Note 1020 — Chapter V

Juan Antonio Llorente, eminent as a writer and historian, both in Spanish and French, was born near Calahorra, Aragon, in 1756, and died at Madrid in 1823. He received the tonsure when fourteen years of age, and was ordained priest at Saragossa in 1779. He was of a vigorous, inquisitive, and liberal spirit, giving free range to his mind, and turning his wide study and deep investigations to the account of his enlargement and emancipation from the limitations of his age and associates. He tells us that in 1784 he had abandoned all ultramontane doctrines, and all the ingenuities and perplexities of scholasticism. His liberalism ran into rationalism. His secret or more or less avowed alienation from the prejudices and obligations of the priestly order, while it by no means made his position a singular or even an embarrassing one under the influences and surroundings of his time, does at least leave us perplexed to account for the confidence with which functions and high ecclesiastical trusts were committed to and exercised by him. He was even made Secretary-General of the Inquisition, and was thus put in charge of the enormous mass of records, with all their dark secrets, belonging to its whole history and processes. This charge he retained for a time after the Inquisition was abolished in 1809. It was thus by a singular felicity of opportunity that those terrible archives should have been in the care, and subject to the free and intelligent use, of a man best qualified of all others to tell the world their contents, and afterward prompted and at liberty to do so from subsequent changes in his own opinions and relations. To this the world is indebted for a History of the Inquisition, the fidelity and sufficiency of which satisfy all candid judgments. He was restive in spirit, provoked strong opposition, and was thus finally deprived of his office. After performing a variety of services not clerical, and moving from place to place, he went to Paris, where, in 1817-1818, he courageously published the above-mentioned History. He was interdicted the exercise of clerical functions. In 1822, the same year in which he published his Biography and French translation of the principal works of Las Casas, he published also his Political Portraits of the Popes. For this he was ordered to quit Paris,—a deep disappointment to him, causing chagrin and heavy depression. He found refuge in Madrid, where he died in the following year.