The History of Evil in the Early Modern Age

1450–1700 CE

Daniel Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781032095141
• eBook ISBN: 9781351138468
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

The third volume of The History of Evil encompasses the early modern era from 1450–1700. This revolutionary period exhibited immense change in both secular knowledge and sacred understanding. It saw the fall of Constantinople and the rise of religious violence, the burning of witches and the drowning of Anabaptists, the ill treatment of indigenous peoples from Africa to the Americas, the reframing of formal authorities in religion, philosophy, and science, and it produced profound reflection on good and evil in the genius of Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Teresa of Avila, and the Cambridge Platonists.

This superb treatment of the history of evil during a formative period of the early modern era will appeal to those with interests in philosophy, theology, social and political history, and the history of ideas.

1 Towards a history of evil

Inquisition and fear in the medieval West

Teofilo F. Ruiz

Writing a history of evil, or even discussing the ‘evilness’ of a particular medieval institution, as, for example in this instance the Inquisition, strikes me somewhat as a presentist and essentializing enterprise. It is a task fraught with dangerous assumptions about the past and about the methodological imperative of judging what came before us from our own present and historically determined ethical perspective. In many respects, it is, at its very core, another form of Whiggish history. Having grown up as a scholar, as many of my generation did, under Clifford Geertz’s considerable shadow, I have always been committed to the relativity of cultures, that is, to the idea that people and institutions as cultural constructs have to be understood within their own specific and peculiar ‘webs of significance’.¹ In truth, to brand someone or to depict an entire institution as ‘evil’ leads more to questions and arguments than to a clear cut statement on the ethics of the past. Evil for whom? Evil according to what ethical (or religious) understanding and standards? Evil understood within what historical contexts?

There is also the great danger of falling – a note of caution I have already raised above – into one of the greatest historical fallacies that is, judging and assessing the past by the mores and ideological leanings of today. Although always keeping in mind Walter Benjamin’s acerbic critic of historicism, in doing so, that is judging the past by our own standards, one risks falling into the deeper quandary of assessing the past according to particular Western traditions – always ideologically tainted – of right and wrong that are often alien to contemporary cultures in other parts of the world or, most certainly, that are alien to ethical concerns in the distant past. In many respects, this is not too far from Smail and Shryock’s formidable recent critique of how concepts of the ‘modern’ and the ‘pre-modern’ are constructed in recent historiography, or John Elliott’s recent statement that such concepts as ‘modernity’ or ‘globalization’ are Eurocentric.²

In this regard it may be useful to invoke, once again, Walter Benjamin’s powerful critique of historicisim, and his reminder of the common sense fact that history is often written by the victors.³ Since we are, meaning in this case most of the Western historians contributing to this volume, the victors, or have been until very recently, are we engaged in a similar historicist practice? While we may somewhat agree – based upon a legal decision undertaken by the Allies when they set up the Nuremberg trials after their defeat of Nazi Germany – that there are acts against humanity of such horrific character (such as the Nazis genocide policies against the Roma, Jews, Communists, homosexuals, physically handicapped people, and others) that can be truly defined as evils, defining repressive regimes or institutions as evil in retrospect is not always historically accurate. An additional problem is that in the world of nations and religious conflict, institutions and individuals are prompt to note the ‘evil’ of others while neglecting to see our own peculiar transgressions. Perhaps only Germany has, in recent times, been willing to confront its past in an honest and direct way.

In dealing with the Inquisition in its papal, episcopal, and Spanish variants, most of us in the Western world today would agree that the institution was oppressive and even evil. Many of us who have worked on these histories would also agree that the consequences of inquisitorial trials and practices proved nefarious to medieval and Spanish societies, not to mention to the many who suffered the effects of inquisitorial attention on their own flesh and lives. Yet, the Spanish Inquisition that has been for so long synonymous with ‘evil’ executed a relative small number of people (around 5,000 according to the latest calculation) over its more than three hundred years history.⁴ Clearly that figure pales when compared with early modern attacks against women during the witchcraze in Europe, or compared with the atrocities undertaken throughout the twentieth century and the first decade of the present one. Of course, ‘evilness’ does not depend only on quantifying the destruction of human life. If that was our sole criterium then such acts as the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would also join, as they should, the list of unspeakable atrocities committed in the last hundred years or so by nations against civilian populations.

Other perspectives must also be taken into consideration. It is clear that a substantial segment of the Catholic population in thirteenth-century Occitania or late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain supported the Inquisition’s work. So did the most noted early modern scholars and clergymen (Protestants and Catholics alike) in their almost universal support for the persecution and killing of witches. Rather, most people saw the Inquisition and the witch hunt as protecting society and fulfilling the very salutary task of ferreting out heresy and enforcing a welcome orthodoxy.

Perhaps defining historical events, institutions, and historical agents as evil from the perspective of ‘enlightened’ Western scholarship or ethics is approaching this inquiry incorrectly. Perhaps the category we are seeking to identify here is not evil but fear, that is, to what an extent the Inquisition or similar systems set up to enforce conformity and orthodoxy thrived within specific historical contexts, while promoting fear as an intrinsic tool for accomplishing their aims. If institutions are or were successful because of fear, then we may ask: to what extent contemporaries and those subjected to such regimes experience enduring fears? What were these institutions’ strategies or individual deeds that provoked such widespread fear? What were the consequences of fear? Then one may try to determine whether the nature of that fear qualifies as evil or not.

Fear and evil in the West and the Inquisition

As a former chair of the History and of the Spanish and Portuguese Departments – talk about living in fear – I often told graduating seniors ‘to live their lives without fear’. As pious and well-meaning as my remarks may have been, the reality is that almost all of us, both as individuals and as members of communities, always live in fear. Our fears are triggered by a broad range of issues: existential, environmental, social, and political. They are also prompted by a whole variety of other reasons. From fear of the dark (a category we often associate with evil), a common experience of childhood that lasts into adulthood and is part of ancestral memories of nights without fire and predators howling outside, to fear of ill-health, fiscal duress, loneliness, betrayal, old age, and, of course, death, most of us are constantly afraid of life’s big and small disasters.⁵ Some fears require medical intervention and result in mental illnesses or worse. Some fears come as a response to what we call ‘evil’. Others, though a constant part of our lives, do not prevent us from living in the world and to lead what people call a ‘normal life’.

Since there are numberless ways in which we, as individuals, experience fear and react to it, these myriad of personal accounts do not offer great promise for historians, except as single case studies or as micro histories. Collective fears, some of them worth describing as manifestations of some forms of pathology, however, provide us with an entry into mentalities, into culture, and into evil. The genesis of collective fears, their development, and, most importantly, their impact on society is perhaps one of the central issues in history. The study of fear is, of course, not new. Long ago when I was a young assistant professor in New York, far more years ago than I care to recollect, one of the most suggestive and engaging books we read was Jean Delumeau’s rightly celebrated La peur en Occident (Fear in the West 1978).⁶ Delumeau’s chronological focus was the very late Middle Ages and the early modern period. His approach had a bit of a functionalist perspective, one with which, on this topic at least, I am fairly sympathetic. In the most elementary of summaries – and there is a lot more to the book than what I describe here – fear was deployed or used by those in power to divert their subjects’ attention from the real social, political, and economic problems besetting Western Europe in its transition to modernity. And so does evil. The witch craze and other early modern persecutory phenomena, including the persecution of religious minorities, may have been part of a hegemonic attempt to distract the minds of the ruled and turn their anger and frustrations against well selected marginalized groups. This was done by branding those to be persecuted as evil. Nothing proved their evilness more clearly than their alleged devotion and allegiance to either a hated and discredited faith or to Satan. Those of us who have lived through the cold war, the Iraq invasion, the fear of terrorists, the latest Republican presidential debates, and Trump’s early presidency know very well that fear of an atomic holocaust, of supposed Iraqi nuclear capability, of another terrorist attacks, of homosexuals, immigrants, and others (all of them branded as evil) could be, and has been, used by our leaders to justify all kinds of policies, from funding of new weapon systems, curtailment of our civil liberties, torture, and the like, while our school systems collapse, the humanities and social sciences are de-funded, and our infra-structure rapidly sinks, or has already done so, to the level of a third world country. This is not however to exclude other factors that lead to fear, mistrust, and evil. Representations of others, difference, discourses of persecution (all of them based however on fear) have played a significant role in the constructions of institutions that had at its main function the cleansing of Christian society in the West and the restoration of order.

The first Inquisition

How did these collective fears work in the Middle Ages in the particular case of the Inquisition? What was the nature (or diverse natures) of these fears? What were society’s responses to widespread social anxiety? Or, to express it more accurately in terms of the politics and functionality of evil, who benefitted from collective fear, who suffered from it? In discussing fear and or ‘evil’ in the medieval West, one should begin by offering a typology of all the different reasons capable of triggering widespread fear and, consequently, widespread or harsh responses. Clearly, ranging over the entire course of medieval Western history or to the long and complicated history of Inquisitions is beyond my abilities or possible in the space allotted. This is after all a contribution as to the role of the Inquisition in a history of evil. Thus, I will focus on two different types of Inquisition: the early thirteenth-century papal inquisition and the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Spanish Inquisition. These are the periods I know best and when the Inquisition was at its most active. The possibilities for research on these themes are endless. One should also begin, as I have already outlined before, by distinguishing between two distinct types of events that triggered (and still trigger) fear: natural and man-made disasters. These categories may be, and often are, intimately related.

In the Middle Ages, plagues and other sicknesses and famines (as well as other agricultural disasters, most famously the 1315–21 Great Famine) were at the forefront of these natural catastrophes that periodically swept the West and unmasked the inability of medieval rulers to deal with crises. Of course, it was common to attribute these natural disasters to God’s wrath and as forms of punishment for sinful behavior. It seems to me that we have not progressed a great deal since the Middle Ages. Today, among religious communities such events are often seen as part of divine retribution for a sinning nation, as has been the case with aids and homosexuality in the US.

Of the man-made variety or fear producing cultural constructs, religion has pride of place. Clearly religion often served (and still serves today) as a remedy for fear, as palliative for all kinds of disasters, or, as I argued in a recent book, as a way of making meaning in the face of catastrophes or to escape from them. Nonetheless, in the medieval West, the Church sought to impose and police orthodoxy. What happened when heresy spread, bringing with it fears about one’s own salvation or the well-being of the Christian community?⁷ As Russell Jacoby, one of my cherished colleagues at UCLA, has recently shown in a wonderful book, Bloodlust, small differences in religious observances, dogma, or doctrinal orthodoxy often led and, still lead, to very violent outcomes.⁸ This was most evident during the religious wars that plagued Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, evident in the attitude towards religious minorities in places such as the Iberian realms, above all, against Conversos, and in the great bouts of heresy that swept most of the Mediterranean West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The fear that these heterodox forms of belief brought about was not entirely irrational, certainly not in the context of medieval learned and popular religious culture. What was at stake was, after all, the salvation of one’s own soul and the survival of the Christian community. Heterodox practices were attacks not only against the sacred but also against secular society and established secular authority, or if the term secular is too anachronistic to be used this early, a threat to the hegemonic political groups within the realm. This is why these heterodox beliefs and movements were often branded as evil by the same people or institution we are examining here as part of the history of evil.

Most of Western history, the American political scene today included as well, provide us with clues about the nefarious overlapping of religion and politics. Religious fundamentalists’ fears of non-believers, environmentalists, leftist, intellectuals, homosexuals, Californians in general, or eccentric old people like me have been made to appear as threats too often during the last presidential campaign to need glossing. The same principles applied to the Middle Ages. Deeply linked to religious beliefs in the medieval West and, especially in the Mediterranean world, was also the fear of contamination or pollution due to contacts with, or proximity to non-Christians, sick people (mostly Jews, those suffering from leprosy, and, to a lesser extent, Muslims), and other marginal groups. And of all these fears of pollution none was as powerful or deeply rooted as fear of sexual pollution, as fears of miscegenation. I am of course not saying anything new. David Nirenberg and others have already illustrated how this fear of bodily contact, whether sexual or with those suffering from illnesses (leprosy) led to extreme measures.⁹

The striking thing about these types of fear of course is that, whether prompted by religious heterodoxy or by bodily pollution, the outcomes are never the same and are fairly unpredictable. People who have lived together in relative peace, even though of diverse religious persuasion or ethnicity, or where the sexual boundaries have been fairly porous and not strictly policed, may, in a short while and triggered by a series of changes in the historical contexts, turn into each other with a vengeance. Albigensians (the so-called ‘Cathars’) and Catholics lived in rather amicable ways in twelfth-century Occitania until Dominicans and others came to disturb the peace. Hutus and Tutsies married each other and shared a territorial space, until the massacres occurred. These are moments of convergence, or the old annaliste word, conjuncture. The term serves here as well, that is, those moments in which evil is articulated and its consequences felt by those on the losing side. These are, after all, the themes that are particularly important for historians to identify. We must ask what prompt these changes? And, far more important, what are the consequences of such changing mentalities and attitudes to those who are either different or perceived as different? That is, as Nirenberg correctly emphasized in his paradigmatic book, Communities of Violence, the context makes all the difference. Contexts also shaped the consequences.¹⁰

But contexts are also often multivocal. They do not emerge out of nothing. They are part of complex historical processes. There is of course the danger of eternal regressions or of teleologies that may take us back to the Big Bang. I, for one, do not believe in teleologies, but it is these points of convergence or encounters, each of them resulting from a variety of factors and having their peculiar history and ancestry, that are of interest. But, perhaps, it is time to move from these general observations, familiar to all, and focus ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Series introduction
• Introduction
• 1 Towards a history of evil: Inquisition and fear in the medieval West
• 2 Witchcraft
• 3 Medicine
• 4 Magic and the sciences during an age of change
• 5 Niccolò Machiavelli
• 6 Luther
• 7 John Calvin on evil
• 8 Evil within and evil without: Teresa of Avila battles the devil
• 9 Anabaptists
• 10 Francis Bacon
• 11 Shakespeare and evil
• 12 Hobbes and evil
• 13 Descartes on evil
• 14 Milton
• 15 Baruch Spinoza on evil
• 16 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
• 17 Cambridge Platonism
• 18 Indigenous peoples
• 19 Religious authority and power: rituals of conflict in Africa
• 20 Representations
• Index