THE INQUISITION OF THE MIDDLE AGES

BOOK 1 - ORIGIN AND ORGANIZATION OF THE INQUISITION

CHAPTER V.

6

THE TEMPORAL AUTHORITY COERCED TO PERSECUTE

The Church thus undertook to coerce the sovereign to persecution. It would not listen to mercy, it would not hear of expediency. The monarch held his crown by the tenure of extirpating heresy, of seeing that the laws were sharp and were pitilessly enforced. Any hesitation was visited with excommunication, and if this proved inefficacious, his dominions were thrown open to the first hardy adventurer whom the Church would supply with an army for his overthrow. Whether this new feature in the public law of Europe could establish itself was the question at issue in the Albigensian crusades. Raymond’s lands were forfeited simply because he would not punish heretics, and those which his son retained were treated as a fresh gift from the crown. The triumph of the new principle was complete, and it never was subsequently questioned.

It was applied from the highest to the lowest, and the Church made every dignitary feel that his station was an office in a universal theocracy wherein all interests were subordinate to the great duty of maintaining the purity of the faith. The hegemony of Europe was vested in the Holy Roman Empire, and its coronation was a strangely solemn religious ceremony in which the emperor was admitted to the lower orders of the priesthood, and was made to anathematize all heresy raising itself against the holy Catholic Church. In handing him the ring, the pope told him that it was a symbol that he was to destroy heresy; and in girding him with the sword, that with it he was to strike down the enemies of the Church. Frederic II declared that he had received the imperial dignity for the maintenance and propagation of the faith. In the bull of Clement VI recognizing Charles IV the first named of the imperial duties enumerated are the extension of the faith and the extirpation of heretics; and the neglect of the Emperor Wenceslas to suppress Wickliffitism was regarded as a satisfactory reason for his deposition. In fact, according to the high churchmen, the only reason of the transfer of the empire from the Greeks to the Germans was that the Church might have an efficient agent. The principles applied to Raymond of Toulouse were embodied in the canon law, and every prince and noble was made to understand that his lands would be exposed to the spoiler if, after due notice, he hesitated in trampling out heresy. Minor officials were subjected to the same discipline. According to the Council of Toulouse in 1229, any bailli not diligent in persecuting heresy forfeited his property and was ineligible to public employment, while by the Council of Narbonne in 1244, any one holding temporal jurisdiction who delayed in exterminating heretics was held guilty of fautorship of heresy, became an accomplice of heretics, and thus was subjected to the penalties of heresy; this was extended to all who should neglect a favorable opportunity of capturing a heretic, or of helping those seeking to capture him. From the emperor to the meanest peasant the duty of persecution was enforced with all the sanctions, spiritual and temporal, which the Church could command. Not only must the ruler enact rigorous laws to punish heretics, but he and his subjects must see them strenuously executed, for any slackness of persecution was, in the canon law, construed as fautorship of heresy, putting a man on his purgation.

These principles were tacitly or explicitly received into the public law of Europe. Frederic II accepted them in his cruel edicts against heresy, whence they passed into the general compilations of civil and feudal law, and even into bodies of local jurisprudence. Thus we see in the statutes of Verona, in 1228, the Podestá swearing, on taking office, to expel all heretics from the city; and in the Schwabenspiegel, or code in force throughout southern Germany, it is laid down that a ruler who neglects to persecute heresy is to be stripped of all possessions, and if he does not burn those who are delivered to him as heretics by the ecclesiastical courts he is to be punished as a heretic himself. The Church took care that this legislation should not remain a dead letter. Frederic’s decrees in all their atrocity were required to be read and taught in the great law-school of Bologna as a fundamental portion of jurisprudence, and were even embodied in the canon law itself. We shall see that they were repeatedly ordered by the popes to be inscribed irrevocably among the laws of all the cities and states which they could control, and the inquisitor was commanded to coerce all officials to their rigid enforcement, by excommunicating those who were negligent in the good work. Even excommunication, which rendered a magistrate incompetent to perform his official functions, did not relieve him from the duty of punishing heretics when called upon by bishop or inquisitor. In view of this earnestness to embody in the statute-books the sharpest laws for the extermination of heretics and to oblige the secular officials to execute those laws, under the alternative of being themselves condemned and punished as heretics, the adjuration for mercy with which the inquisitors handed over their victims to be burned was evidently, as we shall see hereafter, a mere technical formula to avoid the “irregularity” of being concerned in judgments of blood. In process of time the moral responsibility was freely admitted, as when in February, 1418, the Council of Constance decreed that all who should defend Hussitism, or regard Huss or Jerome of Prague as holy men, should be treated as relapsed heretics and be punished with fire—“puniantur ad ignem” —. It is altogether a modern perversion of history to assume, as apologists do, that the request for mercy was sincere, and that the secular magistrate and not the Inquisition was responsible for the death of the heretic. We can imagine the smile of amused surprise with which Gregory IX or Gregory XI would have listened to the dialectics with which the Comte Joseph de Maistre proves that it is an error to suppose, and much more to assert, that Catholic priests can in any manner be instrumental in compassing the death of a fellow-creature.

Not only were all Christians thus made to feel that it was their highest duty to aid in the extermination of heretics, but they were taught that they must denounce them to the authorities regardless of all considerations, human or divine. No tie of kindred served as an excuse for concealing heresy. The son must denounce the father, and the husband was guilty if he did not deliver his wife to a frightful death. Every human bond was severed by the guilt of heresy; children were taught to desert their parents, and even the sacrament of matrimony could not unite an orthodox wife to a misbelieving husband. No pledge was to remain unbroken. It was an old rule that faith was not to be kept with heretics—as Innocent III emphatically phrased it, “according to the canons, faith is not to be kept with him who keeps not faith with God.” No oath of secrecy, therefore, was binding in a matter of heresy, for if one is faithful to a heretic he is unfaithful to God. Apostasy from the faith is the greatest of all sins, says Bishop Lucas of Tuy; therefore if any one has bound himself by oath to keep the secret of such inexplicable wickedness, he must reveal the heresy and perform penance for the perjury, with the comfortable assurance that, as charity covereth a multitude of sins, he will be gently dealt with in consideration of his zeal.

Thus the hesitation as to the treatment of heretics which marked the eleventh and twelfth centuries disappeared in the thirteenth, when the Church was involved in mortal struggle with the sectaries. There was no pretence of moderation, and, save in the technical adjuration for mercy, no attempt to evade the responsibility. St. Raymond of Pennaforte, the compiler of the decretals of Gregory IX, who was the highest authority in his generation, lays it down as a principle of ecclesiastical law that the heretic is to be coerced by excommunication and confiscation, and if they fail, by the extreme exercise of the secular power. The man who was doubtful in faith was to be held a heretic, and so also was the schismatic who, while believing all the articles of religion, refused the obedience due to the Roman Church. All alike were to be forced into the Roman fold, and the fate of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram was invoked for the destruction of the obstinate.

St. Thomas Aquinas, whose overshadowing authority superseded all his predecessors, and who brought canon and dogma into a permanent system still in force, lays down the rules with merciless precision. Heretics, he tells us, are not to be tolerated. The tenderness of the Church allows them to have two warnings, after which, if pertinacious, they are to be abandoned to the secular power, to be removed from the world by death. This, he argues, shows the abounding charity of the Church, for it is much more wicked to corrupt the faith on which depends the life of the soul than to debase the coinage which provides merely for temporal life; wherefore, if coiners and other malefactors are justly doomed at once to death, much more may heretics be justly slain as soon as they are convicted. Yet in its mercy the Church will always receive the heretic back into its bosom, no matter how often he may have relapsed, and will kindly give him penance whereby he may win eternal life; but charity to one must not be allowed to work evil to others. Therefore for once the heretic who repents and recants will be received and his life be spared; but if he relapses, though he may be received to penance for his soul’s salvation, he will not be released from the death-penalty. This is the definite expression of the policy of the Church, which, as we shall see, became its unalterable rule of practice.

PERSECUTION OF THE DEAD.