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THE NEW INQUISITIONS: HERETIC-HUNTING AND THE INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF MODERN TOTALITARIANISM |
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2: The Archetypal Inquisition No institution of the Catholic Church is more notorious than that of the Inquisitions. The image of the inquisitors ordering or conducting tortures, and the fates of those who were burned to death in public exhibitions -- including truly great figures such as the mystic Marguerite Porete (ca. 1280-1310), and the brilliant philosopher Giordano Bruno (ca. 1548-1600) -- condemn the institution irrevocably and utterly, no matter whether the Vatican sponsors symposia or books that downplay or whitewash inquisitional horrors. [1] But our purpose here is not to enter into controversies between Church apologists, on the one hand, and critics, on the other. Our purpose, rather, is to consider the Inquisition's archetypal social dimensions. As an institutional process, the Inquisition has its origin in the early thirteenth century, when the ascetic movements known as Catharism and as the Waldensians began to be seen as a real threat to the power of the Catholic Church in France. Although previous popes had shown clemency toward heretics, already Pope Lucius III in his Ad abolendam of n84 had indicated that bishops should begin to investigate heretics. But when Pope Innocent III convened the Fourth Lateran Council, the third Canon it issued was devoted to the punishment of heretics, whom it said should be turned over to the secular arm if found guilty. It also said that bishops should demand that the faithful denounce heretics, and that heretics should go before a special tribunal. Finally, it said that bishops who did not prosecute heresy should be removed. [2] This was the juridical foundation for the Inquisition, but it also was very clearly part of a larger agenda to centralize Church power (a large part of which was to use secular power to enforce Church doctrine). Here we find the first archetypal dimension of the Inquisition: from its subsequent inception as a juridical process under Pope Gregory IX around 1230 and throughout its history, the Inquisition depended on the juncture of religious and secular power. The conjunction of church doctrine and judgment with secular enforcement allowed for a convenient and lasting excuse on the part of church officials, who could say that it was not they who executed heretics but rather the "secular arm." Thus, responsibility could be cast off -- and when church inquisitors began to torture suspected heretics themselves, the Church allowed them to absolve one another. Despite these casuistries, the fact remains that the Inquisition roughly united both Church ideology and secular power, thus creating a model for a society totalized into unity via force and terror. The second archetypal dimension of the Inquisition is that it, in effect, criminalized thought. Dissent could be punished. "Heresy," after all, is not identical with schism -- it is before any organizational step toward separatism. "Heresy," rather, represents a freely chosen alternative to convention or orthodoxy; it represents alternative ideas. Thus, at its center, the inquisitional process consisted in enforcement of an ideological unity through implied or actual violence: this is its basic nature. It is true that many targets of the Inquisition -- accused witches or sorcerers, for instance, or Cathars who had created an alternative church structure -- were alleged to have gone beyond dissenting ideas, and had undertaken illicit practices. Yet even here, it is often exceedingly difficult to determine where orthodoxy ends and heresy or magic begins. Discerning such distinctions was the basis for the Inquisition. The third archetypal dimension of the Inquisitions was the imposition of torture and of the death penalty. Pope Innocent IV, in his Ad Extirpanda, approved the use of torture by the secular arm in certain cases, but Pope Alexander IV in 1256 gave inquisitors the capacity to mutually absolve one another. Thus, one inquisitor could torture and another inquisitor could absolve him. And although torture was approved for only a single session, inquisitors could suspend torture and then resume it days later under a "continuance." It's true that in 1306, Pope Clement V ordered an inquiry into the necessity and propriety of torture, and that John XXII in 1317 ordered that a bishop had to agree before torture could be applied. In other words, there were some efforts at constraining torture. But there is also at least some truth to H. C. Lea's no doubt exaggerated assertion that "the whole system of the Inquisition was such as to render the resort to torture inevitable." [3] My purpose here is not to enter into the thicket of polemics or apologetics concerning Inquisitions, but rather to point out that regardless of how frequently torture was applied by inquisitors, and regardless of exactly how many people actually received the death penalty and were burned to death or otherwise horribly murdered, the fact is that indisputably, the Church did authorize both torture and murder in order to extirpate 'heresy.' Indeed, Pope John Paul II issued an official apology on behalf of the Church for exactly such inquisitorial practices at the beginning of the twenty-first century. After all, there is a consistent pattern of inquisitorial torture and approved murder that stretches over centuries. But why did officials of the Church deem torture necessary? There are two fundamental reasons. The first is that it allowed inquisitors to hunt down others who also might be part of a heretical group, and thus to extirpate competing institutions. What made Cathars, in particular, so threatening is that they developed an organizational structure in competition with that of the Catholic Church. But the prosecution of heresy was not exclusively to hunt down particular groups -- it also proceeded against individuals. And in this case, the Church insisted on confessions. If individuals were recalcitrant (or, for that matter, innocent), obviously it was difficult to extract admissions of guilt, and so there emerged extraordinary means of forcing admission. Confession was critically important, not only to Church inquisitors, but also later to Communist inquisitors, because under consideration in both cases are ideological crimes. If one violates a prevailing ideology, then the only way to return to the group is by confessing one's error and recanting. The mechanism is fundamentally the same in both cases: one is compelled by fear to acquiesce to the demands of those "deputized" to enforce the ideology of the totalized society. [4] And the basic premise was recognized by Dostoevsky during the nineteenth century: the inquisitors see themselves as the "protectors" of society, as taking away from individuals the "burden" of free will and enforcing on them what is supposedly right for them. Even torture and murder are somehow justified in the name of a totalizing ideological order. Thus we arrive at our fourth archetypal dimension of the Inquisitions: terror. In an article entitled "Patterns of the Inquisitorial Mind as the Basis for a Pedagogy of Fear," Bartolome Bennassar details the methods and purposes of the Spanish Inquisition during the sixteenth century. The original purpose of the Spanish Inquisition was to eliminate the "crypto-Judaism" allegedly practiced by "conversos," or crypto-converts to Judaism, and more than nine out of ten victims of the early Spanish Inquisition (founded 1478-1481) were Jews or Jewish converts. [5] But by the sixteenth century, the "Holy Office ... became an instrument for producing unanimity of words, actions, and thoughts, and for 'guaranteeing social immobility under the constraint of ideological hermeticism.'" [6] In addition to Jews or crypto-Jews, its victims included crypto- Muslims, mystics [Alumbrados), and various sects of Protestantism. The Spanish Inquisition "in order to enforce conformity with the official religious, political, and social model," chose to "foster fear at all levels of the social body." [7] A primary aim of the Spanish Inquisition in the sixteenth century was to inspire terror in the populace. The terror that the Inquisition inspired in the population was deliberately fostered, as the Inquisitors themselves wrote. Bennassar quotes Francisco Pena, who republished Nicholas Eymerich's Directorium Inquisitorium, and wrote that "we must remember that the essential aim of the trial and death sentence is not saving the soul of the defendant, but furthering the public good and terrorizing the people." [8] He also observed that "there is no doubt that instructing and threatening the people by publicizing the sentences and imposing sanbenitos [humiliation) is a good method." And another official wrote in 1564 that as the Inquisition "is too much feared to be well accepted," and as "we already know that [people) do not love it, it is fitting that people nurture fear." [9] Hence arose the widespread advice of the time: que mirase lo que dice, or "watch what you say." Given historians now recognize that, in the midsixteenth century, the Inquisition did not impose torture or the death penalty at rates that exceeded those of the civil courts, one has to ask why "the whole population was so afraid of the Holy Office." Hence we arrive at our fifth characteristic of the Inquisitions: secrecy of proceedings. The Reportorium Inquisitorum (Valencia: 1491) insists "witnesses must lodge their deposition in secret, not publicly, so that they may speak without restraint and tell the whole truth." [10] All charges were to be secret, and "the more secret the matters dealt with are, the more they are held as sacred and revered by all those who have no access to them," wrote an official to the Santiago tribunal in 1607. [11] And Jaime Contreras wrote that "Secrecy fostered the myth and thereby general fear and popular intimidation before the dreadful institution. This socio-psychological process .... constituted perhaps the best weapon of the Inquisition: wrapping itself up in a mist of mystery created fear or at least caution." [12] Inquisitors would not charge a summoned suspect but would force him to guess about why he had been arrested. [13] Not allowing the accused to face their accusers or to hear the evidence or charges against them generated fear, and thus the likelihood that a victim would "inform" against someone else, be it a family member, a friend, or a neighbor. Such secret proceedings intensified terror in the populace. And the final archetypal dimension of the Inquisitions was infamy. If the proceedings and witnesses were secret at least partly in order to inspire terror, the judgments depended in large part for their effectiveness upon publicity. The autos-da-fe -- public lashings and burnings -- became great notorious spectacles in Spain, but even lesser penalties depended on public shame. The "sanbenito" mentioned by the inquisitor Pefia was the garb of public humiliation, adorned with the family name of the accused, and even after the individual no longer had to wear it in public, it was hung in the local church to encourage generational shame. [14] Fear of secret condemnation or betrayal, and fear of public shame: these are very much the same dynamics that we see at work in Leninist-Stalinist Russia during the first decades of Communist dictatorship. Of course, I am not alone in making this connection between the Catholic Inquisitions and modern secular state inquisitions. Bennassar writes that "the inquisitorial mind" still exists today: Secrecy, mystery is the main characteristic of the political police forces of totalitarian states and even, to some extent, of some democratic ones. We readily recall the mysterious fear aroused by the Gestapo and the GPU after the Cheka, and before the NKVD, [later] the KGB. Fear is also fostered by secret police forces in countries like Argentina ... Chile, Paraguay, and all the Gulag countries of the Eastern bloc. The inquisitorial network of familiars and commissioners has truly been "improved upon." ... The work of persuading the defendant to confess for the salvation of his or her soul was the forerunner of the contemporary brainwashing that leads one to self-denunciation for the honor and safety of the new god, the state. [15] Once fear is generated throughout society, people "become silent and try to adapt to the dominant social pattern, religious, ideological, or political -- [they] keep quiet and follow the rules till they stop even thinking, leaving some select individuals to think rightly for them and build their happiness in this world or the next, whether they like it or not." [16] This expresses precisely the inquisitorial mentality (and its consequences) as captured by Dostoevsky in the character of the "Grand Inquisitor," a mentality that by no means disappeared over the course of the twentieth century. Numerous recent studies have outlined how the Catholic Inquisitions really do fit into the general category of jurisprudence, and how many inquisitors were concerned about the legal niceties of their work. John Tedeschi, in The Prosecution of Heresy, notes for instance that the secrecy of the inquisitors was in part for witness protection, so that the accused could not retaliate. Tedeschi quotes Eliseo Masini, inquisitor of Genoa, who calls for "great prudence" in the "jailing of suspects" "because the mere fact of incarceration for the crime of heresy brings notable infamy to the person. Thus it will be necessary to study carefully the nature of the evidence, the quality of the witnesses, and the condition of the accused." [17] Inquisitors meticulously documented their findings, and were under the supervision of the Church bureaucracy. In short, there were indeed constraints on the power of the inquisitors. But all this said, the fact remains that the Inquisitions represent a set of archetypal characteristics that recurred in the twentieth century under various secular dictatorships with much fewer limitations and with far greater virulence. Everyone of these archetypal characteristics is found again in various Fascist and Communist regimes, and indeed, even recur in societies that do not quite so easily fit into either "fascist" or "communist" categories. The unity or totalizing of secular and religious bureaucracies into a single totalitarian power, the criminalization of thought, the use of torture and murder, the inculcation of terror in the populace, the use of secret evidence and witnesses, and the use of public infamy, humiliation, or "show trials" or "show executions" [autos-da-fe] -- all of these can be found again in the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. My point here is not that the Catholic Inquisition is to blame for modem totalitarianism. It is, rather, that what we see emerging in the various Inquisitions is a phenomenon with particular characteristics that recurs again in the twentieth century. I believe that it is vitally important for us to understand as fully as possible the nature of this phenomenon, to throw light on how it recurs in the twentieth century, even in the works of authors who would seem disconnected from one another and even to be opponents of one another. For it is clearly the case that the phenomenon represented by the Inquisitions can be traced through the works of various eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century political philosophers -- out of whose works emerged the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century. If we are not to see these same kinds of events and phenomena recur again, we must begin to analyze and understand more fully the kinds of political philosophies that give rise to them. New inquisitions do not arise ex nihilo, but derive from particular kinds of political philosophies. And so, let us delve now into the labyrinthine channels through which the archetype of the old Inquisitions emerged into new, secular inquisitions.
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