The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (5 page)

The sorry state of affairs in the Church, in fact, invited the criticism and dissent that eventually came to be called heresy. Holy oil, relics of dead saints, and indulgences—promises on paper that the bearer would be relieved of suffering in the afterlife—were sold for hard cash by avaricious bishops, and at least one priest was accused of putting down penances as bets in a game of dice. Popes as well as priests were known to keep wives or mistresses, or both at once. Even cloistered monks and nuns were rumored to take each other as lovers. Perhaps the best evidence that such sins were actually being committed behind the closed doors of the convents is the fact that the bishops of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 found it necessary to specifically forbid them.

No one in the Church openly defended such sexual adventures, of course, but other practices and privileges were equally off-putting to its more pious congregants. Popes, cardinals, and archbishops dressed in silks and other fine fabrics and anointed themselves with rare perfumes; they presided over the rites of the Church in bejeweled vestments, and they collected artifacts and ornaments of gold and silver, ivory and gemstone. Like the nobles whom they aped, they resided in mansions and palaces, lived off the labor of serfs who toiled on lands owned by the Church, engaged in the pleasures of the hunt, and dined at tables where the food and drink were rich and abundant. At a time when hunger and hard labor were the common fate of the peasantry and the urban poor, the men who held themselves up as the moral exemplars of Christendom resembled Herod more than Christ.

“Dumb dogs who can no longer bark, men who will do anything for money, zealous in avarice, lovers of gifts, seekers of rewards” is how Pope Innocent III (1160/61–1216) described the clergy of Narbonne in southern France, ground zero of the Inquisition. “The chief cause of all these evils is the Archbishop of Narbonne, whose god is money, whose heart is in his treasury, who is concerned only with gold.”
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The lower clergy, by contrast, tended to be as poor, and as poorly educated, as their parishioners. “The ignorance of the priests,” complained an English archbishop in 1281, “precipitates the people into the ditch of error.” A French bishop addressed the Council of Vienne in 1311 with his own complaints about the “contemptible persons of abject life, utterly unworthy in learning and morals,” who populated the priesthood. From their “execrable lives and pernicious ignorance,” he insisted, “infinite scandals arise.” Indeed, the clergy were so contemptible, according to the French bishop, that “the lay folk hold the priests as viler and more despicable than Jews.”
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If the common clergy were as sinful as their bishops believed them to be, then we should not be surprised at the impiety of their parishioners. “With Sunday,” complained one medieval chronicler, “reigneth more lechery, gluttony, manslaughter, robbery, backbiting, perjury, and other sins, more than reigned all the week before.”
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The theological illiteracy of ordinary men and women, in fact, was the stuff of pointed joke-telling even in the Middle Ages. According to one disapproving Dominican friar, a pious traveler in the English countryside, encountering a shepherd in service to the lord of the local manor, asked the shepherd whether he “knew the Faith,” to which the shepherd quickly and stoutly assented.

“Do you know the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost?” the traveler persisted.

“The father and the son I know well, for I tend their sheep, but I know not that third fellow,” the shepherd answered. “There is none of that name in our village.”
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Although a Dominican cleric might tell jokes about an unschooled shepherd, the fact is that the common folk of Christendom led far richer spiritual lives than their confessors suspected. As practiced in Europe during the High Middle Ages, in fact, Christianity can be seen as a thin veneer over the far older folkways still cherished by ordinary men and women, who might go through the motions at the parish church and then seek other comforts when the priest was not watching. Joan of Arc, among the most famous victims of the Inquisition, boasted to her interrogators that “I learned my Pater and Ave and Creed from my mother,” but she also conceded that the women of her village sought the intervention of the “Fairy Ladies” who were thought to haunt an ancient and gnarled tree in the nearby countryside. The water from a spring near the tree, she allowed, was believed to cure those who were sick with fever. “I have seen girls hanging garlands on the boughs of that tree,” she confessed, “and I have sometimes done so with them.”
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Indeed, the medieval Church, as the self-appointed guardian of theological law and order, was constantly at war with the imaginings and desires of its own congregants. Consider, for example, the delights and distractions offered by the wandering poets and singers known as troubadours, a commonplace of countless romance novels and adventure movies set in the Middle Ages. Like entertainers in every age, they sought to amuse rather than instruct their audiences, and the songs they composed and performed were regarded by the Church as scandalous and sinful. Famously, the troubadours celebrated the love of a knight in shining armor for his “lady fair”—but the lady was not necessarily his wife and might even be somebody else’s wife, as in the tale of Lancelot’s love affair with Guinevere in the Arthurian legend. For that reason, the Church condemned the chivalric traditions of feudal Europe—and the whole notion of “courtly love,” which had seized the imagination of both lords and ladies and the general populace—as “a form of wanton paganism.”
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To counter the unwholesome influence of the troubadours, and to divert the ardor of their audiences into safer channels, the Church was perfectly willing to invent new traditions of its own. The medieval Church had not yet signed off on the final draft of its own dogma, and its theologians continued to debate the fine points of its rituals, sacraments, and theology. Thus, for example, the Church introduced a newfangled cult in the eleventh century: the Virgin Mary was offered as an object of adoration in place of the sexually desirable and available woman who figured in the songs of the troubadours. Only in 1050 or so did the familiar and beloved Ave Maria—“Hail Mary, full of grace…”—begin to appear in the breviaries of pious Catholics as a specific antidote to the “lady fair” and her knight-suitors.

The shifting ground on which the Roman Catholic church was built would embarrass the efforts of the Inquisition to draw the line between orthodoxy and heresy. “There were important questions which had not yet been definitively answered,” explains historian W. L. Wakefield, “areas of uncertainty in which were encountered religious ideas of which it was not possible to say: ‘To be a Christian, you must hold this belief’; or ‘If you believe that, you are not a Christian.’” Yet, as we shall see, the Church was never reluctant to define the outer limits of correct belief, and the question of whether an otherwise pious man or woman stood on the right or wrong side of the line would turn out to be, quite literally, a matter of life and death.

The unsettled state of Christendom in the years leading up to the Inquisition only encouraged an upwelling of exotic beliefs and practices. At Le Mans in 1116, a charismatic preacher known to us as Henry the Monk succeeded in attracting spirited crowds (and in scandalizing both the clergy and the gentry) by calling on wealthy women to throw off their jewelry and by inviting young men to take prostitutes as wives. At about the same time in Antwerp, a man called Tanchelm endeared himself to his followers by distributing wine and entertaining them with a theatrical style of preaching. Tanchelm liked to dress up in a golden robe, for example, and participate in a wedding ceremony with a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Even the ravings of an apparent lunatic might succeed in attracting a few credulous disciples. Sometime around the year 1000, a peasant named Leutard from the village of Vertus in Châlons-sur-Marne, awakened one morning from a shattering nightmare in which he had been tormented by bees that entered his body through his genitals and exited through his mouth, buzzing and stinging all the way and “bidding him to do things impossible to men.” He interpreted the dream as a command to send away his wife and destroy the crucifix hanging in the local church, and he was inspired to preach to the villagers before drowning himself in a well.

Among the teachings that the local bishop found to be heretical was Leutard’s insistence that good Christians need not pay tithes, a reminder that heresy was often perceived by the Church as a financial or political threat rather than merely a theological one. Modern scholars have debated whether Leutard’s wild ideas were the result of a psychiatric disturbance called ergotism—a form of psychosis caused by ingesting a fungus that grows on rotting rye bread—but the medieval chroniclers blamed Leutard for infecting the populace with the plague of false belief, and they did not fail to notice that the diocese of Châlons-sur-Marne was later “struck three times by heresy.”
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Such eccentrics may strike us as laughable, if not downright pathological, but charismatic preachers like Henry and Tanchelm, and even the village madman of Vertus, were answering the urgent and authentic spiritual needs of contemporaries who felt alienated from the Roman Catholic church. For some pious Christians, the high ceremony of the Roman Catholic mass, the rich vestments of the presiding clergy, and the opulence of the cathedrals in which the rite was conducted all seemed at odds with the ministry of Jesus as plainly depicted in the Bible. Indeed, the point was not lost on certain members of the clergy itself, including men like Francis of Assisi and Domingo de Guzmán, founders of the monastic orders that would come to play a crucial role in the Inquisition. Among the profound ironies of the Inquisition is that the Church itself can be charged with provoking some of the heresies that it punished with such rage and severity.

After all, how could the pope and the princes of the Church reconcile their imperial ways with the words of Jesus as reported in the Gospels? “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” And how could the bishops, comfortably settled in cities across Europe and living off rents, tithes, and taxes, explain why they did not follow the instructions that Jesus issued to the seventy disciples that he sent out into the world to preach? “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals,” says Jesus. “Whenever you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set before you.”
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Some of the most revolutionary ideas in medieval Christendom, in other words, erupted from the pages of the Bible, a fact that helps explain why the Church discouraged the unsupervised reading of the scriptures and the translation of the biblical text into languages that ordinary Christians could understand. The
via apostolica
—“the way of the apostles”—was embraced by Christians who recoiled at the corrupt and decadent spectacle that the Church presented and looked into their own Bibles to answer the question “What would Jesus do?” As it turned out, the provocative question was asked by popes as well as radical priests like Henry the Monk, and the answers brought the kettle of Christianity to a high boil.

The moral squalor that prompted an eccentric like Tanchelm of Antwerp to liken the Church to a brothel, for example, also prompted Pope Gregory VII (1020–1085) to address what he admitted to be a “foul plague of carnal contagion.” The so-called Gregorian Reform established the strict rule of chastity for priests, thus putting an abrupt end to the tradition of clerical marriage that dated back to the beginnings of Christianity and reinforcing the biblical notion that human sexuality was not only sinful but demonic. At the same time, Pope Gregory VII sought to discourage the practice of simony, the buying, selling, and bartering of church offices for profit and political advantage. But the Gregorian Reform could not and did not curb the appetites of the clergy, high and low, for sexual pleasure and self-enrichment. Ironically, the stark contrast between the high-minded papal pronouncements and the sorry practices of the clergy only deepened the disappointment of spiritual seekers throughout Christendom and sharpened their appetite for more meaningful spiritual pursuits.
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“A first cause for the recrudescence of heresy in the West,” explains historian Malcolm Lambert, “lay in the expectations roused by Gregorian reform and its failure to fulfill them.”
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Some of Pope Gregory’s well-intended measures created new problems that a renegade priest might take it upon himself to solve. The pope, for example, issued a prohibition against marriage between men and women related by blood, a decree that was meant to curtail the sin of incest. As a practical matter, however, the new rule reduced the number of available marriage partners, especially in smaller towns and villages. And so, when Henry the Monk called on young men of good families to take harlots as wives—but only after he ritually cut their long hair, burned their alluring garments, and thus purified them—he was creating a fresh supply of marriage partners to replace the ones declared off-limits by Pope Gregory.

Sometimes the reformers inside and outside the Church embraced the same aspirations and the same approach to achieving them. Both Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) and Domingo de Guzmán (ca. 1170–1221) sought to purify themselves by taking strict vows of poverty and going out into the world as barefoot beggars to preach the Christian faith, all in imitation of Jesus and the disciples. The religious orders that they founded were embraced by the Church, and they were canonized as saints upon their deaths. A man named Peter Valdes (sometimes inaccurately rendered as “Waldo”) (1140–ca. 1205) also vowed to pursue the
via apostolica,
but he suffered a very different fate. His followers were among the first targets of the Inquisition, and they remained within its crosshairs for centuries. By a further irony, the Inquisition was staffed by Dominicans and Franciscans, thus turning the imitators of Christ into the persecutors of their fellow Christians.