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Controlling the Human Spirit
The Inquisition and Slavery
1250-1800
by Helen Ellerbe
from The Dark Side of Christian History
Index: Historical Writings (Various)
Home to Positive Atheism
See also: The Witch Hunts: The End of Magic and Miracles by Helen Ellerbe
See also: History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe by
W. E. H. Lecky
There has been no more organized effort by a religion to control people and contain
their spirituality than the Christian Inquisition. Developed within the Church's own
legal framework, the Inquisition attempted to terrify people into obedience. As the
Inquisitor Francesco Pena stated in 1578, "We must remember that the main
purpose of the trial and execution is not to save the soul of the accused but to
achieve the public good and put fear into others." The Inquisition took countless
human lives in Europe and around the world as it followed in the wake of
missionaries. And along with the tyranny of the Inquisition, churchmen also brought
religious justification for the practice of slavery.
The unsubmissive spirit of the Middle Ages only seemed to exacerbate the Church's
demand for unquestioning obedience. The Church's understanding of God was to be
the only understanding. There was to be no discussion or debate. As the Inquisitor
Bernard Gui said, the layman must not argue with the unbeliever, but "thrust his
sword into the man's belly as far as it will go." In a time of burgeoning ideas about
spirituality, the Church insisted that it was the only avenue through which one was
permitted to learn of God. Pope Innocent III declared "that anyone who attempted to
construe a personal view of God which conflicted with Church dogma must be
burned without pity."
Before the inquisition was fully underway, the Church welcomed heretics back into its
fold under terms it considered reasonable. The following is an example of such
terms:
On three Sundays the penitent is to be stripped to the waist and scourged by the
priest from the entrance of town ... to the church door. He is to abstain forever from
meat and eggs and cheese, except on Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas, when he is
to eat them as a sign of his abnegation of his Manichaean errors. For twoscore days,
twice a year, he is to forgo the use of fish, and for three days each week that of
fish,
wine and oil, fasting, if his health and labors will permit. He is to wear monastic
vestments, with a small cross sewed on each breast. If possible, he is to hear mass
daily and on feast- days to attend church at vespers. Seven times a day he is to
recite the canonical hours, and, in addition the Paternoster ten times each day and
twenty times each night. He is to observe the strictest chastity. Every month he is to
show this paper to the priest, who is to watch its observance closely, and this mode
of life is to be maintained until the legate shall see it fit to alter it, while for
infraction
of the penance he is to be held as a perjurer and a heretic, and to be segregated
from the society of the faithful.
Few heretics returned to the Church of their own accord.
The Church turned to its own canon law to authenticate an agency which could
enforce adherence to Church authority. In 1231 Pope Gregory IX established the
Inquisition as a separate tribunal, independent of bishops and prelates. Its
administrators, the inquisitors, were to be answerable only to the Pope. Its
inquisitional law replaced the common law tradition of "innocent until proven guilty"
with "guilty until proven innocent." Despite an ostensible trial, inquisitional
procedure
left no possibility for the suspected to prove his or her innocence; the process
resulted in the condemnation of anyone even suspected of heresy. The accused was
denied the right of counsel. No particulars were given as to the time or place of the
suspected heresies, or to what kind of heresies were suspected. A suspected
friendship with a convicted heretic was also a crime, yet no information was given as
to which heretic the accused was to have "adored." The names of accusing
witnesses were kept secret. One's only recourse was an appeal to the Pope in
Rome, which was so futile as to be farcical. The friar Bernard Delicieux declared:
... that if St. Peter and St. Paul were accused of 'adoring' heretics and were
prosecuted after the fashion of the Inquisition, there would be no defense open for
them.
The inquisitor presided over inquisitional procedure as both prosecutor and judge.
While he was technically to arrive at his decision after consulting with an assembly of
experts of his choosing, this check to his power was soon abandoned. An inquisitor
was selected primarily on the basis of his zeal to prosecute heretics. He and his
assistants, messengers, and spies were allowed to carry arms. And in 1245, the
Pope granted him the right to absolve these assistants for any acts of violence. This
act rendered the Inquisition, which was already free from any secular jurisdiction,
unaccountable to even ecclesiastical tribunals.
Inquisitors grew very rich. They received bribes and annual fines from the wealthy
who payed to escape accusation. The Inquisition would claim all the money and
property of alleged heretics. As there was little chance of the accused being proven
innocent, there was no need to wait for conviction to confiscate his or her property.
Unlike Roman law that reserved a portion of property for the convicted's nearest
heirs, canon and inquisitional law left nothing. Pope Innocent III had explained that
God punished children for the sins of their parents. So unless children had come
forth spontaneously to denounce their parents, they were left penniless. Inquisitors
even accused the dead of heresy, sometimes as much as seventy years after their
death. They exhumed and burned alleged heretic's bones and then confiscated all
property from the heirs.
Inquisitors rarely shared the money collected with the episcopal courts, the civil
government, or spent it building churches as planned. One historian writes how the
inquisitor was often able to "seize everything for himself, not even sending a share to
the officials of the Inquisition at Rome." Inquisitors were reluctant to pay even for
the
cost of feeding their victims, encouraging the families or the community to pay such
costs. It was hardly a coincidence that the eagerness of the Inquisition in any given
region was proportionate to the opportunities for confiscation.
Ironically, inquisitors were most often chosen from Dominican and Franciscan
orders, both of which originally professed vows of poverty. The Church did little to
encourage their ideal of poverty. Although it regarded the Franciscan founder,
Francis of Assisi, as a saint, the Church persecuted Francis's followers who upheld
his ideas of poverty, those known as the Fraticelli, or "Spiritual Franciscans." The
Church denounced the Fraticelli as "false and pernicious" and in 1315
excommunicated them. Pope Martin V ordered their village of Magnalata leveled and
every resident slain. The Franciscans who abandoned Francis's teachings, however,
were often appointed as inquisitors. While it did not overtly endorse the Inquisition's
avarice and corruption, the Church did little to stop it.
The Inquisition had devastating economic impact. Aside from directly seizing the
property of successful merchants by accusing them of heresy, inquisitors crippled
commerce by holding certain operations suspect. For example, maps and map-
makers, so essential to navigating traders and merchants, were held in deep
suspicion. Inquisitors believed the printed word to be a channel of heresy and so
hampered the communication produced by the fifteenth century invention of the
printing press. The mere suspicion of heresy annulled all rights of the suspended
individual. When accused, all debts owed by the heretic and any liens which secured
those debts became null and void. The historian Henry Charles Lea writes:
As no man could be certain of the orthodoxy of another, it will be evident how much
distrust must have been thrown upon the commonest transactions of life. The
blighting influence of this upon the development of commerce and industry can
readily be perceived, coming as it did at a time when the commercial and industrial
movement of Europe was beginning to usher in the dawn of modern culture.
While inquisitors themselves prospered, their activity left communities impoverished.
The Inquisition was merciless with its victims. The same man who had been both
prosecutor and judge decided upon the sentence. In 1244 the Council of Harbonne
ordered that in the sentencing of heretics, no husband should be spared because of
his wife, nor wife because of her husband, nor parent because of helpless children,
and no sentence should be mitigated because of sickness or old age. Each and
every sentence included flagellation.
Of the sentences, pilgrimages were considered the lightest. Yet, undertaken on foot,
such penances could take years, during which the penitent's family might perish.
Carrying a much greater stigma than pilgrimages was "wearing the crosses," also
known as poena confusibilis or "humiliating punishment." The penitents were
required to wear large saffron- colored crosses on the front and back, which
subjected them to public ridicule and hindered every effort of earing a livelihood. A
more frequent sentence was perpetual imprisonment, which always entailed a scant
diet of bread and water, sometimes meant being kept in chains, and occasionally
entailed solitary confinement. The life expectancy in all the prisons was very short.
The harshest sentence of burning at the stake was given to those who either failed in
their previous penance, relapsed into heresy, or who would not confess to any crime.
Although the Church had begun killing heretics in the late fourth century and again in
1022 at Orléan, papal statutes of 1231 now insisted that heretics suffer death by fire.
Burning people to death technically avoided spilling a drop of blood. The words of the
Gospel of John were understood to sanction burning: "If a man abide not in me, he is
cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the
fire, and they are burned."
The Church distanced itself from the killing by turning heretics over to secular
authorities for the actual burning. Such secular authorities, however, were not
allowed to decline. When the Senate of Venice in 1521 refused to approve such
executions, for example, Pope Leo X wrote that secular officials were:
... to intervene no more in this kind of trial, but promptly, without changing or
inspecting the sentences made by the ecclesiastical judges, to execute the
sentences which they are enjoined to carry out. And if they neglect or refuse, you
(the Papal legate) are to compel them with the Church's censure and other
appropriate measures. From this order there is no appeal.
In practice, any secular authorities who refused to cooperate were excommunicated
and subject to the same treatment as suspected heretics.
By far the cruelest aspect of the inquisitional system was the means by which
confessions were wrought: the torture chamber. Torture remained a legal option for
the Church from 1252 when it was sanctioned by Pope Innocent IV until 1917 when
the new Codex Juris Canonici was put into effect. Innocent IV authorized indefinite
delays to secure confessions, giving inquisitors as much time as they wanted to
torture the accused. Although the letter of law forbade repeating torture, inquisitors
easily avoided this rule simply by "continuing" torture, calling any interval a
suspension. In 1262 inquisitors and their assistants were granted the authority to
quietly absolve each other from the crime of bloodshed. They simply explained that
the tortured had died because the devil broke their necks.
Thus, with license granted by the Pope himself, inquisitors were free to explore the
depths of horror and cruelty. Dressed as black-robed fiends with black cowls over
their heads, inquisitors could extract confessions from nearly anyone. The Inquisition
invented every conceivable devise to inflict pain by slowly dismembering and
dislocating the body. Many of the devices were inscribed with the motto "Glory be
only to God." The rack, the hoist, and the water tortures were the most common.
Victims were rubbed with lard or grease and slowly roasted alive. Ovens built to kill
people, made infamous in twentieth century Nazi Germany, were first used by the
Christian Inquisition in Eastern Europe. Victims were thrown into a pit full of snakes
and burned alive. One particularly gruesome torture involved turning a large dish full
of mice upside down on the victim's naked stomach. A fire was then lit on top of the
dish causing the mice to panic and burrow into the stomach. Should a victim
withstand such pain without confessing, he or she would be burned alive at the
stake, often in mass public burnings called auto-da-fé.
Contemporary writings echo the terror created by the Inquisition. Juan de Mariana
reported in the 1490s that people
... were deprived of the liberty to hear and talk freely, since in all cities, towns,
and
villages, there were persons placed to give information of what went on. This was
considered by some the most wretched slavery and equal to death.
A writer in 1538 described life in the Spanish city of Toledo:
... preachers do not dare to preach, and those who preach do not dare to touch on
contentious matters, for their lives and honor are in the mouths of two ignoramuses,
and nobody in this life is without his policeman ... Bit by bit many rich people leave
the country for foreign realms, in order not to live all their lives in fear and
trembling
every time an officer of the Inquisition enters their house; for continual fear is a
worse
death than a sudden demise.
The Inquisition often targeted members of other religions as severely as it did
heretics. The Inquisition now lent its authority to the long-standing Christian
persecution of Jews. Particularly during the Christian Holy Week of the Passion,
Christians frequently rioted against Jews or refused to sell them food in hopes of
starving them. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III required
Jews to wear distinctive clothing. In 1391 the Archdeacon of Seville launched a "Holy
War against the Jews." By 1492 the Inquisition in Spain had become so virulent in its
persecution of Jews that it demanded either their conversion to Christianity or their
expulsion. Muslims experienced little better. Not surprisingly, Islamic countries
offered far safer sanctuaries to escaping Jews than Christian lands.
Historians have often diminished Christian responsibility for the Inquisition by
dividing
the Inquisition into three separate phases: the medieval, the Spanish, and the
Roman. The greater secular influence of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella is
thought to separate the Spanish inquisition from the medieval. Yet, the Spanish
Inquisition's most influential leader, the Dominican Tomás de Torquemada, was
appointed Inquisitor General by Pope Sixtus IV. Jews were expelled from Spain, not
from a profit motive (there was little money to be made in banishing a large
community whose taxes were paid directly to the crown), but from the fear that Jews
contaminated Christian society. The Roman Inquisition is distinct from the medieval
mainly because it was renamed. In 1542 Pope Paul III reassigned the medieval
Inquisition to the Congregation of the Inquisition, or Holy Office. Each phase was
identical, however, in its demand rooted in the orthodox conviction that God similarly
requires unquestioning obedience.
The tyranny inherent in the belief in singular supremacy accompanied explorers and
missionaries throughout the world. When Columbus landed in America in 1492, he
mistook it for India and called the native inhabitants "Indians." It was his avowed aim
to "convert the heathen Indians to our Holy Faith" that warranted the enslaving and
exporting of thousands of Native Americans. That such treatment resulted in
complete genocide did not matter as much as that these natives had been given the
opportunity of everlasting life through their exposure to Christianity. The same sort
of
thinking also gave Westerners license to rape women. In his own words, Columbus
described how he himself "took [his] pleasure" with a native woman after whipping
her "soundly" with a piece of rope.
The Inquisition quickly followed in their wake. By 1570 the Inquisition had established
independent tribunal in Peru and the city of Mexico for the purpose of "freeing the
land, which has become contaminated by Jews and heretics." Natives who did not
convert to Christianity were burned like any other heretic. The Inquisition spread as
far as Goa, India, where in the late 16th and early 17th centuries it took no less than
3,800 lives.
Even without the formal Inquisition present, missionary behavior clearly illustrated
the
belief in the supremacy of a single image of God, not in the supremacy of one all-
encompassing divinity. If the image of God venerated in a foreign land was not
Christian, it was simply not divine. Portuguese missionaries in the Far East destroyed
pagodas, forced scholars to hide their religious manuscripts, and suppressed older
customs. Mayan scribes in Central America wrote:
Before the coming of the Spaniards, there was no robbery or violence. The Spanish
invasion was the beginning of tribute, the beginning of church dues, the beginning of
strife.
In 1614 the Shogun of Japan, Iyeyazu, accused the missionaries of "wanting to
change the government of the country and make themselves masters of the soil."
With no understanding of shared supremacy and authority, missionaries fought
among themselves just as had early orthodox Christians who had "wanted to
command one another" and lusted "for power over one another." In Japan and
China, the Dominicans fought bitterly with the Capuchins. And in India, the Jesuits
fought several wars against the Capuchins. A Seneca chief asked of a Moravian
missionary in 1805, "If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so
much about it?"
Missionaries often took part in the unscrupulous exploitation of foreign lands. Many
became missionaries to get rich quickly and then return to Europe and live off their
gains. In Mexico, Dominicans, Augustinians, and Jesuits were known to own "the
largest flocks of sheep, the finest sugar ingenios, the best kept estates ... " The
Church, particularly in South America, supported the enslavement of native
inhabitants and the theft of native lands. A 1493 papal Bull justified declaring war on
any natives in South America who refused to adhere to Christianity. As the jurist
Encisco claimed in 1509:
The king has every right to send his men to the Indies to demand their territory from
these idolaters because he had received it from the pope. If the Indians refuse, he
may quite legally fight them, kill them, and enslave them, just as Joshua enslaved the
inhabitants of the country of Canaan.
Orthodox Christians defended slavery as part of the divinely ordained hierarchical
order. Passages in the Bible support the institution of slavery:
Both the bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the
heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.
Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall
ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and
they
shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children
after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever.
[Leviticus 25:44- 46]
St. Paul instructed slaves to obey their masters [Ephesians 6:5; I Timothy 6:1; Titus
2:9-10]. The early St. John Chrysostom wrote:
The slave should be resigned to his lot, in obeying his master he is obeying God ...
And in the City of God, St. Augustine wrote:
... slavery is not penal in character and planned by that law which commands the
preservation of the natural order and forbids disturbance.
While there were missionaries who recognized the humanity of Native Americans
and worked earnestly to improve their lot, few recognized an inherent injustice in the
idea of slavery. Even the well-known Jesuit Antonio Vieira, who was imprisoned by
the Inquisition for his work on behalf of the native inhabitants, advocated importing
black Africans to serve as slaves for colonial settlers. And he still considered
fugitives from slavery guilty of sin and worthy of excommunication.
Orthodox Christianity also supported the practice of slavery in North America. The
eighteenth century Anglican Church made it clear that Christianity freed people from
eternal damnation, not from the bonds of slavery. The Bishop of London, Edmund
Gibson, wrote:
The Freedom which Christianity gives, is a Freedom from the Bondage of Sin and
Satan, and from the Domination of Men's Lusts and Passions and inordinate
Desires; but as to their outward Condition, whatever that was before, whether bond
or free, their being baptised, and becoming Christians, makes no manner of Change
in it.
Slaves should, however, be converted to Christianity, it was argued, because they
would then become more docile and obedient.
Both the Inquisition and those supporting the practice of slavery relied upon the
same religious justification. In keeping with the orthodox Christian belief in a
singular
and fearful God who rules at the pinnacle of hierarchy, power resided solely with
authority, not with the individual. Obedience and submission were valued far more
than freedom and self- determination. The Inquisition played out the darkest
consequences of such a belief system as it imprisoned and killed the bodies and
spirits of countless people -- and not simply for a brief moment of time. The
Inquisition spanned centuries and was still active in some places as late as 1834.
Index: Historical Writings (Various)
Home to Positive Atheism
End<{{{
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