Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 8.djvu/55

 INQUISITION

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INQUISITION

their persecution of heretics the Christian emperors fell far short of the severity of Diocletian, who in 2S7 sentenced to the stake the leaders of the Manicli;rans, and inflicted on their followers partly the usual death penalty by beheading, and partly forced labour in the government mines.

So far we have Ijeen deahng with the legislation of the Christianized State. In the attitude of the repre- sentatives of the Church towards this legislation some uncertainty is already noticeable. At the close of the fourth century, and during the fifth, Manicha'ism, Donatism, and Priscillianism were the heresies most in view. Expelled from Rome and iMilan, the Mani- chaeans sought a refuge in Africa. Though th('.\- were found guilty of abominable teachings and luisileods (St..\ugustine,"De haresibus", no. 40), the Churcli re- fused to invoke the civil power against them; indeed, the great Bisho]) nf Hippo explicitly rejected the use of force. He sought their return only through public and private acts of submission, and his efforts seem to have met with success. Indeed, we learn from him that the Donatists themselves were the first to appeal to the civil power for protection against the Church. However, they fared like Daniel's accusers: the lions turned upon them. State intervention not answering to their wishes, and the violent excesses of the Circum- cellions being condignly punished, the Donatists complained bitterly of administrative cruelty. St. Optatus of Mileve defended the civil authority (De Schisraate Donatistarum, III, cc. 6-7) as follows: " ... as though it were not permitted to come for- ward as avengers of God, and to pronounce sentence of death! . . . But, say you, the State cannot punish in the name of tiod. Yet was it not in the name of God that Moses and Phineas consigned to death the worshippers of the golden calf and those who despised the true religion?" This was the first time that a Catholic bishop championed a decisive co-operation of the State in religious questions, and its right to inflict death on heretics. For the first time, also, the Old Testament was appealed to, though such appeals had been previously rejected by Christian teachers.

St. .\ugustine, on the contrary, was still opposed to the use of force, anil tried to lead back the erring by means of instruction; at most he admitted the impo- sition of a moderate fine for refractory per.sons. Fi- nally, however, he changed liis views, whether moved thereto by the incredible excesses of theCircuracellions or by the good results achieved by the use of force, or favouring force through the persuasions of other bish- ops. Apropos of his apparent inconsistency it is well to note carefully whom he is addressing. He appears to speak in one way to government officials, who wanted the existing laws carried out to their fullest extent, and in another to the Donatists, wlio denied to the State any right of punishing dissenters. In his correspond- ence with .state officials he dwells on Christian charity and toleration, and represents the heretics as straying lambs, to be sought out and perhaps, if recalcitrant, chastized with rods and frightened with threats of severer punishment, but not to be driven back to the fold by means of rack and sword. On the other hand, in his writings against the Donatists he upholds the rights of the State, sometimes, he says, a salutary severity would be to the interest of the erring ones themselves and likewise protective of true believers and the community at large (Vacandard, 1. c, pp. 17-26).

As to Priscillianism, not a few points remain yet obscure, despite recent valuable researches. It seems certain, however, that Priscillian, Bishop of Avila in Spain, was accused of heresy and sorcery, and found guilty by several councils. St. Amljrose at Milan and St. Damasua at Rome seem to have refu.sed him a hearing. .'Vt length he appealed to the Emperor Maxi- mus at Trier, but to his detriment, for he was there condemned to death. Priscillian himself, no doubt in

full consciousness of his own irmocence, had formerly called for repression of the Manicha>ans by the sword. But the foremost Christian teachers did not share these sentiments, and liis own execution gave them occasion for a solemn protest against the cruel treat- ment meted out to him by the imperial government. St. Martin of Tours, then at Trier, e.xertetl himself to obtain from the ecclesiastical authority the abandon- ment of the accusation, and induced the emperor to promise that on no account would he shed the blood of Priscillian, since ecclesiastical deposition by the bish- ops would be punishment enough, and blo(KLshed would be opposed to the Divine law (Sulp. Severus, "Chron.", II, in P. L., XX, 155 sqq.; and ibid., "Dialogi", III, col. 217). After the execution he strongly lilamed both the accusers and the emperor, and for a long time refused to hold comminiion with such bishops as had been in any way responsible for Pri.seillian's death. The great Bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose, described that execution as a crime.

Priscillianism, however, did not disappear with the death of its originator; on the contrarj-, it spread with extraordinary rapidity, and, through its open adop- tion of Manicha;ism, became more of a public menace than ever. In this'w-ay the severe judgments of St. Augustine and St. Jerome against Priscillianism be- come intelligilile. In 447 Leo the Great had to re- proach the PriscilUanists with loosening the holy bonds of marriage, treading all decency under foot, and deriding all law, human and Divine. It seemed to him natural that temporal rulers should punish such sacrilegious madness, and should put to death the founder of the sect and some of his followers. He goes on to say that this redounded to the advantage of the Church: "qua; etsi sacerdotali contenta iudicio, cru- entas refugit ultiones, severis tamen christianorum principum constitutionibus adiuvatur, dum ad spirit- ale reciuTunt rcmedium, qui timcnt corporale suppli- cium" — though the Church was content with a spirit- ual sentence on the part of its Ijishops and was averse to the shedding of l)lood, nevertheless it was aided by the imperial severity, inasmuch as the fear of corporal punishment drove the guiltv to seek a spiritual rem- edy (Ep. XV ad Turribium; P. L., LIV, 679 sq.).

The ecclesiastical ideas of the first five centuries may be summarized as follows: (1) the Church should for no cause shed blood (St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Leo I, and others); (2) other teachers, however, like Optatus of Mileve and Priscillian, believed that the State could pronounce the death-penalty on here- tics in ca.se the public welfare demanded it; (3) the majority held that the death-penalty for heresy, when not civilly criminal, was irreconcilable with the spirit of Chri.stianity. St. Augustine (Ep. c, n. 1), almost in the name of the Western Church, says: "Corrigi eos volunius, non necari, nee discipliuam circa eos negligi vnluiuus, iiec suppliciis (|uibus digni sunt exerceri" — we wish them corrected, not put to death; we desire the triumph of (ecclesiastical) discipline, not the death penalties that they deserve. St. John Chrysostom says substantially the same in the name of the East- ern Church (Horn., XLVI, c. i): "To consign a heretic to death is to commit an offence beyond atonement"; and in the next chapter he says that God forbids their execution, even as He forbids us to uproot cockle, but He does not forbid us to repel them, to deprive them of free speech, or to prohibit their assemblies. The help of the "secular arm" was therefore not entirely re- jected; on the contrary, as often as the Christian wel- fare, general or domestic, required it. Christian rulers .sought to stem the evil by appropriate measures. As late as the seventh century St. Isidore of Seville ex- presses similar sentiments (Sententiarum, III, iv, nn. 4-6).

How little we are to tru.st the vaunted impartiality of Henry Charles Lea, the American historian of the Inquisition, we may here illustrate by an example.