[Peace-discuss] charlatan, heresy, heretic

[C. G. Estabrook]

https://www.firstthings.com/article/1995/12/aquinas-and-the-heretics

An interesting article on the matter from the late Michael Novak <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Novak>. 

I edited a college magazine with him long ago, and - altho’ we didn’t agree on much - he wasn’t stupid and writes well on this subject.

And Henry Kamen is an interesting historian. Wikipedia writes, it seems to me accurately, 

"He has been one of the leading historians who have attacked the traditional 'black legend' view of the Spanish Inquisition. His own views have changed since he published a book about the Inquisition in the 1960s: his 1998 book provides extensive evidence that the Inquisition was not made up of fanatics who rejoiced in torture and executions and that, for example, Inquisition gaols were better run and more humane than ordinary Spanish prisons.

"One of the most important living historians of Spain, Kamen has devoted his career, most famously in his revisionist books on Philip II and on the Spanish Inquisition, to taking on the so-called Black Legend, promoted by Spain's opponents. That he has in many ways succeeded, thanks to decades of engaged scholarship, in fundamentally altering historians' understanding of 15th- and 16th-century Spain is testimony to the force of his arguments and the depth and quality of his rigorous, archive-based research. [The Atlantic Monthly (Boston), 2012.]"


> On Nov 10, 2018, at 5:53 PM, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> […]
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>> How to deal with heretics, by the official philosopher-theologian of the Roman Catholic Church:  
> St. Thomas Aquinas, On Law, Morality and Politics  (Hackett Pub. Co., 1988), pp. 255-257: “Ought Heretics to be Tolerated?”  [From Summa Theologiae, II,II, Quotation 11: “Of Heresy,” Article III, as translated by the  Dominican Fathers and excerpted by William P. Baumgarth & Richard J. Regan, S.J., eds.]
> —> Endorses a sort of “three strikes” procedure before rendition of persistent heretics to the secular authorities, who were to carry out the actual killing in the auto-da-fe (“Act of the faith”), usually by burning at the stake but sometimes only in effigy.  (Full-scale burnings were public spectacles. difficult to organize & expensive to carry out.  Sometimes they lost money.) 
> See Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition (New American Library, 1965, 339 pp.). The revised fourth edition is available in paperback from Amazon.
> 
> […]
>