The Inquisition

How Persecution Entered the Church

The Inquisition was not a single office or a single event. It was a system of church courts, built up from the late twelfth century onward, for finding, examining, and punishing those Rome called heretics. In one form or another it hunted dissenters for more than six hundred years, and its victims included many of Christ's free churches. Its story shows what happens when a church takes up the sword of the state to enforce its teaching.

Christ's apostles answered false teachers with the Word and with church discipline, never with prisons or fire. The change came after the state church allied itself with the state. Augustine of Hippo, facing the Donatist churches of North Africa, came to defend the state's force against them, reading the words of the parable of the great supper (Luke 14:23) as a warrant for coercion. Roman law under the Christian emperors made heresy a crime. In 385 the Spanish bishop Priscillian was executed at Trier on charges pressed by fellow bishops, though Martin of Tours and others protested. In 1022 King Robert II of France had a group of clergy burned as heretics at Orléans, the first such burning in the medieval West.

In the twelfth century dissent spread through southern France, northern Italy, and the Rhineland: preachers like Peter of Bruys and Henry of Lausanne, the dualist Cathars, and the Waldenses. Sometimes mobs seized and burned suspected heretics before any court could act. The church's leaders wanted order and orthodoxy, and they built a legal machine to secure both.