For
serious devotees of torture, Washington's embarrassment
about Abu Ghraib paled beside the Vatican's defense last
week of the Spanish Inquisition. It turns out, reported
church officials at a June 15 press conference, that the
Spanish Inquisition burnt at the stake less than 1% of
the 125,000 accused heretics brought before it. On the
strength of this statistic they qualified Pope John Paul
II's previous apology for the Inquisition. "A request
for forgiveness can only refer to facts that are true and
objectively recognized. One does not ask forgiveness for
some impressions widely held by public opinion, which
contain more myth than reality," said Cardinal Georges
Cottier.
Catholic publicists in possession of
these data have been campaigning to rescue the
Inquisition's good name from the besmirchment of
Protestant propaganda. Wrote Prof Thomas F Madden of St
Louis University in October 2003: "The Spanish people
loved their Inquisition. That is why it lasted for so
long."
Silly as he sounds, Prof Madden is quite
right. In fact, I have been defending the Spanish
Inquisition for years, most recently in a comment on
March 16, 2004 (Spain's elections show why radical Islam
can win). People do nasty things not because they
are negligent or bloody-minded, but rather because they
cannot avoid doing them. That is why we call such things
tragic. Spain's inquisitors were not the horror-movie
sadists of popular myth, but sad little functionaries
seeking to prevent the sort of religious war that
plagued Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Not
the boorish Germans but rather the agile Latins first
opened the Pandora's Box of religious reform. If we
accept that Spain's Inquisition was tragic rather than
arbitrary, we must - I believe - also reach the
conclusion that Christianity can flourish only on the
American model. Neither Catholic empire nor the
Protestant nation-state could do anything except destroy
itself. But this is to get ahead of the story; we have
only just tugged at the loose thread.
Before it
burned heretics, the Spanish Inquisition burned books.
Only one leaf remains of Bonifacio Ferrer's 1478 Spanish
translation of the Bible, for the Inquisition hunted
down every copy printed. Bible reading, they knew led to
Protestantism, and Protestantism led to religious war.
Then the Inquisition hunted down Jews, for Jews
knew Hebrew, and might teach it to Protestants who then
might translate the Bible (which happened in Luther's
Germany). As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, the
Inquisition sought to prevent the "Judaizing of all of
Spain", that is, the spread of Protestantism, and thus
persuaded the Catholic monarchs to expel the Jews in
1492.
Was the Spanish Inquisition wrong? On the
contrary. Religious war devastated France during the
16th century, and during the 17th century reduced the
population of Germany by more than half. England's Civil
War shed less blood, but left its business unfinished.
Cavalier and Roundhead diehards emigrated respectively
to Virginia and Massachusetts, sowing the seeds of
America's devastating Civil War 200 years later (see
David Hackett Fischer’s 1989 book Albion’s
Seed).
Not until 1936 did the lid blow off,
and Spain fought a long-delayed religious war between
Catholicism and Atheism, in which the firing squad
claimed more than a fifth of the estimated half-million
violent deaths. The Spanish Civil War reduced a formerly
martial nation to the feckless, infertile hedonists of
today whose only claim to fame is the world's lowest
birthrate. It was not always so.
Thanks to the
Inquisition, the likes of Luther and Calvin got all the
credit for the Reformation, but there is reason to
believe that given a chance, the Spanish variant would
have been far more intrepid. After the American
Revolution, Massachusetts Puritans became overt
Unitarians. Like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas
Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin they believed in a
Creator but not in the divinity of Jesus. As such they
traced their spiritual ancestry to the Spaniard Michael
Servetus, whom John Calvin burned slowly at the stake at
Geneva in 1553. Calvin deserves censure for the killing
of Servetus no more than does the Inquisition for
burning its own heretics. Necessity, not bigotry, made
Calvin kill Servetus.
More radical still was
Fernando de Rojas, whose 1499 "tragic-comedy" La
Celestina became, at least proportionally, the
biggest fiction best seller of all time, with multiple
editions in all the European languages. The tiresome
race of cultural historians likes to think of an orderly
evolution of literary styles. On the contrary, with de
Rojas modernism sprang fully-grown from the Spanish
crisis of 1492, like Athena from the head of Zeus. De
Rojas, a barrister, defended an uncle accused by the
Inquisition of covertly practicing Judaism, suggesting
that his family was among the Jews who chose conversion
rather than exile in 1492.
De Rojas' protagonist
is a perverse old procuress next to whom Shakespeare's
Iago or Marlowe's Barnabas seem like mischievous
children; only Goethe's Mephisto can be termed a worthy
successor. Engaged by a social-climbing nobleman to
obtain access to the daughter of a high and ancient
family, Celestina evinces tactical genius and steely
nerve. Many passages are funny and frightening at the
same time, a true mixture of genres Shakespeare never
attempted. Celestina sets in motion a series of events
that kills the lovers as well as most of the remaining
characters. De Rojas portrays a world of greed, lust,
self-delusion, and hypocrisy that deserves its own doom.
From Spain at the turn of the 16th century, that
is, we already obtain the theology of the Enlightenment
from Servetus, as well as a mixed-genre satire not
re-encountered until Goethe's Faust or Mozart's
Don Juan. Despite the best efforts of the
prudent inquisitors of the Spanish Church, Spain still
managed to produce the greatest satire of all at the
turn of the 17th century, Cervantes' Don
Quixote. A remnant of de Rojas' savage sense of
humor stayed alive in Spanish literature. The auteur
Luis Bunuel was his last spiritual descendant.
The price of religious peace, in short, was to
turn Spain from a nation of spiritual conquistadors into
Europe's laughing-stock. When Pierre Caron de
Beaumarchais put on stage his lampoons of the French
monarchy, the censors gave him leave because he set the
plot in Spain. Even the doomed aristocrats of France had
no objection to portraying the Spanish nobility as
buffoons.
Nonetheless, Spain's inquisitors were
right to fear what Protestantism might bring. Sir Thomas
More, portrayed for posterity as a martyr to freedom of
conscience, had the great English Bible translator
William Tyndale burned at the stake for the same reason.
Protestantism presented a double danger. By its nature
it spoke to the conscience of the individual seeking
grace in the word of God. A Protestant state religion is
a contradiction in terms, yet no one (except the
unfortunate Servetus) then envisioned a separation of
Church and State. When Luther allied with the German
princes against Pope and Empire, he opened a path for a
nationalist Christianity whose deplorable consequences
plagued Europe into its decline, a topic I have
addressed elsewhere (The sacred heart of darkness, Feb 11,
2003).
By replacing the Magisterium of the
Church with the faith of the individual, Protestantism
puts at risk the slender flame of faith. Influenced by
the Jewish critique of original sin, Luther well knew
that it could not be reconciled with free will.
Christianity cannot do without original sin, which
motivates Christ's sacrifice to begin with. Luther
instead excised free will, in favor of the
unsatisfactory doctrine of predestination. Otherwise
Protestantism must take the path indicated by Servetus,
which ultimately must lead to loss of faith.
Doctrinal questions of this sort arise when
under a state religion; in this case heresy implies
disloyalty to the state. The fundamental responses of
Christianity and Judaism are not logical, but rather
existential. Nothing could be further from logic than
the doctrine of election - the notion that God
specifically chose the Jews as His People. Yet the Jews
have persisted through millennia in the faith that
Abraham's seed shall not fail once God established His
covenant with their forefather.
As I wrote
previously (Why Europe chooses extinction, April
8, 2003): "The early Christian Church encountered a
great extinction of peoples and their cultures through
the rise and fall of the Alexandrine and Roman empires.
Who now remembers the Lusitani, the Illyrians, the
Sicani, the Quadians, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians,
Herulians, Pannonians and a thousand other tribes of
Roman times? As nations faced extinction, individuals
within these nations came face to face with their own
mortality. Christianity offered an answer: the Church
called individuals out of the nations and offered them
salvation in the form of a life beyond the grave. The
Gentiles (as the Church called them) embraced original
sin, which to them simply meant the sin of having been
born Gentile, that is, to a culture doomed to
extinction."
Neither Christian nor Jew cares much
about the logic of salvation. The soul stands in fear
and trembling, sick unto death - which is the same
as sin - and reaches out for grace. The Jews do
this as a kinship community (Blutgemeinschaft),
in Franz Rosenzweig's phrase; Christians must do so as
individuals, because as Christians they abandon the
doomed ties of kinship, and instead join the assembly
(ecclesia) that calls them out from among the
nations.
The remnants of Christian state
religion rot and stink on the dying continent of Europe.
Christianity cannot persist except as a continuing
revival, a recurring conversion - as a sequence of
singular events, rather than as an orderly process.
Awaiting execution in Hitler's prisons, the German
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that in a world
come of age, the Christian religion no longer could
exist as organized practice, but only as an expression
of individual conscience.
America was created
for precisely this purpose, to replace state religion on
the European model with a religion of individual
conscience. Such a religion must be schismatic,
multi-sectarian, short on doctrine but long on
inspiration. America's kaleidoscope of Protestant
denominations, so bewildering to Europeans, constitutes
the only type of milieu in which Christianity yet may
flourish. Although Christian communities are burgeoning
throughout the world, they will succeed only in
emulation of the American version.
With right
the Vatican may defend the record of the Spanish
Inquisition, but it alters not a jot or tittle of the
awful sentence - oblivion - that history has passed upon
European Christianity.
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only refer to facts that are true and
objectively recognized. One does not ask forgiveness for
some impressions widely held by public opinion, which
contain more myth than reality," said Cardinal Georges
Cottier. 
