twentieth century would bring a new evolutionary stage: inquisitions that lay fully in the hands of the state and required no religious dimension at all.

Their Inquisition—and Ours

There’s one more factor in the making of an Inquisition: the conviction that one is absolutely right. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the prefect of the Holy Office through most of the 1960s, adopted as his motto the Latin phrase
Semper idem
—“Always the same.”
The inquisitors—like their masters and their theological associates—shared an outlook of moral certainty. They believed that they enjoyed personal access to an unchanging truth. They accepted without doubt that God paid close attention to the affairs of human beings, and was active in the Inquisition’s cause. This outlook was as unquestioned as modern-day belief in the laws of gravity or genetics. To be sure, as time went on, many inquisitors were functionaries and careerists—but the premise of the institution itself remained unchanged.

In a world of moral certainty, the unthinkable becomes permissible. The sanctity of private conscience was no longer deemed inviolate, and techniques for ensnaring the innocent in scenarios of scripted guilt became increasingly sophisticated and systemic. The title of an influential study of the Medieval Inquisition—
The Formation of a Persecuting Society
—gets across part of what occurred.
One twentieth-century historian concludes, “The medieval inquisitors had perfected techniques by which the very fabric of reality could be altered.”
A Franciscan inquisitor once confided to King Philip IV of France, in the early fourteenth century, that if Saints Peter and Paul had appeared before his tribunal, he had no doubt that the techniques he employed would be able to secure their convictions.
A Church apologist of the early 1400s, writing approvingly about the inquisitors, stated: “We persecuted the seeds of evil not only in men’s deeds, but in their thoughts.”

It all sounds very medieval, but it’s not
merely
medieval. Scholars may debate whether there truly is such a thing as a “totalitarian” state, and what its essential characteristics are, but the desire to control the thoughts of others—joined to the conviction that history itself will ultimately render an approving judgment—underlies much of the sad narrative of the past one hundred years. Some phenomena loom with menace because they seem so alien. The Inquisition does so because it seems so familiar.

Looking at the Inquisition, one sees the West crossing a threshold from one kind of world into another. Persecution acquired a modern platform—the advantages afforded by a growing web of standardized law, communications, administrative oversight, and controlled mechanisms of force. It was run not merely by warriors but by an educated elite; not merely by thugs but by skilled professionals. And in its higher dimensions it was animated not by greed or hope of gain or love of power, though these were never absent, but by the fervent conviction that all must subscribe to some ultimate truth.

Every subsequent outbreak of persecution, whether political or religious, has been abetted by these same forces. They ensure that the basic trajectory of repression will always look remarkably the same. They suggest why persecution is so difficult to stop. And they help explain why the Inquisition template has translated so easily from the religious sphere into the world of secular governments and secular ideologies, where for more than a century it has been primarily lodged.

I began to explore the Inquisition as one who happens to be both a Catholic and an American. I’m no less aware of the sins and failures of church and country than I am of the capacity of church and country to inspire and do good. I am also aware that for all the fine recent scholarship, most of the writing about the Inquisition over the centuries has been less than neutral. Studies of the Inquisition have grown out of the agendas and concerns—whether acknowledged or not—of those doing the writing. To this, and without the inducement of strappado or rack, I plead guilty. I ventured into the world of the Inquisition and its offspring in the 1990s, motivated at first by the Vatican’s attempts to silence or censor a significant number of prominent theologians, some of whom I had come to know. There was also a broader context. Many friends and colleagues were experts on the former Soviet Union, and had engaged in long-running debates over the inherent nature and internal mechanisms of that repressive regime. At the same time, America’s political and legal culture seemed to be turning increasingly prosecutorial, increasingly poisonous—this at the end of a century that had seen Red Scares in the 1920s, the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, full-blown McCarthyism in the 1950s, and the government’s pursuit of “subversives” and activists of various stripes in the 1960s. After 9/11, the specter of religious warfare came once again to the fore. So did debates over interrogation and torture, and over domestic surveillance in the name of national security. The accelerating inroads of the Internet, meanwhile, gave rise to fundamental questions about censorship, disinformation, and the meaning of truth.

The advent of the Inquisition offers a lens. Through it lies the world we inhabit now, one in which privacy and freedom of conscience are pitted against forces that would contain them. This is a central contest of the modern era and of the centuries that lie ahead. The issues posed by the Inquisition enfold the world we call our own.

The heretics have lain concealed for a long time,
scuttling about in hiding like crabs.
—POPE GREGORY IX,
1231

You, so and so, of such a place, as is stated
in your confession, did this and this.
—BERNARD GUI, MANUAL FOR INQUISITORS, C.
1323

The Head of the Dragon

T
HE ROADS OF
southwestern France, in the shadow of the Pyrenees, wind among deep valleys and steep gorges. They climb and descend along hairpin turns. Timeless rivers and the ancient paths of shepherds define the best routes still. Silhouetted against the sky, moldering piles of stone crown serrated crags, the remnants of medieval castles—Quéribus, Termes, Aguilar, Puilaurens, Lastours. They occupy the sites of the fortified
castra
where heretics once took refuge, and whose protection from the Inquisition and its allies proved all too temporary.

The most dramatic of these promontories comes into view on the road south from Fougax-et-Barrineuf, soon after it veers off to follow the Ruisseau de St. Nicholas. A sugarloaf singularity looms ahead, the slopes rocky and sheer until gentled slightly at the base by erosion. This kind of geologic formation is known as a pog, from the local word for “peak,” and this particular one is referred to by people in the area simply as “le pog.” The summit, 4,000 feet above sea level, is capped by a pentagonal fortress, which from below appears inaccessible. But a difficult track picks its way upward through the brambles and the rubble. From the top the view opens out to high mountains in the south, and the valley of the Aude in the north. It was an April afternoon when I made the climb with a friend, and on the surrounding foothills the grass was freshly green. Snow survived in the shelter of swales. The sound of wind was strong and constant—the kind of sound used in documentaries to evoke a sense of mystery and antiquity.

The promontory is Montségur, and in 1244 it became a focal point in the clash between two unyielding systems of religious belief. One was the Christian heresy known as Catharism, which had put down deep roots in this corner of Europe. The Cathars were dualists, believing that a God who was good could not be responsible for the manifest evil in the world, which must therefore have a separate source of creation. In one form or another this outlook is among the oldest and most durable heresies in Christendom, arising as it does from a conundrum central to any belief system that posits a beneficent deity. Earthquake, famine, tsunami, disease—headlines daily nurture the dualist in every heart. Augustine, a Church father in the waning days of Rome, had spent the first part of his life as a dualist and the second part making up for the first. Manicheans, Gnostics, Paulicians, Bogomils—dualistic thinking unites them all.

Very little survives of Cathar thinking from Cathar pens—their documents were systematically destroyed by their enemies. But like other dualists, the Cathars believed that the earthly world had been brought to life by the forces of darkness, and that only the world of the spirit was reliably pure.
(Their name may come from the Greek
cathari,
meaning “pure ones,” though another derivation, put about by foes, involves the Latin
cattus,
for “cat,” whose hind parts the Cathars were alleged to kiss.)
The most zealous adherents, who had received a sacrament called the
consolamentum,
and were known as
perfecti
or
parfaits,
were ascetic vegetarians who abstained from sexual relations. Ordinary Cathars, known as
credentes,
or “believers,” could live their lives as other people did, saving the
consolamentum
for the deathbed. The Cathars saw licentious and authoritarian local priests as hypocrites; they regarded the Catholic Church as the Great Beast, the Whore of Babylon.

The Church, of course, was the other system involved in this clash of belief. It is far more of a global institution today than it was in the thirteenth century, when the sway of the “universal” Church was confined to Western Europe. It was hemmed in by the sea to the north and west, by Islam to the south, and by Orthodox Christianity to the east. Catharism, also known as the Albigensian heresy (the name comes from the town of Albi, where many heretics could be found), posed a grave internal threat, and indeed represented one of the most serious threats of any kind since the days of persecution by the pagan emperors of Rome. A succession of popes, beginning in the late twelfth century, had determined to root it out. They tried persuasion, sending priests among the heretics to gather the wayward sheep. When that failed, they took up arms—but even brute force had its limitations. Ultimately, the Cathar heresy led the Church to establish a regime of interrogation and punishment that would come to be known as the Inquisition.

This was a clash in which the contending parties, heretic and orthodox, shared certain mental underpinnings. They believed without question in the reality of their God. They believed in sin, believed in hell, believed in redemption. And with God on one’s side, there was no basis for compromise.

Montségur saw little compromise. In the spring of 1243, several hundred Cathars
—perfecti
and ordinary believers—took refuge in the fortress, which had been a stronghold since Roman times and probably much earlier. The name Montségur means “safe mountain.” The Cathars had been routed from one place after another, and chose the summit for a last stand. The forces of the Church, in the form of an army provided by the king of France, who had his own motives for intervening, put the fortress under siege. For ten months, the Cathars held out, a community of armed men and their families in this Masada of heretics, a dense village of huts clustered tightly against the ramparts. They were sustained by rumors that the Holy Roman Emperor, the pope’s bitter enemy, would come to the rescue. He never did.

The hopelessness of their situation became plain only after the king’s forces scaled a bluff and erected catapults. Spend some time exploring the mountainside, and you may come across rounded stone projectiles the size of cannonballs in the woods. During the last days, it is said, some of the defenders slipped away with a considerable treasure, to sustain Cathar activities elsewhere. If they did, the treasure has never been found, though the romantic quest continues to animate casual enthusiasts and the occasional novelist. (Inevitably, Nazis figure in the stories.)

Some intimate details are known of life at Montségur as the end approached, because priests of the Inquisition questioned the survivors at length and then wrote everything down. The inquisitors were mainly interested in heresy, and in rolling up Cathar networks farther afield, not in writing an enduring work of social history. Even so, a gripping picture emerges. The Church authorities offered lenient terms to those who would abjure their beliefs. The Cathar
perfecti
refused to do so: as they saw it, the salvation of their souls was at stake. On condition that their followers be spared, the
perfecti
and those closest to them agreed to surrender themselves to execution after a two-week truce. They spent the two weeks in prayer and fasting, and gave away their meager possessions. Specific moments, recorded by the inquisitors, are haunting in their banality. One
perfectus
made a gift to a friend of oil, salt, pepper, wax, and some green cloth.
When the truce was over, the Cathars climbed down from the fortress to a slanting field on the slopes. Many had newly accepted the
consolamentum.
More than two hundred people were burned on the spot, mounting ladders to share a single pyre. As the fires smoldered, a message was sent to the pope: “We have crushed the head of the dragon.”