The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual

by Jonathan Kirsch

  The fate of Joan of Arc is only the most notorious example of how the machinery of persecution could be put to political use. The Bogomils of Bulgaria in the tenth century—the early precursors of the Cathars—can also be understood in a political context; the founder of the dissident religious community, according to Malcolm Lambert, “gave a voice to a peasantry oppressed by its Byzantine conquerors, its alien Byzantine priesthood and the Bulgarian aristocracy,” all of whose interests were well served by treating the Bogomils as dangerous heretics. King Frederick II (1194–1250), a constant rival and adversary of the popes, agreed to criminalize heresy in the imperial law codes as a “quid pro quo” for his coronation as Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Honorius III in 1220. Even the persecution of the Knights Templar by King Philip IV, rightly seen as “a wild orgy of plunder,” also served the strategic goals of a French king who sought to outflank and overmaster the pope and arrogate to himself the useful tool of the Inquisition.59

  “The dangerous admixture of politics and religion,” observes Henry Charles Lea, “rendered the stake a favorite instrument of statecraft.”60

  So we have seen that the Inquisition could be made to serve more than one function. Sometimes it was a fearful weapon by which the Roman Catholic church sought to enforce a religious monopoly. Sometimes it was a tool of fiscal policy, both to supplement the tax revenues of a spendthrift king and to enrich the inquisitors themselves by means of extortion. Sometimes it was a convenient way to strike a blow at an unfaithful spouse or an unfriendly neighbor, a rival in love or commerce, or an adversary in matters of war and diplomacy. And sometimes it served all these functions at once. But, even so, we have not exhausted the potential uses of the Inquisition. All along, and especially toward the end of its long history, the machinery of persecution was a weapon of culture war.

  On October 31, 1517, the eve of All Saints’ Day, the worst fears of the men who invented the Inquisition were fully realized. For nearly three hundred years, they had crusaded to purge Christendom of every belief and practice that strayed even slightly from the dogma of the “one Universal Church of the faithful.” When Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church at Wittenberg, however, it was plain that they had failed in their mission. The threat—and the fact—of arrest, confiscation, torture, imprisonment, and even burning at the stake turned out to be insufficient to compel ordinary men and women to conform their religious imaginations to a single faith.61

  By then, the Inquisition was operating creakily or not at all in most of western Europe. Only on the Iberian Peninsula, as we shall see in the next chapter, were the friar-inquisitors still fully employed. The Reformation, however, provoked the Church into a renewed spasm of violence in its long war on heresy. The so-called Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, formally established by Pope Paul III in 1542, was intended to function as a refurbished and reinvigorated version of the medieval Inquisition. Old weapons were deployed once again, and new ones were designed to meet the challenge of a new generation of heretics—not Cathars, not Waldensians, but Protestants.

  The old authoritarian impulse was still fully alive. The Inquisition had always been quick to burn heretical books as well as the heretics who wrote them. The “defendant” in one inquisitorial trial in 1317, for example, was a commentary on the book of Revelation by a Franciscan monk named Peter John Olivi; the author himself had died in 1298, but his writings were found to be heretical and were put to the flames along with a few of his readers. Even the most vigilant inquisitor realized, however, that the advent of printing rendered it impossible to put every offending title to the flames. So the Roman Inquisition resorted to the promulgation of the Index Auctorum et Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of authors and books that Catholics were obliged not to read on pain of excommunication. Among the banned authors were Savonarola, Machiavelli, and Boccaccio. Every word written by Erasmus was condemned, portions of Dante’s writings were censored, and special permission from an inquisitor was required to read a translation of the Bible.

  Clearly, the Inquisition was now engaged in what we would call a culture war as well as a war on heresy. For example, Paolo Veronese (1528–1588) was put on trial by the inquisitors in Venice because they objected to the inclusion of “dogs, dwarfs, a fool, a parrot, men with German weapons, and a man with a bleeding nose” as incidental figures in the background of a painting ostensibly depicting a scene from the Bible. The fact that Luther was German—and the fact that the Inquisition no longer operated in Germany and was thus prevented from simply burning him alive—prompted the inquisitors to define heresy in some new and odd ways as evidenced in the transcript of Paolo Veronese’s interrogation.

  Q: Do you know that in Germany and other places infected with heresy it is customary with various pictures full of scurrilousness and similar inventions to mock, vituperate, and scorn the things of the Holy Catholic Church in order to teach bad doctrines to foolish and ignorant people?

  A: Yes, that is wrong; but I return to what I have said, that I am obliged to follow what my superiors have done.

  Q: What have your superiors done? Have they perhaps done similar things?

  A: Michelangelo in Rome in the Pontifical Chapel painted Our Lord, Jesus Christ, His Mother, St John, St Peter, and the Heavenly Host. These are all represented in the nude—even the Virgin Mary—and in different poses with little reverence.

  Q: Do you not know that in painting the Last Judgment in which no garments or similar things are presumed, it was not necessary to paint garments, and that in those figures there is nothing which is not spiritual? There are neither buffoons, dogs, weapons, or similar buffoonery. And does it seem because of this or some other example that you did right to have painted this picture the way you did and do you want to maintain that it is good and decent?62

  Another new front in the war on heresy can be detected in the 1616 edition of the index of banned authors and books, which now included a work of pure science, Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs by the Polish astronomer Mikolaj Kopernik, better known as Copernicus (1473–1543). The fact that Copernicus expressed no opinion on the troublesome points of theology that had cost the Cathars their lives—“Mathematics are for mathematicians,” he observed in the book’s dedication—did not spare his scientific propositions from being condemned as equally false and heretical. The same inquisitorial cast of mind that refused to countenance any minor variation in Christian true belief now condemned the scientific fact that the earth revolves around the sun as treason to God.63

  Copernicus, of course, was already dead when his book was banned, and the inquisitors no longer dug up the corpses of “defunct” heretics for posthumous trials. Still, the Inquisition found its way to a flesh-and-blood victim who had come to embrace the same heretical ideas—the astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Galileo was already famous across Europe when he attracted the attention of Cardinal Bellarmine, the latest bearer of the old title of “Hammer of Heretics,” and the Congregation of the Holy Office, the papal council that oversaw the operations of the Roman Inquisition. For the crime of entertaining the idea that the earth revolves around the sun, Galileo was denounced to the Inquisition in 1616 “for grievous heresy and blasphemy concerning the nature of God.”64

  Galileo was not the first famous scientist to be arrested and tried by the Roman Inquisition. Cardinal Bellarmine had already prosecuted, among others, Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), a celebrated polymath and an early advocate of the Copernican theory of the universe, on charges of holding erroneous opinions about various aspects of Catholic dogma, including the divinity of Jesus Christ, the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the virginity of Mary. Bruno had offered only a halfhearted recantation rather than the abject confession that the Inquisition always demanded, and he was burned alive as an unrepentant heretic. As we have already noted, on the way to the stake Bruno was fitted with an iron gag that painfully pinned his mouth shut, a
final symbolic gesture by the Inquisition.

  Sixteen years later, when Galileo’s work was first scrutinized by the Roman Inquisition, he apparently believed that he could avoid Bruno’s fate by making fine distinctions between teaching that the earth revolves around the sun and merely speculating that it does. With an excess of self-confidence and a certain tragic naïveté, Galileo insisted that he could offer “a thousand proofs” to show that the Copernican system and the Bible could be reconciled. In doing so, he clearly underestimated both the will and the guile of his persecutors. Indeed, the argument has been made that Galileo’s greatest mistake was to alienate the Jesuit priests whose mission it was to defend the Church against the threat of the Reformation, thus making himself a victim of his own arrogance as well as the Inquisition.65 “If Galileo had only known how to retain the favour of the Jesuits, he would have stood in renown before the world,” observed a Jesuit priest named Christophe Grienberger at the time, “and he could have written what he pleased about everything, even about the motion of the Earth.”66

  Then, too, Galileo was so ardent in his pursuit of scientific knowledge that he did not fully appreciate the perils of thinking and speaking freely while living within the reach of the Holy Office. From our perspective, Galileo was ahead of his time, a figure who anticipated a future era when one might fancy himself both a man of science and a man of faith. But that time had not yet come. “He is all afire on his opinions, and he puts great passion in them, and not enough strength in controlling it,” observed the Florentine ambassador to Rome in a private letter, “so that the Roman climate is getting very dangerous for him.”67

  As it turned out, Galileo’s offer of “a thousand proofs” did not count as evidence in the eyes of the inquisitors, and they concluded in 1616 that Galileo’s proposition was “foolish and absurd, philosophically and formally heretical, inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the doctrine of the Holy Scriptures” and “erroneous in faith.” Galileo was admonished to “abstain altogether from teaching or defending this opinion” on the threat of imprisonment. According to the records of the Inquisition, the bad news was personally delivered to Galileo by Cardinal Bellarmine, the Hammer of Heretics and the prosecutor of Giordano Bruno: “The said Galileo was…commanded and enjoined, in the name of His Holiness the Pope and the whole Congregation of the Holy Office, to relinquish altogether the said opinion that the Sun is the center of the world and immovable and that the Earth moves, nor further to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatsoever.”68

  Another sixteen years passed, and Galileo was charged with heresy a second time in 1632 after he published a new work, Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems, in which the same dangerous ideas were considered yet again. The question of what Galileo had been told he could and could not do after his first skirmish with the Inquisition figured crucially in his second trial. Pope Urban VIII himself had assured Galileo that he could write about the subject “provided the treatment were strictly hypothetical.” Galileo dutifully submitted the manuscript of the Dialogue to the Inquisition in both Rome and Florence, and he published the book with the formal permission of the Florentine censor even though the manuscript had been the subject of much concern and consternation among the Roman censors, some of whom frankly did not understand what they were reading. By styling the book as a dialogue, he argued, he had not actually advocated the forbidden idea that the earth revolves around the sun. Moreover, he had appended a “Preface to the Judicious Reader” in which he explicitly stated that the book was hypothetical.69

  None of these assertions and accommodations satisfied the Inquisition, however, and he found himself denounced as a heretic for a second time. When he pleaded that his ill health prevented him from traveling to Rome to stand trial, the Inquisition threatened to bring him back in irons, sick or not. Ironically, the Republic of Venice—where Veronese had been put on trial for the heretical act of putting a dwarf and a German weapon in a painting of the Feast in the House of Levi—offered Galileo a safe refuge from the Roman Inquisition. But Galileo, old and frail and ailing, was already defeated. Indeed, he was no more able to resist the Inquisition than the terrorized old women accused of witchcraft or the Knights Templar who had been tortured into confession at other times and places. “The pallid specter of fear, a craving for acceptance and forgiveness, and the humiliation of begging,” writes one of his biographers, Giorgio de Santillana, “were besieging the man who had hitherto been a joyous and whimsical warrior.”70

  Galileo presented himself at the Palace of the Inquisition in Rome, where he was famously subjected to the same grim ritual that had attended the Inquisition’s proceedings since its very beginning. He was not told the precise nature of the charges against him; rather, he was put under oath “and asked whether he knew or conjectured why he had been summoned.” No attorney was present to assist the old man, and none of the documents that the inquisitors consulted as they interrogated Galileo were shared with him. Like countless other victims of the Inquisition—but unlike the uncompromising Giordano Bruno—Galileo was reduced to utter self-abasement: “My error, then, has been—and I confess it—one of vainglorious ambition and of pure ignorance and inadvertence,” offered Galileo. “I have not held and do not hold as true the opinion which has been condemned.”71

  Contrary to a cherished and oft-repeated legend, Galileo was not shown the instruments of torture by his inquisitors, although he was verbally threatened with torture at the time of his interrogation, all according to the ancient formula as recorded in the inquisitor’s manuals. Nor did he mutter under his breath the famous words of protest often attributed to him: E pur si muove (And yet it moves). Privately, Galileo may have expressed “cold implacable contempt for his judges” and complained that he was the victim of “a masterly conspiracy of ‘hatred, impiety, fraud, and deceit’ that would startle the world if he could tell.” At the end, and in the presence of the inquisitors, however, Galileo readily denied the scientific facts that he earnestly believed to be true. “I do not hold and have not held this opinion of Copernicus since the command was intimated to me that I must abandon it,” he declared. “For the rest, I am here in your hands—do with me what you please.”72

  On the day of his sentencing, again like the countless other victims of the Inquisition, the seventy-year-old Galileo donned the white shirt that marked him as a penitent, knelt in front of the assembly of inquisitor-judges, and recited the ancient and solemn formula of abjuration: “With sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies and generally every other error, heresy, and sect whatsoever contrary to the Holy Church,” he declared. “Should I know any heretic or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place where I may be.”73

  Thanks to his confession and abjuration, the penances required of Galileo were among the mildest that the Inquisition was empowered to impose. The old man was ordered to recite seven penitential psalms each day for three years, and he was sentenced to “the formal prison of this Holy Office for as long as we deem necessary,” although he was permitted to return to his home in Florence and serve out his life sentence under house arrest. Copies of the inquisitorial decree against Galileo, on the order of the Holy Office, were sent “to all Inquisitors against heretical pravity, and especially the Inquisitor in Florence, who shall read the sentence in full assembly and in the presence of most of those who profess the mathematical art.”74

  The trial of Galileo can be seen as nothing more than a finger in the dike of history. His writings may have remained on the Index until 1822, but even while Galileo was still living he was able to publish his final work, Two New Sciences, by sending the manuscript to Amsterdam, which lay far outside the ever-diminishing reach of the Inquisition. Elsewhere in Europe, waves of innovation and intellectual liberty were eroding the walls of true belief and received wisdom in every aspect of the human enterprise—arts and letters, science and technol
ogy, commerce and industry. In that sense, the Inquisition was already defunct in much of Europe and heading toward obsolescence on the day in 1634 when Galileo fell to his knees and mouthed the same words that had passed the lips of condemned men and women four hundred years earlier.

  Yet the condemnation of Galileo as a heretic was far from the last gasp of the Inquisition. Remarkably, the arrest, torture, and burning of heretics was still a lively enterprise in a few other places around Europe, and nowhere more so than in the kingdom of Spain. The same monarchs who had sent Columbus on the fateful voyages that resulted in the discovery of the New World had also embraced the Inquisition as a crucial tool of state policy and imperial ambition. That ambition, as we shall see, had less to do with the war on heresy than with the purging of what Ferdinand and Isabella saw as the taint of Jewish and Muslim blood. For nearly two centuries after the day on which Galileo rose to his feet and walked out of the Palace of the Inquisition in Rome, the Spanish Inquisition remained in existence, and its long shadow is not yet gone.

  PURITY OF BLOOD

  Some people say that you should become Christian, but may God ruin my holiday if I advise it. The reason is that once you have become Christian, they will figure out a way to shove your face in the fire.

  Interrogation of Juan de Salzedo by the Spanish

  Inquisition, 1502