If you are going to read only one book on the Inquisition...
...do not make it "God's Jury."
As always, please go here and give me a helpful vote.
God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy
If you are going to read only one book on the Inquisition...
...do not make it "God's Jury."
If you want to learn about real history, there are a number of recent books by recognized scholars on the Inquisition.
Henry Kamen's The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision and
Edward Peters' Inquisition, for example, stress that there was no "The Inquisition," rather there were a number of local inquisitions that began as a response to different local reasons and developed over time in an ad hoc fashion. Ironically, recognized scholars agree that the various inquisitions were generally more "advanced" in terms of legal procedure and protection of the accused, and as impossible as it is for those who are raised on the "myth of the inquisition" to believe, sentences were more lenient than those handed out by secular powers. Nonetheless, the "myth of the Inquisition" lives on despite the fact, and scholars like Peters and Kamen spend substantial ink exploring and correcting that myth.
Murphy's book attempts to set this project back by a century. Murphy admits that his principle interest is not in the actual history of the Inquisition. He admits up-front that most books on the Inquisition grow out of a polemical purpose, and for Murphy that polemical agenda grows out of the "the Vatican's attempt to silence or censor a significant number of prominent theologians." (p. 24.) From this starting point, Murphy proposes to use the Inquisition as a lens for looking at the dysfunctions of the "modern world" and the dysfunctions of the modern world to examine "the Inquisition," and, rest assured, it is "the Inquisition" for Murphy. Notwithstanding the fact that he interviewed Peters and Kamen, and occasionally cherry-picks their books for quotes, he seems not to have noticed that there was no "the Inquisition." See p. 24 ("The advent of the Inquisition offers a lense.")
Murphy's project is an exercise in all kinds of rhetorical fallacies that ought to insult an attentive reader. The book is replete with appeals to "guilt by association" based merely on placing Bad Things next to each other in adjacent sentences. Thus, we have a reference to the 1252 papal bull Ad extirpanda which "justified and encouraged the use of torture in the Inquisition" (Bad Inquisition!) welded in the same sentence to a Department of Justice memo during the Bush administration permitting "enhanced interrogation. (Bad George W. Bush!) So, Murphy gets the benefit of smearing the Bush administration with the Inquisition and smearing the Inquisition with the Bush Administration, depending on which is viewed as being more odious at any particular moment. These kinds of "guilt by association" constructs continue throughout the book with nary an effort ever being made by Murphy to provide context for any of the things that are just known to be bad based on his ideological first principles.
But along the way, Murphy just butchers history. As a real historian, Robert Louis Wilken, observes, "every act of historical understanding is an act of empathy." Murphy doesn't want people to understand because he most definitely doesn't want empathy; he wants people to hate the things he hates. So, he doesn't provide context; things just happen because the actors are evil or ignorant or venal or corrupt, all of which could be true, but hardly exhausts the sum total of historical experience.
Let's go back to that juxtaposition of the Ad extirpanda with the Bush memo on "enhanced interrogation." Murphy tells us that Ad extirpanda "justified and encouraged the use of torture." But this was the 13th Century, for heaven's sake! It wasn't the 21st, where torture has to be covered up with evasive language about "enhanced interrogation." In the 13th Century, torture didn't need to be "justified and encouraged"; it was a commonplace feature of every judicial system in the world! With that kind of context one might wonder suspect - with a little empathy providing a motive for ...what's that word?...curiosity! - that Ad extirpanda was doing something more than "justifying and encouraging" the use of torture, and, by golly, one would find out that Ad extirpanda did something unusual for the world before modernity - it limited the use of torture!
It isn't in Murphy's polemical interest to point this out - without sneering at such efforts as ineffectual and hypocritical - but he ought to know better. He ought to know better because he spends pages talking about the 19th Century historian of the Inquisition, Henry Charles Lea. If he had read Lea's work with a certain amount of empathy, he would have read the following from
Lea's History of the Spanis Inquisition, vol. 3, Book 6, Chapter 7:
"We shall see that occasionally tribunals abused the use of torture, but the popular impression that the inquisitorial torture-chamber was the scene of exceptional refinement in cruelty, of specially ingenious modes of inflicting agony, and of peculiar, persistence in extorting confessions, is an error due to sensational writers who have exploited credulity. The system was evil in conception and in execution, but the Spanish Inquisition, at least, was not responsible for its introduction and, as a rule, was less cruel."
Jeepers! Scenes of torture being used by "sensational writers" who want to "exploit credulity" in readers for polemical purposes. Who would do that? Well, Murphy for one, with his listing of unusual names for instruments of torture - Brazen Bull, Iron Maiden, Pear of Anguish (p. 86) - virtually all of which were invented in the 18th Century to satisfy the curiosity of credulous museum visitors for sensationalism. (If you are curious about this point - Murphy wasn't -
search for "Five Common Misconceptions about the Middle Ages".)
And:
"No torture-chamber in the Inquisition possessed the resources of the corregidor who labored for three hours, in 1612, to obtain from Diego Duke of Estrada confession of a homicide--the water torture, the mancuerda, the potro, hot irons for the feet, hot bricks for the stomach and buttocks, garrotillos known as bone-breakers, the trampa to tear the legs and the bostezo to distend the mouth--and all this was an every-day matter of criminal justice."
We await the book on how it was secular power, and its use of torture, which was somehow, mysteriously involved in ...you know.."making the modern secular world."
At times, Murphy's approach to history makes for silly anachronism; at other times, it makes for questions as to his sincerity. For example, Murphy tells us that notwithstanding "older estimates of the number of people put to death by the Inquisition range to upwards of a million; the true figure may be closer to several tens of thousands," before launching on a story about how arguments about body count quickly become pointless and distasteful because the commandant of Auschwitz insisted that he had killed "two million," not "three million," and thereby adding yet another example of "guilt by grammatical juxtaposition."
So, apparently, we aren't supposed to question this number "tens of thousands of deaths" because we certainly don't want to look like a Nazi. The problem, though, is that "tens of thousands" is high by several magnitudes of error. Murphy does not offer a citation for his "tens of thousands" figure, but Edward Peters says that the "body count" in Spain for the period between 1550 and 1800 was around 3,000. (Inquisition, p. 86.) If we add the approximate 3,000 deaths estimated by Murphy for the earlier, more active period when the Inquisition was founded in Spain , over the course of over 300 years, Spain - the most reviled Inquisition - comes nowhere near to the "tens of thousands" of deaths claimed by Murphy, who doesn't offer a citation to back his claim. Also, Peters - a real scholar as Murphy concedes - points out that the Inquisition handed out a far smaller number of death sentences than comparable secular institutions. (Id.)
Murphy has every reason to desire vagueness on this subject. The most notable finding of Inquisition Revisionists is how few people actually fell within the purview of any Inquisition. Approximately 6,0000 deaths over nearly 400 years is hardly working up a sweat; heck, more Catholics were killed by the Spanish Communists during the Spanish Civil War, or the French Revolution, during a busy summer. Given Murphy's desire to make the Catholic Church - particularly conservative, ultramontane Catholics - the villain of the book, he definitely doesn't want anyone to start doing the math and making that kind of comparison.
Murphy cites to Peters' book, and even offers a brief interview with Peters, which is one of the most interesting portions of Murphy's book, but, apparently, what Peters actually wrote made no impression on Murphy because - let's repeat it - "every act of historical understanding is an act of empathy," and Murphy's book is the opposite of empathetic.
Another amusing bit of irony occurs when Murphy points out that notwithstanding the fact that Catholics were subjected to an Inquisition, no Englishman could recognize anything that an Englishman might do as ever imaginably being considered an Inquisition. (p. 195.) But Murphy demonstrates that same mentality throughout the book! So, when he looks at bad special prosecutors harassing Presidents, he doesn't come up with Fitzpatrick's pursuit of information on the silly Plame affair that resulted in the conviction of "Scooter" Libby, instead he goes to Ken Starr and Bill Clinton. Since Clinton was disbarred for his perjury, but Fitzpatrick came nowhere near Bush, one might think that it would be Fitzpatrick who would get the "grand Inquisitor" label, but to anyone aware of conservative-liberal politics, Murphy's choice is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that every single example of "modernity looked at through the lens of the Inquisition" involves something done by the American Right that the American Left objects to. Like the Englishmen, who couldn't recognize "the Inquisition" in their own country, Murphy can't recognize "the Inquisition" when it is done by the Left, and for all his sighing about the "war on terror" and the Bush administration - like the little bits of information that might have put the history of the inquisitions in to context - he finds little time to mention Obama's use of drones to kill Americans as a "disturbing example" the Inquisition's "legacy to modernity."
I was torn about how to rate this book. Murphy writes well. Some of the stories he tells are interesting. I thought his point about the use of torture as presaging a more rational approach to fact-finding was an idea worth the price of admission. But what finally tore it for me was the sense that he was deliberately trying to dupe me. What kicked off that sense was when I realized the reason that Murphy had dwelt on the mob who tore down the original building that had housed the Roman Inquisition. Normally, the Roman Inquisition doesn't get featured as the villain of the Inquisitions; that honor goes to the Spanish Inquisition. The Roman Inquisition famously had its run in with Galileo, who lived, and Bruno, who didn't, but, in general, the Roman Inquisition doesn't get hit with the anti-semitism and death tolls associated with the Spanish Inquisition. And, yet, Murphy mentions several times that a mob tore down the original Inquisition building.
Searching for an answer, I ran across this statement in Henry Kamen's work, "In ancient regime Spain, no popular movement attacked the Inquisition and no rioters laid a finger on its property." This is consistent with other author's statement about the popular support the Spanish Inquisition enjoyed, and how frequently, the Spanish Inquisition damped popular resentment against minorities.
Murphy interviewed Kamen. He cites this work, but he never mentions this point. Instead he dwells on the burning of the Roman Inquisition's building. At some point, one has to conclude that Murphy is deliberately cherry-picking the sources, and that his work is worse than incidentally and anachronistically biased; it's actually a piece of disinformation that can't be trusted.
That was the straw that broke the camels' back. I cannot recommend this book. I had thought I could so long as I gave the caveat that one should read Kamen and Peters and Lea. I understand that by posting this review, and more importantly, the one star rating, I will receive more unhelpful ratings, but the purpose of reviews is to suggest to objective readers whether they should invest their money, and, more importantly, their limited time in a book-reading project. This book does not deserve that investment. Read Peters and Kamen. After you have done that, and if you have a lot of free time, then read this book if you must.
Torture is horribly corrupting. The power and desire of secular governments to control and categorize people is fearsome. The prospect that we Americans might be trading freedom for security is real and should be a concern, but trying to make it all more awful because somehow it fits into the prejudices of American liberals about religion or Catholicism or the Papacy or whatever amorphous target Murphy defines as the snake that deprived modernity of its original innocence is really, really silly, and, insofar as this project is based on distortion, Murphy's book undermines whatever real lesson we could learn about the evil of torture, or of power, or of spying, or whatever it is that pulls Murphy's alarm bell.
Long story short, this is a political hatchet-job. Worse still, it insults the hard work done by true scholars who have tried to wrest the actual history of the Inquisition from the grip of dishonest polemicists.
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