It is stating the obvious to say that for anyone to become a martyr, somebody else had to be prepared to kill them; for heretics to be executed, enough people had to believe that the appropriate way to deal with heresy was execution. According to Henry C. Lea, author of the magisterial A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, a belief in the necessity of dealing unsparingly with heretics, a belief propelled by a sense of duty, was ‘universal public opinion from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century’. It was further believed that the Church should not itself shed blood, but that it was appropriate for those whom the Church found guilty of heresy – particularly those who had previously recanted but had lapsed back into their heresy, thereby demonstrating themselves to be both dangerous and irredeemable – to be handed over to the secular authorities for punishment (which generally meant death by burning).*
In England the death penalty for heresy was made official in 1401, during the reign of Henry IV, when Parliament enacted a heresy law, known as De haeretico comburendo (‘On the burning of the heretic’). This statute stipulated that anyone accused of heresy could be arrested by officers of the law or by the diocesan bishop (who also had the right to detain the suspects in his own prison – or, perhaps, his ‘coalhouse’), examined by the Church and, if deemed guilty and refusing to abjure, or relapsing after abjuration, handed back to the secular authorities for punishment. That punishment was spelt out: the secular authorities – usually the mayor and sheriffs – should arrange for the convicted heretics ‘before the people in an high place … to be burnt, that such punishment may strike fear into the minds of others’. De haeretico comburendo was used to proceed against heretics in the reigns of the monarchs who succeeded Henry IV, and was not repealed until the reign of Edward VI.
Heresy is an opinion chosen by human faculties, contrary to Holy Scripture, openly taught and pertinaciously defended.
Robert Grosseteste (a thirteenth-century English theologian)
The concept of heresy can be seen developing over the early centuries of Christianity, in parallel with the establishment of a body of doctrine which was to be accepted by all members of the Church. The first Christian theologian to refer to doctrinal error as heresy was St Ignatius of Antioch, martyred at the beginning of the second century, who used the word to criticize the so-called docetists, who denied the humanity of Christ. Another writer against heresy was Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon, whose work Against All Heresies, written around 180, was widely circulated and was specifically directed against the major heresy of gnosticism. ‘As an exponent of the apostolic and Catholic tradition, Irenaeus described heretics as bringers of alien doctrines to the altar of God and as rebels against the truth and church whom God would punish for their separation from the church’s unity.’ There seems to be no suggestion here, however, that anyone other than God should carry out the punishment. In about the year 200 Tertullian, a rhetorician, lawyer and leading theologian, weighed into the argument with his Barring of Heretics or Prescription Against Heretics, which included a ‘rule of faith’ setting out the main tenets of Christian doctrine, in an early version of what would become the official ‘Creed’ of the Church. He concluded his summary of the accepted faith with the words: ‘This rule, as it will be proved, was taught by Christ, and raises among ourselves no other questions than those which heresies introduce, and which make men heretics.’ In other words, any questioning of the rule of faith as laid down by Tertullian would in itself be heresy.
Tertullian also explored the nature of heresy as ‘choice’, heresy being ‘a word used in the sense of that choice which a man makes when he either teaches them [i.e. false doctrines] (to others) or takes up with them (for himself). For this reason it is that [St Paul] calls the heretic self-condemned [in his epistle to Titus], because he has himself chosen that for which he is condemned.’ Yet, however much he condemned the self-condemning heretics, Tertullian remained opposed to compulsion in religion.
The passage from St Paul’s Letter to Titus (Titus 3:10–11) to which Tertullian refers stipulates that heretics should be ‘admonished’ once, and for a second time if necessary, but that if they did not mend their ways after the second admonition, they were to be ‘rejected’. There is no suggestion from St Paul of doing anything more than ‘rejecting’ or shunning, but then the early Church was in no position to hand anyone over to the authorities, as Christians were themselves a persecuted minority; they could not have used coercion, even had they wanted to. It was when the Emperor Constantine the Great adopted Christianity and ended the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire in 313, paving the way for the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, by which the doctrines and structures of what had been defined as orthodox Christianity became established as the state Church of the Empire, that the position fundamentally altered.
The first execution for heresy in the history of the Church was that of Priscillian, a Spanish bishop, and four of his supporters; this took place in 385, under the authority and direction of Magnus Maximus, Western Roman Emperor from 383 to 388. This was by no means greeted with universal acclamation by the Fathers of the Church, both St Martin of Tours and St Ambrose of Milan being horrified by this development. There were further executions in 510 under the auspices of Emperor Anastasius who had some people accused of being Manichaean heretics condemned to death; executions for heresy also took place under Justinian I (527–65). Nevertheless, these remained rare events.
It is sometimes imagined that, in consigning a heretic’s body to the fire, the authorities hoped to rescue the heretic’s soul from the eternal flames of hell. This is, however, far from the truth. Rather, it was believed – a belief based on particular interpretations of the teachings of St Augustine of Hippo (354–430) and of words attributed to Jesus in the Gospel according to St Matthew (‘And these shall go into everlasting pain’) – that the soul of an unrepentant heretic would be damned for all eternity. (It is worth noticing, however, that these words attributed to Jesus actually come at the end of his disquisition on the nature of the kingdom of heaven and, though they do refer to a division between ‘the sheep and the goats’, the ‘goats’ in question are those who did not give food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, or clothes to the naked, and did not visit those in prison; all this has nothing, ostensibly, to do with heretics – unless heresy is choosing not to love.) For those who held that unrepentant heretics deserved to die, there was no question of an excruciating death somehow earning the heretic mercy in the afterlife; if mercy was to be extended to anyone, so the argument appeared to go, it would be to society for ridding itself of this plague of heresy – by slaying the wolf to save the flock, or cutting away the rotting flesh to save the whole body – and to those people persuaded to return to the true faith through witnessing, or hearing about, the fate of those foolish enough to have deserted it. The purifying fire ensured that nothing at all was left of the pollution of heresy; the wound in the body politic had been cauterized and only ashes remained. The lapsed heretic could still save his soul, even at the last moment, by recanting – as victims were so frequently urged to do at the scaffold or the stake – in which case the punishment was still likely to go ahead, but at least both victim and executioners could have some hope that the eternal flames had been avoided. Watching a recalcitrant heretic burn, on the other hand, was ‘like peering through a window into hell’.
In 1525 Johann Eck, a conservative German theologian and opponent of Luther and his followers, published his Enchiridion locorum communium or Handbook of Commonplaces. The Enchiridion, a collection of short Latin essays suitable to be read as homilies, was authorized for use as a preaching aid by Bishop Fisher and also promoted by Bishop Stokesley, who ordered a bookseller in Paul’s Churchyard to stock it. In the twenty-seventh chapter, entitled ‘On the Burning of Heretics’, Eck rehearsed the traditional arguments for the execution of heretics. He quoted from the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy in support of his hard line:
If there arise among you a Prophet o
r a dreamer of dreams, and give thee a sign or a wonder, and that sign or the wonder which he hath said come to pass and then say: let us go after strange Gods which thou hast not known, and let us serve them: hearken not unto the words of the prophet, or dreamer of dreams. For the Lord thy God tempteth you to wit whether ye love the Lord your God with all your hearts and with all your souls … And the prophet or dreamer of dreams, shall die for it because he hath spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God …
It is important to realize that this was not a one-sided conviction – that is, it was not only the upholders of traditional religion who advocated the use of the death penalty, citing scripture, against the ‘dreamers of dreams’. The Protestants could be quite as vociferous against their opponents. Michael Servetus, a Spanish theologian, humanist and polymath, who drew the ire of both Catholics and Protestants with his idiosyncratic, non-Trinitarian version of Christianity, was convicted of heresy and burnt at the stake in Geneva in October 1553, under the auspices of the Protestant governing council of that city. According to an eyewitness account, Servetus was fastened to the stake with an iron chain, and a thick rope was wound several times tightly round his neck, until he begged the executioners to stop. A crown of straw coated in sulphur was placed on his head, and then the pile of wood stacked up around his feet was ignited. As the flames began to lick his body, Servetus let out a horrifying shriek. He took just under half an hour to die. Defending Servetus’s execution, the Protestant leader John Calvin, like the anti-Protestant Johann Eck, quoted verses from Deuteronomy, this time in order to underline the importance of defending God’s honour even at the price of executing one’s friends or family:
If thy brother the son of thy mother or thine own son or the daughter of the wife that lieth in thy bosom or thy friend which is as thine own soul unto thee, entice thee secretly saying, let us go and serve strange Gods which thou hast not known nor yet thy fathers of the gods, of the people which are round about thee, whether they be nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the land unto the other. See thou consent not unto him, nor hearken unto him: nor let not thine eye pity him nor have compassion on him nor keep him secret, but cause him to be slain. Thine hand shall be first upon him to kill him, and then the hands of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones that he die, because he hath gone about to thrust thee away from the Lord thy God …
There were also those, however, who argued that under the Christian dispensation, Christ having redeemed the world, the Old Testament strictures could be disregarded, the uncompromising lack of forgiveness associated with them having been overcome. A central text in this argument was the so-called parable of the wheat and tares, one of the stories told by Jesus to illustrate the nature of the kingdom of heaven and, like all of his parables, open to multiple interpretations – often revealing as much, if not more, about the interpreter as about the teller of the story.
The parable of the wheat and tares (tares being harmful weeds or ‘wild oats’) is related in the Gospel according to St Matthew:
Another similitude put [Jesus] forth unto them saying: The kingdom of heaven is like unto a man which sowed good seed in his field. But while men slept there came his foe and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way. When the blade was sprung up, and had brought forth fruit, then appeared the tares also. The servants came to the householder, and said unto him: Sir, sowedst not thou good seed in thy close? From whence then hath it tared? He said to them: The envious man hath done this. Then the servants said unto him: Wilt thou then that we go and gather them? But he said, nay, lest while ye go about to weed out the tares, ye pluck up also with them the wheat by the roots. Let both grow together till harvest come, and in time of harvest, I will say to the reapers, gather ye first the tares, and bind them in sheaves to be brent [burnt]: but gather the wheat into my barn.
If, in accordance with many of the interpretations of this parable, the ‘tares’ are taken to be heretics ‘sown’ by the devil, intent upon destroying the Church, the fundamental question concerning the punishment of heretics hinges on the words ‘in time of harvest’. When was the time of harvest to which Jesus referred? Was it to be at some far-off date, such as the Last Judgement or the Second Coming of Christ? – in which case the Church should suspend its own judgement over who was or was not a heretic, and should let ‘both grow together’, refraining from acting against suspects lest some ‘wheat’ be accidentally plucked up and burnt along with the ‘tares’. Or had the time of harvest already arrived, with the coming into existence of the Church and its ability to distinguish between true faith and heresy? – in which case the injunction was to ‘gather ye first the tares, and bind them in sheaves to be burnt’ – now, before they could do any more harm to the wheat.
St John Chrysostom (c. 349–407), in his Homily 46 on this parable, comes out clearly on the side of the first – ‘wait and see’ or ‘leave it to God’ – interpretation:
What then does the Master? He forbids them, saying, Lest haply ye root up the wheat with them. And this He said, to hinder wars from arising, and blood and slaughter. For it is not right to put a heretic to death, since an implacable war would be brought into the world. By these two reasons then He restrains them; one, that the wheat be not hurt; another, that punishment will surely overtake them [i.e. the tares], if incurably diseased. Wherefore, if you would have them punished, yet without harm to the wheat, I bid you wait for the proper season.
Chrysostom makes the additional point that to execute those convicted of heresy risks killing some who might yet be converted back to the true path – ‘in whom there is yet room for change and improvement’. But in arguing against capital punishment of heretics he is certainly not advocating tolerance of heterodox views – there is no prohibition on ‘stopping the mouths’ of heretics, on ‘taking away their freedom of speech’ or on ‘breaking up their assemblies and confederacies’.
St Augustine dealt with the parable of the tares in his Sermon 23 on the New Testament and he, like Chrysostom, seems to be advocating the ‘leave it to God’ approach, warning his hearers not to be impatient or to trust their own judgement:
O you Christians, whose lives are good, you sigh and groan as being few among many, few among very many. The winter will pass away, the summer will come; lo! The harvest will soon be here. The angels will come who can make the separation, and who cannot make mistakes. We in this time present are like those servants of whom it was said, Will You that we go and gather them up? for we were wishing, if it might be so, that no evil ones should remain among the good. But it has been told us, Let both grow together until the harvest. Why? For you are such as may be deceived.
The ‘harvest time’ is interpreted here by Augustine as being in the future, when ‘the angels will come’, and he reminds his hearers: ‘We are but men, the reapers are the angels. We too indeed, if we finish our course, shall be equal to the angels of God; but now when we chafe against the wicked, we are as yet but men.’ His hope is that, while there is still time, all may be saved: ‘Let the good tolerate the bad; let the bad change themselves, and imitate the good. Let us all, if it may be so, attain to God.’
These were not, however, the last or only words Augustine wrote on the subject, and his writings were used to bolster the arguments of the ‘burn them now’ lobby as well as of those who advocated a more cautious approach. Pierre Zagorin claims that Augustine changed his mind to support the idea of violence against heretics, and that we first learn of this change of mind in the treatise Augustine wrote in about 400 in reply to a letter by the Donatist bishop Parmenian (and which has already been referred to for its distinction between ‘false’ and ‘true’ martyrs). A key passage in Augustine’s treatise is one that can be taken as justifying persecution and in which he quotes from the Psalms (specifically, Psalm 18:37) to support his case:
Again I ask, if good and holy men never inflict persecution upon any one, but only suffer it, whose words do they think that those are in th
e psalm where we read, ‘I have pursued mine enemies, and overtaken them; neither did I turn again till they were consumed?’ If, therefore, we wish either to declare or to recognize the truth, there is a persecution of unrighteousness, which the impious inflict upon the Church of Christ; and there is a righteous persecution, which the Church of Christ inflicts upon the impious.
It is that phrase ‘there is a righteous persecution, which the Church of Christ inflicts’ that, both for the sake of his own reputation and for the history of the Church, one could wish Augustine had never written. Nevertheless, he did also make clear that the aim of this ‘righteous persecution’ should not be to kill the impious, but to rescue them and turn them away from their impiety:
Moreover, she [i.e. the Church] persecutes in the spirit of love, they [i.e. the Church’s opponents] in the spirit of wrath; she that she may correct, they that they may overthrow: she that she may recall from error, they that they may drive headlong into error. Finally, she persecutes her enemies and arrests them, until they become weary in their vain opinions, so that they should make advance in the truth …
Another hostage to fortune, when taken out of context, in Augustine’s treatise is his question: ‘What then is the function of brotherly love? Does it, because it fears the shortlived fires of the furnace for a few, therefore abandon all to the eternal fires of hell?’ The context is that he was writing about a heretical sect – the Donatists – that appeared to have a propensity for suicide, sometimes by self-immolation. He was not writing about judicial execution by burning. Rather, his view seems to have been that if convinced Donatists wanted to set themselves on fire, they should be allowed to get on with it, while the Church should busy herself ‘persecuting’ those not yet convinced enough to go the same way, so that they could be rescued both from the Donatists now and from hell hereafter. (The Donatists themselves were convinced that they were the wheat, while the rest of the Church in Africa – including Augustine – consisted entirely of tares.)
The Burning Time Page 12