What Started the Inquisition?

As Christianity expanded to different regions and with different authorities, philosophical discussions and policies and practices developed in isolation from each other. Councils and Synods were held to bring the various regional groups together to form consistent understanding of their message.

Once you have an approved message, however, you have to guard it, and therefore you have to find ways to stamp out dissent, disagreement, and maybe even simple debate. This need to drag dissenters back into the community of the faithful—or else—led to inquisitions, when the subject was questioned at length to determine whether they were truly UN"faith"ful or were simply misunderstood, and perhaps needed re-education.

This process, too, needed to be made consistent across the Christian world, and therefore the (upper-case) Inquisition was formed, with rules and regulations. The Catholic Encyclopedia website describes the Inquisition thusly:

Its characteristic mark seems to be the bestowal on special judges of judicial powers in matters of faith, and this by supreme ecclesiastical authority, not temporal or for individual cases, but as a universal and permanent office. Moderns experience difficulty in understanding this institution, because they have, to no small extent, lost sight of two facts.

On the one hand they have ceased to grasp religious belief as something objective, as the gift of God, and therefore outside the realm of free private judgment; on the other they no longer see in the Church a society perfect and sovereign, based substantially on a pure and authentic Revelation, whose first most important duty must naturally be to retain unsullied this original deposit of faith.

The period known as the Medieval Inquisition ranged from the 12th to 15th centuries, and started in France to deal with Cathars and Waldensians. It quickly expanded to other countries, looking into the Hussites, the Spiritual Franciscans ("Spirituals"), and the Beguines.

In 1250, Pope Alexander IV appointed Dominicans as the official Inquisitors. (The illustration is by 15th-century artist Pedro Berrugete of St. Dominic presiding over the burning of a heretic, called an auto-da-fé.)

When "moderns" think of the Inquisition, what often comes to mind is the Spanish Inquisition. Let's see what made them special next time.