The Inquisition

by Michael Baigent

  In the meantime, the Church had undergone a significant transformation. As early as 1523, the rapid spread of Protestantism had made the need for reform painfully apparent. It was suggested that such reform might best be effected by a general Church Council. The Papacy and the Curia were at first alarmed by the proposal, fearing that any Council might proclaim itself greater than the Pope. Indeed, no sooner had the prospect of a Council been publicised than the price of saleable ecclesiastical positions in Rome dropped dramatically. Eventually, however, in 1545, Pope Paul III did convene the Council of Trent.

  Trent was one of the supremely important Councils in Church history, playing a crucial role in defining both the Church and the Papacy as they have come down to us today. Punctuated by interruptions and sporadic adjournments, the Council extended over a total of eighteen years, from 1545 until 1563. It outlasted both Paul III and Caraffa in his papal identity of Paul IV.

  The Council opened with an attempt – admittedly half-hearted in the most influential quarters – to conciliate and accommodate Protestantism. It quickly became apparent, however, that any such attempt was doomed. Thereafter, the assembled ecclesiastics addressed themselves to means of contending with Protestantism, and, in order best to do so, to adapting their own Church for struggle. The Council proclaimed, for example, ‘the equal authority of scripture and tradition’.5 In other words, the Church, as embodiment of tradition, was decreed to possess an authority equal to that of scripture itself. This, of course, was intrinsically inimical to Protestantism, which recognised the authority only of the Bible. The rupture with Protestantism was rendered even more definitive by other measures – the formulation of the Doctrine of Original Sin, for example, and a repudiation of Luther's insistence on Justification by Faith.

  At the same time, the Council of Trent undertook to clarify the position of the Papacy in relation to bishops and to Church Councils. Thus, for instance, certain reformers initially endeavoured to ‘affirm the superiority of the Council even to the Pope, and so declare its supreme authority’.6 In the end, however, it was the Papacy that emerged as supreme authority, exercising control over bishops as well as Church Councils. A millennium earlier, the Church had been largely decentralised, and the Pope had simply been Bishop of Rome, the proverbial ‘first among equals’. During subsequent centuries, his power had become progressively more centralised, but it had not been officially ratified as such. After the Council of Trent, the Church became the equivalent of an absolute monarchy, with the Pope enjoying the status of sovereign. From this point on, the Jesuits, the Holy Office and all other Roman Catholic institutions were dedicated less to the supposed ‘purity’ of the faith than to the stability of the Papacy and the Church.

  That stability had already suffered from the proliferation of heretical and secular learning. In regions where Protestantism held sway, little could be done to repair the damage. Elsewhere, however, the Church attempted to regain and reestablish something of its former monopoly over knowledge. To this end, a new form of censorship was introduced. It assumed the form of the Holy Office's notorious ‘Index of Prohibited Books’.

  As early as 1554, local tribunals of the Holy Office – in Venice and Milan for instance – had drawn up their own lists of forbidden works. In 1559, in his capacity as Pope Paul IV, Caraffa published his own definitively authoritative Index Librorum Prohibitorum. It included not only heretical texts, but also those the Holy Office deemed immoral. Among them were works by Hermeticists, such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, and by humanists, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam. All works by Martin Luther were banned, as were those of Jan Hus. Books pertaining to magic, alchemy and astrology were condemned. So were a compilation of texts purporting to have been composed by King Arthur and a collection of prophecies ascribed to Merlin. The Judaic Talmud was forbidden, along with thirty translations of the Bible in its entirety and eleven of the New Testament. There was also a list of sixty-two printers to be shunned, most of them in Protestant Basle.

  In 1564, Caraffa's Index was officially approved by the Council of Trent and reissued with a number of additions. In 1571, Michele Ghislieri – Caraffa's former lieutenant and Grand Inquisitor, now installed as Pope Pius V – created, under the auspices of the Holy Office, a special ‘Congregation of the Index’, whose sole task was to oversee, maintain and update the list of prohibited works. This institution continued in existence until 1917, when its duties were again placed under the direct control of the Holy Office. For four centuries, the Index was issued in updated form at sporadic intervals. Printed at Vatican City, the last complete edition appeared in 1948. Among the authors and texts condemned were (in alphabetical order) Johann Valentin Andreae, Balzac, the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer, Giordano Bruno, Descartes, Dumas (both père and fils), Fenelon, Flaubert, Robert Fludd, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Victor Hugo, James I of England, John Locke, Michael Maier, John Stuart Mill, Montaigne, Henry More, Ernest Renan, Rousseau, Spinoza, Stendhal, Laurence Sterne, Swedenborg, Voltaire, Zola, all histories of Freemasonry and all histories of the Inquisition itself. During the 1950s, a number of other authors were added as afterthoughts – Sartre, Alberto Moravia, Gide, Kazantzakis, Unamuno and Simone de Beauvoir.7

  Such a list posed daunting problems for Catholic historians and literary scholars. One of the authors of the present book recalls his first year of graduate school at the University of Chicago, where a basic course required for the degree programme included Stendhal as mandatory reading. In the class at the time, there were a handful of seminarians and two or three nuns. In order to obtain permission to read The Red and the Black, they were obliged to petition the Holy Office through the local archbishop, and receive special dispensation in writing.

  By that time, however, the sluice gates had already opened. Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita and other major works previously banned by secular authorities had become readily available. So, too, had a number of lesser but still consequential books – by William Burroughs, for example, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby. Libraries at convents and seminaries were being duped by practical jokers into purchasing multiple copies of Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, which was also being mischievously recommended to unsuspecting nuns. For the moral and theological sentinels of the Holy Office, the mere process of keeping up with supposedly depraved texts, still more of banning them, must have seemed a task for a veritable squadron of Sisyphae. At last, in 1966, the Index was officially abolished – an act, one would like to imagine, of capitulation and despair.

  Persecution of the Renaissance Magi

  The Church emerged from the Council of Trent with a new consolidation of pontifical authority and with two institutions – the Jesuits and the Inquisition in its modernised guise as the Holy Office – to spearhead the Counter-Reformation. In reclaiming such territories as Poland and Bohemia for Rome, as well as in spreading the Church's message overseas, these institutions displayed an energy, a resourcefulness and a zeal of often epic proportions. Ultimately, however, the war was already lost, and with only occasional exceptions the battles fought were defensive battles – holding actions conducted to retain an ever-diminishing dominion. In the beginning, for example, Protestantism had meant solely Lutheranism, the creed promulgated by Martin Luther in Germany. But the new heresy of Protestantism had quickly proved to be hydra-headed, and other Protestant sects had appeared with alarming rapidity. Luther had been followed by Calvin in Geneva, Zwingli in Zurich, John Knox in Scotland. Although his reasons for doing so were hardly theological, Henry VIII had created the Church of England and severed its connection with Rome. There had also been a resurgence of certain old heresies in new forms, and a number of messianic or millenarian movements and eruptions – the self-styled Anabaptists, for instance, who had emerged in Protestant Holland and then proceeded to capture the German city of Munster in 1534, proclaiming their own ‘Kingdom of Zion’ and inaugurating a regime of anarchic licence and orgiastic frenzy. Even Catholic scholars had beco
me increasingly ‘infected’ by heterodox thought.

  When the Council of Trent ended in 1563 the world had changed. Through printing and the dissemination of ideas, both secular learning and Protestantism had become established facts, which the Church could neither accommodate nor extirpate. In less than half a century, Rome's previous hegemony over Europe's spiritual life had effectively been shattered, and Catholic dominion reduced by something like a third. The mass persecution of witches continued, by Protestantism as fanatically as by the Church. Apart from this, however, the work of the Holy Office became more focused, more specialised, more precisely delineated, intellectually disciplined and surgically conducted. From the mid sixteenth century on, the history of the retitled Inquisition became a history less of wholesale terror and indiscriminate persecution than of specific individual cases, but certain of these involved some of the most distinguished names in the evolution of Western civilisation.

  Among the chief targets of the Holy Office were the Faustian figures who have come to be known as ‘Renaissance Magi’, men whose thirst for knowledge, audacity of spirit and visionary aspirations encompassed the arts, the sciences, theology, philosophy, medicine, technology and the spectrum of disciplines collectively regarded as ‘esoterica’, including astrology, alchemy and magic. During the first third of the sixteenth century, the most important of these figures had been Aureolus Philippus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, subsequently known simply as Paracelsus, and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, the primary model for both Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and Goethe's Faust. Both Paracelsus and Agrippa had a number of rancorous encounters with the Inquisition. During their lifetimes, however, the Inquisition in question was the old Inquisition, prior to its relaunch as the Holy Office. In consequence, both of them, though incurring sporadic short terms of censure or imprisonment, escaped largely unscathed. Agrippa castigated the Inquisitors of the time as ‘bloody vultures’ and condemned the stupidity whereby heretics ‘are to be convinced with Faggot and Fire, not with Scriptures and Arguments’.8 On one occasion, while serving as a functionary for the Free City of Metz, he defended a woman accused of witchcraft against the local Dominican Inquisitor, whom he confronted, faced down and out-argued in open court.

  The ‘Magi’ who followed Paracelsus and Agrippa, and who found themselves pitted against the modernised Holy Office, were not so fortunate. In 1591, for example, Tommaso Campanella, a mystical Dominican with what would later be seen as ‘Rosicrucian’ tendencies, published a book advocating the validity of empiricism, as well as faith, in the study of philosophy. The book was condemned by the Holy Office and Campanella was imprisoned for heresy. In 1599, shortly after his release, he was again in trouble, this time for subversive political activity. He was accordingly arrested, tortured and sentenced to life imprisonment. A friend who visited him in his cell later reported

  his legs were all bruised and his buttocks almost without flesh, which had been torn off bit by bit in order to drag out of him a confession of the crimes of which he had been accused.9

  During his incarceration, Campanella produced his most famous book, La città del sole (The City of the Sun), a blueprint for an ideal Utopian community of the sort being extolled at the time by mystical writers. In another work, he argued that all nature was alive and that the world possessed a soul ‘created and infused by God’.10 This provoked the wrath of the Inquisitors, who complained that if Campanella's contention were valid, the world soul would imbue with its qualities ‘vermin and other unworthy objects’.11In 1626, after more than a quarter of a century in prison, Campanella was at last released. By 1634, he was again under threat and fled to France.

  A more dramatic case than Campanella's was that of Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). Like Paracelsus and Agrippa before him, Bruno was the very archetype of the ‘Renaissance Magus’. Among numerous other things, he was a poet, a dramatist, a philosopher, a theologian, a scientist, a visionary and a self-proclaimed magician. In certain respects, such as his megalomania, he may well have been more than a little mad; but he was also unquestionably a genius, one of the most profound, brilliant, original and extraordinary minds of his age, whose thinking has reverberated down to our own century and influenced such figures as James Joyce.

  After thirteen years in a Dominican monastery at Naples, Bruno absconded in 1576 and embarked on a peripatetic career, promulgating his own mystical system through preaching, teaching and lecturing, as well as through print. By 1581, he had become an eminent figure in Paris and enjoyed the favour of the court. In 1583, he arrived in England, residing at the lodgings of the French ambassador. He engaged in a prominent public debate at Oxford, expounded on Copernicus's theory that the earth moved around the sun and produced a discernible influence on such figures as the poet Sir Philip Sidney. During the subsequent eight years, he travelled around Germany, Switzerland and Bohemia, and in Prague made the acquaintance of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.

  Unfortunately for Bruno, his success fostered an excessive self-confidence and a misplaced sense of immunity. In 1591, at the invitation of a Venetian noble, he imprudently returned to Italy. A year later, he was denounced to the Holy Office, arrested, transferred to Rome and imprisoned. For the following seven years, despite the most extreme and protracted torture, he argued tenaciously with the Inquisitors. To their demands that he retract, he stubbornly and repeatedly refused. At last, in 1600, he was officially convicted of heresy and sentenced to death. On 17 February of that year, he went to the stake. He went gagged, lest his continuing defiance prove embarrassing to his executioners or unsettling for the assembled spectators.

  For modern readers, the most famous victim of the Holy Office during the Counter-Reformation would undoubtedly be Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who today is a household name, familiar to every schoolchild. The telescope having been invented only shortly before, Galileo in 1609, constructed his own more powerful version of the instrument and began using it, for the first time, to study the heavens. His astronomical observations enabled him to demonstrate empirically that Copernicus's theory had been correct – that the earth and the other planets of the solar system did indeed revolve around the sun and that the earth, therefore, was not the centre of the universe. This was contrary to Church teachings, which rested on the Biblical account of the creation in Genesis, with all the implications attending thereto. In consequence, Galileo was arrested by the Holy Office and spent the last eight years of his life in prison, convicted of heresy. As a somewhat belated afterthought, he was absolved of his sins by the Vatican in 1992, three and a half centuries after his death.

  8

  Fear of the Mystics

  In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is ruthlessly prepared to send Jesus himself to the stake in order to preserve the stability and efficiency of the Church. To understand this mentality – to understand, that is, the Inquisition's role in European history and culture, as well as its own priorities – one must confront the distinction between religion and ‘spirituality’. Or, to phrase the matter slightly differently, one must confront the distinction between ‘a religion’ and ‘the religious experience’. This distinction is crucial, indeed essential, to any comprehension of religious issues. Yet it is almost invariably overlooked, blurred or deliberately muddled. For most people, the words ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ mean the same thing and are used interchangeably, indiscriminately.

  The point in question can be illustrated by a simple, even ostensibly frivolous, analogy. Let us imagine an individual who has never encountered electricity as we know it today – a force regulated, tamed and subject to human control, rendered active or dormant at the flick of a switch. This hypothetical individual might be from a so-called ‘primitive’ society, like those of certain Pacific islands during the Second World War – adherents of a ‘cargo cult’, for example, who regarded Allied servicemen as veritable gods descending from the skies in great metal birds, and continued long after hostilities had cease
d to worship at altars constructed from derelict aircraft components, abandoned Jeeps, rubber tyres or even Campbell soup cans. Alternatively, our hypothetical individual might be from the past – an American Indian before the advent of the white man, or even one of our own medieval ancestors – teleported, as in some science fiction scenario, into the present.

  Such an individual would be dazzled, even terrified, by the surroundings in which he suddenly found himself. But with all the spectacular marvels confronting him, he would probably not be unduly impressed by the serpentine wires connecting our lamps, our refrigerators, our televisions and other appliances to electrical sockets in the wall. If told that these sockets were a source of immense power, our hypothetical individual might well be sceptical. If, however, he poked his finger into one such socket, he would undergo a species of revelation. In the contemporary vernacular, he would ‘get zapped’. Something dramatic, even traumatic, would happen, of an immediacy and an intensity that brooked no questioning, no act of belief or disbelief. Assuming he were not summarily electrocuted, our hypothetical individual would be catapulted for a matter of seconds into an ‘altered state of consciousness’. His hair would stand up on end. His faculties would be scrambled. He would be incapable of any coherent thought, still less of any coherent speech. Without any voluntary assent on his part, a yell or a cry might well be wrenched from his lips. He would be torn out of himself, out of his accustomed mental habitat, and projected into some other dimension of experience.

  To an onlooker or a bystander, our hypothetical individual's ordeal would certainly be real enough, ‘objectively’ real. He would not merely have imagined what was happening, not have hallucinated it. A recognisable mechanism or dynamic would be involved, not just physiologically, but psychologically as well. Yet it would be perfectly explicable in rational terms. To our hypothetical individual himself, however, his experience would be of an altogether different order. The reality he was encountering within his psyche would be very different from that of the onlooker or bystander. That reality would usurp all other realities, would fill and overbrim his consciousness to the exclusion of everything else. It might even eclipse his consciousness entirely.