Inquisition

  THE LAST CENTURY of the Inquisition in Spain saw several attempts at reform. Philip V’s minister Melchor de Macanaz had produced a programme in 1713 calling for secularization of the state, and seeking to reform the Inquisition as part of this. In Macanaz’s vision the Suprema would be served by a royal secretary, turning it effectively into just another ministry, while censorship would have come under royal and not inquisitorial aegis, with calificadores being appointed by the crown and not the Inquisition. However, as we have seen, such ideas did not endear Macanaz to the Inquisition, which began a case against him and drove him to flee to France.*2 34

  Nevertheless, in tune with events in Portugal under the marquis of Pombal, in the reign of Charles III (1759–88) the state in Spain progressively encroached on the territory of the Inquisition. In 1768 attempts were made to rein in the Inquisition’s powers of censorship, and a decree of 1770 restricted it solely to matters of faith, and excluded crimes such as bigamy. The 1790s saw various proposals for reform, one of them led by the first great historian of the Inquisition, Juan-Antonio Llorente, who was also the Tribunal’s secretary. But for one reason or another these later reform programmes all failed, and the Inquisition staggered towards its end.35

  By 1800 what energy the Spanish Inquisition had left was directed at coming books from France. But the inquisitors themselves were increasingly influenced by French ideas, and some of them were accused of the very crimes of Jansenism and excessive tolerance of which they accused others.36 A case in point was the last ever inquisitor-general of Spain, Ramón José de Arce. Arce was said to be polite, enlightened and to have had an affair with the marquessa of Mejorada. When Napoleon’s army occupied Madrid on 22 March 1808 Arce resigned the following day and emigrated – to France.37

  It was the coming of Napoleon which really spelt the end for the Inquisition. Napoleon had first invaded Portugal after disputes with the Portuguese king John VI over the French blockade of English ports. After forcing the Portuguese royal family to flee, the French proceeded to occupy northern Spanish cities. The Spanish king Charles IV was deposed by an aristocratic faction and his son, Ferdinand VII, replaced him; Napoleon removed them both to south-western France ‘for their safety’ and installed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne.

  On 4 December 1808 this government issued a decree abolishing the Inquisition in Spain. Within ten days eight members of the Suprema had been arrested, the offices of the Inquisition in Madrid sacked and large amounts of money confiscated. Napoleon’s forces occupied much of Spain and suppressed the tribunals. In Rome Pope Pius VII had been imprisoned by French troops, which meant that the very idea of the Inquisition had to face difficult questions regarding its spiritual legitimacy.38

  With the Spanish empire in chaos, a Cortes was convened in the southern port city of Cádiz, which was not in Napoleon’s hands. Guerrilla fighting raged across Spain, and it was clear that whatever the outcome of the war between the French, Spanish guerrillas, the Portuguese and British troops fighting in Iberia under the future duke of Wellington, Spain would never be the same again. The Cortes was convened on 24 September 1810, and comprised liberals, royalists and a significant proportion of clergy – almost a third. Just two days after its inauguration one of the leaders of the liberal faction, Agustín de Argüelles, raised the issue of freedom of the press.

  The debate lasted several weeks. Argüelles argued that freedom of the press was the source of Britain’s prosperity, but one of the ecclesiastical deputies, Canon José Isidro de Morales, replied that it was ‘completely irreconcilable with the canons and discipline of the Church and with the very dogma of the Catholic creed’.39 One of the other things that was irreconcilable, it can be seen, was the gulf between the two parties at the Parliament.

  Eventually, on 18 October 1810, the decree permitting freedom of the press was passed. At once a barrage of pamphlets, magazines, newspapers and books commenced attacking the Inquisition. The liberal press was swisher, better written and had a wider public than its conservative rivals. It swiftly took the high ground in the ideological battle. Although after six months some pamphlets in support of the Inquisition began to appear, it was already too late. A port full of ships and sailors from the northern European countries where Enlightenment ideas were in vogue,40 Cádiz was one of the most liberal cities in Spain.

  The Inquisition rapidly became a symbol for everything seen as wrong with the old order. There was, moreover, a sense that the Inquisition had never been weaker. One of its opponents at the Cortes of Cádiz described it as a ‘colossus . . . with a brilliant golden head, the chest and the arms made of silver, the stomach and the muscles of copper, the legs of iron; but half of its feet are built from mud, and so it is very easy to knock it over’.41

  The momentum would be impossible to check. In 1812 a commission was appointed to examine whether the Inquisition should be re-established in Spain in the event of the defeat of the French, and whether it was compatible with the liberal constitution which the Cortes had issued on 12 March 1812. The commission noted the many problems: the pope was imprisoned and the inquisitor-general had resigned, so the question of what authority the Inquisition would report to was a difficult one to resolve. Moreover, it was suggested that the Inquisition was ‘opposed to the sovereignty and independence of the nation and to the civil freedom of Spaniards, which this Parliament has desired to ensure and consolidate’. The commission proposed instead a system working through the bishops to inquire into heresy: the stage was set for abolition.

  It is worth looking at some of the tactics used by the liberals against the tired old colossus that for so long had exerted its influence over Spain. The Inquisition was given a character by the pamphleteers which it had not really had for over sixty years, with torture and executions described as if they were still ongoing. Polemicists described the Inquisition as responsible for the decadence of Spain, the disappearance of practical sciences, agriculture, industry and business. Interestingly, these same accusations had been levelled at the Jesuits earlier in the 18th century, and had been responsible for the order’s expulsion from Portugal in 1759 and Spain in 1767.42

  Where the accusations remain the same and it is only the identity of the accused group which changes, it is reasonable to suspect that the group is being made to take the blame for something whose causes are different. How many enemies had Spain had to live with! Conversos, Lutherans, moriscos; Freemasons, Jansenists, the Enlightenment; sodomites, bigamists and blasphemers; and now, Jesuits, and the Inquisition. In each case the charges of threatening the strength and identity of the Spanish nation were made. But in each case, there was a more complex dynamic at work, one which required a scapegoat to be found.

  Once again, the dynamic met with success in Spain. The campaign was so convincing that when crowds burst into offices of the Inquisition in the organization’s death throes they expected to find instruments of torture set out for the maiming of its victims. This was even though nobody alive could recall ever having witnessed a public auto and very few of the crowd had ever known anyone who had been arrested by the Inquisition.43 Repression had returned to its source: the scapegoat for all of the ills of Spain had become none other than the original scapegoating institution.

  THE POLEMICS WHICH swung into action during the dying days of the Inquisition and old regime were the first full public debate on the past in Spain. The divide which we have seen growing between conservatives and liberals crystallized around the different perspectives on the Inquisition and what these said about the history of Spain.

  In the late 19th century, one of the champions of the conservative view of Spanish history which again had come to predominate in intellectual and political circles, was Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, a man whose excesses of intellectual precocity were matched only by his excessive verbal diarrhoea. At the age of twenty-seven he published an eight-volume history of non-orthodox thought and thinkers in Spain, including much material on the Inquisition, which remains read
today. Menéndez y Pelayo was a staunch defender of the role of the Inquisition in the formation of Spanish society. He held that ‘intolerance is an innate law of the healthy human understanding’:44 the active intelligence reached the truth and then sought to impose it on others, being intolerant to their ideas.

  As I visited the archives in Portugal and Spain, the initial affront which such an idea might have created began to be replaced by different emotions. For what were these mounds of yellowing papers but an attempt to impose a vision of the world? Here these papers lay, patiently awaiting their distillation and dismemberment by each passing generation of historical researchers, confined in their protective boxes, wrapped tightly by cloth ribbons. They were journeys into the past and into the psychology of the past which had made the present, but they were also journeys which at some level made the pain and discord of the present easier to bear by displacing it onto the traumas of those who no longer suffered.

  It became difficult to dismiss entirely the insight of Menéndez y Pelayo into the intolerance of the human mind. Blame was increasingly easy to place on those one held responsible for various evils: one could blame the inquisitors for their venality and surrender to power, the torturers for their sadism, imperial warmongers for their wars from which liberal intellectuals had often benefited indirectly. Thus the liberal view also required its enemies, who, as with the enemies of the Inquisition, renewed themselves with the changing of the intellectual seasons and the passing of time.

  Was the inquisitorial state of mind then in some way an inevitable precursor to the modern human condition? There is no doubt that it has had plenty of successors, by analogy at least. There was the Stasi network of informants known as the Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter, which spread across East Germany during the cold war like inquisitorial familiars, monitoring the politically incorrect; and the executioners of Mao Zedong, who severed the larynxes of their victims so that they could not protest just as the victims of autos had been gagged, and who charged the families of the dead for the bullets used to kill them just as victims of the Inquisition had had to pay the people who flogged them.45

  It had been discovered that administration was a vital tool which could be used to project failings onto others. Human psychology was, then, at the heart of the story of the Inquisition. But if the historical literature spoke with precision of inquisitorial structures, of the statistics of autos, of the detail of the inquisitorial trial process and of its activities all over the Iberian worlds, it very rarely entered into the psychology behind what had gone on in an effort to understand what had actually motivated the persecution.46

  This always seemed a mistake. And yet in the climate in which the research was conducted, one could see how such an omission could come about: the volume of information about the atrocities and the creeping advance of the persecuting culture, the accumulating ‘evidence’ of the threat, all inevitably pushing consumers of this information into relating to it on its own terms, so that it became difficult to perceive it from any external perspective and gain a psychological understanding of what was really going on.

  In the decades that followed the demise of the Inquisition the task of understanding the psychological dynamics involved was increasingly passed to novelists. Classic examples are Dostoyevsky, with his devastating vignette ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in The Brothers Karamazov, and Kafka’s portrait of a bureaucratized inquisitorial pursuit in the story of Joseph K., recounted in The Trial. Who can forget K’s quest for a meaningless piece of paper, of whose name he is always in ignorance, and his sudden execution after a meeting in the cathedral?

  Another writer who used this theme was Elias Canetti. Like myself, Canetti was a descendant of the Iberian Jews who had been among the initial targets of the Inquisition. This made objectivity difficult and yet it also perhaps allowed a level of empathy which, one hopes, rather than trampling upon the emotions produced by the Inquisition, released them. One of Canetti’s most famous works is his novel Der Blendung, published in Austria in 1935 and translated into English under the author’s supervision as Auto-da-Fé. In this book Canetti – who won the Nobel Prize in 1981 – portrays the psychological breakdown of a scholar, Peter Kien, living in a central Europe increasingly dominated by authoritarianism in the years leading up to the Second World War. Hoodwinked out of his apartment by his housekeeper Thérèse and the fascist caretaker Benedikt Pfaff, Kien descends into an underworld from which he cannot re-emerge.

  Canetti’s book reprises the satire of the inquisitorial Auto which had first been composed by Cervantes over three centuries before. In Canetti’s disturbing vision the background to Kien’s madness and collapse is the growing aggression, violence and scapegoating of a society on the brink of genocidal war. This world is unable to take responsibility for its own enormities. Obsessed by his own vision of the truth in his books, surrounded by a culture of incipient persecution, beaten, intense, mad, Kien is no longer able to live with what he has created in the microcosm of his ordered flat. In this space of such learning and culture, its creator, Kien, decides to burn down the flat, burn down the books, and destroy himself in the process.

  THE DEBATE ON the commission’s proposals for the future of the Spanish Inquisition was inaugurated in Cádiz on 4 January 1813. Agustín de Argüelles, one of the members of the commission, came to the defence of its findings, reiterating the difficulties involved in re-establishing an Inquisition when there was no inquisitor-general, and adding that the institution had not promoted the purity of religion, but rather helped in eroding it by ‘encouraging accusations . . . and relying on the probity of the judges, who are as full of wretchedness as any men’.47 He went on to accuse the Inquisition of having dried up the sources of the Enlightenment and chased out of Spain all men of genius and enlightened ideas.

  Argüelles was supported by the count of Toreno, who again stressed the absence of an inquisitor-general and the Inquisition’s opposition to the Enlightenment, and added, ‘The Inquisition has always gone about watching over and investigating the conduct of wise men and the intelligentsia . . . I cannot think of any enlightened person I have known who has not been under threat from the Inquisition’.48 There were, though, many who spoke out in favour of the Inquisition. Some deputies noted that the nation was not comprised just of the enlightened or those who liked novelty, but of ordinary folk, and that these people desired the Inquisition to remain. Others stated that the Cortes should have nothing to do with belief, and should limit its remit simply to defending the faith, which as far as they were concerned meant maintaining the Inquisition.

  The critics of the Inquisition in the Cortes proceeded to pull off a trick. On 16 January, as many of its supporters attended the funeral of the bishop of Segovia, the liberals rushed through a law declaring that ‘the Catholic and apostolic religion will be protected by laws which conform to the Constitution’.49 The Inquisition was doomed; on 22 February 1813 the decree of abolition was approved. Prohibited books went on sale at once, their sales boosted by being advertised as ‘works prohibited by the Inquisition’. In the masked parades during Lent people dressed as bishops with burning axes went from plaza to plaza reading out the decree of abolition. In Cádiz, centre of bourgeois and internationalist Spain, celebration was in the air.

  These events were mirrored in Portugal and the New World. In Mexico the leader of the independence movement, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a liberal priest from the region of Querétaro, was charged in December 1810 by the Inquisition with ‘rebellion and heresy’. Hidalgo was said by numerous witnesses to have doubted the coming of the Messiah, to have said that the Bible had only taken its complete form in the third century AD, and that St Teresa of Ávila had been deluded because of her self-flagellation and repeated fasting.50 It was said that in his house a ‘large group of common people gather perpetually to eat, drink dance and chase women’.51 Priests were said to dance with vials of holy oil around their necks, and the church ornaments and vestments were used in masked balls. On
Christmas Eve the host had been hidden on the altar; the officiating priest suspected it had been stolen and had to hunt for it, just so that the congregants could find something to laugh at.52

  Hidalgo maintained that he would never have been accused of heresy but for his support of the independence movement. However, the vigour with which the Inquisition pursued him may have been due to the fact that he spread stories among his followers about it. To the horror of Inquisition officials, he claimed that ‘the inquisitors were men of flesh and blood; that they could make mistakes; and that their Edicts were driven by passions’.53 Many priests agreed with Hidalgo, and one of them, the friar José Bernardo Villaseñor, announced that the edict issued against the ‘heretic Hidalgo’ was ‘fit for using to wipe your bottom’.54 Hidalgo and his followers then marched on Mexico City but in early 1811 retreated north, where they were defeated in March. Hidalgo was given a summary trial by the Inquisition before being shot.

  Hidalgo, however had not died for nothing. Mexican independence soon followed, and by June 1813 the decree of abolition from Cádiz was public knowledge and the tribunal in Mexico ground to a halt. The same occurred in Lima, while in Chile the municipal council of Santiago had removed the ecclesiastical rent from the cathedral canonjía dedicated to the Inquisition almost two years earlier, in September 1811. Cartagena in Colombia had seen violent demonstrations demanding the abolition of the Inquisition the same year.55

  In Portugal, meanwhile, events were no less dramatic. The Inquisition had been declared abolished by liberals following the flight of the Portuguese royal family from Napoleon’s troops in 1807; the offices of the Inquisition were sacked, and the inquisitor-general fled to south-western France.56 A definitive edict suppressing the tribunal in Goa was published on 16 June 1812.57 The viceroy wrote suggesting that all the trial documents be burned and they have never been found. The Inquisition was finally abolished officially in Portugal on 31 March 1821 by the constitutional government58 after the upheavals of the Peninsula War had come to an end.