The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (45 page)

When it comes to the war on terror, “legal justice” means something quite different than what we expect in an American courtroom. A presidential decree signed two months after the 9/11 attacks subjected the “enemy combatants” in U.S. custody to the jurisdiction of secret military tribunals that were empowered to judge and punish the prisoners without a public trial, the assistance of an attorney, the right of appeal, or any of the other presumptions and protections guaranteed under American constitutional law. Like the victims of the Inquisition, the defendants are not even entitled to be told what crimes they are accused of committing or what evidence the government has relied upon in arresting and holding them. And yet, even though the prosecutors had relieved themselves of these burdens of procedural due process, they did not bestir themselves actually to try and convict their prisoners.

“We’ve cleared whole forests of paper developing procedures for these tribunals, and no one has been tried yet,” a former government attorney told the
New York Times
in 2004. “They just ended up in this Kafkaesque sort of purgatory.”
³⁸

Hyper-vigilance in the war on terror is not limited to foreigners from Muslim countries and Americans of Muslim faith. The Patriot Act permits the government to “read your medical records, screen your credit card bills, search your home or business without telling you, patrol your Internet use, wiretap your phone, spy on you and your house of worship, examine your travel records, inspect your bookstore purchases, snoop on your library records, [and] monitor your political activities,” according to a civil rights group in opposition to the act, and all without regard to race, color, creed, religion, or national origin. Law enforcement maintains “watch lists” and “no-fly lists” that have been used, for example, to detain a couple of middle-aged activists with the thoroughly American names of Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon when they tried to fly to Boston to visit relatives. A project known by the Orwellian phrase “Total Information Awareness”—a database of electronic surveillance that is the high-tech equivalent of the notarial transcripts of the Inquisition and the index card files of the twentieth century—has been described by one of its critics as “the most sweeping threat to civil liberties since the Japanese-American internment.”
³⁹

Like the Inquisition, the war on terror is conducted throughout the world by a vast army of civilian and military personnel, all of them intent on collecting and preserving data of all kinds in the hope that it might someday yield the name of an actual terrorist. The Department of Homeland Security, newly created in the wake of 9/11, is an aggregation of federal agencies with a total staff of some 200,000 men and women. To extend their considerable reach, the Justice Department announced its intention to create a Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) by which “millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others” would be afforded “a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity,” and the proposal was withdrawn only after it was denounced for what it was—a “snitch system.”
⁴⁰

All the weaponry and tactics that have been deployed in the war on terror are justified by precisely the same theological stance once invoked in the war on heresy. Nowadays, of course, Osama bin Laden is the Devil whose cloven hoof is detected behind every act of terrorism around the world, but all concerns about the impact of the war on terror on our civil liberties are checkmated by the same theological absolutism that the grand inquisitors once invoked: “Either you’re with us, or you’re with the enemy,” declared George W. Bush in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. “Either you’re with those who love freedom, or you’re with those who hate innocent life.” When the argument was made by the Inquisition, the enemy consisted of men and women who preferred to read the Bible in translation, or who were persuaded that the sun revolved around the earth, or who saw some merit in herbal remedies, or who happened to have a distant Jewish relative. Nowadays, we might ask ourselves whether the victims of the war on terror might not include more than a few innocents, too.
⁴¹

The history of terror in the name of God is not confined to the medieval Inquisition or its modern successors. But it is a healthy caution to remind ourselves that the Inquisition was “called into existence to meet a national emergency.” The first inquisitors saw themselves as crusaders in a holy war against “a monstrous, anti-human conspiracy,” and they saw their adversaries as “a devoted underground elite” in service to the Devil. They claimed to act in the name of “legal justice,” and they were willing to “kill them all” and let God sort out the carnage. Such is the “murderous engine” that is set in motion whenever we hit the panic button. If a moment of reflection on that sorry history stays our hand, we will have achieved some measure of moral justice.
⁴²

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A
s with all of my books, I was sustained on my journey to the Middle Ages and back to the here and now by my cherished wife, Ann Benjamin Kirsch, and our beloved children, Jennifer Rachel Kirsch and Adam Benjamin Kirsch. Along the way, Adam and his wife, Remy, presented Ann and me with our first grandchild, Charles Ezra Kirsch, a history-making moment in our family.

For their roles in inspiring and shaping this book, I express my deepest appreciation to my agent, Laurie Fox; my editor, Gideon Weil, and his colleagues at HarperOne, Michael Maudlin, Mark Tauber, Claudia Boutote, Jan Weed, Terri Leonard, Jim Warner, Laina Adler, Carolyn Allison-Holland, Anne C. Collins, Annette Jarvie, and Kris Ashley.

My colleague and cherished friend, Judy Woo, supports and encourages my work literally every day, always showing the greatest patience and dexterity in dealing with the little mountains of reference material that hinder her way across our offices.

I salute my fellow author and attorney, Leslie S. Klinger, a constant source of camaraderie and inspiration in both of the fields of endeavor that we share.

I affirm my enduring gratitude to Jack Miles and Karen Armstrong, whom I am proud to claim as my mentors, and the other scholars who have extended their generosity and support over the years, including Don Akenson, David Noel Freedman, (who passed away while this book was in press), David Rosenberg, Leonard Shlain, and John M. Barry.

To my friends, family, and colleagues, I once again express my heartfelt appreciation:

My beloved daughter-in-law, Remy Elizabeth Holzer, and her family, Harold, Edith, and Meg Holzer.

Lillian Conrad Heller, Marya and Ron Shiflett, Paul and Caroline Kirsch, Heather Kirsch, and Joshua, Jenny, and Hazel Kirsch.

Eui Sook (Angie) Yoon, Charlie Alexiev, and Stefan Johnson, my friends and colleagues.

Susan Pollyea, Ralph Ehrenpreis, and Harland Braun, my much-admired colleagues in the practice of law.

Dora Levy Mossanen and Nader Mossanen, Candace Barrett Birk and Raye Birk, Maryann Rosenfeld and Shelly Kadish, Pat and Len Solomon, John Rechy and Michael Ewing, Diane Leslie and Fred Huffman, Doug and Penny Dutton, and Jacob Gabay.

K. C. Cole, Janet Fitch, Carolyn See, Bernadette Shih, Rhoda Huffey, and Dolores Sloan.

Linda Chester and her colleagues at the Linda Chester Agency.

David Ulin, Nick Owchar, Orli Low, Kristina Lindgren, Sara Lippincott, Susan Salter Reynolds, and Janice Dawson at the
Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Doug Brown, Ann Binney, David Nelson, Barbara Morrow, Maret Orliss, and Kristine Erbstoesser at the
Los Angeles Times.

Terry Nathan at the Publishers Marketing Association.

Sarah Spitz and Ruth Seymour at KCRW-FM.

Larry Mantle, Patt Morrison, Aimee Machado, Jackie Oclaray, Linda Othenin-Girard, and Polly Sveda at KPCC-FM.

Rob Eshman at
The Jewish Journal.

Connie Martinson, host of
Connie Martinson Talks Books.

NOTES

AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Citations are collected in a single endnote that appears at the end of a paragraph or portion of a paragraph in which material is quoted. I have taken the liberty of omitting brackets and ellipses to mark the minor changes I have made in some (but not all) quoted material, including changes in spelling, capitalization, italicization, punctuation, and omissions that do not materially change the meaning of the quoted text. In every instance where I have done so, however, the quotation is identified as “adapted” in the endnote where the source is cited. Quotations from the Bible are attributed to the specific translation from which they are taken according to the following acronyms: KJV (King James Version), NKJ (New King James Version), and RSV (Revised Standard Version).

1.
THE PIETÀ AND THE PEAR

1. Robert Held,
Inquisition: A Bilingual Guide to the Exhibition of Torture Instruments from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Era
(Florence: Qua d’Arno, 1985), 18 (“delectable to the Holy Trinity…”). The author is referring here to the burning of heretics at the stake.

2. Edward Peters,
Inquisition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), Plate 5 (following p. 90).

3. 1 Cor. 11:19, nkj.

4. Fydor Dostoyevsky,
The Brothers Karamazov,
trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 270 (adapted).

5. Henry Charles Lea,
The Imquisition of the Middle Ages,
(New York: Citadel Press, 1961) 60, 97 (adapted).

6. Quoted in Lea, 126 (adapted).

7. Lea, 61, 192 (adapted).

8. George Orwell,
1984
(New York: Signet, 1981) 7.

9. Quoted in Lea, 107 (adapted).

10. G.G. Coulton,
The Medieval Village, Manor and Monastery
(New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 347 (adapted). Emphasis added.

11. Lea, 96 (adapted).

12. Norman Cohn,
Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt
(New York: Basic Books, 1975), 17, 20 (adapted).

13. Cohn, 17.

14. Cohn, 49 (“a monstrous, anti-human conspiracy”); Malcolm Lambert,
Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation,
2d ed. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 151 (“a devoted underground elite”); Edward Burman,
The Inquisition: The Hammer of Heresy
(New York: Dorset Press, 1992; orig. pub. 1984), quoting Henry Kamen,
The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision
(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 150–51 (“called into existence…”); Edward Peters,
Torture
(New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 54 (“traitors to God”), paraphrasing the papal decretal
Vergentis in senium,
1199, and 65 (“thieves and murderers…”), paraphrasing
Ad extirpanda,
1252.

15. Dietrich von Nieheim, Bishop of Verden,
De schismate libri III
(1411), quoted in Arthur Koestler,
Darkness at Noon,
trans. Daphne Hardy (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 95.

16. Quoted in Burman, 36 (“heretical depravity”); quoted in Karen Armstrong,
Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World
(New York: Anchor Books, 2001), 393 (“gives birth continually” and harmful filth”); Deborah Root, “Speaking Christian: Orthodoxy and Difference in Sixteenth Century Spain,”
Representations
23 (Summer 1988): 118–34, at 130 (“evil weeds”).

17. Father Aznar Cordona,
Expulsión justificada de los moriscos españoles,
quoted in Root, 118.

18. Graham Greene,
The Power and the Glory
(New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 131.

19. Quoted in Burman, 66 (“one insanely led to reject…”); quoted in Lambert, 177–88 (“good doctors”).

20. Strictures of the Purity of Blood, 1449, quoted in Armstrong, 460 (“purity of blood”); “The Canons of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215,” in
Internet Medieval Sourcebook,
ed. Paul Halsall, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.html (“purity of faith”); R. I. Moore,
The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250
(Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1987), 10 (“machinery of persecution”).

21. Quoted in Lea, 230.

22. Henry Ansgar Kelly, “Inquisition and the Prosecution of Heresy: Misconceptions and Abuses,”
Church History
58 (1989): 439.

23. John and Anne Tedeschi, in Carlo Ginzburg,
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller,
trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), ix (“legal justice” and “moral justice”) (adapted).

24. Franz Kafka,
The Complete Stories,
ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 140, 144, 145, 147, 150 (adapted).

25. Cynthia Ozick, “The Impossibility of Being Kafka,” in
Quarrel & Quandary
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 53 (quoting
The Trial
by Franz Kafka) and (“an Alice-in-Wonderland arbitrariness”).

26. G.G. Coulton,
Inquisition and Liberty
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1959), 316–17 (adapted).

27. Lea, 126.

28. Quoted in Armstrong, 396–97.

2.
THE CATHAR KISS

1. Quoted in Lambert, 10 (adapted).

2. Lambert, 11.

3. Lambert, 11.

4. Quoted in Lambert, 11–12.

5. Quoted in Lambert, 11–12.

6. Lambert, 11–12.

7. See
God Against the Gods: A History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism,
(Viking, 2004) by Jonathan Kirsch.

8. Armstrong, 385–86 (adapted).

9. Quoted in Sean Martin,
The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), 76–77 (adapted).