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The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God
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Average Rating:  out of 4 Reviews
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Price: $26.95
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Sale: $14.89
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Manufacturer: HarperOne
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780060816995
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Jonathan Kirsch
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Publisher: HarperOne
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Edition: 1
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Dewey Decimal Number: 272.2
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Publication Date: 2008-09-01
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Reading Level: 304
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Description: "The inquisitorial apparatus that was first invented in the Middle Ages remained in operation for the next six-hundred years, and it has never been wholly dismantled. As we shall see, an unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors who set up the rack and the pyre in southern France in the early thirteenth century to the torturers and executioners of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia in the mid-twentieth century. Nor does the thread stop at Auschwitz or the Gulag; it can be traced through the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era, and even the interrogation cells at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo." The twelfth century birthed a new and sinister brand of sanctioned terror, an international network of secret police and courts, an army of inquisitors whose sworn duty was to seek out anyone regarded as an enemy, and a casualty list numbering in the tens of thousands. The original agents of the Inquisition—priests and monks, scribes and notaries, attorneys and accountants, torturers and executioners—were deputized by the Church and their worst excesses were excused as the pardonable sins of soldiers engaged in a holy war against heresy that became the obsession of Christendom. Yet the first rumblings of Western civilization's great engine of persecution provided no indication of the ultimate scope and influence of the inquisitorial toolkit and how the crimes of the first inquisitors were perpetrated again and again into the twentieth century and beyond. Despite the importance of this legacy, the history of the Inquisition remains a subject that has largely been overlooked by general historians. With The Grand Inquisitor's Manual, national bestselling author Jonathan Kirsch delivers a sweeping and provocative history that explores how the Inquisition was honed to perfection and brought to bear on an ever-widening circle of victims by authoritarians in both church and state for over six hundred years. Ranging from the Knights Templar to the first Protestants, from Joan of Arc to Galileo; from the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent women during the Witch Craze to its greatest power in Spain after 1492, when the secret tribunals and torture chambers were directed for the first time against Jews and Muslims to the modern war on terror—Kirsch shows us how the Inquisition stands as a universal and ineradicable symbol of the terror that results when absolute power works its corruptions. The history of the Inquisition is draped in myth and mystery, a favorite theme of both artists and propagandists throughout the six hundred years of its active operations. Yet when we pull aside the veil, what we see are the original blueprints for the machinery of persecution that was invented in the High Middle Ages and applied to human flesh ever since. The Grand Inquisitor's Manual exposes the dangerous circular logic of the Inquisition so that we do not perpetuate its brand of terror.
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: Man's Inhumanity to Man |
Date: 2008-12-29 |
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Details: Jonathan Kirsch's writing is readable, well annotated, and reflects solid research, as usual. However, his organization of the material and his footnoting are not quite up to his usual high standards, however. The author traces the history of the Inquisition from its beginnings through its evolution into and final demise as the Spanish Inquisition, a span of some 650 years or so. This is a broad sweep, and Mr. Kirsch has chosen to provide samples from various points in time, but never really summarizes his case. After each chapter, one is left with the sense that just such a summation is needed. Other lacks (such as statistical data) have been noted correctly. However, it does not seem that Mr. Kirsch really sought to write a definitive history of the Inquisition, and so these omissions are both understandable and excusable.
The final two chapters of the book deal with key examples of institutionalized torture since the demise of the Inquisition: Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the penultimate chapter, and America in the final chapter. In these chapters, Mr. Kirsch appears to try to draw the conclusion that the torture documented in these final chapters sprang from the Inquisition itself. While this is a tempting conclusion to draw, I believe that it is flawed. There are the obvious similarities between the Inquisition, the Nazi purges, the Stalinist purges, and the American treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. There are similarities both in tactics and techniques and in political objectives. However, rather than ascribe a causal relationship based on a temporal relationship (the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy), it seems to me that all the instances mentioned spring from some base instincts in humankind.
One can find torture similarly employed by men from ancient civilizations (such as the Romans) all the way up to the present day (including America's treatment of prisoners). The similarities across cultures and time would seem to speak to something larger and more widespread than the simple evolutionary chain Mr. Kirsch proposes.
Aside from that one weakness (and it is a large one!), Mr. Kirsch provides an entertaining and informative overview of the Inquisition and of institutionalized terror. It is well worth reading, even if it falls a bit short of its title. |
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Review Summary: Sensationalist style oversells salient points in Kirsch's history of the inquisitions of the Catholic church |
Date: 2008-12-13 |
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Details: First, the salient points: Kirsch tells the history of inquisition as the establishment of a clerical bureaucracy, which included judges, prosecutors, police, secret agents, procedural manuals, and prescribed and preferred tools of punishment, and which paralleled the contemporary political courts and criminal proceedings in Western Europe. The difference is that the inquisitions targeted crimes of thought, not action, were not held to even the evidentiary standards of their time (the 12th through 19th centuries) and served exclusively the goals of the church: maintaining orthodoxy by rooting out heresy, providing income by confiscating property, and enforcing cultural standards by targeting and labeling as immoral particularly sexual activities. The Spanish form of the inquisition (Kirsch discusses--and alternates between--the use of upper/lower case and singular or plural to identify what were essentially multiple bureaucracies in multiple places over hundreds of years under different names to accomplish similar goals) added a particularly pernicious and persistent twist to the practice by targetting crimes of blood as well as crimes of thought, as they attempted to root out all Jewish amd Muslim influence from their society (a practice that Hitler would finetune to a 20th century Holocaust).
So, these are salient points in Kirsch's book, but he overstates them in sensationalistic catch phrases repeated, without argument, attribution, or amplification throughout the book. He provides few specific examples of torture despite the prominence of instruments of torture in the dust jacket photo and the small insert of color prints, and when it comes to discussing the exact scope of the horror, he is finally forced by the sparse and conflicting nature of the evidence to admit that the total death toll over six-plus centuries may have been as little as 100,000 (and as high as 9,000,000 according to one source he cites). Of course, even 100,000 victims of such a notorious engine of evil, even over 600 years of its existence (an average of about 165 per year) are too many and not to be dismissed, but Kirsch seems entirely too focused on telling a sensational story and not the basic truth (which might not sell as well) to enable the reader to accurately judge the scope of the calamity.
Another flaw I found was his over-reliance on a specific secondary source--an author named Henry Charles Lea, who is identified in a quote from another author in this book as being well-known as a skeptic and anti-clerical source! Now, it is quite acceptable for a popular history such as this one to rely solely on secondary sources, especially on a topic as old and as chronologically (600+ years) and geographically (France, Spain, Italy, and other European countries) dispersed as this one, but over-reliance on one specific secondary source suggests that first, the reader might be better served by going to that source directly, and second, that the author may have adopted a specific viewpoint that favors this secondary source's biases at the exclusion of possibly valuable evidence from other secondary sources.
So, while Kirsch's history makes for interesting reading, it might be better read in conjunction with other sources on the history of the inquisitions |
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Review Summary: Sanctioned terrorism in the Name of God. |
Date: 2008-12-08 |
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Details:
In the 12th century, early Christian heretics, the Cathars, are exquisitely tortured, their broken bodies a deterrent to those who would question the dictates of the True Faith. In the 15th century, the great Inquisitors don the solemn robes of office, casting impassive eyes on those who would commit heresy against a just and loving God, the accoutrements of torture designed in infinite detail for maximum effect. In Salem, Massachusetts, acolytes of the devil are tested, given opportunity to denounce evil between bouts of excruciating pain, all in the name of God's righteousness. Men began their ingenious methods of torturing for truth from religion's beginnings, purging the unacceptable, the tainted, cleansing society of those who would infect it.
Who would have imagined that Nazi Germany would dust off the pages of history, retrieve the arcane tools of torture and apply them even more broadly to an entire disposable people, the Jews? What the Inquisition wrought bloomed in the dark recesses of the human heart, bred in the devotion of fanatics, finding voice as each period of history offered opportunities. And even now, in an enlightened and educated world, such horrors have again emerged, this time focusing on Islamic fundamentalists. One of the fascinating threads in Kirsch's detailed accounting of torture in the name of God is the relentless pursuit of "others", particularly Jews, from the Spanish Inquisition, which pursued them from continent to continent, to Nazi extermination, in the name of an ideal, "purity of blood". The war on Jews is based on blood rather than belief, "the same visceral anti-Semitism that had blighted medieval Europe and prompted some of the worst excesses of the Spanish Inquisition". If the victim is demonized, the torturer is relieved of responsibility.
More sophisticated societies embellished their excesses, implementing useful codes to avoid the plain truth of their atrocities, such as Moscow's Great Terror in the mid-20th century, the Soviet counterpart to the Spanish Inquisition. While a heretical Cathar was a "traitor to God", the subject of The Great Terror was "a traitor to the fatherland". Likewise, taking advantage of the fears of others, associates can be enlisted to inform authorities of suspect behavior or statements, a rich source of collaborative evidence. The accused becomes isolated because of the danger of association (the Salem witch trials; Nazi Germany; the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s).
Drawing parallels between the past and the present (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay), the author weaves atrocities "in the name of God" to more modern applications, a sleeping beast impossible to eradicate once released. The Grand Inquisitor's Manual transitions from the horrors of the past and the dark genius of the Inquisitors who wielded monstrous instruments designed by artisans to the more modern uses and rationalizations created to obfuscate the actions of religion and government in the name of oppression. Always, it is the hand of man, not God, inflicting the torture. "In the Name of God" suggests a divine source; yet Kirsch connects institutions, church, government, not a deity, but sanctioned terror. Kirsch outlines the path of history, the periodic emergence of evil, reminding us that we can only redress the past by acknowledging, not repeating it. It is fascinating to read of man's inhuman ingenuity, but disturbing to realize that the past reoccurs with alarming frequency. Luan Gaines/ 2008
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Review Summary: Impassioned History of a Legendary Religious Institution |
Date: 2008-09-17 |
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Details: In "The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God", author Jonathan Kirsch makes no pretense of cool, detached objectivity. He very obviously loathes the very notion of the Catholic Church's Inquisition (which formally existed from the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth centuries), and he displays open disdain for those revisionist historians who have sought to excuse or minimize the actions of the Inquisition in rooting out and destroying heretics, Jews, and Muslims.
"The Grand Inquisitor's Manual" abounds in vivid tales of the cruel excesses perpetrated by agents of the Catholic Church in the name of defending an ideal of a single orthodox faith, leaving no doubt that an appalling toll of fear and pain was levied against anyone suspected of deviating in the slightest manner from a narrow definition of what constituted a true Christian.
Kirsch's book is perhaps too anecdotal with too few detailed statistics to serve as a definitive history of the Inquisition; even after reading "The Grand Inquisitor's Manual" I do not feel I have a good grasp of how many people suffered directly in the hands of the Inquisition. Furthermore, the last section of the book, seeking to establish a relationship between the Inquisition and the activities of the Nazi Holocaust, Stalinist purges, the American "witch hunts" of McCarthy era, and the presentday excesses of the "War on Terror", seems to me to set awkwardly with the rest of the book. |
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