The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (37 page)

The office long known as the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition still exists today, although it was renamed the Congregation of the Holy Office in 1908 and then the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1965. Until recently, as we have already noted, the cardinal in charge of the office was Joseph Ratzinger (b. 1927), who was elevated to the papal throne as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. Although no one is at risk of torture or imprisonment by the “reformed inquisition,” the office is still charged with the enforcement of church dogma and “canonical discipline.” As recently as 1981, the Sacred Congregation reaffirmed an old decree of excommunication against Catholics who dare to join the Freemasons, the same fraternity that the Spanish Inquisition had found so threatening. So the distinction between permissible and impermissible beliefs—if not the rack and the wheel—survives in the bureaucracy of the Roman Catholic church in the third millennium of the common era.
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“[W]ith its image improved and its name twice changed, the Inquisition still exists and functions today,” concludes Edward Burman, “the heir to a tradition of over seven hundred years.”
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Remarkably, the verdict on the Inquisition itself is still open. To be sure, a whole literature of outrage was produced by French, English, and American propagandists even while the Inquisition was in active operation, and some of the imaginary atrocities that they conjured up still blur the line between fact and fiction. Henry Charles Lea—“the great denouncer of the Inquisition,” according to Giorgio de Santillana—voted to convict the inquisitors on all counts: “It was a system which might well seem the invention of demons,” writes Lea in one characteristic rhetorical flourish, “and was fitly characterized by Sir John Fortescue as the Road to Hell.”
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But the academic historians who have studied and debated the Inquisition over the last two hundred years have failed to reach a moral or historical consensus. The events and personalities of the Inquisition have been reconsidered by each new generation of critics and scholars, an enterprise in the rewriting of history that is still going on today. According to some of its apologists, the Inquisition was a well-meaning and mostly lawful if also sometimes flawed institution, and even the revisionists who concede that the Inquisition was a machine of persecution insist that it never operated quite as well as its inventors had hoped.

The Inquisition, however, is not merely a point of academic interest. Although the historical Inquisition may not have been quite what it was advertised to be by “the great denouncer,” the fact remains that the grand inquisitors aspired to create a Brave New World of authoritarian mind-control, and their example has inspired the same Orwellian dreams in successive generations—not only in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia but even here in America. The inquisitorial toolkit has remained open and in active use, and the modern inquisitors have been even more ruthless than the original ones. Indeed, as we shall see, the machinery of persecution was applied in the twentieth century to produce atrocities on a scale that would have beggared even the fertile imagination of the first men to carry the title of Inquisitors into Heretical Depravity.

The crimes of the Inquisition, as we have now seen in sometimes gruesome detail, begin with the persecution of men, women, and children for nothing more than entertaining a private thought that the Church condemned as heretical. In some cases, the victims were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and burned for an offense that existed only in the minds of the inquisitors, as in the case of the Witch Craze, or for the accident of having a distant Jewish ancestor, as in the case of the Spanish Inquisition. The fundamental fact that real human beings suffered and died at the hands of the inquisitors for nothing more than a thought-crime—or for no crime at all—is sometimes overlooked in the scholarly debate over the Inquisition. Now and then, we need to recall the ordeal of the Jewish
converso
named Elvira del Campo, stripped naked and put to torture by the Spanish Inquisition in 1568 because eating pork made her sick to the stomach, if only to remind ourselves of the human face of the Inquisition: “Lord,” she cried, “bear witness that they are killing me without my being able to confess!”
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To keep these abominations out of sight,” observes G. G. Coulton, “is the same offence as to describe the French Revolution without the guillotine.”
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The case against the Inquisition goes beyond its flesh-and-blood victims. For example, the routine use of torture as a tool of criminal justice by civil police and courts throughout Europe, starting in the Middle Ages and continuing for five hundred years, has been attributed to the example set by the Inquisition. Even the apparent superiority of northern Europe over southern Europe in commerce, scholarship, science, and technology is sometimes explained as a result of the chilling effect of the Inquisition in the places where it lasted the longest and exercised the greatest authority. It is no accident, in other words, that Galileo’s writings were banned in Italy even as they were being published in Holland, or that Spain remained the sick man of western Europe for a century after the Inquisition was formally abolished: “The Dead Hand of the Holy Office,” explains Cecil Roth, “was pressing slowly on the vital arteries of Spanish intellectual life.”
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Yet the Inquisition has its defenders, as we have already seen, and even those who reluctantly admit that the Inquisition was capable of excess also suggest that it was never as fearful as historians such as Lea, Coulton, and Roth have depicted it. Those who seek to justify or explain away the Inquisition argue that it was governed by the rule of law, at least in theory, and they insist that its atrocities and excesses were the exception rather than the rule. They point out that “the Inquisition” is a term that meant different things at different times and places across history, ranging from a freelance papal inquisitor like Robert le Bougre in thirteenth-century France to the elaborate bureaucracy of the grand inquisitor and
La Suprema
in Spain after the fifteenth century.

Above all, the revisionists contend that the Inquisition never really fulfilled its mission, if only because the friar-inquisitors lacked the means to carry out the task of ridding Christendom of every heresy and every heretic. When Henry Charles Lea condemns the Inquisition for creating “a system unspeakably atrocious,” the revisionists retort, he is focusing on the grandiose ambitions of the inquisitors and overlooking their meager achievements. The sorry if also sordid reality, they insist, is something quite different from the carnage that we find in so many accounts of the Inquisition, both in history books and in storybooks.
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“For the Inquisition to have been as powerful as suggested, the fifty or so inquisitors in Spain would need to have had an extensive bureaucracy, a reliable system of informers, regular income and the cooperation of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities,” writes Henry Kamen, a leading modern historian of the Spanish Inquisition. “At no time did it have any of these.”
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So we are invited to regard the Inquisition as a sporadic, quixotic, often hapless, and ultimately futile enterprise. The revisionists point out, by way of example, that the inquisitors were always running short of funds if not of heretics and heresies: “Your Majesty should above all provide that the expenses of the Holy Office do not come from the property of the condemned,” wrote one daring
converso
to Charles V in 1538, “because it is a repugnant thing if inquisitors cannot eat unless they burn.” Ironically, the defenders are able to cite “the great denouncer” for the proposition that the Inquisition was so ineffectual that it could do nothing to stop the single greatest challenge to the authority of the Roman Catholic church, the Protestant Reformation.
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“Had it existed in Germany in good working order, Luther’s career would have been short,” Lea quips. “An Inquisitor like Bernard Gui would have speedily silenced him.”
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Sometimes the apologia offered by modern commentators seems overly generous, if not downright bizarre, in light of the facts available to us. “It was not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible,” write Renaissance historians John and Anne Tedeschi about the Roman Inquisition in the introduction to their translation of Carlo Ginzburg’s
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller.
“Capricious and arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, and wanton abuse of human rights were not tolerated. Rome watched over the provincial tribunals, enforced the observance of what was, for the times, an essentially moderate code of law, and maintained, to the extent that a consensus existed, uniformity of practice.”
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Yet, as we learn from Carlo Ginzburg’s account of one flesh-and-blood victim of the Inquisition, the miller called Menocchio was twice arrested, tried, and convicted on charges of heresy because, among the weightier items of evidence cited against him, he possessed a vernacular translation of the Bible, a book that might or might not have been a copy of the Koran, and a fatally loose tongue. “He was always arguing with somebody about the faith just for the sake of arguing,” one witness testified against him. Like all victims of the Inquisition, Menocchio was required to name names, and when his answers were deemed unsatisfactory, he was tortured with the strappado. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” the old man cried as the inquisitorial notary took down his every anguished word. “Oh poor me, oh poor me.” On his second conviction, Menocchio was sent to the stake as a relapsed heretic, but only after the vigilant bureaucrats of the Holy Office had pointedly reminded the local inquisitors of their sacred duty to burn the old man alive.
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“[Y]ou must not fail to proceed with that diligence required by the gravity of the case, so that he may not go unpunished for his horrible and execrable excesses,” went the merciless message from Rome, “but that he may serve as an example to others in those parts by receiving a just and severe punishment. Therefore do not fail to carry it out with all the promptness and rigor of mind demanded by the importance of the case.”
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The burning of a talkative religious eccentric, as the Tedeschis readily concede, cannot be seen as an act of “moral justice” but they still see it as an example of “legal justice,” at least as the notion was understood and applied in the sixteenth century. They urge us to look at the Inquisition in its historical context, an era in which Europe turned into “a persecuting society,” according to R. I. Moore, with victims that included not only religious dissidents but anyone whose ancestry, appearance, sexual practices, or gender orientation was perceived to be different and therefore dangerous. To apply our modern notions of liberty and due process of law to the Inquisition, some historians suggest, is a pointless anachronism, and they insist that it is possible to explain the peculiarities of the past without condoning them. The proper role of the historian, as Moore explains it, is “with Spinoza, not to ridicule men’s actions, or bewail them, or despise them, but to understand.”
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Yet there is a terrible risk in dismissing of the Inquisition as an antique curiosity that can be safely contained between the covers of a history book. Precisely because the Inquisition provides a blueprint for building and operating the machinery of persecution—and a rationale for using the same apparatus to exterminate one’s enemies—the Inquisition was and still is a danger to human life and human liberty.

So the Inquisition must be seen as both a fact of history and an idea that transcends history. Edward Peters, for example, argues that the inquisitions as they actually existed and operated—he pointedly insists on the lower case
i
and the plural noun—“were transformed by polemic and fiction into a myth” and then into “an indictment, by the modern world, of an earlier Europe for its crushing of the human spirit.” The fact and the idea of the Inquisition are distinguishable, and that is what a revisionist historian like Peters insists that we must do.

But the Inquisition is more than a lens through which to look at the events of the far-distant past. Rather, as Peters reminds us, the Inquisition has come to be “woven tightly into the fabric of modern consciousness,” and it has continued to inspire new generations of persecutors long after the last of the friar-inquisitors were dead and buried. In that sense, the inquisitorial idea has been at work in the world ever since it was first conceived in the thirteenth century, never more so than in the twentieth century and even in our own times.
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Indeed, as we shall see, the inquisitorial apparatus was constantly improved and put to new uses against new victims even as the Inquisition faded into history.

The Inquisition first articulated and embraced the daring idea of eradicating all heresies and exterminating all heretics, an elastic term that came to include Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, radical priests, female mystics, and even the occasional midwife or miller whose eccentricities were unsettling to one inquisitor or another. “Several popes and kings in the high and late Middle Ages had the cast of mind to effect these holocausts,” explains Norman F. Cantor in
Inventing the Middle Ages,
and only the primitive state of medieval technology and statecraft prevented them from doing so. So the argument that the Inquisition was rather less ghastly than it aspired to be may be historically accurate, but it is morally sterile. The medieval inquisitors lacked only the means and not the will to rid the world of everyone they regarded as “heretical filth,” and so Cantor concludes that “the indictment against the Middle Ages runs.”
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