Inquisition

In E. L. Doctorow's City of God, the Inquisition is not a depicted event but a charged historical reference that recurs at key moments of theological and moral reckoning. It stands as the novel's shorthand for the corruption of religious authority into political terror, the point at which the church's claim to divine mandate becomes indistinguishable from the exercise of state power. The novel invokes it most explicitly in Thomas Pemberton's remarks to the bishop's examiners, where it anchors his argument that Christianity has been a political creation with a political history from the time of the emperor Constantine's conversion in the fourth century through the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Reformation. For Pem, the Inquisition is not an aberration but a logical extension of a faith that has always been entangled with the wars among states and the rule of populations. It is the historical proof that the church's authority has been bought and wielded as an instrument of domination, a pattern the novel insists continues into the twentieth century's genocides.

The Inquisition in Pem's Theological Critique

Pem's remarks to the bishop's examiners constitute the novel's most sustained engagement with the Inquisition. Speaking as a priest facing examination, he invokes the Inquisition alongside the Crusades as evidence that Christianity's history is fundamentally a history of power. He argues that the politically triumphant Jesus created from the conflicts of early Christianity has been a political Jesus ever since, and he traces this lineage through the Catholic Church's Crusades, its Inquisition, and its contests and alliances with kings and emperors. The Inquisition serves as the clearest instance of the church's active participation in the rule of populations, the moment when doctrinal enforcement became indistinguishable from state violence. Pem's invocation is deliberately provocative: he is using the church's own history against it, forcing his examiners to confront the weight of what they have inherited. He acknowledges that the higher criticism has gone on for a hundred and fifty years and insists that the church must look again at what is staring it in the face. The Inquisition is thus not merely a historical fact but a living burden, part of the doctrinal and moral weight that makes all the miracles he is asked to affirm a burden to him.

The Inquisition and the Shadow of Genocide

The novel extends the Inquisition's logic into the twentieth century, most devastatingly in the Kovno Ghetto sections. The ghetto archive assembled by Josef Barbanel documents the systematic destruction of a people with the same bureaucratic thoroughness that the Inquisition applied to heresy. Barbanel's diary, written in a neat Yiddish like stitches sewn into the page, records execution orders, regulations, and deaths with the passion to put it all down indelibly. The Germans, like the inquisitors before them, forbade unauthorized writings and confiscated all cameras, understanding that documentation itself was a form of resistance. The archive chest that survives—hammered together with big heavy nails, painted white, lined with oilskin—contains the same kind of meticulous record-keeping that the Inquisition perfected, but turned against the persecutors. The novel draws an implicit parallel: the Inquisition's machinery of surveillance and punishment finds its modern heir in the Nazi apparatus, and the church's historical complicity in such violence is part of what Pem must reckon with. The forbidden photographs in the archive—a body hanging from a gallows, seven little boys in military-school caps standing at attention in the full knowledge of death—are the twentieth century's answer to the Inquisition's auto-da-fé.

The Detective's Framework and the Inquisition's Legacy

Pem's self-fashioning as a detective is inseparable from his confrontation with this history. When he discovers the brass cross of St. Timothy's missing from behind the altar, he finds only a shadow of the crucifix in the unfaded paint of his predecessor's poor taste—an image of absence that echoes the Inquisition's legacy of violence done in the name of the cross. His investigation leads him to the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, where the cross lies flat on the black tarred roof, its transverse exactly parallel to the front of the building, its upright pressed against the granite pediment. The detective's trade, which he learns from used paperback novels bought at a thrift shop on St. Marks, offers a world circumscribed and dependable in its punishments, unlike the world of a God who permits the Inquisition and the Holocaust. The Inquisition haunts this detective framework as the ultimate case that cannot be solved, the crime that no punishment can rectify. Pem's conviction that the appearance of the cross on the synagogue roof announced something momentous belongs to a mode of thought he can no longer countenance, yet he cannot escape it. His sign is ambiguous, recognized for what it is but not for what it instructs him to do, and he must keep his own counsel even as far as Sarah Blumenthal is concerned. The Inquisition's legacy is precisely this ambiguity: the cross that once authorized torture now lies on a synagogue roof, its meaning unresolved.

The Inquisition and the Critique of Divine Authority

Pem's wedding prayer, delivered as his final act as a Christian and an ex-Christian priest, brings the Inquisition's logic to its theological conclusion. He addresses a God who has been bought and embraced like the lowest, most pathetic streetwalker, used at will for the most hideous purposes. The Inquisition is the historical proof that anyone who wants God, and for whatever foul, murderous reason, can have Him. Pem refuses to get into the question of how a supposedly omniscient God could allow such catastrophes, but he insists that the genocidal cruelties of the age have brought God into disrepute. The Inquisition is the original sin of this pattern, the moment when the church first demonstrated that divine authority could be weaponized. The novel's answer is not a defense of God but a turn toward a hallowed secularism, a faith stripped of institutional power. The Inquisition thus functions as the negative image of everything the novel proposes: a religion that persecutes in God's name versus a faith that acknowledges its own complicity and seeks to transcend it. The archive chest, recovered and opened in the International Arrivals Building, contains the testimony that survives the Inquisition's heirs, the record of what was done to the Jews of Kovno, preserved against the oblivion that the church's history of violence has so often served.