The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (2 page)

Some figures and episodes in the history of the Inquisition have a special claim on our imaginations. Joan of Arc is surely the most famous victim of the medieval Inquisition, for example, and Galileo was among the last victims of the Roman Inquisition. But the doomed grandeur of imperial Spain has attracted the most attention in both scholarship and arts and letters, which may explain why we are tempted to think of the Spanish Inquisition as
the
Inquisition. From Goya’s heartrending drawings of inquisitorial victims to Dostoyevsky’s dreamy account of the Grand Inquisitor in
The Brothers Karamazov—
“I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us,” says the imaginary Grand Inquisitor to Jesus Christ, whose second coming at Seville is treated as the ultimate act of heresy—the Inquisition has been made to serve as a symbol of the arrogance, brutality, cynicism, and hypocrisy of an authoritarian regime that drapes itself in the veils of both law and piety.
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The reach and sweep of the Inquisition have discouraged historians from treating it as a single institution. That’s why an overview of the medieval, Spanish, and Roman Inquisitions in a single volume like this one is rare. The fact remains, however, that the inquisitors of every nationality and in every age were deputized under the same body of canon law, inflicted the same tortures and punishments on their victims, and devoted themselves to the same terrible mission—the arrest, torture, and execution of any man, woman, or child whom they regarded as a heretic, a term sufficiently elastic to reach
any
victim who happened to excite their anxieties or greed. Thus, for example, the manuals and handbooks composed in the Middle Ages to instruct the first inquisitors in their day-to-day work were still being consulted by the last inquisitors six centuries later.

Then, too, the Inquisition seems almost quaint when compared to the industrial-scale carnage of the twentieth century. Far more ink has been expended in chronicling the events that took place in Germany and Russia between 1917 and 1945 than in telling the story of the Inquisition, a saga that spans a period of six hundred years. Yet, ironically, the moral and cultural DNA of the grand inquisitors can be readily detected in Hitler and Stalin and their various accomplices and collaborators, and the inner workings of the Inquisition help us understand the goals and methods of the Great Terror and the Holocaust. The similarities are so striking that when the Jewish historian Cecil Roth published
The Spanish Inquisition
in 1937, he felt obliged to warn his readers that the book was a work of history and not merely a satire on current events.

As we unpack the inquisitorial toolkit, we will find a set of interlocking ideas, values, and techniques that link all phases of the Inquisition into one great engine of persecution. Moreover, and crucially, we will see how the crimes of the first inquisitors came to be repeated in the twentieth century and even in our own benighted age.

“Fanatic zeal, arbitrary cruelty, and insatiable cupidity rivaled each other in building up a system unspeakably atrocious,” writes Henry Charles Lea (1825–1909) in summing up the verdict of history on the Inquisition, “It was a standing mockery of justice—perhaps the most iniquitous that the arbitrary cruelty of man has ever devised.”
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Henry Charles Lea is to the Inquisition what Edward Gibbon is to the Roman Empire, a self-invented historian who was also a gifted phrasemaker and relentless polemicist. The scion of a Quaker publishing family from Philadelphia, Lea set himself to work on a definitive study of the Inquisition after a breakdown confined him to his home and library. More than a century after Lea wrote a three-volume history of the medieval Inquisition and a four-volume history of the Spanish Inquisition, his vast body of work remains the starting point for any conversation about the meaning and effect of the Inquisition. Today, even as the history of the Inquisition is being revised by a new generation of scholars, Lea is still invoked to remind us why and how the Inquisition came to be regarded as an ineradicable symbol of the crimes that are committed when absolute power works its corruptions.

Revisionist historians, for example, have engaged in lively debate over how many men and women were actually tortured and burned alive by the Inquisition. Even though the precise body count remains undetermined, the hard evidence for the suffering of its victims was created and preserved by the Inquisition itself. We have the manuals, treatises, ledgers, and transcripts in which the inquisitors and their minions recorded every detail of their daily labors. We can read for ourselves the questions they asked, the punishments (or as the Inquisition preferred to call them, the “penances”) that were prescribed for convicted heretics, and even the precise formulas to be spoken aloud by an inquisitor in Rome or Toulouse, Cologne or Madrid, when sending a condemned man or woman to prison or to the stake.

“The accused are not to be condemned according to ordinary laws, as in other crimes,” explains Bernard Gui (ca. 1261–1331), author of one of the most influential and enduring of the inquisitor’s manuals, “but according to the private laws or privileges conceded to the inquisitors by the Holy See, for there is much that is peculiar to the Inquisition.”
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It reveals something crucial about the inquisitor’s cast of mind that the Inquisition maintained such meticulous and even boastful records. Every word uttered during interrogation, torture, and trial, every gasp and cry of the victim, were dutifully transcribed by a notary. Bookkeepers toted up the income from confiscations and fines as well as the expenditures for ropes, straw, and wood with which to burn those from whom the treasure had been taken. Since the inquisitors were utterly convinced that they were doing God’s work, they collected and preserved the smoking-gun evidence of their own brutality and greed with unmistakable pride as well as an obsessive attention to detail.

The whole point of the Inquisition was to achieve a critical mass of terror by making examples of the men and women who dared to think for themselves, and thereby frightening the rest of the populace into abject compliance. Interrogation, torture, and trial were conducted in strict secrecy, and the inquisitors emerged into daylight only to sentence and punish the victims at the great public spectacle known as an auto-da-fé. But the whispered rumors about what went on in the cells and dungeons of the Inquisition—and the private fears of those whose loved ones had been seized, shackled, and taken away—amounted to a powerful weapon in the war on heresy. “When the Inquisition once laid hands upon a man, it never released its hold,” writes Lea. “The Inquisition had a long arm, a sleepless memory, and we can well understand the mysterious terror inspired by the secrecy of its operations and its almost supernatural vigilance.”
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So we will come to see that the Orwellian future described in
1984
—“Big Brother Is Watching You”—is actually rooted in the distant past. “Naming names,” a hateful feature of both the Moscow show trials of the 1930s and the Communist witch-hunt in McCarthy-era America, actually began with the inquisitors, who regarded the confession of an accused heretic as unacceptable unless it included the names and whereabouts of fellow believers. Even the black dunce’s cap used to humiliate prisoners at Abu Ghraib bears an unsettling resemblance to the
coroza
that was placed on the heads of the condemned before they were burned alive by the Spanish Inquisition.

So, too, did the Inquisition teach its successors how to use language to conceal their crimes and, at the same time, to inspire terror in their victims. Just as the inquisitors used the ornate Latin phrase
judicium secularum
(secular justice) to refer to torture on the rack and the wheel—and just as auto-da-fé (act of the faith) came to signify burning at the stake—mass murder in the Soviet Union was called “liquidation” and the extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany was called “the Final Solution.” Even today, kidnapping a suspected terrorist and spiriting him away to a secret prison where he can be safely tortured is known as “extraordinary rendition” by our own intelligence services. When George Orwell coined the word
Newspeak
to describe a vocabulary of euphemism and misinformation—“War Is Peace, Love is Hate, Ignorance is Strength”—he was recalling yet another invention of the Inquisition.
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Who were these so-called heretics, and exactly what were their misdeeds? The men, women, and children who suffered and died at the hands of the Inquisition, as it turns out, did not do anything that we would recognize as a crime; they were guilty (if at all) of wrongful thoughts rather than wrongful acts.
Heresy,
after all, is derived from the Greek word for “choice,” and one could be condemned as a heretic for choosing to believe something that the Church regarded as impermissible. Perhaps the best way to understand the function of heresy in the workings of the Inquisition is to borrow again from George Orwell’s
1984
: heresy is the original “Thought Crime,” and the agents of the Inquisition were the world’s first “Thought Police.”

“You are accused as a heretic,” the inquisitor was instructed to say to the accused in Bernard Gui’s handbook, “[because] you believe and teach otherwise than the Holy Church believes.”
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Since the official dogma of the Church was still being fine-tuned by various medieval popes, it was sometimes damnably hard for ordinary Christians to avoid heresy. Christian rigorists, apocalyptic theologians, cloistered women, and church reformers—all of whom thought of themselves as perfectly good Christians—were always at risk of arrest, torture, and death. “Nobody can understand the Middle Ages who has not clearly realized the fact,” observes historian G. G. Coulton, “that men might be burned alive for contesting publicly and impenitently
any
papal decretal.”
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The Inquisition slapped the deadly label of heretic on so many of its victims that the word ceased to have any real meaning. Women were tried and burned as witches simply because of their age, appearance, or personal eccentricities; the evidence against Joan of Arc, for example, included the fact that she dressed in men’s clothing. The warrior-monks of the Knights Templar were denounced as heretics and persecuted by the Inquisition because, among other things, their vast wealth provoked the envy and avarice of a French king. Eventually, as we shall see, the maw of the Inquisition would be fed with the bodies of Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity who were accused of lapsing into their old faiths. And Galileo was famously condemned as a heretic merely because he doubted that the sun revolved around the earth. “Even doubt was heresy,” explains Henry Charles Lea. “The believer must have fixed and unwavering faith, and it was the inquisitor’s business to ascertain this condition of his mind.”
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The frantic search for heretics, as we shall see, took on the symptoms of collective paranoia. A woman of North African descent who had converted from Islam to Catholicism was denounced to the Spanish Inquisition as a false Christian merely because she was observed eating couscous at a family meal, and a young woman who had converted from Judaism suffered the same fate because she put on clean underwear on Saturdays. A woman with a facial mole, a bad temper, or no husband—or one who had the misfortune to live next door to someone whose household supply of beer had gone bad—was a likely candidate for arrest, torture, and burning as a witch. At certain ludicrous moments, a text rather than a human being—the Talmud, for example, and the writings of a Christian theologian—was put on trial on charges of heresy and then put to the flames in place of its long-dead authors.

Nor was death itself a refuge from the Inquisition. If an inquisitor had exhausted the local supply of living heretics, he might turn to the graveyard in search of new victims. Charges of heresy were brought against long-deceased men and women whose rotting corpses were dug up, put on trial, and then put to the flames. Since confiscation of a condemned heretic’s land, goods, and money was a standard punishment for heresy, the Inquisition would seize the dead man’s possessions from his children or grandchildren, which is doubtless what inspired the inquisitors to put defunct heretics on trial in the first place. The fact that the heir of a dead heretic was himself a good Christian was wholly irrelevant to the Inquisition; indeed, if he happened to serve the Church as a monk or priest, he would be stripped of his church offices as well as his inheritance.

The appetite of the inquisitors for new victims was so insatiable that they invented heresies where none existed. The so-called heresy of the Free Spirit, a fifteenth-century cult whose adherents were said to engage in all manner of sexual adventure because they regarded themselves as sinless, is now thought to have been a figment of the inquisitorial imagination rather than a real religious community. Precisely because the inquisitors relied on manuals and handbooks that included lists of leading questions to be put to accused heretics, they suggested the answers they wanted to hear from their exhausted, brutalized, and terrified victims. How many women under torture, when asked whether the Devil had ever appeared to them in the guise of a black cat, conducted them to a nighttime orgy, and demanded that they kiss his private parts, were quick to answer yes, thus telling their torturers exactly what they expected and wanted to hear?

Here we find what is arguably the single most dangerous idea that the medieval Inquisition bequeathed to the modern world. “Heretics were not only burned,” writes historian Norman Cohn, “they were defamed as well.” And these two acts were intimately linked. As the inquisitors grasped, and as history has repeatedly proved, it is far easier for one human being to torture and kill another if he has convinced himself that the victim is not really human at all.
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