Prehistory of Heresy and the Inquisition
With more than a little encouragement from the Church, the populace came to regard the Cathars not as Devil-shunners but as Devil-worshippers…P Stanford, The Devil
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
Abstract
Prehistory of the Inquisition
While the Roman empire was not Christian, Christian teachers advocated complete religious liberty for themselves within it. The civil law of Pagan Rome had nothing to do with the punishment of opinions, as long as they were not subversive. Christians were seen as illegal and subversive, so the Christian Church sought freedom of conscience, insisting that religion ought to be promoted only by instruction and persuasion (Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Lactantius). But as soon as Christianity became the authorized religion of the state, the Roman republican idea that the state should punish religiones novas et illicitas was vigorously revived. Soon after Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman empire the persecution of people for religious opinions began.
When Paganism became an offence against the state, those who remained attached to it were persecuted, and embraced Christianity to protect themselves. The conversion of the Pagans to Christianity was less than a half-conversion. The clergy were satisfied by people professing Christianity without conviction. If they then formed sects to practise Paganism in secret covens, the church classed them among the Christian heresies. Zealous ecclesiastical writers and the canons of the Church councils betray practices among Christians that they thoroughly dispproved of as being un-Christian. Thomas Wright, The Worship Of The Generative Powers: During The Middle Ages Of Western Europe (1865), seems to mean heresy was gnostic when he says:
It was a mixture of the licence of the vulgar Paganism of antiquity with the wild doctrines of the later eastern philosophers.
The Church hardly interfered with popular Pagan festivals or secret societies. They were not heresies, and the Church let them alone, except periodically to issue warnings and penances against certain superstitious practices. Heresy was different, especially after the eleventh century. Alarm was great. Gnosticism and Manichæism, dualist heresies, were the most persecuted.
In the case of heretics like Alexander and Hymeneus in the Pauline corpus, exclusion from the communion of the Church (excommunication—“exclusion from God and so delivery to Satan”) was sufficient punishment. Exclusion from the Church was thought to have been far worse for the original Christians, the Essenes, than just death. It meant everlasting death. S Cyprian of Carthage agreed, saying religion “being now spiritual, its sanctions take on the same character, and excommunication replaces the death of the body”. Tertullian also thought the acceptance of religion was a matter of free will, not of compulsion.
It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions. One man’s religion neither harms nor helps another man. It is assuredly no part of religion to compel religion—to which free-will and not force should lead us—the sacrificial victims even being required of a willing mind.Tertullian, Ad Scapulam 2
The notion was that the sacrificial lamb went willingly. In 308, Lactantius wrote:
Religion being a matter of the will, it cannot be forced on anyone. In this matter it is better to employ words than blows. Of what use is cruelty? What has the rack to do with piety? Surely there is no connexion between truth and violence, between justice and cruelty… It is true that nothing is so important as religion, and one must defend it at any cost… It is true that it must be protected, but by dying for it, not by killing others, by long-suffering, not by violence, by faith, not by crime. If you attempt to defend religion with bloodshed and torture, what you do is not defense, but desecration and insult. For nothing is so intrinsically a matter of free will as religion.Lactantius, Divine Institutes 5
About the same time, S John Chrysostom (Homilies 46:1) was saying, “to put an heretic to death is to introduce upon earth a crime beyond atonement”. There is no disputing, then, that leading Christians knew full well the teachings of their religion, and it was not that dissenters should be murdered by a special judiciary.
When Constantine ensured the Christian triumph, bishops happily agreed with Lactantius, the first concern of imperial authority was to defend religion at any cost—but they forgot to read on. So they issued regular penal edicts against heretics. In 57 years, 68 acts were passed. By this legislation, all heretics were subject to exile, confiscation of property, or death. Before Constantine, the Church could excommunicate—exclude anyone from its salvific practices—notionally condemning the soul to eternal death—the second death—but later, worse still, condemning it to eternal torture in boiling sulphur. That ought to have been the ultimate sanction, and so it was when applied to the superstitious medieval rulers, or to the ruler and his subjects en masse, as the interdict. But after Constantine, the Church had actual power of life and death, and notwithstanding its notionally far worse sanction of eternal death or torture, it found an excellent reason to kill people instead. It was to save their soul!
Here is Christian truth at its best! People could be killed eternally and suffer nothing worse than superstitious anxiety, and people could be saved for eternal life by killing them as cruelly as possible. This is the nature of Christian hypocrisy and double-talk, which has never ceased until this day. No matter how absurd the falsehood, Christians have the monopoly on truth. It has always allowed them to lie, torture and murder with a clear conscience, absolutely convinced they are right. Could anything be more satanic? Yet the Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart, taught that if God denied truth, prefer truth and deny God.
Theodosius the Great, in 380, soon after his baptism, issued, with his co-emperors, according to Schaff’s Nicene and Post-Nicene Christianity, the following edict:
We, the three emperors, will that our subjects steadfastly adhere to the religion which was taught by S Peter to the Romans… let us believe in the one Godhead of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, of equal majesty in the Holy Trinity. We order that the adherents of this faith be called Catholic Christians. We brand all the senseless followers of the other religions with the infamous name of heretics, and forbid their conventicles assuming the name of churches. Beside the condemnation of divine justice, they must expect the heavy penalties which our authority, guided by heavenly wisdom, shall think proper to inflict.
Within five years of Theodosius’s pronouncement in 380 AD, Maximus, the emperor in the West, in response to the appeal of the Spanish bishops, ordered the death for heresy and sorcery of Priscillian, a bishop of Avila in Spain. Priscillian, a good and wise man, and seven disciples were tortured and decapitated at Trier (Trèves) beginning a sixteen century long Christian bonfire of humanity. The followers of Priscillian revered their teacher and formed a sect which survived for a long time although its members were excommunicated by the Church. Only sixty-two years later, when the heresy seemed to be reviving, in 447, Leo I the Great (440-461 AD), not only justified the act and praised the condemnation of Priscillian, but declared that if the followers of a heresy so damnable were allowed to live, human and divine law would end. The Priscillian heresy was destroyed by Christian butchery by the seventh century. The Arian heresy had been adopted by the barbarians, but astute political bargaining induced the Arian Teutonic princes to adopt the Trinity and compel their people to do the same.
Christianity ceased to be a religion and became the neo-con party of the rich European clergy and nobility. Any opponent was a bed-fellow of Satan. S Jerome (340-420 AD) said the apostasy of the Devil’s allies from the religion of the true God meant they relinquished life itself, then, relying on Deuteronomy 13:5-11, he advocated capital punishment for heretics. Piety and zeal for God could not be cruelty, he had decided. Temporal punishment was the most genuine mercy, in that it might save the victim from eternal perdition. When S Jerome was annoyed by Vigilantius forbidding the adoration of relics, he was astonished his bishop had not murdered his body for the good of his soul. He meant it. This was the attitude of the inquisitors and is still the attitude of at least some Christians today.
The Church could influence the monarch and procure from him edicts condemning heretics to exile, deportation, to the mines, and even to death. Usually instructed by the church, the state punished and penalized all dissident opinions. A law of 407, aimed at Donatists, puts heretics on the same legal level as traitors to the emperor. It meant that the punishment for heresy, from then on, would be death by being burnt alive! Christianity was now imposed by force upon a reluctant Europe.
The Age of Ignorance commenced with the Christian system.Thomas Paine
Although Western Europeans were robbed of their schools and detained for centuries in the densest ignorance, they repeatedly rebelled in large numbers against the corrupt priestcraft and the absurd Catholic Christian religion. Only by the use of murderous force on a huge scale did the Church keep its authority. The clergy thought that, if God had put into their hands these powers, they were to be used, not neglected. Yet, they did not execute the laws, and remained innocent—unstained with human blood. Only perverted minds could think this way, but the Christian churches are full of such people.
Christian leaders became mafia godfathers devoid of the faintest idea of principles, as Gibbon put it, administrators of a protection racket as their business, operated to keep them in political power by the manipulation of people’s fears and superstitions. With minor exceptions, they had no interest in public welfare, no interest in science or objective scholarship, no interest in music, literature, drama, art or architecture, no interest in health or cleanliness, no interest in anything except their own indulgence. And so it remained for 700 years. 700 years! Whatever religious inspiration they had decayed into a self-serving and self-righteous smugness that could not be challenged. Europe was under an iron heel of totalitarianism calling itself Christianity. But all the while, people with the same sense of martyrdom as the Essenes suffered patiently under the feet of society—the Puritans—the Cathars.
The Christian Church survived for 700 years through the Dark Ages, through the illiteracy and ignorance of the people. Those who could read, read Latin. The only literature was devotional literature and laws, and all were written in Latin. No one spoke Latin any more, and the intention of the Church was to keep religion as a divine mystery. Since no one could read the bible, the Church could do what it liked with no fear of contradiction.
Yet, even as late as 1162, pope Alexander III could say:
It is better to pardon the guilty than to take the lives of the innocent.
Popes were soon to think very differently. Alexander III himself used the title Inquisitor for the first time at the council of Tours (in 1163 AD). In the Lateran Council of 1179, he urged the use of force against them. To princes he gave the right to imprison offenders and, appealing to their greed, to confiscate their property. To all who would “take up arms” against them, he promised two years’ remission of penance and even greater privileges.
Pope after Pope angrily urged the secular powers to persecute them. The synod of Verona (in 1184 AD) cursed all heretics, and ordered them to be handed over to the secular authorities for capital punishment. Pope Innocent III (1198-1216 AD) required all bishops to assist in the discovery and prosecution of unbelievers or be deposed. He instigated the fourth crusade (1202-1204) and exterminated the Albigenses. He instituted the order of Dominicans, the force of the Inquisition, at the suggestion of Castilian Dominic and the Bishop of Toulouse. With the Inquisition, civil courts and national assemblies decreed that whatever penalties were imposed by the Inquisition should be imposed by the state, deserving the infliction of civil penalties, fines, imprisonment, torture and death. The Church allied with the state to torture men out of opinions different from her own.
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Moses and Exodus
