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    God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
    God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
    God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World
    Audiobook9 hours

    God's Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World

    Written by Cullen Murphy

    Narrated by Robertson Dean

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    The Inquisition conducted its last execution in 1826-the victim was a Spanish schoolmaster convicted of heresy. But as Cullen Murphy shows in this provocative new work, not only did its offices survive into the twentieth century, in the modern world its spirit is more influential than ever.God's Jury encompasses the diverse stories of the Knights Templar, Torquemada, Galileo, and Graham Greene. Established by the Catholic Church in 1231, the Inquisition continued in one form or another for almost seven hundred years. Though associated with the persecution of heretics and Jews-and with burning at the stake-its targets were more numerous and its techniques more ambitious. The Inquisition pioneered surveillance and censorship and "scientific" interrogation. As time went on, its methods and mindset spread far beyond the Church to become tools of secular persecution. Traveling from freshly opened Vatican archives to the detention camps of Guantanamo to the filing cabinets of the Third Reich, Murphy traces the Inquisition and its legacy.With the combination of vivid immediacy and learned analysis that characterized his acclaimed Are We Rome?, Murphy puts a human face on a familiar but little-known piece of our past, and argues that only by understanding the Inquisition can we hope to explain the making of the present.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 19, 2012
    ISBN9781452676821

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    Reviews for God's Jury

    4/5

    43 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Really enjoyed this book. Has very important information about why Christianity is a practice not to be followed by anyone melanated. Leave that shit for them caucasoid mountains folks.
    • 3/5
      A decidedly mixed bag. On the one hand, Murphy gives a history of the Inquisition, or rather, the various phases and incarnations of the Inquisition, with an idea of how the records of that process survived the ages. He also focuses on the intense bureaucratic nature of the Inquisition, which produced results that could vary from the bizarre to the slapstick. So far, so good. Where I think Murphy fails is his efforts to relate the Inquisition to the modern world. He makes much of the 2001-2012 period, for things like waterboarding and such, but doesn't note the obvious distinction between the secular powers aiding the Inquisition, and the secular powers outright opposing the inquisition (lower case i) in modern times. This, to me, would seem to be an important differential factor. I found it astonishing that aside from one very brief reference to Lenin, and a later page on the KGB (also brief), Murphy spent no time in discussing the inquisition (again, lower case i) in the USSR. And there, you had a number of remarkable parallels, including attempts to stamp out heresy (think Trotsky) and effects on science a la Galileo (think Lysenko versus those supporting gene theory). No mention of Bulgakov, either, with his phrase "manuscripts do not burn" (though Jacabo Timmerman gets a reference). Coverage of Nazi Germany is slightly better, but not by much, and Murphy doesn't omit to taking swipes -- twice -- at IBM. Obviously, he wants to show off that he's read his Edwin Black. It would seem to me incomprehensible to omit a detailed analysis of the NKVD/KGB and the RHSA/SS, where the secular forces and the inquisitions were one and the same. Rather disappointing book, one that could have been better. (EDIT: by coincidence, I was reading an account of Eisenstein's aborted film "Bezhin Meadow," and the account notes that Ivor Montagu has drawn a parallel between Eisenstein's battle with the censors, and Galileo's battle with the Inquisition, described in the book.)
    • 4/5
      God's Jury is an interesting, if rather too thinly detailed, history of the Inquisition, combined with an extensive contextualization of Inquisitorial institutions in history, from the Church to England, Germany, the Soviet Union and right down to the present day US government and Guantanamo Bay. I enjoyed it for its historical presentation of the Inquisition, and for the historical contextualization. Murphy reminds us that there were really three Inquisitions, the Medieval, the Spanish and the Roman, each with its own orrery of horrors. We get some good detail about inquisitorial practices and the social and political historical context of their enactment, and learn a great deal about modern scholarly and theological debates about what the Inquisition really was and meant.

      That said, I found this to be a flawed book, in a moral sense. Murphy seems determined to not only describe the Inquisition but to normalize it. By lengthy descriptions of other despotic regimes, ancient and modern, which practiced horrible tortures, relished bureaucratic cataloging of heresy, deviance and political subversion, and obsessed over the private lives of each and every citizen, we are given an impression that the Inquisition's greatest significance is merely perhaps that it was among the first in a long line of modern tortuous bureaucratic pursuers of deviance. This seems, on balance, far too kind, far too understanding. It gets worse as we come to understand that, while the Inquisition no longer exists in name, there exists in the modern day Roman Catholic Church a direct institutional descendant of the Office of the Inquisition, and that in some sense the contemporary Catholic Church and its offices are in a line of direct continuity with the Inquisition. Understanding this, the effort to say "but of course everybody does it" begins to sound suspiciously close to an effort to justify, and not merely to understand.

      I don't know what I would do if I were a Catholic, as Murphy seems to be, but I don't think I would be able to live in a relationship to an institution that is unable to separate itself more fundamentally from its evil past, or to feel a part of an institution that is so intimately connected to this history. Germany after all went through a flawed but real de-Nazification, but it is not clear to me that the Catholic church has de-Inquisitioned itself in the same sense.

      There is a fine line between historically contextualizing evil, and making peace with it, and I'm not comfortable that Murphy stands on what I consider to be the right side of that line.

      In the end Murphy presents a history that is plausible in its details, but misguiding. For someone truly interested in Inquisition history, there must surely be better books (and I'll seek one now, and am grateful for Murphy's reintroduction to this is topic.) As an effort to understand what the Inquisition was, and is, in a deeper historical and theoretical sense, God's Jury is not satisfying to me, nor do I think it would be satisfying to anyone who does not, at a basic level, see the Catholic Church as a fundamentally sound and reasonable institution. This book is ultimately about being Catholic when the Catholic Church has this history. It's a solution to a special problem that Catholics must have, but it is not my problem and may not be your problem either. Non-Catholics have the freedom to see the modern Church for what it is, an organization that is theologically contiguous with the men and institutions who burned Jews and other heretics at the stake, who sought out deviance and discovered it, whether it was there or not, and which has never, really, fully renounced its intolerance for divergent beliefs, but instead merely altered, perforce, its methods and strategies. The modern Catholic Church is the still the very same Church of the Inquisition, and this reality is something that God's Jury does us a favor in acknowledging, even highlighting, but frustratingly seems to avoid confronting or challenging. It is well worth reading, but it may leave you disturbed less for the horrors that it presents than by the author's presentation of the modern Catholic Church, an institution that attributes those horrors not to itself, but merely to its misguided followers. This position, ultimately, is unacceptable to me, and I don't really feel confident that the author finds it as unacceptable as I do.
    • 2/5
      Supposedly about the Inquisition and its influence today, this book is peppered with inane references to American pop culture and weak travelogue descriptions, and it manages to be less informative than the Wikipedia entries on the subject.
    • 4/5
      This is a fascinating book about the history of the various Inquisitions of the Catholic Church - the Medieval (against the Catharsis in France), the Spaish & the Roman - and how these persecutions affected the people in each country where they were pursued, but also how the process developed by the Inquisition has moved into our The author, of course, has a point to make and a political ax to grind, but the book is written in such an accessible writing style, that it makes for fascinating & somewhat chilling reading.
    • 5/5
      “God’s Jury” author Cullen Murphy spent a lot of time in archives while researching this book. He writes extensively on the mad amounts of Inquisition-related documentation that exists world wide, much of which is only recently being uncovered and researched. Some documents are surprisingly damning in their straightforward accounting of the mechanisms of its own atrocities. What Cullen makes clear is that the Inquisitions (and they can be categorized into multiple phases) weren't just an effort in blind religious passion and uncontrolled violence (there were certainly those aspects at times). The discipline and energy that went into the attempts to control people, their beliefs, and their minds was extensive and planned. Cullen writes, “Repressive regimes are recordkeeping regimes. Repression demands administration.”Cullen succeeds at consolidating hundreds of years of history into a readably, but concise and broad, accounting of the Catholic Church’s Inquisition(s) and how glimmers of their activities still shine in our modern world. My personal view of the Inquisition was formed by Mel Brooks in his classic “History of the World, Part 1”. Torquemada and his Spanish torturers gaily sing along with jews in mid-torture who happily play the role of background vocalists. Cullen even references this pop culture image and notes that rather than the affable Mel Brooks comic character; Torquemada was uncompromising and "full of pitiless zeal". The Inquisitions grew out of the decentralization of Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire. And while secular institutions supported the investigations into heresy and their related punishments, it was decidedly the non-secular institutions, which propelled the machinery that drove the Inquisitions.There were three distinct inquisitorial periods – the Medieval, The Spanish and the Roman. As offshoots of the second two, there developed a worldwide Inquisition as well; something that was felt from the Spanish conquests in the New World, to colonies as far flung as Africa and Asia. Generally speaking, each of these Inquisition ‘flavors’ followed its predecessor in time. But more importantly, each successive Inquisition became more organized, more thoughtful, and more coordinated. And while the organizational capabilities and necessities continued to grow, the root core focus of each Inquisition continued to be religion. Even beyond religion as an institution, the root of the severity of these conflicts stems from an individual or group’s rabid belief in its own correctness, and the equally violent belief that all alternatives are flat out wrong.Cullen ties specific medieval, Roman and Spanish Inquisition examples to contemporary analogies. Most of the comparisons make sense, though I found some a bit obtuse. His contemporary references fall well short of being essays, or politically preachy, though he does spend a bit more time comparing the inquisitional behavior with the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo. Unsettlingly, many of the interrogation techniques at the U.S. base in Cuba are near exact replicas of some techniques used hundreds of years ago that we now call ‘torture’. Far from being overly political, I found Cullen’s representations to be evenhanded and well documented.While the majority of Cullen’s book focuses on the historical aspects of the Inquisitions, he spends a good amount of ink relating history to what we find in our own contemporary mindset. And religion, forever connected to its historical forbearer, remains at the core. Cullen writes, “For most people in the developed world, memories of outright religious warfare, once a gruesome fact of life, have long been buried. The past decade, with its ominous references to a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West, has revived them.” What Cullen’s book does better than anything else is synthesize and contextualize the Inquisition. It’s a short read…only 250 pages before the notes and bibliography. In wrapping up his work, Cullen revisits a renovated building at the Vatican that acts as the Inquisition’s vast repository and research facility. It’s been completely modernized since his last visit and he reflects on the last half century of academics surrounding this translucent time period. “…Independent scholars have added texture and nuance to the seven-hundred-year story of the Inquisition. They have put it into social context. They have documented its unhappy consequence but also shown is limitations – the wide gap between plans and performance, ambitions and competence. The Inquisition emerges in a somewhat fuller light…It attempted to codify its practices and place restrictions on its behavior. In other ways, the Inquisition emerges as more horrifying than ever – because it could persist for so long in such a mindless way, sustained and perpetuated by larger forces that no one could quite perceive, let alone understand, much less control. At the same time, it comes across as a bureaucracy like any other subject to the same myopic imperatives, the same petty ambition sand animosities that one finds in ‘Dilbert’ or ‘The Office’.”It’s this relatively recent work which Cullen deftly ties together in “God’s Jury”. The book is notated in great detail and Cullen references a plethora of independent and original sources. And through it’s strong academic credibility; the book is an extremely interesting and smooth read. The book is not merely informative, it’s enlightening, interesting and engaging.