Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Author Cullen Murphy
Q: Why the Inquisition—and why now?
A: This question gets to the very heart of the book. We’ve all
heard of the Inquisition—and we all remember the Monty Python
line, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition"—but we tend to
think of it as something safely confined to the past, something
"medieval" that in an enlightened age we’ve moved far beyond. But
that’s exactly the wrong way to think about the Inquisition.
Rather than some throwback, it’s really one of the first
“modern” institutions. This attempt by the Catholic Church to
deal with its enemies, inside and outside, made use of tools
that hadn’t really existed before, tools that have only improved
and that are part of our lives today.
Q: Like what?
A: Well, let’s start with what an inquisition is: it’s a
disciplinary effort designed to enforce a particular point of
view, and it’s built in such a way that it can last for a long
time—in this case, for centuries. To last for a long time you
need to have some sort of functioning bureaucracy. You need to
have trained people—"technocrats," we might call them today—who
can run the machinery, and you need to be able to keep training
new people. You need to be able to watch and keep track of
individuals, know what they think, collect and store
information, and then be able to put your hands on the
information when you need it—you need what today we’d call
search engines. And you need to be able to exert control over
ideas you don’t like—in a word, censorship. It’s quite a feat
of organization. We take these kinds of capabilities for granted
today. With the Inquisition, you can watch them being invented.
Q: Go back to the beginning and fill us in—when did the
Inquisition start, and why?
A: Over a period of about seven hundred years, there were many
Inquisitions ed under Church auspices, and they varied in
intensity from era to era and place to place. That said, you can
divide the Inquisition into three basic phases. The first of
them, called the Medieval Inquisition, is usually given a
starting date of 1231, when the pope issued certain founding
decrees. It was mainly concerned with Christian heretics,
especially in southern France, whom the Church saw as a growing
threat. Then, in the late fifteenth century, came the Spanish
Inquisition. It was run by clerics but effectively controlled by
the Spanish crown, not by the pope, and its main targets were
Jews and to a lesser extent Muslims. After that, in the
mid-sixteenth century, came the Roman Inquisition, which was
run from the Vatican, and was mainly concerned with Protestants.
This is a very simplified outline. And all kinds of people were
caught up in the Inquisition’s machinery—Jews and heretics, yes,
but also witches, sexuals, rationalists, and intellectuals.
Q: How did the Inquisition work?
A: In the early days inquisitors would arrive in a particular
locale and ask people to come forward to confess their misdeeds
or to point the finger at others. Because there was a "sell by"
date—anyone who came forward by a certain time would be treated
with lenience—a dynamic of denunciation was set into motion.
Interrogation was at the center of the inquisitorial
process—hence the Inquisition’s name. The accused was not told
the charges against him or the names of the witnesses. The
questioning often made use of torture. Detailed records were
kept. Most of those who came before tribunals received sentences
short of death—for instance, they had to wear a special
penitential gown for a year or two. But tens of thousands were
burned at the stake for their beliefs. In all, hundreds of
thousands of people passed through the tribunal process. The
psychological imprint on society would have been profound. And
as time went on, the Inquisition in some places became a fixture,
with its own buildings and with officials in permanent
residence. In some places, the networks of informers were complex
and dense.
Q: Burning at the stake frankly doesn’t seem all that
contemporary. Why do you say that the Inquisition is
essentially "modern"?
A: I’ll start by asking a different question: why was there
suddenly an Inquisition when there hadn’t been one before?
After all, intolerance, hatred, and suspicion of the "other,"
often based on religious and ethnic differences, had always
been with us. Throughout history, these realities had led to
persecution and violence. But the ability to sustain a
persecution—to give it staying power by giving it an
institutional life—did not appear until the Middle Ages. Until
then, the tools to stoke and manage those omnipresent embers of
hatred did not exist. Once these capabilities do exist,
inquisitions become a fact of life. They are not confined to
religion; they are political as well—just look at the
totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Or, on a far
lesser scale, the anti-communist witch hunts. The targets can
be large or small. An inquisition impulse can quietly take root
in the very systems of government and civil society that order
our lives.
Let’s think about those tools—the ability to put people under
surveillance; to compile records and databases, to conduct
systematic interrogations, to bend the law to your needs, to
lodge your activities in the hands of a self- perpetuating
bureaucracy, and to underpin all this with an ideology of moral
certainty. The modern world has advanced far beyond the
medieval one on all these fronts. Look at what governments can do
when it comes to listening in on private conversations, or what
corporations can do to distill personal information from the
Internet, or what law can do on a hint of a
suspicion.
Q: In the wake of 9/11, torture has certainly made a comeback.
A: Yes, it has, and it has done so for the same reason it always
does: when the stakes seem very high, and when the people who
want to do the torturing believe fervently that their larger
cause has the full weight of morality on its side, then all
other considerations are irrelevant. If you’re absolutely certain
that your cause is blessed by God or history, and that it’s
under mortal threat, then in some minds torture becomes easy to
justify. The Inquisition tried to put limits on torture, but
the limits were always pushed. Thus, if the rules said you could
torture only once, you could get around that obstacle by defining
a second session of torture as a "continuance" of the first
session.
That’s how it is with torture—once it’s deemed permissible in
some special situation, the bounds of permissibility keep being
stretched. There’s always some desired piece of information just
beyond reach, and there’s always the hope that one more little
turn of the screw will secure it. The Bush administration pushed
the limits not only in practice but also in theory. In its
view, an act wasn’t torture unless it caused organ failure,
permanent impairment, or death. Ironically, that’s a far
narrower definition than what the Inquisition would have
accepted. The Inquisition understood that torture began well
short of that threshold—and if it was reached, it had to stop.
