Crime and Forgiveness

Christianizing Execution in Medieval Europe

Adriano Prosperi, Jeremy Carden, Jeremy Carden

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674240278
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

A provocative analysis of how Christianity helped legitimize the death penalty in early modern Europe, then throughout the Christian world, by turning execution into a great cathartic public ritual and the condemned into a Christ-like figure who accepts death to save humanity. The public execution of criminals has been a common practice ever since ancient times. In this wide-ranging investigation of the death penalty in Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, noted Italian historian Adriano Prosperi identifies a crucial period when legal concepts of vengeance and justice merged with Christian beliefs in repentance and forgiveness. Crime and Forgiveness begins with late antiquity but comes into sharp focus in fourteenth-century Italy, with the work of the Confraternities of Mercy, which offered Christian comfort to the condemned and were for centuries responsible for burying the dead. Under the brotherhoods' influence, the ritual of public execution became Christianized, and the doomed person became a symbol of the fallen human condition. Because the time of death was known, this "ideal" sinner could be comforted and prepared for the next life through confession and repentance. In return, the community bearing witness to the execution offered forgiveness and a Christian burial. No longer facing eternal condemnation, the criminal in turn publicly forgave the executioner, and the death provided a moral lesson to the community.Over time, as the practice of Christian comfort spread across Europe, it offered political authorities an opportunity to legitimize the death penalty and encode into law the right to kill and exact vengeance. But the contradictions created by Christianity's central role in executions did not dissipate, and squaring the emotions and values surrounding state-sanctioned executions was not simple, then or now.

 

1

Thou Shalt Not Kill

IS IT LEGITIMATE and right to kill other human beings? If so, when and in what circumstances? The legacy of the Bible has taken different forms in Mediterranean cultures, diverging between the Christian and Islamic traditions. Among the most evident differences is the Christian abandonment of the practice of stoning adulteresses, a punishment that still exists in Islam. On the other hand, both traditions embraced the interpretation of the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill” as referring to the sphere of private behavior alone. The rule does not hold for public powers, which can impose killing as a norm of criminal justice and in the event of war. This has been justified on the grounds of the biblical dictate, or on that of the natural law of people. The death penalty continues to be habitually practiced in various parts of the world and is a feature of the historic past of the majority of our societies. Even where it is no longer part of criminal law it persists in the cultural tradition and mentality of societies, because the fact that it once existed holds out the possibility that it could return. Its cultural roots are so deep that attempts have often been made to elaborate general theories referring to a natural or symbolic root that would enable us to understand why we feel the necessity to kill: the explanations oscillate between the naturalistic and the psychological. It is talked about as a natural and non-eliminable fact of the human species, whereby Homo sapiens is also necessarily Homo necans. The legacy of a very long past weighs upon our present in the everyday use of the Italian language. Deriving from the word giustizia, “justice,” is the verb giustiziare, “to execute,” a synonym for the infliction of capital punishment. Cultural memory speaks through a repository of ideas and images that we continue to draw upon in the heated controversies that regularly flare up over the legitimacy or otherwise of the death penalty. The plane of historic knowledge offers overarching descriptions and general historic-anthropological interpretations devoted to myths and rituals in the ancient Greek and Roman world: for the Western Christian tradition the abundance of available sources has yielded an array of analytical investigations of the history of social practices, norms, and doctrines. But little has been said and done to understand the historic relationship between capital punishment and the sphere of the sacred in Christian cultures. That the relationship exists is undeniable: the quantum of religion emerging from the sources is so evident that every study of the premodern history of European judicial rituals has had to signal the religious aura of the punishment as a recurrent feature. There have been plenty of theoretical suggestions and general theses as to how this tie formed and developed in the history of Western Christianity. For instance, on the basis of a comparative study of the history of religions, Sir James Frazer argued that the condemned individual is the “scapegoat” onto which the whole community offloads everything bad that has to be eliminated. René Girard later grafted a theological-philosophical reflection in the typical style of twentieth-century French culture onto the research findings of the English anthropological tradition. He suggested that the Jesus of the Gospels, and the Jewish and Christian foundations of the West, should be credited with having made the death sentence an object of shame, and with having stimulated intolerance of it—albeit one which, he admits, took two thousand years to manifest itself. But ultimately, what are two thousand years “on the scale of peoples and civilizations”?¹

In this book I will try to avoid the risks inherent to general theories by following the arduous and tricky path of historic sources. The subject of this work is the history of the Christianization of capital punishment that took place in the course of the long European Middle Ages, a process that will be reconstructed by investigating the traces offered by Italian history. But it cannot be ignored that the timeless duration of the practice and its continual reappearance in human societies offer an argument to those who uphold its legitimacy. Right at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a French observer wrote that the custom of performing elaborate ceremonies when taking men to their death was so ancient that no possible change could be envisaged in the immediate future.² He could not have imagined that not long afterward another Frenchman, citizen Guillotin, would lend his name to the instrument that marked the passage from the ancient artisanal ritual to the machine age. And this was soon after solemn declarations made as a preamble to the revolutionary constitutions of the United States of America and France affirmed the natural right to life as the first and most important of human rights. That did not stop death sentences from being passed, nor did it put an end to the devising of ceremonies and rites. Human beings still continue to be killed today as a result of legal decisions that vary in form from country to country, and their deaths take place for the most part in a ritual framework of symbols and messages. It is a question of justifying what is happening, not just in the eyes of society, but first of all in those of the person who is going to be executed. The purpose of the framework is to highlight the significance of what is being done: the choice of methods draws on elements lying deep within cultures. Two examples will help to give an idea of some of these variants.

In the absence of reliable official data, it is estimated that in China several thousand people are sentenced to death each year. The European Parliament, when it requested a moratorium on the death penalty in 2007, indicated that at least 5,000 of the 5,420 officially known executions in the world—91 percent—were carried out in China. A number of cases were publicized in that country on a special television channel designed to measure the degree of social consensus for the justice system and to send pointed signals to would-be criminals. From November 18, 2006, and for some five years thereafter, the Henan Legal Channel aired a talk show called Interviews before Execution, watched on average by 40 percent of the province’s one hundred million inhabitants. The program was conducted by a journalist called Ding Yu, so beautiful and coldly pitiless that she was dubbed the “Beauty with the Beasts.” Every Monday morning, Ding Yu interviewed a criminal due to be shot within a week after having been found guilty of violent homicide. During the interview, and again at the end, the journalist declared that the sentence was just and that she felt no sympathy whatsoever. Indeed, the interviewees were described as “excrement,” treated with hate and contempt as enemies of the country, and told to their faces that society as a whole would benefit from their execution. In one case that attracted a particularly large audience, that of Bao Ronting, a homosexual who had murdered his mother, Ding Yu said she felt awkward about his proximity (homosexuality still being a taboo subject in China). In her every action, the journalist displayed her lack of pity for the murderer, expressing scorn and loathing, and egging on the audience to do likewise. But she also said that she had been thanked on various occasions for having listened to them, because they had many things in their hearts. There was no one in prison they felt willing to open up to, while they wanted to “talk about past events.”³

The death penalty also exists in some US states, where the execution rituals have many variants but a shared basic structure: the sentence must be carried out by a mechanical or chemical agent triggered by an apparatus that gives the executioner an impersonal identity. Following the definitive sentence, a human being becomes a “dead man walking.”⁴ His address is the prison’s “death row,” where he lives out the time given to him by his lawyers’ efforts to obtain a review of the sentence or a pardon from the state governor. Permission to watch the condemned person die is granted to a select few—members of the murderer’s family and the victim’s family. Hateful and loving looks are balanced by a state power without feelings and by a justice whose impartiality is symbolized by the blindfold covering the eyes of its symbolic figure—a blindfold that also covers the eyes of the prisoner at the moment of execution. Because the sentence is not carried out in public, death remains a private matter for the person who is to die, and he or she can just say a few final words to those present. A trace does remain, however, of the long past of Christian culture: alongside the condemned person stands a member of their religious confession, to comfort them with the words and rituals envisaged by the particular faith.

These are two examples that give an idea of the importance of rituals as an expression of the foundations of the judicial system in force and of the idea of justice on which it is based. The way in which the condemned person is shown and made to talk is fully part of the process. Both in the Chinese region of Henan and in the US state of Louisiana, the person about to die wants to be heard, wants to leave some testimony of themselves, of what they would like to be remembered about them—a plea for forgiveness, in the majority of cases a declaration of innocence, but at any rate always a final living act, an appeal to the memory of others. Even claiming responsibility for the crime can, if necessary, be a way of not having lived in vain. This primary need into which the final residue of the natural instinct for self-preservation and survival is channeled has had to be taken into account by all the cultures that have practiced capital punishment, whether to deny it or, more often, to exploit its efficacy for the legitimation of power. And in the way they have bent it to such ends they have appealed to the deep sentiments of their tradition.

The majority of the historic forms of power have conceived and justified legal killing. But each culture has practiced it in their own way. This has not prevented all kinds of justifications being invoked for the act of killing. Long before Enlightenment culture reached the point of affirming, in the name of reason, that every human being possessed the right to life, religions had proposed it in the name of a higher divine authority. The Tables of the Law that the Jewish people received from Moses included the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” It should be noted that the fundamental authority invoked since then in all the texts was a passage from the prophet Ezekiel (33:11), where we read that the living God of the Jewish Bible does not want the death of the wicked but their conversion. It is worth bearing this word in mind—we will come across it often. The Christian religion started from here in order to attain a higher level: that of the duty to forgive wrongdoings and love one’s enemies. And yet Christian cultures, no differently from all the others, used to resort to the death penalty, and indeed often still do. During the age in which power was conceived as the fruit of a divine investiture they did so by searching, according to circumstances, for legitimation in the sacred Hebrew-Christian texts. The inexhaustible repertoire of biblical passages supplied sufficient arguments to silence any calls for moderation and forgiveness. But the primary path to legitimating the death penalty was first embarked upon by Saint Thomas Aquinas, when he distinguished Christian precepts from the norms of natural law: on the basis of this distinction, animals could be killed to feed oneself, enemies to defend oneself, and wrongdoers to ensure the health of society. His key argument was that the part is subordinate to the whole, the imperfect to the perfect, the single person to the community. Thus, a tainted limb of the social body can—and indeed must—be cut off. Admittedly a Gospel parable did say that the wicked should be allowed to live and be reserved for divine justice, just as the owner of the field ordered his slaves not to remove the weeds from the midst of the wheat, but to leave it to him to destroy them by fire at harvest time: but if the bad seed could be pulled out without damaging the good, why not go ahead and eliminate it straight away? And so the Gospel prohibition lost all its efficacy, paving the way for that same parable to be used to legitimate death at the stake in the struggle against the “bad seed” of the heretics. But there is a more general, anthropological argument that justifies capital punishment for Thomas Aquinas: by committing the crime, the wicked person (“malus homo”) loses all human dignity and becomes a beast. So killing them could be for the good, just as killing a beast is.⁵ Abhorring the culprit as someone who had forgone the dignity of being human thus acquired the dignity of a theological argument. From then on the dehumanization of the condemned would remain a commonplace in crime reports, as it would in the erudite language of jurists.

Even after the publication and circulation of the work of Cesare Beccaria, the position officially maintained by Catholic doctrine was that the death penalty was universal, and therefore natural.⁶ But the most effective argument, and the one still officially advanced by the Catholic Church today, was that of the division of tasks between religious and political power. In recent discussions about the death penalty it has often been pointed out that one of the last European nations to abolish it was presided over by the Catholic pope. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, formulated on the basis of a project drawn up by a commission headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, pointed out, at no. 2266 of the 1992 version, that the traditional teaching of the Church recognized the right and the duty of the legitimate public authority to inflict punishments proportionate to the gravity of the crime, without excluding, in extremely serious cases, “recourse to the death penalty” (2267). Such rights and duties are analogous, according to the Catechism, to those “holding legitimate authority … to repel by armed force aggressors against the civil community.” To some readers this analogy seemed questionable. Indeed, the text of the Catechism was reworked in the new edition promulgated with the apostolic letter of August 15, 1997, where the issue is formulated as follows: “Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.” These formal changes reveal the uneasiness of the Church toward its tradition and its increasing distance from the arguments that had been used to legitimate the death penalty. This uneasiness grows all the stronger together with the embarrassment of legitimating the right to kill while holding up the slogan of the defense of human life in order to combat the practice of abortion.⁷ It is no accident that, on November 30, 2011, an international conference held in Rome to celebrate the anniversary of the first abolition of the death penalty in the world, that of the grand duke of Tuscany in 1786, was greeted by the reigning pope with words expressing his encouragement for initiatives “to eliminate the death penalty.”⁸

There is a profound tie linking Christian cultures to the death penalty. The God they worship took human form and was condemned to death. For centuries justice was administered in his name in European societies. And the crucifix very soon became a habitual presence wherever people were judged and sentenced, whether to console the condemned or to legitimate those sending them to their death. In the history of modern France a provision of the king made it obligatory to display the religious symbol in courts of justice, offering defense lawyers a ready opportunity to point to it as historic proof of the gravity of judicial errors.⁹

The question that arises is this: What was that crucifix doing in court? Who had brought it there and why? Just asking a question like this prompts the realization that the death penalty as it developed in the history of European societies would be incomprehensible if one did not take account of the contribution of Christianity. As Hans Kelsen had occasion to write, “one of the most important elements of Christian religion is the idea that justice is an essential quality of God.”¹⁰ Not for nothing does the historic tradition of Western Christianity encompass not only the legitimation of capital punishment but also its contestation. There is a celebrated statement which, by common consensus, is considered one of the noblest expressions of Christian culture: “To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine; it is to kill a man.” It was written by Sebastian Castellio, the sixteenth-century Savoyard humanist who raised his voice in protest against the execution in Geneva of the Spanish physician Michael Servetus, who was condemned for heresy. It was the culmination of a denunciation of the practice of sending people to their deaths for heresy that had run through the reforming currents of Christianity in the sixteenth century, starting with the writings of Erasmus before then being channeled into the paths of the radical Reformation. Albeit under a pseudonym, a vehement contestation by Antonio Brucioli had circulated in print, in which the author stressed “how great is the impiety of those who kill the Lord’s servants on the pretext that they are heretics,” also recalling that “Christ came not to condemn anyone, but to save.”¹¹ Yet such views remained marginal, and those who held them often paid the penalty with their lives. And it was above all to affirm ideas that legalized killing continued to be practiced, accompanied, moreover, by the infliction of particularly cruel torture and suffering.

2

A Starting Point: Cesare Beccaria

ALM...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the English-Language Edition
• Preface
• Introduction: Justice—Revenge or Reconciliation?
• 1. Thou Shalt Not Kill
• 2. A Starting Point: Cesare Beccaria
• 3. The Law of Forgiveness, the Reality of Vengeance
• 4. The Murderer’s Confession
• 5. The Earthly City, the Right to Kill, and the Ecclesiastical Power to Intercede
• 6. Bodies and Souls: Conflicts and Power Plays
• 7. Confession and Communion for the Condemned: A Rift between Church and State
• 8. Buried with Donkeys
• 9. A Special Burial Place
• 10. The Criminals’ Crusade
• 11. “I Received His Head into My Hands”
• 12. Factional Conflict and Mob Justice in the Late Middle Ages
• 13. “Holy Justice”: The Turning Point of the Fifteenth Century
• 14. The Service
• 15. Political Crimes
• 16. Rome, a Capital
• 17. Reasoning on Death Row: The Birth and Development of the Arts of Comforting
• 18. A Charity of Nobles and the Powerful: The New Social Composition of the Companies
• 19. The Voices of the Condemned
• 20. Compassionate Cruelty: Michel de Montaigne and Catena
• 21. The Fate of the Body
• 22. Public Anatomy
• 23. Art and Spectacle at the Service of Justice
• 24. Capital Punishment as a Rite of Passage
• 25. The Arrival of the Jesuits: Confession and the Science of Cases
• 26. Laboratories of Uniformity: Theoretical Cases and Real People
• 27. Devotions for Executed Souls: Precepts and Folklore
• 28. Dying without Trembling: The Carlo Sala Case and the End of the Milanese Confraternity
• 29. Comforting of the Condemned in Catholic Europe
• 30. “… y piddiendo a Dios misericordia lo matan”: The Jesuits and the Export of Comforting around the World
• 31. The German World, the Reformation, and the New Image of the Executioner
• 32. Printing and Scaffold Stories: Models Compared
• 33. The Slow Epilogue of Comforting in Nineteenth-Century Italy
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index
• Illustrations