The Inquisition - A Political And Military Study Of Its Establishment. Hoffman Nickerson
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next point I have to notice is Mr. Nickerson’s presentation both of the Inquisition as an idea and of the contrast between its methods and those of modern times. The task undertaken is the most difficult of any that lies before the historian; yet it is also the most essential. The wrong way of dealing with the remote past when it presents acts or states of mind quite unfamiliar, and even repulsive to us, is to express horror or ridicule and leave it at that. Thus we have Mr. Davis in his typical Oxford textbook upon the Angevin period sneering at the massacre at Beziers as” pious butchery”; thus we have another typical Oxford textbook, Mr. Oman’s, dealing with an earlier period, sneering at the piety of Gildas; and thus we have yet another textbook—from Cambridge this time—in which the Regius Professor of History, Dr. Bury, sneers at a vision of St. Patrick’s as the result of a “pork supper.”
Now that way of writing history, which is, I am sorry to say, still the common way in our English Universities, is worthless. Your business in writing of the past is to make the past comprehensible. More: you ought, as I quoted at the beginning of this, to make it rise from the dead; and that you certainly cannot do if you are so little able to enter into its spirit that everything in it which differs from yourself appears small, repulsive, or absurd. Anyone, however ignorant, can discover what is repulsive and absurd in standards different from their own; and one’s learning, no matter how detailed, is wasted if one gets no further than that. The whole art of history consists in eliminating that shock of non-comprehension and in making the reader feel as the men of the past felt.
We have a very good example of the same difficulty in the case of travel-books. We all know how intolerably boring is a book of travel in which the writer can get no further than decrying or laughing at the foreigner, and we all know how the charm of a book of travel consists in its explaining to us, putting before us as a living and comprehensible thing, some civilization which at first sight seemed to us incomprehensible.
It is just the same with history. In the case of the Inquisition it is particularly difficult to make the modern reader understand the affair because all the terms have been, so to speak, transliterated; but I think we can arrive at a fairly satisfactory result if we translate the terms involved into things which the modern man is familiar with. Instead of physical torture, for instance, read cross-examination and public dishonour; instead of the sacrifice of all civic guarantees to the preponderant interest of united religion, read the similar sacrifice of all such guarantees to the preponderant interest of a united nation; instead of clerical officers using every means (or nearly every means) for the preservation of religious unity, read civil officers using every means for the preservation of national unity in time of peril. If you do that, I think the modern man can understand. Had you presented to the early thirteenth century the spectacle of the whole male population medically examined, registered, and forcibly drafted into a life where a chance error might be punished immediately by death or by some other terrible punishment; had you shown him men, doubtful in their loyalty to the nation, condemned to years of perpetual silence, secluded from their fellow beings after being made a spectacle of public dishonour in the Courts; had you even sketched for him our universal spy system whereby a strong modern central Government holds down all its subjects as no Government of antiquity, however tyrannical, ever held them down—could you have shown a man of the thirteenth century all this, he would have felt the same repulsion and horror which most modern men feel on reading of the Inquisition, its objects and its methods.
A man who should so explain our modern life to a man of the thirteenth century as to make it comprehensible to him (a difficult task!) in spite of his repulsion and horror at our cruelties, blasphemies, and tyrannies, would be a good historian. The converse also is true.
There are many special points in the book on the consideration of which I would delay did space allow. Thus my own knowledge of the time and place enables me to make certain suggestions. I see that the author inclines to the Cerdagne route for the march of Pedro of Aragon. I should do more than incline—I should be morally certain of it—at least on the evidence to our hand; and that in spite of Pedro’s presence at Lascuarre in August. If, which is very unlikely, further evidence comes forward, we may have to accept the Somport salient or even the Val d’Aran, but the more I think of it, the more the latter seems to me out of the question. I know the steep and dangerous approaches upon either side, especially upon the Aragonese side. I consider the great difficulty of reaching them from the point of concentration at Lerida. The Cerdagne is the one really open road. It was the only easy pass of value then to large armies; as for the second pass, the Puymorens, into the valley of the Ariege, it is perfectly easy, a mere lift of land. I have crossed it a dozen times under all conditions of weather. Again I would find it most interesting to contrast the procedure even of the late Inquisition with contemporary civilian procedure, e.g., Torquemada’s procedure with Henry VII’s Judges in a treason trial. It is to the advantage of the former. Better still, a trial under Philip III and Cecil’s Judges in his carefully nursed Gunpowder plot.
But such detailed discussion of a hundred matters of history raised in this book would unduly prolong what is already too lengthy an introduction of a work to which the reader must be anxious to turn.
Kings Land, Shipley,
Horsham.
H. BELLOC.
THE INQUISITION:
A Political and Military Study of its Establishment.
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CHAPTER I.
THE MEDIÆVAL RECOVERY OF CIVILIZATION.
WHAT was the society in which the Inquisition, that great attack upon human liberty, succeeded? To answer this, in the case of that other great attack of which we are the unhappy spectators, it would be necessary to estimate first the chief forces active in the world, and second their modification by local circumstance in America. A man, having done this, is able to get a just idea of Prohibition. He must get into the picture of the great nineteenth century expansion of civilization, and the fact that this expansion was, in great part, due to increased command over material nature through what we call “science.” He must see, contemporary with this, the rapid decay of Protestantism, its abandonment of theology and concentration upon taboos. Given then, in his mind, a clear notion of the extreme importance attributed by our society to power over material things, in which power it has so clearly surpassed all other known societies, and from this the resulting importance granted to the opinions of the masters of this “science” which has done such fine things (although morally, and therefore politically, such men may be, and often are, grossly ignorant and stupid); given further a true estimate of our warped Protestant morals now consisting principally of savage taboos, and such a man is able to estimate justly the “Prohibition” movement.
What, then, were the forces which led to the very similar “Inquisition” movement?
First of all, the time felt itself strong and confident. We are apt to think of the world in which the Inquisition was set up as feeble and crack-brained, shrouding itself in elaborately useless pageantry. But this is error, due partly to our pre-occupation with our own age, and with the Imperial Roman time which of all past ages most nearly resembles our own in high energy, strict government, frequent communication, positivist view of life and consequent lack of any defined general code of morals. In reality, most of the fantastic trappings belong to the later Middle Ages, the Middle Ages in their decline, and only because we do not see the stagnant “Dark Ages” clearly enough do we fail to grasp the height and suddenness of the mediæval rise. In the opening years of the thirteenth century, men rightly felt themselves to be a society growing and expanding (as we say in our contemporary jargon “progressing”) so rapidly on all sides that they must have been almost dizzy with a success so sudden and vast. Perhaps not even at the beginning of our own twentieth century did the slope just climbed seem so high, and so steep, and the future so full of the promise of continued ascent. For, as in the early years of the twentieth century, there was no sign that the expanding movement had reached its term. It was still going on, full of the promise of further achievement, and men hardly seemed to have the right to be anything but