The background to the Inquisition…

“For us, the Inquisition is a phenomenon that certainly deserves criticism, yet even such a historical phenomenon can be fathomed only when we look at it within the framework of its historical context and do not try to measure yesterday by today’s standards.  An essential step is to realize the unity of the medieval world, in which exclusion from the Church simultaneously meant exclusion from all human society. 

This meant, in turn, that if someone attacked a dogma, he was attacking at the same time the foundations of the societal order and hence was considered a danger to the public.  Only against this background can we understand also that the state (and not the Church) took the initiative in the Inquisition and that broad sectors of the population – including Luther and Calvin, by the way – considered it lawful.

An initial question arises in connection with the moment when the Inquisition began – namely, only after centuries of proceeding in a relatively mild manner.  How could the practice of coercion become a method of fighting heresy?  The historical answer requires an analysis of the situation in Christian antiquity.

In late antiquity, Church and empire were two clearly distinct, noninterchangeable entities, however close a mutual relationship they may have formed in the post-Constantinian period [ie after the Emperor Constantine converted].  Even when the Roman Empire had become Christian, it remained an autonomous political structure that owed neither its origin nor its continuation to Christianity....Thus, even long after the days of Constantine, it was still possible for pagans, Jews and Christians to live together in the one Roman Empire as citizens with equal rights.  Similarly, the heretic who had been excluded from communion with the Church could still find a basis for his civic and social life in the empire, provided that he complied with its laws.

This changed fundamentally when the old empire collapsed under the onslaught of the barbarians.  Migrating hordes streamed into the center of the ancient world, initiating an extremely complex and differentiated process of assimilation, the final result of which was a synthesis of antiquity and Teutonic culture, with the Gospel of Christ as the formative principle.  This new Western culture, which in the empire of Charlemagne made its first impressive appearance as a force encompassing the West, was essentially a Christian, ecclesiastical culture.  Indeed, it was the Church that had preserved the treasures of ancient learning in the stormy times preceding the break with antiquity and had handed them on to the new peoples from the north and the east.  Charlemagne’s most important counselors were men of the Church, and his laws – the famous capitularies – often read like conciliar canons or the admonitions of a preacher.  This interpenetration of empire and Church found its most striking expression in the Carolingian imperial synods, where great men of the spiritual and temporal realms consulted and reached decisions about spiritual and temporal matters.

....The world was no longer divided into two separate realms – empire and Church; from now on, royal power and spiritual authority were ordered to each other, like the foci of an ellipse.  One single human society had come into being, which was called the Church and, as of the ninth century, Christianitas (that is, Christendom).”

To be continued…

From “Light and Shadows:  Church History amid Faith, Fact and Legend” by Fr Walter Brandmüller, president of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences, Ch. VI, pp. 100-102.  Translated by Michael J. Miller.

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