The Inquisition: Fact or Fable? A Little of Both

The Spanish Inquisition. Just the mention of it makes people shudder inside to this day. The Inquisition is a household word all across the western world, and is used to criticize Christianity as well as any sort of civil trial that appears to either railroad a person into prison, or any sort of harsh interrogation by the police or other civil authorities.

When most people think of the Inquisition, they think of people being hauled off to a dungeon, placed on a rack, and being forced under extreme torture to admit that they were practicing witchcraft on the night of October 31, 1508, and tortured again and again until they finally cracked, at which point they were hauled out of the dungeon and into the middle of town where they were lashed to a stake and burnt, as a foretaste of the Hell that was surely going to be their eternal fate. And I'm sure that to anyone who had been hauled off and thrown in that dungeon, this was pretty much their perception of the experience.

But how did the Christian church, professing the meekness and humility of Christ, become so mean as to torture and burn people alive simply because they didn't believe properly? What ever became of the church as light of the world, the salt of the earth? I'm sure Jesus didn't intend that salt to be rubbed into the wounds of victims of torture at the hands of his professed followers. I'll try to explain how I think this happened by going over a bit of the history as I understand it. Again, don't cite me as a source without checking out my claims for yourself, or you may be sorry and a wee bit embarrassed some day. Consider yourself warned. But be that as it may, here we go.

The Inquisition, like everything else, is part of a very complex chain of historical developments, some of which go back to ancient Roman jurisprudence. Had the Romans not thought that torture was the best way to get the truth out of a person under interrogation (a myth which sadly persists to this day), the Inquisition might not have been such a fearsome and hated institution. They actually did seek to fully establish a person's actual guilt before sentencing them, again following the spirit of Roman jurisprudence. The Romans were quite hard on criminals, but at the same time, they did strive to be fair and truly get to the bottom of things before pronouncing sentence.

For example, in the medieval Inquisition, the accusers had to be named, and if the accused could demonstrate that his/her accusers might have reason to bear a grudge against them, then the testimony could be allowed. I recall hearing of one case where a guy had over 100 accusers, and he managed to disallow every one of their testimonies by proving they were his potential enemies, and went free. The guy must have been a consummate jerk to piss off so many people, but as is often the case, being a jerk paid off.

Be that as it may, even if you went free, the "interrogation" might take months, and involve tremendous physical torture that would leave the exonerated person crippled, or worse, for life. That was the sad combination, I think, of adopting ancient Roman interrogation methods with the extremely difficult theological task of probing into a person's beliefs to spot out some strain of heretical belief, which can take a while.

While the Inquisition was by all means a dreadful thing, especially by modern standards, it could be argued that they set precedents for our modern system of justice which presumes innocence until guilt is proven. We're talking baby steps here, of course, but still, they did not want to burn a person at the stake who might actually be heaven-bound rather than hell-bound.

Roman Origins of the Inquisition

Which brings up another reason for the Inquisition. What was so bad about heresy anyway? From our modern perspective in which separation of church and state runs deep in our psyche, the very thought of burning someone for heresy is--well, quite heretical. But the truth is that throughout human history until only a few centuries ago, religion was regarded as inseparable from any other part of a person's life, and religion was usually regulated and controlled by civil authorities. What this means is that if a person's religion was outside the pale, they were simultaneously outside the pale of the civil magistrates, guilty of treason for all intents and purposes.

However, this also proved to be tragic in the case of Christian Europe, again due to some complex historical processes. In the days of the Roman Empire the state religion was Roman paganism mixed in with emperor worship. Rome did allow tremendous religious freedom, however, since there were so many worshippers of so many different pagan deities, but as long as a person gave homage to the Roman deities at least now and then, things were fine. And most pagans were fine with worshipping whatever deities happened to be honored in a particular region.

So everything was fine in Roman when it came to religion. People in the empire, by and large, understood that since they were subjugated by Rome, that meant they paid homage to Roman deities. That was a common belief throughout the ancient world, and posed no problem until the Jews, and later the Christians, came along and refused to worship the Roman deities. Now Rome decided Jews were okay because they clearly worshipped a very ancient deity, and even though they were adamant in their refusal to worship any Roman deity, the Romans came to terms and allowed certain legal exceptions to Jews.

But the Christians, who also refused adamantly to pay homage to Roman deities, were a different story, since they claimed to worship a human being who walked around Palestine for a few years, and was recently crucified. Because this was a novel and recent idea, the Christians received no respect from Rome and were expected to do the right thing and worship the Roman deities like everyone else. Needless to say, this resulted in persecution of Christians that closely resembled the later Inquisition, or to say it correctly, the later Christian Inquisition resembled the Roman persecution of Christians.

And this is the irony, that after about three centuries Christianity became the state church with the conversion of the emperor Constantine. Now, with the shoe on the other foot, the Christians in power mandated that one must worship Christ to be in line with the emperor, and since there is only one God, then it stood to reason that any pagan worship would be forbidden. This was a completely different paradigm, and one that survived intact into the middle ages. And that, again, was tragic in that the pagan Roman system could make great allowance for a multitude of religions, while the Christian Roman system could not. One simply cannot worship Christ, then turn around and worship Jupiter or Isis. It simply didn't work that way.

I think these are the reasons why the Inquisition is remembered as an institution of infamy. They employed torture in their interrogations, and they allowed no deviance from a strict orthodoxy, based on the Nicene creed, from any person who was ever baptised as a Christian. And, they linked loyalty to the Christian religion with loyalty to the king. While these concepts were simply understood as the way things are in the middle ages, modern people find such ideas quite shocking, and understandably so.