The Influence of the Inquisition
Illustration by Jonathon Rosen
GOD’S JURY
The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
By Cullen Murphy
310 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27.
¶
From the run-up to this massacre, Murphy dates the start of the
Inquisition. By this, he means not only the Spanish iteration with its
concentration on Jews converted to Christianity (Marranos) but several
sequential inquisitions that over 700 years convulsed Europe, Central
America and parts of Asia in pursuit of a wide variety of theological
deviants. Even this expansive history, in turn, functions for Murphy as a
kind of prologue, for the goal of this lucid, learned and ultimately
predictable book is to present the Inquisition as the template for
America during the “global war on terror” declared by President George
W. Bush and still being fought.
¶
An editor at Vanity Fair and previously The Atlantic, Murphy has done
this sort of political time-traveling once already, in a 2007 book
neatly distilled by its title: “Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and
the Fate of America.” And he is not alone in parsing history to find the
antecedents for the panic and intolerance he associates with post-9/11
America. In Louis Begley’s 2009 book “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters,”
the lawyer-author likened the persecution of a French army officer in
the 1890s to the assault on civil liberties in the name of national
security in the contemporary United States.
¶
All three of these books share an aura of knowledge, a tone of
refinement and a sensation of bracing insight that, in a volume of
modest length, loses rather than gains power through repetition. For all
its fascinating detail and immensely readable prose, “God’s Jury”
essentially delivers the single point of a potent op-ed essay. That
point comes early, when Murphy characterizes the Inquisition not as a
primitive, atavistic undertaking but a presciently modern one.
¶
“Looking at the Inquisition,” Murphy writes, “one sees the West crossing
a threshold from one kind of world into another. Persecution acquired a
modern platform — the advantages afforded by a growing web of
standardized law, communications, administrative oversight and
controlled mechanisms of force. It was run not merely by warriors but by
an educated elite; not merely by thugs but by skilled professionals.
And in its higher dimensions it was animated not by greed or hope of
gain or love of power, though these were never absent, but by the
fervent conviction that all must subscribe to some ultimate truth.”
¶
At his best, Murphy assays Inquisition history both by smoothly
synthesizing secondary sources and by describing his encounters with
active scholars in the field. Strange as the comparison may seem,
Murphy’s passages about his visits to the Vatican’s Inquisition archives
bring to mind the mordant wit and curious eye of Paul Theroux in his
travel memoirs. Every sentence in “God’s Jury,” and I mean every
sentence, reads as if it had been chiseled and etched. And in his
concise way, Murphy provides a thorough overview of the Inquisition’s
motives, methods and effects.
¶
Murphy, though, has larger ambitions, and in pursuing them he becomes
tendentious. Point by point, he shows the precise manner in which the
Inquisition anticipated the Bush administration’s war(s) on terror.
Murphy traces the rendition of suspected terrorists to third countries,
generally ones that practiced unrestrained torture, back to the Catholic
Church’s policy of turning over convicted heretics to secular armies or
governments for punishment. He explains that one of the Spanish
Inquisition’s favored techniques — “toca,” a word for “cloth” — referred
to “the fabric that plugged a victim’s upturned mouth, and upon which
water was poured . . . to induce the sensation of asphyxiation by
drowning.” Waterboarding 101: got it. And should a reader not get it,
Murphy heavy-handedly applies the modern antiterror lexicon to the
Inquisition — “chain of command,” “enhanced” interrogation, “mission
creep.”
¶
You can be appalled by America’s willing adoption of torture, a process
exposed and chronicled by Jane Mayer in her 2008 book “The Dark Side,”
and still feel hectored and preached at by Murphy. Moreover, he can let
his critique grow so wide-ranging as to include what would seem to be
permissible modes of interrogation during wartime. In citing a medieval
guide to inquisitors written by the Dominican cleric Nicholas Eymerich,
Murphy notes that the manual suggests ruses for the interrogators to use
with their quarry, like feigning compassion, providing food and water,
pretending to already know the answers being sought. A recent United
States Army manual, Murphy informs us, recommends similar tactics.
¶
Is this to say that in the present context, nonviolent, psychologically
astute interrogation is as heinous as torture? Unless I misread him,
Murphy appears to be saying so. Yet isn’t the lesson of the former
F.B.I. agent Ali Soufan in his recent memoir, “The Black Banners,” that
precisely such methods obtained accurate information from prisoners, as
opposed to the desperate fictions that captives offered to stay a
torturer’s hand? It is to America’s shame that our nation swept up so
many innocent people in its hunt for terrorists. But that sweep also did
capture some of the guilty, a reality that Murphy mentions only
belatedly and almost backhandedly.
¶
“Moral certainty ignites every inquisition,” he writes late in the book,
“and then feeds it with oxygen.” “God’s Jury,” while no inquisition,
abounds in moral certainty of its own.
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