The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (4 page)

The artful device on display in Kafka’s story is an appropriate symbol of the Inquisition, as Kafka himself surely intended it to be, and for reasons that will become increasingly clear as we move forward in history from the origins of the Inquisition to its reverberations in our own world. Like the bewildered defendant whose ordeal is depicted by Kafka in
The Trial—
“You can’t defend yourself against this court, all you can do is confess”—the victims of the Inquisition were subjected to the workings of an all-powerful tribunal that operated with “an Alice-in-Wonderland arbitrariness.” Indeed, Kafka can be regarded as the poet laureate of the Inquisition, if only because its absurdities and grotesqueries—as it was conceived in the febrile imaginations of the first inquisitors, and as it actually operated in the here and now—can aptly be described as “Kafkaesque.”
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“[T]he story of the Inquisition reads,” observes G. G. Coulton, “sometimes like a tale from a madhouse.” Yet we cannot dismiss the Inquisition as a figment of anyone’s imagination. It is not merely a myth fabricated by parlor propagandists and the writers of bodice rippers, as its modern apologists argue, nor can we comfort ourselves with the argument that the flesh-and-blood inquisitors never really succeeded in carrying out the master plan for persecution that is writ large in the inquisitor’s handbooks. Men, women, and children in the thousands and tens of thousands suffered and died at the hands of the pious friar-inquisitors, and the death toll is immeasurably greater if we include the latter-day inquisitors who followed in their footsteps, and still do.
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The Inquisition has imprinted itself on the history of Western civilization in ways that are sometimes overlooked but can never be eradicated. To be sure, it was not the first or only tribunal that acted cruelly and capriciously in the name of “Mercy and Justice,” but the routine use of torture under the imprimatur of the Church has been blamed for encouraging the secular authorities across western Europe to do the same. The fact that England and the Netherlands far outpaced Spain, Portugal, and Italy in commerce and technology has been explained by some historians as yet another unintended consequence of the Inquisition; after all, enterprise and invention proved to be more vigorous in places that were beyond the reach of the inquisitor and “the power of fanaticism to warp the intellect of the most acute,” according to Henry Charles Lea.
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The story of the Inquisition, however, is also the story of flesh-and-blood human beings who suffered at the hands of men whose fears and fantasies were acted out in real life. We know them by name: Jerónima la Franca is the woman who was condemned as a heretic because she ate couscous, Arnaud Assalit is the bookkeeper who added up the cost of ropes, straw, and wood for burning a heretic alive, and Arnauld Amalric is the abbot who, when asked by the soldiers under his command how to tell a Christian from a heretic, answered by issuing the chilling command: “Kill them all; God will know his own.”
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Into the world where they lived and died, we now go.

THE CATHAR KISS

Kill them all; God will know his own.

ARNAULD AMALRIC,
Abbot of Cîteaux, 1209

A
t Christmastide in the year 1022, the townsfolk of Orléans in the Loire Valley of France were distracted from their seasonal revelries by an ugly rumor. A strange and dangerous cult had supposedly been detected among the highest-ranking citizens of the town, and the initiates were said to be practicing self-invented rites and rituals that included incestuous sex orgies, infanticide, and cannibalism. The suspects included monks and nuns, gentlemen and ladies, as many as twenty in all, and even a priest named Stephen who had once served as confessor to the queen of France.

The cult at Orléans, as we learn from an obscure medieval text, had been uncovered in the course of a covert investigation by a Norman aristocrat called Arëfast. When word of their heretical beliefs and hateful practices reached the self-appointed spy, Arëfast posed as a potential convert in order to infiltrate and expose the heretics. Arëfast listened attentively to their whispered teachings, “all the time availing himself of the protection afforded by Christ and the Church,” as he insisted on pointing out, “praying, making the sign of the cross, and receiving the holy communion every day.” Thus shielded from the taint of heresy, he discovered for himself their dark secrets and then hastened to tell what he knew to the church authorities.
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The cultists, as we might call them today, embraced an eccentric set of beliefs and practices that were wholly at odds with the dogma of the Roman Catholic church. They claimed to possess a body of secret knowledge—or gnosis—that was miraculously conveyed from one to the other by the laying on of hands. Once initiated into the cult, they were able to discern that the teachings of the Church were based on an erroneous reading of the Bible: “Christ was not born of the Virgin Mary. He did not suffer for men. He was not really buried in the sepulcher and was not raised from the dead.” Thus filled with the “Holy Spirit,” they rejected all the sacraments of the Church, including baptism, ordination of priests, confession and penance, and the Eucharist. And they convinced themselves that they were cleansed of sin and thus privileged to dine not on the body and blood of Christ like ordinary Christian believers but on a diet of “heavenly food.”
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Exactly what was the “heavenly food” that took the place of the wafer and the wine for the cultists of Orléans? We do not and cannot know what metaphorical meanings were attached to the phrase as it was used by the initiates, but according to a monk named Paul, who composed an account some fifty years after the events he described, what passed their lips was a “devilish viaticum made of the ashes of a murdered baby.” Nor did the monk stop there. Paul insisted that the ritual slaughter of a baby and the cannibalistic communion were followed by a sexual free-for-all in which each of the male participants in the orgy “grabbed whatever woman came to hand” and freely satisfied his own sexual appetites, no matter how cruel or bizarre.
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Such was the report that eventually reached the king of France, Robert the Pious, and his consort, Queen Constance, and they were sufficiently alarmed by these wild rumors to convene a council of bishops at Orléans to confront and condemn the heretics. The accused men and women were brought in irons to the Church of the Holy Cross, where the king, queen, and bishops were waiting to hear the evidence and pass judgment. Arëfast was among the defendants, and it was only during the trial that he revealed himself to be an undercover agent and a friendly witness for the prosecution. Confronted with Arëfast’s damning testimony, the accused are said to have admitted the charges against them, but they refused to renounce their own cherished beliefs. Indeed, they continued to insist that they alone possessed the divine truth as revealed to them in angelic visions, whereas the Church relied only on “the fictions of carnal men, scribbled on animal skins.”
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“Do with us what you will,” they affirmed. “Now we see our king reigning in heaven—He will raise us to His right hand in triumph.”
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The self-appointed inquisitors were happy to oblige. A bishop stripped the vestments from those of the defendants who held clerical rank, and all the accused were condemned to death. Only a single clerk and a single nun, who recanted at the last moment, were spared. So agitated was the crowd that King Robert stationed the queen herself by the doors “to prevent the common people from killing them inside the church.” Even so, someone in the crowd raised his staff and struck out the eye of the queen’s former confessor as the convicted heretics were herded by armed guards to the place of execution. The condemned heretics, apparently convinced that their salvation was at hand, are said to have laughed out loud in the face of imminent death.
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The execution itself was an improvised affair. The condemned men and women were locked inside a cottage that stood outside the town walls, and the cottage was set afire and allowed to burn to the ground. Paul reports that the “evil ashes”—that is, the remains of the babies who supposedly had been killed and eaten during the cult’s orgiastic rituals—were tossed on the flames, too. At last, on the order of the bishop, the bones of one of the cultists, who had died of natural causes before he could be tried and burned alive, were exhumed and dumped into the pits where garbage and human waste were buried.

The trial and execution of the heretics at Orléans took place more than a century before the Inquisition was called into formal existence by the Church. But the incident allows us to see how the mere existence of free-thinking men and women was regarded by the guardians of law and order as an intolerable threat, and how brutally and cynically the authorities were willing to act in suppressing any belief they regarded as deviant. We can see, too, that many of the moving parts of the inquisitorial machine were already available for use. The whispered accusations, the testimony of infiltrators and informers, the high drama of the trial, the frenzy of the crowd, the burning of condemned heretics, both dead and alive, the improbable beliefs and practices attributed to the cultists—and even the slanderous charges of ritual murder and incestuous sex orgies—will be seen again and again in the long, terrible history of the Inquisition itself and its successors in later times.

Exactly here we begin to see the footprints of the rude beast that was already slouching toward Bethlehem.

The self-invented gnostics of Orléans, as it turns out, were hardly the only people in medieval Christendom who were inspired to borrow or invent a shiny new set of religious beliefs and practices to supplement those provided by the Roman Catholic church. Contrary to its own shrill claims, the Church was never “catholic” in the literal sense of the word: “one Universal Church of the faithful, out of which there is absolutely no salvation.” To the distress of the pope and the princes of the Church, the men and women who lived under their authority were always ready to embrace some rich and strange ideas of their own. To understand the Inquisition at all, it must be seen as a panicky and ultimately futile effort to establish a monopoly in religion rather than as an effort to preserve one that already existed.

Here we find not only the starting point of the Inquisition but also the great besetting irony of
all
religion. The core idea of monotheism is the sure conviction that there is only One True God and only one proper way to worship the deity. Yet none of the three great monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—has ever managed to win the hearts and minds of its own followers, much less the whole world. The gray matter of
Homo sapiens
seems to be hardwired to produce a rich flowering of religious ideas and images, and no amount of brute force has ever been able wholly to suppress them, not now and not at any point since the first Cro-Magnon shaman painted the first totemic image of a bison on a cave wall.
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The competition among various strains of true belief in medieval Christianity was sometimes almost comical. The Roman Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox church, for example, each claimed to be the sole source of religious authority in Christendom, and each church condemned the beliefs and practices of the other as heretical. At one highly theatrical moment in 1054, a papal legate acting in the name of Pope Leo IX, and Michael Cerularius, the patriarch of Constantinople, pronounced decrees of excommunication against each other. The reciprocal excommunications marked the beginning of the Great Schism between the eastern and western churches, and the decrees were not formally rescinded until 1965.

Nor was the Great Schism merely a game of theological tit-for-tat. A charge of heresy, as we shall see, was always a convenient excuse for bloodshed. The knights of the Fourth Crusade and their Venetian allies, for example, sailed from Italy in 1202 with the pious goal of taking the city of Jerusalem back from its Muslim overlords. But the holy warriors turned instead toward Constantinople, the seat of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the blood they spilled belonged to their fellow Christians. Of course, the crusaders were taught to regard the populace of Constantinople as inauthentic Christians, and the former’s religious bigotry served the ulterior motives, both political and commercial, of the men who sent them into battle in the first place.

“For three days the Venetians and Crusaders rushed through the streets, raping, killing and pillaging,” writes Karen Armstrong in
Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World,
pointing out that Christian women and children were among the casualties and that the victims of rape included cloistered nuns. “In the great basilica of St. Sophia, drunken soldiers tore down the silk hangings and trampled the sacred books and icons underfoot, and a prostitute sat on the Patriarch’s throne singing bawdy songs.”
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Yet the rape of Constantinople during the Crusades is only one particularly outrageous example of the open conflicts that raged within medieval Christianity. The Roman Catholic church itself was in a state of constant moral and political crisis. Popes contended with kings and emperors over the right to govern the nations of Europe, and the Church was repeatedly shaken by scandals that boiled up in its inner circles. Critics both inside and outside the Church complained about the arrogance and opulence of the pope and the high clergy, the appalling ignorance of parish priests, and the carnality and corruption that could be found in all ranks. All of these stresses and strains played a role in triggering the authoritarian impulse that found its ultimate expression in the Inquisition.