A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume ILea, Henry Charles
History
A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume I
Lea, Henry Charles
Inquisition -- History
were deceased. The argument was irrefragable, and the anathema was
pronounced in spite of the protests of Pope Vigilius, who stubbornly
refused to be convinced. The ingenuity of Eutychius, till then an
obscure man, was rewarded with the patriarchate of Constantinople, and
Vigilius was compelled, by means not the most gentle, to subscribe to
the anathema. In 618 the Council of Seville denied the power of
condemning the dead; but in 680 the sixth general council, held at
Constantinople, exercised the largest liberty in anathematizing all whom
it regarded as heretical, both living and dead. In 897 Stephen VII.
accordingly held himself authorized to dig up the body of his
predecessor, Pope Formosus, then seven months in the tomb, drag it by
the feet and seat it in the synod which he had assembled in judgment,
and, after condemning it, to cut off two fingers of the right hand and
throw it into the Tiber, whence it chanced to be rescued and buried. The
next year, however, a new pope, John IX., annulled these proceedings and
caused a synod to declare that no one should be condemned after death,
for the accused must have the opportunity of defence. This did not
prevent Sergius III., in 905, from again exhuming the body, when it was
clothed in pontifical robes, seated on a throne, and once more solemnly
condemned, beheaded, three more fingers cut off, and thrown in the
Tiber. Yet the iniquity of these proceedings was proved when the
restless remains were dragged from the river by some fishermen, and, on
being carried to the church of St. Peter, the images of saints there
bowed before them and saluted them reverently. About the year 1100, St.
Ivo of Chartres, the foremost canonist of his day, pronounced
unhesitatingly that the power of the Church to bind and to loose was
confined to things on earth; that the dead had passed beyond human
judgment, they could not be condemned, and burial must not be refused to
those who had not been tried while living. Yet as heresy multiplied and
its obstinacy seemed to justify the passionate hatred which it excited,
the churchman might well feel himself unable to endure the thought that
the bones of heretics polluted the sacred precincts of church and
cemetery, and that unconsciously he was including them in his prayers
for the dead. It was easy to find a method of reaching them. The Council
of Verona in 1184, and subsequent popes and councils, repeatedly and
formally excommunicated all heretics. It was an old rule of the Church
that all excommunicates who did not within a year apply for absolution
were condemned. All heretics who died without confession or recantation
were thus self-condemned, and were ineligible to sepulture in
consecrated ground. Though they could not be excommunicated, being
already under _ipso facto_ excommunication, they could be anathematized.
If mistakenly they had received Christian burial, as soon as the fact
was discovered they were to be dug up and burned; the inquisition which
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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