In the Jubilee Year of 2000, Pope John Paul II issued a special apology for the past sins of the Roman Catholic Church: for its treatment of Jews, its hostility to other groups and faiths, and its “use of violence in the service of truth”. That last phrase, which distinguished so neatly between the means (bad) and the end (good), was taken to be a coded reference to the Inquisition.
But the Pope did not go into any detail about this – which is just as well, since the story of what the Inquisition did at different times is complex, and the degree of blame is often quite hard to measure.
In a nutshell, there were three main Inquisitions.
The medieval one was a rather ad hoc affair, with inquisitors (typically, Dominican friars) tackling outbreaks of heresy here and there.
The Spanish one (created in 1478) was, in contrast, almost an arm of the Spanish state; obsessed at first with sniffing out crypto-Judaism among newly converted Jews, it then became a general enforcer of orthodoxy against heresy, superstition and sexual immorality.
The Roman Inquisition, known as the “Holy Office”, was set up in response to the Reformation; its main target was heresy, and it worked hand in hand with the committee which maintained the famous Index of Prohibited Books.
That Index was abolished only in the 1960s, when the Holy Office was reformed and renamed.
Its head, until his most recent change of job, was Cardinal Ratzinger; it is still a force to be reckoned with, as it summons errant Catholic theologians to Rome for questioning.
But while knuckles may be metaphorically and severely rapped, “violence in the service of truth” is no longer used.
How violent had these Inquisitions been?
Modern research has dismantled the “black legend” of the Spanish Inquisition; it did kill roughly 2,000 in its first 50 years, but then settled into a rhythm of at most 10 deaths per year.
The Roman Inquisition may have killed 1,250 people in its entire history. Torture was used, but only in a very small percentage of cases.
Yes, there are many human tragedies lurking within these statistics; but there are many, many more in the history of the secular courts of the same periods, which dispensed much rougher justice.
Cullen Murphy’s new book is partly – but only partly – an overview of this history; it picks out a string of memorable details, from the appalling massacres of medieval Cathars to the agonising of Vatican censors over the novels of Graham Greene.
Murphy has read enough of the scholarly literature to know that the old “black legend” is unsustainable. Yet he sets up, in its place, a new dark legend of his own.
The old view was that the Inquisition was the worst example of institutionalised evil in our rather primitive past.
The new one is that while it wasn’t so very bad by past standards, it foreshadowed the institutionalised evil of the present.
It is the ancestor, in some way or other, of the fascist and communist secret police, McCarthyism, the surveillance state, and, for good measure, Guantánamo Bay.
I say “in some way or other”, because it’s often unclear what exactly Murphy is claiming.
Sometimes he is just drawing analogies between past and present (witty comparison-making being part of his stock in trade as a writer for Vanity Fair magazine).
But sometimes he does imply that our modern bureaucracies of oppression had their origin in the Inquisition.
“Repressive regimes are record-keeping regimes”, he observes; and who taught the modern world how to keep such records, if not the Inquisition?
Historically speaking, this argument is worthless, for two obvious reasons. Murphy pays almost no attention to the centuries-old history of ordinary bureaucracy, as developed by governments, not the Church.
Taxation, not heresy-hunting, was what taught the emerging modern state to keep track of its citizens.
And secondly, the idea that the dossier-keeping of the Inquisition foreshadows that of the Gestapo or the KGB ignores a rather elementary difference.
The Inquisition, like any legal system, was merely storing the records of the cases that came before it; it never tried to keep tabs on the whole population.
Admittedly, this book is not intended as a piece of historical research. While Murphy has visited archives, he has done so to get local colour, not to do original work.
(The results are some rather bathetic descriptions of reading-rooms: “A few scholars sit at tables. Espresso must be left outside. Smoking is prohibited.”)
He also supplies various pen portraits of historians in their offices – a quaintly journalistic approach to historical understanding, as if someone writing a book about the novels of Dickens were to go and interview other people who had read them.
Along the way, readers may pick up some interesting details about such things as the perennial nature of torture techniques or the survival of crypto-Judaism in Mexico.
But they will also encounter jarring attempts to jollify the past – as, for example, when Murphy introduces the founder of the Dominican Order as “the man celebrated in the 1963 song Dominique by the Singing Nuns”.
If ever there is an Index of Recommended Books, this one is unlikely to be on it.
Cullen Murphy
Allen Lane, £25, 310pp