Inquisition

  BY THE MIDDLE OF the 17th century the Iberian peninsula was moving onward only in desolation. Decline hung in the emptying fields and the atrophying cities. Where had it all gone wrong? With the secession of the Dutch United Provinces from Spain in 1568? At the death of the heirless Portuguese King Sebastian in a pointless war in Morocco in 1578? During the failed Armada launched from both countries in 1588? With the temporary loss of parts of Brazil to the Dutch from the 1620s to the 1650s? The list lengthened into the second half of the 17th century with no respite.

  Eventually, Spain had to acknowledge its limitations. After twenty-eight years of conflict Portugal achieved separation from Spain in 1668 but lasting damage had been done to both countries and their empires. Although Portugal had managed to recover Angola (1648), São Tome (1649) and Pernambuco in Brazil (1654) from the Dutch, its empire in the Estado da Índia was irreparably damaged. Bombay (Bom Baia) was transferred to English control in 1661 as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganca with her marriage to Charles II, and the chain of ports from Mombasa to Mozambique Island in east Africa would come under severe attack from the empire of Oman from 1650 onward. By 1700 Portuguese power in east Africa north of Mozambique was finished.1

  For Spain, meanwhile, control of Portugal and its colonies had gone, and in 1648 the independence of the United Provinces was acknowledged. The Spanish population was falling and the state effectively bankrupt. Spain’s American colonies were declining in importance with the rise of North America. The last Spanish king of the 17th century, Charles II, was both physically and mentally disabled, drooled frequently, and proved to be impotent; his death led to the disastrous War of the Spanish Succession.

  What we are looking at here is the decline of imperial powers which had once stretched around the globe. In these circumstances, the inquisitorial bureaucracy which we have observed, bedevilled by minutiae which by any objective standards are meaningless, seems incomprehensible. Yet the emphasis on the steady accumulation of pieces of paper betrays a mentality unable to deal with the reality before it: the reality was of an empire and society in precipitous decline: unable to face it, the inquisitorial mentality took refuge in useless documents designed to safeguard the honour and nobility of the nation.

  In such circumstances opinions which diverged from the chosen picture of reality were unwelcome. The truth perhaps hurts most – and provokes most anger in – those who are increasingly distant from it. Thus in Spain in particular the broad current of European thought groping towards the Enlightenment in the latter 17th century was unpalatable and had to be prevented from polluting the nation. This movement of scientific inquiry, raised on the shoulders of Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Spinoza, was a direct challenge to the inquisitorial world view. The Inquisition could sense from afar that here was an ideology which could deal it a mortal blow in a way that the conversos and the moriscos never had.

  The Inquisition was right to be suspicious, for some of the more important roots of this ideology did indeed penetrate back to the very people whom the inquisitors had pursued remorselessly for so long, the conversos. The development of the scientific world view was in fact deeply connected with the waves of persecution which the Inquisition had first unleashed in Spain at the end of the 15th century, 200 years before this era of decline.

  Zaragoza 1485 to Bordeaux 1592

  ON THE LAST DAY of February in 1533 a son was born to Pierre Eyquem and Antoinette Lopez in south-west France. Eyquem was a prominent local dignitary who would later be mayor of Bordeaux and a councillor at Court in Périgeux. The name Lopez was, however, less obviously French. This is not the first time that we have met it in our story, however, for Antoinette Lopez’s family had migrated across the border to France during the first onslaught of the Spanish Inquisition, with the persecutions that afflicted Zaragoza in 1486 after the assassination of Inquisitor Pedro de Arbues.*1 Midnight assassinations, autos burning in the enclosed streets of the city, an atmosphere of paranoia and vengeance; here lay some of the more unexpected origins of the modern scientific world view.

  Antoinette Lopez’s father had been called Pierre Lopez de Villanueva. When the autos tore into the converso community of Zaragoza in the late 15th century many including Pierre fled to France, but not all members of the family were as fortunate. His father, Micer Pablo Lopez de Villanueva, and his father’s father, Juan Fernando Lopez de Villanueva, were both burnt in the autos in Zaragoza which followed the sensational assassination of Arbúes.2 It is worth pausing for a moment to imagine the mindset which the refugees must have taken with them. These were the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people who had, often voluntarily, left the Jewish faith for Christianity.*2 They had then been rejected by their new religious community, and persecuted for their origins. It would be surprising if some of these people had not begun to doubt the validity of all religions. Certainly, it was precisely such scepticism which was implanted in the family of the Lopez de Villanueva.

  The son born to Pierre Eyquem and Antoinette Lopez in February 1533 became known to the world as Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne, in the view of some philosophers today, was the central figure in the evolution of modern sceptical philosophy, a forerunner to Descartes and Hume and the rise of the scientific world view.3 In the 16th century he was the most eloquent champion of a brand of thinking known as Pyrrhonian scepticism, which held that there was never enough evidence to determine whether knowledge was possible, hence all judgment should be suspended4 – a sort of agnosticism as to whether anything could ever be known.5

  These ideas were reformulated by Montaigne and advanced in his famous Essays, still read today for their scope, wit and literary style. Many of the views put forward in the Essays were testament to Montaigne’s belief in the validity of individual ideas and opinions. In his essay on the education of children, he noted that he was putting forward ‘my humours and opinions: I give them because they are what I believe, not because they are what everyone should believe’.6 His understanding of the gulfs that separate different views of the world and how each can appear valid to those that hold them was summarized in his statement in his famous essay on cannibals that ‘people call barbarous that which is foreign to them’.7

  It is the relevance of insights such as these even today, over 400 years after their formulation, which reveals Montaigne’s innovativeness to his contemporaries. It is worth reflecting on the contrast between his belief in the essential independence of thought and expression and the ideology of the institution which had persecuted some of his ancestors in Zaragoza. As far as the Inquisition was concerned, it was precisely independence of thought and belief that was most dangerous and in need of punishment; should it therefore surprise us if one of the descendants of its victims championed the very ideas which the Inquisition found most dangerous?

  This does not mean that Montaigne saw his Essays as deliberate challenges to the Inquisition or the ideology that lay behind it. One must be clear from the outset that Montaigne was not brought up as a crypto-Jew. While his mother’s father came from Zaragoza, his mother’s mother Honorette Dupuy was from an old Gascon Catholic family,8 and Antoinette was brought up as a Protestant.9 Montaigne himself was raised, like his father, to be a Catholic, but quickly became fascinated by both Reformation and Counter-Reformation thought. One must acknowledge this Christian background, but one must also recognize that Montaigne’s converso background places some of his ideas in an intriguing perspective.

  One idea to emerge from Montaigne was his emphasis on the distance between intention and action. Like a 16th-century Freud, Montaigne was aware that the two were quite different things. As he put it at one point, ‘deeds must go with words . . . the real mirror of our ideas are the courses of our lives’.10 One might say, for example, all kinds of beautiful things about loving one’s neighbour and charity, and the need to sow peace and harmony in troubled parts of the world, but if one spent one’s life waging war against people and sowing enmities among them it was difficult to arg
ue that love and charity were one’s deepest intentions; or as Montaigne noted in his essay on freedom of conscience, ‘it is very common to see very good intentions, if they are conducted without moderation, drive men to produce very vicious results’.11

  One sees here Montaigne’s despair at the role of passion in the lives of human beings and his emphasis on moderation. His most influential essay on scepticism is called the Apology of Raimond Sebond, and in it Montaigne stresses that religion should not be guided by passion but by faith. There is, he wrote, ‘nowhere such excellent an hostility as a Christian hostility. Our zeal wreaks marvels, when it bolsters our tendency towards hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion . . . Our religion is supposed to be made to extirpate vices; but it conceals, nourishes and incites them.’12 Again, the tension between intention and action is evident, as is Montaigne’s conviction that true religion should not be guided by passion, which only leads people astray.

  In the Apology of Raimond Sebond Montaigne attacks the idea of Christian universality, both by pointing to the irrational passions which so often underlie religion, and by arguing for relativism. ‘We receive our religion in our own way and through our own hands, and no differently from the way in which other religions are received . . . [in other circumstances] another religion, other witnesses, similar promises and threats could in the same way imprint in us a contrary belief . . . we are Christians in the same way that we are Périgordins or Germans.’13 He argues that, rather than using our inherently flawed reasoning to reach God, simple faith is the way forward for a ‘good man [homme de bien]’,14 lest there be an attempt to subject the divine power to the legal interpretations of men.15 This philosophy is called fideism.

  The key to the argument is Montaigne’s scepticism.16 Such scepticism was in fact what saved Montaigne’s reputation in the eyes of religious orthodoxy, for it was used by the Counter-Reformation – following the argument advanced by Montaigne – to argue that faith alone was the route to salvation. The possibility of absolute scepticism was used by Catholic theologians to engage Calvinists in particular in debates which ended up leading them towards a total scepticism which made their own viewpoint meaningless – and left faith in dogma as a rational position.17

  At the same time, however, this development of an agnosticism of knowledge was the beginning of a long road. It would be taken up enthusiastically by philosophers and champions of science such as Francis Bacon and Galileo*3 to push Europe towards the scientific outlook which, in the 18th-century Enlightenment, would come to challenge decisively the theological view of the world held by institutions like the Inquisition. Montaigne’s version of Pyrrhonian scepticism was one of the most important sources of a movement which would eventually lead all branches of knowledge into a sceptical crisis from which the modern scientific outlook would emerge.18 In the 18th century, as we shall see, it was this outlook which would become the principal bugbear of the Inquisition as it decayed towards extinction.

  It is worth pausing for a moment to recall the way in which both conversos and moriscos were hardened into heresy by the persecution directed at them. These were cases, as we have seen, of the Inquisition at some level creating the heresy which it proceeded to persecute and which it saw as its greatest threat. In the case of the Enlightenment a comparable process was at work, as we see in the case of Montaigne. The circumstances created by the Inquisition gave rise to the forces which rebelled against it through a new ideology: the scientific world view.

  For while Montaigne was no crypto-Jew, he was aware of his background. He wrote a long exposition of the history of the Jews of Spain in an essay dealing ostensibly with the attachment which some people have towards dying, with his excursus on the history of the Jews and conversos being much the longest example in this essay.19 The first publisher of his Essays, Simón Millanges, was the son of a converso, and the book was printed on 1 March 1580, the date of the Jewish festival of Purim that year. Purim was the most symbolic festival for those conversos who were crypto-Jews for it deals with keeping to the Jewish faith in times of oppression.*4 Montaigne declared in his introduction that the ‘date [of publication] was intentionally chosen, to permit companions to understand its hidden message’.20 Here is undeniable evidence of converso influence in Montaigne’s thought in spite of the fact that only one of his grandparents had indeed been converso.

  This statement implies that Montaigne’s real beliefs were hidden behind outward opinions and suggests contentions such as that in the Apology of Raimond Sebond, ‘The pest of mankind is the opinion of knowledge. This is why ignorance is so enjoined to us by our religion as a vital element in our belief’,21 while supposedly supporting his fideism, were intended as irony. For conversos and descendants of conversos such as Montaigne the use of ‘dual language and equivocation’ had become an accepted means of concealing subversive opinions behind those that were outwardly acceptable.22 This was something which Montaigne, a voracious reader, would have known all too well, hiding the dynamite which was his scepticism behind the fac¸ade of his greater devotion to faith which he pretended to derive from it.23 This was a tactic which would be employed in an analogous context by Charles Darwin in his 1859 publication of Origin of Species.

  When one considers this, the continual exhortations in Montaigne’s Essays towards relativism and against the role of the passions in religion, and his emphasis on the importance of measuring people by actions and not words, it is difficult not to conclude that the history of his maternal ancestors in Zaragoza must have had at least some impact on the evolution of his philosophy.24 By its very persecution, the Inquisition fostered an atmosphere in which those it persecuted came to question all received truths. In such an atmosphere a new ideology would develop, one which was sceptical of all claims to divine right and justice, and which would herald the modern age – the very modern age which would ultimately bring the Inquisition down.

  IT IS INSTRUCTIVE to read accounts of how the attentions of the Inquisition affected the attitudes of converses and moriscos towards religion. In both cases, while no doubt some had their faith in their ancestral Islamic or Jewish creed strengthened, as they fled to North Africa (if morisco) or the Ottoman empire (if converse), those who remained in Portugal and Spain were forced into a double life which often turned them towards a sceptical outlook.

  Living as a morisco often required a sort of ambiguous, double existence. The reality for some was summed up by an Old Christian in the town of Daimiel in Castile in the 1530s, who said to the morisco Lope Cambil, ‘When you were Muslims, you always told the truth, but now you never do’.25 Meanwhile, as we saw from the morisco uprising in Andalusia 1568–70, some of what moriscos did was hardly consonant with Islamic practice.*5

  Scepticism was, however, more apparent among converses. A typical converse view which was frequently denounced to the inquisitors was that ‘there was nothing more to existence than being born and dying’.26 The social position of these converts encouraged scepticism. As the bishop of Porto Alegre (Brazil) put it in the 16th century, these people, ‘pretending to be Christians, are neither Jews nor Christians’.27 The lack of full instruction in either religion could often lead towards atheism.28

  An ambiguous religious outlook was often married to geographical instability. Many conversos travelled constantly around both Europe and the colonies in Africa, America and Asia, as we have seen with the Carvajal family. These wanderings gave them a position between different worlds and, together with their religious ambiguity, created an environment in which they often found it impossible to adopt any one particular mindset, or religion, as entirely their own.29

  Such feelings are easy to understand today in our equally fragmentary lives. Where one can freely enter so many different contexts and worlds, morality comes more and more to seem like a child of custom. Not for nothing did a traveller exclaim in the early 17th century, ‘For who would have thought, that I who had seene so many sexs [sic: sects] and varieties of Religion, dispers
ed over the face of the earth, could have stucke fast to any Religion at all’.30 Thus, with their perennial travelling and the perennial insecurity that was their lot, did the conversos become prototypes for the modern sceptic.31 The conversos were permanent travellers because the persecutions of the Inquisition made them feel unsafe in any part of the Iberian world, Europe or the colonies. Scepticism was therefore not just a result of the memory of persecution, but also originated from the social condition which had become the lot of the conversos. In this situation, Michel de Montaigne was not to be the only converso descendant to develop a sceptical philosophy which would directly challenge the ideology of the Inquisition.

  Montaigne studied for seven years at the Collége de Guyenne in Bordeaux. It had perhaps been here that converso intellectual influence had been brought most strongly to bear, for this important educational establishment had been founded in 1533 by the Portuguese converso André de Gouveia, who brought many other conversos to the faculty. In 1547 Gouveia was replaced by another converso, Jean Gelida, the tutor of Montaigne and, twenty years later, of another converso student who was to be almost as important in the development of scepticism.32 This was the Portuguese doctor Francisco Sanches, whose book That Nothing Is Known*6 would dovetail with Montaigne’s views and lead directly to the ideas of Descartes and Spinoza.

  Sanches was born in northern Portugal in 1551. Along with many Portuguese conversos of the time, his family moved to Bordeaux in 1562 as the attacks of the Inquisition on Portuguese converso families became ever stronger. Like his father Sanches trained as a doctor and spent most of his life in Toulouse. Here he held the university chairs of medicine and philosophy and lived as a practising and devout Christian – so much so that his two sons became priests.33

  In his book – published in Lyon in 1581 – Sanches proclaimed time and again his complete scepticism. The first line of his book declares, ‘I do not know even this one thing, namely that I know nothing’,34 an assertion repeated in various guises throughout the book. From this starting point Sanches proceeded to demolish the Aristotelian theories of logic and science that had come to dominate scholastic circles, arguing that it was impossible to have certain or perfect knowledge of the rational world. This led Sanches to a very early form of empiricism in which he argued that direct study and verification of physical phenomena were the only paths to knowledge of the natural world.35 As he wrote, challengingly, in his introduction, ‘Let them be deceived who wish to be deceived; it is not for them I write, so they need not read my works . . . I would address myself to those who, “not bound by the oath of fidelity to any master’s words”, assess the facts for themselves, under the guidance of sense-perception and reason’.36