God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (6 page)

And yet change is slowly coming. Roads radiate afresh from towns and cities into a distant beyond; isolated areas once reachable only by track or footpath may now be touched by a
via nova,
a “new road.” Along pilgrimage routes, monastic houses repair the ancient bridges and build new ones. In 1300, a Jubilee year for the Church, some two million pilgrims will converge on Rome. Trade expands rapidly throughout the continent. Meanwhile, universities in places like Paris and Bologna start bringing order to philosophy, theology, and the law. Although there will never be anything like uniformity, a new way of doing official business begins to gather momentum at royal courts and in the Church. All this has a bearing on how dissent is perceived and handled.

Why the apparent surge in heretical activity in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? One can point to many factors: the corruption of the Church, economic stresses of various kinds, the role of charismatic preachers, a pervasive sense of injustice. Individuals, as one historian notes, are also showing “feelings of alienation” and “expanded curiosity about the human condition.”
The truth is that popular belief had always diverged widely and without discipline from the pure strains of belief and practice as defined by Church councils. What had undeniably changed was the Church itself.

By the standards of the time, it is a modernizing institution, increasingly centralized under a Roman pope whose claims to both spiritual and temporal authority over all of Christendom are to be taken seriously—and to be seriously defended. The papal chanceries become busier and busier; under Innocent III, secretaries begin making copies of every letter for the official files.
Clerics sent out from Rome on specific missions now carry the stamp of papal authority with them, superseding the writ of local bishops. At the same time, the conceptual structure of “orthodoxy,” together with laws to codify it, has been laid out with unprecedented clarity—the work of scholastics and canon lawyers in the great university centers.

In law, the chief intellectual milestone is the so-called
Decretum,
compiled around 1140 by a canon lawyer in Bologna named Gratian. Gratian is believed by some to have been a member of the Benedictine Order, but most speculations about his life have been shown to be unreliable. The documentary trail is meager. The record of a trial in Venice, held at the Basilica of San Marco in 1143, refers to the presence of a consulting legal expert named Gratianus, and circumstantial evidence suggests that this could well be Gratian the canon lawyer.
If so, it’s the only “live” sighting of the man himself in the documents.

Gratian’s achievement was momentous. The official name of his great work is the
Concordia discordantium canonum
—the “Concordance of Discordant Canons”—and the title aptly captures the challenge Gratian faced. Over the course of a millennium, the Church had accrued for its use a massive stockpile of theological opinions, conciliar decrees, papal pronouncements, biblical injunctions, and legal rulings—massive, and often contradictory. From this clay Gratian molded a coherent code of canon law. It was a revolutionary accomplishment, and would be built on for centuries to come. Gratian’s work remained in use by the Church until 1917.

Large swaths of Gratian are devoted to heresy—what it is, how it should be dealt with—and over time the Church’s elaborations became more detailed. That the Church had an obligation to prosecute heretics no one doubted—there was biblical sanction in the parable of the wedding banquet, from the Gospel of Luke. In that story, invited guests fail to appear at the appointed hour, so the master sends forth his servant with the command “Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.”
Augustine had interpreted “compel them to come in” as an injunction to deal with heresy by brute force, if necessary: “Let the heretics be drawn from the hedges, be extracted from the thorns.”
At the Council of Tarragona, in 1242, the varieties of heretical behavior were sorted out with zoological precision, as if by a naturalist. Apart from the basic category of
hereticus
there were three kinds of
suspectus
and also
celatores
(people who failed to report heretics),
receptatores
(people who received heretics into their homes), and other types of transgressors.

In a less sophisticated and more decentralized world, before the hardening of canon law, heresy and deviance could subsist almost unnoticed, as a kind of “local option.” But now, questionable beliefs could be examined against codified standards. Casual remarks could be sorted into pre-existing categories of nonconformity. Groups that might once have represented short-lived eruptions were endowed with a sense of coherence, importance, and menace. To some degree, heresy in its consequential new form was brought into existence by having a definition placed on the table in such a way—here’s how heretics behave, here’s what they say—that even laypeople could recognize the signs. Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined a memorable phrase—“defining deviancy down”—to encapsulate how standards of what is acceptable are gradually eroded.
He might also have noted that deviancy can be defined “up”—that the notion of what is acceptable can become
more
restrictive.

A self-fulfilling dynamic of this kind, set in motion from above, is not unfamiliar. The anticommunist efforts in the United States during the 1950s bore some of the same hallmarks. The Soviet Union certainly posed a security threat, but the Red Scare fostered national paranoia. Popular fears got out of hand, and the government clamped down hard on people deemed subversive. A pamphlet prepared by the U.S. Army in 1955 conceded that “there is no foolproof way of detecting a Communist.” It noted that the typical revolutionary was no longer “bearded” and “coarse,” and warned people to be on the lookout for anyone using the terms “vanguard,” “hootenanny,” “chauvinism,” “progressive,” “hooliganism,” and “ruling class.” The pamphlet observed that “such hobbies as ‘folk dancing’ and ‘folk music’ have been traditionally allied with the Communist movement in the United States.”

In our own time, the war on terror has had similar consequences —some of them darkly comic but symptomatic of how the psychological process works. In the summer of 2009, a Pomona College student named Nicholas George was detained and interrogated at Philadelphia International Airport because he was found to be carrying Arabic flash cards for a language course. Here is a press account published after George filed a lawsuit:

Authorities detained him in the screening area for 30 minutes before he was questioned by a TSA supervisor, the lawsuit states. At one point, the supervisor asked George if he knew who committed the 9/11 terrorist attacks, according to the lawsuit. George answered, “Osama bin Laden.” “Do you know what language he spoke?” the supervisor asked, according to the document. “Arabic,” George answered. The supervisor then held up the flashcards and said, “Do you see why these cards are suspicious?”

Search Engines

To be effective, any organization must have the capacity to manage information. That capacity is especially urgent for an organization whose purpose is to monitor, to discipline, to control. It is no accident that regimes notable for sustained activities of this kind are also regimes that have created a long paper trail. The Berlin Document Center, which preserves what survives of the bureaucratic product of the Third Reich, contains some 75 million pages of records.
The Nazis employed the first generation of IBM punch-card systems in order to count and classify the German population.

Together with the new coherence of canon law there came a revolution in record-keeping as Church chancery clerks developed the art of paperwork—composing in the same legible script, making copies of documents, depositing them in archives, and inventing techniques for retrieving information that had been written down and stored away. They were creating a rudimentary form of something so fundamental to life today—bureaucracy—that we rarely give it a moment’s thought.

The digital era has revolutionized data collection and data retrieval. As the historian James B. Given points out, the late medieval world experienced an information revolution of its own. Haphazard approaches to organizational management were wrestled into something recognizably modern. Inquisitors developed standardized systems for logging cases and preserving the history and outcome of every trial. Church councils discussed the proper way to fill out forms and the importance of making duplicates. To give some idea of the scale and speed of the change: in a typical year—say, 1200—Pope Innocent III would have sent out some three hundred official Church letters; the annual total for Boniface VIII, a century later, was 50,000.
No one became more adept at maintaining vast quantities of records—and, just as important, knowing where to find them—than the notaries of the Inquisition. Their new capability extended the reach of the Inquisition and made it durable.

This revolution was in fact a technological one. It may seem odd to think of the way information is organized on paper as a technology, but consider a household item we take for granted—the desk dictionary. It is a codex—a bound volume with pages—rather than a scroll, making it much easier to browse. The words in the dictionary are arranged alphabetically, and the architecture of the typography—catchwords, boldface, italics, capital letters, numbers—presents information in accordance with a clearly defined hierarchy. Getting all this to the point where we don’t even think about it was the work of centuries, going back to Roman times, when the basic shift from scroll to codex occurred.

In the Middle Ages, the courts of England and France—the most developed secular governments—were great compilers of archives. Scholars sifting through them today are grateful for their abundance. But the archives were not all that useful to people at the time, because it was hard to find anything—the equivalent of putting your hands on an old report card or love letter among hundreds of boxes in the attic. England’s King Edward I was certain that documents existed to prove his claim to the overlordship of Scotland. On two occasions—in 1291 and 1300—he ordered a search for them in the royal archives, but to no avail.

The medieval inquisitors were more practical and more inventive. Conducting countless interrogations and working constantly, they needed records from the past that they could access quickly. Had some defendant come before the Inquisition previously—even ten or twenty years earlier? Had any immediate family members been identified as heretics—or anyone in the extended family? What about other people in the defendant’s village? All that aside, how had inquisitors dealt with similar cases on other occasions? And regarding the issue in question, what was the nature of the Church’s teaching over the years? Had it hardened? Softened? Information on all these matters was essential, and the inquisitors designed record-keeping procedures to meet their needs. They created, in effect, the equivalent in parchment of search engines.

On the manuscript page, trial transcripts were abstracted into boxed synopses in the margin, for quick scanning. Cases were grouped by location—a sensible approach in a time when people were not as mobile as they are now, and tended to pass their beliefs down through the generations. The compilation of comprehensive indexes allowed for easy cross-referencing.
Had a defendant given different testimony to someone else in another place, perhaps decades earlier? If he had, he might well be found out. A man named Guillaume Bonet the elder, of Villeneuve-la-Comptal, swore to inquisitors in 1246, not long after the fall of Montségur, that he had never participated in the Cathar ceremony known as the
melioramentum.
As it happened, this same Guillaume, during an earlier interrogation by someone else, had admitted to joining in the ceremony; a check of the records made the connection. Guillaume Bonet was caught in a lie. James Given writes, “With tedious frequency one finds at the end of a deponent’s statement the notation that his deposition does not agree with the testimony” that he had given on a different occasion.

The Grand Inquisitor

Flawed and patchwork though it was, the secretarial machinery of the Church represented a degree of bureaucratic infrastructure that hadn’t been seen in Europe since antiquity. Operating this modern machinery required the service of professionals. Today we would call them lawyers or technocrats or information-technology specialists. Those who served the Inquisition were clerics of various kinds, perhaps schooled in canon law, certainly able to read and write—indeed, to write in a common language, Latin, using official styles of calligraphy and abbreviation that their brethren everywhere could easily read. They were trained to the task with the help of instruction manuals that covered everything from definitions of heresy to conditions of confinement. These manuals offered primers, with sample dialogue, on how to conduct interrogations.
A cadre of technicians was essential. Without them, no form of inquisitorial activity could sustain itself for very long.

Umberto Eco, in his novel
The Name of the Rose,
summons to life a dark and compelling character: Bernard Gui, a bishop and papal inquisitor. In the movie, he is played with serpentine menace by F. Murray Abraham. The year is 1327, and Gui has come to a Benedictine abbey in Italy where, as it happens, a murder has just been committed. It falls to Gui to convene a tribunal and examine the suspects. “Bernard Gui took his place at the center of the great walnut table in the chapter hall,” Eco writes. “Beside him a Dominican performed the function of notary, and two prelates of the papal legation sat flanking him, as judges.”

Eco continues, describing the inquisitor’s bearing as the tribunal gets under way:

He did not speak: while all were now expecting him to begin the interrogation, he kept his hands on the papers he had before him, pretending to arrange them, but absently. His gaze was really fixed on the accused, and it was a gaze in which hypocritical indulgence (as if to say: Never fear, you are in the hands of a fraternal assembly that can only want your good) mixed with icy irony (as if to say: You do not yet know what your good is and I will shortly tell you) and merciless severity (as if to say: But in any case I am your judge here, and you are in my power).