The Inquisition

by Michael Baigent

  As mystics have traditionally done, Teresa recognises the ultimate futility of attempted communication: ‘The glory that I felt within me cannot be expressed in writing, nor yet in words; it is inconceivable to anyone who has not experienced it.’5 And she confesses:

  There was one thing that I was ignorant of at the beginning. I did not really know that God is present in all things; and when He seemed to me so near, I thought that it was impossible.6

  Any attempt to dismiss Teresa as a mere neurasthenic or hysteric would be negated by her autobiography and her letters, which display a surprising secular shrewdness, an admirable pragmatism and commonsense, a refreshing sense of humour. They also show an acute awareness of the dangers posed by the Inquisition. Teresa is clearly nervous about her testimony being condemned as heretical. She writes to her confessor that he should only accept her work

  so long as my tale is consistent with the truths of our holy Catholic Church. If it is not, your Reverence must burn it immediately, and I agree to its destruction. I will set down my experience, so that, if it conforms to Christian belief, it may be of some use.7

  She states in her autobiography that certain clerics were unwilling to hear her confessions. Some of those who did, she says, declared her to be possessed by demons and in need of exorcism. One, she reports, concluded definitively that she was being deceived by the devil. And she speaks, too, of friends coming to warn her ‘that some charge might be raised against me, and that I might have to appear before the Inquisitors’.8

  There were certainly grounds for such concern. Teresa's radical mysticism was intrinsically inimical to the Church's hierarchal structure, implicitly challenging the relevance of the established priesthood. She addresses head-on the distinction established at the beginning of this chapter between the mystical experience and any a posteriori interpretation of it. She recognises that ‘in spiritual matters we often try to interpret things in our own way, as if they were things of this world, and so distort the truth’.9 She states boldly that ‘the wearing of a habit is not enough to make a man a friar, and does not imply that state of great perfection which is proper to a friar’. And then, turning abruptly cautious, she adds: ‘I will say no more on this subject.’10

  No less controversial are Teresa's assertions that mere adherence to the forms of ritual, however assiduously performed and for however long, do not render God's grace – that is, the mystical experience – any more certain: ‘Sometimes we attach a pitiful importance to things we do for the Lord which could not really be considered important even if we did them very often.’11 And:

  We think we can measure our progress by the number of years during which we have been practising prayer. We even think that we can find a measure for Him who bestows immeasurable gifts on us at His own pleasure, and who can give more to one person in six months than to another in many years.12

  And again:

  it is dangerous to keep counting the years that we have practised prayer. For even though it may be done in humility, it always seems liable to leave us with the feeling that we have earned some merit by our service… any spiritual person who believes that by the mere number of years during which he has practised prayer he has earned these spiritual consolations, will, I am sure, fail to reach the peak of spirituality.13

  More dangerously still, Teresa militantly opposed the holding of possessions, not only by monks, friars and nuns, but by other ecclesiastics as well:

  Someone once asked me to inquire of God whether he would be serving Him by accepting a bishopric. After Communion, the Lord said to me: ‘Tell him that when he truly and clearly understands that true dominion consists in possessing nothing then he can accept it.’ By this He meant that anyone who is to assume authority must be very far from desiring to do so. At least he must never strive to obtain office.14

  Teresa was no doubt fortunate in that by the time she came to prominence, Torquemada was long dead. Apart from being forbidden to publish during her lifetime, she escaped all molestation from the Inquisition – which must probably be ranked as much of a miracle as anything else in her life. In 1622, forty years after her death, she was canonised.

  But if Teresa evaded the Inquisition's clutches, there were many other mystics – some of them personally known to her – who did not. Chief among these was one of the most important poets of the period, Juan de Yepes y Alvárez, who adopted the name of Juan de la Cruz (John of the Cross). Of humble origins, Juan was born more than a generation after Teresa, in 1542. In 1563, at the age of twenty-one, he joined Teresa's reformed Order of Barefoot Carmelites and became spiritual director of her convent at Ávila in 1572. In the great mystical poems that constitute his legacy to posterity, he addressed both the numinous experience and the ‘dark night of the soul’ that precedes it.

  Juan also wrote that

  church observances, images and places of worship are merely for the uninstructed, like toys that amuse children; those who are advanced must liberate themselves from these things which only distract from internal contemplation.15

  Not surprisingly, such assertions caused him to be repeatedly denounced to the Inquisition. He was investigated at regular intervals and subjected to persecution. In 1576, he was imprisoned for nine months under particularly stringent conditions by the Inquisition's tribunal at Toledo. In the years immediately preceding his death in 1591, he was banished to a so-called ‘desert house’ in Andalucia. He was finally rehabilitated and canonised in 1726.

  9

  Freemasonry and the Inquisition

  In the Europe of the early seventeenth century – a Europe no longer subject to the Church's hegemony – heresies, mysticism and mystically oriented philosophies were proliferating. There were a number of ultimately futile attempts to institutionalise the mystical experience and establish it as a new, all-encompassing world religion – with, inevitably and paradoxically, its own accompanying dogma diluting and distorting it. And there were attempts as well to adapt mysticism to politics, and establish an ideal Utopian state resting on mystical foundations. Such, for example, was the vogue of so-called Rosicrucian thought that began to appear around 1614 and was hailed by its exponents as a harbinger of a new Golden Age. Although Rosicrucianism was more ‘gnostic’ in its approach, more all-embracing, more tolerant, more psychologically sophisticated and more spiritually honest than either Catholicism or Protestantism, it, too, involved an intellectual interpretation of an empirical experience; and the more complex the interpretation became, the more the experience itself receded into the background, becoming supplanted by yet another theology.

  The Church unquestionably felt threatened by Rosicrucianism, and the Holy Office duly added suspected Rosicrucians to its list of deviants. Like witches, Rosicrucians were to be hunted down, ferreted out and vigorously prosecuted. But the chief culprit in Rome's eyes remained Protestantism, with which Rosicrucianism was more or less tenuously associated. It was, after all, Protestantism that had created the circumstances and the spiritual climate in which Rosicrucianism, along with other forms of heterodox thought, could thrive. And thus Protestantism remained the primary target of the Counter-Reformation. If the Jesuits and the rechristened Holy Office represented the Counter-Reformation in the sphere of thought, teaching and doctrine, the corresponding social, political and military offensive was conducted – at least initially and ostensibly – by the Catholic armies of Habsburg Spain and the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire.

  This offensive occurred in the form of the Thirty Years War (1618–48) – a conflict akin to a world war in the modern sense, and the most appalling, costly and catastrophic conflict to be fought on European soil prior to the twentieth century. In this war, the Church was not only ultimately thwarted, but, in its own eyes, scandalously betrayed. By the time hostilities ended, Rome's authority was even more fragmented and precarious than it had been before. Having been engaged in her own civil war, England, under Cromwell's Protectorate, was even more securely Protestant than ever. The Protestantism of Sc
andinavia and the North German states was equally unassailable; and Protestant Holland had emerged as a major world power, at least at sea and abroad. The Protestant naval powers of England and Holland now fought each other for control of the oceans, and of the colonies, formerly dominated exclusively by Catholic Spain and Portugal.

  Worst of all for the Church, France had supplanted Spain as the supreme military power on the continent; and she had done so by aligning herself with the avowed enemy. French policy during the Thirty Years War had been orchestrated not by the apathetic Louis XIII, but by his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu. And Richelieu, a Catholic cardinal implementing policy for a predominantly Catholic country, proceeded to deploy Catholic troops on behalf of the Protestant cause. Although other countries, especially Sweden, had repeatedly thwarted the Church's military power, it was ultimately the army of Catholic France that shattered the martial supremacy of Catholic Spain. The Thirty Years War had commenced as a predominantly religious conflict, with Catholic armies endeavouring to extirpate Protestantism in Bohemia and Germany. By the time the war ended, it had turned into a conflict of vested interests fought for the sake of the balance of power; and religion had become both incidental and subordinate to secular concerns. France, once regarded as ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’, now dominated Europe; but her priorities had come to revolve less around the throne of Saint Peter than around that of the ‘Sun King’, Louis XIV, and his court at Versailles. The regime jealously guarded its independence of Papal control. It even possessed the right to appoint its own bishops.

  Such was the situation in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War and during the latter half of the seventeenth century. By 1725, the Church's authority on the continent had become even more eroded, its position even more precarious. In 1688, James II of England had converted to Catholicism, and the Papacy was able for a brief moment to envisage itself reinstated as the official religious power of the British Isles. But Britain remained obdurate in her opposition to ‘Popery’ and James was repudiated by his subjects, who offered the crown to his son-in-law, William of Orange. There ensued the Siege of Londonderry and, in 1690 and 1691 respectively, the two decisive battles of the Boyne and Aughrim. As a result, James was deposed and Parliament enacted legislation that prevented a Catholic from ever sitting on the British throne. The now Catholic Stuarts fled into exile, whence they repeatedly attempted to foment rebellions in Scotland, culminating with the campaign of Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, in 1745 – 6. Nothing was to come of any of these endeavours. Even if the 1745 campaign had succeeded, it is questionable whether Bonnie Prince Charlie's Presbyterian supporters would have accepted a Catholic monarch; and had he been forced to choose between the Church and the British throne, the prince would almost certainly have chosen the latter.

  On the continent, Spain, formerly the supreme military and naval executor of the Church, had been reduced to lame-duck status; and by 1704, Europe's other great powers, indifferent altogether to Rome, were fighting over whether the increasingly decrepit Spanish Empire was to be ruled by a Bourbon or a Habsburg. Austria remained nominally Catholic and managed to repel a major Islamic thrust westwards. By the mid eighteenth century, however, her influence in central Europe was being challenged and neutralised by the advent of a new and dangerous Protestant power to the north, the fledgling Kingdom of Prussia, created in 1701. During the wars of the period, Russia, too, made her début on the chessboard of European politics, bringing a further threat to Rome in the form of the Orthodox Church.

  Of the Catholic powers that had formerly been the Church's executive in secular spheres, only France remained. However, France fiercely maintained her independence from Rome. And though still nominally Catholic, she now began to pose the greatest threat of all – a threat in the world of ideas and values, and thus more difficult to oppose than any military or political edifice. Under the influence of Cartesian rationalism, France, by the mid eighteenth century, had assumed the vanguard of anti-clerical sentiment and become a veritable hotbed of hostility – towards organised religion in general and towards Catholicism in particular. In the writings of ‘les philosophes’ – men such as Montesquieu, Diderot and, supremely, Voltaire – the once august and unassailable Church was not only repudiated, but openly, scandalously and blasphemously mocked. To the mortification of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, Rome became a species of running joke, the object of merciless derision. In consigning the authors of this derision to the Index, the Holy Office only contrived to look more puerile, more humiliatingly impotent.

  If Cartesian rationalism and the writings of les philosophes represented major challenges to the Church, a challenge of comparable magnitude was presented by the dissemination of Freemasonry. The institution now known as Freemasonry had coalesced, at least in something like its modern form, in Scotland and England during the early seventeenth century. By the end of Cromwell's Protectorate and the restoration of the Stuarts to the British throne in 1660, Freemasonry seems to have been widespread throughout the British Isles, and increasingly supportive of the ruling dynasty. Had it remained confined to Britain, a lost cause anyway in Rome's eyes, ‘the Craft’, as it was called, might have been ignored. But when the Stuarts were driven into exile, they took Freemasonry with them; and in the years that followed, it proceeded to proliferate rapidly across the continent.

  According to the documentation now available, the first Lodge outside the British Isles was founded in Paris in 1726 by Charles Radclyffe, later Earl of Derwentwater, an illegitimate grandson of Charles II. In 1746, Radclyffe would be executed in London for his role in Bonnie Prince Charlie's bid for the British throne. Before his death, however, he founded additional Lodges in France, and Freemasonry acquired an irresistible momentum of its own. The Austrian Empire's first Lodge was established at Prague in 1726, shortly after Radclyffe's in Paris. In 1736, having been initiated as a Mason five years earlier, François, Duke ofLorraine, married Maria Theresa von Habsburg, thus becoming joint ruler of the Austrian Empire. He founded a Lodge in Vienna and extended his protection over Freemasonry throughout the Habsburg domains.

  The first Lodge was founded in Italy in 1733, in Holland in 1734, in Sweden in 1735, in Switzerland in 1736. The first German Lodge was established at Hamburg in 1737. A year later, the future Frederick the Great of Prussia was initiated and subsequently founded his own Lodge at his castle of Rheinsberg. In 1740, a Lodge was founded in Berlin. By that time, the number of Lodges in Holland and Sweden had become sufficiently great to warrant the creation of a national Grand Lodge. By 1769, there were ten Lodges in Geneva alone. In the very teeth of the Inquisition, Lodges were also established in Spain and Portugal.

  By the mid eighteenth century, Freemasonry had reached every corner of western Europe. It had already spread across the Atlantic to the Americas. It was soon to extend eastwards into Russia, as well as to European colonies in Asia, the Indian subcontinent and the Pacific. In addition to Frederick the Great and the Holy Roman Emperor François of Lorraine, the ranks of Freemasonry included such crowned heads as Stanislaus II of Poland, Adolphus Frederick of Sweden and, according to unconfirmed reports, Louis XV of France. They also included many ‘founding fathers' of the future United States, such as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. They included prominent literary figures such as Montesquieu, Diderot, Voltaire and, by the end of the eighteenth century, Goethe and Schiller. In Britain, prominent members of the Hanoverian ruling dynasty were Masons, as were Pope, Swift, Boswell and Hogarth.

  The threat posed to the Church by Freemasonry was manifold. In the first place, many if not most Lodges of the time subscribed in at least some measure to Cartesian rationalism, and thus served as a conduit for modes of thought inimical to Catholicism. Freemasonry never pretended to be a rival or alternative religion; but it raised spiritual questions and thereby presented challenges to the dogmatic, docile and obsequious faith demanded by Rome. While Rome clung stubbornly to dogma that had not changed for centuries,
Freemasonry embraced the rapidly changing world of the eighteenth century, with its commerce, industry and scientific progress. That world also included significant social reform, with an unprecedented emphasis on egalitarianism and the rights of man. While the Church looked backwards, Freemasonry looked forwards; and when Rome contemplated the future, that future seemed more likely to be influenced by the Lodge than by the pulpit.

  There were other grounds for concern. Until the Reformation, the Church, if only in theory, had represented the supreme arbiter of western Christendom. In effect, it served, or was supposed to serve, as an international forum – the equivalent for the time of the League of Nations, or the United Nations. If only in theory, secular disputes between rival potentates, for example, were subject to arbitration and judgement by the Church. The Church was authorised and mandated to act as negotiator, as peace-broker and facilitator of reconciliation.

  This role had been dramatically restricted by the Reformation. Protestant churches were hardly prepared to accept Catholic authority in either spiritual or temporal matters. But Catholicism still retained enough currency on the continent – in France, in Austria and southern Germany, in Italy, in Spain and Portugal – to offer at least some common ground on which rapprochement might be established. It was precisely in this area that Freemasonry threatened to encroach on the Church's traditional functions, possibly even to usurp them.

  Unlike the Church, the network of Lodges transcended denomination, enabling Catholics and Protestants to talk to each other without the fetters of doctrine and dogma. The proliferating web of Lodges afforded both a conduit for the transmission of messages and a forum for high-level inter-governmental and international contacts, for off-the-record discussion of treaties, for delicate diplomatic negotiations. Thus, for example, Protestant Prussia, under Frederick the Great, and Catholic Austria, under Maria Theresa and François ofLorraine, might be at war – as indeed they were on two separate occasions between 1742 and 1763. But both Frederick and François were Freemasons, as were many of their ministers and military commanders. Through the Lodges, peace feelers might be extended and common ground established in a way that was no longer possible through the Church. Through the Lodges, new alliances might be formed, new alignments and configurations to maintain the balance of power in equilibrium. This undoubtedly complemented the fluidity of the era's politics, whereby developments such as the famous ‘Diplomatic Revolution’ could be instigated. During the War of the Austrian Succession (1742-8), Austria was aligned with Britain against Prussia and France. As a result of the ‘Diplomatic Revolution’, the antagonists changed partners. During the Seven Years War (1756–63), Austria was aligned with France against Prussia and Britain.