Greg DalyGreg Daly examines an unlikely defence of Church history
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition to be heroes in any debate about religious tolerance, so the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark was sceptical when he first encountered claims that the Inquisition had relatively little blood on its hands and been an important moderating force.
On further investigation, he says, Prof. Stark was stunned to discover that “among other things, it was the Inquisition that prevented the murderous witchcraft craze, which flourished in most of Europe during the 16th and 17th Centuries, from spreading to Spain and Italy”.
“Instead of burning witches,” he continues, “the Inquisition sent a few people to be hanged because they had burned witches.”
Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History might seem an unlikely book to be written by a man raised Lutheran and temperamentally agnostic who now describes himself as an “independent Christian”, and certainly no Catholic. It might seem an even less likely product from a faculty member of Baylor, the largest Baptist university in the world and a place with a history of being, in Stark’s words, “a hotbed of militant anti-Catholicism”.
Tolerant
Baylor may be a far more diverse and tolerant place now than it once was, but anti-Catholicism, Stark suggests, is far from a thing of the past, with today’s Catholics being all too often tainted in the popular mind by dubious associations with all manner of wrongdoing and folly.
To take just a few examples: they’re members of a historically anti-Semitic organisation whose leader maintained a studied silence in the face of the Shoah; they’re gullible sorts, suspicious of reason and ignorant of how their Church rose through persecution and the suppression of more liberal varieties of Christianity; and their Church dragged Europe into the mud and ignorance of the Dark Ages, holding back scientific progress and sowing the seeds for today’s violent Islamism through their unprovoked Crusades against the Muslim world.
For Stark, historians have a moral duty to ensure the truth is told and justice is done to the Church, not for the sake of the dead, to whom the opinions of later generations hardly matter, but to the Catholics of today.
The author of almost 40 books including 1996’s breakthrough work The Rise of Christianity, which deployed sociological tools to analyse the growth of Christianity in its first centuries, Stark is a sociologist by training rather than a historian, and often seems most comfortable in Bearing False Witness when grinding the numbers.
On the Spanish Inquisition, for instance, he’s in his element when tackling claims that it engaged in torture as a matter of course, and was responsible for 100-135,000 deaths when helmed by Tomas de Torquemada, with anything between 31,000 and 300,000 people burned at the stake during the Inquisition’s lifetime and perhaps as many as 3 million condemned over the same period.
That such figures can be bandied about nowadays, he argues, is irresponsible and inexcusable, given how modern historians such as Henry Kamen and William Monter have revealed that “in contrast with the secular courts all across Europe, the Spanish Inquisition was a consistent force for justice, restraint, due process, and enlightenment”.
These historians, he says, base their claims not merely on contemporary diaries, letters, decrees and other similar documents but on having examined and entered into a database the files from all 44,674 cases heard by the Inquisitions of Aragon and Castile between 1540 and 1700. As these files had been confidential, he explains, there was no reason for the clerks who penned them to have misrepresented the cases.
Torture was a commonplace in the courts of early modern Europe, according to Stark, who maintains that it was used less often and less aggressively by the Spanish Inquisition than other courts; the records indicate that it was used in just 2% of cases.
The notion that torture was used at all tends to be rightly repugnant to us, with the canonical limitations on its use seeming mere hypocritical quibbles, but it is important to avoid anachronism here; it’s deeply ahistorical to expect people in the past to abide by our standards and how we see the world.
This should also be kept in mind when considering the Inquisition’s use of the death penalty. Between 1540 and 1700, Stark says, 826 people in total were executed by the Spanish Inquisition, 1.8% of the total number tried, and a figure standing in stark contrast to the 750 or so people who were hanged every single year in England between 1530 and 1630, when many were put to death for minor thefts.
The Inquisition’s activities from before 1540 are poorly documented, says Stark, observing that “historians now agree that these were its bloodiest days and that perhaps as many as 1,500 people may have been executed, or about 30 a year”.
Some historians estimate a higher rate of executions, with perhaps as many as 2,000 people burned at the stake under Torquemada’s tenure alone, but even then it seems that things settled after 1500, with the reformed Spanish Inquisition gaining a reputation through Europe for efficiency and even compassion; there are records of convicts blaspheming so they could be transferred to the Inquisition where they felt confident of a fair trial.
Inquisition
Armed with these figures, we should perhaps not be surprised that the Inquisition was instrumental in preventing the early modern witch-hunting craze from taking root in Spain, trying those who took part in unauthorised witch hunts, denouncing witch hunts in general, and discrediting evidence gained through torture. It would be another century before Enlightenment philosophers like the Dutch Balthasar Bekker would be similarly outspoken.
One might wonder, then, how the Inquisition has the reputation it does. The answer lies above all with the work of English and Dutch propagandists during their wars against Spain in the 16th and 17th Centuries. In 1567, the Spanish monk-turned-Lutheran-polemicist known as Reginaldus Montanus published The Arts of the Spanish Inquisition, Uncovered and Laid Bare, the first substantial and widely circulated work on the Inquisition.
Published as the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule was beginning, Montanus’ book was a bestseller when translated into English, French, German, and Dutch, his luridly distorted claims appealing to audiences eager to believe the worst of Catholic Spain and creating a popular myth of the Inquisition that persists to this day.
Returning to territory he previously covered in 2009’s God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, Stark draws on the work of leading historians to argue against the conventional cliché that during the Crusades “an expansionist, imperialistic Christendom, directed by the Pope, brutalised, looted, and colonised a tolerant and peaceful Islam”, as well as the line that the Crusades have long been a source of resentment in the Middle East.
He shows how the Muslim age of conquests did not end with their defeat by Charles Martel at Poitiers in 732: the 9th Century, for example, saw Muslims sacking Rome and conquering Sicily, holding it and using it as a platform for raids for two centuries, while the 11th Century had scarcely begun before Muslim troops destroyed Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the holiest of all Christian sites.
Muslim aggression was given new momentum in the 11th Century, he continues, with the newly Muslim Seljuk Turks – who defeated the Byzantine Empire at Manzikert in 1071 – becoming masters of Asia Minor and cutting off the pilgrimage routes to Jerusalem, attacking, harassing, and even abducting and enslaving those Christians foolhardy enough to attempt to make their way to the Holy Land.
Seljuk aggression prompted the Byzantine emperor to appeal to Pope Urban II for help, leading the Pope to call for a western force to put aside their own quarrels and strive to save Byzantium, protect the pilgrim routes, and liberate Jerusalem.
The knights who answered this call, Stark shows, were not the poor younger brothers of popular myth but were typically the heads of eminent families, raising funds at great cost to themselves. Indeed, far from being a lucrative colonial exercise, the tiny Crusader States that were established during the Crusades would prove very expensive, and clung to existence for almost two centuries only through sustained European support.
During this period, Stark stresses, there was no effort made to impose Christianity on the local Muslim population and little effort even to convert them.
Claims
Stark draws especially on the late Jonathan Riley-Smith’s work to refute claims that the Crusades lie at the roots of conflicts in the modern Middle East.
Before the late 19th Century, he says, Muslims had looked back on the Crusades with “indifference and complacency”, with medieval Arabs having seen them as attacks on the hated Turks by “a primitive, unlearned, impoverished and un-Muslim people, about whom Muslim rulers and scholars knew and cared little”. It was not until the aftermath of the First World War that Muslims, faced with Anglo-French rule, would adopt the Crusades as a symbol of western imperialism.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Stark’s book – and a topic effectively addressed at greater length in James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers – requires him to hold the Middle Ages up to the light and explore how, as G.K. Chesterton’s Fr Brown put it, while some charge the Church with lowering reason, the opposite is true.
“Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme,” the fictional cleric intoned, continuing, “Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason.”
Following today’s specialists in Late Antiquity in pointing to how up to the end of the 4th Century Christian emperors routinely appointed pagans to high office, Stark relates how the 4th Century was hardly over before Rome was sacked by Alaric the Visigoth, and within a few decades the last emperor of the western Roman Empire was deposed, beginning the period known as the Middle Ages.
The term ‘Dark Ages’ is increasingly unfashionable among historians, even when referring to the early Middle Ages, but as Stark explains, the term has a long pedigree, starting with the 14th-Century Petrarch’s claim that though the previous centuries had seen men of genius, they were “surrounded by darkness”.
A few centuries later in the so-called Enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Gibbons were among those who most eagerly promoted the trope that the rise of Christianity was linked with a rise in ignorance and barbarism.
Western history, Stark says, has long been schematically understood as having four major eras: Classical Antiquity; the Middle or Dark Ages; the Renaissance and Enlightenment; and finally modern times. Serious historians, however, have long known this scheme to be “a complete fraud”, not least because “there never were any Dark Ages”.
The Middle Ages, Stark explains, were marked by a litany of technological improvements in agriculture, weaponry, power, transportation, manufacturing, and commerce, as well as seeing the demise of slavery as Church leaders first ensured slaves had access to the sacraments, and then argued that no Christians – or Jews – should ever be enslaved.
The roots of modern democracy lay in medieval Christian ideas of moral equality and the shortcomings of states, he observes, before detailing developments in music, architecture, art, vernacular literature, and education.
Those who despite this have difficulties in embracing the idea that the Middle Ages were a time of huge progress might consider perhaps the most famous sentence attributed to Isaac Newton. “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” Stark quotes Newton as saying, pointing out this admission carried no false modesty.
Newton’s era of superb scientific achievements was the culmination of centuries of sustained scientific progress rooted in a profound faith in reason dating back to the early years of Christianity when Clement of Alexandria maintained that “truth cannot be without reason”.
The line of medieval Catholic scholar-priests who laid the foundations of modern science is long and venerable, and Stark lists just a few: Robert Grosseteste, whose discoveries were outdone by his immeasurable contribution to the scientific method; Albertus Magnus, known especially for his experimental and observational biological studies; Roger Bacon, who built on Grosseteste’s work on the scientific method and published his work under orders from Pope Clement IV; William of Ockham, who anticipated Newton’s first law of motion after realising that space is a frictionless vacuum; Nicole d’Oresme, who established that the earth rotates; Nicholas of Cusa, who argued that the earth moves through space; and Nicolaus Copernicus, who tried using mathematics to map a solar system with the sun at its heart and the Earth and other planets circling it.
This Catholic dedication to science continued into the modern period, with the Galileo affair appearing as a deeply uncharacteristic anomaly; as Stark says, this is something that shouldn’t surprise us.
Rational
As Catholics believed the universe was a created thing and that God is rational, so they believed the universe must in principle make sense and must operate according to laws that could be discovered.
The book, it should be stressed, is by no means perfect: written by an intelligent non-historian for intelligent non-historians, it occasionally feels like Stark is engaging in a kind of special pleading that undermines his insistence that not being a Catholic, he wrote the book not “in defence of the Church” but “in defence of history”.
On, for example, crusader massacres – and they did happen, especially in Jerusalem – while it’s correct to stress that we cannot evaluate medieval practices by modern standards, it’s still hard to read that “according to the norms of warfare at that time, a massacre of the population of Jerusalem would have been seen as justified because the city had refused to surrender and had to be taken by storm, thus inflicting many casualties on the attacking forces”.
Likewise how we’re told that the torture conducted by the Spanish Inquisition wasn’t as bad or anywhere near as common as we might have expected, and anyway, others were worse.
These are fair points, but they leave a slightly bad taste. Similarly the distinction between Catholics and the Church that Stark attempts to outline when discussing anti-semitism and slavery: he’s not wrong, and indeed has a point, but it’s hard not to feel that some of this is quibbling and hairsplitting.
These qualms aside, however, Stark’s book is a fascinating and important read, and one that could usefully adorn many a Catholic bookshelf and be fruitfully deployed to settle – or start – any number of rows. He has done Catholics, justice, and truth quite a service.