The Grand Inquisitor's Manual Read Online Free PDF Page A

being carved into his flesh and thereby learns why he was condemned in the first place. “Enlightenment,” the prison official concludes in a moment of unwitting self-parody, “comes to the most dull-witted.” 24
    The artful device on display in Kafka’s story is an appropriate symbol of the Inquisition, as Kafka himself surely intended it to be, and for reasons that will become increasingly clear as we move forward in history from the origins of the Inquisition to its reverberations in our own world. Like the bewildered defendant whose ordeal is depicted by Kafka in The Trial— “You can’t defend yourself against this court, all you can do is confess”—the victims of the Inquisition were subjected to the workings of an all-powerful tribunal that operated with “an Alice-in-Wonderland arbitrariness.” Indeed, Kafka can be regarded as the poet laureate of the Inquisition, if only because its absurdities and grotesqueries—as it was conceived in the febrile imaginations of the first inquisitors, and as it actually operated in the here and now—can aptly be described as “Kafkaesque.” 25
    “[T]he story of the Inquisition reads,” observes G. G. Coulton, “sometimes like a tale from a madhouse.” Yet we cannot dismiss the Inquisition as a figment of anyone’s imagination. It is not merely a myth fabricated by parlor propagandists and the writers of bodice rippers, as its modern apologists argue, nor can we comfort ourselves with the argument that the flesh-and-blood inquisitors never really succeeded in carrying out the master plan for persecution that is writ large in the inquisitor’s handbooks. Men, women, and children in the thousands and tens of thousands suffered and died at the hands of the pious friar-inquisitors, and the death toll is immeasurably greater if we include the latter-day inquisitors who followed in their footsteps, and still do. 26
    The Inquisition has imprinted itself on the history of Western civilization in ways that are sometimes overlooked but can never be eradicated. To be sure, it was not the first or only tribunal that acted cruelly and capriciously in the name of “Mercy and Justice,” but the routine use of torture under the imprimatur of the Church has been blamed for encouraging the secular authorities across western Europe to do the same. The fact that England and the Netherlands far outpaced Spain, Portugal, and Italy in commerce and technology has been explained by some historians as yet another unintended consequence of the Inquisition; after all, enterprise and invention proved to be more vigorous in places that were beyond the reach of the inquisitor and “the power of fanaticism to warp the intellect of the most acute,” according to Henry Charles Lea. 27
    The story of the Inquisition, however, is also the story of flesh-and-blood human beings who suffered at the hands of men whose fears and fantasies were acted out in real life. We know them by name: Jerónima la Franca is the woman who was condemned as a heretic because she ate couscous, Arnaud Assalit is the bookkeeper who added up the cost of ropes, straw, and wood for burning a heretic alive, and Arnauld Amalric is the abbot who, when asked by the soldiers under his command how to tell a Christian from a heretic, answered by issuing the chilling command: “Kill them all; God will know his own.” 28
    Into the world where they lived and died, we now go.

THE CATHAR KISS
     
Kill them all; God will know his own.
ARNAULD AMALRIC,
Abbot of Cîteaux, 1209
 
 
    A t Christmastide in the year 1022, the townsfolk of Orléans in the Loire Valley of France were distracted from their seasonal revelries by an ugly rumor. A strange and dangerous cult had supposedly been detected among the highest-ranking citizens of the town, and the initiates were said to be practicing self-invented rites and rituals that included incestuous sex orgies, infanticide, and cannibalism. The suspects included monks and nuns, gentlemen