Nicholas Eymerich, the Inquisitor General for the Spanish Inquisition in Aragón, died today in 1399. Eymerich made his name by writing the definitive handbook for inquisitors, the Directorium Inquisitorum. It shared knowledge on heretics, blasphemers, Jews, sorcerers, alchemists and witches, and gave practical advice on how to spot lies and conduct interrogations (above) and trials. It codified interrogation techniques which are still in use today. Eymerich’s manual was on every Inquisitor’s bookshelf from the 14th to the 17th centuries.
‘Punishment does not take place primarily and per se for the correction and good of the person punished, but for the public good in order that others may become terrified and weaned away from the evils they would commit.’ Directorium Inquisitorum, 1578 edition
Today in 1964, Pope Paul VI left Rome on an unprecedented pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This earned him a number of historic firsts: first flying pope, first pope to leave Europe, first pope to visit the Holy Land. On top of that, it was the first time a pope had left Italy since 1804, when Napoleon was crowned emperor in Paris. When Paul VI toured Galilee, Life magazine remarked that he was ‘the first Vicar of Christ since the Apostle Peter to walk these green hills.’
Moses Mendelssohn, the German Jewish philosopher (and grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn), died today in 1786 at the age of 56. His most famous work was the book Jerusalem, which argued that the state has no right to limit freedom of conscience in religious belief.
Tonight in 1944, Kaj Munk, a Danish church pastor and playwright, was arrested by the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Munk had been a courageously outspoken opponent of the Nazis and antisemitism in his plays and sermons, and an important cultural figure in the resistance to the occupation, which had begun in April 1940. He was shot in the head and his body was found in a roadside ditch the next morning. In defiance of the occupation, 4,000 people came to the funeral at his parish church in Verdersø.
‘If I were to sit down as a passive spectator because of fear of men, I should feel myself a traitor to my Christian faith, my Danish outlook, and my ordination vow. It is better now that Denmark’s relations with Germany should deteriorate than its relations with the Lord Jesus.’ Kaj Munk, wartime letter
The poet TS Eliot died today in 1965 at the age of 76. He wrote one of the most important (and despairing) poems of the 20th century, ‘The Waste Land’, as well as the poem which won him a Nobel Prize, ‘Four Quartets’. He also wrote the light verse collection, ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’, which in 1981 was adapted to become the musical Cats. Eliot was buried in East Coker, Somerset, the village his Calvinist ancestor Andrew Eliot had left in the 1660s to find a new life in America, and where he was unhappily a juror in the Salem witch trials.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
TS Eliot, Four Quartets, Little Gidding
Image: Rijksmuseum, Gift of G.J. Boekenoogen, Leiden / Public Domain