The Inquisition

by Michael Baigent

  There were other instances, however, when the Church itself trafficked in unreason, and faith was yoked not to rationality, but to the irrational. If the volcanic and tempestuous energy of the Walpurgisnacht could be channelled into piety – into the hysteria associated with certain Church festivals, for example, or with the abandonment often apparent in evangelical sects today – it could be sanctioned and endorsed. A visitation from a succubus in the form of Helen of Troy might serve to damn Faustus; but the same psychological mechanism, if it generated an apparition of the Virgin instead, could confer sainthood.

  If the Virgin, rather than Helen, appeared in a vision, the demonic became that which questioned the vision's validity. By extension, the demonic became the sceptical intellect which questioned the validity of anything promulgated by the Church. If the devil could sometimes take the form of frenzied Pan, he could also take the form of cold, cunning, silkily seductive and persuasive Lucifer, the wily logician and tempter whose subtle skill in sophistry and casuistry could outwit the most adept theologian. It was in this form, as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, that the devil had supposedly first manifested himself in the Old Testament. And according to Christian propagandists, it was in this form that Lucifer, as a consequence of his intellectual pride, was first supposed to have been expelled from heaven and his seat by God's side. If the devil could sometimes be wildly irrational, then, he could also be hyper-rational, hyper-intellectual. When faith depended on irrational belief and unquestioning adherence, the devil became the principle which dared to question – in other words, any defiantly independent thought. During the Renaissance and the Lutheran Reformation, according to the Inquisition, it was in this form that the devil manifested himself; and it was in this form that the Inquisition sought to locate and extirpate him.

  This is not to say that persecution of the irrational demonic ceased. The ferreting out of witches, warlocks and other adherents of the old pagan religion continued, even gained momentum; and the newly established Protestant churches were as zealous in harrying them as Rome. Luther himself inveighed against the devil and against witchcraft, and Protestant religious leaders of all denominations quickly followed suit. Protestantism could be as intolerant, as narrow-minded, as bigoted, ignorant and brutal as the Inquisition itself.

  But while Catholic and Protestant thought-police jointly pursued the traditional irrational forms of the demonic, the Inquisition now had to contend as well with the demonic in its antithetical form – the form of intellectual pride, of independent thought, of investigation and inquiry that openly defied the priesthood and pursued an agenda of its own. For the Inquisition of the Renaissance and the Reformation, Satan might be discernible in the aged midwife or wise woman of one or another village; but he could also be discerned – and more dangerously so – in the guise of such figures as Martin Luther, Galileo Galilei, Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella.

  What, then, was the demonic? In practice, anything deemed to be hostile or inimical to the Church could be labelled so. The infernal powers could be held responsible not only for extreme manifestations of rationality or irrationality, but also for books, philosophies, political movements and anything else that might be construed as disobedience of Papal authority. Learning itself would soon come to be regarded as demonic.

  Throughout the Middle Ages, the Church had comprised a bastion of learning in a world of untutored barbarism. As Umberto Eco illustrates in The Name of the Rose, however, the Church also exercised a monopoly on learning which effectively ensured that the world around it remained untutored and barbaric. Knowledge, so the cliché goes, is power; and the Church wielded power largely through the knowledge it monopolised, commanded, controlled and made available to the lay populace only, as it were, by drip-feed.

  With the Reformation, this situation was to change dramatically. The Reformation was to witness a veritable explosion of knowledge. It was to issue from secular sources. It was to issue from the newly established Protestant ‘heresies’, such as Lutheranism. It was to issue from the recently reinvigorated esoteric tradition of Hermeticism. And it was to be disseminated on an unprecedented scale by the advent of printing and the circulation of printed material. Luther's translation of the Bible into the vernacular, and other translations that followed such as the Geneva Bible and the English-language King James Version, were to make scripture available for the first time to the layman – who could read it for himself, without the interpretation and filtering apparatus of the priesthood. All such learning was to be stigmatised by the Church as demonic, and in consequence to attract the attention of the Inquisition.

  In the past, there had been very few learned men outside the Church, and fewer still who could hope to receive a hearing without incurring dire, even fatal, consequences. Now, an entire and imposing edifice of learning was being erected that arrogantly ignored, and sometimes flagrantly defied, Rome's authority. If the devil was manifest in the orgiastic irrationality of witchcraft, he was now becoming equally manifest in the eloquence of the printed word – and in the audacity of the inquiring, questing and independent mind, which rushed boldly in where angels, fools, ecclesiastics and even saints had previously feared to tread.

  The Counter-Reformation

  For Rome, the new situation posed new demands. Without conceding any more ground than it was forced to, the Church sought to adapt – and to adapt the Inquisition with it. In the thirteenth century, during the Albigensian Crusade, the Dominicans had constituted a major innovation by virtue of being learned – by virtue of being trained in theology and thus able to dispute with Cathar and other heretics on their own terms. Over the subsequent three centuries, however, the Dominicans, like their rival Orders, had become increasingly idle, self-indulgent, reposing on their laurels, clinging to the power and privileges they possessed, making scant effort to confront the new challenges that had arisen. Their position in relation to the proliferating Protestant heresy was defensive at best. More often than not, they were simply passive, hoping it would go away. Persecuting hapless women for witchcraft required little effort, little discipline, little organisation. To counter the influence of knowledgeable and articulate heresiarchs like Luther, Calvin and Zwingli was rather more troublesome.

  To contend with Protestantism, the Church needed a sixteenth-century equivalent of what the Dominicans had been 300 years before – a cadre of highly trained and dedicated individuals who could actually dispute with their adversaries on a basis of equal learning and intelligence, equal subtlety, equal psychological sophistication. And if Protestantism was indeed – as appeared ever more likely – going to withstand all attempts at extirpation, the Church had at least to establish some sort of quantitative or numerical superiority, in the size of its congregation and in the territory over which it exercised spiritual dominion. Among other things, it had to consolidate its position in parts of the world that were only just beginning to be explored, had to convert whole regions and continents of heathen before Protestantism could get to them. In other words, the Church needed an institution or organisation of highly skilled, highly intelligent, highly trained and highly motivated missionaries – a new soldiery of Christ or ‘Milice de Christ’, who, with military discipline and fortitude, could crusade in the sphere of the intellect the way the Templars and Hospitallers had done on the battlefields of the Holy Land. The institution that rose to this challenge was the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits.

  The Society of Jesus was created by a Spaniard, Ignatius Loyola (c. 1491–1556), whose original ambition had been to win military glory. During a siege of the fortress of Pamplona in 1521, Loyola was seriously wounded. While convalescing, he became increasingly studious and introspective. He embarked on a pilgrimage to Montserrat, hung his weapons at the shrine there, then retired to live in a cave for a year as a hermit. In this seclusion, he wrote his manual, The Spiritual Exercises, which outlined a new and rigorous programme of Christian meditation. In 1523, he embarked on a second pilgrimage, this time to Jeru
salem. When he returned to Spain, he took up studies at the University of Alcalá.

  By 1526, Loyola had begun to preach in public – and to incur suspicions of heresy from the Spanish Inquisition, who arrested him and kept him in chains for some three weeks while The Spiritual Exercises was examined and investigated. He was duly exonerated of the charges against him and released, but ordered to cease all public discussions of theology for four years. To escape this prohibition, Loyola moved to Paris in 1528. Here, he gathered a small circle of devoted followers who were to become the original Jesuits. In 1534, all of them took an oath of allegiance at a church in Montmartre.

  On 27 September 1540, Pope Paul III officially established the Jesuits under their original name, the ‘Company of Jesus’. Although they carried no arms, their training, discipline and nomenclature conformed to essentially military patterns. It has even been suggested, and not without some credibility, that Loyola modelled the Jesuits’ hierarchy and organisation on those of the Knights Templar.

  In the century and a half that followed, the Jesuits were to become the spearhead of the Counter-Reformation, the Church's methodical efforts to establish new spheres of influence, as well as to regain at least some of the ground lost to Protestantism. Like military planners, the Jesuits organised their campaigns in accordance with strategic thinking. In order to establish currency and credibility, they were quite prepared to join in the general persecution of witchcraft. According to Hugh Trevor-Roper,

  if the Dominicans had been the evangelists of the medieval Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits were the evangelists of the sixteenth-century Counter-Reformation, and if Protestant evangelists carried the craze to the countries which they conquered for reform, these Catholic evangelists carried it equally to the countries which they reconquered for Rome. Some of the most famous of Jesuit missionaries distinguished themselves in propagating the witch-craze.1

  Ultimately, however, witchcraft was of secondary importance to the Jesuits. Their primary interests lay elsewhere. Bohemia and Poland, for example, both of which had proved fertile soil for Protestantism, were soon to be reclaimed for the Church. And within a few years, the network of Jesuit missions, like the old preceptories of the Templars and Hospitallers, encompassed the known world. They extended westwards across the Atlantic to the Americas, eastwards to the Indian subcontinent, to China, Japan and the islands of the Pacific. Closer to home, the Jesuits were instrumental in reforming, repackaging, rebranding and relaunching the Inquisition.

  By 1540, when Pope Paul III officially established the Jesuits, the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ at Avignon had ended, and the Great Schism that had rent the Church for more than a century had finally been resolved. Within five years, the Council of Trent was to formulate a blueprint that would determine the Papacy's status, administrative apparatus, orientation and hierarchy of priorities for the next three and a quarter centuries. And for the newly reunified Church, the paramount concern was, of necessity, the crusade against the heresy of Protestantism.

  As a prelude to the Council of Trent, Pope Paul embarked on a radical reform of the Papacy's government and administration. A number of separate offices or departments was created to preside over the various subdivisions of the Church's affairs. All functioning under direct Papal control, they were designated ‘congregations’ and ‘councils’. The Inquisition was now to become one such ‘congregation’. Having suffered personally at its hands, Loyola may not have harboured much love for the Spanish Inquisition, but he admired its discipline, its efficiency, its smoothly working machinery. Instigated in large part by the Jesuits, the old Papal or Roman Inquisition was reconstituted, and modelled specifically on its Spanish counterpart. Just as the Spanish Inquisition served as an instrument of Spanish royal policy, the Papal or Roman Inquisition was to become an instrument of Church policy. In other words, its chief priority was no longer to be the supposed ‘purity’ of the faith, but the stability and welfare of Papacy and Church. Its official title was the ‘Sacred Roman Congregation and Universal Inquisition, or Holy Office’. In 1908, its name was to be changed again to the ‘Congregation of the Holy Office’. For most commentators, a more abbreviated form – simply the ‘Holy Office’ – was subsequently to suffice. Seldom has so innocuous, even ostensibly laudable, a title managed to acquire such sinister associations. In an effort to purge these and sanitise the institution further, the Inquisition was once more renamed in 1965 as the ‘Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’. It operates under that appellation today, a direct lineal descendant of the original Inquisition created in 1234 and reconstituted in 1542.

  Loyola and the Jesuits were one major influence in the creation of the revamped Inquisition, or Holy Office. Of comparable importance was an ambitious and fanatical Dominican, Giovanni Caraffa. Between 1515 and 1522, Caraffa had served as Papal Nuncio to Spain, where he, like Loyola, had been impressed by the Spanish Inquisition's efficiency. On his return to Italy, he had become the leader of a pious circle of high-ranking ecclesiastics devoted to restoring the Church's purity and moral integrity.

  One means of doing so for Caraffa, and of attracting attention to himself in the process, was to launch a campaign against Michelangelo's painting of the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. When the painting was unveiled in 1541, Caraffa and his circle proceeded to turn it into a scandal. They were outraged by Michelangelo's overt phallic symbolism, by his depiction of one man being dragged by the genitals and others kissing, and vociferously condemned the work as indecent. Their indignation was soon being echoed by like-minded colleagues, and criticism rumbled on for the next twenty-four years. In 1551, for example, a prominent Dominican wrote that Michelangelo ‘is admirable in depicting the naked bodies of men and their pudenda’, and complained that ‘it is most indecent to see all these nudities everywhere, on the altars and in the chapels of God’.2 Eventually, the Council of Trent decreed that ‘corrections’ be made to the painting. In 1565, an artist was specifically commissioned for this purpose and modestly shrouded all offending protuberances in loincloths and robes. The receipt he received for his efforts still exists, detailing ‘the sum of 60 scudi due… in payment for the work done by him in 1565 in covering the pudenda of the figures in the Chapel of Pope Sixtus’.3

  By that time, Caraffa himself was dead. But his original attacks on the painting in 1541 had attracted the sympathetic interest of Pope Paul III, who raised Caraffa and five other members of his circle to the status of cardinals. Eventually, in 1555, Caraffa himself became Pope, taking the name of Paul IV and occupying the throne of Saint Peter until his death in 1559.

  Supported by Loyola and the Dominican Cardinal Archbishop of Burgos, Caraffa, on earning the favour of Paul III, advocated the establishment of a permanent tribunal of the Inquisition, modelled on that of the Inquisition in Spain. It was thus that the Holy Office was created in 1542. Caraffa was appointed the first Inquisitor-General of the reconstituted institution. The Pope reserved for himself the right of pardon. Apart from that, the new Papal Inquisition, or Holy Office, was given virtually unrestricted powers, including the right to delegate authority to other ecclesiastics and invoke the aid of the secular arm if necessary. Immediately on receiving his appointment, Caraffa commandeered a substantial house in Rome and fitted it with prison cells. He then issued four procedural rules to be implemented by all Inquisitors. They were to ‘punish even on suspicion’. They were to ‘have no regard for the great’. They were to be severe with any who ‘shelter behind the powerful’. And they were to ‘show no mildness, least of all towards Calvinists’. Of these injunctions, Caraffa in private conversations particularly stressed the need to strike at men in high places, ‘for… on their punishment, the salvation of the classes beneath them depends’.4 What he had no need to say, of course, was that such an onslaught against the powerful effectively neutralised any prospective rivals or challengers to his authority.

  There ensued a purge of the kind that anticipated those perpetrated in our own century
by Hitler, Stalin and other more petty tyrants of their ilk. According to one historian, the whole of Italy ‘became paralysed’. The head of the Capuchin Order fled to Geneva. Other prominent figures, both secular and ecclesiastic, sought refuge elsewhere. In 1546, the entire University of Modena disbanded itself. Yet Caraffa still chafed against Pope Paul's preparedness to pardon and the extent to which this vitiated the Holy Office's capacity to terrorise.

  It was not until he himself became Pope in 1555 that Caraffa at last possessed the licence he had long sought. To exploit this fully, he delegated his right-hand man, the Dominican Michele Ghislieri. In 1557, Ghislieri was appointed cardinal and, a year later, Grand Inquisitor. Subsequently, in 1566, Ghislieri was to become Pope in his turn, taking the name of Pius V.

  No sooner had Caraffa ascended the throne of Saint Peter than the new reign of terror began in earnest. In 1556, twelve converted Jews were burned at Ancona, their conversion presumably being deemed insufficiently complete. In 1557, a cardinal was imprisoned. During the same year, a number of Venetians were convicted of heresy, delivered to Rome and consigned to the stake. When Caraffa died in 1559, he was so loathed by the populace of Rome that they attacked the Holy Office's premises, demolished the buildings, looted and burned all records. Undeterred, however, the Holy Office continued about its business. In 1562, some 2,000 Waldensians were brutally massacred in southern Italy. In 1567, a prominent Florentine humanist was beheaded. In 1570, a professor of rhetoric was garrotted at Siena. In 1573, the Holy Office undertook to ‘investigate’ Veronese's painting, The Feast in the House of Levi, and Veronese himself was summoned before the tribunal for questioning. He escaped punishment, but was ordered to alter the painting at his own expense.