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

agitated was the crowd that King Robert stationed the queen herself by the doors “to prevent the common people from killing them inside the church.” Even so, someone in the crowd raised his staff and struck out the eye of the queen’s former confessor as the convicted heretics were herded by armed guards to the place of execution. The condemned heretics, apparently convinced that their salvation was at hand, are said to have laughed out loud in the face of imminent death. 6
    The execution itself was an improvised affair. The condemned men and women were locked inside a cottage that stood outside the town walls, and the cottage was set afire and allowed to burn to the ground. Paul reports that the “evil ashes”—that is, the remains of the babies who supposedly had been killed and eaten during the cult’s orgiastic rituals—were tossed on the flames, too. At last, on the order of the bishop, the bones of one of the cultists, who had died of natural causes before he could be tried and burned alive, were exhumed and dumped into the pits where garbage and human waste were buried.
    The trial and execution of the heretics at Orléans took place more than a century before the Inquisition was called into formal existence by the Church. But the incident allows us to see how the mere existence of free-thinking men and women was regarded by the guardians of law and order as an intolerable threat, and how brutally and cynically the authorities were willing to act in suppressing any belief they regarded as deviant. We can see, too, that many of the moving parts of the inquisitorial machine were already available for use. The whispered accusations, the testimony of infiltrators and informers, the high drama of the trial, the frenzy of the crowd, the burning of condemned heretics, both dead and alive, the improbable beliefs and practices attributed to the cultists—and even the slanderous charges of ritual murder and incestuous sex orgies—will be seen again and again in the long, terrible history of the Inquisition itself and its successors in later times.
    Exactly here we begin to see the footprints of the rude beast that was already slouching toward Bethlehem.
     
     
    The self-invented gnostics of Orléans, as it turns out, were hardly the only people in medieval Christendom who were inspired to borrow or invent a shiny new set of religious beliefs and practices to supplement those provided by the Roman Catholic church. Contrary to its own shrill claims, the Church was never “catholic” in the literal sense of the word: “one Universal Church of the faithful, out of which there is absolutely no salvation.” To the distress of the pope and the princes of the Church, the men and women who lived under their authority were always ready to embrace some rich and strange ideas of their own. To understand the Inquisition at all, it must be seen as a panicky and ultimately futile effort to establish a monopoly in religion rather than as an effort to preserve one that already existed.
    Here we find not only the starting point of the Inquisition but also the great besetting irony of all religion. The core idea of monotheism is the sure conviction that there is only One True God and only one proper way to worship the deity. Yet none of the three great monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—has ever managed to win the hearts and minds of its own followers, much less the whole world. The gray matter of Homo sapiens seems to be hardwired to produce a rich flowering of religious ideas and images, and no amount of brute force has ever been able wholly to suppress them, not now and not at any point since the first Cro-Magnon shaman painted the first totemic image of a bison on a cave wall. 7
    The competition among various strains of true belief in medieval Christianity was sometimes almost comical. The Roman Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox church, for example, each claimed to be the sole source of religious authority