The Inquisition. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. Viking. 318pp. £16.99.

Fans of the Baigent and Leigh style will enjoy this clean-sweep through the history of the notorious Catholic Inquisition. An understanding of that history is critical to understanding the attraction of Freemasonry to 18th and 19th century Europe and America.
    The Inquisitors were the guardians of Catholic dogma, the nit-pickers extraordinaires of individual beliefs, the Papacy’s all-purpose deep-suction vacuum-cleaners of dissent. Their operation was doctrinally logical and they exercised all the heartless cruelty that goes with abstracted logic. Like all tyrannies, the Inquisition operated through fear and ignorance. The Inquisition stands as the Judas of Catholicism, betraying Christ’s injunction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ (accepting your neighbour may think very differently to yourself) for the mess of pottage that is doctrinal uniformity. The historian, Sir Steven Runciman has written that “Tolerance is a social rather than a religious virtue. There are still those who are loth to accept the Inquisition as a sickening stain on the record of western religion and they may be pleased to know that, according to the authors, the madness continues. Deprived of its torture chambers and dungeons, much of the Inquisitors’ underlying theology persists in the contemporary Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has removed a number of continental Catholic theologians from their posts and livelihoods in very recent times for not toeing the dogmatic line.
    The primary use of dogmatic theology is to defend and assert the power of a state, that state whose essential principle has been described by Dean Inge as one of ‘theocratic imperialism’. It is based on the theory of an infallible meta-Church which guarantees the validity of the terrestrial Church’s every authorised action. Against such a theory, the thinking individual or sincere believer who deviates from its pronouncements does not stand a chance.
    Needless to say, Freemasonry, in its tolerance and non-dogmatic character stands in direct contradistinction to the persecutions promoted, aided and abetted by the various inquisitorial bodies which have served the Catholic Church since the 13th century, and whose several forms are described in this book. Interested brethren will probably rush to the chapter in the book called Freemasonry and the Inquisition, where they will read of the heroic resistance of John Coustos, tortured repeatedly by the Inquisition in Lisbon in 1743 for being a Freemason and refusing to convert to Catholicism.
    The authors write from a definite perspective. For them, the essence of authentic spiritual belief lies in an experience of the divine, a gnosis (knowledge) or direct apprehension of the divine pneuma (spirit) or nous (mind) which cannot be fully expressed - if, indeed, at all - in rational or dogmatic categories. As it has been said by gnostics: ‘the gnosis which can be told is not the true gnosis’. Any attempt at such an expression only reveals the limitations of reason and may lead to a diminuition of the original experience’s spiritual influence. (The conflation of reason and dogma could do with a more detailed treatment in the book). To the authors, all theology is probably suspect the moment it is compressed into dogmatic statements, for in the transmission of that compression, dogma does not contain but effectively estranges itself from primary spiritual experience. Thus, as the authors assert, the Inquisition was the enemy of the non-dogmatic mystic and suspicious of mystical experience generally. That reason may be understood as a gift of the spirit, is not a view for which the authors seem to have much time. It is difficult to be rational when you’re on the rack. However, it is worth noting that orthodox Christian theology is widely held to have developed out of a need to counter-act the Gnostics’ own speculative and rationalising theologies. Take away the possibility of dogma, the authors seem to imply, and the Catholic Church can a). never have need for an Inquisition and b). never be the religious authority. What you might get in place of the Catholic Church might be a kind of freewheeling variety of mutually tolerant mystery cults. However desirable this may be to the authors or many of their readers, one can at least see why the Catholic Church is suspicious of Freemasonry. I wish the authors had fully addressed the difficult question: why are so many prepared, willingly, to accept dogmatic theology? (I suspect they might answer, ‘because it offers a short-cut to paradise’). Nevertheless, the book does show us why so many people are definitely not prepared to accept it!
    The book is highly readable and its subject important - especially as the freedom to exchange ideas still lags well behind the freedom to exchange goods and services in today’s world. We cannot guarantee that we have seen the last of the Inquisition in all its gory, judicial fullness. However, it is arguable whether the Inquisition was an inevitable product of the dogmatic theory. Other ideologies have exercised similar penalties against deviants. The history of world communism in the 20th century might suggest that the problem lies not so much in Catholic Christianity itself, but in the human psychology of power generally. The particular horror of the Inquisition is, of course, that Christians promoted its work in the sincere belief that they were doing God’s will.
    That this book lacks a degree of objectivity may be discerned from the first sentence of its first chapter: “Inspired by Saint Paul’s dextrous salesmanship, Christianity has always offered shortcuts to paradise. Thus did it recruit adherents, even before its emergence as a recognisable religion.” These two sentences carry so much subjective weight, debatable premises and know-all loftiness that the authors’ general case may lack the definitiveness to which the work as a whole seems to strive.
    Tobias Churton.