Henry Charles Lea

“ In 1523 he made the acquaintance of Francisca and his feelings towards her are emphatically expressed in a defiant declaration to the Inquisition during his trial.—“No word of love, however strong, is by a hundredth part adequate to describe the holy love, so pure and sweet and strong and great and full of God’s blessing and melting of heart and soul, which God in his goodness has given me through His holy betrothed, my true Mother and Lady, through whom I hope, at the awful Day of Judgement, to be numbered among the elect. I can call her my love for, in loving her, I love nothing but God.” ”

“ That the majority of the Spanish mystics were thoroughly pure in heart there can be no doubt, but spiritual exaltation, shared by the two sexes, had the ever-present risk that it might insensibly become carnal, when those who fancied themselves to be advancing in the path of perfection might suddenly find that the flesh had deceived the spirit. This was an experience as old as mysticism itself, and the eloquent warning which St. Bonaventura addressed to his brethren shows, by the vividness of its details, that he must have witnessed more than one such fall from grace. ”

“ For the most part, the condemned propositions were merely the common-places of the great mystics of the sixteenth century—that the perfected soul enjoys absolute peace, for the appetites and passions are at rest and the flesh in no way contradicts the spirit—that trances are the highest of God’s gifts—that the supreme grade of contemplation becomes habitual, and that the soul at will can thus enter God’s presence—that, in the trance, God can be seen—that the perfected soul should ask only that God’s will be done. ”

“ It was the crowning iniquity of the Inquisition that it thus afforded to the evil-minded the amplest opportunity of wrong-doing. History affords no parallel to such a skilfully organized system, working relentlessly through centuries.
The inquisitors were men, not demons or angels, and when injustice and oppression were rife in the secular courts it would be folly not to expect them in the impenetrable recesses of the Holy Office. ”

“ Yet who can blame Isabella or Torquemada or the Hapsburg princes for their share in originating and maintaining this disastrous instrument of wrong? The Church had taught for centuries that implicit acceptance of its dogmas and blind obedience to its commands were the only avenues to salvation; that heresy was treason to God, its extermination the highest service to God and the highest duty to man. ”

“ After all, the great lesson taught by the history of the Inquisition is that the attempt of man to control the conscience of his fellows reacts upon himself; he may inflict misery but, in due time, that misery recoils on him or on his descendants and the full penalty is exacted with interest. Never has the attempt been made so thoroughly, so continuously or with such means of success as in Spain, and never has the consequent retribution been so palpable and so severe. The sins of the fathers have been visited on the children and the end is not yet. ”

“ So he combats at length the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, which he stigmatizes as a delirium, a dream and a deception. Yet he admits that the Inquisition is not perfect—that it has committed errors through imprudence, through ignorance, through excessive zeal, and through human frailty, and that it has prevented the development of some things which would aid the prosperity of the nation. ”

“ The loss of the Empire and of Austria, awarded to the younger branch of the Hapsburgs, strengthened rather than weakened the inheritance of Philip II, by rendering it less cumbrous and unwieldy, while the acquisition of Portugal unified the Peninsula and the increasing wealth of the Indies promised almost unlimited resources for the extension of his power. Yet this power, so colossal in outward seeming, was already becoming a mere shell, covering emptiness and poverty, for its rulers had exhausted the nation in enterprises beyond its strength and foreign to its interests. ”

“ The yearly Edict of Faith kept the terror of the Inquisition constantly before every man and was perhaps the most efficient device ever invented to subject a population to the fear of an ever-impending danger. No other nation ever lived through centuries under a moral oppression so complete, so minute and so all-pervading. ”

“ That such a being should excite universal detestation was inevitable, and that no effort should be spared for her extermination was the plainest duty of legislator and judge. There are no pages of European history more filled with horror than those which record the witch-madness of three centuries, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth. No land was more exposed to the contagion of this insanity than Spain where, for more than a hundred years, it was constantly threatening to break forth. ”

“ It is enough to know that the inquisitors used their utmost efforts to stamp out what they deemed heresy, and the tale of their victims is not the gauge of their cruelty but of the number of heretics whom they could discover. Save when pride or cupidity or ambition may have been the impelling motive, the men are not to be blamed, but the teaching which gave them such a conception of the duty so relentlessly performed, and framed a system of procedure which shrouded their acts in darkness and deprived the accused of his legitimate means of defence. ”

“ It is one of the interesting problems in the history of literature that Spain, whose brilliant achievements throughout the Reformation period promised to make her as dominant in the world of letters as in military and naval enterprise, should, within the space of a couple of generations, have become the most uncultured land in Christendom, without a public to encourage learning and genius, and without learning and genius to stimulate a public. For this there must have been a cause and no other adequate one than the Inquisition has been discovered to account for this occultation. ”

“ A still more eccentric invocation of the terror felt for the Inquisition, when the secular machinery failed to accomplish its purpose, occurred when the debasement of the coinage threw Spanish finance into inextricable confusion. The miserable vellon tokens were forced into circulation at rates enormously beyond their intrinsic value, and statesmen exhausted their ingenuity in devising clumsy expedients to arrest their inevitable depreciation—punishments of all kinds to keep down the premium on silver, and laws of maximum to regulate prices, from shirts to house-rent. ”

“ It was in vain that the Holy See asserted its unquestioned right of decision and ordered the Inquisition to suppress the superstition. Popular excitement reached such height that an attempt was made to murder in the pulpit a secretary of the tribunal, when he endeavored to read the edict; a priest named Ozar was slain for opposing the popular frenzy, and Archbishop Aliaga, for six years after his election in 1612, was unable to perform the visitation of his see, because he would everywhere have met with the unauthorized cult which he could not sanction by partaking. ”

“ The land was robbed of its most industrious classes, it was drained of its bravest soldiers, its trade and productiveness were fatally crippled, and it was reduced to the lowest term of financial exhaustion, all for the greater glory of God, and in the belief that it was avenging offences to God. To meet the exigencies arising from this, and from the thoughtless extravagance of the monarchs, the labor, on which rested the resources of the State, was crushed to earth and subjected to burdens that defeated their own ends, for they drove the producer in despair from the soil. ”

“ So, in 1820, the learned Canon Francisco Martínez Marina, in indicating the measures necessary to restore prosperity, says that the first one is to reduce the wealth of the clergy for the benefit of agriculture and the poor and oppressed peasant, and to abolish forever the unjust and insupportable tribute of the tithe, a tribute unknown to Spain before the twelfth century, a tribute which directly prevents the progress of agriculture and one of those which have inflicted the greatest misery on the husbandman. ”

“ Belief in the powers of sorcery had been too strongly inculcated to disappear with the cessation of persecution. A modern writer assures us that all the old superstitions flourish as vigorously as ever—conjurations and formulas to cure or to kill, to foretell the future, to create love or hatred, to render men impotent and women barren, to destroy the flocks and herds and harvests, to bring tempests and hail-storms. ”

“ It debarred the Inquisition from acting in any cases save those of heresy and apostasy, and even in these it could make no arrests unless guilt was conclusively proved. Since that year, it says, how many have abandoned themselves to solicitation, sorcery and other crimes, believing themselves secure from the Inquisition! How many have allowed themselves to utter propositions impious or heretical, believing that, even when denounced, they could not be arrested until their offences were fully proved—a thing which could rarely or never happen! ”

“ As to the relations of religion and the State, he assumes that the only function of the civil power is to punish him who offends the faith; the Catholic religion is as intolerant as light is of darkness, or as truth is of falsehood, and this intolerance distinguishes it from all religions invented by man. Repeatedly and savagely he proclaims that burning is the proper remedy for unbelief, and he tells his adversaries that, if they wish free thought, they may go to England or to the United States, but in Spain what they had to expect was the quemadero. ”

“ In 1563, Paolo Tiepolo, after dwelling on the secrecy and unsparing rigor of its judgements, says that every one shudders at its very name, as it has supreme authority over the property, life, honor and even the souls of men. Two years later Giovanni Soranzo speaks of the great fear inspired by it, for its authority transcends incomparably that of the king. In 1567, Antonio Tiepolo echoes these assertions, and all agree in their comments on the influence of the mysterious secrecy of its operation and the relentless severity of its action. ”

“ The blindness and inefficiency of the Government intensified in every way the evils created by its mistaken policy but, at the root of all, lay the prolonged and relentless determination to enforce conformity, at a time when the industrial and commericial era was opening, which was to bring wealth and power to the nations wise enough and liberal enough to avail themselves of its opportunities—opportunities which Spain was invited virtually to monopolize through its control of the trade of the Indies and the production of the precious metals. ”

“ When, in the yearly Edict of Faith, every one was required, under pain of excommunication, to denounce any impeding, direct or indirect, of the tribunal, or any criticism of the justice of its operation, restraint became universal and habitual and, in the instinct of self-preservation, men would naturally seek to teach themselves and their children not even to think ill of the Inquisition lest, in some unguarded moment, a chance utterance might lead to prosecution and infamy. ”

“ The soul abandoned itself wholly to God; when divine love took possession of it, God deprived it of all human desires, even for spiritual consolations, exercises of piety and the perfection of virtue. ”

“ When, in 1504, at the age of 17, she entered the Franciscan convent of Santa Isabel de los Angeles of Córdova, she was already regarded as a vessel overflowing with divine grace, a belief confirmed by a series of ecstasies, trances, visions, revelations and miracles. Space is lacking to recount the varied series of marvels, many of which do infinite credit to her imaginative invention, while some of them required confederates, who seem not to have been lacking, in view of the benefit to the convent accruing from its containing so saintly a person. ”

“ Thus every man’s liberty and property were at the mercy of secret and irresponsible informers. It was a Libro Verde on a scale which the Inquisition itself had never imagined, and the system was more thorough and more dangerous to the innocent than that of the Inquisition. ”

“ Mariana de Jesus, a barefooted Carmelite, was a Maestra de Espiritu, who taught Illuminism and had a record of endless visions, prophetic inspiration and conflicts with Satan. She maintained herself in luxury by selling her spiritual gifts, and it was in evidence that poor people had pledged their household gear to purchase her intercession for the souls of their kindred, but she was only paraded in vergüenza with four year’s reclusion in a convent and perpetual exile from Seville. ”

“ The Inquisition could suppress Judaism, it could destroy Protestantism, it could render necessary the expulsion of the Moriscos, but it failed when it sought to eradicate the abuses of Mysticism, which not only signalized the ardor of Spanish faith, but were so difficult of differentiation from beliefs long recognized and encouraged by the Church. There seems to be, in the average human mind, an insatiable craving for manifestations of the supernatural. ”

“ NO modern European nation has endured such vicissitudes of good and evil fortune as the Spanish. From the virtual anarchy of the Castilian kingdoms under Juan II and Enrique IV, the resolute wills of Ferdinand and Isabella evoked order and, by the union with Aragon, the conquest of Granada, Naples and Navarre and the acquisition of the New World, they left Spain in a most commanding position. ”

“ Francisca’s strange powers of fascination were manifested by the influence which she acquired over a man of infinitely higher character than Medrano. Fray Francisco Ortiz was the most promising member of the great Franciscan Order, who was rapidly acquiring the reputation of the foremost preacher in Spain. He was not fully a mystic, but his pulpit exhortations, stimulating the love of God, caused him to be regarded as wandering near to the dangerous border. ”