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 INQUISITION

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INQUISITION

tion. At the consistory of 15 March, 1S75, Pius IX an- nounced that he was creating and reserving in petto five cardinals, whose names would be found, in case of his death, in a letter annexed to his will. But the canonists having raised serious doubts as to the vahdity of such a posthumous publication, Pius IX published their names in the consistory of the follow- ing 17 September. (See Cabdinal.)

Santi-Leitner, Pralectiones juris canonici, I, tit. xxxi, n. 23. A. BODDINHON.

Inquisition (Lat. inquirere, to look into). — By this term is usually meant a special ecclesiastical institu- tion for combating or suppressing heresy. Its char- acteristic mark seems to be the bestowal on special judges of judicial powers in matters of faith, and this by supreme ecclesiastical authority, not temporal or for individual cases, but as a universal and perma- nent office. Moderns experience difficulty in under- standing this institution, because they have, to no small extent, lost sight of two facts. On the one hand they have ceased to grasp religious belief as something objective, as the gift of God, and therefore outside the realm of free private judgment; on the other they no longer see in the Church a society perfect and sov- ereign, based substantially on a pure and authentic Revelation, whose first and most important duty must naturally be to retain unsullied this original deposit of faith. Before the religious revolution of the sixteenth century these views were still common to all Chris- tians; that orthodoxy should be maintained at any cost seemed self-evident. However, while the posi- tive suppression of heresy by ecclesiastical and civil authority in Christian society is as old as the Chiu-ch, the Inquisition as a distinct ecclesiastical tribunal is of much later origin. Historically it is a phase in the grov.'th of ecclesiastical legislation, whose distinctive traits can be fully understood only by a careful study of the conditions amid which it grew up. Our sut> ject may, therefore, be conveniently treated as fol- lows: I. The Suppression of Heresy during the first twelve Christian centuries; II. The Suppression of Heresy by the Institution known as the Inquisition under its several forms: (A) The Inquisition of the Middle Ages; (B) The Inquisition in Spain; (C) The Holy Office at Rome.

I. The Suppression of Heresy during the First Twelve Centuries. — (1) Though the Apostles were deeply imbued with the conviction that they must transmit the deposit of the Faith to posterity undefiled, and that any teaching at variance w'ith their own, even if proclaimed by an angel of Heaven, would be a culpable offence, yet St. Paul did not, in the case of the heretics Alexander and Hymeneus, go back to the Old-Covenant penalties of death or scourging (Deut., xiii, 6 sqq.; xvii, 1 sqq.), but deemed exclusion from the communion of the Church sufficient (I Tim., i, 20; Tit., iii, 10). In fact to the Christians of the first three centuries it could scarcely have occurred to assume any other attitude towards those who erred in matters of faith. TertuUian (Ad. Scapulam, c. ii) lays down the rule: "Humani iuris et naturalis po- testatis, unicuique quod putaverit colere, nee alii obest aut prodest alterius religio. Sed nee religionis est religionem colere, quiE sponte suscipi debeat, non vi", in other words, he tells us that the natural law authorized man to follow only the voice of indi- vidual conscience in the practice of religion, since the acceptance of religion was a matter of free will, not of compulsion. Replying to the accusation of Celsus, based on the Old Testament, that the Christians perse- cuted dissidents with death, burning, and torture, Origen (C. Cels., VII, 20) is satisfied with oxiiliiiiing that one must distinguish between the law which the Jews received from Moses and that given to the Christians by Jesus; the former was binding on the Jews, the latter on the Christians. Jewish Christians,

if sincere, could no longer conform to all of the Mo- saic Law; hence they were no longer at liberty to kill their enemies or to burn and stone violators of the Christian Law.

St. Cyprian of Carthage, surrounded as he was by countless scliismatics and undutiful Christians, also put aside the material sanction of the Old Testament, which punished with death rebellion against the priesthood and the judges: "Nunc autem, quia cir- cumcisio spiritalis esse apud fideles servos Dei ccepit, spiritali gladio superbi et contumaces necantur, dum de Ecclesia ejiciuntur " (Ep. Ixxii, ad Pompon., n. 4) — religion being now spiritual, its sanctions take on the same character, and excommunication replaces the death of the body. Lactantius was yet smarting under the scourge of bloody persecutions, when he WTote his " De Divinis Institutionibus" (in 308); naturally, therefore, he stood for the most absolute freedom of religion. "Religion", he says, "being a matter of the will, it cannot be forced on anyone; in this matter it is better to employ words than blows [verbis melius quam verberibus res agenda est]. Of what use is cruelty? What has the rack to do with piety? Surely there is no connexion between truth and violence, between justice and cruelty. ... It is true that nothing is so important as religion, and one must defend it at anj' cost [summfl, vi] . . . It is true that it must be protected, but by dying for it, not by killing others; by long-suffering, not by violence; by faith, not by crime. If you attempt to defend re- ligion with bloodshed and torture, what you do is not defence, but desecration and insult. For nothing is so intrinsically a matter of free will as religion " (op. cit., V, xx). The Christian teachers of the first three centuries insisted, as was natural for them, on com- plete religious liberty; furthermore, they not only urged the principle that religion could not be forced on others — a principle always atlhered to by the Church in her dealings with the unbaptizcd — but, when comparing the Mosaic Law and the Christian religion, they taught that the latter was content with a spiritual punishment of heretics (i. e. with excom- munication), while Judaism necessarily proceeded againsrt its dissidents with torture and death.

(2) However, the imperial successors of Constan- tine soon began to see in themselves Divinely ap- pointed "bishops of the exterior", i. e. masters of the temporal and material conditions of the Church. At the same time they retained the traditional authority of " Pontifex Maximus", and in this way the civil authority inclined, frequently in league with prelates of Arian tendencies, to persecute the orthodox bishops by imprisonment and exile. But the latter, particularly St. Hilary of Poitiers (Liber contra Auxentium, c. iv), protested vigorously against any use of force in the province of religion, whether for the spread of Chris- tianity or for preservation of the Faith. They re- peatedly urged that in this respect the severe decrees of the Old Testament were abrogated by the mild and gentle laws of Christ, plowever, the successors of Con- stantine were ever persuaded that the first concern of imperial authority (Theodosius II, "Novella;", tit. Ill, A. D. 438) was the protection of religion and so, with terrible regularity, issued many penal edicts against heretics (cf. E. Vacandard, " L'Inquisition: Etude historique et critique sur le pouvoir cocrcitif de I'Eglise", Paris, 1907, p. 10). In the space of fifty- seven years si.xty-eight enactments were thus pro- mulgated. All manner of heretics were affected by this legislation, and in various ways, by exile, confis- cation of property, or death. A law of 407, aimed at the traitorous Donatists, asserts for the first time that these heretics ought to be put on the same plane as transgressors against the sacretl majesty of the em- peror, a concept to which was reserved in later times a very momentous role. The death penalty, how- ever, was only imposed for certain kinils of heresy; in