The Monk and the Marquis

Well, I just spent a big chunk of this afternoon putting together an editorial calendar for the blog through the end of March. Tightening the focus a little and forcing myself to engage more deeply with the topics I'm researching at the moment. This post is mostly a catch-all for some of the topics I've been ruminating on lately. (And don't worry, this will be the last post of this type for at least four months!)

I promised some of you I'll be writing a lot about witchcraft in the coming months, and that's true. But once I started looking into witchcraft I came up against the fact that the early witch hunts were done by the Inquisition. So that takes me digging into the history of the Inquisition–where it came from, what its purpose was, what its methods (and legal status) were.

When we hear about the Inquisition today, we immediately expect the Spanish Inquisition. But the Spanish Inquisition was an extremely late development, which took place only after the Inquisition had existed for almost three centuries. The Pope only nominally had control of the Spanish Inquisition, which was effectively a secret police arm of Castilian state power.

The original Inquisition began around the beginning of the 13th century as a response to the Cathar heresy. The Cathars, a dualist gnostic sect mostly prevalent in southern France and northern Italy, didn't call themselves Cathars; they modestly called themselves the Good Christians.

Anyway, the Pope was having none of this and there was a whole to-do about it called the Albigensian Crusade. Zillions of people slaughtered and there's still a bunch of heretics in southern France. Eating cheese, sipping wine, and making obscure references to Proust.

But luckily there's a new Pope with a new idea. In 1232 Innocent III founds the Papal Inquisition, and in only 120 years they manage to cleanse the land of those dirty, cheese-eating Cathars.

Even at the beginning, inquisitorial methods weren't exactly cuddly. But heck, for the first 20 years inquisitors weren't even allowed to torture people. It wasn't until Innocent IV issued the 1252 Papal Bull Ad extirpanda ("To Exterminate") that the Inquisition was permitted torture as a method of extracting confessions. But even then there were a lot of rules about it and it wasn't as much fun as you'd think.

Plus in 1256 Innocent IV made a little addendum stating that inquisitors who ordered torture had to receive absolution for their actions.

Which is a point worth dwelling on, actually. Because there's a tangled web of motivations going on behind all this inquisitorial business. But it's crucial to understand this: formally, the Inquisition was in the business of saving souls from hell. And as a practical matter that meant the Inquisition had the support (or at least the passive consent) of the people.

Power hierarchies always work both ways. Those on the bottom might whine about those on top, but the ones on top can't do anything the others don't let them get away with.

There are delicious layers of ambiguity here. But let's continue.

We'll get into the formalities and timetables of a visit from the Inquisition another time. But the squeamishness of the Church is fascinating here. The Church wants no blood on its hands–in the most literal sense possible.

A few examples. Torture is permitted, but inquisitorial torturers must not draw blood. (Perversely, to us moderns, the legal justification for torture is that it's meant to increase the certainty of getting a genuine confession.) After confessing, a penitent heretic may receive absolution–before being handed off to the secular authorities to be executed the next day.

The Holy Mother Church must not let herself get sullied with heretic blood. The heretics may be criminals, and the state must deal with them as necessary. But the role of the Inquisition is only to discover heresy and bring the heretics back into the fold.

All of this is justified by the absolute importance of saving the heretic's soul.

It's an alien way of thinking when we put it in terms of God, heresy, and the Inquisition. But the modern parallels are many and obvious enough that there's no need to name them here.

Most inquisitors were members of the Dominican order, which was formally founded in 1216 with the express goal of combating heresy. Not all Dominicans were Inquisitors, however, and only a small part of the order ever actively took part in inquisitorial practice. The Inquisitors themselves were primarily Doctors of Theology--academic types who taught courses and engaged with the intellectual currents of the day. For example, Jacob Sprenger, one of the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, was a Dominican friar and inquisitor who became Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Cologne in 1480.

But the other author of the Malleus is by far the more colorful character, so let’s focus on him.

Heinrich Kramer (who may have written the Malleus all by his lonesome and tacked Sprenger’s name on the title page) was also a Dominican friar. Little is known about his early life, but sometime before 1474 he became Inquisitor for Tyrol, Salzburg, Bohemia, and Moravia. He ran into a little trouble during an investigation in Innsbruck, where he accused 14 citizens of witchcraft. The trouble came about when he accused one Helena Scheuberin, an “aggressive, independent woman who was not afraid to speak her mind.”

(You know the type.)

You know how it goes. He comes into town, some high muckety muck looking to root out heresy. She walks by him in the streets and says, “Hey, fuck you.” Next thing you know she’s not coming to his sermons, she’s not answering his texts, and she’s talking other women into avoiding his sermons.

So of course he accuses her of witchcraft.

Long story short, Kramer spends the trial asking Scheuberin a lot of intimate questions about her sex life. Things get so bad that the local bishop has to come in and ask him, “What do you think you’re doing here, buddy?” The investigation falls apart and Kramer never gets to send Scheuberin to the stake.

Thus the Malleus Maleficarum was born.

The Malleus Maleficarum, also known as The Hammer of Witches, also known by its (superior) German title: Der Hexenhammer. The book was published in 1486 and became one of the early bestsellers of the new era of printing. In scholastic style it set out to demonstrate the existence of witches, the enormity of their sins, the necessity of exterminating witches for the preservation of Christendom, etc. A witch hunting manual, essentially, and one which would set the pattern for increasing efforts at the extermination of witches over the next several centuries.

Up to this point, you see, the Catholic church had hemmed and hawed on the subject of sorcery. Was it real, was it heretical, was it part of the Church's duty to eradicate it? These questions had come up before, but Kramer forced the issue.

And say what you will about Kramer. He fit the stereotype of the early Renaissance witch hunter to a remarkable degree, sure. He says things about women in the Malleus that would make Schopenhauer's sideburns fall off, sure. He probably really, really, really enjoyed torturing people while telling them it was for their own good, yes.

But he wasn't an idiot. And he was remarkably well-connected. Right hand man to the Archbishop of Salzburg and all that.

So in 1484 he convinced Pope Innocent VIII to issue a Papal Bull called Summis desiderantes affectibus ("Desiring with Supreme Ardor"). With this Bull, Innocent VIII declared that the existence of witches was Catholic doctrine, required clergy to aid in the destruction of witchcraft, and heavily implied that anything less than full cooperation with the Inquisition would be considered heretical.

One imagines Kramer rubbing his hands together and cackling with glee, pitchfork in one hand and torch in the other.

At any rate, when the time came to print the Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer made sure the text of the Papal Bull figured prominently at the front of the book. He also tried to get further approval for his work from the theologians at the University of Cologne. He failed in this effort.

(The learned theologians, in fact, condemned the book for recommending illegal practices and proliferating questionable theology.)

But really, the Papal Bull was all Kramer needed. With the Pope's official approval the book would take on a life of its own, offering the broad outlines of the prosecution of witchcraft that would survive beyond the Reformation. Both Catholics and Protestants alike would employ the Malleus extensively.

Kramer himself went on to lead a brilliant career, writing and preaching until the end of his days in 1505.

So that’s one of the things that’s been on my mind lately. I’ve also been reading de Sade.

(Completely unrelated, don’t read too much into it.)

At the moment I’m working my way through Philosophy in the Bedroom, and I’m planning on having a review for that book up on the blog this Friday.

It’s a strange book. Reads like a bizarre combination of a porn script and a Platonic dialogue. There’s plenty of sex in it, but it’s almost painful to read. You can take de Sade seriously as a philosopher, though. There are many moments where he seems to anticipate Nietzsche, although he lacks Nietzsche’s sense of history, appreciation of beauty, and Victorian restraint. But de Sade as a symptom of his time is extremely illuminating. Reading de Sade, reading de Laclos, we can get a clear sense of the French aristocracy driving itself headlong into the jaws of the Revolution.

(Revolutions are not primarily cases of the people rising up out of oppression. Before and above that, they are the spiritual suicide of a ruling caste that becomes too weak and too pleasure-driven to assert its prerogative.)

But to return. You know how it is, it’s impossible to write about sex. It turns ridiculous the moment you try. All that happens is you start imagining the Marquis scribbling out his sexual fantasies while he’s imprisoned, which is good and well in the moment, but to read it 200 years after the fact…

Although of course you have to read it through the eyes of an 18th-century French citizen. Or better yet, through the eyes of the reader de Sade is imagining: a sweet, innocent, beautiful little 15-year-old French aristocrat whose mother forbids her to read naughty books.

(When Philosophy in the Bedroom was published, it’s worth noting, the posters read “Mothers will forbid their daughters from reading it!” A bit heavy-handed for our media-savvy times, but still. De Sade had the knack for perversity in marketing.)

But to return to the point: with Philosophy in the Bedroom, de Sade is just writing out his sexual fantasies and making a lot of (mostly bad) philosophical justifications for doing whatever you want. But he’s also (and this is crucial to understanding the genius behind the work) just writing out his sexual fantasies and making a lot of (mostly bad) philosophical justifications for doing whatever you want.

Or to put it another way: what’s a world-hating, brilliantly intelligent, sexually obsessed French aristocrat going to do when he gets thrown in prison? Try to corrupt the world through his pen. The real fantasy of the work doesn't appear on the page--it appears in the eyes of that imagined reader.

Imagine your typical dirty old man with a fixation on deflowering virgins. Now mix in a touch of genius, an annoying dispute with the powers that rule the earth (i.e., a stint in prison), and the depersonalizing sublimation of art.

(I know what you’re thinking. Stop thinking that.)

Now, I’m not saying all writers are perverts and I’m not making any analogy between writing and sexual penetration. But what I am saying is that de Sade seems to emphatically want it both ways; the various characters all explain to our 15-year-old heroine that not only can she act on every one of her desires, she should do so. Any restraint placed on desire is an insult and affront to nature!

(Come to think of it, it’s strange to think of how de Sade’s once-revolutionary pronouncements seem so much like the reigning ideology of the Western world today. You must enjoy. You must participate. You must consume.)

But de Sade wants it both ways. On the one hand he wants to say his polymorphously perverse sexual program is good (as in, morally good). But on the other hand everything about the book makes it abundantly clear that what he most enjoys about it is the feeling that he is utterly wrong and entirely depraved.

Which probably comes with the territory. Just try to logically parse a statement such as, “Spank me, Daddy, I’m a naughty, naughty girl!”

Or look at the famous opening of Foucault’s History of Sexuality: we’ve supposedly thrown off the repression of the Victorians, but are we in fact any less repressed?

Or the joke about the polyamorous couple who stayed entirely faithful to one another their whole life long, “Because nine-tenths of the fun of cheating was getting to lie about it.”

So de Sade suffers from the same tension all revolutionaries suffer from: he wants to destroy the old values, but his entire enjoyment comes from transgressing those values. His characters will often go on the most over-the-top tirades against God, but you get the feeling that behind the hatred and rebellion against God there’s a deep gratitude to a being who can be infinitely hated. (“God must exist,” goes the thought, “Otherwise there would be no God to be offended when I say God does not exist!”)

The rebel, in other words, always depends on whatever he’s rebelling against. And de Sade was an aristocrat. By temperament a rebel, by birth the thing being rebelled against.

(Again, modern parallels too obvious to be worth enumerating.)

When the revolution finally came, they let de Sade out for a while. They kind of liked him, because he was a revolutionary. But they also hated, resented, and distrusted him for being an aristocrat. (Not to mention the fact that the only thing revolutionaries hate more than conservatives is other revolutionaries.)

Fortunately for de Sade, they never made up their minds to execute him.

He was back in prison by the time Napoleon took power, though, and one of Napoleon’s favorite activities as emperor was his annual decision not to let de Sade out of prison.

Anyway, this is a shaggy mess of a post and it just keeps getting longer with no apparent end in sight. So as the rabbi said to the foreskin, "I'm gonna cut it off now."

Will cover both de Sade and Kramer in more depth at a later date.