Catholic Answers Explains The Inquisition

I recently came across the Catholic Answers tract: The Inquisition. This is actually an article of a better pedigree than most Roman apologetic stuff (the article has the NIHIL OBSTAT and IMPRIMATUR).

The article ends with the following:

"The fact that the Protestant Reformers also created inquisitions to root out Catholics and others who did not fall into line with the doctrines of the local Protestant sect shows that the existence of an inquisition does not prove that a movement is not of God. Protestants cannot make this claim against Catholics without having it backfire on themselves. Neither can Catholics make such a charge against Protestants. The truth of a particular system of belief must be decided on other grounds."

At first glance, this argument contains an appealing sense of balance. Certainly it's true that previous generations of Roman Catholics and Protestants understood that heresy was a so serious as to warrant the death penalty. I mean... why should we point fingers at each other? Our forefathers on both sides were guilty of cruelty and executions. One may be tempted to argue that because Romanism put more people to death, she's more guilty. True, but in fairness, the charges against Protestants utilizing the death penalty for heresy is not alleviated by such a response. Simply because they weren't as guilty doesn't mean they weren't guilty.

I can certainly appreciate the even-toned conclusion, "The truth of a particular system of belief must be decided on other grounds." I've argued similarly in regard to scandalous priest problems, much to the disapproval of  some of my Protestant friends (yes, it's a lonely position to hold!).  But, I don't think this argument really treats Romanism accurately. I'm sure the Inquisitors wouldn't be happy being thrown under the bus by Catholic Answers. I'm fairly sure the Council of Constance would be very confused by Catholic Answers, for they stated:

Sentence condemning J. Hus to the stake

This holy synod of Constance, seeing that God's church has nothing more that it can do, relinquishes John Hus to the judgment of the secular authority and decrees that he is to be relinquished to the secular court.

Now I imagine (though I'm not certain), Romanists have a way around how an infallible council sentenced a man to death, and how the conclusion of the Catholic Answers tract still follows. I'm sure there's a way to weasel out of this. I can't recall if it was Sungenis, Matatics, or Staples (in debate against Dr. White) who argued Constance didn't kill Hus, the secular authority did (I'm thinking it was Staples, Algo can correct or verify). Plainly though, Constance at least knew what their decision would mean for Hus, and if the bolded "Sentence condemning J. Hus to the stake" is part of the actual document of Constance, they certainly expected it. If an infallible council can sentence people to death, this certainly puts a different spin on things. In fact, it makes the conclusion of the Catholic Answers tract null and void.

Addendum
Old Google Books can sometimes give a good snapshot as to how previous generations of Protestants understood Romanism. For instance, note the following from 1853 as to trying to figure out just what councils were said to be infallible:

This becomes still more palpably evident when we advert to the disputes among Romanists themselves, as to what the councils are that ought to be reckoned general and unerring. Most Romanists agree in maintaining, that there have been eighteen councils which were oecumenical and infallible; but they differ materially among themselves as to what particular councils are entitled to a place in this list. The Italians and Ultramontanists, that is, the immediate adherents, and the most servile dependents, of the Pope and the court of Rome, regard the councils of Lyons, Florence, and the fifth Lateran as oecumenical and infallible, while the French divines, who defend the liberties of the Gallican Church, deny to these three councils this exalted character, and substitute in their room the councils of Pisa, Constance, and Basle. Every Popish priest at his ordination swears to believe and maintain "everything delivered, defined, and declared by the oecumenical councils." It is to be presumed that when men take this oath, they have made up their minds as to what particular councils are oecumenical, and have satisfied themselves that all the decisions of these councils are just and accurate. Now, we would like much to know, whether, when the Popish priests of this country take this oath, they swear to adopt the French or the Italian list. They have never given us any information upon this subject, and probably most of them have never considered, and are unable to tell, what the oecumenical councils are, to which they intend to swear.

The Birth of the Inquisition

Part 1: Augustine as Conduit to the Inquisition
Part 2: How Confession became a Divinely Instituted Sacrament
Part 3: The Origins of Payment for Penance
Part 4: Crusading and Other Indulgences
Part 5: The Great Schism of the Fifth Century
Part 6: “Deliver us from the hands of the Romans”
Part 7: Impetus for the Crusades
Part 8: “Babies roasted on spits”
Part 9: The Insecurity of the Medieval Church
Part 10: When Suppressing Heresy Became a Crusade

This will be the last of the longer selections I’ll post from Johnson’s “A History of Christianity.” Though it's possible that I will bring up a point or two in another post.

As I noted at the outset of this series, I thought it was important to show that the roots of the Inquisition go back to Augustine -- his world and theology. Many Reformed and Evangelical Protestants know that the Inquisition occurred, but are less familiar with why it occurred or how it came about. What we have in this series is the gestation and the birth of that institution. I know that this series has been tedious for some; perhaps it has been interesting for others. I found it interesting and edifying.

Of course, the ultimate purpose, on this blog, is to talk about the Reformation in an apologetic sense. And that, too, is what I hoped to do – to put “out there” just one more reason for the Reformation.

The Inquisition itself provided the sort of “mood,” or “back-drop” within which other theologies developed. That may or may not be important. Some memories of the Inquisition made it into the U.S. Constitution, in the form of a prohibition against a state religion, and also a prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Just precisely how these came about should be the topics of another study. I don’t have all the answers. I merely hope to arouse some curiosity, and to provoke some questions.

* * *

Ever since the eleventh century, secular rulers had been burning those who obstinately refused to fit in with established Christian arrangements; the Church had opposed capital punishment, successive councils decreeing confiscation of property, excommunication, imprisonment or whipping, branding and exile. But in the 1180s, the Church began to panic at the spread of heresy, and thereafter it took the lead from the State, though it maintained the legal fiction that convicted and unrepentant heretics were merely 'deprived of the protection of the Church', which was (as they termed it) 'relaxed', the civil power then being free to burn them without committing mortal sin. Relaxation was accompanied by a formal plea for mercy; in fact this was meaningless, and the individual civil officer (sheriffs and so forth) had no choice but to burn, since otherwise he was denounced as a 'defender of heretics', and plunged into the perils of the system himself.

The codification of legislation against heresy took place over half a century, roughly 1180-1230, when it culminated in the creation of a permanent tribunal, staffed by Dominican friars, who worked from a fixed base in conjunction with the episcopate, and were endowed with generous authority. The permanent system was designed as a reform; in fact it incorporated all the abuses of earlier practice and added new ones. It had a certain vicious logic. Since a heretic was denied burial in consecrated ground, the corpses of those posthumously convicted (a very frequent occurrence) had to be disinterred, dragged through the streets and burnt on the refuse pit. The houses in which they lived had to be knocked down and turned into sewers or rubbish-dumps.

Convictions of thought-crimes being difficult to secure, the Inquisition used procedures banned in other courts, and so contravened town charters, written and customary laws, and virtually every aspect of established jurisprudence. The names of hostile witnesses were withheld, anonymous informers were used, the accusations of personal enemies were allowed, the accused were denied the right of defence, or of defending counsel; and there was no appeal. The object, quite simply, was to produce convictions at any cost; only thus, it was thought, could heresy be quenched. Hence depositors were not named; all a suspect could do was to produce a list of his enemies, and he was allowed to bring forward witnesses to testify that such enemies existed, but for no other purpose. On the other hand, the prosecution could use the evidence of criminals, heretics, children and accomplices, usually forbidden in other courts.

Once an area became infected by heresy, and the system moved in, large numbers of people became entangled in its toils. Children of heretics could not inherit, as the stain was vicarial; grandchildren could not hold ecclesiastical benefices unless they successfully denounced someone. Everyone from the age of fourteen (girls from twelve) were required to take public oaths every two years to remain good Catholics and denounce heretics. Failure to confess or receive communion at least three times a year aroused automatic suspicion; possession of the scriptures in any language, or of breviaries, hour-books and psalters in the vernacular, was forbidden. Torture was not employed regularly until near the end of the thirteenth century (except by secular officials without reference to the Inquisition) but suspects could be held in prison and summoned again and again until they yielded, the object of the operation being to obtain admissions or denunciations. When torture was adopted it was subjected to canonical restraints - if it produced nothing on the first occasion it was forbidden to repeat it. But such regulations were open to glosses; Francis Pegna, the leading Inquisition commentator, wrote:

'But if, having been tortured reasonably (decenter), he will not confess the truth, set other sorts of torments before him, saying that he must pass through all these unless he will confess the truth. If even this fails, a second or third day may be appointed to him, either in terrorem or even in truth, for the continuation (not repetition) of torture; for tortures may not be repeated unless fresh evidence emerges against him; then, indeed, they may, for against continuation there is no prohibition.'

Pegna said that pregnant women might not be tortured, for fear of abortions: 'we must wait until she is delivered of her child'; and children below the age of puberty, and old folk, were to be less severely tortured. The methods used were, on the whole, less horrific than those employed by various secular governments - though it should be added that English common lawyers, for instance, flatly denied that torture was legal, except in case of refusal to plead.

Once a victim was accused, escape from some kind of punishment was virtually impossible: the system would not allow it. But comparatively few were executed: less than ten per cent of those liable. Life-imprisonment was usual for those 'converted' by fear of death; this could be shortened by denunciations. Acts of sympathy or favour for heretics were punished by imprisonment or pilgrimage; there were also fines or floggings, and penance in some form was required of all those who came into contact with the infected, even though unknowingly and innocently. The smallest punishment was to wear yellow cloth crosses - an unpopular penalty since it prevented a man from getting employment; on the other hand, to cease to wear it was treated as a relapse into heresy. A spell in prison was virtually inevitable.

Of course there was a shortage of prison-space, since solitary confinement was the rule. Once the Inquisition moved into an area, the bishop's prison was soon full; then the king's; then old buildings had to be converted, or new ones built. Food was the prisoner's own responsibility, though the bishop was supposed to provide bread and water in the case of poverty. The secular authorities did not like these crowded prisons, being terrified of gaol fever and plague, and thus burned many more people than the Church authorized. The system was saved from utter horror only by the usual medieval frailties: corruption, inertia, and sheer administrative incompetence.

Where the system was employed against an entire community, as in Languedoc, it evoked resistance. There were riots, murders, the destruction of records. Many countries would not admit the Inquisition at all. In Spain, however, it became a state instrument, almost a national institution, like bullfighting, a mystery to foreigners but popular among the natives. It is surprising how often admirable, if eccentric, individuals were burned, not only without public protest but with general approval. Thus the fourteenth century breakaway movement of Franciscans, the fraticelli, who opposed clerical property and reasserted the apostolic practices of their founder, were hunted and burned all over Europe but especially in their native Umbria and the Mark of Ancona; the crowds who watched them destroyed were apathetic or inclined to believe antinomianism was rightly punished. In the Middle Ages, the ruthless and confident exercise of authority could nearly always swing a majority behind it. And the victims of the flames usually died screaming in pain and terror, thus appearing to confirm the justice of the proceedings.

Paul Johnson, History of Christianity, © 1976 Athenium, pgs. 253-255.

When Suppressing Heresy Became a Crusade

Part 1: Augustine as Conduit to the Inquisition
Part 2: How Confession became a Divinely Instituted Sacrament
Part 3: The Origins of Payment for Penance
Part 4: Crusading and Other Indulgences
Part 5: The Great Schism of the Fifth Century
Part 6: “Deliver us from the hands of the Romans”
Part 7: “Impetus for the Crusades”
Part 8: “Babies roasted on spits”
Part 9: The Insecurity of the Medieval Church

Continuing with Johnson:

Yet returned crusaders undoubtedly brought back heresy with them…

'Cathar' was first applied to heretics in northern Europe about 1160. They were also called Publicans, Paterines (in Italy), Bougres or Bulgars in France, or Arians, Manichaeans or Marcionites. Around Albi the Cathars were termed Albigensians. The confusion over names reveals a confusion over ideas. But basically all these heresies were the same. They aimed to substitute a perfect elite for the corrupt clergy.

Where they were numerous enough, as in southern France, they organized churches and bishoprics, and constituted an alternative Church. Very few of the sect were 'perfected' - perhaps 1,000 to 1,500 in the whole of Languedoc in c. 1200. The majority were 'believers', who married, led normal lives, and 'received the consolamentum' only on their deathbeds, thus dying 'in the hands of the Good Men'. The Cathars were well-organized and orderly people. They elected bishops, collected funds and distributed them; led admirable lives. Unlike most Charismatics, they could not be broken up by a sharp cavalry charge. They got on well with the local authorities. The only effective evangelizing against them came from equally poor groups, like the Poor of Lyons, founded by a former Lyonnais merchant, Waldo, around 1173-6. These men were strictly orthodox in their beliefs, but they took apostolic poverty literally and were outside the Church's organizational structure. The clergy thus regarded the Waldensians as a threat. As Walter Map put it, when he saw some in Rome in 1179: 'They go about two by two, barefoot, clad in woolen garments, owning nothing, holding all things in common like the Apostles ... if we admit them, we shall be driven out.' They were excommunicated three years later.

There was, indeed, no shortage of men prepared to defend orthodoxy. But they set standards which exposed the existing structures and personnel of the church, and thus formed a remedy more serious than the disease. Innocent in, despite his many limitations, did grasp the essence of this problem very clearly, and was the only pope to make a systematic attempt to solve it. His creation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders - the first to beat the heretics at their own game of apostolic poverty, the second to preach orthodox concepts in popular terms - sought to harness volcanic Christian forces to institutional objectives. But the dilemma could not be solved by a once-and-for-all operation. It was permanent; it was endemic in Christianity. If the Franciscans, for instance, were allowed to pursue their idealism, they got out of control; if they were controlled, they promptly lost their idealism and became corrupt. Within two generations, the whole friar experiment was a failure; within three it was a liability.

There remained the Augustinian solution: force. It was, in a way, a recapitulation of the fourth and fifth centuries. The Church was terrified by the rapid disintegration of Christianity in southern France. There was no question of peaceful coexistence of orthodoxy and heresy: orthodox bishops could not function and there was imminent danger that the collapse would soon be extended to other areas. It is notable that where there was strong, centralized royal power, to back up the organized Church, heresy was weak or even non-existent (as, for instance, in England at this time). Heresy took root in areas where the ultimate source of secular authority was obscure, and where secular power was divided or remote.

Thus the Church, in its fear, tended to appeal to secular power outside the infected area. Suppressing a heresy became a crusade, promising tangible benefits, and bringing into play differences of language and culture, the forces of racism and the spur of greed for land. The Albigensian crusades, organized from 1208 onwards, the precursors of many other 'internal' papal crusades, were preached by upper-class Cistercians, the great disciplinarians of peasants. Heretics were either rabble or, if not, forfeited their privileged class status. Conversely, a crusade was an opportunity to rise in the social scale, for younger sons, would-be knights, and any kind of professional soldier with genteel aspirations. These crusaders got a plenary indulgence for forty days service, plus a moratorium on their debts and any interest payable; if they had lands, they could tax both their vassals and clergy. The Church reserved to itself the right to redistribute among the more faithful crusaders the confiscated lands of the defeated heretics.

Thus the crusade attracted the most disreputable elements in northern France, and the result was horror. In 1209, Arnold Aimery exulted to the Pope that the capture of Beziers had been 'miraculous'; and that the crusaders had killed 15,000, 'showing mercy neither to order, nor age nor sex'. Prisoners were mutilated, blinded, dragged at the hooves of horses and used for target practice. Such outrages provoked despairing resistance and so prolonged the conflict. It was a watershed in Christian history. Of course it aroused much criticism even at the time. Peter Cantor asked: 'How doth the church presume to examine by this foreign judgment the hearts of men? Or how is it that the Cathari are given no legitimate respite for deliberation but are burned immediately?

... Certain honest matrons, refusing to consent to the lust of priests ... were written in the book of death and accused as Cathari ... while certain rich Cathari had their purses squeezed and were let go. One man alone, because he was poor and pale, and confessed the faith of Christ faithfully on all points, and put that forward as his hope, was burned, since he said to the assembled bishops that he would refuse to submit to the ordeal of hot iron unless they could first prove to him that he could do this without tempting the Lord and committing mortal sin.'

A few years later, Innocent III abolished the ordeal on precisely these grounds. More generally, it was the type of criticism voiced by Cantor which led to the organization of a regular inquisition system, which would be effective yet less open to the abuses developed under the haphazard methods hitherto employed.

Paul Johnson, History of Christianity, © 1976 Athenium, pgs. 251-253.

The Insecurity of the Medieval Church

Part 1: Augustine as Conduit to the Inquisition
Part 2: How Confession became a Divinely Instituted Sacrament
Part 3: The Origins of Payment for Penance
Part 4: Crusading and Other Indulgences
Part 5: The Great Schism of the Fifth Century
Part 6: “Deliver us from the hands of the Romans”
Part 7: “Impetus for the Crusades”
Part 8: “Babies roasted on spits”

Here Johnson begins to tie some of the loose ends together. In a way, this post provides a response to some of the comments which suggested that things might not be coming together. Johnson is a writer who writes 1000 page books; he takes a while to get to his point – he necessarily must tie in a lot of information – but when he gets there, you genuinely have an understanding of what he was trying to say.

After the twelfth century, the crusading idea lost its appeal in the West. Population was no longer rising at the same rate, and the surplus, in France, tended to drift instead to the towns; in Germany, led by the Teutonic knights who transferred their activities to Prussia and Poland, it pushed to the east. After about 1310 population actually fell, and from the mid fourteenth century there was an acute labour shortage in Europe. Population did not begin to expand again significantly until the sixteenth century, when emigration was resumed, but in a westerly direction. But the decline of the crusade was due to more than demographic factors. … By the end of the twelfth century some Europeans, at least, rejected the crude popular theology of the crusading movement. …

By this time, of course, the papacy had long since devalued the crusading ideal by adapting it for internal political and financial purposes. The legal mechanism of crusading was too tempting to escape abuse. A man who took the cross enjoyed the protection of the courts. He might evade his debts and taxes. On the other hand, careful investigations were made after a crusade had been preached to ensure that people had fulfilled their vows. Reneging was punished canonically.

The papacy was quick to use the procedure against the Hohenstaufen. Fredrick II was first excommunicated for not going on crusade, then for going without the Popes permission; and he was denounced as an infidel for showing that, with the Saracens, more could be obtained by negotiation than by force. Later the weapon was turned against Henry III of England, who could not fulfil his vow to go on crusade by midsummer 1256: Alexander IV commuted it, but Henry in return had to provide troops for the Pope’s anti Hohenstaufen campaign in Italy, and pay in addition 135,541 marks, with excommunication and interdict in default. England could not pay and the result was a constitutional crisis and the famous Oxford Parliament of 1259, the episode forming an important landmark in the progressive breakdown of Rome’s relations with England.

It is, in fact, a misleading over-simplification to see the crusade simply as a confrontation between Christian Europe and the Moslem East. The central problem of the institutional church was always how to control the manifestations of religious enthusiasm, and divert them into orthodox and constructive channels. The problem was enormously intensified when large numbers of people were involved. At what point did mass-piety become unmanageable, and therefore heresy? It was a matter of fine judgment, a dilemma s old as the Montanists. A crusade was in essence nothing more than a mob of armed and fanatical Christians. Once its numbers rose to over about 10,000 it could no longer be controlled, only guided. It might be used to attack the Moslems, or unleashed against Jews, or heretics; or it might become heretical and antinomian itself, and smash the structures of established society. This fear was always at the back of the minds of the clerical and secular authorities. In the Dark Ages, the West had been comparatively free of heresy.

The Church was cocooned within the authoritarian tradition of Augustine. But occasionally strange figures popped up: nearly always lay-folk, spontaneously reenacting the Montanist tradition. Gregory of Tours tells of a freelance preacher from Bourges, who called himself Christ, collected an army of followers and amassed booty in the name of God. He and his men finally presented themselves to the Bishop of Le Puy, stark naked, leaping and somersaulting. The leader was killed on the spot, his female companion, Mary, tortured until she revealed “their diabolical devices”. This type of incident became more common with the development of long-distance pilgrimages.

Pilgrims brought back weird religious ideas and cults from the East, where dualist or Gnostic heresies had always flourished, and indeed ante-dated Christianity. And then, the man from Bourges was an example of the low-born charismatic leader who often led mass pilgrimages, which in the eleventh century developed into popular crusades: Peter the Hermit was an archetype. The phenomenon took on huge and dangerous dimensions in the eleventh century, with the rapid growth of population, the increase in travel and the spread of ideas, and the impact of the Gregorian reforms. Gregory’s vision [Gregory VII] of a pure, undefiled church aroused more expectations than it could fulfil. The clergy, in particular, simply could not produce the results, in terms of piety and pastoral enthusiasm, which Gregory had seemed to promise. Hence, as with the original Montanists, Christian activists tended to turn against the clergy, and take the religious reform, or revival, into their own hands.

Here was a mortal threat to the Church. We mistakenly think of medieval institutional Christianity as an immensely solid and stable structure. But in some ways it was much more vulnerable than the civil power, itself a fragile vessel. Like civil government, the regular routine of organized Christianity could easily collapse; the two often disintegrated together, under pressure. The Christian system was complex and [could be] disorganized with comparative ease; an accidental conjunction of two or more of a huge number of forces could bring about de-Christianization over quite a large area very suddenly. Thus St Bernard of Clairvaux on a preaching tour of southern France in 1145 reported that a number of heresies were common and that in large areas Catholicism, as he understood it, had disappeared.

Naturally, where antinomian mobs were liable to sweep away church institutions, established authority was anxious to get them out of Christendom – preferably to the East, whence few would return. These mass crusades or armed pilgrimages were usually led by unauthorized prophetae or Montanists, and were a form of popular millenarianism, highly unorthodox but to some extent controlled or canalized by authority. Sometimes they attacked the Jews, regarded as devils like the Moslems, but more accessible. But if now Jews or Moslems were available, they nearly always, sooner or later, turned on the Christian clergy.

Paul Johnson, History of Christianity, © 1976 Athenium, pgs. 248-249.

I’m envisioning two more posts in this series after this one: the “crusade” against the Cathars, one of these “de-Christianization” events that the Institutional Church chose to combat by force, and also, the development of the Inquisition, which was the stated intention of this series at the beginning.

Crusading and Other Indulgences

Here are other posts in this Paul Johnson series:

Part 1: Augustine as Conduit to the Inquisition
Part 2: How Confession became a Divinely Instituted Sacrament
Part 3: The Origins of Payment for Penance

This post picks up where the previous post, “The Origins of Payment for Penance” left off. Though Johnson is a Catholic, he’s honest with the history and his sources.

From the Protestant perspective, we always hear that Luther’s first shots in the Reformation had to do with “the abuse” of indulgences, but we need to remember where they came from, and how they were an affront to Christ’s blood in the first place.

In this selection, Johnson summarizes the history of indulgences, from the 10th through the 15th centuries. The tie in with “indulgences for crusades” is important for reasons that later lead to the Inquisition.

Continuing here with Paul Johnson, “A History of Christianity.”

Once vicarial penance in any form was admitted, it proved impossible to keep money out of it. Was not alms-giving a form of penance? There, it was argued, the payment was to God, or to God’s servants to perform God’s purposes, and could not, therefore, be reprehensible. The Church at first opposed penitential alms-giving, too, as an easy way to heaven for a rich man. But it soon found justificatory texts: “The ransom of a man’s life are his riches (Proverbs 13:8); and ‘make unto yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” This last passage was particularly useful; it might almost have been framed by an ingenious canon lawyer for his professional purposes. Thus the penitential system was quite quickly transformed into a means whereby the wealth of the sinful rich could be diverted into ecclesiastical endowments. An early case was that of the Anglo Saxon Wulfin, who slew six priests; he went on a penitential trip to Rome, and was there told to endow a foundation for seven monks to pray for him for ever. Another case, from the tenth century, was Eadqulf, King Edgar’s Chancellor. He loved his little son so much that he had him sleep between himself and his wife; one night, both were drunk and the son was suffocated. Eadwulf proposed to walk to Rome as a barefoot pilgrim; but he was told to repair a church instead.

The idea of ecclesiastical foundations as atonement for grievous sin became a striking feature of the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. It explains why so many abbeys and priories were endowed by wicked men. Thus a period of pillage and lawlessness might also be characterized by a luxuriant crop of new monasteries, like the England of Stephen’s reign. The Cistercians were outstanding beneficiaries of this syndrome. A robber-baron might also, it is true, have to perform a physical penance himself; but we hear less and less of such after the twelfth century. The mechanical processes had taken over. And of course, its forms proliferated.

In 1095, Urban II, propagating the First Crusade, laid it down that a crusade to the Holy Land was a substitute for any other penance, and entailed complete remission of sin. This, of course, involved an actual and hazardous crusade, and the privilege, or indulgence, was hedged about with careful qualifications and terrific penalties if a man reneged. Throughout the twelfth century, crusading was the only source of indulgences, except in rare individual cases. But of course it was always these rare individual cases (that is, the rich, the well placed, the smart cleric) which shipwrecked the principle.

Early in the thirteenth century, Innocent III extended crusader indulgences to those who helped merely with money and advice. Fifty years later, Innocent IV awarded indulgences without any conditions of crusader service, naturally only in special circumstances. By the end of the thirteenth century, indulgences were being granted to secular princes for political reasons. Soon after, individuals were allowed to buy plenary indulgences from their confessors on their death-beds; this meant they could enter Heaven immediately, provided they died in a state of grace, immediately after full confession. In the first six months of 1344, Clement VI granted this privilege to two hundred people in England alone; it cost them less than ten shillings each. The Pope justified this by saying: “A pontiff should make his subjects happy.” By this time, the idea had already been extended to boost the pilgrimage trade to Rome. Boniface VIII gave a plenary indulgence to all confessed sinners who, in the course of the jubilee year 1300, and every hundredth year in the future, visited the churches o the Holy Apostles in Rome. In 1343, Clement VI reduced the period to every fifty years, remarking: “One drop of Christ’s blood would have sufficed for the redemption of the whole human race. Out of the abundant superfluity of Christ’s sacrifice, there has come a treasure which is not to be hidden in a napkin or buried on a field, but to be used. This treasure has been committed by God to his vicars on earth.” The period was reduced to a third of a century in 1389, to a quarter in 1470, and, from about 1400, extended to many local churches on special occasions. At this point the dam burst, and indulgences were sold on almost any ecclesiastical occasion for quite trivial sums; or, indeed, given away by indulgent or emotional popes. We have an eye-witness account of an occasion in 1476, when Sixtus IV, on the spur of the moment, gave plenaries to the Franciscan nuns of Foligno every time they confessed their sins. This, of course, was to destroy the idea of physical penance absolutely, and for ever. The cardinals who were with the Pope clamoured for the privilege too; and he generously awarded it. By this time, inflation was bringing the system into disrepute.


Paul Johnson, History of Christianity, © 1976 Athenium, pgs. 232-233, emphasis added.

Augustine as Conduit to the Inquisition

I want to change gears here for a minute, and provide some selections on the topic of "a total Christian society." This has roots in Augustine, and his reflections on the fall of Rome. But some of these ideas were picked up during the middle ages (as I've recently been reminded, listening to some Carl Trueman lectures on the Medieval Church), as well as some discussions that I've been involved with on the topic of "Persecutors and their Victims."

What follows is from Paul Johnson's "History of Christianity":

What Augustine absorbed in Ambrosian Milan, what he brought back to Africa, and what he opposed to Donatist particularism, was the new sense of the universality of the Church which the Constantine revolution had made possible. In Milan, Augustine had seen the Church, through the person of a shrewd and magisterial prelate, helping to run an empire. His creative mind leapt ahead to draw conclusions and outline possibilities. In Milan the Church was already behaving like an international organization; it would soon be universal. It was already coextensive with the empire; it would ultimately be coextensive with humanity, and thus impervious to political change and the vicissitudes of fortune. This was God's plan. Augustine had a historical view of human development. There were six ages: man was now living in the last, between the first and second comings of Christ, when Christianity would gradually envelop the world, as preparation for the final and seventh age. Against the background of this concept, the Donatists seemed ridiculously petty. They had grasped the seriousness of Christianity. But, by worrying about what particular bishops had done at a particular time and in a particular place, they had lost sight of the enormous, objective scale of the faith, its application to all places, times, situations. "The clouds roll with thunder," Augustine wrote, "that the House of the Lord shall be built throughout the earth; and these frogs sit in their marsh and croak -- 'We are the only Christians!'" Moreover, the Donatists had got the wrong notion of the world. Because of their obsession with their own limited local predicament and history, they saw the world as hostile and themselves as an alternative to society. But the world was there to be captured; and Christianity was not the anti-society -- it was society. Led by the elect, its duty was to transform, absorb and perfect all existing bonds of human relations, all human activities and institutions, to regularize and codify and elevate every aspect of life. Here was the germ of the medieval idea of a total society, with the church permeating everything. Was she not the Mother of All? "It is You," he wrote, "Who make wives subject to their husbands ... you set husbands over their wives; join sons to their parents by a freely-granted slavery, and set parents above their sons in a pious domination. You link brothers to each other by religious bonds tighter than blood …. You teach slaves to be loyal to their masters, masters to be more inclined to persuade than to punish. You link citizens to citizen, nation to nation, you bind all men together in remembrance of their first parents, not just by social bonds but by common kinship. You teach kings to rule for the benefit of their people, and warn the peoples to be subservient to their kings."

But the idea of a total Christian society necessarily included the idea of a compulsory society. People could not choose to belong or not to belong. That included the Donatists. Augustine did not shrink from the logic of his position. Indeed, to the problem of coercing the Donatists he brought much of their own steely resolution and certitude, the fanaticism they themselves displayed, and the willingness to use violence in a spiritual cause. To internationalize Africa, he employed African methods -- plus, of course, imperial military technology. When Augustine became a bishop in the mid-390's, the Donatist church was huge, flourishing wealthy and deeply rooted. Even after a long bout of imperial persecution, inspired by Augustine, the Donatists were still able to produce nearly 300 bishops for the final attempt at compromise at Carthage in 411. Thereafter, in the course of the two decades before Vandals overran the littoral, the back of the Donatist church was broken by force. Its upper-class supporters joined the establishment. Many of its rank and file were driven into outlawry and brigandage. There were many cases of mass suicide.

Augustine watched the process dry-eyed. Of course the times were horrific. The late empire was a totalitarian state, in some ways an oriental despotism. Antinomial elements were punished with massive force. State torture, supposedly used only in serious cases such as treason, was in fact employed whenever the State willed. Jerome describes horrible tortures inflicted on a woman accused of adultery. A vestal virgin who broke her vows might be flogged, then buried alive. The state prisons were equipped with the emulous, or rack; and a variety of devices including unci, for laceration, red-hot plates and whips loaded with lead. Ammianus gives many instances. And the State, to enforce uniformity, employed a large and venal force of secret policemen dressed as civilians, and informers, or delators. Much of the terminology of the late-imperial police system passed into the language of European enforcement, through the Latin phrases of the Inquisition. Augustine was the conduit from the ancient world. Why not? he would ask. If the State used such methods for its own miserable purposes, was not the Church entitled to do the same and more for its own far greater ones? He not only accepted, he became the theorist of, persecution; and his defences were later to be those on which all defences of the Inquisition rested.

We must not imagine that Augustine was necessarily a cruel man. Like many later inquisitors, he disliked unnecessary violence and refinements of torture. He thought heretics should be examined "not by stretching them on the rack, not by scorching them with flames or furrowing their flesh within claws, but by beating them with rods". He deplored, too, the dishonesty of using paid informers and agents provocateurs. But he insisted that the use of force in the pursuit of Christian unity, and indeed the total religious conformity, was necessary, efficacious, and wholly justified. He admitted he had changed his mind on this point. He wrote to a Donatist friend that he had seen his own town, originally Donatist, "brought over to the Catholic unity by fear of the imperial edicts". That had convinced him. In fact heretics in their hearts welcomed persecution: they would say "fear made us become earnest to examine the truth…the stimulus of fear startled us from our negligence". And then, this was Christ's own way. Had not he, "by great violence", "coerced" Paul into Christianity? Was not this the meaning from the text of Luke, 14:23: "Compel them to come in"? It was Augustine who first drew attention to this, and a number of other convenient texts, to be paraded through the centuries by the Christian apologists of force. He also had the inquisitorial emphasis: "The necessity for harshness is greater in the investigation, than in the infliction, of punishment"; and again: "…it is generally necessary to use more rigor in making inquisition, so that when the crime has been brought to light, there may be scope for displaying clemency." For the first time, too, he used the analogy with the state, indeed appealed to the orthodoxy of the State, in necessary and perpetual alliance with the Church in the extirpation of dissidents. The Church unearthed, the State castigated. The key word was disciplina -- very frequent in his writings. If discipline were removed, there would be chaos: "Take away the barriers created by the laws, and men's brazen capacity to do harm, their urge to self-indulgence, would rage to the full. No king in his kingdom, no general with his troops, no husband with his wife, no father with his son, could attempt to put a stop, by any threats or punishments, to the freedom and the sheer, sweet taste of sinning."

Here, first articulated, is the appeal of the persecuting Church to all the authoritarian elements in society, indeed in human nature. Nor did Augustine operate solely at the intellectual level. He was a leading bishop, working actively with the state in the enforcement of imperial uniformity. We have a vignette of him Carthage in 399, when imperial agents arrived to close down pagan shrines, preaching to excited mobs: "Down with the Roman gods!" Perhaps more sinister is Augustine's contact with authoritarian elements in Spain, already a centre of Christian rigorism and orthodox violence. There, in 385, the Bishop of Avila, Priscillian, a notable ascetic and preacher, had been accused of gnosticism, Manicheism and moral depravity, had been indicted under the imperial law of witchcraft, tried at Bordeaux, and brought to the imperial court at Trier. There, under torture, he and his companions confessed they had studied obscene doctrines, held meetings with depraved women at night, and prayed naked. Despite the protests of a leading Gaulish bishop, Martin of Tours, they were executed -- the first instance we have both of the slaughter of "heretics" and of witch-hunting under the Christian auspices. The episode aroused indignation, notably that of Ambrose, and provoked a reaction. But it did not end religious persecution in Spain; on the contrary, it was the beginning. Spain was already staging pogroms of Jews by the time Augustine became a bishop. And twenty years later we find him in correspondence with ferocious Spanish heresy-hunter, Paul Orosius, about the met means of winkling out heretics not only in Spain but at the other end of the Mediterranean in Palestine.

Paul Johnson, History of Christianity, © 1976 Athenium, pgs. 114-117.