The End of Faith (11 page)

There really seems to be very little to perplex us here. Burning people who are destined
to burn for all time seems a small price to

pay to protect the people you love from the same fate. Clearly, the common law marriage
between reason and faithwherein other- wise reasonable men and women can be motivated by
the content of unreasonable beliefsplaces society upon a slippery slope, with confusion
and hypocrisy at its heights, and the torments of the inquisitor waiting below.

Witch and Jew

Historically, there have been two groups targeted by the church that deserve special
mention. Witches are of particular interest in this context because their persecution
required an extraordinary degree of credulity to get underway, for the simple reason that
a confeder- acy of witches in medieval Europe seems never to have existed. There were no
covens of pagan dissidents, meeting in secret, betrothed to Satan, abandoning themselves
to the pleasures of group sex, cannibalism, and the casting of spells upon neighbors,
crops, and cattle. It seems that such notions were the product of folklore, vivid dreams,
and sheer confabulationand confirmed by confessions elicited under the most gruesome
torture. Anti-Semitism is of inter- est here, both for the scale of the injustice that it
has wrought and for its explicitly theological roots. From the perspective of Christian
teaching, Jews are even worse than run-of-the-mill heretics; they are heretics who
explicitly repudiate the divinity of Jesus Christ.

While the stigmas applied to witches and Jews throughout Chris- tendom shared curious
similaritiesboth were often accused of the lively and improbable offense of murdering
Christian infants and drinking their blood18their cases remain quite distinct. Witches, in all likelihood, did not even exist, and
those murdered in their stead numbered perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 over three hundred years
of persecution;19 Jews have lived side by side with Christians for nearly two millennia, fathered their
religion, and for reasons that are no more substantial than those underlying the belief in
the Resurrec-

tion have been the objects of murderous intolerance since the first

centuries after Christ.

THE accounts of witch hunts resemble, in most respects, the more widespread persecution of
heretics throughout the Inquisition: imprisonment on the basis of accusations alone,
torture to extract confession, confessions deemed unacceptable until accomplices were
named, death by slow fire, and the rounding up of the freshly accused. The following
anecdote is typical:

In 1595, an old woman residing in a village near Constance, angry at not being invited to
share the sports of the country people on a day of public rejoicing, was heard to mutter
something to her- self, and was afterwards seen to proceed through the fields towards a
hill, where she was lost sight of. A violent thunder- storm arose about two hours
afterwards, which wet the dancers to the skin, and did considerable damage to the
plantations. This woman, suspected before of witchcraft, was seized and impris- oned, and
accused of having raised the storm, by filling a hole with wine, and stirring it about
with a stick. She was tortured till she confessed, and burned alive the next evening.20

Though it is difficult to generalize about the many factors that conspired to make
villagers rise up against their neighbors, it is obvi- ous that belief in the existence of
witches was the sine qua non of the phenomenon. But what was it, precisely, that people
believed? They appear to have believed that their neighbors were having sex with the
devil, enjoying nocturnal flights upon broomsticks, chang- ing into cats and hares, and
eating the flesh of other human beings. More important, they believed utterly in maleficiumthat is, in the efficacy of harming others by occult means. Among the many disas- ters
that could befall a person over the course of a short and difficult life, medieval
Christians seemed especially concerned that a neigh-

bor might cast a spell and thereby undermine their health or good fortune. Only the advent
of science could successfully undercut such an idea, along with the fantastical displays
of cruelty to which it gave rise. We must remember that it was not until the
mid-nineteenth century that the germ theory of disease emerged, laying to rest much
superstition about the causes of illness.

Occult beliefs of this sort are clearly an inheritance from our primitive, magic-minded
ancestors. The Fore people of New Guinea, for instance, besides being enthusiastic
cannibals, exacted a grue- some revenge upon suspected sorcerers:

Besides attending public meetings, Fore men also hunted down men they believed to be
sorcerers and killed them in reprisal. The hunters used a specialized attack called tukabu against sorcerers: they ruptured their kidneys, crushed their genitals and broke their
thigh bones with stone axes, bit into their necks and tore out their tracheas, jammed
bamboo splinters into their veins to bleed them.21

No doubt each of these gestures held metaphysical significance. This behavior seems to
have been commonplace among the Fore at least until the 1960s. The horrible comedy of
human ignorance achieves a rare moment of transparency here: the Fore were merely respond-
ing to an epidemic of kurua fatal spongiform infection of the brainbrought on not by
sorcerers in their midst but by their own religious observance of eating the bodies and
brains of their dead.22

Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was per- fectly apparent that disease
could be inflicted by demons and black magic. There are accounts of frail, old women
charged with killing able-bodied men and breaking the necks of their horsesactions which
they were made to confess under tortureand few people, it seems, found such accusations
implausible. Even the relentless tor- ture of the accused was given a perverse rationale:
the devil, it was believed, made his charges insensible to pain, despite their cries for

mercy. And so it was that, for centuries, men and women who were guilty of little more
than being ugly, old, widowed, or mentally ill were convicted of impossible crimes and
then murdered for God's sake.

After nearly four hundred years some ecclesiastics began to appreciate how insane all this
was. Consider the epiphany of Freder- ick Spee: “Torture fills our Germany with witches
and unheard-of wickedness, and not only Germany but any nation that attempts it. . . . If
all of us have not confessed ourselves witches, that is only because we have not all been
tortured.”23 But Spee was led to this reasonable surmise only after a skeptical friend, the duke of
Brunswick, had a woman suspected of witchcraft artfully tortured and interrogated in his
presence. This poor woman testified that she has seen Spee himself on the Brocken,
shape-shifting into a wolf, a goat, and other beasts and fathering numerous children by
the assembled witches born with the heads of toads and the legs of spi- ders. Spee, lucky
indeed to be in the company of a friend, and certain of his own innocence, immediately set
to work on his Cautio Crim- inalis (1631), which detailed the injustice of witch trials.24

Bertrand Russell observed, however, that not all reasonable men were as fortunate as Spee:

Some few bold rationalists ventured, even while the persecution was at its height, to
doubt whether tempests, hail-storms, thun- der and lightning were really caused by the
machinations of women. Such men were shown no mercy. Thus towards the end of the sixteenth
century Flade, Rector of the University of Treves, and Chief Judge of the Electoral Court,
after condemning count- less witches, began to think that perhaps their confessions were
due to the desire to escape from the tortures of the rack, with the result that he showed
unwillingness to convict. He was accused of having sold himself to Satan, and was
subjected to the same tor- tures as he had inflicted upon others. Like them, he confessed
his guilt, and in 1589 he was strangled and then burnt.25

As late as 1718 (just as the inoculation against smallpox was being introduced to England
and the English mathematician Brook Taylor was making refinements to the calculus), we
find the mad- ness of the witch hunt still a potent social force. Charles Mackay relates
an incident in Caithness (northeast Scotland):

A silly fellow, named William Montgomery, a carpenter, had a mortal antipathy to cats; and
somehow or other these animals generally chose his back-yard as the scene of their
catterwaulings. He puzzled his brains for a long time to know why he, above all his
neighbors, should be so pestered. At last he came to the sage conclusion that his
tormentors were no cats, but witches. In this opinion he was supported by his
maid-servant, who swore a round oath that she had often heard the aforesaid cats talking
together in human voices. The next time the unlucky tabbies assembled in his back-yard,
the valiant carpenter was on the alert. Arming himself with an axe, a dirk, and a
broadsword, he rushed out among them. One of them he wounded in the back, a second in the
hip, and the leg of a third he maimed with his axe; but he could not capture any of them.
A few days afterwards, two old women of the parish died; and it was said, that when their
bodies were laid out, there appeared upon the back of one the mark as of a recent wound,
and a similar scar upon the hip of the other. The carpenter and his maid were convinced
that they were the very cats, and the whole county repeated the same story. Every one was
upon the look-out for proofs corroborative; a very remark- able one was soon discovered.
Nancy Gilbert, a wretched old crea- ture upwards of seventy years of age, was found in bed
with her leg broken. As she was ugly enough for a witch, it was asserted that she also was
one of the cats that had fared so ill at the hands of the carpenter. The latter, when
informed of the popular suspi- cion, asserted that he distinctly remembered to have struck
one of the cats a blow with the back of his broadsword, which ought to have broken her
leg. Nancy was immediately dragged from her

bed and thrown into prison. Before she was put to the torture, she explained in a very
natural and intelligible manner how she had broken her limb; but this account did not give
satisfaction. The professional persuasions of the torturer made her tell a different tale,
and she confessed that she was indeed a witch, and had been wounded by Montgomery on the
night stated; that the two old women recently deceased were witches also, besides about a
score of others whom she named. The poor creature suffered so much by the removal from her
own home, and the tortures inflicted upon her, that she died the next day in prison.26

Apart from observing, yet again, the astonishing consequences of certain beliefs, we
should take note of the reasonable way these witch-hunters attempted to confirm their
suspicions. They looked for correlations that held apparent significance: not any old woman would do; they needed one who had suffered a wound similar to the one inflicted
upon the cat. Once you accept the premise that old women can shape-shift into cats and
back again, the rest is practi- cally science.

The church did not officially condemn the use of torture until the bull of Pope Pius VII
in 1816.

ANTI-SEMITISM27 is as integral to church doctrine as the flying buttress is to a Gothic cathedral, and
this terrible truth has been published in Jewish blood since the first centuries of the
common era. Like that of the Inquisition, the history of anti-Semitism can scarcely be
given sufficient treatment in the context of this book. I raise the subject, however
briefly, because the irrational hatred of Jews has produced a spectrum of effects that
have been most acutely felt in our own time. Anti-Semitism is intrinsic to both
Christianity and Islam; both traditions consider the Jews to be bunglers of God's initial
revelation. Christians generally also believe that the Jews

murdered Christ, and their continued existence as Jews constitutes a perverse denial of
his status as the Messiah. Whatever the context, the hatred of Jews remains a product of
faith: Christian, Muslim, as well as Jewish.

Contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism is heavily indebted to its Christian counterpart. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian anti-Semitic forgery that is the source of most conspiracy theories relating to
the Jews, is now considered an authoritative text in the Arab-speaking world.28 A recent contribution to Al-Akhbar, one of Cairo's mainstream newspapers, suggests that the problem of Mus- lim anti-Semitism
is now deeper than any handshake in the White House Rose Garden can remedy: “Thanks to
Hitler, of blessed mem- ory, who on behalf of the Palestinians took revenge in advance,
against the most vile criminals on the face of the Earth.... Although we do have a
complaint against him, for his revenge was not enough.”29 This is from moderate Cairo, where Muslims drink alco- hol, go to the movies, and watch belly dancingand where
the gov- ernment actively represses fundamentalism. Clearly, hatred of the Jews is
white-hot in the Muslim world.

The gravity of Jewish suffering over the ages, culminating in the Holocaust, makes it
almost impossible to entertain any suggestion that Jews might have brought their troubles
upon themselves. This is, however, in a rather narrow sense, the truth. Prior to the rise
of the church, Jews became the objects of suspicion and occasional per- secution for their
refusal to assimilate, for the insularity and pro- fessed superiority of their religious
culturethat is, for the content of their own unreasonable, sectarian beliefs. The dogma of
a “chosen people,” while at least implicit in most faiths, achieved a stridence in Judaism
that was unknown in the ancient world. Among cultures that worshiped a plurality of Gods,
the later monotheism of the Jews proved indigestible. And while their explicit
demonization as a peo- ple required the mad work of the Christian church, the ideology of
Judaism remains a lightning rod for intolerance to this day. As a system of beliefs, it
appears among the least suited to survive in a