A relapsed heretic, once his guilt was thoroughly established, must be “abandoned to the secular arm,” and this notwithstanding any repentance he might manifest or any promises he might make for the future. “Sine audientia quacumque,” says Eymeric.* “In effect,” adds his commentator, “it is enough that such people should once have defrauded the Church by false confession”* — a statement this, diametrically opposed to the injunction of the Founder of Christianity on the score of forgiveness.
[* Lib. iii. .]
[* Lib. ii. Schol. lxiv.]
All the mercy they vouchsafed a relapsed heretic who confessed and expressed repentance was the mercy of being strangled at the stake before his body was burnt.
Eymeric instructs inquisitors to see that the prisoner is visited and entertained on the subject of contempt for this world, the miseries of this life and the joys of Paradise. He should be given to understand that there is no hope of his escaping temporal death, and he should be induced to put the affairs of his conscience in order. He is to be accorded the sacraments of Penitence and the Eucharist if he solicits them with humility. Further, the inquisitor is advised not to visit him personally, lest the sight of him should excite the sin of anger in the doomed man, and so turn him from the sentiments of patience and penance which are to be inspired in him.
It would seem at least that the inquisitors had no delusions as to the sentiments which the sight of them inspired in their victims, just as it seems that they were able to endure these with Christian resignation — perhaps even with that sense of martyrdom of him who accounts himself misunderstood or misjudged.
After some days thus employed in preparing the prisoner for death, the inquisitor should advise the secular justices of the day and hour and place when and where he would abandon to them a heretic. At the same time an announcement should be made to the people inviting them to attend, as the inquisitor is to preach a sermon of the Faith, and those who are present will gain the usual indulgences.*
[* Eymeric, lib. iii. .]
It is not necessary at present to enter into particulars of the dread ceremonial, the ghastly, almost theatrical, solemnities that went to compose the greatest horror that has sprung from the womb of Christianity: the Auto de Fé.
“An Asiatic,” says Voltaire, “arriving in Madrid on the day of an Auto de Fé, would doubt whether here was a festival, a religious celebration, a sacrifice, or a massacre. It is all of these. They reproach Montezuma with sacrificing human captives to God. What would he have said had he witnessed an Auto de Fé?”*
[* See “Essai sur les Moeurs.”]
Occasion to enter into these details will occur later. We are more concerned at the moment with the words of the inquisitors than with their acts, and it is necessary on the subject of the laws that governed the Auto de Fé to touch upon quite the most extraordinary of all the quibbles by means of which the Holy Office avoided — in the letter — committing an irregularity.
Nothing in the whole of its jurisprudence savours more rankly of hypocrisy than this matter of abandoning a heretic to the secular arm. It is the very last word in that science which it is the fashion to call “Jesuitism,” but which we think might quite as aptly and justly be termed “Dominicanism.” Yet it would be very rash to say that these men were prompted by conscious hypocrisy. Such is certainly not the inference to be drawn from their jurisprudence. Stupidity — the stupidity of the man of one idea, of the man who is able to perceive but one thing at a time — was, rather than hypocrisy, responsible for what they did.
They were imbued with a passion for formality, for procedure that should be scrupulously correct, scrupulously in accordance with the letter of the law; and they justified their circumvention, their perversion of its spirit, with crazy arguments that must at least have been convincing to themselves, obfuscated as they were by the fanaticism that bubbled through their extraordinary intelligences.
We say that these arguments must have been convincing to themselves, because we find them in books that were never intended to be perused by any but inquisitors and ecclesiastics. Since these books were never meant to be placed before the world, no suspicion can attach to them of having deliberately and hypocritically resorted to sophistries for the purpose of hoodwinking the lay mind.
It was themselves they hoodwinked — by the arguments they themselves conceived — and although it is undeniable that they practised a deception which must provoke the scorn of every thoughtful man, yet it must be remembered that this deception was the selfdeception that lies in wait for every fanatic, whatever the subject of his fanaticism. By staring too long and too intently at one object, that object itself becomes blurred and indistinct.
“Ecclesia abhorret a sanouine.”
That was the principle that governed them. Conceive it!
The tenet that a Christian must not be guilty of shedding blood or causing the death of a fellow-creature has been touched upon more than once in these pages. It has been seen how in the very dawn of Christianity the Christian’s refusal to bear arms in the service of the State gave rise to friction with the Roman authorities, and, being construed into insubordination, was one of the causes of the persecutions to which Christians were subjected in the first and second centuries. As time went on, under stress of the necessities of this world, the Christian was forced to abandon that fine and loftily humanitarian ideal. Soon he had not only abandoned it under pressure of expediency, but he had forgotten it altogether; so that he donned the cross of the crusader, and went forth sword in hand, exultantly, to shed the blood of the infidel in the name of that tender Founder Whose disciple had brought to Rome the great Message of Forbearance.
But however much it might be accounted justifiable and even necessary for the Christian layman to wield the sword, the priest still continued under the prohibition to shed blood or compass the death of any man. And if a priest lay under such an injunction, so must a tribunal that was controlled by priests.
Therefore it follows that not only was it admittedly illicit for the inquisitor to pass a capital sentence, to send a man to his death, but even to be in any way a party to such an act.
This was the letter of the law, and, happen what might, that letter must suffer no violence. Nor did it. When the accused was found guilty of heresy, when he was impenitent, or relapsed, the inquisitor was careful that the sentence he passed contained no single word that could render him responsible for the delinquent’s death. Far from it. The inquisitors earnestly implored the secular justiciaries to whom they abandoned him not to do him any hurt whatever.
But consider the actual formula of the sentence as prescribed by Eymeric. It concluded thus:
“The Church of God can do no more for you, since you have already abused its goodness...Therefore we cast you out from the Church, and we abandon you to the secular justice, beseeching it none the less, and earnestly, so to moderate its sentence that it may deal with you without shedding your blood or putting you in danger of death.”*
[* “Rogamus tamen et efficaciter dictam curiam saecularem quod, circa te, citra sanguinis effusionem et mortis periculum sententiam suam moderetur.”— “Directorium,” pars iii.— “Forma Ferendi Sententiam,” .]
They were careful not so much as to say that they delivered him to the secular arm; for delivery suggests activity in a matter in which they must remain absolutely passive. They merely abandoned him. Pilate-like, they washed their hands of him. If the secular justiciaries chose to bear him away and burn him at the stake in spite of their “earnest intercessions” to the contrary, that was the secular justiciaries’ affair.
Thus was the letter of the law most scrupulously observed, and the inquisitor displayed in his intercession on the heretic’s behalf the benignity proper to his sacerdotal office. His conscience was entirely at peace.
For the rest, he knew, of course, that there was a bull of Innocent IV, known as “ad extirpanda,” which compelled the secular justiciaries, under pain of greater excommunication, and of
being themselves prosecuted as heretics and fautores, to put to death within a term of not more than five days any convicted heretic taken within their jurisdiction.
Francesco Pegna recommends inquisitors to be careful not to omit the intercession on the prisoner’s behalf, lest they should render themselves guilty of an irregularity. At the same time he raises the interesting question whether an inquisitor can reconcile this intercession with his conscience — not, as you might suppose, upon the score of the dissimulation it entails; but purely on the ground that it is most strictly forbidden to intercede on behalf of heretics; to do so, indeed, is to incur suspicion of being a befriender of heretics — an offence as punishable as heresy itself.
This question he has no difficulty in answering. Thus:
“In truth it would not be permitted to employ for a heretic an intercession that would be of any advantage to him, or which tended to hinder the justice which is to be executed upon his crime, but only an intercession whose aim it is to relieve the inquisitor of the irregularity he might otherwise incur.”
He goes on to say that when the heretic has been abandoned to the secular justiciaries, the latter must pronounce their own sentence and conduct him to the place of execution, permitting him to be accompanied by pious men, who will pray for him and not leave him until he shall have delivered up his soul. And he reminds the inquisitors — though it hardly seems necessary — that should the magistrates delay in putting to death a heretic who has been abandoned to them, they must be regarded as fautores and themselves prosecuted.
Innocent IV, as we have seen, allowed the magistrates a term of five days in which to do their duty in this matter, and in Italy it was usual to take the heretics back to prison after sentence, and bring them forth again upon a week-day — always within the prescribed term — to be burnt. In Spain, however, the custom was that the magistrates having pronounced their own sentence — as soon as the heretic was abandoned to them — should immediately proceed to execute it.
According to some authorities the sentence, by which was meant the Auto de Fé generally, should not take place in church. Pegna agrees with these, but not upon the score of the desecration of sanctuary, which was their reason. He agrees because in a large open space higher scaffolds can be erected for the Auto, and greater multitudes can assemble to witness this uplifting spectacle of the triumph of the Faith. On the same grounds does he belittle those who maintain that heretics should not be put to death on Sundays. He considers it quite the best day of the week, and excellent the Spanish custom that appoints it for the Auto, “for,” he says, “it is good that large multitudes should attend, so that fear may turn them from evil ways; the spectacle being one that inspires the attendance with terror and presents a fearful image of the last judgment.”
That it is expedient to put heretics to death no pious authority has ever ventured to dispute. But there have been differences of opinion on the subject of the means by which this should be done. The scholiast is entirely on the side of the large majority that considers fire the proper instrument, and actually cites the Saviour’s own authority for this: “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch that is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned” (John XV. 6).
If the accused should happen to be a cleric, he must be unfrocked and degraded by a bishop before being arrayed in the hideous sanbenito and abandoned to the secular arm, whilst those convicted of contumacy were — if still absent at the time of the sentence — to be burnt in effigy pending their capture, when, without further trial, they would be burnt alive.
In effigy also were burnt those convicted after death, these effigies being cast into the flames together with the remains of the dead man, which were exhumed for the purpose.
Reference has several times been made here to the sanbenito, which was imposed upon all whom the Holy Office found guilty of heresy, whether reconciled or abandoned, and also upon those who were suspected in the degree violenter.
In this garment they attended the Auto de Fé, and went to execution if they were abandoned; or they might be required to wear it for varying periods after reconciliation, and in some instances for as long as they lived, to advertise their infamy.
It was the perversion into a garb of shame and disgrace of the penitential garment originally prescribed by St. Dominic; for whereas once it — or, rather, that from which it was derived — had been worn even by princes as an outward mark of contrition for the sins into which they had fallen, it was now imposed that it might subject its wearer to opprobrium and contempt.
St. Dominic’s instructions were that it should be a sackcloth habit, of the kind worn by his own brotherhood, and that its colour might be at the discretion of the wearer so long as it was sombre. As it had ever been the custom of the Church to bless the “sack” or tunic worn by members of religious confraternities or by those upon whom it had been imposed as a penance, such a garment was called a saco bendito, which in course of time was contracted into sanbenito, though also known by its proper Spanish name oi zamarra.
When the crusade against the Albigensian heretics was at its height in Southern France, not only did the crusaders wear the cross upon their garments, but all faithful Catholics assumed it for their protection; for — as on the night of the St. Bartholomew, some four centuries later — no man’s life was safe if he did not display that device. St. Dominic desired that the penitent should enjoy the same protection, but so that his penance should still be proclaimed, he was ordered to wear two crosses, one on each breast.
Later, when the wars of religion had ceased, and the general wearing of the cross was abandoned, the Council of Toulouse decreed, in 1229, that these penitential crosses should be yellow, whilst the Council of Beziers, four years later, going further into the matter, ordained that they should be two and a half hands long (vertical) by two hands wide (horizontal), and that they should be made of cloth of the width of three fingers. Instead of being worn upon the breast, as hitherto, they were now placed one on the breast and one on the back, with a third on the hood or veil if hood or veil were worn.
For abettors of heresy the following solemn penance was enjoined by the Council of Tarragona in 1242:
“On All Saints’, on the First Sunday in Advent, on the feasts of Christmas, the Circumcision, the Epiphany, St. Mary of February (Purification), St. Mary of March, and all Sundays in Lent, the penitents shall go to the Cathedral to take part in the procession. They shall be dressed only in their shirts, barefoot, their arms crossed, and they shall be whipped in the procession by the bishop or parish priest. Similarly shall they repair to the Cathedral on Ash Wednesday in their shirts, barefoot, their arms crossed, and submit to banishment from church for all Lent; so that during that season they must remain at the church door and hear the service thence. On Thursday in Holy Week they shall come to the church to be reconciled in accordance with the canonical provisions, it being understood that this penance of remaining out of the church through Lent and of being whipped in procession on the days appointed shall be performed yearly for the remainder of the penitents’ lives.”
At first, and down to Eymeric’s day, the sanbenito preserved its original form — a tunic similar to that worn by the members of regular orders. But in the fourteenth century it was altered to a scapulary or tabard, with an opening at the top through which the head was passed; it was to be of the full width of the body, and to descend no lower than the knees, lest it should too closely resemble the scapulary which the regulars wore in addition to their tunic. Soon after it was resolved that it should be of yellow sackcloth, and that the crosses should be red.
Once this stage was reached, it may be said that the transition from a garment solely of penitence into a garment chiefly of shame and infamy was complete.
We have said that the imposition of the sanbenito had been falling into desuetude during the fifteenth century. But for Torquemada it might indeed have become entirely obsolete. It happened, however, th
at the Prior of Holy Cross perceived the virtues of it, the salutary results to be obtained from parading the victims of the Holy Office in that hideous garb. Therefore he revived it, and strongly enjoined its use by all offenders save those against whom there was no more than evil reputation, and who submitted themselves to be purged of this canonically.
PROCESSION TO AUTO DE FÉ
From Limborch’s “Historia Inquisitionis.”
It was not, however, until the famous Ximenes de Cisneros, who became Grand Inquisitor some ten years after Torquemada’s death — that the sanbenito attained its full development, the form which it was to preserve until the extinction of the Inquisition.
Cisneros substituted for the ordinary rectangular cross worn on back and breast of the sanbenito an aspa, or St. Andrew’s cross, and he otherwise disposed that the sanbenito might proclaim the offence and sentence of its wearer. Three varieties were devised for those who were abjuring a heresy of which they had incurred suspicion: the suspect of the degree leviter wore a perfectly plain sanbenito without any cross or other device; the suspect vehementer wore upon back and breast one arm only of the St. Andrew’s cross; the suspect violenter was made to wear the full cross.
Those actually convicted of heresy wore in addition to the sanbenito a tall mitre, or pyramidal cap, made of cardboard and covered with yellow sackcloth; and that their precise condition might be distinguished, the following differentiations were prescribed: the heretic who repented before the passing of sentence, and who — not being a relapsed — was not to die by fire, bore upon the breast and back of his sanbenito and upon the front and back of his coroza, as the mitre was called, a full St. Andrew’s cross; the relapsed heretic who had repented before the Auto bore, in addition to the crosses, the device of a bust upon burning faggots on the nether part of his sanbenito; further his sanbenito and coroza were flecked with tongues of flame, which pointed downwards to signify that he was not to die by fire, although his body was to be burnt. He had deserved the charity of being strangled at the stake before the faggots were ignited. And this mercy, be it added, the Holy Office conceded to any heretic who at the eleventh hour confessed his guilt and desired to make his peace with the Church and die, as it were, upon her loving bosom. To this end the condemned was accompanied from the Auto to the stake by two friars, who never ceased to exhort him to make confession, save his body from the temporal torment of physical fire, and his soul from the eternal torment of spiritual fire.
Collected Works of Rafael Sabatini Page 639
