The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (11 page)

Yet another inquisitor was dead, but his ominous title and function survived for another six centuries. When it came to heresy hunting, the weakness of the legatine inquisitors, as far as the papacy was concerned, was their inefficiency rather than their brutality. “Conrad’s lack of scruple over evidence may well have brought as many innocent as guilty to the fire,” observes historian Malcolm Lambert, “and still let the heretics, Cathar or Waldensian, escape.” But Conrad’s wild-eyed sexual slanders were wholly plausible to Pope Gregory IX, who imported them into an influential papal bull titled
Vox in rama
(A voice on high) and thus “gave Conrad’s poisonous stories a vogue they might not otherwise have had.” The inquisitor himself may have suffered a sudden and violent death, but his leering notion that heresy is invariably and inevitably wedded to sorcery and sexual excess enjoyed a much longer life.
⁹

Still, a practical lesson had been learned. Neither the episcopal inquisition nor the legatine inquisition was sufficient to the task of achieving a final solution to the problem of religious diversity within the realm of the Roman Catholic church. A kind of perfect storm of zeal, paranoia, and hubris inspired the Church to design a wholly new weapon for deployment in the war on heresy. The ancient Roman legal procedure of
inquisitio
would be entrusted to an army of friar-inquisitors recruited from the ranks of the mendicant orders, and they would be charged by the pope with the task of cleansing Christendom of every kind of heresy. Once called upon to live in imitation of Christ, the friar-inquisitors were recruited to serve in a corps of persecutors whose instruments of torture were identical to those that had been used in pagan Rome.

The irony was apparent to Dostoevsky, whose Grand Inquisitor is ready to burn Jesus Christ himself as a heretic, but it was wholly lost on the flesh-and-blood inquisitors who murdered their victims by the countless thousands. For them, the work of the torturer and the executioner was always for the greater glory of God and the Church, or so they succeeded in convincing themselves.

The creation of the Inquisition as an arm of the Church has been tracked by historians through a series of papal decrees and church councils starting as early as 1184. But the man who is generally credited with (or blamed for) bringing the Inquisition into formal existence is Pope Innocent III, a brilliant and accomplished canon lawyer who ascended to the papal throne in 1198 and remained there for eighteen tumultuous years. Innocent, as we have already seen, is the man who first sent the Dominicans and Franciscans into Languedoc to call the Cathars back into the Church. When preaching failed, he charged the king and nobles of France to go on crusade in their own country against the Cathars who refused to be converted. And when the Albigensian Crusade failed in its mission of exterminating the Cathars, it was Pope Innocent III who resolved to root out heresy once and for all by entrusting the task to a corps of papal inquisitors, the charter members of the Inquisition.

Innocent, the most celebrated of the lawyer-popes of the medieval Church, sought to drape the machinery of persecution with the mantle of law and theology. On November 1, 1215, he convened an assembly of more than four hundred bishops, eight hundred abbots, and various emissaries from the kings and princes of western Europe, all of them gathered in the Lateran Palace in Rome. At the end of their deliberations, the so-called Fourth Lateran Council voted to approve a new set of ecclesiastical laws (or “canons”) that were intended to dictate the beliefs and practices of obedient Christians—and to punish the disobedient ones. The document in which the work of the Fourth Lateran Council is recorded has been called “the first sketch of the Inquisition,” but it also provided a useful precedent for lawmakers in Spain in the fifteenth century and Nazi Germany in the twentieth century.
¹⁰

Many of the canons appear to be unrelated to the persecution of heresy, but the whole document hums with the urgent concern of the Roman Catholic church to assert its absolute authority over Christendom. The clergy and congregants of the Eastern Orthodox church, for example, were warned to “conform themselves like obedient sons to the holy Roman church, their mother, so that there may be one flock and one shepherd”—or else “be struck with the sword of excommunication.” Because it was sometimes impossible to tell Jews and “Saracens” (that is, Muslims) from Christians—and “thus it happens at times that through error Christians have relations with the women of Jews or Saracens, and Jews and Saracens with Christian women”—they were ordered to wear garments of a kind that would set them apart from Christians. And a new crusade “to liberate the Holy Land from the hands of the ungodly” was ordered to depart on June 1, 1217.
¹¹

Even the canons that do not seem to refer to heresy can be understood as a stern caution against even the slightest innovation or variation in matters of faith. The very first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council, for example, asserts the theological monopoly of the Roman Catholic church, which is declared to be “one Universal Church of the faithful, outside of which there is absolutely no salvation.” Dualism of the kind embraced by the Cathars is implicitly condemned—“We believe and openly confess there is only one true God”—although the credo goes on to allow that God actually comprises “three Persons indeed but one essence,” that is, “Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” The affirmation of baptism in water and the doctrine of transubstantiation—the belief that the bread of the Eucharist is miraculously “changed (
transsubstantio
) by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood” of Jesus Christ—can be understood as an oblique repudiation of the Cathars, who rejected both items of Catholic dogma.
¹²

Only the third canon directly addresses the goal of ridding Christendom of what the clerics called “heretical filth.” But it amounts to a declaration of total war on heresy of all kinds and, at the same time, a general conscription of all Christians to serve on the front lines. “We condemn all heretics, whatever names they may go under,” the council resolved. “They have different faces indeed but their tails are tied together inasmuch as they are alike in their pride.” Any Christians “who receive, defend or support heretics” were themselves to be excommunicated. Anyone in a position of authority was under a solemn obligation to the Church to persecute heresy: “Thus whenever anyone is promoted to spiritual or temporal authority,” the third canon states, “he shall be obliged to confirm this article with an oath.”
¹³

Bishops were sternly reminded of their duty to “force the faithful to denounce any heretics known to them,” and any bishop who failed to do so was to forfeit his office in favor of “a suitable person who both wishes and is able to overthrow the evil of heresy”—a pointed reminder of the failings of the episcopal inquisition. The secular lords of Christendom, too, were admonished not to tolerate the presence of heretics within their realms. The goal of the Church, in other words, was to require all officers of Church and state—and, later, the population at large—to serve as spies and informers in the war on heresy. If they failed to turn in a suspected heretic, they were guilty of “fautorship”—that is, the crime of aiding or abetting a heretic—and faced punishment no less severe than that imposed on the heretics themselves.

Some of the well-established penalties for heresy were reaffirmed—confiscation and forfeiture of property, removal from public office, and excommunication for heretics who recanted and then reverted to their old beliefs. New and ominous penalties were added. Once detected and condemned, for example, an unrepentant heretic was to be “abandoned” by the Church and “handed over to the secular rulers to be punished with due justice,” a formula that later came to serve as a sanctimonious euphemism for death by burning at the stake.
¹⁴
Significantly, the war on heresy in western Europe was declared to be the moral equivalent of the Crusades in the far-off Holy Land. “Catholics who take the cross and gird themselves up for the expulsion of heretics,” the third canon affirmed, “shall enjoy the same indulgence, and be strengthened by the same holy privilege, as is granted to those who go to the aid of the holy Land.”
¹⁵

Innocent III did not live long enough to see the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council put into full operation. “At his death in 1216,” concedes historian Edward Burman, “the Inquisition did not yet exist.” But it is also true that Innocent’s long, bloody campaign against religious liberty and diversity, culminating in the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, would “lead irrevocably to the creation of the Inquisition.” He was the author of the very idea of a war on heresy, which expressed itself in the Albigensian Crusade as well as in the burning of heretics by the legatine inquisitors. He was the first pope to recognize the usefulness of the Dominicans and Franciscans in the persecution of heretics. And he convened the council whose enactments of church law would serve as the constitution of the Inquisition, thus dignifying what was essentially a program of Church-and state-sponsored terrorism.
¹⁶
Once the blueprints of the Inquisition were available, men in power did not hesitate to put them to use.

Still, it was left to Innocent’s successors to assemble the various parts into the elaborate contraption that came to be called the Inquisition. The Council of Toulouse in 1229, for example, endorsed the notion of the Inquisition as a permanent fixture of the Church rather than a series of ad hoc tribunals. The papal decree titled
Excommunicamus,
issued in 1231 by Pope Gregory IX, expanded upon the antiheretical canons of the Fourth Lateran Council. By April 20, 1233, when Pope Gregory IX formally charged the friars of the Dominican order with the duty of serving as inquisitors, the Inquisition was fully deployed. Once in place, it would not pause in its work for six hundred years, when the last victim of the Inquisition was put to death as a heretic.
¹⁷

By a certain Orwellian logic, the Inquisition always fancied itself to be the spiritual benefactor of the men and women whom it arrested, tortured, and killed. Pope Innocent III encouraged the inquisitors to regard the persecution of heresy as strong medicine intended to restore the spiritual health of the heretics even if it meant afflicting their bodies or even ending their mortal lives. Pope Gregory IX, too, saw the Inquisition as “an integral part of pastoral care.” Thus did the inquisitors come to justify the prosecution of accused heretics as “an act of love” and “profound Christian charity” toward errant Christians who had put their souls at risk by straying from the benign embrace of the Mother Church. The same rationale has been invoked by apologists down through the ages when they piously insist that the Inquisition imposed only “penances” and deferred to the civil authorities when it came to torture and execution.
¹⁸

For that reason, too, it made sense for the Church to recruit inquisitors from the ranks of its own clergy. But the popes who called the Inquisition into existence declined to entrust the task to a motley crew of ordinary priests. Rather, they chose the friars of the newly chartered Dominican and Franciscan orders to serve as the shock troops of the war on heresy. Thus were friars of the so-called mendicant orders called away from their work as wandering preachers and charged with the new mission of finding and punishing heretics of all kinds. And that is why the uniform of the inquisitor—a hooded robe like the one worn by Tomás de Torquemada (1420–1498)—consisted of nothing more than the ordinary habit of his order.
¹⁹

One might be tempted to believe that a man who had taken vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience out of a zealous desire to live in imitation of Christ would be temperamentally unsuited for the role of persecutor, but the opposite turned out to be true. Indeed, the religious zeal that attracted men to the mendicant orders could be readily turned against the victims of the Inquisition once the friar-inquisitors accepted the idea that those dragged into the torture chamber and burned at the stake were “heretical filth” rather than mortal human beings. So fierce and so faithful were the Dominicans in doing the dirty work of the Inquisition that they came to be described with a fearful pun—
Domini canes,
“the hounds of God.”

The friar-inquisitors brought with them certain skills and training that were especially useful in dealing with dissident Christians. The friars’ command of church dogma, for example, came in handy when they were called upon to confront the occasional Cathar
perfectus
who had been caught up along with the less sophisticated victims of the Inquisition. “How can the fire that burns the houses of the poor and holy be created by God?” a Cathar is shown to taunt his interrogator in the pages of one inquisitorial tract. “How can the God who sends suffering to good men be good himself?” To hear the inquisitors tell it, the investigation of an accused heretic was sometimes the occasion for disputation rather than interrogation, and a working knowledge of Catholic theology was as important as the interrogator’s skill with the techniques of torture.
²⁰

The friars were regarded as suitable candidates for inquisitors for more practical reasons as well. They were available to serve full-time in that role and, if called upon, for the rest of their lives. Because they had taken a vow of poverty, they were thought to be untempted by the bribes that might be offered by wealthy defendants or their families. Perhaps even more important, as far as the masters of the Inquisition were concerned, the Dominicans and Franciscans were deferential to authority, a crucial quality in light of the fact that the proceedings of the Inquisition were to be conducted in the strictest secrecy. All of them had taken vows of obedience when they joined their orders, and a papal bull of 1260 formally redirected their loyalty from their own Dominican and Franciscan superiors to the pope himself. The intimacy of the relationship between the pope and “the Preaching Friars Inquisitors,” as they came to be known, is captured in a canon in which they are addressed as “our cherished and faithful children in Christ.”
²¹