The Inquisition: A Political and Military Study of its Establishment

What was the society in which the Inquisition, that great attack upon human liberty, succeeded? To answer this, in the case of that other great attack of which we are the unhappy spectators, it would be necessary to estimate first the chief forces active in the world, and second their modification by local circumstance in America. A man, having done this, is able to get a just idea of Prohibition. He must get into the picture of the great nineteenth century expansion of civilization, and the fact that this expansion was, in great part, due to increased command over material nature through what we call “science.” He must see, contemporary with this, the rapid decay of Protestantism, its abandonment of theology and concentration upon taboos. Given then, in his mind, a clear notion of the extreme importance attributed by our society to power over material things, in which power it has so clearly surpassed all other known societies, and from this the resulting importance granted to the opinions of the masters of this “science” which has done such fine things (although morally, and therefore politically, such men may be, and often are, grossly ignorant and stupid); given further a true estimate of our warped Protestant morals now consisting principally of savage taboos, and such a man is able to estimate justly the “Prohibition” movement.

What, then, were the forces which led to the very similar “Inquisition” movement?

First of all, the time felt itself strong and confident. We are apt to think of the world in which the Inquisition was set up as feeble and crack-brained, shrouding itself in elaborately useless pageantry. But this is error, due partly to our pre-occupation with our own age, and with the Imperial Roman time which of all past ages most nearly resembles our own in high energy, strict government, frequent communication, positivist view of life and consequent lack of any defined general code of morals. In reality, most of the fantastic trappings belong to the later Middle Ages, the Middle Ages in their decline, and only because we do not see the stagnant “Dark Ages” clearly enough do we fail to grasp the height and suddenness of the mediæval rise. In the opening years of the thirteenth century, men rightly felt themselves to be a society growing and expanding (as we say in our contemporary jargon “progressing”) so rapidly on all sides that they must have been almost dizzy with a success so sudden and vast. Perhaps not even at the beginning of our own twentieth century did the slope just climbed seem so high, and so steep, and the future so full of the promise of continued ascent. For, as in the early years of the twentieth century, there was no sign that the expanding movement had reached its term. It was still going on, full of the promise of further achievement, and men hardly seemed to have the right to be anything but hopeful.