The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

torture, denunciation, and new torture, producing an ever-widening pool of suspects. That the noble
and wealthy who confessed to heresy could be stripped of their fortunes did nothing to reign in the
abuses in the system. Eventually:
[t]he introduction of torture led, within thirty years, to a new reign of terror such as Languedoc had not
seen since the days of the Albigensian Crusade. Since every heretic suspect was obliged to denounce
several others, eventually almost every member of the population found a place in the Inquisitors' books.
(...) Since the heirs of those posthumously condemned as heretics were automatically disinherited, no
moderately prosperous family in the region could feel entirely safe, however firm its orthodoxy. (p. 95)
The great Witch Hunts on the continent during the 16 th and 17 th Centuries similarly devolved
into cycles of denunciations through torture, with similarly pernicious effects on the social fabric.
Interestingly, the same year that saw the official end of Church support for the Ordeal also saw the
Church explicitly deny the reality of witchcraft, viewing it as a delusion of afflicted women. (Currie, p.
9) The publication of the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”) by two German priests in the
1480s marked a turning point – the Church began to believe in the reality of witchcraft, and
inquisitions were empowered to seek out and eradicate this threat to the divine order. A crucial
argument made by the Malleus is that witches were not merely those using magic to harm their
neighbors – the traditional and folk understanding of witchcraft – but were instead part of a grand
conspiracy with Satan to undermine and overthrow God's Church (and the governments that Church
upheld). 20
With the acceptance of this doctrine, it followed that all witches were part of a common
organization. The impossibility of convening any great number of witches in one place at one time
given the low level of transportation infrastructure was explained by the concept of the sabbath: the
devil would use his powers to transport witches (either physically, or mentally) to a single meeting
ground for their satanic rites. Thus, witches could be made to identify their fellow malefactors under
torture, and only by doing so could they hope to avoid further torment. (Ruthven, 1978)
Unsurprisingly, many confessed and fingered others and the process would be repeated until some
crisis of confidence struck the witch-hunters, or the accused began to turn their accusations against the
20 Witchcraft had to be a compact with the Devil in this view, since only supernatural beings could do magic, unlike
humans, and such maleficent magic could not originate with God. (Malleus, p. 7) That this compact necessarily struck
at the foundations of civilization flowed from the fact that the witch was obliged to do everything possible to help the
Adversary – whose one and only goal was the destruction of the Church. Consequently, witchcraft was “high treason
against God's majesty.”(p. 6) These references are taken from the 1928 translation of the Malleus by Rev. Montague
Summers. The full text can be found online at http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/mm/.
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