So we will come to see that the Orwellian future described in 1984—“Big Brother Is Watching You”—is actually rooted in the distant past. “Naming names,” a hateful feature of both the Moscow show trials of the 1930s and the Communist witch-hunt in McCarthy-era America, actually began with the inquisitors, who regarded the confession of an accused heretic as unacceptable unless it included the names and whereabouts of fellow believers. Even the black dunce’s cap used to humiliate prisoners at Abu Ghraib bears an unsettling resemblance to the coroza that was placed on the heads of the condemned before they were burned alive by the Spanish Inquisition.
So, too, did the Inquisition teach its successors how to use language to conceal their crimes and, at the same time, to inspire terror in their victims. Just as the inquisitors used the ornate Latin phrase judicium secularum (secular justice) to refer to torture on the rack and the wheel—and just as auto-da-fé (act of the faith) came to signify burning at the stake—mass murder in the Soviet Union was called “liquidation” and the extermination of six million Jews by Nazi Germany was called “the Final Solution.” Even today, kidnapping a suspected terrorist and spiriting him away to a secret prison where he can be safely tortured is known as “extraordinary rendition” by our own intelligence services. When George Orwell coined the word Newspeak to describe a vocabulary of euphemism and misinformation—“War Is Peace, Love is Hate, Ignorance is Strength”—he was recalling yet another invention of the Inquisition.8
Who were these so-called heretics, and exactly what were their misdeeds? The men, women, and children who suffered and died at the hands of the Inquisition, as it turns out, did not do anything that we would recognize as a crime; they were guilty (if at all) of wrongful thoughts rather than wrongful acts. Heresy, after all, is derived from the Greek word for “choice,” and one could be condemned as a heretic for choosing to believe something that the Church regarded as impermissible. Perhaps the best way to understand the function of heresy in the workings of the Inquisition is to borrow again from George Orwell’s 1984: heresy is the original “Thought Crime,” and the agents of the Inquisition were the world’s first “Thought Police.”
“You are accused as a heretic,” the inquisitor was instructed to say to the accused in Bernard Gui’s handbook, “[because] you believe and teach otherwise than the Holy Church believes.”9 Since the official dogma of the Church was still being fine-tuned by various medieval popes, it was sometimes damnably hard for ordinary Christians to avoid heresy. Christian rigorists, apocalyptic theologians, cloistered women, and church reformers—all of whom thought of themselves as perfectly good Christians—were always at risk of arrest, torture, and death. “Nobody can understand the Middle Ages who has not clearly realized the fact,” observes historian G. G. Coulton, “that men might be burned alive for contesting publicly and impenitently any papal decretal.”10
The Inquisition slapped the deadly label of heretic on so many of its victims that the word ceased to have any real meaning. Women were tried and burned as witches simply because of their age, appearance, or personal eccentricities; the evidence against Joan of Arc, for example, included the fact that she dressed in men’s clothing. The warrior-monks of the Knights Templar were denounced as heretics and persecuted by the Inquisition because, among other things, their vast wealth provoked the envy and avarice of a French king. Eventually, as we shall see, the maw of the Inquisition would be fed with the bodies of Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity who were accused of lapsing into their old faiths. And Galileo was famously condemned as a heretic merely because he doubted that the sun revolved around the earth. “Even doubt was heresy,” explains Henry Charles Lea. “The believer must have fixed and unwavering faith, and it was the inquisitor’s business to ascertain this condition of his mind.”11
The frantic search for heretics, as we shall see, took on the symptoms of collective paranoia. A woman of North African descent who had converted from Islam to Catholicism was denounced to the Spanish Inquisition as a false Christian merely because she was observed eating couscous at a family meal, and a young woman who had converted from Judaism suffered the same fate because she put on clean underwear on Saturdays. A woman with a facial mole, a bad temper, or no husband—or one who had the misfortune to live next door to someone whose household supply of beer had gone bad—was a likely candidate for arrest, torture, and burning as a witch. At certain ludicrous moments, a text rather than a human being—the Talmud, for example, and the writings of a Christian theologian—was put on trial on charges of heresy and then put to the flames in place of its long-dead authors.
Nor was death itself a refuge from the Inquisition. If an inquisitor had exhausted the local supply of living heretics, he might turn to the graveyard in search of new victims. Charges of heresy were brought against long-deceased men and women whose rotting corpses were dug up, put on trial, and then put to the flames. Since confiscation of a condemned heretic’s land, goods, and money was a standard punishment for heresy, the Inquisition would seize the dead man’s possessions from his children or grandchildren, which is doubtless what inspired the inquisitors to put defunct heretics on trial in the first place. The fact that the heir of a dead heretic was himself a good Christian was wholly irrelevant to the Inquisition; indeed, if he happened to serve the Church as a monk or priest, he would be stripped of his church offices as well as his inheritance.
The appetite of the inquisitors for new victims was so insatiable that they invented heresies where none existed. The so-called heresy of the Free Spirit, a fifteenth-century cult whose adherents were said to engage in all manner of sexual adventure because they regarded themselves as sinless, is now thought to have been a figment of the inquisitorial imagination rather than a real religious community. Precisely because the inquisitors relied on manuals and handbooks that included lists of leading questions to be put to accused heretics, they suggested the answers they wanted to hear from their exhausted, brutalized, and terrified victims. How many women under torture, when asked whether the Devil had ever appeared to them in the guise of a black cat, conducted them to a nighttime orgy, and demanded that they kiss his private parts, were quick to answer yes, thus telling their torturers exactly what they expected and wanted to hear?
Here we find what is arguably the single most dangerous idea that the medieval Inquisition bequeathed to the modern world. “Heretics were not only burned,” writes historian Norman Cohn, “they were defamed as well.” And these two acts were intimately linked. As the inquisitors grasped, and as history has repeatedly proved, it is far easier for one human being to torture and kill another if he has convinced himself that the victim is not really human at all.12
The war on heresy was a total war, and no weapon in the arsenal of the Inquisition was left unused. Among the ugliest was a psychological ploy that the inquisitors used with unmistakable zeal and a certain relish. Lest the accused heretics be viewed with pity and compassion as good Christians who had been wrongly condemned by the Inquisition, they were officially denounced as the vile and wretched minions of Satan, far beyond sympathy or salvation. Thus, for example, the victims were charged not only with the crime of false belief but also with every act of wretched excess that the human imagination is capable of conjuring up.
Ironically, the very same charges that had been laid against the first Christians by their persecutors in imperial Rome were now applied to the Christian rigorists who caught the attention of the Inquisition. Their sober religious services were falsely characterized as “erotic debauches” in which fathers coupled with their daughters and mothers with their sons. The babies who were conceived at such orgies, it was said, were tortured to death and then eaten in a ritual meal that was a diabolical imitation of the Eucharist. Such outrages and excesses existed only in the perverse imaginations of certain friar-inquisitors, but they eventually found their way into one of the papal decrees that served as the charter of the Inquisition.13
Sexual slander against accused her
etics was so common that we might conclude that the friar-inquisitors protested too much when they charged their victims with sexual excess. The incestuous orgy was a favorite theme, used indiscriminately against heretics of both genders and all religious persuasions, but the accusers’ imaginations wandered to even darker corners. Women charged with witchcraft were assumed to kiss the backside and private parts of the Devil before engaging in sexual acrobatics with him. The pious members of the Knights Templar were accused of engaging in homoerotic rituals of initiation and acts of organized homosexuality. Bugger, a word still used today to refer to anal intercourse, is derived from a term used in the Middle Ages to identify the Cathars, who were wrongly believed to prefer any kind of sexual activity that did not lead to conception.
Imaginary sexual perversion of various kinds may have titillated the inquisitors, but the routine and unrelenting slander of accused heretics served another purpose as well. The Inquisition understood the danger that its victims might be seen by their friends, neighbors, and relations as pitiable rather than hateful. So the inquisitors sought to convey the impression that they were engaged in a life-and-death struggle against “a monstrous, anti-human conspiracy” under the control of “a devoted underground elite,” and that the Inquisition itself had been “called into existence to meet a national emergency,” all of which will strike a shrill but familiar note to contemporary readers. Heretics were nothing less than “traitors to God,” according to Pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216), and “thieves and murderers of souls,” according to Pope Innocent IV (d. 1254). Once the war on heresy was understood as an apocalyptic struggle between good and evil, God and Satan, then the end plainly justified the means—and no means were ruled out.14 “When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality,” declared the Bishop of Verden in a tract published in 1411. “[T]he use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death.”15
So the dehumanization of accused heretics, which provided a theological rationale for their extermination, was an early and constant theme of inquisitorial propaganda. Heresy, according to Innocent III, “gives birth continually to a monstrous brood” that “passes on to others the canker of its own madness.” The men and women accused of “heretical depravity,” according to the cant of the Inquisition, were not human beings at all but rather “harmful filth” and “evil weeds,” and it was the duty of the inquisitors to cleanse Christendom by eliminating them as one would dispose of other forms of waste or infestation.16 “[They] were the wolves in the sheepfold,” a Spanish priest wrote of the Muslim conversos in 1612, “the drones in the beehive, the ravens among the doves, the dogs in the Church, the gypsies among the Israelites, and finally the heretics among the Catholics.”17
Here is yet another linkage between the Inquisition of the distant past and the crimes against humanity that have taken place within our living memory. The better angels of our nature inspire us to look into the eyes of another human being and see a kindred spirit and, according to both Genesis and Michelangelo, the face of God. “When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity—that was a quality God’s image carried with it,” writes Graham Greene in The Power and the Glory. “Hate was just a failure of the imagination.”18
It is also true, however, that some men and women are capable of acting with appalling cruelty once they convince themselves that their victims are filth or vermin or, at best, miscreants with some incurable disease or congenital defect that compels them to serve the Devil rather than God. That’s how the Inquisition instructed good Christians to look on those it condemned as heretics, and it is the same moral and psychological stance that has always served as a necessary precondition for crimes against humanity. Not coincidentally, Zyklon B, the poison used to kill Jewish men, women, and children in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, was the brand name of an insecticide.
Strictly speaking, the Inquisition exercised its authority only over professing Christians who had deviated from whatever the Church defined as its current dogma. This explains why the only Jews and Muslims who fell into the hands of the Spanish Inquisition were those who had formally converted to Christianity after Ferdinand and Isabella offered them the choice between conversion and expulsion from Spain. Jews who refused to convert were expelled from Spain in 1492, the year that the same monarchs famously sent Columbus on his fateful voyage across the Atlantic. Since the inquisitors followed the conquistadores, however, a Jewish or Muslim converso who managed to escape the Inquisition in the Old World was at risk of torture and burning in the New World, too. The first Jews to reach North America, in fact, were some two dozen refugees from Brazil who were fleeing the long reach of the Inquisition.
Accused heretics who confessed to their crime, recanted their false beliefs, and managed to survive the “penances” imposed by the Inquisition would be welcomed back into the arms of the Mother Church, or so insisted the pious friar-inquisitors. The official theology of the Inquisition held that the inquisitors never actually punished anyone; they merely corrected the errors of repentant Christians who had strayed from the Church and then freely returned to its maternal embrace. Thus, for example, a convicted heretic who had managed to escape from an inquisitorial prison is described in an inquisitor’s handbook as “one insanely led to reject the salutary medicine offered for his care.” By contrast, the truly repentant Christian was likened to a patient who took his medicine by performing without protest all the penances that had been prescribed by the “good doctors” of the Inquisition.19
The Inquisition in practice was never as benign as it advertised itself to be. Confession was required before the sin of heresy could be forgiven, for example, and yet confession alone was never enough. The confession had to be abject, earnest, and complete, which meant that it had to include the betrayal of others, including spouses and children, friends and neighbors. That’s why the naming of names was rooted in both the theology and the psychology of the Inquisition—the will of the victim to resist had to be utterly crushed, his or her sense of self eradicated, and the authority of the interrogator acknowledged as absolute. The best evidence that an accused man or woman has been utterly defeated, then as now, is the willingness to betray a loved one or a trusting friend.
At its darkest moment, the Inquisition developed a new and even more dangerous notion: an obsession with “purity of blood” rather than “purity of faith.” With the adoption of a Spanish law that distinguished between those who had been born into Christianity and those who had converted to the faith, it was no longer sufficient or even possible for an accused heretic to merely confess and repent the sin of heresy. Under the Spanish Inquisition, the conversos were regarded as ineradicably tainted by their Jewish or Muslim origins, a fact that could not be changed by confession, no matter how many names were named. Thus did the Strictures of the Purity of Blood, as a Spanish decree of 1449 was known, prefigure the Law for Protection of German Blood and Honor of 1935, Nazi Germany’s formal declaration of war on its Jewish citizenry. The “machinery of persecution,” as the Inquisition has been called by historian R. I. Moore, was now driven by race rather than religion.20
The Spanish Inquisition marked the zenith of the inquisitorial enterprise and thus the beginning of its long and slow decline. But it also signaled a sea-change in the inner meaning of the Inquisition and its significance in history. Once the Inquisition began to condemn people to death because of the blood that ran in their veins, the groundwork was laid for crimes against humanity that would be committed long after the last inquisitor had donned his hood and uttered the tortuous Latin euphemism—debita animadversione puniendum or “he is to be duly punished”—that translated into burning at the stake. By the mid–nineteenth century, the last grand inquisitor was dead and gone, and his successor in the twentieth century was the nameless and faceless man in a field-gray uniform who dropped the canisters of Zyklon B into the gas chambers at Auschwitz.21
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Remarkably, the Inquisition has always had its defenders and its deniers, then and now. The most stubborn among them insist that it is more accurate to speak of two inquisitions, “one uppercase and one lowercase,” as historian Henry Ansgar Kelly puts it. The lowercase inquisition consisted of a random assortment of persecutors who were at work at various times and places across six centuries, sometimes as freebooters under papal commission and sometimes as apparatchiks in a fixed bureaucracy like the notorious one in Spain. By contrast, they insist that the uppercase Inquisition is purely mythic, the collective invention of Protestant reformers, Enlightenment philosophers, Russian novelists, and English propagandists, all of whom contributed to the fanciful notion that the Inquisition was, according to Kelly’s sarcastic description, “a central intelligence agency with headquarters at the papal curia.”22
The apologists also urge us to make a lawyerly distinction between the way the Inquisition was designed to work on paper and the atrocities that took place behind the closed doors of its tribunals and torture chambers. They correctly point out that the workings of the Inquisition were subject to canon law and papal oversight; indeed, the men who designed and ran the Inquisition were obsessed with rules and regulations, and that’s why the inquisitors consulted the handbooks and manuals in which standard operating procedures were prescribed in meticulous detail. The duration of torture was carefully measured out by degrees: the second degree of torture, for example, was to be applied no longer than it took to recite an Ave Maria. If a sadistic or overzealous inquisitor sometimes disregarded the rules and tortured a victim to death, the apologists insist, we should regard any such incident as an aberration—a crime against the Inquisition, in other words, rather than a crime of the Inquisition.
The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual Page 2