The Grand Inquisitor's Manual by Jonathan Kirsch Read Free Book Online

they did not fail to notice that the diocese of Châlons-sur-Marne was later “struck three times by heresy.” 15
    Such eccentrics may strike us as laughable, if not downright pathological, but charismatic preachers like Henry and Tanchelm, and even the village madman of Vertus, were answering the urgent and authentic spiritual needs of contemporaries who felt alienated from the Roman Catholic church. For some pious Christians, the high ceremony of the Roman Catholic mass, the rich vestments of the presiding clergy, and the opulence of the cathedrals in which the rite was conducted all seemed at odds with the ministry of Jesus as plainly depicted in the Bible. Indeed, the point was not lost on certain members of the clergy itself, including men like Francis of Assisi and Domingo de Guzmán, founders of the monastic orders that would come to play a crucial role in the Inquisition. Among the profound ironies of the Inquisition is that the Church itself can be charged with provoking some of the heresies that it punished with such rage and severity.
    After all, how could the pope and the princes of the Church reconcile their imperial ways with the words of Jesus as reported in the Gospels? “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” And how could the bishops, comfortably settled in cities across Europe and living off rents, tithes, and taxes, explain why they did not follow the instructions that Jesus issued to the seventy disciples that he sent out into the world to preach? “Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals,” says Jesus. “Whenever you enter a town and they receive you, eat what is set before you.” 16
    Some of the most revolutionary ideas in medieval Christendom, in other words, erupted from the pages of the Bible, a fact that helps explain why the Church discouraged the unsupervised reading of the scriptures and the translation of the biblical text into languages that ordinary Christians could understand. The via apostolica —“the way of the apostles”—was embraced by Christians who recoiled at the corrupt and decadent spectacle that the Church presented and looked into their own Bibles to answer the question “What would Jesus do?” As it turned out, the provocative question was asked by popes as well as radical priests like Henry the Monk, and the answers brought the kettle of Christianity to a high boil.
    The moral squalor that prompted an eccentric like Tanchelm of Antwerp to liken the Church to a brothel, for example, also prompted Pope Gregory VII (1020–1085) to address what he admitted to be a “foul plague of carnal contagion.” The so-called Gregorian Reform established the strict rule of chastity for priests, thus putting an abrupt end to the tradition of clerical marriage that dated back to the beginnings of Christianity and reinforcing the biblical notion that human sexuality was not only sinful but demonic. At the same time, Pope Gregory VII sought to discourage the practice of simony, the buying, selling, and bartering of church offices for profit and political advantage. But the Gregorian Reform could not and did not curb the appetites of the clergy, high and low, for sexual pleasure and self-enrichment. Ironically, the stark contrast between the high-minded papal pronouncements and the sorry practices of the clergy only deepened the disappointment of spiritual seekers throughout Christendom and sharpened their appetite for more meaningful spiritual pursuits. 17 “A first cause for the recrudescence of heresy in the West,” explains historian Malcolm Lambert, “lay in the expectations roused by Gregorian reform and its failure to fulfill them.” 18
    Some of Pope Gregory’s well-intended measures created new problems that a renegade priest might take it upon himself to solve. The pope, for example, issued a prohibition against marriage between men and women related by blood, a decree that was meant to curtail the sin of