It was not only Poe and Dostoyevsky and even Professor Higgins who assumed that the Spanish Inquisition was wicked because it was Spanish; the rest of us, the hoi polloi, concluded the same. To assert that conclusion was enough to establish its truth; no evidence was required and no rebuttal allowed. In one of the most enduring public relations victories ever accomplished, the history of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Spain's Golden Age, was consciously and methodically distorted by what scholars now candidly call "the Black Legend." This collection of bitter fables, with their overtones of bigotry and racism, proves once more–if proof were necessary–that a lie told often enough and convincingly enough will in the end be accepted as gospel.
And with this he leads us into a concise and insightful contextual accounting, with this concluson:
for my part I am glad there is no longer in existence an Inquisition that might have me arrested on the basis of charges lodged by persons unknown to me, as happened to St. Ignatius Loyola. Yet as one who has lived through most of a century in which cruelty and atrocity and oppression have reached a pitch, quantitatively and qualitatively, inconceivable to our ancestors–inconceivable even to Torquemada–I think a measure of discretion would be appropriate when bemoaning the wickedness of the Spanish Inquisition, more discretion anyway than that exercised by Poe and Dostoyevsky.
The belief in creation stood like a godfather beside the cradle of modern science. I shall not demonstrate this in detail, but I am convinced of it and for good reasons. Copernicus, Galileo and Newton were certain that the work of science means reading in the book of creation. God has written that book, and he has given men the power of understanding, in order than they may decipher it. God has written it in legible form, as a comprehensible text. It is admittedly not easy to understand, and the writing is not easy to decode, but it is possible. The entire scientific enterprise is the discovery of order, laws, connections and relationships. Let us say, using this book metaphor: It is the discovery of the letters, the grammar, the syntax and ultimately of the text itself that God has put into this book of creation.
The proposition that the relationship between the Church and science is a bad one, that faith and science, since time immemorial, have been in a state of interminable conflict, belongs to the enduring myths of our time, indeed, I would say, to the acquired prejudices of our time. And, of course, the notion that generally goes along with it, like a musical accompaniment, is the notion that the Church has acted as an enormous inhibitor, with science the courageous liberator.
Curtsy to Insight Scoop for both pieces. Do RTWT in both cases.
