Inquisition

  As the Enlightenment – and the Inquisition’s reaction against it – proceeded in the 18th century, so did the number of banned books. Authors banned included Condorcet, Hume, Locke, Montesquieu, Pope, Rousseau, Swift and Voltaire; Laurence Sterne was banned in 1801 and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – surely too close to the bone – followed in 1806.131 In the bookshop of Estanislao de Lugo, raided in 1817, books seized included works by Berkeley (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, now seen as a key work of philosophy), Erasmus, Gibbon, Locke, Milton (Paradise Lost), Montesquieu, Rabelais, Rousseau and Voltaire.132

  By any modern standard, these authors rank among the towering figures of Western literature and philosophy; the Inquisition wanted nothing to do with them.

  AS WE HAVE SEEN in the last few chapters, it was the social effects of the Inquisition which became most pronounced in the 17th century. As the global influence of the Spanish and Portuguese empires diminished, so did the physical reach of the Inquisition and its capacity to inflict its violence. This reminds us that the Inquisition was essentially a political institution, and that, as we have also seen, Catholic theology and papal authority merely served the authorities as an excuse and a justification.

  In Portugal in the later 17th century, for instance, the papacy was once again a restraining influence. When, in July 1672, some of Lisbon’s wealthiest conversos were arrested, the papacy eventually issued an ultimatum to the regent Dom Pedro demanding an inquiry into the trials and threatening suspension of the Inquisition.133 Around this time an anonymous account was circulating in Rome of the terrible practices of the Portuguese Inquisition. Little had changed since the early days of the institution: there was still routine torture; lawyers were not allowed to see the evidence against defendants; the most genuine Catholics were most likely to be condemned. When the executioner at an auto in Coimbra was forced by the struggles of his victim to slacken the rope a little, the dying man cried out, ‘Jesus!’134

  In Spain, meanwhile, the emphasis on pomp and ceremony at autos meant that these were rarer, but they tended to be violent affairs when they did occur. A legacy of the union with Portugal was the association of all Portuguese with crypto-Judaism,*11 with the result that numerous Portuguese victims were convicted of this crime through to the 18th century. In Majorca a terrible series of trials unfolded against the converso community of Palma which resulted in the reconciliation of 250 conversos at five autos in 1679 and the ‘relaxation’ of thirty-seven of these for relapsing in an auto of 1691.135 In Madrid, meanwhile, one of the greatest autos in the history of the Inquisition occurred in 1680, when twenty-three people were ‘relaxed’ on a stage 58 metres long and 30 metres side dominating the Plaza Mayor in the centre of the city.136

  This auto occurred almost exactly two centuries after the first auto in Seville in 1481 and showed that even though people were no longer burnt and garrotted every year, the Inquisition could still descend with fury on communities when it wished to. It is difficult today beneath the brightly painted balconies of the Plaza Mayor to imagine such a terrible scene, but memories of horror and brutality fade quickly; it is only in their social legacies that something of the cultural memory of fear can be discerned.

  What comes across most of all, perhaps, is the joylessness of it all. Pleasure was anathema to the censors. Some paintings and playing cards were banned from the mid-17th century onward for their offence to dogmatic morality.137 By the end of the 18th century complaints were being received about the words of hymns sung in church.138 Some of the works of Goya were banned.139 It was possible to object to any aspect of cultural endeavour: literature and philosophy, song and craft, painting and theatre. The ideology behind this process drove the decline of the Iberian powers in two key ways: first by helping to foster an ideology – scepticism – which would deal a mortal blow to the Inquisition during the Enlightenment, and second by helping to ensure the intellectual stagnation of the culture from which the Inquisition had grown, rendering it incapable of dealing with this threat when it emerged in the 18th century.

  Other societies in other times and places have exhibited some of these tendencies. But the Inquisition was the first to leave detailed records of its road to self-inflicted ruin. In its painstakingly recorded loss was indeed a tragedy, for here lay all the debris of that emotion which can drive some human beings to destroy the very things that sustain them.

  Chapter Twelve

  THE NEUROTIC SOCIETY

  . . . they feel fits of madness and they go to look for them and their spiritual guides kiss them and . . . put their hands on their breasts and over their hearts, telling them that these contacts are not sinful, that they do them to make them happy . . .

  THE MONASTERY OF BORJAS was in the district of the tribunal of Zaragoza, venue of the assassination of Inquisitor Arbues and home to the forebears of Montaigne. It was here that a bizarre case began in 1705, at the height of the War of the Spanish Succession. The case centred on a nun in the local convent, Sister Theresa Longas. Longas had entered the convent as a teenager. At once she had provoked comment, dressing herself with flamboyance and refusing to offer charity to those nuns who were sick.1 Such questionable behaviour, however, was merely the prelude to an extraordinary career in the convent which led to Longas being accused of literally hundreds of charges before the inquisitors of Zaragoza.

  The charges were summarized: ‘[Longas is] a famous liar, a hypocrite, scandalous, impertinent, impious, abusive of the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist and of the exorcisms of the Church, irreverent, suspected of having an illicit relationship with her spiritual director ... a boastful faker of prophecies, revelations, apparitions, communications from the saints and of miracles’.2 With such a charge sheet it was clear that all was not peace and light within the sacred walls of the Borjas convent.

  The case had developed gradually. At the age of nineteen Longas had taken a new spiritual director in the convent, a Franciscan friar called Manuel de Val. Tongues started to wag immediately, since Val was also young, only twenty-seven years old. There was good reason for the gossip since Longas ‘took to communicating with so much frequency and excess in the confessional that she was there every day for an hour and a half or two hours in the morning, and after lunch he [Val] would return to the confessional where he remained with [Longas] until dusk, and on some days he would return again at night’.3 Quite when Longas had the opportunity to commit the number of sins implied by such protracted confessions was not clear, since she appeared to spend every waking hour with Val; perhaps the sins were committed in the confessional itself. On one occasion Val only left the convent at three in the morning after having ‘administered communion’ to his ‘daughter of confession’.

  Soon enough Longas and Val were fast friends. Many nuns in the convent were scandalized by the ‘pleasure which they could see in the feelings of both of them’ whenever they looked at one another.4 One can imagine the glowing smiles and the mutual enjoyment of the tension and envy which their pleasure provoked. On one occasion the two of them helped tend a nun who was sick. Their solicitude was not, however, all that it appeared. They took advantage of the situation to go at night to a nearby room to discuss spiritual matters. It was unclear what spiritual matters were being discussed as the nuns heard volleys of laughter echoing from the room.5

  Longas and Val took to eating from the same plate and drinking water from the same glass.6 Val began to remark on the extraordinary spiritual prowess of Longas, who, he claimed, had visions, and of whom he said that all her works were prodigious and touched by divinity.7 Longas developed a following of adepts in the convent, people who perhaps admired her bravado. Naturally, this made her foes all the more vituperative. Matters came to a head nine years after the beginning of her relationship with Val, when Longas made an audacious bid to become the convent’s abbess.

  Longas retired to her cell. No, she said, she would shun the world. She did not require material sustenance. No, she would only take bread
and water from Friday through to Sunday, and she would survive off chard and beans for the rest of the week. Yes, she was disciplining herself, lashing herself repeatedly in the confines of the cell so that its walls were smeared with blood.8 Such an extraordinary show of discipline and devotion was undermined in the eyes of some by the fact that Longas’s room sometimes smelt of bacon and chocolate but the devoted nun took things further. She fasted for forty days without food and drink; breadcrumbs and pots for making hot chocolate were, however, sometimes found by the door of her cell.9 Nevertheless, the performance had its desired effect, and Longas was elected abbess.

  Once she had become first among equals, the problems in the convent really started. Longas made use of her position to torment her adversaries. Spurred on by her confessor Val, she claimed to have visions of nuns from the convent who had died, saying of one dead nun that she had had horrible visions of her in hell. This dead nun was blamed for noises that were heard by some – Longas and her followers – in the convent; Longas’s adversaries claimed they could hear nothing. Tensions peaked as some of the nuns started to have fits whenever the noises occurred.

  In an attempt to face down the ghostly noises Longas and Val took a group of nuns to the choir stalls of the convent chapel. As soon as they entered Longas leapt back and screamed, ‘Don’t you hear it? Don’t you hear it?’ Val joined in, saying in a frightened voice, ‘What’s that?’ cowering and indicating that he could hear the same noises as the abbess. Not all of the nuns were convinced, and one of them replied to his question, ‘Father, it’s the air going up the chimney’. Longas shooed the other nuns away and was seen in prolonged conversation with Val; at one point his voice rose and he asked her, ‘Condemned for ever?’ The answer, of course, was yes.10

  Many now claimed that they could hear the noises. Longas and Val exorcized the poor nuns, who were increasingly desperate. The cell of the dead nun so disliked by Longas and said to be responsible for all the noises burst into flames at three o’clock one morning; the night before, Longas had been seen alone carrying a bucket of hot coals. Indeed, she and Val were clearly not as distraught as the rest of the community, since Val was seen one evening with a white flower in his hand, with Longas at his feet, both of them laughing about something or other.11

  In all, Longas was charged with 377 offences. Her defence was piecemeal and she was found guilty. The Inquisition ordered her to abjure her errors and spend six years in seclusion in her cell. She was to emerge only to hear communal mass among the very nuns whose behaviour she had precipitated with her own cravings for power and attention.

  The scenes from the convent reveal how after over two centuries of hard work excising heresy from the heart of Iberia, the Inquisition had built an increasingly neurotic society. Today, it is difficult to use the term ‘neurotic’ without thinking of Freud. Freud saw neurosis as a state which followed the repression of some of a person’s instincts. This repression was, however, ultimately unsuccessful, and the instincts were able to achieve their goals, drawing on creations of the person’s fantasies to do so. But in achieving these goals, reality was distorted, and the fantasies emerged as a substitute.*1 This is a fairly precise description of the goings-on at the Borjas convent, and indeed of much of Portugal and Spain during these centuries.12

  This sort of behaviour was not confined to the repressed atmosphere of the convents. It was just as apparent among the holy women known as beatas, found in the towns and villages of Iberia. Beatas were secular women living in the community, held to have special powers to mediate with the divine.13 Unlike married women and nuns they did not accept the authority of any particular man, and this gave them an unusual position of freedom and power in a deeply misogynistic society.14 The Church hierarchy was unhappy with this situation and increasingly forced beatas to follow the rule of one or other of the spiritual orders. The Inquisition also began to discredit beatas through repression and misrepresentation.15 The stage was set for a series of extraordinary denunciations.

  One condition of being a beata was that she had to make a private vow of chastity. This led to some calling them ‘brides of Christ’.16 These women dressed in simple habits and shunned material considerations; they were living exemplars of the purity of the Virgin herself. Yet chastity and purity were not qualities for which all beatas were known.

  Cordoba 1718 to Villar 1801

  ON 24 APRIL 1718 a beata was reconciled by the Inquisition of Cordoba. She had perverted the beliefs of four Franciscan friars, one of whom asked to be garrotted rather than suffer the indignity of wearing a sanbenito. The poor friar’s sense of humiliation was understandable. The beata had ‘through the cunning of the devil’ enticed an image of the baby Jesus to speak to the friars and give them precise and unusual instructions as to the best means of securing their salvation.

  What the image of the baby Jesus had told the four men was that no soul existed below the hips and that their salvation required them to have sexual intercourse with the beata. It was only after this intercourse that they would become sanctified. However, in order to ensure the efficacy of their salvation they needed to strip naked and lubricate themselves with certain oils, with the friar and the beata rubbing the oil into one another from top to bottom. Once they had done this there was no need for them to receive communion or confess provided that they follow certain precise preparations before saying mass. These preparations required them to kiss the beatas breasts and then to look at the host, where they would see that she was herself visible in the sacrament with her breasts prominently displayed.

  There were numerous other remarkable teachings and prophecies of this unusual leader of friars. The beata informed them that she was to have four children, one by each of them, and that these offspring would go to the four corners of the world preaching the beatas remarkable divine law. And when any of them had toothache, there was a sure-fire way of alleviating the pain – sticking her tongue into the mouth of the patient.17 The four friars had accepted her teaching unquestioningly, and no doubt with a feeling of release that all their emotions and urges could at last find a holy outlet.

  EIGHTY-THREE YEARS LATER, in Villar, a case was brought against the beata Isabel María Herraínz, who over three years had developed a large following in the town. Most of her male followers, it may come as little surprise to discover, were themselves in religious orders. The remarkable powers of Herraínz were confirmed by her servant Manuela Perea, who said that she herself had seen the baby Jesus at the breast of her mistress on numerous occasions. A group of her female followers known as the endiabladas – the bedevilled – took to barking, roaring and dancing in front of the church, screaming at those not in their group until the beata ordered them to be quiet.

  One of Herraínz’s followers, Atanasio Martínez, revealed the sort of goings-on commonplace in her circle. Martínez had got to know Herraínz in Cuenca, where he used to take his hat off whenever he passed her home and received ‘an interior light from the mystery hidden within [her house]’. One day, when praying in Cuenca, he realized that God inhabited the beata and, following ‘an inner impulse, he embraced her, and kissed her on the face and on the breasts which were decently covered with a cloth’. Soon Martínez came to call the beata Señor – the Lord – and took to expressing his love of God by kissing her face and putting his tongue in the mouth of the Lord and kissing her naked nipples with his eyes closed, ‘knowing it to be an infallible truth that these acts were executed by the Lord himself in union with himself [Martínez] without any influence from carnal desires’. Curiously, once these demonstrations of Martínez’s sincere love for the Lord were over, he found that his feelings of anxiety ebbed away, and the beata Herraínz would say to him, ‘Your grace may leave having received all of the sacraments’.

  When the behaviour of Herraínz became widely known, Martínez was arrested by the Inquisition. Put in jail, he would go mad whenever Herraínz’s name was mentioned. After his intimate relationships with ‘the Lord’ he believe
d that he had Jesus in his chest. On one occasion he put his finger in his mouth, licked it, and spat at the doctors who were examining him so that they would receive the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

  Herraínz had been feted by many priests – all aged between thirty and fifty years old – who had experienced the same sort of intimacy with the Lord as Martínez. Four of them would surround her bed during private meetings. But there was nothing untoward here since, as the servant Manuela Perea told the inquisitors, when one of them got into bed with her the bedroom was filled with light and angels encircled the bed.

  The beata summoned another priest to her room and stripped naked. Hugging the priest to her breasts, the beata shouted, ‘I feel it here, I have it here, I see it here, this is where God has placed his love for the highest ends of his providence. Come here, your grace, ask of it what you will, adore it, your grace, kiss it, do not be afraid, this is what God desires, this is his wish, this is what pleases him’. The priest did as he was ordered, kissing and adoring the Lord where he had been told to, and even touching it with his hand, although, as he stressed to the Inquisition, ‘without feeling even remotely any effects of sensuality . . . but rather love for God, respect for the Lord and devotion to the Holy Virgin’.18

  Such extraordinary cases were all too common in 18th-century Spain. Beatas were often accused of faking miracles. Some pretended to levitate; others would suddenly announce to companions that the Virgin was in front of them or that Jesus had given them a crown, and then would slap themselves and say that the devil had taken it from them.19 In many cases such fantasies were clearly designed simply to obtain an easier life but from today’s standpoint it seems that there must often have been an intense conjunction of desire and repression.