Dear Preston,
I don't know who Christopher Hitchens is, and I assume from your e-mail that you indeed cannot think of a
reference off the top of your head regarding the Inquisition. I noticed you mentioned your interest in
hearing a charitable account of the Inquisition. I have no reason to treat such an inhumane, barbaric
institution as charitable.
The fact is, no one has written the account of its atrocities in succinct form, to my knowledge. The
accounts given in histories of Christianity are weak and "charitable." They expect us to believe that it had
nothing to do with the intransigence of a dying religion against a backdrop of gains in general public
enlightenment.
INQUIRY BOX
Greg and Preston use the word "charity" differently. It comes from the Latin word caritas, which means
"dearness," "affection," "love" and "esteem." President Abraham Lincoln used the word in his Second
Inaugural Address (delivered in August 1864, near the end of the Civil War), when he called for "charity
for all"-victorious Northerners and nearly defeated Southerners alike.
How do Greg and Preston use this word differently, and how do these different meanings lead to
misunderstanding?
Many of the accounts were written by Christians. This is like right-wing Germans writing the definitive
history of the Nazi atrocities. Christians need to be educated about the barbarism of their religion's
history.
If Christianity is any better today, it is only because of its scholarship and understanding of the world,
not because it can revise and forget its brutal past. I see tinges of Inquisition rhetoric throughout modern
Christian writing, although I avoid anything written by Christian scholars generally. I simply am not
interested in learning how modern knowledge can be reconciled with outdated theology.
Sincerely,
Greg Graffin
Dear Greg:
My area of specialty is late nineteenth-century North America, so I don't know what's definitive as far as
Inquisition goes. (I could have a research assistant do some checking.) If the Spanish Inquisition is what
you're thinking of, then Simon Whitechapel's new book Flesh Inferno: Atrocities of Torquemada and the
Spanish Inquisition might be useful but, judging from the title, it promises to be more polemical than
dispassionately historical. Also there's Susan McCarthy's Spanish Inquisition of a few years ago. If you're
interested in the broader inquisitions that include witch trials, B. P. Levack's The Witch Hunt in Early
Modern Europe might be good. There are more than a dozen books available on the witch trials in
colonial America. If the general topic of inquisition in Western civilization is what you're interested in,
then you'd probably include the anti-Christian death squads of the French Revolution, Stalinism in the
Soviet Union and elsewhere, the Alien and Sedition Acts in this country, etc.