Inquisition

  Montaigne and Sanches were between them, as one leading scholar has put it, ‘responsible for a re-examination of old claims to knowledge by thinkers in the seventeenth century’.37 They were the two philosophers to make ‘a major contribution to the diffusion of sceptical ideas [in the sixteenth century]’.38 Moreover, Sanches’s reading of Aristotle was heavily indebted to the humanist Joan-Lluis Vives, and in particular to Vives’s book De Disciplinis.39 Vives had been born in Valencia in 1493 and studied in Italy before settling in Bruges until his death in 1540. He was a friend of Erasmus and Thomas More and a prominent figure in the humanist movement sweeping Europe;40 perhaps it will come as no surprise to learn that, like Montaigne and Sanches, Vives was a converso.

  Joan-Lluis Vives had direct personal experience of the Inquisition and its methods. His great-grandfather Pau Vives had been condemned in one of the very first autos of the new Inquisition, in Valencia in 1482.41 Then in 1500 the Inquisition had uncovered a secret synagogue in the house of his grandfather Miguel where his father Lluis had been implicated in heretical ceremonies. This time the family members were reconciled, but in 1522 the Inquisition struck again, arresting his father Lluis and four other relatives. His father was burnt at an auto in 1524, together with his uncle Joan Mac¸ana and effigies of his mother Blanquina March (who had died in 1508), and of his great-aunt.42

  Some have argued that the converso background of Vives is testament precisely to the lack of a specifically converso ideology influencing intellectual ideas in the 16th century.43 Vives, certainly, was no crypto-Jew, yet as we have seen, he influenced Sanches in his powerful development of a sceptical philosophy to match the scepticism of which individual conversos were often accused. And, like Montaigne and Sanches, Vives held that absolute truth could not be known by the human mind, believing that the sceptic’s aim should be to see whether or not trustworthy – if not entirely accurate – knowledge could be obtained.44 At one point he wrote, ‘We are ignorant of the beginning, development and causes of every single thing’.45

  Where the impact of the Inquisition on Vives’s philosophy can best be traced, however, is that like Montaigne and Sanches he was a devoted champion of the priority of reason.46 While, unlike Montaigne and Sanches, he favoured reaching probable forms of truth rather than abandoning the conceit of knowledge altogether, like them he feared the triumph of passion over reason. If reason was abandoned, he wrote, the danger was that ‘we will fall into absurd fictions and end up pursuing fickle dreams instead of wise doctrines’.47 The type of fickle dreams he had in mind was revealed in a letter which he wrote to his friend Erasmus in January 1524 in which he described his hope that the popularity of Erasmus in Spain might lead the Spaniards ‘to soften and to dismantle certain barbarous conceptions of life, conceptions with which these penetrating but uneducated and inhumane spirits are imbued’.48 It is worth bearing in mind that it was in January 1524 that Vives’s father Lluis was incarcerated in the inquisitorial jail prior to being burnt to death; the ‘barbarous conceptions of life’ which he feared need no further explanation.

  Here a pattern begins to emerge, surely, in the origins of the sceptical philosophy that came to dominate the Western tradition during the Enlightenment. Persecution, it turns out, could not only lead to a general current of scepticism among conversos in their travels around the world; it could also lead the intellectuals among them to formulate ideas which assisted in the overthrow of all received certainties. These figures preached scepticism and the need to obtain knowledge by observation of the natural world – what became known as scientific experiment. It was the very experience of persecution which led to these intellectuals developing a concrete ideology which, between the 16th and the 18th centuries, helped along with many others to shatter the certainties upon which the ideology of the Inquisition was based.

  The influence of this first generation of converso sceptics was far-reaching. Sanches’s That Nothing Is Known was reprinted in Frankfurt in 161849 and may have been read by René Descartes – in Frankfurt in 1619 – as he worked his way towards writing his famous work on scepticism, Discourse on Method.50 Descartes was in turn studied by Baruch Spinoza, a Jew from Amsterdam whose family had previously been conversos and had moved to Holland to be able to live as Jews.51 Spinoza rejected Judaism and developed a form of scientific empiricism and a metaphysical system which was essentially Godless and prefigured some of the Enlightenment ideas which so bedevilled the Inquisition in the 18th century. Spinoza’s ideas sprang from the strong current of converso scepticism, and there were many ways in which Spinoza reformulated both converso literary styles and ideas.52

  It would be a mistake to take these ideas too far. No one can say that all or even most of the credit or blame for the rise of sceptical philosophy should be laid at the door of the conversos. But the fact that perhaps the three most important sceptics of the 16th century – Montaigne, Sanches and Vives – were all from families with experience of the Inquisition, and that the champion of a Godless world view where knowledge was obtained by scientific experiment in the 17th century – Spinoza – also came from this background is suggestive.

  As we saw in the last chapter, the corruption of the Inquisition at home led to decay in the very things it wished to preserve. Abroad, its history of persecution led to the development of philosophies which would further undermine it. Every extreme action, perhaps, provokes an extreme reaction. And thus like every authoritarian institution or government did the Inquisition possess the seeds of the tendencies which would destroy it.

  IN 1499 A PLAY was written which, together with Cervantes’s Don Quixote, has widely been hailed as one of the masterpieces of Spanish literature. The play is called La Celestina, and deals with the doomed love of a young rake called Calisto. Calisto loves a noble lady called Melibea, but loves her in despair as he is not of her station. However, Calisto’s servant Sempronio introduces him to a local procuress called Celestina, who specializes in the arcane (but important) art of restoring maidenheads to ‘virgins’. Celestina lures Melibea towards Calisto, but the young gallant dies falling off a ladder while leaving Melibea’s house in the dark, and his bereft lover responds by killing herself. Replace the impossibility of bridging snobbery with the impossibility of reconciling feuding noble houses, and here is much of the plot of Romeo and Juliet a century before Shakespeare.

  In La Celestina the storyline combines beautiful disquisitions on many fine human emotions with some extremely powerful writing. A feature of the text, however, is the existence of phrases which could also convey an inquisitorial meaning. In the opening scene Calisto declares to Sempronio that ‘the flame which kills one soul is bigger than that which burnt a hundred thousand bodies’.53 This flame, for Calisto, is his love for Melibea, but when he is challenged by Sempronio as persevering with something bad, Calisto responds, ‘You know little about steadfastness’, to which Sempronio answers, ‘Perseverance in sin is not constancy, but is called stubbornness and pertinacity in my country’.54 When considering an inquisitorial subtext here, one must bear in mind that heretics condemned to burn were called pertinaz in the language of the Inquisition.

  Another servant, Parmeno, tells Calisto that ‘you lost the name of a free man when you allowed your will to become captive’55 (as the conversos had become captives to inquisitorial jurisdiction when they had converted to Christianity). When Celestina describes the suffering of Parmeno’s mother, who has been processed in an auto for witchcraft, she relates how ‘with false witnesses and severe tortures they made her confess what she had never done’56 and how she had been told by a priest that ‘the Holy Scripture held that the fortunate were those who suffered persecution in the name of justice, and that they would inherit the kingdom of Heaven’.57

  Such clear instances of an inquisitorial subtext do not occur on every page of La Celestina, but they are undoubtedly present, although they should not be used as the only prism through which to interpret the play.58 But they are an important element o
f its context, and it will by now come as no surprise to learn that the author of La Celestina, Fernando de Rojas, was born in Castile in around 1476 to a converso family. When he was ten years old, in 1486, his future father-in-law was reconciled by the Inquisition, while his father-in-law’s parents were exhumed and their bodily remains burnt.59 Having written the play as a young man, Rojas became an upstanding figure in society, a barrister, and even acted in some inquisitorial trials, but when one reads some of the passages of La Celestina there can be little doubt that Rojas’s converso background was one of the emotional sources for the play.

  There were large numbers of conversos among the most important writers of golden age Spain. The very first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, written in 1554 by an anonymous author and depicting Spanish society from the perspective of an individual at its bottom, is known to have been written by a converso,60 as was the great poetry of Luis de Góngora.61 Even Cervantes had some converso ancestry, and some historians have gone as far as to suggest from the sort of food that he ate that Don Quixote himself was supposed to be a converso.

  Just as there is no coincidence in the fact that some of the most important early sceptics were conversos, so there is no coincidence about the prevalence of conversos among the most important Spanish dramatists, poets and novelists of the 16th century. The dissonance which existed between the converso individual and his ambiguous place in society created an alienation which was the starting point for the literature of the golden age, and indeed for the alienation at the heart of all modern literature.62

  There were, it is true, other reasons for the predominance of conversos in writing and philosophy. Their Jewish ancestors had come to Christian Spain in the first place from the far more cultivated Muslim kingdom of Al-Andalus; there they had inherited a tradition of scholarship and literature unavailable to the militaristic Christians, for whom excessive intellectual activity would have obstructed the reconquest.63 This inevitably meant that a disproportionate number of thinkers and writers were conversos, but it also meant that thinking and writing came to be associated with heresy.

  The impact of this began to be felt in the 16th century, when the converso class as a whole gained a reputation for being clever (agudos). When the converso bishop of Granada and confessor of Queen Isabella, Fernando de Talavera, tried to convert the Jews, one chronicler wrote, he found that ‘as [the Jews] are naturally clever and can quote the Holy Scripture so readily, they often argued against what was preached to them’64 whereas most people apparently simply accepted it. In another case a teacher at the University of Salamanca in 1572 was held to descend from conversos simply because ‘[his father and uncles] were all very clever’.65

  The association of intelligence and independence of thinking with conversos and thus with heresy began with the persecution of the followers of Erasmus in the 1530s, when, as we saw in Chapter 5, large numbers of intellectuals were arrested for deviance from the orthodoxy. Rodrigo de Manrique, the son of Inquisitor-General Alonso Manrique, who was sidelined in those years, described the situation eloquently in a letter to Joan-Lluis Vives of 9 December 1533 after the arrest of the well-regarded humanist Juan de Vergara:

  When I consider the distinction of his spirit, his superior erudition and (what I value most) his irreproachable conduct, I feel great sadness that some great wrong may be done to this excellent man. Thinking of the intervention of those who have laid impudent calumnies at his door, I tremble at the thought that he has fallen into the hands of men lacking in dignity and culture who hate men of value, and who think they are doing a good and pious work in making wise men disappear for the sake of just one word, or because of a joke. What you say is right: our country is a land of envy and arrogance; you could add: of barbarity. Because it is well understood there that one cannot possess a certain degree of culture without being full of heresy, error and converso stains. Thus silence has been imposed on the learned; and as for those who ran to the call of science, as you say, great terror has been inspired in them.66

  Historians who favour the general role of the Inquisition in the formation of Spanish society have often tried to exonerate it from this charge of being ‘anti-knowledge’,67 yet in the protracted 18th-century debates on the issue the defenders of the Inquisition cited works of theological science rather than natural science in their arguments. The general attitude of the inquisitorial hierarchy towards individual talent and scientific advances can be seen in several cases: that of Manuel de Tovar Olvera, a Spaniard accused in Mexico around 1660 of having a pact with the devil because he was able to control a herd of mares which usually kept ten or eleven men busy;68 or the extraordinary case in the early 18th century when the Inquisition in Lima proceeded against a pilot simply because he had guided a ship from Callao (the port for Lima) to Valparaíso in Chile in less than half the previous record time.69

  It is cases like this that confirm the validity of the view of the great historian H.C. Lea on the Inquisition: ‘The real importance of the Inquisition is not so much in the awful solemnities of the autos-da-fé, or in the cases of a few celebrated victims, as in the silent influence exercised by its incessant and secret labours among the mass of the people and the limitations which it placed on the Spanish intellect’.70 The pursuit by the Inquisition of Erasmian intellectuals stifled the development of ideas, and the lack of informed debate about the great scientific issues of the day became a factor in the decadence which engulfed the world south of the Pyrenees in the 17th century.71

  The effects were stark. By the early 17th century no Spanish press used Greek characters – an extraordinary fact considering that just one century before the Universities of Alcalá and Salamanca had been centres of Hellenism.72 Such was the fear of science that in 1640 all the works of Copernicus were placed on its index of prohibited books by the Inquisition.73 The great works of literature acquired by Philip II and placed in the library of his funereal palace at the Escorial went unread, and were in fact left uncatalogued until the beginning of the 19th century, when the work was undertaken by a Frenchman.74

  Henceforth, erudition and reading were to be undertaken with caution. A new opponent was secured for the Inquisition which, in the 18th century in particular, became the major preoccupation of the institution: the book. As one inquisitor put it in the late 16th century: ‘the truth is that the [doctrine of the heretics] is nowhere so much communicated and distributed as through the medium of books, which, as mute teachers, talk continuously; they teach all the time, and in all places . . . the typical adversary and enemy of the Catholic faith has always relied on this efficient and pernicious medium’.75

  In such an atmosphere books were as worthy of condemnation as people and were burnt before the people together with heretics at autos.76 In 1579 the inquisitor-general of Portugal ordered that they should be incinerated until not even the ashes remained.77 But of course writers and thinkers were not above satirizing such events. Cervantes included a scene mocking the burning of books at an auto in Don Quixote, where the books of chivalry which the poor deluded knight had amassed were, as Cervantes put it, ‘relaxed’ by the secular arm of his housekeeper – thrown onto a bonfire in the courtyard to keep Don Quixote from reading any more of them.

  The burning of the books in Don Quixote was a forerunner of other such literary scenes of which the most famous today is perhaps the scene in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose where the blind friar of a Benedictine monastery, Jorge, burns down a secret stash of priceless books rather than seeing their heresies spread. Ideas are dangerous. Like viruses they can be contagious. They must be stamped out. A future vision of the same concern was brilliantly imagined by Ray Bradbury in his novel Fahrenheit 451, memorably adapted for the cinema by the French director François Truffaut. In Bradbury’s vision books are too dangerous for the population and are held to breed elitism and divergence from the accepted norms of society; 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which the paper used to bind books catches fire, and fir
emen no longer put out house fires but burn books. Thus is a security cordon erected against ideas which might, it is feared, destroy the state, a security cordon that was first erected by the Inquisition.

  IT IS NOT AN INSIGNIFICANT comment on the human condition that, no sooner had the printing press been developed in the late 15th century, than people tried to censor what could be printed. It turns out that there is always a side of humanity – the side in authority – which fears the products of human creativity and tries to suppress them.

  In Spain the potential of books to threaten the national identity became apparent during the early conflicts with the Muslims in Granada. Cisneros’s ceremonial burning of thousands of Islamic books in Granada in 1501 was followed by an edict issued on 12 October of the same year ordering the burning of all Islamic books ‘so that there should be no memory of them and no one should have the occasion to err in their faith again’.78 The potential danger of books clearly penetrated the royal consciousness for the following year, on 8 July 1502, the Reyes Católicos passed a law that no printer or bookseller could publish without their royal permission.79