“Well, I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition,” the mild-mannered Englishman grumbles at a woman’s questioning—and then the door opens and in rush Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, and Terry Jones, wearing blood-red cardinal’s robes and waxed mustaches and golden crosses. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” Palin announces with ominous self-satisfaction, eyes bright beneath a broad-brimmed hat, as the Monty Python sketch continues, only to get caught up in the difficulties of enumerating the things one does expect from the Spanish Inquisition. (“Our chief weapon is surprise—surprise and fear. Fear and surprise. Our two weapons are fear and surprise. And ruthless efficiency. Our three weapons are fear and surprise and ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Our four—no! Amongst our weaponry are such elements as fear and—I’ll come in again.”) The joke, of course, is that the Spanish Inquisition as a byword for cruel tyranny looks absurd in a modern setting.
In “God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Cullen Murphy tries to find out why people once did expect the Spanish Inquisition, and if the inquisitors have vanished or merely changed clothes. He believes that the Inquisition, far from being a “medieval” relic, is an institution as deeply rooted in modernity as the scientific tradition that it opposed. Its fanaticism, its implicit totalitarianism (with inquisitors investigating every crevice of its victims’ lives, from how they cooked chicken to how they made love), its sheer bureaucratic brutality—in short, its surprise, fear, ruthless efficiency, and fanatical devotion to the Pope—make it central to who we are and what we do. Its thumbprint is everywhere: the Gestapo, the K.G.B., the Stasi. Even our own Guantánamo-making apparatus—more than twelve hundred government organizations focus on national-security concerns, Murphy tells us—has a forebear in Torquemada and the men in the red hats.
Is the Inquisition still alive? Murphy, as in his book “Are We Rome?,” asks a question that is, in a way, too large to be answered. Yet this roominess is also the book’s virtue. The-little-thing-that-did-that-big-thing pop history usually tries to squeeze enough juice from a tiny subject to make a book. Murphy, by contrast, takes a great big subject and tries to walk right around it. If you’re worn out or confused by the end, at least you’ve seen a lot. Murphy’s tone is calm, even good-humored, but he can vibrate to the victims’ preserved cries for mercy, which he reproduces from transcripts that the Inquisition kept. The good ghost of Garry Wills’s historical writing haunts his pages—the same kind of open-ended, casually erudite inquiry scrutinized at length and from a liberal-Catholic point of view. He makes a grand and scary tour of inquisitorial moments, racing back and forth in history from Torquemada to Dick Cheney, and from Guantánamo to Rome; we are there when Giordano Bruno is burned to death, on the orders of Cardinal Bellarmine, and then are asked to compare our own readiness to torture when what we fear threatens us.
Murphy’s point, entirely convincing, is that Cheney’s “one per cent doctrine”—if there’s any chance that terrorists might get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, we have an obligation to do what-ever we have to do to make sure that they haven’t—is ancient and all too easily universalized. Torturers always do their work with regret, and out of last-ditch necessity, certain that the existence of their country or their church or their values depends on it. No one burns people alive by halves. If you believe that you know the truth of the cosmos or of history, then the crime of causing pain to one person does seem trivial compared with the risk of permitting the death or damnation of thousands. We had no choice is what the Grand Inquisitor announces in Dostoyevsky. We know the cruellest of fanatics by their exceptionally clear consciences.
Generations of students were taught that the Spanish Inquisition was a permanent office of the Church in the Iberian peninsula, particularly active in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Using torture and fear, inquisitors forced confessions from suspected heretics and hidden Jews—conversos who continued the clandestine practice of their former faith. Once discovered, they were marched through autos-da-fé: grand penitential parades, which often culminated in a public burning. The archetypal inquisitor was, supposedly, Tomás de Torquemada, the fifteenth-century “hammer of heretics,” who looked for crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims under every paella pan and helped push forward the decree that expelled all the Jews from Spain, in 1492. (He’s the guy the Python people are pretending to be like when they come rushing in.) The Inquisition’s omnipresence created a climate of fear so acute that it helped paralyze Spanish thought on the brink of the modern age, and led to the breakdown of Spanish intellectual life. While the Inquisition was most notorious and most effective in Spain, it spread throughout Europe, taking hold in Italy, for instance, long enough to burn up Bruno and shut up Galileo.
As Murphy learns, however, professional scholars now tell the story very differently. By consensus, historians have come to reject the idea of a more or less unitary Inquisition, as it was traced by the Philadelphia historian Henry Charles Lea, a century ago: rather, there were many inquisitions, started and stopped in various places under independent authority and without any single program or control. Murphy goes to visit the two most important revisionists. The first is a memorable figure by any standard: the elder Netanyahu, Bibi’s now hundred-and-one-year-old father, Benzion, who, over years of research, has established, at least to his own satisfaction, that the idea of a flourishing clandestine community of Iberian Marranos, who paid lip service to Christian rites and rituals while secretly remaining Jews, is a myth, invented by the Inquisition for its own evil ends and taken up, much later, by the Jews, in the hope that it would make their ancestors seem less fearful and more resistant.
Netanyahu’s revisionism is, in certain ways, limited: his mordant point is not so much that the Inquisition doesn’t deserve its reputation for cruelty as that its victims don’t deserve theirs for moral courage. In reality, he argues, the fifteenth-century Jews who converted tried to stay that way, and to practice the new faith of their neighbors as best they could. The myth was invented by the persecutors out of frustration with their inability to dispossess the Jews as a class. If they sneakily made themselves over into Christians in order to keep money and position, then they must have been cheating all along, being Jews.
Netanyahu denies that he has any end in mind save disinterested historical inquiry—“I write only as a historian, to find out how it really was,” he says to Murphy—but this seems like the Freudian case where what the patient denies is the place to dig. The lesson Netanyahu obviously takes, and teaches, from his study can be summed up in three words: assimilation is impossible. Anti-Semitism is too deeply implanted in Gentile cultures to be assuaged by softening or even renouncing your identity as a Jew. The acquiescent Jewish hope that if you stop eating kosher they will stop eating you is an illusion. There were no “hidden Jews,” any more than there were secrets of the Elders of Zion. It didn’t matter. The Spanish Catholics didn’t have any real interest in saving the Jews’ souls; they just wanted their houses and their money. The implicit contemporary corollary is that Arabs have no real interest in peace or accommodation with the Jews in Israel, except as strictly controlled and fearful second-class citizens. (The truth of Netanyahu’s view of the Inquisition is much debated. There does seem to be evidence that Marrano practices persisted: the Inquisition, after all, went so far as to look for recipes from suspected crypto-Jews and seems to have found them.)
The revisionism that Murphy finds in the work of another leading historian of the Inquisition, Henry Kamen, a Brit now resident in Barcelona, is at once more academically orthodox and more unsettling. In a much praised 1997 study, Kamen meticulously takes apart the acts of the inquisitors in Spain, turn by turn and torture by torture. And yet he concludes by saying, basically, Well, sure, they burned people alive and tortured people and organized nightmarish parades where people were forced to wear degrading uniforms—but they did it differently and less often than you might think. The sequential inquisitions had different degrees of severity, authority, and bureaucratic power. The inquisitors themselves, even at their worst, didn’t burn people alive: they handed them over to the civil executioners to do it. Though they tortured people, they didn’t do it any more than the secular guys did, and there was usually a doctor around. The full-scale autos-da-fé that Voltaire satirizes and Goya draws were expensive and therefore relatively rare, and, in any case, were essentially over by the time Goya and Voltaire were describing them.
What’s more, Kamen argues, the Spain of the Inquisition was essentially pre-modern: the Holy Office, as the Inquisition was properly called, depended less on an omnipresent police than on a pervasive system of informers. This meant that pretty much everyone was implicated—that the Spanish Inquisition was more Spanish than Inquisition. Nor could the Inquisition alone have condemned Spain to centuries of backwardness in science and education; after all, Cervantes thrived while the Inquisition did. Besides, the anti-Catholic inquisition, in seemingly “progressive” England, was just as violent, though it preferred to tear Jesuits alive on a scaffold rather than burn them to bits. There were a lot of other reasons, economic and linguistic, that Spain became a backwater for so long. Where, for obvious reasons, most twentieth-century accounts of the Inquisition focus on the persecution of the Jews, older accounts make more, for equally obvious reasons, of the persecution of Protestants. (It’s certainly true that you can’t see the Inquisition outside the context of the Reformation, which really did present an existential threat to the Roman Catholic Church. The inquisitors weren’t crazy to think that they had mortal enemies out there.)
Kamen’s book represents the academic orthodoxy on the subject now. Indeed, the British historian Helen Rawlings, in her 2006 study “The Spanish Inquisition,” meets Kamen’s work and raises him. She doesn’t whitewash her subject. She explains that Spain in the early sixteenth century was an especially thriving spot for Erasmians, followers of the great humanist Erasmus; the Holy Office made sure that all the prominent humanists “chose to leave Spain rather than fall victims to the campaign to discredit their tolerant tradition,” such that “by the mid-1530s, the Inquisition, under heavy Dominican influence, had effectively enforced silence on humanist scholarship as part of its campaign to turn Spain into a fortress against heresy.” Yet she ends with this chillingly condescending sentence: “While the Inquisition will never be totally divorced from the dark image that surrounds its activities nor its excesses condoned, recent research has enabled us to draw a more balanced picture of the nature and ambit of the authority it exercised.” It sounds a bit like the self-congratulation of a cancer-ward patient for best tumor. Like a lot of modern academic historians, Kamen and Rawlings risk turning history into all nuance and no news.
The pursuit of scholarly rigor too easily leads historians to erase any signs of the historical imagination from their work. What is the historical imagination? It’s simply the ability to see small and think big. Just thinking big leads you to Spenglerian melodrama and fantasy; just seeing small makes you miss history altogether while seeming to study it. After all, any significant change in human consciousness can be dissolved if you break it down into its individual parts, which are bound to seem contradictory or many-sided—you can dissolve anything by dissolving it. The Italian Renaissance can be argued out of existence as easily as the Spanish Inquisition. (In fact, Europeans had constant contact with Greek and Roman styles right through the Middle Ages, and the fifteenth-century Italian way of seeing antiquity was more Catholic-minded and anachronistic than its predecessors had been.)
History helps us to understand reality by disassembling the big nouns into the small acts that make them up. But if history ignores its responsibility to the big nouns it isn’t doing its job. That there were not weekly autos-da-fé in sixteenth-century Spain does not alter our horror that there were any at all, much less that they were so effectively institutionalized. Their purpose was to frighten and terrorize; the mark of their success is that they did not need to happen every day. That the Inquisition did not often burn men alive for thinking the wrong thoughts does not alter the truth that it burned men alive for thinking the wrong thoughts—that it raised the casual cruelty of previous intolerance to a theatricalized black Mass.
And then history written without sufficient imagination risks a failure of basic human empathy. We sometimes think that the historical imagination is the gift of seeing past—seeing past the surface squalors of an era to the larger truths. Really, history is all about seeing in, looking hard at things to bring them back to life as they were, while still making them part of life as it is. If you can’t imagine the horror of being burned alive, then you haven’t, so to speak, lived. Murphy, to his credit, makes us feel not just what it was to see the Inquisition at work but what it was to suffer from it. We learn, for instance, that it was considered a special favor and mercy to supply a heretic, about to be set alight, with a bag of gunpowder to tie around his neck so that he would die from the explosion before he died from the flames.
Reading the revisionist histories, one is often startled by the introduction of shocking material that fails sufficiently to shock the author. Rawlings remarks blandly that, before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, “there were obvious anomalies between the position of Jews and of Jewish converts in Spanish society that had to be resolved,” and then reproduces a “test of purity of blood,” right out of the Nuremberg laws. (Applicants are to swear that they are “without any stain or taint of Jewish, Moorish, or Converso origins.”) Is it anachronistic, in the sense of imputing modern feelings to ancient acts, to be sickened by such things? Well, not if one imagines asking the threatened conversos how they felt about it. Pain is pain in any period.
Murphy quotes another historian of the period, Eamon Duffy, of Cambridge, announcing that he doesn’t find the cruelties of the inquisitions particularly shocking: “That was then, and this is now. Of course, these things are outrageous if they’re considered in the abstract. But human beings don’t live in the abstract. They live in the particular.” Well, they do. Murphy reproduces the transcript of a “heretic” under torture, made by the recording secretary:
The point of an inquisition is to reduce its victims to abstractions, and abandoning the effort to call their pain back to particular life is a true trahison des clercs.
A historical imagination, of the kind that can bring such suffering back to life, is essential to Goya’s genius. The painter knew that, even if the Inquisition and its hideous rituals were becoming archaic, their presence had maimed the imagination of his civilization and his country: the knowledge that a man could be forced into a tall cap and robe and reduced to an object to be mocked, that he could be tortured in the name of the God he importuned for help, was now part of the inexpugnable bad conscience of his civilization. Spain, as Kamen argues, made the Inquisition—and then the Inquisition unmade Spain. The national iconography isn’t what you’re proud to look at but what you can’t help seeing, even if you close your eyes. (Especially if you close your eyes.) Goya could not have seen or made those images without knowing his nation’s historical nightmare, any more than an American can look at lynching photographs—or, for that matter, at pictures of the hooded man on the box at Abu Ghraib, a found Goya if ever there was one—without understanding that he is implicated in it. We did that are the words we hear inside, even if we didn’t do it recently, or personally. The historical imagination, like Giordano Bruno’s cosmology, includes a plurality of worlds, but it sees that what happens in each of them has weight.
Recognizing that the Inquisition is really a set of inquisitions complicates but doesn’t curb Murphy’s indignation. He presses on with his search for the Inquisition’s contemporary heirs, even after the experts tell him that there’s no specific essence to inherit. He visits Guantánamo, travels to museums of torture in Spain, and broods on Cardinal Ratzinger’s ambiguous repudiations of the Holy Inquisition. (He quotes the great Italian historian of the Inquisition Carlo Ginzburg crying out at a Vatican meeting, “Not sorry. Sorry is easy. . . . I want to hear the Catholic Church—I want to hear the pope—say he is ashamed. ”) In the end, you come to feel that the real continuity is so pervasive that it needs no tradition to feed it; people torture other people everywhere for any reason at hand. The real issue is why and when they ever stop.
And here a little bit of self-congratulation seems in order. Murphy nears his conclusion with a glance at our own Torquemada, J. Edgar Hoover, who was as scary an inquisitorial type as could exist, and who would surely have tortured and executed the Communists he imagined besieging America (and for the same good reason the Inquisitor always has: Dr. King did have suspected Communists near him), if he had had the chance. But he didn’t have the chance. Mostly, Hoover lost, and what made him lose was the persistence of traditions and laws of civil liberties. That those liberties can be diminished at a remote terrorist threat does not alter the reality that they are well enough established so that people at least notice when they’re threatened. Not a few of us feel that Ginzburgian shame when we find out what we’ve done from fear.
What makes a civilization lose the inquisitional tendency? The truth seems to be that abundance helps—the more goods there are, the more purely symbolic the struggles over them tend to become—but the idea of decency matters most. The values of tolerance are one of the most difficult lessons to impart, not because people are naturally cruel but because power is naturally fearful. We’re slow learners. The Inquisition has become a byword for cruelty combined with state power and superstition because it was. Monty Python could take it as a figure of fun because Enlightenment ideals of tolerance and decency make us feel safe from it.
After Monty Python ended, Terry Jones (who not only appeared as one of the inquisitors but directed the Python films) went back to his original work as a medievalist, and co-wrote a book about the mysterious death of Geoffrey Chaucer. One can debate its conspiratorial point—that Richard II was, despite Shakespeare, a very good king and Henry IV a very bad one, who may have had Chaucer murdered. But it’s wonderfully eloquent in its ability to make the ideological battlefield of fourteenth-century England come alive in modern terms. Jones and his collaborators posit not a war between faith and doubt but a kind of permanent war between the common-sense humanism represented by Chaucer and, later, Erasmus, both of whom worked within an entirely Catholic context, and the intolerant fanaticism of their enemies: when Chaucer’s patron Richard II fell and Chaucer was silenced, the evil Archbishop Arundel instantly returned to burning heretics. After reading Murphy’s accounts of so many bodies tortured and so many lives ended, one ought, I suppose, to feel guilty about laughing at the old Python sketch, but it’s hard not to feel a little giddy watching it. How did we become this free to laugh at fanaticism? That for a moment or two the humanists seem to have it—that we don’t really expect the Inquisition to barge into our living rooms—is a fragile triumph of a painful, difficult, ongoing education in Enlightenment values. Bloody miracle, really. ♦
