Book Review

The Spanish Inquisition

by Jean Plaidy

     Religious people often like to make the claim that without religion there would be no morality. Such a claim does not address the problem of why, if it is true, that there can be so many religious people who are immoral. Take the Spanish Inquisition, for example. As a bureaucratic arm of the Catholic Church, surviving a span of time from the Middle Ages to the Napoleonic Wars, they engaged in such crimes and human rights violations as torture, mass murder, extortion, blackmail, ethnic cleansing, and sexual abuse. If they had truly been the moral arbiters of the Spanish Kingdom, they would not have so freely indulged in such atrocities that make your average organized crime family look like a gang of saints. In fact you wouldn’t be wrong to compare the Inquisition to the Nazis for a long list of reasons, rabid anti-Semitism being one of them. Jean Plaidy’s The Spanish Inquisition does a sufficient job of showing just how immoral that political organization really was while analyzing the mechanisms of their practices and motivations, further condemning them as yet another corrupt and vicious criminal element of human history.

This nicely bound impression is actually a facsimile edition of three different books written by Jean Plaidy, a woman who more famously found success as an author of historical romance novels under the pen name Victoria Holt. The first part examines the precursors, origins, and rise of the Spanish Inquisition. She begins with a spasm of righteous anger directed towards the sadists who ran this institution. From her own Christian point of view, she accuses them of ignoring their own religious doctrines for the sake of maintaining their own power and control over Spanish society. Plaidy further examines the first medieval Papal Inquisitions that took place across Europe. From there she details the practices and methods of the Inquisitors, how they used torture as a method of extracting false confessions from so-called heretics, then later to publicly humiliate them and burn them at the stake in public spectacles called autos de fe. They Inquisition dominated Spanish society, ruling them by fear, and enforcing strict conformity of thought, speech, and action. In its details and narrative, this fist section is the best and most informative part of this book.

The second section is of mixed value. On one hand, it gives a strong explanation of how King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella used the Inquisition to help them consolidate and solidify the Spanish Kingdom. Led by the bigoted and sadistic Primate Torquemada, they persecuted minority populations to ensure the uniformity of the Spanish populace. They first went after the most marginalized citizens, Jewish converts to Christianity, and punished them for allegedly practicing Judaism clandestinely after being baptized into the Catholic faith. Soon after, the Inquisition went after Jews who did not convert and the Islamic Moors who also insisted on maintaining their own traditions. Sadly, both groups of people were either forced to convert, chased out of the country, or executed en masse. Unfortunately for the Spanish Kingdom, these wars and ethnic cleansings resulted in an economic crash because all the farmers and merchants were quickly eliminated from society without being replaced. Conservatives of our day who support an anti-pluralistic agenda might want to look at a past example like this to see a possible consequence of such a political program. Cultural diversity often leads to more stable societies rather than the other way around.

On the other hand, this second section of the book goes into a lot of detail about the political intrigues and affairs of Ferdinand and Isabella and their sidekick Ximenes, the man who replaced Torquemada when he died. These passages are not poorly written or even uninteresting, but Plaidy strays too far away from the subject of the Spanish Inquisition to make them relevant to the overall subject matter of the book.

The third part is the weakest. There is a lot about the Spanish monarchy and the succession of kings and queens that came after Ferdinand and Isabella. Again, a lot of this is not directly relevant to the Inquisition. There are, however, a lot of anecdotal stories about the corruption and the wrongdoings of that most hated institution. There are some stories about the Inquisition’s weak attempts at spreading abroad and into the Spanish colonies too. But after a while, these passages read more like lists of terrible things the Inquisition did and less like an interesting engagement with history.

Jean Plaidy’s The Spanish Inquisition gets off to a very strong start but dwindles into chore-like writing by the end. Still, it is a strong and solid analytical work of history that serves as a good overview of this shameful but fascinating sector of Europe, bridging the medieval with the early modern world. By extension, it is easy to see how this piece fits into the puzzle of 20^th century atrocities, totalitarian regimes, the World Wars, nationalist movements, and the modernist revolt in favor of the individual’s liberation. And as for the religious question, you may be left wondering how religion could be the foundation of morality when it seems, rather, that it has so often been the cause of immorality, cruelty, and corruption more than anything else. The Spanish Inquisition is just one of a multitude of examples supporting the latter side of that ethical equation. If anything, the Spanish Inquisition demonstrates why the separation of church and state became such an important idea for the Founding Fathers of America and why history is needed to remind us of this. 

 

Book Review

Inquisition: The Reign of Fear

by Toby Green

     If you don’t have a low opinion of humanity before reading this book, you will when you finish. Inquisition: The Reign of Fear by Toby Green is a history of The Spanish Inquisition and an analysis of why it happened. Some of the themes he covers are the use of fear for social engineering, the use of religion for the ideological unification of a society, and the Inquisition as a precursor to the totalitarian governments of the 20^th century, namely Nazi Germany. He also gives a sufficient analysis of how scapegoating is used for the purpose of social cohesion.

The Spanish Inquisition began roughly in the 15^th century. Papal Inquisitions had already taken place in the persecution of heretical groups like the Cathars and the Albigenses, as well as with the military order known as the Knights Templar. Green skips over most of the Papal Inquisitions and jumps straight into what happened in Spain and Portugal, which was part of the Spanish kingdom until the later war of separation. In their bid to unify the Iberian peninsula, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella established a bureaucracy to uproot elements of “cultural impurity” in their lands.

The first target of this Spanish Inquisition was the conversos, Jews who had converted to Catholicism for the sake of assimilating to Spanish culture. These conversos, who were usually wealthy, were accused of practicing Judaism in secret after being baptized. Many of these conversos fled to Portugal to escape the autos da fe, public spectacles in which these alleged heretics were burned alive in public to scare Spanish citizens into obedience. As the Portuguese set sail for distant lands, many of these conversos went abroad as colonialists to escape further persecution when the Inquisition took over in Lisbon. Later victims of this terrorist bureaucracy were Muslims, homosexuals, Lutherans, and people accused of practicing witchcraft.

Green does a good job of writing about the historical events and political context of the Spanish Inquisition. He also does an adequate job of analyzing the social and psychological forces that were related to it. He points out that the torture of the accused and the public autos da fe were effective tools of controlling the beliefs and behavior of the monarchy’s subjects; the threat of torture was enough to keep people submissive and obedient while the display of religious processions that ended with burning heretics alive gave visual proof of what could happen to anyone who stepped out of line. He also demonstrates the psychological impact of rigid ideological purity. When the Inquisition felt they held the ultimate truth, a truth that is so lofty that reaching it is impossible, they felt justified in doing whatever they saw fit to cleanse society of its impurities. The result was censorship, limitations on human rights, persecution of marginalized people, sadism, and mass murder. Being placed above the law, the Inquisition also became corrupt, adhering to a set of double standards by embezzling property from those they persecuted, and also indulging in quid pro quo sexual favors and bribery in exchange for freedom from punishment. Reading this can make you think that the writings of the Marquis de Sade were so scandalous in his time because he was merely articulating the atrocities the European aristocracy had been committing against the lower classes for thousands of years.

Some of the weaker parts of this book involve Green’s psychoanalysis of people subject to the oppression of the Spanish Inquisition. He uses Freudian concepts of hysteria, sexual suppression, paranoia, and neurosis to explain some of the bizarre behaviors indulged in by the religiously-minded in Spain. His analyses actually make sense, but he brushes over them with so little detail that they come off as a little sketchy and based on hasty conclusions. Despite being Freudian concepts, they still make sense in this narrative, but Green is no psychologist and this part of the book is an amateurish attempt at what he sets out to prove.

The biggest flaw in this history is the way the author almost leaves the Catholic church out of the story. It is true that the bishops gave control of prosecution for heretics over to the secular arm of the Spanish government, but little else is said about the church’s role in all this. Almost nothing is said about the Papal Inquisition that preceded the Spanish Inquisition and, by Green’s account, the church remained silent for the almost 400 years that the Spanish Inquisition existed. It is hard to imagine that an institutionalized form of torture and persecution would be ignored by the religious authorities it was meant to defend. The author appears to downplay the role of the church, emphasizing the political nature of the persecution, for the sake of avoiding indulgence in religious intolerance. The Catholic church obviously had opinions on the Inquisition and they were enablers at the very least, so leaving them out of the story is not fair to students of history who need to learn the whole story. What happened needs to be said and if Catholics and their apologists are offended, they should make the effort to reflect on why that might be so rather than attacking historians whose job it is to tell the truth.

What Toby Green is successful in demonstrating is that the Spanish Inquisition was used as a tool of political domination by the Spanish monarchy. In Hannah Arendt’s masterwork The Origins of Totalitarianism, the defining characteristics of authoritarian government are laid out in the final section. Many of them overlap with, and are rooted in, the Spanish Inquisition. These include, infallible leadership, anti-intellectualism, scapegoating, conspiracy theories, censorship, control of information, purging of unwanted social elements, fear mongering, intolerance of dissenting opinions, and encouraging citizens to spy on each other. The connections are so easy to see that it is a surprise that Hannah Arendt had so little to say about the Inquisition, especially since anti-Semitism was such a rampant part of it, and it is also a surprise to see that Toby Green had nothing to say about Hannah Arendt, despite his opinion that the Spanish Inquisition was a form of proto-fascism that reached full fruition in 20^th century Europe.

Sometimes it is all too easy to look at history and see parallels with our contemporary political climate. The human mind evolved to see patterns and sometimes those patterns are not real while at other times they are. Looking at America’s Republican party today, it is not hard to see elements of latent fascism in their mentality. We can see the presence of conspiracy theories, anti-intellectualism, and the scapegoating of immigrants, Muslims, scientists, and secular humanists. Most alarming is the conservative Christian idea that a national religion is necessary to unify the state. Arendt also said that the identification of one political party as the only legitimate representative of the nation is a symptom of fascism. In America that political party would be the Republicans and in the medieval Kingdom of Spain and Portugal that state would be the monarchy supported by the Catholic church. If that isn’t enough, remember that torture was used against Muslims in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those wars were wildly popular with the right-wing sector of America. That’s not to say the Democrats don’t have their authoritarian impulses because they certain do, but if another bureaucratic inquisition were to be established, it would be more likely to come from the right. Toby Green’s Inquisition: The Reign of Fear is not a book about contemporary politics, but considering it was written fairly recently, it can be looked at as a warning that we might be on the wrong path of making the same stupid mistakes the human race has continuously made. Just be careful of what you support.