The Inquisition, however, is not merely a point of academic interest. Although the historical Inquisition may not have been quite what it was advertised to be by “the great denouncer,” the fact remains that the grand inquisitors aspired to create a Brave New World of authoritarian mind-control, and their example has inspired the same Orwellian dreams in successive generations—not only in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia but even here in America. The inquisitorial toolkit has remained open and in active use, and the modern inquisitors have been even more ruthless than the original ones. Indeed, as we shall see, the machinery of persecution was applied in the twentieth century to produce atrocities on a scale that would have beggared even the fertile imagination of the first men to carry the title of Inquisitors into Heretical Depravity.
The crimes of the Inquisition, as we have now seen in sometimes gruesome detail, begin with the persecution of men, women, and children for nothing more than entertaining a private thought that the Church condemned as heretical. In some cases, the victims were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and burned for an offense that existed only in the minds of the inquisitors, as in the case of the Witch Craze, or for the accident of having a distant Jewish ancestor, as in the case of the Spanish Inquisition. The fundamental fact that real human beings suffered and died at the hands of the inquisitors for nothing more than a thought-crime—or for no crime at all—is sometimes overlooked in the scholarly debate over the Inquisition. Now and then, we need to recall the ordeal of the Jewish converso named Elvira del Campo, stripped naked and put to torture by the Spanish Inquisition in 1568 because eating pork made her sick to the stomach, if only to remind ourselves of the human face of the Inquisition: “Lord,” she cried, “bear witness that they are killing me without my being able to confess!”6 “
To keep these abominations out of sight,” observes G. G. Coulton, “is the same offence as to describe the French Revolution without the guillotine.”7
The case against the Inquisition goes beyond its flesh-and-blood victims. For example, the routine use of torture as a tool of criminal justice by civil police and courts throughout Europe, starting in the Middle Ages and continuing for five hundred years, has been attributed to the example set by the Inquisition. Even the apparent superiority of northern Europe over southern Europe in commerce, scholarship, science, and technology is sometimes explained as a result of the chilling effect of the Inquisition in the places where it lasted the longest and exercised the greatest authority. It is no accident, in other words, that Galileo’s writings were banned in Italy even as they were being published in Holland, or that Spain remained the sick man of western Europe for a century after the Inquisition was formally abolished: “The Dead Hand of the Holy Office,” explains Cecil Roth, “was pressing slowly on the vital arteries of Spanish intellectual life.”8
Yet the Inquisition has its defenders, as we have already seen, and even those who reluctantly admit that the Inquisition was capable of excess also suggest that it was never as fearful as historians such as Lea, Coulton, and Roth have depicted it. Those who seek to justify or explain away the Inquisition argue that it was governed by the rule of law, at least in theory, and they insist that its atrocities and excesses were the exception rather than the rule. They point out that “the Inquisition” is a term that meant different things at different times and places across history, ranging from a freelance papal inquisitor like Robert le Bougre in thirteenth-century France to the elaborate bureaucracy of the grand inquisitor and La Suprema in Spain after the fifteenth century.
Above all, the revisionists contend that the Inquisition never really fulfilled its mission, if only because the friar-inquisitors lacked the means to carry out the task of ridding Christendom of every heresy and every heretic. When Henry Charles Lea condemns the Inquisition for creating “a system unspeakably atrocious,” the revisionists retort, he is focusing on the grandiose ambitions of the inquisitors and overlooking their meager achievements. The sorry if also sordid reality, they insist, is something quite different from the carnage that we find in so many accounts of the Inquisition, both in history books and in storybooks.9
“For the Inquisition to have been as powerful as suggested, the fifty or so inquisitors in Spain would need to have had an extensive bureaucracy, a reliable system of informers, regular income and the cooperation of the secular and ecclesiastical authorities,” writes Henry Kamen, a leading modern historian of the Spanish Inquisition. “At no time did it have any of these.”10
So we are invited to regard the Inquisition as a sporadic, quixotic, often hapless, and ultimately futile enterprise. The revisionists point out, by way of example, that the inquisitors were always running short of funds if not of heretics and heresies: “Your Majesty should above all provide that the expenses of the Holy Office do not come from the property of the condemned,” wrote one daring converso to Charles V in 1538, “because it is a repugnant thing if inquisitors cannot eat unless they burn.” Ironically, the defenders are able to cite “the great denouncer” for the proposition that the Inquisition was so ineffectual that it could do nothing to stop the single greatest challenge to the authority of the Roman Catholic church, the Protestant Reformation.11 “Had it existed in Germany in good working order, Luther’s career would have been short,” Lea quips. “An Inquisitor like Bernard Gui would have speedily silenced him.”12
Sometimes the apologia offered by modern commentators seems overly generous, if not downright bizarre, in light of the facts available to us. “It was not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible,” write Renaissance historians John and Anne Tedeschi about the Roman Inquisition in the introduction to their translation of Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. “Capricious and arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, and wanton abuse of human rights were not tolerated. Rome watched over the provincial tribunals, enforced the observance of what was, for the times, an essentially moderate code of law, and maintained, to the extent that a consensus existed, uniformity of practice.”13
Yet, as we learn from Carlo Ginzburg’s account of one flesh-and-blood victim of the Inquisition, the miller called Menocchio was twice arrested, tried, and convicted on charges of heresy because, among the weightier items of evidence cited against him, he possessed a vernacular translation of the Bible, a book that might or might not have been a copy of the Koran, and a fatally loose tongue. “He was always arguing with somebody about the faith just for the sake of arguing,” one witness testified against him. Like all victims of the Inquisition, Menocchio was required to name names, and when his answers were deemed unsatisfactory, he was tortured with the strappado. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus,” the old man cried as the inquisitorial notary took down his every anguished word. “Oh poor me, oh poor me.” On his second conviction, Menocchio was sent to the stake as a relapsed heretic, but only after the vigilant bureaucrats of the Holy Office had pointedly reminded the local inquisitors of their sacred duty to burn the old man alive.14 “[Y]ou must not fail to proceed with that diligence required by the gravity of the case, so that he may not go unpunished for his horrible and execrable excesses,” went the merciless message from Rome, “but that he may serve as an example to others in those parts by receiving a just and severe punishment. Therefore do not fail to carry it out with all the promptness and rigor of mind demanded by the importance of the case.”15
The burning of a talkative religious eccentric, as the Tedeschis readily concede, cannot be seen as an act of “moral justice” but they still see it as an example of “legal justice,” at least as the notion was understood and applied in the sixteenth century. They urge us to look at the Inquisition in its historical context, an era in which Europe turned into “a persecuting society,” according to R. I. Moore, with victims that included not only religious dissidents but anyone whose ancestry, appearance, sexual practices, or gender orientation was perceived to be different and therefore dangerous. To ap
ply our modern notions of liberty and due process of law to the Inquisition, some historians suggest, is a pointless anachronism, and they insist that it is possible to explain the peculiarities of the past without condoning them. The proper role of the historian, as Moore explains it, is “with Spinoza, not to ridicule men’s actions, or bewail them, or despise them, but to understand.”16
Yet there is a terrible risk in dismissing of the Inquisition as an antique curiosity that can be safely contained between the covers of a history book. Precisely because the Inquisition provides a blueprint for building and operating the machinery of persecution—and a rationale for using the same apparatus to exterminate one’s enemies—the Inquisition was and still is a danger to human life and human liberty.
So the Inquisition must be seen as both a fact of history and an idea that transcends history. Edward Peters, for example, argues that the inquisitions as they actually existed and operated—he pointedly insists on the lower case i and the plural noun—“were transformed by polemic and fiction into a myth” and then into “an indictment, by the modern world, of an earlier Europe for its crushing of the human spirit.” The fact and the idea of the Inquisition are distinguishable, and that is what a revisionist historian like Peters insists that we must do.
But the Inquisition is more than a lens through which to look at the events of the far-distant past. Rather, as Peters reminds us, the Inquisition has come to be “woven tightly into the fabric of modern consciousness,” and it has continued to inspire new generations of persecutors long after the last of the friar-inquisitors were dead and buried. In that sense, the inquisitorial idea has been at work in the world ever since it was first conceived in the thirteenth century, never more so than in the twentieth century and even in our own times.17 Indeed, as we shall see, the inquisitorial apparatus was constantly improved and put to new uses against new victims even as the Inquisition faded into history.
The Inquisition first articulated and embraced the daring idea of eradicating all heresies and exterminating all heretics, an elastic term that came to include Jews, Muslims, homosexuals, radical priests, female mystics, and even the occasional midwife or miller whose eccentricities were unsettling to one inquisitor or another. “Several popes and kings in the high and late Middle Ages had the cast of mind to effect these holocausts,” explains Norman F. Cantor in Inventing the Middle Ages, and only the primitive state of medieval technology and statecraft prevented them from doing so. So the argument that the Inquisition was rather less ghastly than it aspired to be may be historically accurate, but it is morally sterile. The medieval inquisitors lacked only the means and not the will to rid the world of everyone they regarded as “heretical filth,” and so Cantor concludes that “the indictment against the Middle Ages runs.”18
Within a century after the last victim of the Spanish Inquisition was put to the flames, a new generation of inquisitors came to power in Europe. They enjoyed access to the technology of the twentieth century—railroads, chemical pesticides, automatic weapons, radio transmitters, and much else besides—and they swore themselves to serve rulers who enjoyed far more authority than any pope or king of the Middle Ages. But they embraced the same hateful idea that was the raison d’être of the Inquisition, and so they were able to update and automate the medieval equipment and set it into operation on an industrial scale. “The modern totalitarian state in Nazi Germany and the Leninist-Stalinist Soviet Union and its satellites was a realization of a medieval nightmare,” writes Cantor. “The result was Auschwitz and the Gulag, World War II, and the death of at least twenty million civilians at the hands of the Nazi and Bolshevik governments.”19
To be sure, the willingness to torture and kill one’s fellow human beings because of some trivial difference in appearance or habit or belief hardly began with the Inquisition. The first heretic to be burned alive in Spain, for example, was Priscillian of Ávila, who was sent to the stake on charges of witchcraft in 383, more than a thousand years before the Spanish Inquisition came into existence. The persecutorial impulse—“the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil”—seems to be hardwired into Western civilization. Sad to say, human beings as a species have never failed to find reasons to regard one another with fear and loathing and thus to offer violence to one another.20
But the Inquisition transformed these ugly and tragic impulses into something vastly more powerful and thus more perilous by draping them in the trappings of law and theology and creating a bureaucracy to organize and administer the bloodshed. Once available, the inquisitorial toolbox could be put to use by any authoritarian regime with the will and the means to unpack and use it. “Here, then, was an engine so constructed that it might be turned effectually to any purpose,” explains Coulton. “Good purpose or bad purpose depended only upon the policy or the caprice of the man or the group who had this tribunal at command.”21 The “engine” to which Coulton is referring is the medieval Inquisition, but his words apply with equal force to the lowercase inquisitions of the twentieth century and, as we shall see, the opening decades of the third millennium, too.
When a young SS officer named Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) first showed up for work at the Main Office for the Security of the Reich in Berlin, he was promptly sworn to secrecy and then ushered into a locked room in the headquarters of the Gestapo in the ornate Prinz-Albrecht-Palais. “Then I saw what we would be doing,” he later recalled, “and it gave me the creeps.” What gave Eichmann the creeps, as it turns out, had nothing to do with the crimes against humanity for which he was later tried and hanged by the state of Israel. But it had everything to do with the machinery of persecution that had been borrowed from the Inquisition and put to use in Nazi Germany.
“We had to put the card files in alphabetical order,” Eichmann told the Israeli police captain who interrogated him in advance of his trial. “It was all about Freemasons. We sorted and sorted. Always taking care to keep the right letters together, the C’s with the C’s and so on. I’d never even heard of the Freemasons, I had no idea what they were.”22
Eichmann’s reminiscences—yet another scene that must be described as Kafkaesque—reveal something important about the Inquisition and the long shadow that it casts across history. Like the friar-inquisitors who came before them, the dutiful bureaucrats who operated the Nazi version of the machinery of persecution were avid collectors of information, which they also gathered from spies, informers, and prisoners interrogated under torture. Both the Inquisition and the Nazi regime were fearful of any idea or practice that fell outside the narrow circle of dogma; thus, for example, both turned their attention to Freemasons, homosexuals, and Jews, among other victims. Both were obsessed with their self-appointed mission of imposing a rigid authoritarian order on an unruly world, always putting “the C’s with the C’s.” Tragically, the similarities do not stop there.
When Eichmann was later transferred to what he called “the Jews department,” he was handed a copy of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State and told “to make an abstract of it to serve as an orientation booklet for the General SS”—a kind of latter-day inquisitor’s manual. Even after Eichmann had been promoted to the upper ranks of the bureaucracy whose job it was to find and kill Jews, his underlings were still collecting and sorting index cards (Judenkartei or “Jew cards”) that were “intended to identify every Jew living in the Reich,” a task the Nazi regime deemed necessary “for a successful internal struggle against Jewry.”23
Just as the Roman Inquisition was headquartered in the Vatican and the Spanish Inquisition was governed by La Suprema in the Palace of the Inquisition in Madrid, their counterpart in Nazi Germany was administered from a complex of stately buildings in Berlin, the same site where Eichmann was first assigned to sort index cards. Working under the command of a failed chicken farmer named Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) who rose to the lofty rank of Reichsführer, the dutiful Nazi bureaucrats su
pervised the day-to-day operations of the secret state police (Geheime Staatspolizei, better known as the Gestapo), the criminal police, the security service of the SS, and the various other departments in charge of the mundane tasks required to carry out a well-organized genocide. Together they aspired to create and operate “an entirely integrated system of surveillance, reporting and arrests,” according to historian and Holocaust survivor Saul Friedländer, with the ultimate goal of supplying “combustible material” for the crematoria.24
To accomplish these tasks, the Nazis used many of the same instruments of torture that would have been found in any inquisitorial dungeon. The Gestapo, for example, contrived its own version of the strappado by suspending the victim from a rope threaded through his or her handcuffs, and then dangling and jerking the victim at the pleasure of the questioning officer. The ordeal by water was applied by forcibly submerging the victim in a tub of cold water or by leaving the victim in a barrel of water placed outside in cold weather until he or she was nearly frozen, and the ordeal by fire was administered by use of a soldering iron.
The Nazis were enchanted with medieval legend and lore, as we shall see, but they were not content with medieval technology, and so they encouraged innovation and invention in the application of torture. A favorite technique of the Gestapo was to apply electrical shocks conveyed through wires attached to the penis and the anus of the victim. Like the Renaissance artisan who fashioned the Pear as a tool for the torture of heretics, some nameless German inventor in service to the Nazi regime devised a cunning little metal box with a thread-and-screw device that allowed the Gestapo torturer to slowly crush the testicles of his victim during questioning.
The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual Page 27