God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World (8 page)

The
HUMINT
[human intelligence] collector prepares a dossier containing all available information concerning the source or his organization. The information is carefully arranged within a file to give the illusion that it contains more data than actually there. . . . It is also effective if the
HUMINT
collector is reviewing the dossier when the source enters the room.

Another technique suggested by Eymerich is to suddenly shift gears, approaching the person being interrogated in a seeming spirit of mercy and compassion, speaking “sweetly” and solicitously, perhaps making arrangements to provide something to eat and drink.
The army manual puts it this way:

At the point when the interrogator senses the source is vulnerable, the second
HUMINT
collector appears. [He] scolds the first
HUMINT
collector for his uncaring behavior and orders him from the room. The second
HUMINT
collector then apologizes to soothe the source, perhaps offering him a beverage and a cigarette.

Kindness may prove ineffective. Another way to break the impasse, Eymerich writes, is to “multiply the questions and the interrogations,” observing that asking many different questions, quickly and repeatedly, will create confusion, elicit contradiction, and furnish information for deeper questioning.
The Army recommends what it calls “rapid-fire interrogation”:

The
HUMINT
collectors ask a series of questions in such a manner that the source does not have time to answer a question completely before the next one is asked. This confuses the source, and he will tend to contradict himself as he has little time to formulate his answers.

Eymerich and the army describe many other techniques. You can try to persuade the prisoner that resistance is pointless, because others have already spilled the beans. You can take the line that you know the prisoner is but a small fish, and if only you had the names of the bigger fish, the small one might swim free. You can play on the prisoner’s feelings of utter hopelessness, reminding him that only cooperation with the interrogator offers a path to something better. Eymerich writes a script, telling the inquisitor he should say that he is obliged to stop the questioning because he must go on a long trip—that he wishes the questioning were at an end, but it must be interrupted until he returns. He does not know how long that will be, perhaps weeks or months, and until that time the prisoner will have to remain in the dungeons . . . unless, perhaps, we can successfully conclude the questioning now?
The army manual refers to this as the “emotional-futility” approach:

In the emotional-futility approach, the
HUMINT
collector convinces the source that resistance to questioning is futile. This engenders a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness on the part of the source. Again as with the other emotional approaches, the
HUMINT
collector gives the source a “way out” of the helpless situation.

Who Needs God?

In the background, always, lies the possibility of physical persuasion. Few words summon the Dark Ages to mind as quickly as “torture” does, but the uncomfortable truth is that the emergence of torture as an acceptable instrument reveals glimmerings of a modern way of thinking: the truth can be ascertained without God’s help. To be sure, the use of torture goes far back into prehistory. Cave paintings from 12,000 years ago suggest that torture techniques developed very early.
“Torture him, how?” asks the judge in Aristophanes’
The Frogs,
who goes on to mention stretching on the rack, putting bricks on the chest, hanging by the thumbs, and other well-known techniques.
Torture has been used as a ritual act, a means of deterrence, a tool of coercion, and a form of vengeance. Frequently it has been done simply to slake something fundamental in certain natures. An unidentified member of a Mexican drug cartel spoke about this to CNN
:

ANDERSON COOPER:
Torture is common?

DRUG CARTEL MEMBER:
Yes it is.

COOPER:
Why? Just to get information?

CARTEL MEMBER:
To—not to get information. Just the pleasure of doing it.

Torture had been used in ancient Rome as part of the
inquisitio
process. But as a legitimate tool of jurisprudence it was actually little known in the 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. Confessions made during a torture session were not admissible—they had to be repeated later, after an interval. And torture could be used only once. The Church laid down more rules governing torture than civil magistrates did. But inquisitors pushed the boundaries. For instance, what did “once” mean? Perhaps it should be interpreted, as Eymerich urged, to mean once for each charge. As for clerics participating in torture—surely it would be permissible if inquisitors absolved one another (as they came to do).

When one pope insisted that torture should have the explicit authorization of a local bishop, Bernard Gui proposed a looser standard: that it should be allowed after “mature and careful deliberation.”
Gui did not prevail on this point, but torture would prove difficult to contain. The potential fruits always seem so tantalizing, and the rules so easy to bend.

Amoral brutes certainly commit torture, but in their hands it doesn’t become part of an integrated system. Torture becomes systematic in the hands of a different sort of person—one who is determined to use the powers of reason, and who believes in the rightness of his cause. This is what Michael Ignatieff means when he calls torture chambers “intensely moral places.”
Those who wish to justify torture don’t do so by
avoiding
moral thinking; rather, they override the obvious immorality of the specific act by the presumptive morality of the larger endeavor. If the endeavor is deemed important enough, there is little that can’t be justified. There are no lengths to which one may not go. In Arthur Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon,
the protagonist Rubashov ultimately acquiesces in his own condemnation and execution—even uttering a false confession at his show trial—on the grounds that he must bow to the historical inevitability of the revolutionary process. Wasn’t this, after all, the same exculpatory logic he had used when dispatching others?

It is a logic without limits. Thomas More points out the dangers in a celebrated exchange in Robert Bolt’s
A Man for All Seasons,
when he asks his son-in-law, William Roper, if he’d be willing to cut a swath through the laws in order to ensnare the devil. “I’d cut down every law in England to do that,” Roper says. Thomas More replies, “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”

Just Tell Us Everything

Not knowing where to stop: that turns out to be a central problem of any inquisition. Bureaucracy is not merely passive—it is an inertial force, sustaining action just as mindlessly as it does inaction. Bureaucracies are composed of individuals who have their own interests, their own will, but interests and will are also shaped by the institution. Like a nervous system, a bureaucracy can flex muscles in the absence of overt instruction. It can persist even when by its own lights there is no longer reason to do so. That aside, what, in the end, is the truth one is looking for? And assuming it is ascertainable, at what point is it in fact ascertained? How does one know? The quest has no clear destination.

Montaillou is a village in what is now the south of France. In the late thirteenth century it occupied a more nebulous position. It was part of the Comte de Foix, which had once been independent but now owed allegiance to the king of France, and served as a frontier bulwark against the kingdom of Aragon. The 250 or so people of Montaillou spoke not French but Occitan. And they were heretics. By 1300 the Cathars and their faith had been exterminated almost everywhere, but Montaillou remained untouched, a last redoubt.

Today the village seems as remote as it ever was, in a soft green valley on a road to nowhere. It may in fact be
more
remote than it used to be: this region of France, below the sharply etched defiles that drain the Pyrenees, is losing its people. The landscape of Montaillou has not greatly changed since the fourteenth century, though only a few silent houses stand there now, together with the village church. A ruined castle occupies a rise. If you know the history, and if there’s a low, late-afternoon sun to bring out the shadows, you can make sense of the indentations here and there in the rolling grass—where the village square used to be, where the women did the washing, where the tracks to Ax and Prades ran, where the outlying fields were cultivated.
The place brings on a sensation of deep loneliness. It was once so thick with events, and now is occupied mainly by the wind.

It holds surprises, though. Stroll around the Gothic church in Montaillou—Notre Dame de Carnesses—and you will see gravestones, some of them quite new, for people who bear the surname Clergue. The sight comes as something of a shock. The Clergues were already living in Montaillou seven hundred years ago, attending this very church. They were the most prominent family in town—part Ambersons, part Corleones, part Simpsons, on a
sou
-sized stage—and their quarrels and ambitions were inescapable. Some of them were central to the drama that played out in Montaillou when an inquisitor set his eyes on the village.

The inquisitor was Jacques Fournier, the bishop of Pamiers.
His aim was to clean out the last pockets of Cathars from this backwater of his diocese. In 1318, Fournier proceeded to interrogate everyone in Montaillou; its adult population had been arrested and taken to Carcassonne. Over a period of years he probed into the smallest intimacies of their personal lives—not only their beliefs but also their tastes and habits, whom they liked and disliked, their sexual practices, the village gossip. He wanted detail: names, dates, numbers, locations, relationships. To exert control you must nail people down: identify them, count them, keep track of them, put them in context. He was five hundred years ahead of his time.