'Inquisition' still with us? 12-29-11

You may imagine that the Inquisition is well over and done with.

And if you're really tuned in to the history of the Catholic Church's efforts to identify and punish heretics, Jews and others, you'll say that the Inquisitions, plural, are long gone. You use the plural because you know that there was a Medieval, a Spanish and a Roman Inquisition.

And, of course, you'd be right that those Inquisitions are long behind us. But what Cullen Murphy argues in God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World, his compelling new book to be released in about three weeks, is that the Inquisitions helped to create modernity, and their methods can be found all over the map still today. (The book can be preordered now.)

Murphy is right to note that among the general populace, "the Inquisition remains very little known." Not many people, for instance, know that in one form or another the Inquisition continued for more than 700 years.

And although people no longer are being burned at the stake, Murphy argues that in some ways the Inquisition "is as robust as ever."

By that, it turns out, the author is not arguing that the Catholic Church is engaged in the kind of witch hunts that marked the earlier Inquisitions, though a Vatican agency, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is in clearly in the business of aggressively defending the faith. Rather, what Murphy means is that you can find all kinds of evidence that the techniques and attitudes that characterized the Inquisition are being employed today by religious and secular powers to maintain their hold on power.

Beyond that, the institutions created and used by the Inquisition are being used today in various ways, some of them quite benign, some not.

"Looking at the Inquisition," he writes, "one sees the West crossing a threshold from one kind of world into another. Persecution acquired a modern platform -- the advantages afforded by a growing web of standardized law, communications, administrative oversight, and controlled mechanisms of force. It was run not merely by warriors but by an educated elite; not merely by thugs but by skilled professionals. And in its higher dimesions it was animated not by greed or hope of gain or love of power, though these were never absent, but by the fervent conviction that all must subscribe to some ultimate truth. . . .

"The advent of the Inquisition offers a lens. Through it lies the world we inhabit now; one in which privacy and freedom of conscience can be pitted against forces that would contain them. This is a central contest of the modern era and of the centuries that lie ahead. The issues posed by the Inquistion enfold the world we call our own."

Ah, yes. The ultimate truth. In many ways that was the bane of modernity, which is why we're now in post-modernity, which shies away from adherence to any ultimate truth, any meta-narrative. And yet folks who insist they know the ultimate truth still hang on and cause the world trouble.

One of the practices of the Inquisition that, sad to say, we see in our own time -- and even defended by the very government officials who should be standing resolutely against it -- is torture.

As Murphy notes, "The public profile of torture is higher than it has been for many decades, and arguments have been mounted in its defense with more energy than at any other time since the Middle Ages."

This is the second book I've read recently that dealt, at least in part, with the Inquisition. And they are quite different in tone as it concerns the Spanish Inquisition. In Rodney Stark's book, The Triumph of Christianity, which I reviewed here, he argues that it was "was a quite temperate body that was responsible for very few deaths and saved a great many lives by opposing the witch hunts that swept through the rest of Europe."

Murphy acknowledges that some new scholarship has reduced the casualty figures for the seven centuries of the Inquisition from "upwards of a million" to "closer to several tens of thousands."

Well, I'll leave that for scholars to sort out, but we should be aware of those differences of approach to describing the Inquisition. And, for sure, we should be aware that traces of the Inquisition still are with us today.

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HONORING RIGHTEOUS GENTILES

As a bit of a follow-up to yesterday's posting here about the Holocaust and antisemitism today in Poland, I want to share this column from a Holocaust survivor who, like the survivors in my last book, was saved by a non-Jew. Only now Israel's Holocaust memorial authority, Yad Vashem, has thus far failed to honor the man who saved the author. And she's rightfully upset about that.

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P.S.: My latest National Catholic Reporter column now is online. To read it, click here.