A Short History of Christianity: Second Edition, Revised, With AdditionsRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
History
A Short History of Christianity: Second Edition, Revised, With Additions
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Church history
The main effect of the Inquisition is seen in Spain, which in the
Saracen period had been one of the great sources of new thought
and knowledge. There, despite the element of intellectual curiosity
set up in the period of Moorish supremacy, when the Christians were
in general treated with tolerance, the spirit of fanaticism was in
some measure ingrained by the long struggle between Christians and
Moslems for the land, though there were also contrary developments;
and an inquisitorial war on Jewish and Moorish ideas was part of the
Christian campaign. As the Christians gained ground, ecclesiasticism
gained with them; yet when the Inquisition, not yet a permanent Spanish
tribunal, was set up in Spain in 1236, it was received by a large part
of the population with fear and dislike. It is an error to suppose
that there was something in "Spanish character" specially prone to
the methods of the Inquisition. Spanish orthodoxy is a manufactured
product, and represents the triumph, under special conditions, of the
fanatical element which belongs to every nation. Not only did many
eminent Spaniards detest and denounce the Inquisition in its first
and imperfectly destructive form: the common people rioted against
it when, in its permanent and more murderous form, it was constituted
in 1478-83, and put under Torquemada. That memorable persecutor long
felt his life to be in danger from the people, both in Aragon and
in Castile; and the first inquisitor-general of Aragon was actually
killed by them.
Yet even the "ancient" Inquisition had been fatally successful. In
the two centuries from its establishment, while Averroism was rife
in Italy and France, Christian Spain must have been well nigh rid of
the other forms of heretical thought; and the first step of Ferdinand
and Isabella after their crowning triumph was to expel all Jews who
would not apostatize. On the remaining Moors the New Inquisition
went to work in a similar spirit, persecuting them, baptizing them by
force, burning their books, and driving them repeatedly to revolts,
which were always murderously put down. Finally, after the failure
of the great Armada against England, the Inquisitors decided that
the cause of the divine wrath was their undue toleration of heresy,
and a million of nonconforming Moriscoes were miserably driven out of
Spain, as a hundred and sixty thousand Jews had been a century before.
As all civilization lives by the play of intellectual variation,
Spain was now stripped of a large part of her mental as well as her
material resources; and the continued work of the Inquisition at length
clinched the arrest of her brilliant literature for centuries, keeping
her devoid of science while the rest of Europe was gathering it. In
introducing the Inquisition the Church had destroyed the specific
civilization of southern France, thereby laming that of northern
France; and in thereafter applying the machine to the civilization
of Spain she reduced that to inanition.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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