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Rating: Humans have a great interest in living safely: an ancestral need from which "power" is generated as a tool to produce security, exercised through norms reinforced by the force of penalties.
However, safety is a vague and changeable condition, filled with its own content by that very "power" which sets the rules of civil living. Operating on such an uncertain basis, the risk is to crush individual freedoms, at least for those who stubbornly believe, even in the orienting legal framework, that they can self-determine. Thus emerges the problem of the limits to the voracious punitive idea.
Meanwhile, a warning arrives from the banks of the Main River: "the criminal law of security [...] is an instrument of authoritarian power, ready for violence. The criminal law of security has not lost this character. Therefore, it is indifferent whether it operates in the service of a monarchy, a dictatorship, or a democracy" (W. Naucke, The Robust Tradition of Security Criminal Law: A Critical Illustration, in M. Donini / M. Pavarini (eds.), Security and Criminal Law, Bonomia University Press, Bologna, p. 80).
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The unidentified narrative object under discussion can be inserted into the aforementioned framework; Leonardo Sciascia describes the horrible appearance of unlimited power, which needs, today as in the past, to be restrained.
Let us take a step back, however.
Death of the Inquisitor tells the story of Fra Diego La Matina from Racalmuto, who lived in Sicily in the 17th century and belonged to the group of men of tenacious thought, "stubborn, inflexible, capable of enduring enormous amounts of suffering and sacrifice" (p. 119). It seems that this man revolted against "social injustice, against iniquity, against the usurpation of goods and rights", reaching the point "where he saw his own defeat as irremediable and hopeless, identifying his fate with the fate of man [...], to accuse God" (p. 95); consequently, he clashed with the fierce institution of the Inquisition, which intended to protect the security of honest citizens from the danger of heresy, exercising a terroristic social control for this purpose.
"In Racalmuto, in 1575, there were eight relatives and a commissioner of the Holy Office; and two years later ten relatives, a commissioner, and a master notary: out of a population of about five thousand [...]. That is to say, the only Holy Office had a force which today, with a double population, the carabinieri do not have. If we then add the bailiffs of the lay court and those of the vicariate court, and the spies, imagining the life of our town at the end of the 16th century fills us with dismay" (p. 32).
"It was easy [...] to formulate charges of Lutheranism, and against anyone" (p. 36).
Specifically, the Inquisition operated in Sicily from 1487 to 1782.
It generally acted against "five kinds of people: heretics and suspected heretics, their supporters, wizards and witches, blasphemers, opponents of the Holy Office and its officials; and extraordinarily (but tragically frequently) against Jews, Muslims, and infidels of other sects" (p. 51).
The procedure provided no guarantees for the accused – "it must be noted that in the sentences there are no grounds and reasons offered by the accused" (p. 79) – and the search for truth did not disdain the "molestations of the oar, long fasts, salutary penances, painful tortures, shackles, handcuffs, chains, sufficient to soften iron" (p. 65).
This legal monstrum burned alive at least 234 people, while the number of those condemned to lesser penalties is unknown.
Thus, Death of the Inquisitor narrates the relentless institutional ferocity unleashed against the man of tenacious thought. Pages that do not belong to a distant past but are extremely current, as "as soon as the Inquisition is touched, many gentlemen feel called by name, surname and party membership number. And I am evidently not speaking only of Catholic gentlemen" (p. 10). It repeats, power needs limits, which seem to be accepted with increasing intolerance by a politics that wants free hands and, above all, by a public opinion that wants to be magically saved from above, questioning the institutions for every answer, under the waving of the all-encompassing flag of security. Now, with this admirable story, Sciascia highlights how important it is – for those who care about freedom – to doubt "power," which has been and can return to being Inquisition, not mistaking its boundaries for empty and manipulable formulas of a past era.
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