God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

by Cullen Murphy

  The notion of a “slippery slope”—the idea that one particular step will set the precedent for a second step, ever onward in an unfortunate downhill cascade—is as commonplace as it is controversial. Much has been written about the subject in journals of philosophy, social science, and the law. Legalizing assisted suicide will lead to legalized euthanasia. Legalizing marijuana will lead to the abuse of more-dangerous drugs. The use of surveillance cameras to stop crime will lead to the use of surveillance cameras to monitor personal behavior. One English essayist recalls the suggestion by his rector at Eton that not wearing cuff links would lead to heroin addiction. Sometimes the examples are silly, but the phenomenon can be very real. In many ways the Inquisition is a cautionary example of the slippery slope at work: how seemingly minor developments in theory and practice open the door to further developments—and on and on.

  Bernard Gui would not have put it this way, but his aim in the Practica was to create something like a science of interrogation. It depended on an elite who knew the rules, knew the methods, knew the pitfalls. Gui’s order, the Dominicans, provided a core group of operatives. Like the Franciscans, who came into existence at roughly the same time, the Dominicans represented a startling new way of doing Church business. Rather than living in settled monastic communities, which were often rich and complacent, they traveled far and wide as individuals or in small groups, recognizable in their white habits, and depending on donations to meet basic needs. Their authority came directly from the pope. In a largely static society—the typical peasant might spend an entire lifetime within a tight radius around his birthplace—the radical character of these aggressively itinerant agents, wielding transcendent power, proved highly advantageous. The Dominicans preached everywhere, to whatever audiences they could find. And they possessed a common body of knowledge. Dominicans received intensive instruction in moral theology and canon law and, as part of their normal training, very practical guidance on how to ask the hard questions. One thirteenth-century training manual for the order offers succinct commentaries under headings such as “In how many ways is one said to be a heretic?” “How should heretics be examined?” “What are the penalties for heresy, according to the law?”

  Innocent III had given the founding of the Dominican Order his provisional approval in 1215, the year before he died, recognizing the role these traveling preachers might play among the Cathars. When the Church needed vigorous investigators—even before the Inquisition was formally established—it was natural to outsource most of the work to this order. As one historian concludes, “The Dominicans were not so much asked to prepare themselves for a new challenge; they were called upon because they were already seen to be in a position to meet it.” The name of the order gave rise all too easily to a Latin pun: its members came to be known as Domini canes, “the hounds of God.”

  Bernard Gui’s outlook, as reflected in his manual for inquisitors, was sophisticated. “It must be noted,” he wrote, “that just as all diseases are not treated by one single medicament, but that each disease has its own remedy, so one cannot use the same methods of interrogation, enquiry, and examination with heretics of differing sects, but must employ distinct and appropriate techniques.” Gui was well aware that interrogation is a transaction between two people—a high-stakes game—and that the person being interrogated, like the person asking the questions, brings an attitude and a method to the process. The accused may be wily and disputatious. Or he may seem humble and accommodating. He may feign insanity. “It must be noted,” Gui warned, “that as the heretics cannot defend themselves against the truth of the faith by strength, reason, or authorities, they quickly resort to sophistries, deceit, and verbal trickery to avoid detection. This double-speak is a clear sign by which heretics can be recognized.”

  Gui’s was not the Inquisition’s first interrogation manual, but it was one of the most influential. At a time when “publishing” was a laborious process, it was copied and recopied repeatedly and disseminated across Europe. Nor was it the last interrogation manual. A generation after Gui, another Dominican, Nicholas Eymerich, produced the Directorium inquisitorum, which built on the work of his predecessor and achieved even greater renown.

  Torture was an integral part of the inquisitorial process, though it was reserved for difficult cases and was technically subject to certain restrictions. Eymerich and others granted wide latitude to inquisitors. For instance, although the accused was supposed to be subjected to a single “cycle” of torture, if he failed to confess or retracted a confession the inquisitors could decide that the cycle had not proceeded sufficiently: the accused, to use the term of art, had not yet been “decently” tortured. The cycle could therefore resume. Half a millennium later, the interrogators of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, employed similar reasoning to expand their options. Like Gui, Eymerich became a figure in later works of fiction. His inquisitor’s manual turns up, for instance, in the library of the doomed mansion in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

  Eymerich’s methods, and perhaps his personality, frequently landed him in political trouble, and his career was one of frenetic activity interrupted by sudden bouts of exile. But it was never a torpid exile. During one of these periods, he wrote his Directorium.

  Tricks of the Trade

  In modern times, the techniques of interrogation have been refined in theory by batteries of psychologists, criminologists, and intelligence experts, and in practice by soldiers, policemen, and spies. In some quarters, the word “interrogation,” with its inescapable undertones, has been replaced by the sanitized “eduction,” from “educe,” meaning “to lead out.” In 2006, the Intelligence Science Board, a government advisory group, published a thorough overview of current and historical interrogation practices under the anodyne title Educing Information. It contains papers with titles such as “Mechanical Detection of Deception: A Short Review” and “Options for Scientific Research on Eduction Practices.” In passing, it mentions the works of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich. Place the medieval techniques alongside those laid out in modern handbooks, such as Human Intelligence Collector Operations, the U. S. army interrogation manual, and the inquisitors’ practices seem very up-to-date.

  The inquisitors became astute psychologists. Like Gui, Eymerich was well aware that those being interrogated would employ a range of stratagems to deflect questions and disarm the interrogator. In his manual, he lays out ten ways in which heretics seek to “hide their errors.” They include “equivocation,” “redirecting the question,” “feigned astonishment,” “twisting the meaning of words,” “changing the subject,” “feigning illness,” and “feigning stupidity.” For its part, the army interrogation manual provides a “Source and Information Reliability Matrix” to assess the same kinds of behavior. It warns interrogators to be wary of subjects who show signs of “reporting information that is self-serving,” who give “repeated answers with exact wording and details,” and who demonstrate a “failure to answer the question asked.”

  But the well-prepared inquisitor had ruses of his own. To confront an unforthcoming prisoner, he might sit with a large stack of documents in front of him, which he would appear to consult as he asked questions or listened to answers, periodically looking up from the pages as if they contradicted the testimony and saying, “It is clear to me that you are hiding the truth.” The army manual suggests a technique called the “file and dossier approach,” a variant on what it terms the “we know all” approach:

  The HUMINT [human intelligence] collector prepares a dossier containing all available information concerning the source or his organization. The information is carefully arranged within a file to give the illusion that it contains more data than actually there. . . . It is also effective if the HUMINT collector is reviewing the dossier when the source enters the room.

  Another technique suggested by Eymerich is to suddenly shift gears, approaching the person being interrogated in a seeming
spirit of mercy and compassion, speaking “sweetly” and solicitously, perhaps making arrangements to provide something to eat and drink. The army manual puts it this way:

  At the point when the interrogator senses the source is vulnerable, the second HUMINT collector appears. [He] scolds the first HUMINT collector for his uncaring behavior and orders him from the room. The second HUMINT collector then apologizes to soothe the source, perhaps offering him a beverage and a cigarette.

  Kindness may prove ineffective. Another way to break the impasse, Eymerich writes, is to “multiply the questions and the interrogations,” observing that asking many different questions, quickly and repeatedly, will create confusion, elicit contradiction, and furnish information for deeper questioning. The Army recommends what it calls “rapid-fire interrogation”:

  The HUMINT collectors ask a series of questions in such a manner that the source does not have time to answer a question completely before the next one is asked. This confuses the source, and he will tend to contradict himself as he has little time to formulate his answers.

  Eymerich and the army describe many other techniques. You can try to persuade the prisoner that resistance is pointless, because others have already spilled the beans. You can take the line that you know the prisoner is but a small fish, and if only you had the names of the bigger fish, the small one might swim free. You can play on the prisoner’s feelings of utter hopelessness, reminding him that only cooperation with the interrogator offers a path to something better. Eymerich writes a script, telling the inquisitor he should say that he is obliged to stop the questioning because he must go on a long trip—that he wishes the questioning were at an end, but it must be interrupted until he returns. He does not know how long that will be, perhaps weeks or months, and until that time the prisoner will have to remain in the dungeons . . . unless, perhaps, we can successfully conclude the questioning now? The army manual refers to this as the “emotional-futility” approach:

  In the emotional-futility approach, the HUMINT collector convinces the source that resistance to questioning is futile. This engenders a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness on the part of the source. Again as with the other emotional approaches, the HUMINT collector gives the source a “way out” of the helpless situation.

  Who Needs God?

  In the background, always, lies the possibility of physical persuasion. Few words summon the Dark Ages to mind as quickly as “torture” does, but the uncomfortable truth is that the emergence of torture as an acceptable instrument reveals glimmerings of a modern way of thinking: the truth can be ascertained without God’s help. To be sure, the use of torture goes far back into prehistory. Cave paintings from 12,000 years ago suggest that torture techniques developed very early. “Torture him, how?” asks the judge in Aristophanes’ The Frogs, who goes on to mention stretching on the rack, putting bricks on the chest, hanging by the thumbs, and other well-known techniques. Torture has been used as a ritual act, a means of deterrence, a tool of coercion, and a form of vengeance. Frequently it has been done simply to slake something fundamental in certain natures. An unidentified member of a Mexican drug cartel spoke about this to CNN :

  ANDERSON COOPER: Torture is common?

  DRUG CARTEL MEMBER: Yes it is.

  COOPER: Why? Just to get information?

  CARTEL MEMBER: To—not to get information. Just the pleasure of doing it.

  Torture had been used in ancient Rome as part of the inquisitio process. But as a legitimate tool of jurisprudence it was actually little known in the darkest part of the Middle Ages. The reason is that in the early medieval view, when mortals stood humbly before an all-knowing God, the capacity of human beings to discover the truth was seen to be limited. Thus the reliance not on judges or juries but on iudicium Dei—divine judgment—to determine guilt or innocence. This could, and usually did, take the form of swearing a solemn oath before God, perhaps joined by friends and associates who swore the same oath, that one was innocent of the alleged crime. With the fate of one’s immortal soul in the balance—as everyone at the time would have believed—such an oath was no small thing. If the case was of sufficient gravity, an accused person might endure trial by ordeal: he would be submerged in water, or made to walk on red-hot coals, or to plunge an arm into boiling water. If he suffered no harm, or if the wounds healed sufficiently within a certain period of time, then it was deemed to be the judgment of God that the accused was innocent.

  This regime was common in Europe from the sixth through the twelfth centuries. It conformed naturally to the prevailing mental outlook, and it suited an age in which the institutions of government as we understand them were few and overburdened. Trial by ordeal was unquestionably primitive, even barbaric. But it was expeditious, and ensured that the quest for truth had a clear and definitive end point.

  The twelfth-century revolution in legal practice—exemplified by the work of Gratian but manifest everywhere, from ecclesiastical tribunals to secular ones—took the pursuit of justice out of God’s hands and put it into those of human beings. Edward Peters, who has written extensively about this subject, offered a brief tour d’horizon one morning in his office at the University of Pennsylvania. Peters at the time was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, and his dark-paneled office atop the university library opened through double doors into the Lea Library, a Victorian Gothic wonder transplanted from Lea’s Philadelphia mansion in the 1920s. It is the room in which Lea wrote his many volumes on the Medieval and Spanish Inquisitions, works still unsurpassed in breadth and ambition.

  Underlying the medieval legal revolution, Peters explained, was one big idea: when it came to discovering guilt or innocence—and, more broadly, discovering something akin to truth—there was no need to send the decision up the chain of command to God. These matters were well within human capacity.

  But that didn’t quite settle the issue, Peters went on. When God is the judge, no other standard of proof is needed. But when human beings make themselves the judges, the question of proof comes very much to the fore. What constitutes acceptable evidence? How does one decide between conflicting testimony? In the absence of a voluntary confession—the most unassailable form of evidence, the “queen of proofs”—what means of questioning can properly be employed to induce one? Are there ways in which the interrogation might be aggressively enhanced? And in the end, how does one know that the full truth has been exposed, that there isn’t a bit more to be discovered some little way beyond, perhaps accessible with some additional effort—one more slight turn of the screw? Of course, that turn of the screw is unpleasant—certainly a last resort—and possible to justify only in terms of the greater good. So do you see, Peters asked, how torture comes into the picture?

  It was widely used in secular courts, and then crossed into the spiritual realm. In 1252, Pope Innocent IV issued the papal bull Ad extirpanda, which authorized the use of torture in the work of the Inquisition. Churchmen could be present but were not to participate—some representative of secular authority would do the job. In theory, torture was somewhat controlled. It was not supposed to cause grave injury or put life in jeopardy. A physician was typically present. Confessions made during a torture session were not admissible—they had to be repeated later, after an interval. And torture could be used only once. The Church laid down more rules governing torture than civil magistrates did. But inquisitors pushed the boundaries. For instance, what did “once” mean? Perhaps it should be interpreted, as Eymerich urged, to mean once for each charge. As for clerics participating in torture—surely it would be permissible if inquisitors absolved one another (as they came to do).

  When one pope insisted that torture should have the explicit authorization of a local bishop, Bernard Gui proposed a looser standard: that it should be allowed after “mature and careful deliberation.” Gui did not prevail on this point, but torture would prove difficult to contain. The potential fruits always seem so tantalizing, and the rules so easy to bend.

  Am
oral brutes certainly commit torture, but in their hands it doesn’t become part of an integrated system. Torture becomes systematic in the hands of a different sort of person—one who is determined to use the powers of reason, and who believes in the rightness of his cause. This is what Michael Ignatieff means when he calls torture chambers “intensely moral places.” Those who wish to justify torture don’t do so by avoiding moral thinking; rather, they override the obvious immorality of the specific act by the presumptive morality of the larger endeavor. If the endeavor is deemed important enough, there is little that can’t be justified. There are no lengths to which one may not go. In Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, the protagonist Rubashov ultimately acquiesces in his own condemnation and execution—even uttering a false confession at his show trial—on the grounds that he must bow to the historical inevitability of the revolutionary process. Wasn’t this, after all, the same exculpatory logic he had used when dispatching others?

  It is a logic without limits. Thomas More points out the dangers in a celebrated exchange in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, when he asks his son-in-law, William Roper, if he’d be willing to cut a swath through the laws in order to ensnare the devil. “I’d cut down every law in England to do that,” Roper says. Thomas More replies, “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”