Book of Fire by Brian Moynahan

Author:Brian Moynahan [Moynahan, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780748125777
Google: PsDja3fidFUC
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2011-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

Evangelicals’ fury matched that of the Catholics. In Zwinglian Zurich, heretics were being drowned. The great evangelical Theodore Beza was to argue in Calvinist Geneva that it was wrong to spare a heretic because Christ had turned the other cheek. He said that ‘true charity’ lay in defending the flock against the wolf. It was the duty of the magistrate to protect his people against crime. Beza described heresy as a crime worse than murder, for that destroyed bodies, where the heretic assassinated souls and God’s majesty. Calvin himself said wearily of heretics that ‘an end could be put to their machinations in no other way than cutting them off by an ignominious death’.

Heresy was firmly established in Catholicism as the most mortal of all sins. ‘In our charity towards God’s sheep, who must all die some day, some way,’ St Augustine, greatest of the Latin Fathers, had written in 430, ‘we should be more afraid of a butchery of their minds by the sword of spiritual evil than of their bodies by a sword of steel.’ He condoned the use of torture for heretics. ‘We often have to act with a sort of kindly harshness, when we are trying to make unwilling souls yield,’ he wrote, ‘because we have to consider their welfare rather than their inclination.’ It was good for a heretic to suffer, since ‘nothing is more hopeless than the happiness of sinners’.

The principle of the ‘just war’ against heretics had been enshrined by the Bolognese monk and jurist Gratian in the Decretum Gratiani of about 1140. This passed into the Corpus Iuris Canonici, the chief collection of canon law, which laid down ecclesiastical rules on faith, morals and discipline in the Catholic Church for the next nine centuries. ‘Ecclesiasticae religionis inimici etiam bellis sunt cohercendi ’, Gratian wrote in his concise and unyielding Latin, ‘the enemies of the Church and religion are coerced by war’. St Thomas Aquinas, known as ‘Doctor Angelicus’ for the divine inspiration that he was thought to bring to his teaching, had demonstrated to the satisfaction of the medieval Church that heresy separates man from God more than any other sin. As an actual and physical emissary of Satan, the heretic was held to merit the fiercest punishment of burning alive. As the successor to St Peter, Catholics believed, the pope was God’s representative on earth. He therefore had the right to establish the Inquisition, and to encourage and condone acts of repression that included the torture and burning of ‘newe men’.

The evangelicals did not yet have the power to punish others in England and the Low Countries. Tyndale had no way of unleashing the ‘holy work’ of divine retribution against recalcitrant Catholics. For the moment, at least, Catholics remained in authority, and the English had in Thomas More a chancellor whose wrath with heretics was boundless.

The time of burnings had come.

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