God's Jury by Cullen Murphy

From The Week of October 22, 2012 Though the human character is possessed of many heartening virtues like compassion, generosity and altruism, these cannot be counted without also tallying up its more lamentable aspects. And of these, surely our tendency to be judgmental must be considered among the most grievous. For few other features of human nature have been responsible for more death and destruction than judgment which not only legitimizes our childish jealousies, it enables a capacity for slaughter on a scale that has kept human civilization from reaching its full potential. For in passing judgment on a man, one is effectively elevating himself and his codes of behavior above the object of his judgment. He is declaring that his way is better, that he is wiser. And with this superior mindset in place, authoritarianism is soon to follow. This sad, recurring truth inherent to the human character is demonstrated well in Mr. Murphy's fascinating if scattered history.

Ignited as a means of punishing heretics and scaring the faithful into proper compliance with Catholic orthodoxy, the Inquisition has existed,in various states,for almost 800 years. Formalized in 13th-century Europe and headquartered in Rome, its practitioners were dispatched to the four corners of the Catholic world where, empowered by the church, they would sit in judgement of strayed,and supposedly straying, adherents of the faith. Described by Mr. Murphy as having been detectives,prosecutors and judges rolled into one, inquisitors were not burdened with the necessity of proving their cases. They were not troubled with the bothersome necessity of public trials. Backed by the awesome authoritas of the Catholic church, they could act as they saw fit, arrogantly confident that only god, and perhaps their ecclesiastical masters, could judge them. In this way. Armed with these unimaginable powers, the Inquisition not only supposedly uncovered crypto-Muslims and Jews, they actively worked to foil the plots of those disorderly rebels who aimed to reform the church,untroubled by anything like the modern law. For in such times, they were the only law that mattered.

Chillingly penned and extensively researched, God's Jury is the gripping and disturbing result of ten years of labor. Mr. Murphy,an American author and magazine man, dredges up 800 years of church history to mount a devastating case against not only the abuses of civil liberties inherent in the surveillance state, but the ways in which the human capacity for hypocrisy and smug superiority are unleashed in the judgmental, blinding them to the balms of compassion and decency. In illustrating how inquisitors cynically kept their hands clean even while consigning tens of thousands of their fellow humans to painful torture and fiery death, The author marshalls any number of cases of the abuse of church power not so much to assault the already crumbling walls of an ancient institution, but to highlight the ways in which we can all, even the righteous, especially the righteous, be tempted to separate ourselves from our morality for the sake of power over others.

For all its virtues, God's Jury suffers somewhat from flawed construction. In incorporating elements of memoir, investigative journalism, historical non-fiction and political commentary, it is compelled to make compromises in order to come in at fewer than 400 pages. For instance, a more thorough reconstruction of the Inquisition's earlier centuries is forsaken in lieu of an analysis of how its practices and the desires that drive them can be connected to modern-day state-sponsored surveillance. But while there is value in connecting these dots, the effort dilutes the history that is the backbone of Mr. Murphy's tale, a reality that makes of it a jack of many trades but master of none. Still, it may be that the present-day connections drawn here will please many readers who might've been off-put by a dryer reconstruction of dark deeds now centuries gone.

It may well be that the Inquisition's ugliness was confined to those who claimed to be Catholics, that others were beyond their purview. But given the degree to which the Inquisition systematized cruelty, and in light of how difficult it would have been to be anything but a Christian for much of the time of its height, this fails to be a distinction with any meaning. It wasn't as though the faithful had much of a choice. In wishing to live as they chose, they were broken and burned. There is, for them, no apology too strong to earn forgiveness. (3/5 Stars)