Free God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy Page B

darkest part of the Middle Ages. The reason is that in the early medieval view, when mortals stood humbly before an all-knowing God, the capacity of human beings to discover the truth was seen to be limited. Thus the reliance not on judges or juries but on
iudicium Dei
—divine judgment—to determine guilt or innocence. This could, and usually did, take the form of swearing a solemn oath before God, perhaps joined by friends and associates who swore the same oath, that one was innocent of the alleged crime. With the fate of one’s immortal soul in the balance—as everyone at the time would have believed—such an oath was no small thing. If the case was of sufficient gravity, an accused person might endure trial by ordeal: he would be submerged in water, or made to walk on red-hot coals, or to plunge an arm into boiling water. If he suffered no harm, or if the wounds healed sufficiently within a certain period of time, then it was deemed to be the judgment of God that the accused was innocent.
    This regime was common in Europe from the sixth through the twelfth centuries. It conformed naturally to the prevailing mental outlook, and it suited an age in which the institutions of government as we understand them were few and overburdened. Trial by ordeal was unquestionably primitive, even barbaric. But it was expeditious, and ensured that the quest for truth had a clear and definitive end point.
    The twelfth-century revolution in legal practice—exemplified by the work of Gratian but manifest everywhere, from ecclesiastical tribunals to secular ones—took the pursuit of justice out of God’s hands and put it into those of human beings. Edward Peters, who has written extensively about this subject, offered a brief
tour d’horizon
one morning in his office at the University of Pennsylvania. Peters at the time was the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History, and his dark-paneled office atop the university library opened through double doors into the Lea Library, a Victorian Gothic wonder transplanted from Lea’s Philadelphia mansion in the 1920s. It is the room in which Lea wrote his many volumes on the Medieval and Spanish Inquisitions, works still unsurpassed in breadth and ambition.
    Underlying the medieval legal revolution, Peters explained, was one big idea: when it came to discovering guilt or innocence—and, more broadly, discovering something akin to truth—there was no need to send the decision up the chain of command to God. These matters were well within human capacity.
    But that didn’t quite settle the issue, Peters went on. When God is the judge, no other standard of proof is needed. But when human beings make themselves the judges, the question of proof comes very much to the fore. What constitutes acceptable evidence? How does one decide between conflicting testimony? In the absence of a voluntary confession—the most unassailable form of evidence, the “queen of proofs”—what means of questioning can properly be employed to induce one? Are there ways in which the interrogation might be aggressively enhanced? And in the end, how does one know that the full truth has been exposed, that there isn’t a bit more to be discovered some little way beyond, perhaps accessible with some additional effort—one more slight turn of the screw? Of course, that turn of the screw is unpleasant—certainly a last resort—and possible to justify only in terms of the greater good. So do you see, Peters asked, how torture comes into the picture?
    It was widely used in secular courts, and then crossed into the spiritual realm. In 1252, Pope Innocent IV issued the papal bull
Ad extirpanda,
which authorized the use of torture in the work of the Inquisition. Churchmen could be present but were not to participate—some representative of secular authority would do the job. In theory, torture was somewhat controlled. It was not supposed to cause grave injury or put life in jeopardy. A physician was typically present.