02/23/10

Sorcery, Alchemy and Witchcraft

Although Christianity affirms the existence of a transcendent reality, it has always distinguished between religio (reverence for God) and superstitio, which in Latin means “unreasonable religious belief.” Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire in 395 C.E., and in 525 the Council of Oxia prohibited Christians from consulting sorcerers, diviners, or any kind of seer. A canon passed by the Council of Constantinople in 625 prescribed excommunication for a period of six years for anyone found practicing divination or who consulted with a diviner.
Although the Church had issued many canons warning against the practice of witchcraft or magic, little action was taken against those learned men who experimented with alchemy or those common folk who practiced the old ways of witchcraft. In 906 C.E., Abbot Regino of Prum recognized that earlier canon laws had done little to eradicate the practices of magic and witchcraft, so he issued his De ecclesiaticis disciplinis to condemn as heretical any belief in witchcraft or the power of sorcerers. In 1,000 C.E., Deacon Burchard, who would later become archbishop of Worms, published Corrrector which updated Regino’s work and stressed that only God had the power to transform matter. Alchemists could not change base metals into gold, and witches could not shapeshift into animals.
In spite of such decrees, a lively belief in a world of witches and ghosts persisted throughout the Middle Ages and co-existed in the minds of many of the faithful with the miracle stories of the saints. To the native beliefs were added those of non-Christian peoples who either lived in Europe or whom Europeans met when they journeyed far from home, as when they went on the Crusades. By the twelfth century, magical practices based upon the arcane systems of the Spanish Moors and Jewish Kabbalah were established in Europe. The Church created the Inquisition in the High Middle Ages in response to unorthodox religious beliefs that it called heresies. Since some of these involved magical practices and witchcraft, the occult also became an object of persecution. The harsh treatment of the Manichaean Cathars in southern France is an example of society’s reaction to those who mixed arcane practice with heterodox theology.
By the twelfth century, the Cathar sect had become so popular among the people that Pope Innocent III (1160 or 1161–1216) considered it a greater menace to Christianity than the Islamic warriors who pummeled the crusaders and who threatened all of Europe. To satisfy his outrage, he ordered the only Crusade ever launched by Christians against fellow Christians, declaring as heretics the Albigensians, as the Cathars of southern France were known.
In spite of persecution, the concept of witchcraft persisted and even flourished in early modern times. At least the fear of it did, as the Salem witch trials richly illustrate. In the early decades of the twentieth century, schools of pagan and magical teachings were reborn as Wicca. Wiccans, calling themselves “practitioners of the craft of the wise,” would resurrect many of the old ways and infuse them with modern thoughts and practices. Whatever its origin, the occult seems to be an object of permanent fascination to the human race.
02/23/10

Inquisition Deux

By the twelfth century, the Cathar sect had become so popular among the people that Pope Innocent III (1160 or 1161–1216) considered it a greater menace to Christianity than the Islamic warriors who pummeled the crusaders and who threatened all of Europe. To satisfy his outrage, he ordered the only Crusade ever launched by Christians against fellow Christians, declaring as heretics the Albigensians, as the Cathars of southern France were known.
The Inquisition came into existence in 1231 with the Excommunicamus of Pope Gregory IX (c. 1170–1241), who at first urged local bishops to become more vigorous in ridding Europe of heretics, then lessened their responsibility for determining orthodoxy by establishing inquisitors under the special jurisdiction of the papacy. The office of inquisitor was entrusted primarily to the Franciscans and the Dominicans, because of their reputation for superior knowledge of theology and their declared freedom from worldly ambition. Each tribunal was ordered to include two inquisitors of equal authority, who would be assisted by notaries, police, and counselors. Because they had the power to excommunicate even members of royal houses, the inquisitors were formidable figures with whom to reckon.
In 1246 Montsegur, the center of Albigensian resistance, fell, and hundreds of Cathars were burned at the stake. The headquarters of the Inquisition was established in Toulouse, and in 1252, Pope Innocent IV (d. 1254) issued a papal bull that placed inquisitors above the law. Another decree within the bull demanded that all civil rulers and all commoners must assist the work of the Inquisition or face excommunication. In 1257, the church officially sanctioned torture as a means of forcing witches, sorcerers, shapeshifters, and other heretics to confess their alliance with Satan.
The inquisitors would stay in a particular location for weeks or months, from which they would bring suit against any person suspected of heresy. Lesser penalties were levied against those who came forward of their own volition and confessed their heresy than against those who ignored the summons and had to be placed on trial. The tribunal allowed a grace period of about a month for the accused to come to them and confess before the heretic would be arrested and brought to trial. The penances and sentences for those who confessed or were found guilty during the trial were pronounced by the inquisitors at a public ceremony known as the sermo generalis or auto-da-fe and might consist of a public whipping, a pilgrimage to a holy shrine, a monetary fine, or the wearing of a cross. The most severe penalty that the inquisitors could pronounce was life imprisonment; therefore, when they turned over a confessed heretic to the civil authorities, it was quite likely that person would be put to death at the stake.
12/29/09

INQUISITION IN FRANCE

In Medieval Latin, the term inquisitio generally conveyed the sense of investigation or inquest. Charlemagne’s agents, the missi dominici, conducted inquests; William the Conqueror’s survey that produced Domesday Book was an inquisitio. Emperor Henry IV encountered opposition from the Saxons when he attempted to conduct an inquisitio concerning lost royal rights in Saxony. Thus, the investigation of religious dissent, the practice with which the word “inquisition” has been most closely identified, was in a major sense merely another form of investigation by an authority competent to inaugurate an inquest and carry it out.
Other forms of inquisitio included the obligation of bishops to make visitations to the religious institutions of their dioceses and to correct wrongs found during such visitations. Various forms of inquisitio were used in the church, usually against erring or criminous clergy, more frequently after 1200. These instances of the term probably echoed older Roman criminal legal procedure, which from the 1st century tended to supplant an older private accusatorial criminal procedure with one in which the magistrate or judge assumed the responsibility for assembling evidence and carrying out a criminal trial. This process was technically known as cognitio extraordinaria. In another instance, inquisition might be made into the writings of a scholar accused of error.
With the emergence of formalized and institutionalized papal authority in the 11th century and classical canon law in the mid-12th, other dimensions were added to inquisitio. Papally delegated investigators and judges were instituted and in some instances could subdelegate all or part of their judicial authority to others. With the growth of widespread forms of religious dissent, popes urged bishops to investigate heresy in their own dioceses and appointed monastic figures to preach against it. This combination of delegation and appointment was not restricted to matters of dissent, however; popes also appointed preachers of the Crusades and later constituted the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and delegated judicial authority for other matters as well.
Earlier episcopal attempts to discover heresy were hampered by the survival in many regions of the accusatorial procedure—that is, someone had to accuse publicly those he suspected of heresy. In 1162, however, Pope Alexander III wrote to Henry, archbishop of Reims, ordering an archiepiscopal inquest into reported heresy in Flanders. The next year, at the Council of Tours, Alexander included a canon indicating that heretics were to be sought out by local ecclesiastical authorities. Another canon, c. 10 of Tours, stated that “it is expedient to discover new remedies for new maladies,” and some of Alexander III’s other correspondence indicates a concern for the secrecy of heretics and could be considered a rationale for requiring the inquisitio procedure in this instance.
As for the laity, Alexander also allowed the procedure of denunciation—that is, accusation without the responsibilities normally incumbent on the accuser. This was a form of the denunciatio evangelica that with accusation and inquisition came to be regarded as the three standard means of making a crime known to authorities. Denunciations were to be made by suitable people, synodal witnesses—testes synodales, a principle laid out in the well-known decretal of Alexander III, Ad abolendam of 1184, which also insisted that the ordinaries (bishops) of dioceses conduct hearings of these special witnesses for the purpose of discovering heresy.
As the perception of the extent and danger of heresy increased, more and more severe penalties were imposed by both ecclesiastical and temporal powers for those convicted. Crusades against heretics were launched, and the use of the inquest increased during the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216). In 1199, Innocent III appointed the abbots of Cîteaux and other Cistercian monasteries to hold inquests in Metz in matters of dissent, and in the process of rationalizing the prosecution of criminous clerics, Innocent commanded that they be proceeded against by the inquisitio method rather than by accusation. Recent scholarship has indicated how important the changing criminal law of clergy now seems to have been for developments in criminal procedure generally.
In the wake of the Albigensian Crusade, the pope and the king of France collaborated upon the general constitution of inquisitorial tribunals throughout the kingdom, established in the ordonnance Cupientes of 1229. Cupientes established, as Maisonneuve stated, “the inquisitorial procedure, by virtue of which all vassals and officers of the king were obliged specifically to seek out heretics and accomplices to heresy.” In the same year, the Council of Toulouse formalized the episcopal inquisition. With the increasing importance of the mendicant orders, particularly the Dominicans, in the early 13th century, mendicant inquisitors joined mendicant confessors and preachers. After the disastrous inquisitorial experiments of Robert le Bougre in 1233–35, Dominicans began to be used regularly as inquisitors, even in episcopal inquisitions.
Inquisitorial tribunals flourished most effectively in the south of France, but in 1310 Marguerite Porete became the first capital victim of the inquisitors at Paris, followed by the destruction of the Templars in 1316. The case of Jeanne d’Arc in 1431 reflects the increasingly prominent role in the inquisitional tribunals not only of the Dominicans but of the faculty of theology at the University of Paris and continued the close collaboration among episcopal, mendicant, and political authorities.
From the 14th century through the 16th, the faculty of theology of Paris provided most of the inquisitorial activity in France.
12/29/09

The Medieval Inquisition

Pedro Berruguete. Saint Dominic Presiding over an Auto-da-fé (around 1495).
Inquisitions were instituted by the popes. Pope Gregory IX (1227–41) established the Medieval Inquisition in 1229 to try to destroy those people they believed to be heretics. One such group, the Albigensians, admitted two principles as the source of the universe: a good principle that created spiritual reality and a bad principle that created material things. Their way of life and dress was simple, and they attacked the worldliness of the clergy. They also rejected the Old Testament and opposed infant baptism, since it lacked a personal commitment to Christ. Condemned at the Council of Albi in 1176, they continued to survive. Pope Gregory created a powerful body that had almost unlimited powers to persecute those it considered to be heretics. The brutal use of the Inquisition, combined with a war against the Albigensians, led to the mass murder of thousands in the south of France. The Inquisition was also used in the early 14th century to destroy the Knights Templar, who were accused of heresy, and was used against the Waldensians—an early Protestant group who rejected the power of the clergy and who created new communities in the mountains of northern Italy from the 13th century onward.

“On Toleration”

Toleration of religious differences was appealed to by the philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) in his essay “On Toleration,” written during his exile from England in the 1680s. The basic assumptions of Locke’s work are that the teachings of any church are opinions that people hold, and every reasonable opinion should be respected. He argued that people simply choose to join a religion the way they choose to belong to any organization. Religious gatherings and celebrations are permitted on the same terms as a dinner meeting of an extended family or a club. In short, religious rituals are treated in the same way as a secular event: A Eucharistic liturgy in Locke’s view is simply an act of eating bread and wine. Catholics claim that during the Mass the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ (a process called transfiguration). Locke would later claim that Catholics have a right to believe such a thing as long as it does not harm anyone.