Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition. Rafael Sabatini

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СКАЧАТЬ now knew peace and enjoyed the fullest liberty. Upon that followed a period of severe oppression, initiated by Decius, continued by Valerian and Aurelian, and reaching something of a climax under Diocletian, in the dawn of the fourth century, when the Christians endured the cruellest and most ferocious of all these persecutions. But the end of their sufferings was at hand, and with the accession of Constantine in 312 a new era began for Christianity. Constantine, upheld by the Christians as their saviour, in admitting the inevitable predominance which the new religion had obtained in rather less than three hundred years, was compelled to recognize the rights of its votaries not only to existence but to authority.

      Legends surround the history of this emperor. The most popular relates how, when he was marching against Maxentius, his rival for the throne, desponding in the consciousness of his own inferior force, there appeared at sunset a fiery cross in the heavens with the inscription ΕΝ ΤΟΓΤΩ ΝΙΚΑ—IN THIS SIGN YOU CONQUER. And it is claimed that as a consequence of this portent, whose injunction he obeyed, he sought instruction in Christianity, was baptized and made public avowal of that faith. Others maintain that he was reared in Christianity by his mother, St. Helena—she who made an expedition to the Holy Land to recover the true cross, and who is said to have built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; whilst others still assert that Constantine did not receive baptism until at the point of death, and that throughout his life, whilst undoubtedly favouring Christians, he continued in the pagan religion in which he had been educated by his father.

      The truth probably lies midway. During the early years of his reign Constantine not only pursued a middle course, according religious liberty to all sects, but, himself, whilst leaning strongly towards Christianity, retained his imperial dignity of High-priest of the polytheistic Roman cult, and the title “Pontifex Maximus,” which later—together with so much else of pagan origin—was appropriated by the Christians and bestowed upon their chief bishop. But in 313-14 he refused to celebrate the ludi seculares, and in 330 he issued an edict forbidding temple-worship, whilst the Christian Council of Nicæa, in 325, was held undoubtedly under his auspices.

      From the very moment that the new religion found itself recognized and invested not only with civil rights but actually with power, from the very moment that the Christian could rear his head and go openly and unafraid abroad, from that very moment do we find him engaging in persecutions against the votaries of other cults—against pagan, Jew, and heretic. For although Christianity was but in the beginning of the fourth century of its existence, not only had it spread irresistibly and mightily in spite of the repressive measures against it, but it was already beginning to know dismemberment and divisions in its own body. Indeed, it has been computed that the number of schisms in the fourth century amounted to no less than ninety.

      Of these the most famous is that of Arius, a priest of Alexandria, who denied that Christ was God Incarnate, accounting Him no more than divinely inspired, the first and the highest of the sons of men. Although already denounced by the Synod that met at Alexandria in 321, so great had been the spread of this doctrine that the Œcumenical Council of Nicæa was convoked especially to deal with it. It was then condemned as heretical, and the Articles of Faith were defined and set down in the Nicene Creed, which is recited to this day.

      Other famous heresies were the Manichæan, the Gnostic, the Adamite, the Severist, and the Donatist; and to these were soon to be added, amongst others, the Pelagian and the Priscilliantist.

      Perhaps the Manichæans’ chief claim to celebrity lies in the fact that the great St. Augustine of Tagaste, when he abandoned the disorders of his youth, entered Christianity through this sect, which professed a form of it vitiated by Sun-worship and Buddhism.

      The other heresies—with the exception of the Pelagian—were, in the main, equally fantastic. The Gnostic heresy, with its many subdivisions, was made up of mysticism and magic, and founded upon Zoroastrian notions of dualism, of the two powers of good and evil, light and darkness. To the power of evil it attributed all creation save man, whose soul was accounted of divine substance. The Adamites claimed to be in the state of original innocency of Adam before the fall; they demanded purity in their followers, rejected marriage, which they urged could never have come into existence but for sin, and they expelled from their Church all sinners against their tenets, even as Adam and Eve had been expelled from Eden. The Severists denied the resurrection of the flesh, would not accept the acts of the apostles, and carried purity to fantastic lengths. The Soldiers of Florinus denied the Last Judgment, and held it as an undeniable truth that the resurrection of the flesh lay entirely in reproduction.

      The Pelagians were the followers of Pelagius, a British monk who settled in Rome towards the year 400, and his heresy at least was founded upon rational grounds. He denied the doctrine of original sin, maintained that every human being was born in a state of innocency, and that his perseverance in virtue depended upon himself. He found numerous followers, and for twenty years the conflict raged between Pelagians and the Church, until Pope Zosimus declared against them and banished Pelagius from Rome.

      From Constantine onwards Christianity steadily maintains her ascendancy, and her earliest assertion of her power is to bare the sword of persecution, oblivious of the lofty protests against it which she, herself, had uttered, the broad and noble advocacy of tolerance which she had urged in the days of her own affliction. We find Optatus urging the massacre of the Donatists—who claimed that theirs was the true Church—and Constantine threatening with the stake any Jew who should affront a Christian and any Christian who should become a Jew. We find him demolishing the churches of the Arians and Donatists, banishing their priests and forbidding under pain of death the propagation of their doctrines.

      The power of Christianity suffered one slight check thereafter, under the tolerant rule of Julian the Apostate, who reopened the pagan temples and restored the cult of the old gods; but it rose again to be finally and firmly established under Theodosius in 380.

      Now we see the pagan temples not only closed, but razed to the ground, the images broken and swept away, their worship, and even private sacrifice, forbidden under pain of death. From Libanius we may gather something of the desolation which this spread among the pagan peasant-folk. Residing at a distance from the great centres where doctrines were being expounded, they found themselves bereft of the old gods and without knowledge of the new. Their plight is a far more pathetic one than that of the Arians, Manichæans, Donatists, and all other heretics against whom there was a similar enactment.

      It is now, at this early date, that for the first time we come across the title “Inquisitor of the Faith,” in the first law3 promulgated to render death the penalty of heresy. It is now that we find the great Augustine of Tagaste—the mightiest genius that the Church has brought forth—denouncing religious liberty with the question, “Quid est enim pejor, mors animæ quam libertas erroris?”4 and strenuously urging the death of heretics on the ground that it is a merciful measure, since it must result in the saving of others from the damnation consequent upon their being led into error. Similarly he applauded those decrees of death against any one pursuing the polytheism that but a few generations earlier had been the official religion of the Roman Empire.

      It was Augustine—of whom it has been truly said that “no man since the days of the Apostles has infused into the Church a larger measure of his spirit”—in his enormous fervour, and with the overwhelming arguments inspired by his stupendous intellect, who laid down the principles that governed persecution, and were cited in justification of it for nearly 1,500 years after his day. “He was,” says Lecky, “the most staunch and enthusiastic defender of all those doctrines that grow out of the habits of mind that lead to persecution.”5

      So far, however much persecution may have been inspired by the Church, its actual execution had rested entirely and solely with the civil authorities; and this aloofness, indeed, is urged upon the clergy by St. Augustine. But already before the close of the fourth century we find ecclesiastics themselves directly engaged in causing the death of heretics.

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