The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (39 page)

Local lords, clerks, and bureaucrats had no idea how to determine whether someone was a heretic, unless of course the heretic made things extremely easy for the official by saying something like, “Hey, I am a heretic!” or driving a mule cart with a satan is my Co-pilot! bumper sticker. That’s why the Church was called in to provide expert advice on the question, like a theological CSI team. Most accusations of heresy under the Medieval Inquisition ended in either acquittal or a suspended sentence. Persons found guilty of “grave error” were for the most part permitted to confess their sins, perform penance, and thus be returned to the Lord’s grace.

Believe it or not, most priests and monks were not, like the bishop of Hereford in
Robin Hood
, money-grubbing frauds. They were actual Christians who took an abiding interest in the souls of their flocks. And so they tended not to excommunicate total strangers on the basis of hearsay, hysteria, and innuendo.

Moreover, they weren’t exactly eager to see people executed without a good reason. Indeed, the Church didn’t put people to death for heresy, never mind burn them at the stake (which is not to say that it didn’t endorse secular sentences when it found them warranted). Capital punishment for heresy was a secular sanction imposed by secular authorities (recall that St. Thomas More, alas, burned heretics when he was chancellor of England under Henry VIII).

The thing to keep in mind is that kings derived their authority by divine right, so heresy was perceived as a threat to their legitimacy (and charges of heresy were a useful means of eliminating political challengers). “The simple fact,” writes Madden, “is that the medieval Inquisition
saved
uncounted thousands of innocent (and even not-so-innocent) people who would otherwise have been roasted by secular lords or mob rule.”
²²

Ultimately, though, when you say “Inquisition,” most people think only of the Spanish Inquisition. And to the extent they think of it at all, they
probably think of Monty Python’s hilarious running sketch that begins with: “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Or, they remember Mel Brooks’s funny but wildly fictional treatment at the end of
History of the World Part I
.

In a sense, the truth of the matter lies somewhere in between the two renditions. In the Monty Python sketch the inquisitors are led by the fearsome Cardinal Ximénez and his entourage of blood-red cloaked goons. In one famous scene (easily found on YouTube) the inquisitors interrogate an old woman, demanding that she confess her heresy. When she denies she’s a heretic they threaten to torture her with soft cushions. When the poking of the cushions fails, they ominously call for—dum dum dumm!—“the comfy chair!” At the other end of the spectrum there is Mel Brooks’s bizarre fantasy of what appear to be Hasidic or Ashkenazi Jews being mercilessly tortured with hot pokers and iron maidens.

Here is the truth: There was torture in the Spanish Inquisition, though surprisingly little—indeed, considerably less torture than in secular jails. In “only” 2 percent of the cases under review of the Spanish Inquisition was torture employed. No torture was permitted to last more than fifteen minutes, and in “only” 1 percent was torture used twice. It was never used a third time. A total of 1 percent of the cases ended in execution. Now, I put the word only in quotation marks for the simple reason that any use of torture is offensive and any use of torture to compel confessions of faith is beyond abhorrent. But, as I’ll discuss in a moment, one has to ask, “Abhorrent compared to what?” The practices of the Muslims? The monarchies of Europe? The traditions of Asia or Africa? Such barbaric practices were a staple for roughly 98 percent of human history, and the fact that we have moved beyond them today is a thing to celebrate. But it is both Whiggish and arbitrary to single out the Church or the Spanish Inquisition as a unique offender. It’s like singling out the Dutch for wearing shoes in the sixteenth century. If the dungeons and torture chambers of the Inquisition were so barbaric, why did some criminals profess their own heresy just so they could be transferred from the far crueler secular prisons to those of the Church?

But let’s get back to those tortured Jews in the Mel Brooks version of the Inquisition. Not only is it absurd that Spanish (Sephardic) Jews be depicted
as European (Ashkenazi) Jews—Sephardic Jews of the time would have looked more like turban-wearing Arabs—it’s absurd that there are Jews in the scene at all!

No Jews were tortured in the Spanish Inquisition. Open Jews had nothing to fear from it whatsoever. The issue to be decided by the Inquisition was whether
conversos
(and Moriscos, i.e., converted Muslims) were in fact
Catholics
.

The
conversos
were descendants of Jews who had converted to Christianity in response to the rise of anti-Semitism in Spain
in the fourteenth century. The ancient madness of Jew hatred arrived in Spain later than in most European lands (as a generalization, Jews have always been treated better in the Latin countries of southern Europe than in the north or east), but when it did break out it was particularly virulent. Waves of anti-Jewish hysteria erupted across the country, sometimes fueled by various kings or local Church leaders, sometimes against their wishes. Jewish quarters suffered murderous pogroms. Jews were told they must convert or leave the country. Hundreds of thousands opted to leave. Many stayed, hoping to ride out the madness. And some converted to Catholicism, becoming
conversos
, or “converts.” The
conversos
—baptized Catholics of Jewish descent—thrived in Spain for nearly a century. They were an odd bunch, all things considered. Though they were practicing Catholics, they nonetheless dressed as Jews, observed many Jewish customs, and took special pride in being indirect descendants of Jesus. Madden recounts that when the
converso
bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena, prayed the Hail Mary, he would add with pride, “Holy Mary, Mother of God and my blood relative, pray for us sinners.”
²³

Their success was resented both by the “Old Christians” as well as by the Jews who had refused to convert in the first place. Both groups fueled vicious conspiracy theories about
conversos
being “secret Jews” (crypto Jews sounds even more sinister). “Modern scholarship has definitively shown that, like most conspiracy theories, this one was pure imagination,” writes Madden. “The vast majority of
conversos
were good Catholics who simply took pride in their Jewish heritage. Surprisingly, many modern authors—indeed, many Jewish authors—have embraced these anti-Semitic fantasies.”
²⁴

When combined with more typical anti-Jewish hysteria, the situation in Spain rapidly escalated, and it reached a fevered pitch in the 1470s. In 1478, Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand persuaded the Vatican to sanction an inquisition into the status of the
conversos
, giving birth to the Spanish Inquisition. However, the whole enterprise was ultimately run under the authority of the crown, not the Vatican (as had become the custom at the time). Ferdinand, who relied on Jewish and
converso
advisers, believed that the investigation would not amount to much. He was wrong. False accusations multiplied. The same spirit that caused German businessmen to turn in Jewish competitors to the Nazis infected many of the old Christians. The throne encouraged well-publicized burnings of heretics. It was a repugnant spectacle; a conclusion shared by Pope Sixtus IV who, in April 1482, wrote the bishops of Spain:

[I]n Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca, and Catalonia the Inquisition has for some time been moved not by zeal for the faith and the salvation of souls but by lust for wealth, and that many true and faithful Christians, on the testimony of enemies, rivals, slaves, and other lower and even less proper persons, have without any legitimate proof been thrust into secular prisons, tortured and condemned as relapsed heretics, deprived of their goods and property and handed over to the secular arm to be executed, to the peril of souls, setting a pernicious example, and causing disgust to many.
²⁵

It was not a proud or honorable moment for European Christianity or the Church—a fact the Vatican has never denied and for which it has formally apologized. Ferdinand, now utterly ensorcelled by anti-Semitic fervor, replied that the pope had been bribed with
converso
blood money. He and Isabella appointed Tomas de Torquemada to oversee the Inquisition. The Vatican hoped—in vain, alas—this would restore order to the madness. It was not until 1507, when Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros was appointed to run the Castile Inquisition, that something approaching sanity was restored. But by this point, Ferdinand and Isabella had already expelled the Jews from Spain. Some returned as
conversos
and had their property and rights restored. But the horrible stain on Spain’s honor and, to a lesser extent, the Church’s had indelibly sunk in. Over the course of the
350-year Spanish Inquisition some four thousand souls were put to the stake. It is worth noting that as horrible as this chapter of human history is, it is not nearly so horrible as portrayed by centuries of propagandists—first aided by the invention and spread of the printing press in the Protestant North, later by
philosophes
, secular humanists, atheists, and various flavors of socialists.

Looking back on this record some would understandably say, If that’s an exoneration of the Church, I’d love to see what an indictment looks like. But my point is not to exonerate the Church from its misdeeds but to put them in context. The Church has much to atone for, and to its credit it has, repeatedly, openly, and with conviction. But to listen to various voices warning of the rise of “theocracy” in America, it seems all one has to do is say “The Inquisition” to settle all sorts of unstated, undeveloped, and unproven arguments. When one wants to proclaim that organized religion is the enemy of decency and humanity, it is easy to invoke the Inquisition or the witch trials as lazy shorthand. Religion, we are constantly told by its foes is an excuse to spill blood and set man against man. “I call Christianity the one great curse,” proclaimed Nietzsche, “the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough—I call it the one immortal blemish on the human race.”
²⁶
And when Christianity is on trial Catholicism is in the dock. Of course, it’s also called the “opiate of the masses,” a crutch for the weak-minded and superstitious. This is similar to the double bind conservatives are always caught in. We’re caricatured as morons in every aspect of life save one—our capacity to orchestrate incredibly elaborate and sinister conspiracies.

But look at it from the flip side. The story of humanity is the story of man lifting himself out of the muck of blood spilled for the slightest advantage. Rousseau’s noble savage never existed, not among the American Indians and not in the caves of Europe. The archeological record is abundantly clear that early humans, including allegedly peaceful farmers, routinely resorted to murder to settle differences, seize property, slaves, and women. Something like half of the remains of cave-dwelling men and other hunter-gatherers found in regions across the globe show signs that their lives ended through violence.
²⁷
Ancient burial grounds overflowing with the
skulls of men, women, and children punctured or crushed by stones, axes, sticks, and spikes testify to the fact that mankind has clawed slowly from barbarity.

Hatred of the Church, sometimes understandable, often deranged, is too often the hallmark of men whose will to power drives them to clear the field both of competing sources of authority as well as any institution that gives voice to conscience. From the Jacobins to the Kulturkampfers, to the Nazis and the Bolsheviks the witness of Christian faith has buzzed the ears of evil men to the point of distraction. In one of countless pithy ditties against religion, Voltaire proclaimed a decade before his death in 1778 that Christianity “is without a doubt the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and the most bloody [idea] to ever infect the world.” He may have been a hero of free inquiry and civil liberties, but if only he had lived a little longer, he’d have seen the antireligious movement to which he lent his intellect unleash the Terror and kill in a few short years tenfold the number of men killed in three hundred years of the Spanish Inquisition. Or consider that the deaths from the Inquisition in the thirteenth century amounted to something like three per year. Between 1939 and 1945 the virulently anti-Catholic Nazis averaged that many every ninety seconds.

The Marxists who claimed to be ending the masses’ addiction to religion then proceeded to slaughter those same masses at a rate unprecedented in the history of human life. The Church was intolerant of heresy to be sure, as one would expect of a
church
, but the exoneration rate of the Inquisitions is a monument to human decency and restraint compared to the inquisitions of the Communist world, which consigned men and
populations
alike to miserable deaths based on the diktats of a secular faith that the murderers in power made up as they went along. Catholic heretics had the right to a trial. Under communism whole populations did not.

John Reed, the heroic liberal journalist played by Warren Beatty in the incandescently asinine film
Reds
, dismissed complaints that the Bolsheviks were killing
fellow socialists
with a wave of his hand. “I don’t give a damn for their past. I am concerned only in what this treacherous gang has been doing during the past three years. To the wall with them! I say. I have learned one mighty expressive Russian word: ‘
razstrellyat
’ [
sic
] (execute by shooting).” Again this was the same man who wrote about his epiphany on the
occasion of attending a Bolshevik funeral: “I suddenly realized that the devout Russian people no longer needed priests to pray them into heaven. On earth they were building a kingdom more bright than any heaven had to offer, and for which it was a glory to die.”
²⁸