Book 6 — CHAPTER VI.

THE INQUISITION AND THE INDEX.[724]

§ 1. The Inquisition in Spain.

The idea conveyed in the term Inquisition is the punishment of spiritual or ecclesiastical offences by physical pains and penalties. It was no new conception in the Christian Church. It had existed from the days of Constantine. So far as the mediæval Church is concerned, historians roughly distinguish between the Episcopal, the Papal, and the Spanish Inquisitions. In the half-barbarous Church of the early Middle Ages, in which a curious give-and-take policy existed between the secular and civil powers, a seemingly consistent understanding was arrived at between Church and State, which may be summed up by saying that it was recognised to be the Church’s duty to point out heretics, and that of the State to punish them—the Church being represented by the Bishops. This episcopal Inquisition took many forms, and was never a very effective instrument in the suppression of heresy.

In 1203, Pope Innocent III., alarmed at the spread of heresies through southern France and northern Italy, published a Bull censuring the indifference of the Bishops, appointing the Abbot of Citeaux his delegate in matters of heresy, and giving him power to judge and punish heresy. This was the beginning of the Inquisition as a separate institution. It was an act of papal centralisation, and a distinct encroachment on the episcopal jurisdiction. The papal Inquisition, thus started, took root. It did not displace the old episcopal Inquisition; the two existed side by side; but the “Apostolic Tribunal for the suppression of heresy” was by far the more effective weapon. It was usually managed by the Dominican and Franciscan Orders.

The Spanish Inquisition took its rise in the closing decades of the fifteenth century. The Popes had frequently desired to see the papal Inquisition introduced into Spain, and leave had always been refused by the sovereigns, jealous of papal interference. Pope Sixtus IV. had gone the length of granting to his Legate, Nicolo Franco, “full inquisitorial powers to prosecute and punish false Christians who after baptism persisted in the observance of Jewish rites,” but Isabella and Ferdinand did not allow him to exercise them. But the power and wealth of the Conversos—Jews who had nominally embraced Christianity—had made them detested by the Spanish people, and a large section of the clergy were clamouring for their overthrow. Thomas de Torquemada, the Queen’s confessor, eagerly pressed the Inquisition upon his royal penitent, and at last the sovereigns applied to the Pope for a Bull to enable them to establish in Spain an Inquisition of a peculiar kind. It was to differ from the ordinary papal Inquisition in this, that it was to be strictly under royal control, that the sovereigns were to have the appointment of the Inquisitors, and that the fines and confiscations were to flow into the royal treasury. The Bull was granted (November 1st, 1478), but the sovereigns hesitated to use the rights it conveyed. After a year’s delay, two royal Inquisitors were appointed (September 17th, 1480), and the first auto-da-fé, at which six persons were burnt, took place on February 6th, 1481. The succeeding years saw various modifications in the constitution of the Holy Office; but at last it was organised with a council, presided over by an Inquisitor-General, Thomas de Torquemada. He was a man of pitiless zeal, stern, relentless, and autocratic; and he stamped his nature on the institution over which he presided. The Holy Office was permitted to frame its own rules. The permission made it practically independent, while all the resources of the State were placed at its command. When an Inquisitor came to assume his functions, the officials took an oath to assist him to exterminate all whom he might designate as heretics, and to observe, and compel the observance by all, of the decretals Ad abolendum, Excommunicamus, Ut officium Inquisitionis, and Ut Inquisitionis negotium—the papal legislation of the thirteenth century, which made the State wholly subservient to the Holy Office, and rendered incapable of official position any one suspect in the faith or who favoured heretics. Besides this, all the population was assembled to listen to a sermon by the Inquisitor, after which all were required to swear on the cross and the Gospels to help the Holy Office, and not to impede it in any manner or on any pretext. The methods of work and procedure were also taken from the papal Inquisition. The Inquisitors were furnished with letters patent. They travelled from town to town, attended by guards and notaries public. Their expenses were defrayed by taxes laid on the towns and districts through which they passed. Spies and informers, guaranteed State protection, brought forward their information. The Court was opened; witnesses were examined; and the accused were acquitted or found guilty. The sentence was pronounced; the secular assessor gave a formal assent; and the accused was handed over to the civil authorities for punishment. When Torquemada reorganised the Spanish Inquisition, a series of rules were framed for its procedure which enforced secrecy to the extent of depriving the accused of any rational means of defence; which elaborated the judicial method so as to leave no loop-hole even for those who expressed a wish to recant; and which multiplied the charges under which suspected heretics, even after death, might be treated as impenitent and their property confiscated. The Spanish Inquisition differed from the papal in its close relation to the civil authorities, its terrible secrecy, its relentlessness, and its exclusion of Bishops from even a nominal participation in its work. Thus organised, it became the most terrible of curses to unhappy Spain. During the first hundred and thirty-nine years of its existence the country was depopulated to the extent of three millions of people. It had become strong enough to overawe the monarchy, to insult the episcopate, and to defy the Pope. The number of its victims can only be conjectured. Llorente has calculated that during the eighteen years of Torquemada’s presidency 114,000 persons were accused, of whom 10,220 were burnt alive, and 97,000 were condemned to perpetual imprisonment or to public penitence. This was the terrible instrument used relentlessly to bring the Spanish people into conformity with the Spanish Reformation, and to crush the growing Protestantism of the Low Countries. It was extended to Corsica and Sardinia; but the people of Naples and Sicily successfully resisted its introduction when proposed by the Spanish Viceroys.

§ 2. The Inquisition in Italy.

Cardinal Caraffa (afterwards Pope Paul IV.), the relentless enemy of the Reformation, seeing the success of this Spanish Inquisition in its extermination of heretics, induced Pope Paul III. to consent to a reorganisation of the papal Inquisition in Italy on the Spanish model, in 1542. The Curia had become alarmed at the progress of the Reformation in Italy. They had received information that small Protestant communities had been formed in several of the Italian towns, and that heresy was spreading in an alarming fashion. Caraffa declared that “the whole of Italy was infected with the Lutheran heresy, which had been extensively embraced both by statesmen and ecclesiastics.” Ignatius Loyola and the Jesuits highly approved of the suggestion, and they were all-powerful with the Cardinal Borromeo, the pious and trusted nephew of the Pope. In 1542 the Congregation of the Holy Office was founded at Rome, and six Cardinals, among them Cardinals Caraffa and Toledo, were named Inquisitors-General, with authority on both sides of the Alps to try all cases of heresy, to apprehend and imprison suspected persons, and to appoint inferior tribunals with the same or more limited powers. The intention was to introduce into this remodelled papal Inquisition most of the features which marked the thoroughness of the Spanish institution. But the jealousy of the Popes prevented the Holy Office from exercising the same independent action in Italy as in Spain. The new institution began its work at once within the States of the Church, and was introduced after some negotiations into most of the Italian principalities. Venice refused, until it was arranged that the Holy Office there should be strictly subject to the civil authorities.

Although modelled on the Spanish institution, the work of the Holy Office in Italy never exhibited the same murderous activity; nor was there the same need. The Italians have never showed the stern consistency in faith which characterised the Spaniards. It was generally found sufficient to strike at the leaders in order to cause the relapse of their followers. Still the records of the Office and contemporary witnesses recount continuous trials and burnings in Rome and in other cities. In Venice, death by drowning was substituted for burning. The victims were placed on a board supported by two gondolas; the boats were rowed apart, and the unfortunate martyrs perished in the waters. The Protestant congregations which had been formed in Bologna, Faenza, Ferrara, Lucca, Modena, Naples, Siena, Venice, and Vicenza were dispersed with little or no bloodshed. A colony of Waldenses, settled near the town of Cosenza in the north-central part of Calabria, were made of sterner stuff. Nothing would induce them to relapse, and they were exterminated by sword, by hurling from the summits of cliffs, by prolonged confinement in deadly prisons, at the stake, in the mines, in the Spanish galleys. One hundred elderly women were first tortured and then slaughtered at Montalto. The survivors among the women and children were sold into slavery. Such was the work of the Counter-Reformation in Italy, and the measures to which it owed much of its success.

§ 3. The Index.

Leaders of the Counter-Reformation in Italy like Popes Paul IV. and Pius V. were determined on much more than the dispersion of Protestant communities and the banishment or martyrdom of the missionaries of Evangelical thought. They resolved to destroy what they rightly enough believed to be its seed and seed-bed—the cultivation of independent thinking and of impartial scholarship. They wished to extirpate all traces of the Renaissance. In the fifteenth and first half of the sixteenth centuries, Italy had been “the workshop of ideas,” the officina scientiarum for the rest of Europe. The Inquisition, in Italy as in Spain, attacked the Academies, the schools of learning, above all the libraries in which the learning of the past was stored, and the printing-presses which disseminated ideas day by day. They had the example of Torquemada before them, who had burnt six thousand volumes at Salamanca in 1490 on pretence that they taught sorcery.

It was no new thing to order the burning of heretical writings. This had been done continuously throughout the Middle Ages. The episcopal Inquisition, the Universities, the papal Inquisition, had all endeavoured to discover and destroy writings which they deemed to be dangerous to the dogmas of the Church. After the invention of printing such a method of slaying ideas was not so easy; but the ecclesiastical authorities had tried their best. The celebrated edict of the Archbishop of Mainz of 1486, prompted by the number of Bibles printed in the vernacular, and trying to establish a censorship of books, may be taken as an example.[725]

Pope Sixtus IV. in 1547 had ordered the University of Köln to see that no books (libri, tractatus aut scripturæ qualescunque) were printed without previous licence, and had empowered the authorities to inflict penalties on the printers, purchasers, and readers of all unlicensed books. Alexander VI. had sent the same order to the Archbishops of Köln, Mainz, Trier, and Magdeburg (1501). In a Constitution of Leo X., approved by the Lateran Council of 1515, it was declared that no book could be printed in Rome which had not been expressly sanctioned by the Master of the Palace, and in other lands by the Bishop of the diocese or the Inquisitor of the district; and this had been homologated by the Council of Trent.[726] From its reorganisation in 1543 the papal Inquisition in Rome had undertaken this work of censorship.

Outside the States of the Church the suppression of books and the requirement of ecclesiastical licence could only be carried out through the co-operation of the secular authorities; and they naturally demanded some uniformity in the books condemned. This led to lists of prohibited books being drawn up—as at Louvain (1546 and 1550), at Köln (1549), and by the Sorbonne, who managed the Inquisition for the north of France (1544 and 1551). Pope Paul IV. drafted the first papal Index in 1559. It was very drastic, and its very severity prevented its success.[727] It was this Index Librorum Prohibitorum which was discussed by the Commission appointed at the Council of Trent.[728]

The Commission drafted a set of ten rules to be followed in constructing a list of prohibited books, and left the actual formation of the Index to the Pope. This new Index (the Tridentine Index) was published by Pope Pius IV. in 1564. His successor, Pius V., appointed a special Commission of Cardinals to deal with the question of prohibited books. It was called the Congregation of the Index, and although distinct from the Inquisition, worked along with it. Its work was done very thoroughly. Italian scholarship was slain so far as the peninsula was concerned. The scholarship of Spain and Portugal was also destroyed. Learning had to take shelter north of the Alps and the Pyrenees. So thoroughly was the work of prohibition carried out, so many difficulties beset even Roman Catholic authors, that Paleario called the whole system “a dagger drawn from the scabbard to assassinate all men of letters”; Paul Sarpi dubbed it “the finest secret which has ever been discovered for applying religion to the purpose of making men idiots”; and Latini, a champion of the Papacy, declared it to be a “peril which threatened the very existence of books.”

The rules for framing the Index, drafted by the commission of the Council of Trent, are curious reading. The writings of noted Reformers, of Zwingli, Luther, and especially of Calvin, were absolutely prohibited. The Vulgate was to be the only authorised version of the Scriptures, and the only one to be quoted as an inspired text. Scholars might, by special permission of their ecclesiastical superiors, possess another version, but they were never to quote it as authoritative. Versions in the vernacular were never to be quoted. Bible Dictionaries, Concordances, books on controversial theology, had to pass the strictest examination at the hands of the censors before publication. The censors were directed to examine with the utmost care not merely the text, but all summaries, notes, indexes, prefaces, and dedications, searching for any heretical phrases or for sentences which the unwary might be tempted to think heretical, for all criticisms on any ecclesiastical action, for any satire on the clergy or on religious rites. All such passages were to be expunged.

North of the Alps the Index had small effect. It was impotent in lands where the Reformation was firmly established; and in France, papal Germany, and north Italy a class of daring colporteurs carried the prohibited tracts, Bibles, and religious literature throughout the lands.

The tremendous powers of suppression set forth in the Tridentine rules could not avoid doing infinite mischief to thought and scholarship, even if placed in the hands of qualified and well-intentioned men. But the censors were neither capable nor high-minded. Scholars refused the odious task. Commentaries on the Fathers were read by men who knew little Latin, less Greek, and no Hebrew. They were discovered extorting money from unfortunate authors, levying blackmail on booksellers, listening to the whispers of jealous rivals.

So effectually was learning slain in Italy, that when the Popes at the close of the sixteenth century strove to revive the scholarship of the Church and to gather together at Rome a band of men able to defend the Papacy with their pens, these scholars had to work under immense disabilities. Baronius wrote his Annals, and Latini edited the Latin Fathers, both of them ignorant of Greek, and both harassed by the censorship.

Some of the more distinguished leaders of the Counter-Reformation saw the dangers which lurked in this system of pure suppression. The great German Jesuit, Canisius, who did more than any other man for the maintenance and revival of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany, pointed out that destruction was powerless to effect permanent good. The people must have books, and the Church ought to supply them. He laboured somewhat successfully to that end.

§ 4. The Society of Jesus and the Counter-Reformation.

Neither the Inquisition nor the Index account for the Counter-Reformation. Repression might stamp out Reformers in southern Europe; but faith, enthusiasm, unselfish and self-denying work were needed to enable the Roman Church to assume the offensive. These were supplied to a large extent by the devoted followers of Ignatius Loyola.

Roman Catholicism reached its ebb during the pontificate of Pius IV. It stood everywhere on the defensive, seeing one stronghold after another pass into the hands of a victorious Protestantism. Pius V., his successor, was the first fighting Pope of the new Roman Catholicism. He had behind him the reorganisation effected by the Council of Trent; the Roman Catholic revival of mediæval piety of which Carlo Borromeo, Philip Neri, and Francis de Sales were distinguished types; the Inquisition and Congregation of the Index; and, above all, the Company of Jesus. Romanism under his leadership boldly assumed the offensive.

In 1564 it seemed as if all Germany might become Protestant. The States which still acknowledged the Papacy were honeycombed with Protestant communities. Bavaria, the Rhine Provinces, the Duchy of Austria itself, were, according to contemporary accounts, more than half-Protestant. Nearly all the seats of learning were Protestant. The Romanist Universities of Vienna and Ingolstadt were almost deserted by students. Under the skilful and enthusiastic leadership of Peter Canisius, the Jesuits were mainly instrumental in changing this state of things. They entered Bavaria and Austria. They appeared there as the heralds and givers of education, and took possession of the rising generation. They established their schools in all the principal centres of population. They were good teachers; they produced school-books of a modern type; the catechism written by Canisius himself was used in all their schools (it transplanted into Romanism the Lutheran system of catechising); they charged no fees; they soon had the instruction of the Roman Catholic children in their hands. The astonished people of town and country districts began to see pilgrimages of boys and girls, conducted like modern Sunday-school treats, led by the good fathers, to visit famous churches, shrines, holy crosses, miraculous wells, etc. The parents were induced to visit the teachers; visits led to the confessional, and the confessional to the directorate. Then followed the discipline of the Spiritual Exercises, usually shortened to suit the capacities of the penitents. Whole districts were led back to the confessional—the parents following the children.

The higher education was not neglected. Jesuit colleges founded at Vienna and Ingolstadt peopled the decaying universities with students, and gave them new life. Student associations, on the model of that founded by Canisius at Köln, were formed, and were affiliated to the Company of Jesus. Pilgrimages of students wended their way to famous shrines; talented young men submitted their souls to the direction of the Jesuit fathers, and shared in the hypnotic trance given by the course of the Spiritual Exercises. A generation of ardent souls was trained for the active service of the Roman Church, and vowed to combat Protestantism to the death.

The Company had another, not less important, field of work. The Peace of Augsburg had left the management of the religion of town or principality in the hands of the ruling secular authority. The maxim, Cujus regio ejus religio, placed the religious convictions of the population of many districts at the mercy of one man. Many Romanist Princes had no wish to persecute, still less to see their principalities depopulated by banishment. Some of them had given guarantees for freedom of conscience and limited rights of worship to their Protestant subjects. The Jesuits set themselves to change this condition of things. They could be charming confessors and still more delightful directors for the obedient sons and daughters of the Papacy. They were invited to take charge of the souls of many of the Princes and especially of the Princesses of Germany. They set themselves to charm, to command, and, lastly, to threaten their penitents. Toleration of Protestants they represented to be the unpardonable sin. They succeeded in many cases in inducing Romanist rulers to withdraw the protection they had hitherto accorded to their Protestant subjects, who, if they stood firm in their faith, had to leave their homes and seek refuge within a Protestant district.

Thus openly and stealthily the wave of Romanist reaction rolled northwards over Germany, and district after district was won back for the Papacy. This first period of the Counter-Reformation may be said to end with the sixteenth century; the second, which included the Thirty Years’ War, lies beyond our limit.

The savage struggle in France, culminating in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, did not belong to the New Roman Catholicism, and lay outside of what may be called the Counter-Reformation proper. The force of this new aggressive movement was first felt in the formation of the Holy League, which had for its object to prevent Henry of Navarre from ascending the throne of France. The League was the symbol in France of this Counter-Reformation. The Jesuits never attained a preponderating influence in that country until the days of Marie de Medici; but they were the restless and ruthless organisers of the Holy League. The Jesuit fathers, Auger, Henri Saumier, and, above all, Claude Matthieu, called the Courrier de la Ligue, worked energetically on its behalf. The Company issued tracts from their printing-presses asserting the inalienable rights of the people to govern and therefore to choose their rulers. They taught that while God had given spiritual power into the hands of one man, the Pope, He had bestowed the secular power on the many. Kings, they asserted, do not reign by any divine right of hereditary succession, but by the will of the people and of the Pope. Hence all Romanist France was justified in setting aside the King of Navarre and putting in his place the Cardinal of Bourbon, his uncle.

The arguments they laid before the English people were based on principles altogether different, even contradictory. There they extolled hereditary and legitimate succession. Elizabeth was illegitimate, and Mary of Scotland had divine rights to the throne of England. It is needless to relate the efforts made by the leaders of the Counter-Reformation to bring England back to the Papacy—the College at Douai, the English College at Rome, both erected to train missionaries for service against the heretical Queen; the mission of the Jesuits, Parsons and Campion. The student of history can scarcely fail to note one thing,—that the sailing of the Spanish Armada marks the flood-tide of the first period of the Counter-Reformation. After the ruin of the great fleet the first wave of the reaction seems to have spent itself. The League failed in France, and Henry IV. secured the rights of his Protestant subjects in the Edict of Nantes. The Hollanders emerged triumphant from their long war of liberation. Even in Germany the defeat of the Armada dates in a rough way the end of the impetus of the Romanist reaction. The German Protestants assumed the offensive again, and an energetic and aggressive Calvinism redeemed the halting character of the Lutheran Reformation.

Mr. Symonds, in his brilliant sketches of the forces at work to make the Romanist reaction, thinks that the part of the Jesuits in the Counter-Reformation has rather been exaggerated than insufficiently recognised. “Without the ecclesiastical reform which originated in the Tridentine Council; without the gold and sword of Spain; without the stakes and prisons of the Inquisition; without the warfare against thought conducted by the Congregation of the Index,—the Jesuits alone could not have masterfully governed the Catholic revival.”[729] This is perhaps true; but what would all these things have come to apart from the activity of the Company of Jesus? They were little better than the mechanism to which the enthusiasm and the indomitable work bred from enthusiasm gave the soul. Stern, relentless, savage repression can do much. It can make a desert and call it peace; but it cannot requicken with renewed life. The gentle piety of Carlo Borromeo, the sweet languishing tenderness of Francis de Sales, the revived mediæval mysticism discernible in the Romanist reaction, had neither the religious depth nor the endurance needed for the times. Ignatius breathed the Spanish spirit, at once wildly visionary and intensely practical, into his Company, and they transfused it throughout the Church of the Counter-Reformation—the exalted devotion, the tenacity which no reverses could wear out, and the unquenchable religious hope. They ruled it as the soul governs the body.

It was the time of Spanish domination. Spain grasped the New World and hoped to subdue the Old. Her soldiers were the best in Europe. They dreamed of nothing but conquests. The Jesuits brought the Spanish spirit into the Church. Others might scheme, and wish, and wonder. They worked. They reaped the harvest which hard and unremitting labour gathers in every field. It was not for nothing that Adrian and other papal statesmen dubbed Luther another Mahomet; the word kindled in every Spanish breast the memory of their centuries of war with the Moslems and its victorious ending. If the gold and sword of Spain were at the service of the Counter-Reformation, it was the Spanish spirit incarnate in the Company of Jesus that made such dry bones live.

We must remember that in the first period of the Romanist reaction we have to do with the Jesuits of the sixteenth century, and must banish from our minds the history of the Order in the two centuries that follow. Its worst side had scarcely appeared. Its theory of Probabilism, by which directors were trained to transform all deadly sins, even murder, adultery, and theft, into venial offences, and casuistry became a method for the entire guidance of souls, belonged to a later period. It was not till the seventeenth century that the forgiveness of sins had been reduced by them to a highly refined art. Their shameless neglect of religion and morality, when the political interests of the Church and of the Society seemed to require it, was also later. What the depressed Romanists of the sixteenth century saw was a body of men whom no difficulties daunted, who spent themselves in training boys and girls and in animating them with religious principles; who persuaded boys and youths to attend daily Mass, to resort to monthly confession, to study the articles of their faith; who elevated that obedience, which for generations they had been taught was due to the earthly head of the Church, into a sublime religious principle.

All this the Romanism of the Counter-Reformation owed to those three unknown men, who crept into Rome through the Porto del Popolo during Easter 1538 to beg Pope Paul III. to permit them and their companions to enroll themselves in a new Order, for the defence of the faith.

It is true that men can never get rid of their personal responsibility in spiritual things, but multitudes will always attempt to cast the burden upon others. In all such souls the spirit of the Counter-Reformation lives and moves and has its being, and they are sustained, consciously or unconsciously, by that principle of blind obedience which its preachers taught. It is enough for us to remember that no weakened sense of personal responsibility and no amount of superstitious practice can utterly quench the conscience that seeks its God, or can hinder that upward glance to the Father in heaven which carries with it a living faith.