The Inquisition Part 19

[1] Cf. s.e.xto, v. ii, cap. xi, and xviii. _De Haereticis_, in Eymeric, _Directorium_, p. 110.

[2] _Verb.u.m abbreviatum_, cap. lxxvii, P.L., vol. ccv, col. 231.

It is therefore erroneous to pretend that the Church had absolutely no part in the condemnation of heretics to death. It is true that this partic.i.p.ation of hers was not direct and immediate; but, even through indirect, it was none the less real and efficacious.[1]

[1] In Spain, the manner in which the Inquisition abandoned heretics to the secular arm denoted a real partic.i.p.ation of the State in the execution of heretics. The evening before the execution the Inquisitors brought the King a small f.a.got tied with ribbons. The King as once requested "that this f.a.got be the first thrown upon the fire in his name." Cf. Baudrillart, _A propos de l'Inquisition_, in the _Revue Pratique d'Apologetique_, July 15, 1906, p. 354, note.

The judges of the Inquisition realized this, and did their best to free themselves of this responsibility which weighed rather heavily upon them. Some maintained that in compelling the civil authority to enforce the existing laws, they were not going outside their spiritual office, but were merely deciding a case of conscience. But this theory was unsatisfactory. To rea.s.sure their consciences, they tried another expedient. In abandoning heretics to the secular arm, they besought the state officials to act with moderation, and avoid "all bloodshed and all danger of death." This was unfortunately an empty formula which deceived no one. It was intended to safeguard the principle which the Church had taken for her motto: _Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine_. In strongly a.s.serting this traditional law, the Inquisitors imagined that they thereby freed themselves from all responsibility, and kept from imbruing their hands in bloodshed. We must take this for what it is worth. It has been styled "cunning" and "hypocrisy;"[1] let us call it simply a legal fiction.

[1] Lea, op. cit., vol. i, p. 224.

The penalty of life imprisonment and the penalty of confiscation inflicted upon so many heretics, was like the death penalty imposed only by the secular arm. We must add to this banishment, which was inscribed in the imperial legislation, and reappeared in the criminal codes of Lucius III and Innocent III. These several penalties were by their nature vindicative. For this reason they were particularly odious, and have been the occasion of bitter accusations against the Church.

With the exception of imprisonment, which we will speak of later on, these penalties originated with the State. It is important, therefore, to know what crimes they punished. As a general rule, it must be admitted that they were only inflicted upon those heretics who seriously disturbed the social order. If the death penalty could be justly meted out to such rioters, with still greater reason could the lesser penalties be inflicted.

The penalty of confiscation was especially cruel, inasmuch as it affected the posterity of the condemned heretics. According to the old Roman law, the property of heretics could be inherited by their orthodox sons, and even by their agnates and cognates.[1] The laws of the Middle Ages declared confiscation absolute; on the plea that heresy should be cla.s.sed with treason, orthodox children could not inherit the property of their heretical father.[2] There was but one exception to this law. Frederic II and Innocent IV both decreed that children could inherit their father's property, if they denounced him for heresy.[3] It is needless to insist upon the odious character of such a law. We cannot understand to-day how Gregory IX could rejoice on learning that fathers did not scruple to denounce their children, children their parents, a wife her husband or a mother her children.[4]

[1] 4 and 19, cap _De haereticis_, iv, 5, _Manichaeos_ and _Cognovimus_.

[2] Decretal _Vergentis_ of Innocent III. Decretals, cap. x, _De Haereticis_, lib. v, t.i.t. vii.

[3] _Mon. Germ., Leges_, vol. ii, sect. iv, p. 197; Ripoll, _Bullarium ordinis Praedicat_., vol. i, p. 126.

[4] Bull _Gaudemus_, of April 12, 1233, in Ripoll, vol. i, p. 56.

Granting that banishment and confiscation were just penalties for heretics who were also State criminals, was it right for the Church to employ this penal system for the suppression of heresy alone?

It is certain that the early Christians would have strongly denounced such laws as too much like the pagan laws under which they were persecuted. St. Hilary voiced their mind when he said: "The Church threatens exile and imprisonment; she in whom men formerly believed while in exile and prison, now wishes to make men believe her by force."[1] St. Augustine was of the same mind. He thus addressed the Manicheans, the most hated sect of his time: "Let those who have never known the troubles of a mind in search for the truth, proceed against you with rigor. It is impossible for me to do so, for I for years was cruelly tossed about by your false doctrines, which I advocated and defended to the best of my ability. I ought to bear with you now, as men bore with me, when I blindly accepted your doctrines."[2] Wazo, Bishop of Liege, wrote in a similar strain in the eleventh century.[3]

[1] _Liber contra Auxentium_, cap. iv; cf. supra, p. 6.

[2] _Contra epistolam Manichaei, quam vocant Fundamenti_, n. 2 and 3, supra, p. 12.

[3] _Vita Vasonis_, cap. xxv and xxvi, Migne, P.L., vol. cxlii, col.

752, 753; cf. supra, p. 51.

But, continued St. Augustine, retracting his first theory,--and nearly all the Middle Ages agreed with him,--"these severe penalties are lawful and good when they serve to convert heretics by inspiring them with a salutary fear." The end here justifies the means.

Such reasoning was calculated to lead men to great extremes, and was responsible for the cruel teaching of the theologians of the school, who were more logically consistent than the Bishop of Hippo. They endeavored to terrorize heretics by the specter of the stake. St.

Augustine, bold as he was, shrank from such barbarity. But if, on his own admission, the logical consequences of the principle he laid down were to be rejected, did not this prove the principle itself, false?

If we consider merely the immediate results obtained by the use of brute force, we may indeed admit that it benefited the Church by bringing back some of her erring children. But at the same time these cruel measures turned away from Catholicism in the course of ages many sensitive souls, who failed to recognize Christ's Church in a society which practiced such cruelty in union with the State.

According, therefore, to St. Augustine's own argument, his theory has been proved false by its fatal consequences.

We must, therefore, return to the first theory of St. Augustine, and be content to win heretics back to the true faith by purely moral constraint. The penalties, decreed or consented to by the Church, ought to be medicinal in character, viz., pilgrimages, flogging, wearing the crosses, and the like. Imprisonment may even be included in the list, for temporary imprisonment has a well-defined expiatory character. In fact that is why in the beginning the monasteries made it a punishment for heresy. If, later on, the Church frequently inflicted the penalty of life imprisonment, she did so because by a legal fiction she attributed to it a purely penitential character.

Any one of these punishments, therefore, may be considered lawful, provided it is not arbitrarily inflicted. This theory does not permit the Church to abandon impenitent heretics to the secular arm. It grants her only the right of excommunication, according to the penitential discipline and the primitive canon law of the days of Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Lactantius, and Hilary.

But is this return to antiquity conformable to the spirit of the Church? Can it be reconciled in particular with one of the condemned propositions of the Syllabus: _Ecclesia vis inferendae potestatem non habet_?[1] _The Church has no right to use force_.

[1] Proposit, xxiv.

Without discussing this proposition at length, let us first state that authorities are not agreed on its precise meaning. Every Catholic will admit that the Church has a coercive power, in both the external and the internal forum. But the question under dispute--and this the Syllabus does not touch--is whether the coercive power comprises merely spiritual penalties, or temporal and corporal penalties as well. The editor of the Syllabus did not decide this question he merely referred us to the letter _Ad Apostolicae Sedis_ of August 22, 1851. But this letter is not at all explicit; it merely condemns those who pretend "to deprive the Church of the external jurisdiction and coercive power which was given her to win back sinners to the ways of righteousness." We would like to find more light on this question elsewhere. But the theologians who at the Vatican Council prepared canons 10 and 12 of the schema _De Ecclesia_ on this very point of doctrine did not remove the ambiguity. They explicitly affirmed that the Church had the right to exercise over her erring children "constraint by an external judgment and salutary penalties," but they said nothing about the nature of these penalties. Was not such silence significant? It authorized, one may safely say, the opinion of those who limited the coercive power of the Church to merely moral constraint. Cardinal Soglia, in a work approved by Gregory XVI and Pius IX, declared that this opinion was "more in harmony with the gentleness of the Church."[1] It also has in its favor Popes Nicholas I[2] and Celestine III,[3] who claimed for the Church of which they were the head the right to use only the spiritual sword. Without enumerating all the modern authors who hold this view, we will quote a work which has just appeared with the imprimatur of Father Lepidi, the Master of the Sacred Palace, in which we find the two following theses proved: 1. "Constraint, in the sense of employing violence to enforce ecclesiastical laws, originated with the state." 2. "The constraint of ecclesiastical laws is by divine right exclusively moral constraint."[4]

[1] _Inst.i.tutiones juris publici ecclesiastici_, 5 ed., Paris, vol.

i, pp. 169, 170.

[2] _Nicolai_, Ep. ad Albinum archiepiscop., in the _Decretum_, Causa x.x.xiii, quaest. ii, cap. _Inter haec_.

[3] Celestine, according to the criminal code of his day, declared that a guilty cleric, once excommunicated and anathematized, ought to be abandoned to the secular arm, _c.u.m Ecclesia non habeat ultra quid faciat_. Decretals, cap. x, _De judiciis_, lib. ii, t.i.t. i. This was the common teaching.

[4] Salvatore di Bartolo. _Nuova expozitione dei criteri teologici_, Roma, 104, pp. 303, 314. The first edition of this work was put upon the Index. The second edition, revised and corrected, and published with the approbation of Father Lepidi, has all the more weight and authority.

Indeed, to maintain that the Church should use material force, is at once to make her subject to the State; for we can hardly picture her with her own police and gendarmes, ready to punish her rebellious children. Every Catholic believes that the Church is an independent society, fully able to carry out her divine mission without the aid of the secular arm. Whether governments are favorable or hostile to her, she must pursue her course and carry on her work of salvation under them all.

"Heresy," writes Jean Guiraud, "in the Middle Ages was nearly always connected with some antisocial sect. In a period when the human mind usually expressed itself in a theological form, socialism, communism, and anarchy appeared under the form of heresy. By the very nature of things, therefore, the interests of both Church and State were identical; this explains the question of the suppression of heresy in the Middle Ages."[1]

[1] Jean Guiraud, _La repression de l'heresie au moyen age_, in the _Questions d'archeologie et d'histoire_, p. 44.

We are not surprised, therefore, that when Church and State found themselves menaced by the same peril, they agreed on the means of defence. If we deduct, from the total number of heretics burned or imprisoned the disturbers of the social order and the criminals against the common law, the number of condemned heretics will be very small.

Heretics in the Middle Ages were considered amenable to the laws of both Church and State. Men of that time could not conceive of G.o.d and His revelation without defenders in a Christian kingdom. Magistrates were considered responsible for the sins committed against the law of G.o.d. Indirectly, therefore, heresy was amenable to their tribunal.

They felt it their right and duty to punish not only crimes against society, but sins against faith.

The Inquisition, established to judge heretics, is, therefore, an inst.i.tution whose severity and cruelty are explained by the ideas and manners of the age. We will never understand it, unless we consider it in its environment, and from the viewpoint of men like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Louis, who dominated their age by their genius.

Critics who are ignorant of the Middle Ages may feel at liberty to shower insult and contempt upon a judicial system whose severity is naturally repugnant to them. But contempt does not always imply a reasonable judgment, and to abuse an inst.i.tution is not necessarily a proof of intelligence. If we would judge an epoch intelligently, we must be able to grasp the viewpoint of other men, even if they lived in an age long past.

But although we grant the good faith and good will of the founders and judges of the inquisition--we speak only, be it understood, of those who acted conscientiously--we must still maintain that their idea of justice was far inferior to ours. Whether taken in itself or compared with other criminal procedures, the Inquisition was, so far as the guarantees of equity are concerned, undoubtedly unjust and inferior. Such judicial forms as the secrecy of the trial, the prosecution carried on independently of the prisoner, the denial of advocate and defence, the use of torture, etc., were certainly despotic and barbarous. Severe penalties, like the stake and confiscation, were the legacy which a pagan legislation bequeathed to the Christian State; they were alien to the spirit of the Gospel.

The Church in a measure felt this, for to enforce these laws she always had recourse to the secular arm. In time, all this criminal code was to fall into desuetude, and no one to-day wishes it back again. Besides, the crying abuses committed by some of the Inquisitors have made the inst.i.tution forever odious.

But in abandoning the system of force, which she formerly used in union with the State, does not the Church seem to condemn, to a certain degree, her past?

Even if to-day she were to denounce the Inquisition, she would not thereby compromise her divine authority. Her office on earth is to transmit to generation after generation the deposit of revealed truths necessary for man's salvation. That to safeguard this treasure she uses means in one age which a later age denounces, merely proves that she follows the customs and ideas in vogue around her. But she takes good care not to have men consider her att.i.tude the infallible and eternal rule of absolute justice. She readily admits that she may sometimes be deceived in the choice of means of government. The system of defence and protection that she adopted in the Middle Ages succeeded, at least to some extent. We cannot maintain that it was absolutely unjust and absolutely immoral.

Undoubtedly we have to-day a much higher ideal of justice. But though we deplore the fact that the Church did not then perceive, preach or apply it, we need not be surprised. In social questions she ordinarily progresses with the march of civilization, of which she is ever one of the prime movers.

But perhaps men may blame her for leaving abandoned and betrayed the cause of toleration, which she so ably defended in the beginning. Do not let us exaggerate. There was, undoubtedly, a period in which she did not deduce, from the principle she was the first to teach, all its logical consequences. The laws she enforced against heretics prove this. But it is false to say that, while in the beginning she insisted strongly on the rights of conscience, she afterwards totally disregarded them. In fact, she exercised constraint only over her own stray children. But while she acted so cruelly toward them, she never ceased to respect the consciences of those outside her fold. She always interpreted the _compelle intrare_ to imply with regard to unbelievers moral constraint, and the means of gentleness and persuasion. If respect for human liberty is to-day dominant in the thinking world, it is due chiefly to her.

In the matter of tolerance, the Church has only to study her own history. If, during several centuries, she treated her rebellious children with greater severity than those alien to her fold, it was not from a want of consistency. And if to-day she manifests to every one signs of her maternal kindness, and lays abide for ever all physical constraint, she is not following the example of non-Catholics, but merely taking up again the interrupted tradition of her early Fathers.