Koestler, Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition

Sometimes the beliefs of hyper-rational men are subject to long held prejudice. Arthur Koestler would have liked to have been thought of as a man who followed the evidence where it led even when it seemed to stray into avenues of unreason according to scientific rationalists. What though are we to make of this commonplace observation about the depredations of religious persecution.

This may sound like a psychological paradox. Yet I think most historians would agree that the part played by impulses of selfish, individual aggression in the holocausts of history was small; first and foremost, the slaughter was meant as an offering to the gods, to king and country, or the future happiness of mankind. The crimes of a Caligula shrink to insignificance compared to the havoc wrought by Torquemada. The number of victims of robbers, highwaymen, rapers, gangsters and other criminals at any period of history is negligible compared to the massive numbers of those cheerfully slain in the name of the true religion, just policy, or correct ideology. Heretics were tortured and burnt not in anger but in sorrow, for the good of their immortal souls.

(from The Ghost in the Machine)

Torquemada would be generally accepted to be the most assiduous Inquisitor. The Inquisition was continued after his death by Isabella and it is interesting that the Queen’s secretary estimated that 2,000 were executed during her reign.

There are various estimates of the number of victims of the Spanish Inquisition during Torquemada's reign as Grand Inquisitor. Hernando del Pulgar, Queen Isabella's secretary, wrote that 2,000 executions took place throughout the entirety of her reign, which extended well beyond Torquemada's death.[15]

(from Torquemada)


That would be a period of 26 years. Now considering the number of capital crimes in that era I would say this was not anything like the slaughter that Koestler assumes.

The Dance of the Bats and Arthur Koestler

In the early morning just before dawn around 6:30, I go outside to see the pipistrelle bats coming back to roost. When I first step outside there’s a couple and then quite quickly there’s a lot circling round my head as though they were checking to see what this big object on the sonar was. Round and round they go in a 15 foot circle enjoying the last of the night feinting towards the dormer and swinging away again. Wonderful, dizzying dance. There must be some ingress into the roof space at the dormer which I can’t make out. They only need less than one inch to enter. Occasionally one comes in an open window and then we have fun with a butterfly net. Extraordinary creatures with their delayed conception. Is there any permutation or possibility that nature hasn’t happened on; most of them useless and some decidedly handy. Arthur Koestler in his The Ghost in the Machine writes how when later stages of evolution come to a dead end, its as though the process bethought itself and went back to the larval stage and took a different tack. His teleology would cause conventional evolutionists to sniff :

It seems that this retracing of steps to escape the dead ends of the maze was repeated at each decisive evolutionary turning point. I have mentioned the evolution of the vertebrates from a larval form of some primitive echinoderm. Insects have in all likelihood emerged from a millipede-like ancestor -- not, however, from adult millipedes, whose structure is too specialised, but from its larval forms. The conquest of the dry land was initiated by amphibians whose ancestry goes back to the most primitive type of lung-breathing fish; whereas the apparently more successful later lines of highly specialised gill-breathing fishes all came to a dead end. The same story was repeated at the next major step, the reptiles, who derive from early, primitive amphibians -- not from any of the later forms that we know.

And lastly, we come to the most striking case of paedomorphosis, the evolution of our own species. It is now generally recognised that the human adult resembles more the embryo of an ape than an adult ape. In both simian embryo and human adult, the ratio of the weight of the brain to total body weight is disproportionately high. In both, the closing of the sutures between the bones of the skull is retarded to permit the brain to expand. The back-to-front axis through man's head -- i.e., the direction of his line of sight -- is at right angles to his spinal column: a condition which, in apes and other mammals, is found only in the embryonic, not in the adult stage. The same applies to the angle between backbone and uro-genital canal -- which accounts for the singularity of the human way of copulating face to face. Other embryonic -- or, to use Bolk's term, foetalised -- features in adult man are: the absence of brow-ridges; the scantness and late appearance of body hair; pallor of the skin; retarded growth of the teeth, and a number of other features -- including 'the rosy lips of man which were probably evolved in the young as an adaptation to prolonged suckling and have persisted in the adult, possibly under the influence of sexual selection' (de Beer).........
It is as if the stream of life had momentarily reversed its course, flowing uphill for a while, then opened up a new stream-bed. I shall try to show that this reculer pour mieux sauter -- of drawing back to leap, of undoing and re-doing -- is a favourite gambit in the grand strategy of the evolutionary process; and that it also plays an important part in the progress of science and art.