The crux of St Augustine’s argument concerning coercion of belief and practice is presented in chapter six of his treatise:
It is indeed better (as no one ever could deny) that men should be led to worship God by teaching, than that they should be driven to it by fear of punishment or pain; but it does not follow that because the former course produces the better men, therefore those who do not yield to it should be neglected. For many have found advantage (as we have proved, and are daily proving by actual experiment), in being first compelled by fear or pain, so that they might afterwards be influenced by teaching, or might follow out in act what they had already learned in word.
In other words, to force people to conform to right doctrine, through the fear or reality of physical pain, when teaching alone had not succeeded, was better than allowing them to carry on in their error – and eventually they would realize this for themselves, and be grateful. One should not forget when reading such arguments that Augustine in the fifth century – as indeed his readers in the sixteenth, and in all the intervening centuries – lived in a society in which corporal punishment, for all but the very privileged, was the norm and assumed to be the right way to correct aberrant behaviour.
An often quoted extract of Augustine’s treatise is his comment about St Paul having initially been coerced to believe (when he, as Saul, the persecutor of Christians, was struck down with blindness on the road to Damascus). One can perhaps detect Augustine being rather carried away by his own rhetoric in this passage, careless of its dangerous implications because revelling in its symmetry (fear leading to love, love casting out fear), a favoured device of early Christian theologians who enjoyed reversals such as the redemption of the disobedient Eve (‘Eva’) through the ‘Ave’ uttered by the Angel Gabriel to the obedient Virgin Mary:
Where is what the Donatists were wont to cry: Man is at liberty to believe or not believe? Towards whom did Christ use violence? Whom did He compel? Here they have the Apostle Paul. Let them recognize in his case Christ first compelling, and afterwards teaching; first striking, and afterwards consoling. For it is wonderful how he who entered the service of the gospel in the first instance under the compulsion of bodily punishment, afterwards laboured more in the gospel than all they who were called by word only; and he who was compelled by the greater influence of fear to love, displayed that perfect love which casts out fear.
For Augustine constraint and love were not incompatible, but in later centuries his words were used more to justify constraint than to promote love.
The burning in 1553 of Michael Servetus, referred to above, gave rise to some protest, most notably on the part of a professor of Greek at Basel, Sebastian Castellio, who compiled a work in favour of toleration, drawing on the writings of earlier thinkers to support his belief that the execution of heretics was both ineffective and unchristian. The work attributed to Castellio (and published anonymously) was entitled Concerning heretics: whether they are to be persecuted and how they are to be treated; a collection of the opinions of learned men, both ancient and modern. St Augustine figured among the ‘ancient learned men’ quoted, as did a number of the other Church Fathers. In his translation and edition of this work, Roland H. Bainton traces the way in which some of Augustine’s words came to be used to support policies he would not himself have endorsed:
The persecutor, said Augustine, is like a kind father who disciplines a wayward son, or like a dutiful son restraining a crazy father from destroying himself. In each case the concern is to save the erring. Such analogies are irrelevant as justification for burning heretics at the stake. But there is another comparison which is susceptible of wider application, namely, that of the physician who amputates a diseased member for the sake of the rest of the body. So long as the death penalty is not admitted, so long as the State is not personified, this simile is innocuous. But the moment the diseased body is identified with the social group, then the individual becomes the rotten member to be destroyed for the sake of the larger good. Then the imagery swiftly shifts; the heretic becomes the wolf, the fox, the serpent, the thief, and the robber, epithets which themselves suggest the proper treatment. All of these terms are found in Augustine, as in his predecessors, waiting to be used as justification for a policy more rigorous than any he would countenance.
In the twelfth century St Augustine’s writings on the treatment of heresy – and particular interpretations of them – found their way into Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1140), a legal compilation which laid the foundation for the body of canon law, the Corpus iuris canonici. Through inclusion in the Decretum, the definition of heresy as a crime and the concept of a Christian theory of persecution became part of the law of the Church. In 1179 the third Lateran Council proclaimed anathema against all heretics, along with anyone who defended them, gave them shelter, or engaged in business with them. The Council authorized the confiscation of the possessions of such heretics as the Cathars (translated as ‘the Pure Ones’ or the ‘Albigenses’) in southern France. (Catharism was considered by the Church to be a major heresy, or indeed not Christian at all; it was ‘dualistic’ in that it featured two gods – one of good and one of evil.) In 1184 Pope Lucius III and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa joined forces to ban a number of heresies, against which Lucius issued a decretal, entitled Ad abolendam. This decretal required all archbishops and bishops to conduct regular investigations into heresy in their dioceses, using the evidence of reliable people as to whether there were heretics meeting in their neighbourhoods. In what was to become a familiar process, ‘Convicted heretics, unless they abjured their errors, were to be handed over to the secular authority for punishment, and civil officials were required to take an oath to pursue heresy when asked by the bishops.’ During the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216) the struggle against heresy intensified, with the French nobility being encouraged to join the crusade against the Cathars in the Languedoc (a twenty-year military campaign beginning in 1209, known as the Albigensian Crusade) and much effort being expended on preaching to persuade heretics to return to orthodoxy. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council, summoned by Pope Innocent and attended by more than 1,200 prelates as well as representatives of many secular rulers, passed a declaration that stated: ‘there is one Universal Church of the Faithful, outside of which there is absolutely no salvation’. Canon 3 of this Council endorsed ‘due punishment’ for heretics to be carried out by the ‘secular arm’.
Church and state were so closely linked in medieval Europe, and culture and everyday life so infused with religion, that the contagion of heresy came to be seen as a danger not only to the health of the Church but to that of society as a whole. It was in large part because of this fear for the stability of society (shared later by, for instance, Thomas More) that the death penalty became so embedded as the usual punishment for heresy, meted out by the secular authorities but with the agreement of the Church.
The process whereby execution as a punishment for heresy became accepted is also traced by G. G. Coulton in his book The Death Penalty for Heresy from 1184 to 1917; his argument is particularly valuable in its analysis of the use of the word ‘exterminate’:
Abraham did not wish to kill Hagar and Ishmael; but he did find it necessary to get them somehow out of the way; and the medieval churchman was much of the same mind where heretics were concerned. Thus there grew up the habit of using this vague word ‘exterminate’, very much as churchmen began soon afterwards to speak of ‘handing over to the secular arm’ – a euphemistic expression for consequences which were quite well understood.
One churchman prepared to defend ‘extermination’ in every sense was William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris from 1228 to 1249, who wrote at some length in defence of capital punishment for heresy, using similar arguments to those adduced by Pope Innocent III. Heretics are traitors to God, he declares, and therefore even more deserving of punishment than other traitors; furthermore, by disseminating their false beliefs, they murder people’s souls, and so are
more deserving of punishment than simple murderers, who kill only the body. He too uses the parable of the tares in support of his argument, professing the belief that the tares are far more likely to pervert the wheat than the wheat to convert the tares:
If it be urged that these, who are now tares, might become wheat, since they might be converted to the way of truth, this indeed is true; but there is no certainty that such contumacious folk, pertinacious in their error, would be converted and turn into wheat. On the other side we have the certainty that these tares turn the wheat into tares; for it is incredible with what ease they subvert, by their cunning, the simple and unlearned. Moreover, a few tares easily pervert and choke a great crop of wheat. For we see how difficult and how very rare is the conversion of heretics; on the other hand, how very easy and frequent is the subversion of the faithful.
In 1233 Pope Gregory IX laid a special responsibility on members of the Dominican order to investigate heresy, and take action against heretics and their supporters. Thus was born the so-called Inquisition, which took over from diocesan bishops the primary responsibility for the discovery and punishment of heretics. The Dominican theologian and philosopher St Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) is cited by Pierre Zagorin as an authoritative voice in support of the belief that obstinate heresy, as a defilement and infection that needed to be removed from society, should be punished by death. Zagorin quotes from Aquinas’s great Summa theologiae on the subject:
For it is a much more serious matter to corrupt faith, through which comes the soul’s life, than to forge money, through which temporal life is supported. Hence if forgers of money or other malefactors are straightway justly put to death by secular princes, with much more justice can heretics, immediately upon conviction, be not only excommunicated but also put to death.
This quotation is useful in reminding us that the context was a society in which the death penalty was widely used for crimes which we in the twenty-first century Western world would certainly not consider capital offences. It consequently required far less of a leap for the medieval mind to countenance death for heretics – when death for other ‘criminals’ was far more common – than it does for us.
Zagorin argues that Aquinas afforded the parable of the tares ‘the same harsh interpretation as had Saint Augustine: when the tares are recognized and there is no chance of a mistake, then Christ’s command against uprooting them no longer applies’. Aquinas’s comment in the Summa does seem to support this argument; while not appearing to insist on the execution of heretics, he certainly does not condemn it: ‘Yet if heretics be altogether uprooted by death, this is not contrary to Our Lord’s command, which is to be understood as referring to the case when the cockle [another word for ‘tares’] cannot be plucked up without plucking up the wheat, as we explained above … when treating of unbelievers in general.’ Aquinas also upheld the view that the relapsed heretic should be put to death, even if he or she recanted again; if that were to take place, the individual ‘should be admitted to penance but nevertheless sentenced to die’.
Conflicting interpretations of the parable of the tares were still being discussed around the time of the first executions for heresy of supporters of Martin Luther: two Augustinian monks, Hendrik Vos and Johann van den Esschen, who were burnt at the stake in Brussels on 1 July 1523. Their contemporary Erasmus held that the parable indicated that heretics were not to be destroyed, but tolerated, in the hope that they might eventually repent and become ‘wheat’. Luther himself preached on the parable in 1525, arguing fiercely and eloquently against the burning of heretics (though later, like Augustine, he changed his mind on the subject):
Again this Gospel teaches how we should conduct ourselves toward these heretics and false teachers. We are not to uproot nor destroy them. Here [Jesus] says publicly let both grow together. We have to do here with God’s Word alone; for in this matter he who errs today may find the truth tomorrow. Who knows when the Word of God may touch his heart? But if he be burned at the stake, or otherwise destroyed, it is thereby assured that he can never find the truth; and thus the Word of God is snatched from him, and he must be lost, who otherwise might have been saved. Hence the Lord says here, that the wheat also will be uprooted if we weed out the tares. That is something awful in the eyes of God and never to be justified.
From this observe what raging and furious people we have been these many years, in that we desired to force others to believe; the Turks with the sword, heretics with fire, the Jews with death, and thus outroot the tares by our own power, as if we were the ones who could reign over hearts and spirits, and make them pious and right, which God’s Word alone must do. But by murder we separate the people from the Word, so that it cannot possibly work upon them and we bring thus, with one stroke a double murder upon ourselves, as far as it lies in our power, namely, in that we murder the body for time and the soul for eternity, and afterwards say we did God a service by our actions, and wish to merit something special in heaven.
The parable also featured, again on the side of not executing heretics, in the Anabaptist theologian Balthasar Hubmaier’s On Heretics and Those Who Burn Them, published in 1524. Hubmaier contended that heretics should be ‘overcome with holy knowledge, not angrily but softly’. He believed it was right for the secular power to execute criminals, but that, as heretics could not injure body or soul – true Christians having the power of the word of God to defend them – they presented an opportunity for good to come out of evil.
But the voices urging toleration were not those that prevailed – certainly not for many centuries – while those who believed that the ‘tares’ should be identified, uprooted and executed kept the upper hand.
For mark, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven: and all the proud, yea and all such as do wickedness, shall be straw: and the day that is for to come, shall burn them up (saith the Lord of hosts) so that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.
But unto you that fear my name, shall the Sonne of righteousness arise, and health shall be under his wings: ye shall go forth, and multiply as the fat calves.
Ye shall tread down the ungodly: for they shall be like the ashes under the soles of your feet, in the day that I shall make, saith the Lord of hosts.
Malachi 4:1–3 (Matthew Bible)
The next question must be why, having determined that the fate of the obstinate heretic was to be execution, was the chosen method that of burning? A literal interpretation of the parable of the tares must be one reason, along with literal readings of various other texts including, from the Old Testament, the verses from Malachi quoted above, and, from the New, a verse from the Gospel according to St John: ‘If a man bide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered: and men gather it, and cast it into the fire, and it burneth.’
Leonard A. Parry, in The History of Torture in England, notes that burning as a method of punishment dates back a very long time. ‘The ancient Britons sacrificed their prisoners to the Gods in this way. The offenders were placed in wicker cages made in the form of some well-known idol, and big enough to hold several persons. The cage was surrounded by wood and was then set on fire and the wretched victims destroyed. This was 1,500 years before the fires of Smithfield.’ The exceedingly visible, melodramatic nature of this form of capital punishment has always been a consideration for the authorities interested in exercising social control, as is evident from the words of the early fifteenth-century heresy law De haeretico comburendo, referred to earlier: ‘that such punishment may strike fear into the minds of others’.
Professors Irene and Yale Rosenberg of the University of Houston Law Center have investigated the methods of execution prescribed in the Jewish scriptures for various crimes, and the rationale behind these prescriptions, publishing their findings in the Tulane Law Review in 2004, under the heading ‘Of God’s Mercy and the Four Biblical Methods of Capital Punishment: Stoning, Burning, Beheading and Strangulation’. They included in their researches not only the Torah (the first five bo
oks of the Bible) but also the Jewish Oral Law, known as the Talmud, the two parts of which are the Mishnah and the Gemara. The Mishnah, compiled around the year 200, generally states the law while the Gemara, a much lengthier text compiled some three centuries later, is a commentary on it, consisting largely of rabbinic debates. There is much discussion in the Mishnah and Gemara as to the most severe penalty, and which should be attached to which crime. ‘An anonymous Mishnah rule, which usually signifies a majority opinion, lists the penalties in descending order of severity as stoning, burning, beheading and strangulation. There is a dissent by Rabbi Shimon, who argues that the proper sequence is burning, stoning, strangulation and beheading.’ In trying to determine whether burning was a more severe punishment than stoning, or vice versa, the rabbinic discussions focused less on the relative physical torment involved than on the nature and seriousness of the crime for which the respective sentences were prescribed in the biblical texts. So some of the rabbis would argue that ‘stoning is the most severe because it is the punishment for blasphemy and idol worship, applicable to those who breach the most fundamental tenets of Judaism’, while others would contend that ‘burning is the most severe because it applies to the daughter of a priest who commits adultery, and that such an act profanes her father. Why is profaning her father a worse offense than profaning God? Because God is not harmed by idolatrous acts or blasphemy, whereas the priest is injured by his daughter’s promiscuity.’
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