THE INQUISITION CANONICALLY ESTABLISHED
For some seven centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire
persecutions for heresy were very rare and very slight. This, however,
cannot be attributed to mercy. Although some of the old heresies
survived, yet they were so sapped of their vitality that they were
no longer openly flaunted in defiance of the mother-Church, but were
practised in such obscurity as, in the main, to escape observation.
Fresh schisms, on the other hand, do not appear to have sprung up
during that spell. Largely this would be due to the clear formulation
of the Catholic theology by the various œcumenical councils held in
the years that followed upon the Christian emancipation, and by the
intellectual breadth of these doctrines, which were entirely adequate
and all-sufficient to the intellectual capacity of the time. But this
state of things could only have endured at the cost of arresting
man’s intellectual progress. A certain restraint and curb undoubtedly
was exerted, but definitely to check the imaginative and reasoning
faculties of man has never been within the power of any creed, and
never can be. It was in vain that the Church sought to coerce thought
and to stifle the learning that struck at her very foundations and
discovered the error of the cosmic and historical conceptions upon
which her theology was based; in vain that she entrenched herself
within her doctrines, and adhered rigidly to the form she had adopted.
Upon this uncompromising rigidity of the Catholic Church much censure
has been poured. The present aim is a cold survey of certain features
of history, and in such a task all polemical matters should be avoided.
Yet it may be permissible to say a word here to elucidate rather than
to defend an attitude that has been unduly abused.
It is admitted that the unyielding policy of the Church was one that
militated seriously against intellectual evolution, and on that
account it is to be deplored. But let the unbiassed mind consider for
a moment the alternative. The admission of error is the commencement
of disruption. Where one error is admitted, a thread is drawn from a
weft whose threads are interdependent for the stability of the whole.
Who has yielded once has set up a precedent that will be urged against
him to make him yield again, and yet again, until he shall have yielded
all, and, having nothing left, must suffer an imperceptible effacement.
When all is considered, there is an indisputable dignity in the
attitude of a Church which, claiming that what she teaches rests not
upon human knowledge but upon divine inspiration, refuses to cede one
jot of her doctrines to man’s discoveries; holding--and incontestably,
so long as the premise is admitted--that however certain may appear the
truths which human subtlety has disclosed, however false may appear
the doctrines to which she owes her being, it still remains that the
former are human and the latter divine of origin. Between the two she
proudly holds that there is no disputing; that error possible to man is
impossible to divinity; that man’s perception of error in the divine
tenets of the Church is no more than the manifestation of his own
liability to err.
The Church of Rome realized that either she must be entirely, or
entirely cease to be. And it is matter for unprejudiced consideration
whether the spectacle of her immobility is not more dignified than
would have been that of her yielding up her divinities one by one to
the expanding humanities, and thus gradually undergoing a course of
dismemberment which must in the end remove her last claim to existence.
In the attitude she assumed she remained the absolute mistress of her
votaries; had she departed from it she must have become their abject
servant.
Dr. Rule invites his readers to notice attentively that “no Church but
that of Rome ever had an Inquisition.”[8] But he neglects to carry
the consideration to its logical conclusion, and to add that in no
Christian Church but that of Rome could an Inquisition be possible.
For it would be impossible to offend heretically against any Church
that accommodates itself to new habits of thought in a measure as these
occur, and gives way step by step before the onslaught of learning.[9]
The Church of Rome presented her immutable formularies, her
unchangeable doctrines to the world. “This,” she announced, “is my
teaching. By this I hold. This you must accept without reservations, in
its entirety, or you are no child of mine.”
With that there could be no cavil. Had she but added the admission of
man’s liberty to accept or reject her teaching, had she but left man
free to confess or not her doctrines as his conscience and intelligence
directed, all would have been well. Unfortunately she accounted it her
duty to go further; she used coercion and compulsion to such an extent
that she imbued her children with the spirit of the eighteenth-century
Jacobin, exclaiming, “Be my brother, or I kill you!”
Unable by intellectual means to stem the intellectual secession from
her ranks, she had recourse to physical measures, and revived the
fiercely coercive methods of the first centuries.
A serious heretical outbreak had been occurring in Southern France.
There, it would seem, all the schisms that had disturbed the Church
since her foundation were gathered together--Arians, Manichæans, and
Gnostics--to which were added certain more recent sects, such as the
Cathars, the Waldenses, and the Boni Homines, or Good People.
These new-comers deserve a word of explanation.
The Cathars, like the Gnostics, were dualists; indeed, their creed was
little more than a development of Gnosticism. They believed that the
earth was the only hell or purgatory, that it was given over to the
power of the devil, and that human bodies were no more than the prisons
of the angel spirits that fell with Lucifer. In heaven their celestial
bodies still awaited them, but they could not resume these until they
had worked out their expiation. To accomplish this a man must die
reconciled with God; failing that, another earthly existence awaited
him in the body of man or beast, according to his deserts. It will be
seen that, saving for abundant Christian elements introduced into this
faith, it was little more than a revival of metempsychosis, the oldest
and most fascinating of intelligent beliefs.
The Waldenses, or Vaudois, with whom were allied the Good People, were
the earliest Protestants, as we understand the term. They claimed
for every man the right to interpret the Bible and to celebrate the
sacraments of the Church without the need of being in holy orders.
Further, they denied that the Roman Church was the Church of Christ.
These sects were known collectively as the Albigenses, so called
because the Council of Lombers, convoked to pronounce their
condemnation, had been held in the Diocese of Albi in 1165.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Anderson._
ST. PETER THE MARTYR PREACHING.
From the Painting by Berruguete.]
Pope Innocent III made an attempt to convert them; with this aim in
view he sent two monks, Peter de Castelnau and one Rodolfe, to
restore order amongst them and induce them to return to submission.
But when they murdered one of his legates the Holy Father had recourse
to those other less legitimate measures of combating liberty of
conscience. He ordered the King of France, the nobles and clergy of
the kingdom, to assume the crusader’s cross, and to proceed to the
extirpation of the Albigensian heretics, whom he described as a worse
danger to Christendom than the Saracens; and he armed them for the fray
with the same spiritual weapons that John VIII had bestowed upon those
who went to war in Palestine in the ninth century. Upon all who might
die in the service of the Church he pronounced a plenary indulgence.
It is not the present aim to follow the history of the horrible strife
that ensued--the massacres, pillages, burnings that took place in the
course of the war between the Albigenses under Raymond of Toulouse
and the Crusaders under Simon de Montfort. For over twenty years did
that war drag on, and in the course of it the original grounds of the
quarrel were forgotten; it passed into a struggle for supremacy between
North and South, and thus, properly speaking, out of the history of the
Inquisition.[10]
Now, for all that the title “Inquisitor of the Faith” was first
bestowed by the Theodosian Code, and for all that persecutions against
heretics and others had been afoot since an even earlier date than
that of Theodosius, Innocent III is to be considered the founder of
the Holy Inquisition as an integral part of the Church. For it is
under his jurisdiction that the faculty of persecuting heretics, which
hitherto had belonged entirely to the secular arm, is now conferred
upon the clergy. He dispatched two Cistercian monks as inquisitors into
France and Spain, to engage in the work of extirpating heretics; and
he strictly enjoined all princes, nobles and prelates to afford every
assistance to these emissaries, and to further them in every way in the
work they were sent to do.[11]
Himself, personally, Pope Innocent directed his attention to the
Paterini--a sect which rebelled against the celibacy imposed upon the
clergy--who were gaining ground in Italy. He invoked the secular arm
to assist him in their apprehension, imprisonment, and banishment, in
seizing their possessions, which were confiscated, and in razing their
houses to the ground.
In 1209 he assembled a council at Avignon, under the presidency of his
legates, wherein by his directions it was ordained that every bishop
should select such of his subjects, counts, castellans, and knights as
might seem to him proper, and swear them to undertake the extermination
of all excommunicated heretics.
* * * * *
“And to the end that the bishop may be the better enabled to purge his
diocese of heretical pravity, let him swear one priest and two, three
or more laymen of good repute in every parish to report to the bishop
himself, and to the governors of cities or to the lords and bailiffs of
places, the existence of any heretics or abettors of heresy wherever
found, to the end that these may be punished according to the canonical
and legal dispensations, in all cases suffering forfeiture of property.
And should the said governors and others be negligent or reluctant in
the execution of this divine service, let their persons be severally
excommunicated, and their territories placed under the interdict of the
Church.”[12]
* * * * *
In the year 1215 Pope Innocent held a further council at the Lateran in
which he extended the field of ecclesiastical activity in persecution.
He issued an injunction to all rulers, “as they desired to be esteemed
faithful, to swear a public oath that they would labour zealously
to exterminate from their dominions all those who were denounced as
heretics by the Church.”[13]
This injunction was backed by a bull which menaced with excommunication
and forfeiture of jurisdiction any prince who should fail to extirpate
heretics from his dominions--so that at one stroke the Pope asserted
his power to an extent that denied liberty of conscience to people and
independence to princes.
And meanwhile every heretic against the Holy Catholic and Orthodox
Faith, as accepted by the fathers assembled in the Church of St. John,
was excommunicated, and there followed these provisions:
“When condemned, the secular powers, or their representatives, being
present, they shall be delivered to these for punishment, the clerics
being previously degraded from their orders. The property of laymen
shall be confiscated; that of clerics bestowed upon their churches.
Persons marked with suspicion only shall, unless they can clear
themselves, be smitten with the sword of anathema, and shunned by all.
If they persist for a year in excommunication, they shall be condemned
as heretics.
“Secular powers must be moved or led, or at need compelled by
ecclesiastical censure, to make public oath for the defence of the
faith, as they themselves desire to be esteemed faithful, undertaking
to labour with all their power to extirpate from their dominions those
whom the Church shall denounce as heretics.”[14]
* * * * *
The excommunication that was to wait upon disobedience was no empty
threat, nor yet was it concerned alone with the spiritual part of man.
The Pope’s anathema imposed the same penalties upon those against whom
it was launched as the Druid’s curse had imposed of old.[15]
Persons under the ban of the Church might hold no office, nor claim
any of the ordinary rights of citizenship, or, indeed, of existence.
In sickness or distress none might show them charity under pain of
incurring the same curse, nor after death should their bodies be given
Christian burial.
By these provisions and injunctions the Inquisition may be said to have
entered upon the second stage of its evolution, and to have assumed
a strictly ecclesiastical character--in short, to be canonically
established.
It was Pope Innocent III who placed in the hands of the Church this
terrible weapon of persecution, and who, by the awful severity of
his own attitude towards liberty of conscience, of thought, and of
expression, afforded to fanaticism and religious intolerance an example
that was to be their merciless guide through centuries to come.