The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

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The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God

by Jonathan Kirsch

3.70 · rating details · 77 ratings · 22 reviews

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""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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Hardcover, 296 pages

Published September 1st 2008 by HarperOne

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Jun 04, 2009

Bob rated it

A page-turner that synthesizes the history of the inquisition, from its earliest medieval days through the last gasp in 19th century Spain. Kirsch appends a couple of chapters on the 20th and 21st century heirs of the inquisition. He provides some welcome context and perspective on Jane Mayer's "The Dark Side,' which details the crimes of the Bush administration in its prosecution of the war on terror.

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Nov 04, 2008

Charlie rated it

Could not put this one down. After years studying holocaust, genocide,etc, this one put it all together. A kind of formula developed by ancient Romans contains elements of such effectiveness that it has been used through history by successive cultures right up to present day. This put so many things together for me it will undoubtedly be on my "life list" stamped in my mind like Joseph Campbell and james Michener. Kirsch is an exhaustive researcher but like Michener captures and holds ...more

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Jan 19, 2009

Robert rated it

I was hesitant to read this because I knew that I would get pissed off. I was right. But because I kept coming across the Inquisition in my readings of history, I thought it might be good to get some information about it. I thought perhaps I might even get some new information about it.

Although I try to maintain a certain amount of objectivity in reading about the Inquisition, ultimately I am appalled by the behavior of the Catholic Church. I made a real effort to contextualize the ...more

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Oct 09, 2011

Kam rated it

Shelves: historical, non-fiction

The word "Inquisition" is, in many ways, one of the most dreadful to hear. When one looks at it objectively, at the level of basic vocabulary, it seems almost innocent, associated as it is with the words "inquiry" and "inquire," words associated with ideas of polite but focused curiosity. But there is absolutely nothing polite or merely curious about the movement known as the Inquisition, as any student of history knows.

The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A H...moreThe word "Inquisition" is, in many ways, one of the most dreadful to hear. When one looks at it objectively, at the level of basic vocabulary, it seems almost innocent, associated as it is with the words "inquiry" and "inquire," words associated with ideas of polite but focused curiosity. But there is absolutely nothing polite or merely curious about the movement known as the Inquisition, as any student of history knows.

The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God is author Jonathan Kirsch's attempt to describe the Inquisition in all its horrific glory - its motivations, its mechanisms, and its failures - but Kirsch describes the Inquisition not as a historical curiosity, locked in its place in time, but as a continuing, evolving machine. Kirsch insists that, for as long as there are people who wish to control or cleanse the world, for whatever reason, then the Inquisition will never truly die.

And indeed, it was because of control - religious control - that the Inquisition began in the first place. Kirsch begins his history with the persecution of the Cathars in southern France in the Middle Ages. At the time Christianity, which was (and still is, truth be told) never a stable religion to begin with, was still ironing out some kinks in its dogma, still trying to determine what was acceptable in the religion and what was unacceptable. This fluidity of belief allowed for various other movements to evolve, all of them operating under the umbrella term of Christianity, though not under the control of the Church.

It was this inability to totally control what people believed and the way they worshiped that troubled Pope Innocent III, and it would be the impetus behind his creation of the Holy Office of Inquisition into Heretical Depravity - what is now known simply as the Inquisition. Indeed, Kirsch points out that this inability to completely monopolize faith and later on knowledge and learning would be the driving force behind the Medieval and Roman Inquisitions. It was this drive to monopolize what its flock were allowed to know and believe that would later lead to the infamous episode with Galileo and the Inquisition.

But Kirsch makes clear that the Inquisition was also very much grounded in less ephemeral concerns - political power and finance being the two other legs of the Inquisition, and the two main reasons why it lasted as long as it did, beyond the extermination of perceived heretics. Both the Church and Kings saw the Inquisition as a useful tool for gaining more money and more power, and so used it to those ends - oftentimes solely for those reasons. Kirsch offers up the Knights Templar as an example, whose wealth and power were the envy of not just certain members within the Church itself, but also of Philip the Fair. Given the nature of the Inquisition, which allows the inquisitor to take as evidence even the flimsiest of rumor, Philip was able to use the Inquisitorial machine to rid himself of the Templars, gaining both political and spiritual power from their extermination.

This thread of power and greed continues throughout all the variations of the Inquisition, but Kirsch draws an even further distinction when he begins talking about the most infamous of its iterations: the Spanish Inquisition. In Spain, Kirsch claims, the driving force was not so much the thought-crime of heresy, as it was elsewhere in Europe where the Inquisition had a foothold, but it was rooted in the concept of "limpia de sangre:" purity of blood. The Spanish Inquisition was driven by an overpowering anti-Semitic sentiment, and it used the machinery developed since the Medieval period to its own advantage in destroying and rooting out those who were not "Old Christians." Just like with the Inquisition as it appeared in France and in Italy, there was a thread of monetary and political advantage running as an undercurrent throughout the persecution of the Jews: the excuse simply shifted from "heretical thoughts" to "impure blood."

Towards the latter end of the book, Kirsch begins to describe the Inquisition not as a movement that died before World War II, but as a machine that could be used by whoever decided it would be a good idea to do so. Thus he calls the Nazi extermination of the Jews an Inquisition, specifically the kind rooted in the Spanish iteration of the movement. The Soviet Union's political machinery while under Stalin's grasp is also considered a variation of the Inquisition, since it uses the machinery of the movement as a means of controlling those who lived within its grasp.

Even the United States, Kirsch argues, is not completely innocent in this. He points to the imprisonment of hundreds of Japanese-Americans in camps during World War II, and then to McCarthyism and HUAC, as primary examples of the machinery of the Inquisition being put to use. Torture might not have occurred, that he agrees with, but the fact that a governing body attempted to police thought-crimes (McCarthyism) and imprisoned people based on their heritage (Japanese-Americans) is enough to dub these moments in American history as Inquisitions in their own right.

While this is all well and good, there are some areas that I feel Kirsch does not explore to my satisfaction, no matter how interesting it might seem. One of those is the link between witch-hunts and the Inquisition. It is clear that witch-hunters used the techniques of the Inquisition when judging their victims, but the Inquisition itself was not very concerned with witchcraft. In fact, Kirsch seems to say that inquisitors were more inclined to let suspected witches go, believing them to be insane, or judging their acts to have originated with a possession by demons, and hence not entirely their fault. The Inquisition, it appears, was more concerned with heretical ideas than with witchcraft. And yet, since the witch-hunters were using the same techniques as the Inquisition, and since the Inquisition was later on allowed to prosecute witches, Kirsch seems to argue that the two were linked.

I feel that the connection between the witch-hunts and the Inquisition is a little loose, despite Kirsch's argument that they are linked. Kirsch has already established that the Inquisition was about policing blood heritage or thought-crimes, so this association with witch-hunting seems rather tenuous. Also, Kirsch has difficulty in explaining why witch-hunts were far more prevalent than the Inquisition, occurring as they did in countries where the Inquisition had very little to no power, such as England and the Netherlands. Even the Salem Witch Trials are described as a mini-Inquisition, but the only similarity I see between them is the machinery of the Inquisition, and not necessarily the motives.

In the final chapter of the book, Kirsch attempts to link the Inquisition with the events in Guantanamo and the war on terror. That link, however, is extremely weak. While it may be argued that the methods of torture developed by the Inquisition were used on the prisoners at Guantanamo in order to extract information, and the Inquisitorial concept of "naming names" was certainly in force, I have difficulty seeing the link between the modern war on terror and the Inquisition as Kirsch has described it beyond those few points of reference. If Kirsch had written more on it, described it more concretely, I suppose I would have seen the connection, but as it stands, the chapter - which could have been the most powerful and most controversial - is the weakest of the lot.

Overall, this book is an interesting and provocative read. On one hand, it can be read as a guide to understanding the Inquisition, and on the other, it can be read as a testament to the fact that, when given power or the chance to gain it, human beings can and will do whatever they think is necessary to achieve and control that power. The Inquisition itself might no longer be around as it existed in its most infamous forms, but that does not mean the machinery has ceased to exist - it is still there, and was used, and will still be used, when those in power deem it necessary.(less)

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Feb 19, 2011

Paul Pessolano rated it

· review of another edition

If you want to know everything there is to know about the Inquisition this book comes pretty close to doing that. When we speak of the Inquisition most of us do not realize that there were in fact two separate Inquisitions, there was the Medieval Inquisition and the more famous and more deadly Spanish Inquisition.

The Inquisitions were instituted by the Roman Catholic Church to stamp out heresy. The author takes this a step further and cites several reasons that grew out of this pro...more

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Aug 08, 2010

Roadkill1313 rated it

Political essay in guise of "historical" book. Author is definitely not an historian, but if he is, shame on him. Kirsch spends too much time trying to compare what happened centuries ago to the events of the present day, with typical freshman college student ernestness. And like a freshman he relies too heavily on the work of others to make his point with little effort at examining those sources with measured skepticism. He seems more interested in proving his sources are infallib...more

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Jun 22, 2009

Katie rated it

I'm not entirely sure this is much more than snuff porn, and given that suspicion, I'm not sure what it says about me that I've read my copy twice. (In my defense I was quite bored the second time I picked it up and didn't have a library card yet.) It does give a bit of insight into how the Inquisitions (Medieval, Roman and Spanish) prefigured torture as used by governments in the 20th and 21st centuries (waterboarding was called "water treatment" in the 13th century). More interest...more

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Nov 03, 2010

Mark rated it

Horrifying & detailed look into the history of the Inquisition (in the variety of forms that it took over time) - but I couldn't shake the feeling that the author really, really wanted to use this historical account as a platform to pontificate on current American policy.

The weakest part of the book is the closing section - while he does an excellent job of establishing the connections of the Inquisition bureaucracy to Nazi Germany & the Soviet Union under Stalin, his attempts to par...more

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Jan 16, 2009

Terence rated it

Shelves: history-general, religion-general

I’ve read most of Jonathan Kirsch’s work, beginning with The Harlot by the Side of the Road. In his earlier books, he’s an engaging writer able to winkle out some of the lesser known aspects of commonly accepted ideas and stories in Western history – as in his first book, Harlot, which highlighted “real” and obscure but important stories from the Hebrew and Christian bibles.

In recent works, however, I’ve felt that Kirsch has been throwing together poorly integrated essays in response...more

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Mar 22, 2009

Bruce rated it

As the subtitle says, it's a history of terror in the Name of God. However, the last chapter notes that God can be a political ideology a la Nazism, Stalinism, McCarthyism, and Bush/Cheneyism. What we should learn from this history of the Inquisition, as the author states, is 'the machinery of persecution once switched on, cannot be easily slowed or directed, much less stopped.' He notes that inquisitions are based on whispered rumors and fabricated evidence, testimony taken in secret from an...more

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Jan 21, 2011

Cameling rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: history

The Inquisition of the Middle Ages, the Spanish Inquisition and the Roman Inquisition provided for centuries of terror, torture and well documented strategies in annihilating mostly innocent people for heresy. While the original objective of the Inquisition was the Roman Catholic Church's fear of losing control over the thoughts and beliefs of Christians, the inquisitors, the Church and later, the kings of Spain and France, turned it into a strategy in profiteering and later, genocide.

...moreThe Inquisition of the Middle Ages, the Spanish Inquisition and the Roman Inquisition provided for centuries of terror, torture and well documented strategies in annihilating mostly innocent people for heresy. While the original objective of the Inquisition was the Roman Catholic Church's fear of losing control over the thoughts and beliefs of Christians, the inquisitors, the Church and later, the kings of Spain and France, turned it into a strategy in profiteering and later, genocide.

Cloaking themselves with a language that played down what they were actually doing to the victims, the Inquisition laid the path for modern inquisitions such as the Nazi regime, the Soviet Gulag, the witch trials, the Japanese American internment, the McCarthy anti-Communist hunt and the American military proceedings in Abu Ghraib.

It's horrifyingly interesting to read how the Inquisition made heretics wear large fabric crosses on their garments to humiliate them, even if they had been released from trial, and that this practice was used by Hitler with the Jews in WWII. The practice of getting neighbors, friends, and relatives to spy on and denounce each other, and the purpose of a trial to get victims to name others were used also by the Nazis and McCarthy's committee. Even the Inquisition's practice of spreading imagined depravities against the targeted victims continues to be used today to build disgust and fear against them.

Even the tools of the Inquisition have not been destroyed or left to gather dust in some dark museum. Some of them have been used through the centuries and some, such as the water torture, now renamed waterboarding, and the humiliating dunces cap, are being used today.

It was appalling to see how easily it's been to press the panic button in people, and once pressed, how very quickly it can be to spread fear, distrust and the belief that inhumane treatment of those we fear is acceptable, because they are now seen as being less than human. Once the panic button is pressed, how ready are we to relinquish common sense, embrace the flimsiest of excuses to legalize the torture and incarceration of our imagined enemies.

Covering some very distasteful details of mainly the Inquisitions' strategies and practices, this is, however, a really good documentation of man's need to control that which he fears. It certainly made me realize that not only does history repeat itself, but that there are some who will actually try to justify evil actions.(less)

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Mar 12, 2010

Heather rated it

Recommends it for: no one with a brain

Shelves: history, non-fiction, religion-spiritual

While this book should have been interesting, and may contain some good information, its disorganization and repetitiveness completely overshadow its good qualities. I was about halfway through the book before I started feeling like I was no longer reading the introduction. The author is not a historian, and does not make any attempt to treat information with objectivity, and in the later part of the book, he freely admits to this. Throughout the book, the author quotes his few favored sources a...more

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Jun 01, 2010

Logan rated it

Shelves: own-bought-ebook

This book was really engaging for the first few chapters, and then quickly took a nosedive. After covering the medieval Inquisition quite well, the recap of the Spanish Inquisition gets very repetitive. The later chapters drawing parallels to McCarthyism, Abu Ghraib, the Salem witch trials, Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany did not need to be broken down in such detail. I felt he was beating a dead horse by that point. One chapter to sum up parallels would have sufficed, as I picked up the b...more

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Feb 25, 2010

Ken Sweet rated it

· review of another edition

Enlightening.

Although I sometimes felt as if the author had a definite agenda (to prove Inquisition apologists wrong,) I feel compelled to believe in his agenda as fact, and therefore greatly enjoyed the work. The persecution of anyone of differing beliefs (and many who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time) has led to the time-honored techniques of mass hysteria = witch hunt = innocent lives being lost.

One of my own ancestors was Samuel Wardwell, a good Chri...more

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Aug 16, 2011

David Melbie rated it

Recommends it for: history lovers

Recommended to David by: Picked from Library

This is great! I especially liked how the author implies that, even though we are centuries past the Inquisition, the attitude still prevails as far as how people live in fear of people who are different than them. The last chapter -- American Inquisition -- was way too short, but gets the point across nonetheless.

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Oct 05, 2010

Jack Dixon rated it

Shelves: history-medieval, history

Well-researched and informative view into the mind and the mechanisms of the Inquisition. For anyone who thinks the forces and the mindset that led to the most prolonged atrocity in the history of man were a distant and temporary anomoly, this book is a must-read.

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Oct 19, 2009

Jeanmarie rated it

An easy read - with good information about the medieval inquisition especially. A little too insistent on its argument, though, that the inquisition still lives (in 20th century genocide) which, while of course true, seems obvious after a while.

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Apr 15, 2011

Dirk rated it

Shelves: religion, history, non-fiction

A very good history of the inquisition with good comparisons to the more modern ones such as the witch hunts and those implemented by Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, McCarthy and Bush. Many of the techniques used centuries ago have been useful in the present, water boarding for example, was once known as the ordeal by water. What have we learned from this history? "Either you're with us, or you're with the enemy."

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Feb 05, 2011

Kathie rated it

Fantastic book. Very blunt about the Roman Catholic Church's role in all this...and not a flattering mirror for humans in general, but to look away or try to whitewash all the atrocities committed is a huge mistake. History is just too easily repeated.

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Feb 22, 2011

Athena rated it

Shelves: science, religion-philosophy, favorites

This was an amazing book on christianity/Catholocism and the things that have occured through the ages in a struggle for power, God, humanity, and what cruel things people will do for these things. But some may see it as blessings bestowed by God for the greater human good....you decide!

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Jul 20, 2009

Janet rated it

Shelves: hey-i-m-learning-here, non-fiction

I only read part of this and then had to return it. Too busy with other stuff now to read a non-fic. Later though. It was good.

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Dec 25, 2010

Jessica Trapp rated it

This book is chilling.

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“...free-associative sexual libel...is typical of the impulses of religious authoritarians to demonize all heretics by attributing to them every manner of outrage that a perverse human mind could imagine.” — 2 people liked it

“The persecutorial impulse - 'the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings as imagined agents of corruption and incarnations of evil' - seems to be hardwired into Western civilization.” — 2 people liked it

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