§ 86. THE INQUISITION. ITS ORIGIN AND P0BPOSE. 517
witches in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the Spanish Inquisition organized in 1480. * The Inquisition with its penalties had among its ardent advocates the best and most enlightened men of their times, Innocent III., Fred erick II., Louis IX., Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas. A parallel is found in the best Roman emperors, who lent themselves to the bloody repression of the early Church. The good king, St. Louis, declared that when a layman heard the faith spoken against, he should draw his sword and thrust it into the offender's body up to the hilt.2
The Inquisition was a thoroughly papal institution, wrought out in all its details by the popes of the thirteenth century, beginning with Innocent III. and not ending with Boniface VIII. In his famous manual for the treatment of heresy the Inquisitor, Bernard Guy, a man who in spite of his office elicits our respect,3 declares that the " office of the Inquisition has its dignity from its origin for it is derived, commissioned, and known to have been instituted by the Apostolic see it self." This was the feeling of the age.
Precedent enough there was for severe temporal measures. Con stan tine banished the Arians and burned their books. Theodosius the Great fixed death as the punishment for heresy. The Priscillianists were executed in 385. The great authority of Augustine was appealed to and his fatal interpretation of the words of the parable " Compel them to come in," 4 justifying force in the treatment of the Donatists, was made to do service far beyond what that father prob ably ever intended. From the latter part of the twelfth century, councils advocated the death penalty, popes in sisted upon it, and Thomas Aquinas elaborately defended it. Heresy, so the theory and the definitions ran, was a crime
1 This is the date given by Lea, Span. Inq., I. 161. Sixtus IV. author ized the Spanish Inquisition, Nov. 1, 1478.
2 De Joinville, Bonn's ed., p. 362.
8 Practica, p. 176, habet excellentiam altitudinis ex sita origine, quia im mediate a sede apostolica dirivatur, committitur et noscitur institutum.
4 Cogite intrare. Ep., 03, ad Vincent, contra Gaudent., I. 1. On the other hand he expressed himself against, putting upon them the sufferings they deserved. Ep., 100, ad Donat., etc.; Migne, 33. 360.
518 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
the Church could not tolerate. It was Satan's worst blow.
Innocent III. wrote that as treason was punished with death and confiscation of goods, how much more should these punishments be meted out to those who blaspheme God and God's Son. A crime against God, so he reasoned, is surely a much graver misdemeanor than a crime against the secular power.1
The calm discussion, to which the eminent theologian, Thomas Aquinas, subjects the treatment due heretics, was made at least a quarter of a century after the Inquisition was put into full force. Leaning back upon Augustine and his interpretation of "compel them to come in," he de clared in clearest terms that heretics deserved not only to be separated from the Church by excommunication, but to be excluded from the earth by judicial death.2 Errors in geometry do not constitute mortal guilt, but errors in matters of faith do. As falsifiers of coin are put to death, much more may they justly be put to death who perform the more wicked act of corrupting the faith. The heretic of whose reclamation the Church despairs, it delivers over to the secular tribunal to be executed out of the world. The principle was that those who were baptized were under the immediate jurisdiction of the Church and the Church might deal with them as it saw fit. It was not till the fourteenth century, that the jurisdiction of the Church and the pope was extended to the heathen by Augustinus Triumphus, d. 1328,3 and other papal writers. Sovereigns were forbidden
1 Ep., II. 1. Hurter, II. 264, thus describes Innocent's attitude to incor rigible heretics. They are fallen under the power of Satan, should be deprived of all their possessions, and the bodies of the dead dug up from consecrated ground. Secular princes were to draw the sword against them, for the Lord has confided it to the mighty for the protection of the pious and the dismay of evil-doers and nowhere could it be put to better use than upon those who were
-seeking to lure others away from the true faith and rob them of eternal life.
2 Meruerunt non solum ab ecclesia per excommunicationem separari sed etiamper mortem a mundo excludi. Summa. II. Ft. II. 11 ; Migne'sed., III. 109.
8 This is the interpretation Hefele puts upon the passage, V. 716.