Early in the 18th century, while the Spanish Inquisition still raged, the Catholic Church fathers declared an 18-year old girl guilty of heresy, and they did to her what they had done to thousands of others over the previous 200 years: They burned her at the stake.
We don’t know what heresy the girl was accused of. Possibly she was a Jew who had refused to convert to Catholicism under orders of the Inquisition. At any rate, they subjected the girl to the auto-da-fé—the “act of faith” by which the flames that consumed her body also would purify her soul, so that it could enter into Heaven cleansed of sin, and sit forever at the side of Jesus.
Even as the Inquisition was expending its last energies in Europe, a new movement was arising: The Enlightenment. Led by men such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Spinoza, Hobbes and Locke, the new movement sought to overthrow what it perceived as the brutal and irrational cult of religious-Christian superstition which had dominated European thought for a millennium, and replace it with what we might today call “secular humanism”—an approach that emphasized the worth of the individual mind and conscience, stressed the importance of science over superstition, and was based upon Greek and Roman philosophical notions of freedom, truth, reason and beauty.
The 18-year old girl’s horrible murder did not go unnoticed. Just to the north of Spain, across the Pyrenees in Bordeaux, Charles-Louis de Secondat, the Baron de Montesquieu, was a wealthy lawyer who had left that profession in order to devote himself to philosophical studies. (Montesquieu’s essays about man and reason became powerful influences on our American Founding Fathers, especially James Madison). How Montesquieu learned of the girl’s death, we do not know; but he wrote about it, in a work in which he assumes the guise of a Jewish man speaking to the leaders of the Inquisition.
In his remarks, Montesquieu—the consummate humanist and rationalist—is scathing concerning the Church’s “crimes.” The Roman Church, he thunders, had become “incorrigible, incapable of all enlightenment and of all instruction; and a nation [i.e. Spain] is very unhappy that gives authority to men like you.” He has a particular message for the murderers who lit the girl’s pyre: “We must warn you of one thing; it is that, if someone in the future ever dares to say that the peoples of Europe had a police in this century in which we live, you will be cited to prove that they were barbarians, and the idea one will have about you will be such that it will stigmatize your century and bring hatred on all your contemporaries.”
By “police,” Montesquieu referred, not to our modern notion of a civic police force, but to older Latin concepts of policy, or politics: the idea that a rational people will tend towards justice and reason, if governed correctly and educated in a rational, scientific way. He meant, in other words, that there apparently was no such moral force in Europe in the 18th century—at least, not in Catholic Spain. If you think about Montesquieu’s warning, it’s clear that it has come true: we look back at the Inquisition, at the psychotic Church “fathers” who burned little girls at the stake, and we indeed do stigmatize them and hate what they did and what they stood for.
A modern version of Montesquieu’s warning might well be adapted for the evangelicals and others who form the base of the modern Republican/Trump political party. Like the Inquisitors of Spain, they too believe they, and only they, know the word of God, and that God has instructed them to do what has to be done in order to carry out that word, and hasten the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Like the Inquisitors of Spain, they harbor no doubts about the correctness of their actions. Like the Inquisitors of Spain, they too engage in heinous acts. Perhaps they no longer burn people at the stake, but they indulge in hateful actions and speech against people whom they consider their enemies, and they enable a president who, by his words and deeds, causes pain, suffering and death. And like the Inquisitors of Spain, they gaze upon that pain and suffering and death and see that it is good, because it is the will of their God.
So here is Montesquieu’s warning, recast for 21st century Republicans: “if someone in the future ever dares to say that the Christian Republicans of America had a moral imperative, you will be cited to prove that those dreadful people, the evangelicals, were barbarians. And the idea one will have about you, and about your leader Trump, will be such that it will stigmatize your century, your political party, your false version of religion, and bring hatred on all your contemporaries.”
It’s too bad that we People of the World can’t get rid of these strains of superstitious bigotry and stupidity forever, so that Reason, and Reason alone, will rule. There seems to be some metastasizing corruption that keeps spurting out of some humans, in the guise of “religion,” so that for every two steps we take forward, we’re tugged one backward. The new Inquisition has become Republican evangelical Christianity, its Grand Inquisitor Donald J. Trump. And we know exactly how history will treat it, because we’re writing that history right now, and you’re witnessing it.
I recently read The Day of Atonement, by David Liss, a novel that takes place during the Portuguese Inquisition. I actually hadn’t known anything about the Inquisition in Portugal. And while this was fiction, it seemed to capture the reality of the Inquisition.