God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (2 page)

Any archive is a repository of what some sliver of civilization has wrought, for good or ill. This one is no exception. The Archivio may owe its existence to the Inquisition, but it helps explain the world that exists today. In our imaginations, we offhandedly associate the term “inquisition” with the term “Dark Ages.” But consider what an inquisition—any inquisition—really is: a set of disciplinary procedures targeting specific groups, codified in law, organized systematically, enforced by surveillance, exemplified by severity, sustained over time, backed by institutional power, and justified by a vision of the one true path. Considered that way, the Inquisition is more accurately viewed not as a relic but as a harbinger.

A 700-Year Trial

Say what you will about the Inquisition, but it was an unequivocal success in one respect: everyone knows its name. And everyone knows at least enough to throw its name around casually, to summon the Inquisition as a metaphor, to exploit it for entertainment, to wield it in argument as a quiet stiletto or a clumsy bludgeon.

“No one expects the Spanish Inquisition,” cries Monty Python’s Michael Palin, bursting into a room in a cardinal’s robes.
In the movie
History of the World: Part 1,
the Inquisition becomes a showstopping Mel Brooks dance number: “The Inquisition (What a show!). / The Inquisition (Here we go!).”
You could compile a substantial monograph on just the Inquisition’s contribution to the field of humor. An apt epigraph for it would be Woody Allen’s observation that “Comedy is tragedy plus time.”

On ABC’s
Good Morning America,
the political commentator Cokie Roberts was asked about government officials who had become the focus of special investigations: “Cokie, you talk to these people a lot. Do they feel like they’re targets of the Inquisition?”
On Fox News, the anchorman Brit Hume described media scrutiny of Sarah Palin’s record in Alaska as “the full Inquisition treatment.”
In
Fortune,
a column about captains of finance who were summoned to testify on Capitol Hill carried the title “The Inquisition Convenes in Washington.”

Sometimes the references become more specific. In an interview with Kenneth Starr, whose investigations of President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky resulted in the exhaustive
Starr Report,
Diane Sawyer began by noting that Starr had been “compared to Saddam Hussein, Nero, to Torquemada, who was the head of the Inquisition.” Starr replied, “I had to learn who Torquemada was. Yeah . . . that was a new one to me.”
Gore Vidal already knew, of course. Looking back on his life in an interview, the aging and acerbic writer attacked various members of the Kennedy family, as he had often done, singling out Bobby as “a phony, a little Torquemada.”
The columnist Taki Theodoracopulos, criticizing the tactics of Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, raised the specter of defendants’ “being railroaded by a Swiss woman who thinks she’s Torquemada, and looks like him to boot.”
The comparisons are often flip—but just as often deadly serious. Maureen Dowd, writing about the sex-abuse scandal that reaches to the highest levels of the Church, headlined a column “Should There Be an Inquisition for the Pope?”

No series of events in recent times has produced more invocations of the Inquisition than the prosecution of the war on terror since September 11, 2001. The enactment of tough new legal instruments, the use of extralegal surveillance, the detention without trial of suspected enemies, the reliance on torture in interrogations, the pervading atmosphere of religious suspicion: taken together, these developments help account for the fact that a Google search of “inquisition” today yields upward of eight million entries.

For all its familiarity as a reference point, the real Inquisition remains very little known. Few people can relate even a handful of basic historical facts about it. When did it start, and why? How long did it last? What countries did it affect? How was it conducted? What consequences did it have? How did it end? Does it, in various guises, reside with us still? And what, in the end, do we even mean by that word “it”? At best, common knowledge encompasses not much more than this: the Inquisition took place in the distant past, promoted persecution of the Jews, and notably employed torture and burning at the stake. All true enough, but just a small portion of the story.

Though its influence waxed and waned, the Inquisition continued in one form or another for more than seven hundred years.
It touched on episodes as diverse as the suppression of the Knights Templar and the siege of the heretic fortress at Montségur. It intervened in the lives of Galileo and Graham Greene. Associated most commonly with the persecution of the Jews, the Inquisition was in fact far more wide-ranging in its targets, and initially was not much concerned with Jews at all. Indeed, the Inquisition’s specific warrant was to enforce discipline among members of the Church, not those outside it: people who had fallen into error, who had embraced heretical movements, or who had in some other way loosened the bonds of faith.

In the year 1231 Pope Gregory IX appointed the first “inquisitors of heretical depravity” to serve as explicit papal agents. Thus began what is called the Medieval Inquisition, which was launched to deal with the menace posed to the Church by Christian heretics, notably the Cathars of southern France. The newly established Dominican Order, whose priests and nuns are identifiable to this day by their white habits, was instrumental in combating the Cathar heresy. Its founder, Dominic Guzmán, is the man celebrated in the 1963 song “Dominique,” by the Singing Nun (said to be the only Belgian song ever to hit No. 1 on the American charts).
The inquisitors solicited denunciations and, as their name implies, conducted interrogations. Their efforts were highly localized—there was no central command. The inquisitors were aided in their work by the papal bull
Ad extirpanda,
promulgated in 1252, which justified and encouraged the use of torture, wielding philosophical arguments that have never wanted for advocates and that would eventually echo in the White House and the Justice Department. Within a century, the work of the Medieval Inquisition was largely done. One modern writer, reflecting on what makes inquisitions come to an end, calls attention to a simple reason: an eventual shortage of combustible material.
The Dominicans were nothing if not thorough. As a Catholic growing up with many Jesuit friends, I remember hearing a comment about the difference between Dominicans and Jesuits: Both orders were created to fight the Church’s enemies—Cathars in the one case, Protestants in the other. The difference: Have you ever met a Cathar?

A second chapter, the Spanish Inquisition, commenced in the late fifteenth century. As King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile consolidated their rule, the Inquisition in a recently unified Spain pursued its targets independent of Rome. It was effectively an arm of the government, and the monarchs appointed its personnel. The Spanish Inquisition was directed primarily at Jews who had converted to Christianity and whose conversions were suspect—in other words, who were thought to be (or said to be) secretly “judaizing,” or reverting to Judaism. It also focused its efforts on the many Christianized Muslims, who might likewise be reverting to the faith of their heritage. The first inquisitor general in Spain, Tomás de Torquemada, a Dominican monk, embarked on a career that made his name synonymous with the Inquisition as a whole, sending some 2,000 people to be burned at the stake within a matter of years. The Inquisition in Spain would lead to a cataclysm: the expulsion, in 1492, of unconverted Jews from the kingdom.

Because the domains of the Spanish sovereigns eventually extended to Asia and America, the Inquisition traveled far beyond Iberia. It was active in areas of what is now the United States—New Mexico, for instance. In Santa Fe, religious disputes in which the Inquisition played a role led to executions outside the Palace of the Governors, on the plaza, within sight of today’s boutique restaurants and upscale art galleries. From Spain the Inquisition spread to Portugal and thence to the Portuguese Empire. It could be found operating in Brazil and India, and in places between and beyond.

The Spanish Inquisition ended at different times in different places. It survived in Mexico until 1820, when independence from Spain was just a few months away, and in Spain itself until 1834, when a royal decree abolished it once and for all. It conducted its last execution in 1826—the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster named Cayetano Ripoll, who had been convicted of heresy. (He was hanged rather than burned at the stake.)
In some ultraconservative Catholic precincts there are those who contemplate the record of the Spanish Inquisition with at most a shrug: Yes, the methods were perhaps too enthusiastic—but it was a different time. Let’s not be anachronistic. And don’t forget the threat to the Church! A group of Catholic clerics and activist laypeople are today pressing to have Queen Isabella declared a saint.

The third but not quite final chapter of the Inquisition, the so-called Roman Inquisition, began in the sixteenth century with the advent of the Reformation. This is the inquisition for which the palazzo was built. The main focus of the Roman Inquisition was Protestantism, but it did not spare Jews, homosexuals, people accused of practicing witchcraft, and certain kinds of quirky or annoying freethinkers and gadflies who might today be called “public intellectuals.” With the Roman Inquisition, the inquisitorial process was for the first time lodged in an organ of state under direct papal supervision. It was a centralized bureaucracy overseen by a papal inquisitor general, whose job was often a stepping-stone to the papacy itself. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, no fewer than three grand inquisitors went on to become pope. The inquisitorial bureaucracy was a fertile recruiting ground for bishops and cardinals.
It populated the curia the way the security services now staff the Kremlin. The operations of the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition were entwined with those of the Congregation of the Index, which oversaw censorship efforts—this at a time when the diffusion of the printing press had made ideas more dangerous, and censorship more difficult, than ever before. It was the Roman Inquisition that put Galileo on trial for his arguments about the heavens. In some ways it behaved like a modern institution—its rhythms and procedures, and even its inanities, will be recognizable to anyone with experience of a large bureaucracy. But the chief target was modernity itself, and the ideas and cast of mind that underlay it.

In 1870, the unification of Italy brought about the demise of the Papal States, the domains where the pope ruled as a temporal monarch. Except for matters of purely internal Church discipline, which carry no threat of secular penalty or physical harm but which can stifle intellectual life and dissent all the same, the Roman Inquisition was at an end. It would take almost sixty years for the pope’s dominion over the tiny walled 108-acre rump state of Vatican City to be recognized by Italy, in a concordat signed by Benito Mussolini and Pope Pius XI. By then, the Congregation of the Inquisition had disappeared into the organizational charts of the Roman curia, though as one historian observes, “No death certificate has ever been issued.”
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith preserves the processes and functions of the Roman Inquisition in milder form. Until the 1960s, it remained in the business of censoring and banning books, though few took heed, and some of those who did pay attention did so for the wrong reasons. During my Catholic childhood, the relegation of a book to the Papal Index seemed to serve mainly as an inducement (though not always a reliable one, as those who tried reading Hobbes or Pascal under the covers with a flashlight will have discovered). Following the practice of the old Inquisition, the CDF still holds regular weekly meetings. It is to the Congregation that bishops, papal envoys, and others send complaints about teaching and theology—the modern-day analogue of medieval denunciations, though the official term is not “denunciation” but “delation,” as if to suggest referral for a medical procedure. I have sometimes found myself conflating the CDF with the CDC—the Centers for Disease Control. There is a certain parallel.

The Inquisition, plainly, is not what it was. And yet in some ways it is as robust as ever. The historian Edward Peters has noted that the long decline of the actual Inquisition over the centuries was paralleled by the rise of a metaphorical Inquisition that lives on in folklore and popular culture, in works of art and literature, in comedy and polemic.
Partly this was a response to, even a mythologizing of, a receding past—a coming to terms with what the Church had done, as perceived through many lenses. Partly it was a response to an evolving present. The world may have been rushing toward whatever we mean by “modernity,” but the methods and mind-set of the Inquisition were clearly not confined to the Church. They had taken on lives of their own and could be found in the institutions of the secular world. Arthur Koestler set his inquisitorial novel,
Darkness at Noon,
in a simulacrum of Stalin’s Russia, at the height of the purges in the 1930s. In the late 1940s, Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, cited the Inquisition in his summation at the close of the trial of major Nazi war criminals.
In the 1950s, Arthur Miller evoked the witch hunts of colonial Massachusetts in his play
The Crucible,
a parable of the McCarthy era. Other writers—Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury, George Orwell—looked ahead to imagined societies, just over the horizon, where inquisitions of some kind had won control. To conduct surveillance, to impose belief, to censor, to manipulate, to punish people who think differently from those in power: in the modern world the inquisitorial dynamic was more in evidence than ever, and enabled by ever more powerful instruments.

Dostoyevsky’s tale “The Grand Inquisitor,” in
The Brothers Karamazov,
is as much a secular parable as a theological one—it is about the corruption of any faith. Dostoyevsky wrestled with religious questions all his life. He also suffered censorship and imprisonment at the hands of the czarist state. On one occasion he endured the trauma of what turned out to be a mock execution. In “The Grand Inquisitor,” Jesus returns to the living world—to Seville, “in the most horrible time of the Inquisition”—and is brought before the leading cleric for interrogation. Jesus himself never speaks, but the Grand Inquisitor delivers a scathing indictment, condemning Jesus for the gift of moral freedom, which mankind can neither comprehend nor wisely use. But no matter. The Church understands full well the implication—understands that moral freedom leads only to trouble—and so has taken steps to curb it. The Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus, “We have corrected your deed. . . . And mankind rejoiced that they were once more led like sheep.” And he asks, “Why have you come to hinder us now?”