Customer Reviews

God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

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Here is another thoughtful and endlessly engaging book by Cullen Murphy. God's Jury is subtitled The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World. Nowadays the word Inquisition actually has a somewhat humorous sound to many people thanks to its caricature by Monty Python. Murphy's account, while making it clear that the Inquisition in its various forms (Spanish, Roman, etc.) was a deadly serious and tragic development in European history, also demonstrates a sort of black humor based on irony. Even more importantly, Murphy draws comparisons between the Inquisition and its modern counterparts which serve to illuminate present day follies.

God's Jury is part history, part travelogue, and part commentary. I was fascinated to learn of the many remnants the old Inquisition has left behind: buildings, prisons, and above all the records. Murphy makes the good point that the Inquisition was more than any thing else a bureaucracy, self perpetuating and aggrandizing as are all bureaucracies, dedicated to preserving records of the most trivial offenses, some of which caused even the Chief Inquisitors to write dismissive notes on their pages. Even more interesting were the parallels Murphy draws between the Inquisition's practices and those of our own time, including an amusing comparison between an Inquisitor's questioning of a man caught in a sexual dalliance and the Starr Report. More troubling parallels are drawn between Inquistorial practices and those of our own modern surveillance society and between the Inquisition's fear of conversos and the post 9/11 distrust of Muslims.

This is rightfully disturbing material and Murphy handles it with appropriate seriousness, leavened with his ability to tell a good anecdote and relate an amusing misstep, whether its one of his own or one that happened hundreds of years ago. God's Jury is an important, challenging look at what has been happening to our society in the early twenty first century, with abundant warnings of what may lie in store for us.

God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World by Cullen Murphy is a fitting examination of one of the darker episodes in human history. While not the same as the Holocaust, and certainly with different aims, the period of the inquisition marks a low point the history of the Catholic Church and the administrators that managed the affair.

One point worth making is that I'd never really thought of the inquisition as something that needed to be managed and administered, an activity that generated enormous piles of records that need to be stored and preserved. Murphy writes:

"At the time of my first visit, the Inquisition archive--officially, the Archivio della Congreazione per la Dottrina della Fede--splled from room to room and floor to floor in the palazzo's western wing, filling about twenty rooms in all. "

Again making my own comparison to the Nazi regime, I am stunned at the amount of record keeping activities such as the inquisition and the extermination of entire populations generate and the compulsive nature of man to record such activities.

Murphy does a good job in explaining the two inquisitions, Spanish and Roman. I'm not a historian and certainly not an expert in this area, so finding out that there were two inquisitions is an eye opener for me.

The reader is introduced to the library of the inquisition, the dungeon and torture chambers and left to ponder the purpose of these activities. The Spanish Inquisition commenced in 1492 when the Jews of Spain were told to convert to the Catholic faith or leave Spain. The activity of the Inquisition was to root out those who openly converted but continued to practice their old faith.

Murphy's purpose in writing God's Jury is to force the reader to look at later periods where those in power arrested, detained, tortured, and murdered those who might disagree with whatever power structure exists. He's not bashful about including the recent detentions of combatants in the post 9/11 period. I do see a difference between those who quietly operate on a different belief system (innocent Jews in Spain) and those captured on the battlefield bearing arms and engaged in combat. I also believe torture in wrong in all it's various incarnations, but I don't see a straight comparison. Just my opinion!

God's Jury is an intensely interesting read. Murphy's ability to do effective research is apparent on every page and his ability to effectively convey what he has found also top notch.

I recommend.

Peace.

Though I have been reading bits about inquisition for the last 15 years, I always thought it was mainly something that the Spanish and the Portuguese did. I also thought that it ended in the 19th century. Mr. Murphy disabused me thoroughly of both the notions. He shows how it spilled over from Europe into the colonies, as far as Brazil. I also learned that England had its own date with inquisition as did the Vatican. He does not restrict himself to inquisition proper, but also writes about witchcraft, censorship and other forms of religious persecution. Through this all, he travels to the places where all this happened and talks to a number of players. This gives a very 'current event' kind of feeling to the book.

He then goes on to show that though inquisition primarily started as a religious institution, it gradually became entwined with the State. Finally in the modern 21st century, the religious overtones are almost completely gone, and all that remains is the bureaucracy and the machine, put to effective use by the modern secular state. And this is happening the world over - from Russia to the US.

Despite the title, this book is not about religious persecution. The church origins and history of the inquisition are used to launch and dramatise the story. This helps us focus on modern realities, thinking about the intrusions of the state into our lives, and where it might all lead us. Those who do not learn from history are....

Mr. Murphy is a journalist and it shows in the readability of his prose. He also is very good at dovetailing events across centuries and drawing parallels. The writing is very live, and it is difficult to put the book down. There is an enormous amount of information and delicious tidbits for people interested in inquisition per se. And there is a lot to chew on for others who are concerned about just how much the government and corporations intrude into our privacy and personal lives. Mr. Murphy is a modern Catholic, very perceptive and his insights are invaluable.

The hardcover edition that I read was bound quite nicely, with good paper and a readable type face. There is a useful index, though somewhat stingy in terms of references, considering the amount of information in this book. There is a bibliography, as well as notes.

All in all, readable, thought provoking, informative writing and a great book!

Santayana famously wrote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". Cullen Murphy's latest work is an examination of the Inquisition (or inquisitions as there were at least three historical episodes of the Inquisition) in light of the current war on terror and the methodologies used. His thesis is that we are currently in the midst of a modern inquisition and that by not remembering the past, we are engaging in a secular persecution that mirrors the Catholic Inquisition.

There can definitely be parallels drawn between many of the current methods used in the war on terror and the historical inquisitions. However, all of our modern culture is shaped by the past, sometimes subtly and sometimes in ways that are blindingly obvious. Torture as an interrogation technique certainly predates the inquisition as there is ample evidence of the use of torture by ancient greeks and romans. It was hardly invented by the Catholic church. Our current use of torture could just as easily be a remnant of our shared greco-roman heritage. I found the simplicity of this argument annoying. In general, the tone of the book was antagonistic to the current Catholic church. As an aside, I am not a Catholic so I do not feel personally affronted, however the heavy handedness of the argument bothered me. The argument felt very ham handed, I was expecting nuanced history and instead got the political commentary of a pundit. The arguments felt loosely tied together and disjointed. There were spots where the writing was compelling and interesting and large areas that were a slog to get through. This book would have benefitted from a more in-depth treatment of the historical episodes and the psychology and culture that was behind the Inquisition. A more nuanced examination of our current methodologies and the motivations behind them would have vastly increased the value of this work. Although I largely agree that the methodologies behind our current war on terror will be remembered as grave mistakes, I do not believe that those who disagree with me are modern "Torqhemadas". Both sides of the current issue have deep and often very nuanced reasoning behind their views. A more even discussion would have elevated this book. As is, I was disappointed.

It's easy to regard the Inquisition, redolent as it is of medieval dungeons, burnings at the stake, and other things utterly alien to American readers, as not merely historical but antiquated. Yet, as Cullen Murphy points out in his new book, the Inquisition became possible, both intellectually and strategically, because of developments that are, however different their context, recognizably modern. Legal reforms encouraged the idea that the discovery of truth could be put into the hands of men instead of being left to God, raising the question of how far the search for truth should go-- and opening the door to torture. Meanwhile, centralization and increased record-keeping allowed the Catholic Church to track and punish heresy as never before, creating for the first time professionals and an institutional structure devoted to the enforcement of orthodoxy. And the influence of these developments would reach beyond the Inquisition itself to shape national policies and attitudes down to the present day. The legitimacy of torture, while hardly taken for granted as it was by the Inquisition, remains a subject for debate, and extensive government surveillance and record-keeping around the world are largely taken for granted. These modern parallels (however diluted) to Inquisition methods, particularly American ones, are as much Murphy's subject as the history of the Inquisition itself. Covering so much ground in a book of 250 pages (plus notes, bibliography, and index) has its drawbacks, both for the medieval material and the modern, but this is nonetheless a readable history of the Inquisition for general readers with little to no knowledge of the topic.

After a stage-setting introductory chapter, the second through fifth chapters of the book deal with various forms of the Inquisition: the early phase devoted to rooting out Catharism from southern France; the famous Spanish Inquisition, which concerned itself primarily but by no means solely with Jewish and Muslim converts who were suspected of backsliding; the Roman Inquisition, which controlled the Index of Forbidden Books and was responsible for the trials of Giordano Bruno and Galileo; and the global reach of the Spanish Inquisition, which maintained a presence in Spanish and Portuguese colonies, including what would eventually become the state of New Mexico. That's a lot to deal with in 160 pages, and the space available is further reduced by the exploration of modern parallels and by the author's penchant for digression. Descriptions of his travels in the places where these events occurred and his meetings with scholars of the period are not without interest (and give a sense of the enduring weight of history), and a certain emphasis on interesting trivia over scholarly focus is inevitable in a piece of popular non-fiction. But here the attention to the course of history is a little too loose, and I found myself wishing at times for a more rigorous and detail-oriented approach. Other readers, though, will welcome the book's breezy accessibility, and even I found much that was fascinating, most notably the unexpected history and impact of the Inquisition in New Mexico. I also enjoyed the occasional bits of dry humor.

The sixth and seventh chapters extend the parallels drawn in the historical section, dealing with the Inquisition's effect on post-Reformation England, its influence on the surveillance and censorship infrastructure of many later states (Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany, and contemporary Russia, Great Britain, and the United States), and the continuing efforts of the Catholic Church to ensure doctrinal conformity within the clergy. Murphy's greatest emphasis throughout the book, however, is on American parallels, from the Red Scares of the 1920s and 1950s to the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to the present era of debates over Guantanamo Bay, Cordoba House, and birthright citizenship. From a strict perspective of historical comparison, this is too limited a focus: greater emphasis on Nazi and Soviet policies, where the parallels are stronger at least with regard to ruthlessness, would be more revealing. For a general audience less likely to be surprised that "bad" countries can be compared to the Inquisition, however, the American comparisons are perhaps more worthwhile... insofar as they're forceful. At times the similarities Murphy isolates are broad enough that they arguably reveal more about human nature than about the legacy of the Inquisition. But part of his point is about parallels of mindset, and many of the connections he makes are at least intriguing. I'm not sure this book will have much worth as a political argument: supporters of contemporary American policies may well bristle at being compared to the Inquisition and read Murphy's attempt at a balanced tone as disingenuous, while opponents of those policies might find that tone frustrating when allied to what strikes them as a powerful argument. Murphy acknowledges at the end of the first chapter that he, like all historians of the Inquisitions, has agendas and concerns, and they shape his presentation in ways that have the potential to frustrate.

Books arguing that some occurrence was vital to the shaping or is vital to the understanding of the modern world are common enough, and most readers know to take their arguments with a grain of salt. Like any moment in history, the Inquisition simultaneously points backward to the era it grew out of and forward to the one that grew out of it. The orthodox zeal from which it rose can still be found among certain followers of religious and political ideologies, but by and large the unquestioned approval of violence that made it so powerful has faded away. Guantanamo Bay aside (and it's no small exception), the intellectual conformity and hostility to difference that Murphy identifies is non-violent. The manner in which "peaceful" coercion has replaced physical cruelty could be the subject of a valuable discuss, but in its absence there's something feeble about linking, however loosely, the rack and water torture to ugly rhetoric and the firing of a magazine editor. But whatever the limitations of its argument, God's Jury is a solid popular overview of the Inquisition, and especially appropriate for audiences who like their history with a touch of travelogue and digression.

Medievalism may conjure images of monasticism, romance and knights to modern minds, but for the huddled masses which deflect crushing poverty it was a time when the great men were popes, kings, queens, and the lesser men: clergy, the "urban intellectual" (often the impoverished peripatetic professor), craftsman and farmers. Yes, the 1% and the 99% as well as torture have always been with us.

Inquisitions support torture and Murphy defines its hallmarks: "...any inquisition is a set of disciplinary procedures targeting specific groups, codified in law, organized systemically, enforced by surveillance, exemplified by severity, sustained over time, backed by institutional power, and justified by a vision of the one true path." In today's lingo, Inquisitions are probably the purest form of "hate crimes."

Torture and the inquisition are roommates but the groundwork for activities such as water-boarding was laid down long before Guantánamo Bay welcomed its first Muslim. In Europe we are led from palatial halls to the dark dungeons where only the shadows of sins remain. In one of the final chapters "War on Error" we are transported to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba where the U.S. pays rent to the Cuban government for a piece of property where post 9/11 it will rise to new heights in population as well as infamy when details of torture go public.

Cullen Murphy is no stranger to the blank page as editor and award-winning author who has made an invaluable contribution to the literature. While neither historian nor novelist by trade he finds and forges history any academician would honor. It's clear that one needs only a passion for truth and time to write a great expose on a dark cell of human history. God's Jury has all the elements of a gripping historical whodunit.

Read entire review at: http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-gods-jury-the-inquisition/page-3/#ixzz1jizqLlVS

"God's Jury" is not the first history of the Inquisition which I have read, but it is certainly among the most entertaining. The author goes deeply into the roots of the Inquisition (and explains that actually there were several different Inquisitions") and often supplies vivid details that really make the subject come alive. And he devotes a great deal of attention in pointing out the parallels between the Catholic Church's Inquisition(s) and more recent secular equivalents intended to root out enemies of the state or subversives or terrorists. If you are looking for a scholarly work which lays out the Inquiaition's history in precise detail, this is probably not the book for you. But if you are looking for one that perhaps brings it into sharper focus, then this is a good starting point.

"God's Jury" author Cullen Murphy spent a lot of time in archives while researching this book. He writes extensively on the mad amounts of Inquisition-related documentation that exists world wide, much of which is only recently being uncovered and researched. Some documents are surprisingly damning in their straightforward accounting of the mechanisms of its own atrocities.

What Cullen makes clear is that the Inquisitions (and they can be categorized into multiple phases) weren't just an effort in blind religious passion and uncontrolled violence (there were certainly those aspects at times). The discipline and energy that went into the attempts to control people, their beliefs, and their minds was extensive and planned. Cullen writes, "Repressive regimes are recordkeeping regimes. Repression demands administration."

Cullen succeeds at consolidating hundreds of years of history into a readable, but concise and broad, accounting of the Catholic Church's Inquisition(s) and how glimmers of their activities still shine in our modern world.

My personal view of the Inquisition was formed by Mel Brooks in his classic "History of the World, Part 1". Torquemada and his Spanish torturers gaily sing along with jews in mid-torture who happily play the role of background vocalists. Cullen even references this pop culture image and notes that rather than the affable Mel Brooks comic character; Torquemada was uncompromising and "full of pitiless zeal".

The Inquisitions grew out of the decentralization of Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire. And while secular institutions supported the investigations into heresy and their related punishments, it was decidedly the non-secular institutions, which propelled the machinery that drove the Inquisitions.

There were three distinct inquisitorial periods - the Medieval, The Spanish and the Roman. As offshoots of the second two, there developed a worldwide Inquisition as well; something that was felt from the Spanish conquests in the New World, to colonies as far flung as Africa and Asia. Generally speaking, each of these Inquisition `flavors' followed its predecessor in time. But more importantly, each successive Inquisition became more organized, more thoughtful, and more coordinated. And while the organizational capabilities and necessities continued to grow, the core focus of each Inquisition continued to be religion. Even beyond religion as an institution, the root of the severity of these conflicts stems from an individual or group's rabid belief in its own moral certainty, and the equally violent belief that all alternatives are flat out wrong.

Cullen ties specific medieval, Roman and Spanish Inquisition examples to contemporary analogies. Most of the comparisons make sense, though I found some a bit obtuse. His contemporary references fall well short of being essays, or politically preachy, though he does spend a bit more time comparing the inquisitional behavior with the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo. Unsettlingly, many of the interrogation techniques at the U.S. base in Cuba are near exact replicas of some techniques used hundreds of years ago that we now call `torture'. Far from being overly political, I found Cullen's representations to be evenhanded and well documented.

While the majority of Cullen's book focuses on the historical aspects of the Inquisitions, he spends a good amount of ink relating history to what we find in our own contemporary mindset. And religion, forever connected to its historical forbearers, remains at the core. Cullen writes, "For most people in the developed world, memories of outright religious warfare, once a gruesome fact of life, have long been buried. The past decade, with its ominous references to a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West, has revived them."

What Cullen's book does better than anything else is synthesize and contextualize the Inquisition. It's a short read...only 250 pages before the notes and bibliography.

In wrapping up his work, Cullen revisits a renovated building at the Vatican that acts as the Inquisition's vast repository and research facility. It's been completely modernized since his last visit and he reflects on the last half century of academics surrounding this translucent time period.

"...Independent scholars have added texture and nuance to the seven-hundred-year story of the Inquisition. They have put it into social context. They have documented its unhappy consequence but also shown is limitations - the wide gap between plans and performance, ambitions and competence. The Inquisition emerges in a somewhat fuller light...It attempted to codify its practices and place restrictions on its behavior. In other ways, the Inquisition emerges as more horrifying than ever - because it could persist for so long in such a mindless way, sustained and perpetuated by larger forces that no one could quite perceive, let alone understand, much less control. At the same time, it comes across as a bureaucracy like any other subject to the same myopic imperatives, the same petty ambition sand animosities that one finds in `Dilbert' or `The Office'."

It's this relatively recent work which Cullen deftly ties together in "God's Jury". The book is notated in great detail and Cullen references a plethora of independent and original sources. And through it's strong academic credibility; the book is an extremely interesting and smooth read. The book is not merely informative, it's enlightening, interesting and engaging.

Early on in this lively history of both the institution of the Inquisition and the concept of the inquisition (lower case...), Cullen cites an inside joke about the different nature of this arm of the Catholic Church over time that Jesuits still apparently tell. Back in the 13th century, the original inquisitors were founded by Dominicans and some Franciscans to exterminate the Cathar "heresy" in southern France; the Jesuits, meanwhile, spearheaded the Inquisition in its later years, as it combated Protestantism. So, how well did the rival religious orders do their jobs, and how ruthless were their tactics? The punchline boils down to, "Well, have you ever met a Cathar?"

Cullen's approach to history is entertaining and eclectic, and as he showed in his last book, Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, he likes to tie the past to the present. So it's not surprising that he looks at the Inquisition (or rather, the Inquisitions -- he breaks it down into the medieval Inquisition dealing with the Cathars, the Spanish inquisition that primarily targeted Muslim and Jewish converts that religious zealots believed were returning to their roots, and the later "Roman Inquisition"), Cullen focuses not only on the historical events but on what enabled these inquisitions to function (a decent communications infrastructure, literate staff and above all an overwhelming sense of moral certainty) and then extrapolating those to analyze some rather more recent events of the 20th and 21st centuries.

When the Inquisition was born, the Catholic church was a state in its own right, more powerful than any single other nation state; by the 19th century, when it had become less threatening to life and limb and more focused on managing a list of books Catholics were forbidden to read, the Vatican's power didn't stretch beyond its own walls. But new moral certainties were born, and Cullen poses some interesting and provocative questions about the ways in which inquisition-like tactics, strategies and ways of thinking still exist today, from censorship to torture.

This is an intelligent book, and one that forces you to question and think, even if you end up disagreeing with Cullen's conclusions. It's not quite as good (although just as provocative and timely -- an odd word for a book about a centuries-old institution, but appropriate) as his prior one, but it's well written and is first-hand evidence that history doesn't have to be just about Henry VIII and his wives to be entertaining. Definitely recommended to history buffs or anyone interested in how ideas shape policies and thus the world we live in.

It is truly unfortunate that we do not learn more about the present from the past. And, to the author's credit, that seems to be his primary concern. But at times the lessons in this work seem more politically motivated than for a love of the more subtle lessons of history. It becomes difficult when reading this work to determine if the subject is truly the inquisitions of the middle ages or the Starr investigation of former president Clinton or the actions carried out in the name of the "war on terror."

Certainly there are parallels in history and one could justify virtually any political view using or twisting those parallels to fit. As a reader with a deep appreciation for history, I had hoped for something new and enlightening about the inquisitions. Instead, it comes across as more demonizing those of a different political persuasion than the author. To the historian, the lessons of history are typically subtle - the author, however, is anything but subtle. He seems bent on beating us over the head with how anyone on the other side of the political fence is an inquisitor and his side is the only one of pure reason. Self-righteous politicizing is rather distasteful. The perceived evils (from a purely libertarian view) that come with the war on terror or any of the other government investigative methods is indeed worth countering. But, what is interesting in these types of works is when an author fails to identify the evils in his own political slant - perceiving the speck in a brother's eye while ignoring the plank in your own. An historically-inspired mea culpa is far more interesting to read and truly makes us think. Political harangues serve no purpose in persuading or educating.

As a side issue, the author, who acknowledges his Catholic upbringing, seems to favor the widespread belief that the Pope and the Magisterium are all out of touch with the beliefs of the grass roots Catholics. It may be true but it begs the question, do such Catholics think the Church is a democracy? This is one of the things that distinguish the Catholic faith from other Christian and pseudo-Christian groups; the others pick and choose what part of the faith they will accept while the Catholic Church has always defined for itself what is truth. Truth is not left to majority opinion but is determined by the authority passed down from the Apostles. If it were a democracy, it would cease to be Catholic. If democracy is truly desired, such people would likely be more comfortable in one of the thousands of Protestant denominations that share their view - creating their own sect if they do not find one that fits their particular view of what is true. It is a fallacy to expect the Church to suddenly be something other than it has always been and that it should bend and sway with the whims of the latest popular opinions. Enough said on that.

On the positive side, the little tidbits of historical context are colorful, interesting, and helpful. The author's work is immensely readable save for the underlying political tone. However, if an historical analysis of the inquisitions is truly what the reader is seeking, it will be better served in works such as Kamen's The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision. Interestingly enough, the author does refer positively to Kamen's work (as well as others) and, in that, is helpful to redirect the reader elsewhere for serious historical analysis.