The last two chapters have dealt with change in the outward-facing aspects of the inquisition in the 14th century, but change is perhaps more detectable within its structures. This chapter deals with changes that took place in how the purpose and jurisdiction of the inquisition were understood by inquisitors and the Church; the next chapter, Chapter VI, deals with changes in the inquisition’s relationship with suspects and how the process of inquisition was conducted. The two sets of issues are closely related. Changes in inquisitors’ thinking on the role of the inquisition influenced how they perceived suspects; and inquisitors’ perceptions of suspects impacted on their thinking about inquisition. These interactions are discussed at the end of Chapter VI. These changes in the understanding of inquisition can be seen through a comparison of Eymerich’s thinking with Gui’s and, to a lesser extent, Ugolini’s and with that in De officio. They were related to wider developments, in particular changing views on the nature and threat of magic. Indeed the Directorium played a role in the theological/legal changes which helped underpin the later witch persecutions in the 15th century and beyond.
Eymerich conceived of an inquisition which was in some ways different from Gui’s (although perhaps less so from that in Ugolini and De officio) but the immediate practical realisation of his thinking was patchy, not least because of his expulsion from Aragon. He can perhaps best be characterised as trying to codify for inquisitors 14th century changes in heresy and the
inquisition, as well as giving the inquisition a permanent and fixed role within the Church. In doing this he did not simply reflect change which had already occurred but played a more active role in crystallising, for the purposes of the inquisition, changes which had not yet fully occurred. He would have seen himself as reflecting the best thinking of his time on heresy and inquisition by drawing out the conclusions of earlier thinking on the pursuit of heresy in a coherent way. But that process led in itself led to change, in particular in the cases of magic and blasphemy.
Role of the Inquisitor
For the purpose of this chapter change is considered under a number of separate headings, including magic, blasphemy, the position of non-Christians, and ‘intellectual’ heresy (that is heresy by acknowledged thinkers, in particular in this context Raymond Llull). These different
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topics can be seen as part of wider change in thinking on the role of inquisition; that is, on what the inquisition was for, its position in the Church, what its tasks were and what its jurisdiction should be. This wider issue is considered first. There is an imbalance in the sources here. Gui does not theorise at any length on the role of the inquisition or on the nature of heresy or heretics in general; his interest is in the beliefs of particular groups of heretics (Part 5 of the Practica), the powers of the inquisition (Part 4), and how the process of inquisition worked or should have worked (Parts 1-3). There is no equivalent in the Practica, De officio or the Tractatus of Eymerich’s extensive theological discussion both of the inquisition’s role and of the nature of heresy, which constitutes effectively the whole of Part 1 of the Directorium and two quæstiones in Part 2.
But the other works do offer some brief definitions of the inquisition’s role. Gui gives an indication at the beginning of Part 4 of the Practica, of how he sees the role of the inquisition:
The office of inquisition is ordered and provided against every heresy rising up against the Catholic and Apostolic Church and the faith of Lord Jesus Christ and for the promoting of the business of faith […].1
He then states the canon law underpinning this statement. It is all in all a rather brief statement, and, although a good deal of Part 4 is drawn from Quoniam, Gui chose to exclude a purple passage outlining the spiritual perils of modern times, and putting the inquisition in a wider context, which begins that document.2 Indeed having set down the role of the inquisition, Gui paints that role as deriving simply from canon law, implying that the inquisition was essentially a tool of papal policy, a means to an end established by successive popes. At another point in Part 4 he states that:
[…] the end of the office of inquisition is that heresy should be destroyed, which cannot be destroyed unless heretics are destroyed: Finis […] officii inquisitionis est, ut heresis destruatur, que destrui non potest nisi heretici destruantur […].3
1 Practica, p. 173: ‘Inquisitionis officium ordinatum extitit et provisum contra omnem hersim
extollentem se adversus catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam et fidem Domini Jhesu Christi, et ad promovendum ejusdem fidei negocium […]’.
2 BNF, Doat XXXVI, fol. 2ʳ. 3 Practica, p. 217.
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Gui talks here of an officium inquisitionis, that is a function rather than an institution, or perhaps a legal mechanism for delivering particular ends. This is classically the way in which 13th century inquisitors saw the inquisition, as Richard Kieckhefer demonstrated in his 1995 Journal of Ecclesiastical History article.4 Nor is there any sense here or elsewhere in the
Practica that these aims are not achievable. These two quotations suggest that Gui’s inquisition had not become an institution, but there is other evidence on this subject, which is brought together in Chapter VII.
Unlike the Practica, De officio does define heresy. Heresy consists of beliefs contrary to everything in Holy Scripture and to those things which are pertinent to Holy Scripture according to the ‘explanation and teaching of the Church; expositionem et doctrinam ecclesie’. Heretics are ‘those who give rise to or follow new and false opinions’ (Augustine’s definition).5 The work is also concerned about what defences may be possible against a charge of heresy; ignorance is a poor excuse, since Christians should know the articles of the Faith.6 The anonymous author’s approach to defining heresy and heretics is legal rather than theological.
Ugolini’s Tractatus gives a concise description, again based on Scripture and Augustine, of what constitutes a generic heretic, that is someone: who teaches something contrary to the Faith; or who gives rise to an opinion contrary to the Faith; or who makes errors in the exposition of scripture; or who transgresses and despises the precepts of the Church; or who perverts the sacraments or is a simoniac; or who doubts the Catholic Faith.7 Ugolini does give a short list of past heresies and points out that the number of sects is infinite, although the point is made briefly.8
Eymerich goes into more detail than any of his three predecessors in defining heretics and heresy. The first part of the Directorium, ‘De fide: On the Catholic Faith’, covers a category of material absent from Gui, De officio, and Ugolini: the theological justification for suppressing heresy by the inquisition. Much of this part is taken up with an exposition of 13th-14th century
4 Kieckhefer, ‘The Office of Inquisition and Medieval Heresy: the Transition from Personal to
Institutional Jurisdiction’.
5 De officio inquisitionis, p. 39. 6 Ibid., p.42.
7 Tractatus, pp. 7-9.
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canon law, consisting of sections from Lateran IV, Augustine, Gratian, Justinian and Boniface VIII and others. These are aimed at establishing a set of propositions setting out a coherent view of faith and heresy. The starting point is the first two chapters of Lateran IV (the statement of the Christian Faith and the condemnation of Joachim di Fiore) and a defence of Trinitarian doctrine at the Council of Lyon in 1274 (taken from the Sextus) and at the Council of Vienne (1312) (taken from the Clementines).9 Peña’s edition then includes St Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on them, but this is absent from the Majorca manuscript.10 Peña’s later addition
(which it seems to be) is helpful because Eymerich’s arguments draw heavily on Aquinas. Eymerich did not include this material probably because it did not occur to him to go beyond including canon law and the accepted interpretation of it. The addition of Aquinas is only marked in the printed addition by the use of a slightly smaller typeface. Both the manuscript and the printed edition then include the standard glosses on the three primary texts. Peña has filled out these glosses to include some linking material, but made no substantive changes. Extracts from the Justinian Code, Unam Sanctam, canon law on baptism, the creeds, Augustine and Gratian follow and are much the same in both manuscript and printed version, apart from Peña’s rather more explicit titling.11
These various authorities underpin a series of quaestiones at the end of this part, which establish Eymerich’s view of the faith and thereby the necessity for the inquisition. In this Eymerich draws on Aquinas for his thinking, in particular Quæstio XXXII of the First Part of the Summa Theologica and the first three quæstiones of the Secunda secundæ.12 One quæstio in Part 2 of the Directorium (Part 2 Quæstio 32) sums up this thinking by defining who may truly and properly be called a heretic and what a heretic is.13 This thinking on heretics and
heresy had in fact been developed by Eymerich earlier and more fully in 1359 in De iurisdictione inquisitorum in et contra christianos demones invocantes, which is only available in manuscript.14
9 Directorium, pp. 3-5, BM, fols Iᵛ - IIʳ; CIC, vol. 2, cols 5-7. 10 Ibid., pp. 6-14.
11 Ibid., pp. 15-45, BM, fols VIᵛ - XVʳ.
12 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.22, and 2.2. 1-3. 13 Directorium, pp. 227-28, BM, fols XCVʳ-XCVᵛ.
14 BNF, MS LAT 1464, fols 100ʳ-161ͬ; and Palma de Mallorca, Biblioteca Bartomeu March,
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This Part of the Directorium raises the questions whether Eymerich’s definition of heresy merely reflects Aquinas’ thinking, and how far it differs from a classic Augustinian view of heresy or from a view of heresy that might be derived from Gui’s work. Eymerich starts in Part 1 by saying that all articles of faith must be held and explained equally by religious people (simple people, the simplices, are exempt, because they depend on those who are better educated).15 The key parts of the Church’s theology on Christ and the Trinity should also be believed explicitly.16 Other articles of faith must be believed implicitly. This follows from the
(canon legal) Glossa ordinaria interpretation of the words ‘Firmiter credemus’, the opening words of the first article of Lateran IV, which are:
‘[…] oportet omnes alios articulos credere implicite, hoc est credere, verum esse quidquid credit ecclesia catholica; all other articles should be believed implicitly, that is that whatever the Catholic Church believes should be believed to be true’.17
Eymerich apparently accepts the distinction, referred to in the Glossa Ordinaria and also made by Aquinas, between those articles of faith which must be explicitly believed (such as the teaching on the Trinity) and those, such as Old Testament stories, about which heterodox opinion can be held without risk of heresy, unless and until it has been determined that such a belief is contrary to Faith.18 Nevertheless he argues in the Directorium that all parts of Holy Scripture should be believed since, if any part is considered false, all Scripture will be considered false.19 Therefore, in certain cases, a confession of faith in any part of the Church’s beliefs is essential to salvation.20 Then, in the final quæstio, by far the longest, he shows the relevance of this thinking to an inquisitor. All are required to believe in Christ’s humanity and the Trinity. Individuals are not expected necessarily to believe other parts of the Christian faith explicitly but, when informed by an inquisitor that they should be believed, they must do so or
15 Directorium, pp. 46-47, BM, fol. XVIʳ, Q. IIII. Here Eymerich draws on an analogy from
the pseudo-Dionysius that superior angels depend on inferior.
16 Ibid., pp. 47-48, fols XVIʳ - XVIᵛ, Qs V & VI. 17 Ibid., p. 19, fol. VIIIʳ.
18 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.32.4: About this sort of things therefore, someone can
therefore give false opinions without risk of heresy before it is considered or determined that out of that follows something contrary to Faith […];Circa huiusmodi ergo absque periculo haeresis aliquis falsum potest opinari, antequam consideretur, vel determinatum sit, quod ex hoc sequitur aliquid contrarium fidei [...].
19 Directorium, pp. 48-49, BM, fols XVIᵛ-XVIIʳ, Q. VII. 20 Ibid., pp. 49-50, fol. XVIIʳ, Q. IX.
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be considered a pertinacious heretic. In short, while accepting the view that it is not necessary to believe all Scripture explicitly, Eymerich allows an inquisitor the latitude to require explicit belief in every part of Scripture.
It might be argued that Eymerich is simply realising the Glossa ordinaria’s and Aquinas’ position in a clear judicial context. But that in itself changes things. The Glossa and Aquinas in practice left some space for debate or differences of opinion about those things which were not essential to the Faith or not yet determined unless and until, presumably after some discussion, a determination was made. Eymerich, on the other hand, makes the denying of any part of Scripture, however trivial, potentially heretical and the concern of the inquisition, if the individual persists in that belief. The logic is that doubt on any aspect of the Faith makes it vulnerable, which might nowadays be called ‘zero tolerance’. Furthermore the initial determination of the faith has slipped from being a matter for theologians to discuss to being a matter for inquisitors to resolve in individual cases, albeit those inquisitors would have the services of theologians amongst the iurisperiti who confirmed their decisions. There is in this description of the inquisitor’s role a substantially more comprehensive jurisdiction than Gui envisaged. His heretics belonged to a number of discrete pathologies. As shown in Chapter II, in an example where Eymerich amends Gui’s words, Eymerich was aware that he differed from Gui in seeing the possibility of heresy being an individual rather than a group phenomenon.21 Although there is more similarity between Ugolini’s position and Eymerich’s, Ugolini’s definition does not envisage in the terms that Eymerich sets out that every jot and tittle of Scripture should be held inviolable.22
Eymerich probably also goes further than Augustine. The classic Augustinian definition of heresy, which Eymerich quotes and which is used by Gratian, is that heretics are those who persist, even after they are corrected, in defending dogmas which are ‘pestiferous and deadly’.23
Augustine proposed this definition in The City of God and probably had in mind the Manichean sect of which he had been a member or the Donatists against whom he struggled as Bishop of Hippo. These movements involved theological differences from Catholicism which were of
21 See p. 57 above. 22 Tractatus, pp. 7-9.
23 Directorium, p. 55, BM, fol. XIXᵛ; CIC, 1, col. 998: Qui in Ecclesia Christi aliquid morbidum
pravumque quid sapiunt, si correcti ut sanum rectumque sapiant, resistunt contumaciter, suaque pestifera et mortifera dogmata emendare nolunt, sed defendere persistunt, heretici sunt.
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huge practical significance. It must be doubtful whether Augustine envisaged these words being applied to an unimportant piece of Scripture. Indeed the words ‘morbidum pravumque: morbid and depraved’, which qualify heretical belief, imply more than a disagreement on a minor matter. The Eymerician defence would be that any belief which contradicted any determination of the Church or any part of Scripture was indeed ‘morbidum pravumque’, because it throws the whole edifice of belief into doubt. But the impression remains that Eymerich takes a more rigorous position on heresy than his inquisitorial predecessors and Aquinas and Augustine.
However, there is one exception to this picture. Guido Terreni does take a rather similar view in his Summa de hæresibus, in which he says:
Opinio etenim illa est heretica quæ expresse et evidenter scripturæ sacræ adversatur, sic quod est contra expressum textum novi vel veteris testamenti […]: Indeed that opinion is heretical which expressly and clearly is opposed to Holy Scripture, because it is against the express text of the New or Old Testament’.24
Terreni was the closest in time to Eymerich, so it may be that Eymerich drew his thinking from him. We know from the Directorium that Eymerich saw his advice to John XXII on magic and he may well have had access to his other works at Avignon.25
Claudia Heimann has noted that the definition of a heretic in Quaestio 32 of Part 2 of the
Directorium, although clearly drawing on Contra christianos demones invocantes, differs in one significant respect from that work.26 At the end of a definition of heresy in Contra christianos demones invocantes Eymerich, drawing on Aquinas, points out that heretics must have received the faith of Christ and that: ‘Qui enim fidem aliquando non recepit, hereticus existere nequit […]: For who has not received the faith [of Christ] cannot be a heretic […].’27
24 Guido Terreni, Summa de haeresibus et earum confutationibus, (Parisiis, Prelum
Ascensianum, 1528.), fol. IIIIᵛ.
25 Directorium, p. 237, BM, fol. Cʳ:
26 Claudia Heimann, ‘Quis proprie est hereticus?’ in The Dominicans and the Medieval Inquisition. Acts of the 1st International Seminar on the Dominicans and the Inquisition,
Dissertationes Historicae 29 (Rome: Dominican Historical Institute, 2004), pp. 603-05.
27 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2.2.24.1 and 2.2.3.5; and BM, Contra christianos demones
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These words and the whole thought are absent from the Directorium and Heimann’s contention is that this is to allow non-Christians to be considered heretics, a point which is considered below.
Gui presents heresies as a discrete set of identifiable and dangerous pathologies, which are described in Part 5 of the Practica, which it was the inquisitor’s role to eliminate and which were potentially finite. Ugolini and De officio defined heresy and heretics generically but in a precise and legal way. Eymerich, on the other hand, while sharing the legal thinking on heresy, adds a theological dimension. He sees the Church as under continuous attack. It is therefore the role of the judge – an inquisitor or bishop – to defend its doctrinal boundaries by declaring any activity outside the Church’s teaching as heretical. Eymerich does give a long list of heresies, some described in useful detail, but these defined heresies are not the full list: ‘There are also other heresies without authors and without names […]’, as Eymerich concludes at the end of a long list of heresies and their authors.28
This view of a church being tested by heresy at every point is reinforced by the eschatological language in Eymerich’ own introduction to the Directorium, where he talks of heresy as being introduced by Satan into the Lord’s vineyard and being part of a wider struggle against the devil and demons.29 This concept of struggle is not original in Eymerich; Aquinas, for example, talked in much the same terms when discussing the role of the Dominican Order.30 But it is not present in Gui’s or Ugolini’s text or that of the anonymous author of De officio. Quoniam, however, does talk of the ‘doctrines of demons: doctrinis demoniorum’ in a fairly purple passage about spiritual dangers of modern times, which, as noted above, Gui chose to omit from the Practica.31 The tone of this passage in Quoniam is that the difficulties are recent and time-limited. Similarly Gui was dealing with (mostly) temporary heretical phenomena