But the said Inquisitors of Spain have not, by the above or any other arguments, made out a sufficient case to prove that such soothsayers etc. may not be tried by the Ordinary or the Bishops without the Inquisitors; and that the Inquisitors may not be relieved from the duty of trying such diviners and necromancers, and even witches: not that the Inquisitors are not rather to be praised than blamed when they do try such cases, when the Bishops fail to do so. And this is the reason that they have not proved their case. The Inquisitors need only concern themselves with matters of heresy, and the heresy must be manifest; as is shown by the frequently quoted Canon accusatus, § sane.
This being the case, it follows that however serious and grave may be the sin which a person commits, if it does not necessarily imply heresy, then he must not be judged as a heretic, although he is to be punished. Consequently an Inquisitor need not interfere in the case of a man who is to be punished as a malefactor, but not as a heretic, but may leave him to be tried by the Judges of his own Province.
It follows again that all the crimes of invoking devils and sacrificing to them, of which the Commentators and Canonists and Theologians speak, are no concern of the Inquisitors, but can be left to the secular or episcopal Courts, unless they also imply heresy. This being so, and it being the case that the crimes we are considering are very often committed without any heresy, those who are guilty of such crimes are not to be judged or condemned as heretics, as is proved by the following authorities and arguments.
For a person rightly to be adjudged a heretic he must fulfil five conditions. First, there must be an error in his reasoning. Secondly, that error must be in matters concerning the faith, either being contrary to the teaching of the Church as to the true faith, or against sound morality and therefore not leading to the attainment of eternal life. Thirdly, the error must lie in one who has professed the Catholic faith, for otherwise he would be a Jew or a Pagan, not a heretic. Fourthly, the error must be of such a nature that he who holds it must confess some of the truth of Christ as touching either His Godhead or His Manhood; for if a man wholly denies the faith, he is an apostate. Fifthly, he must pertinaciously and obstinately hold to and follow that error. And that this is the sense of heretics is proved as follows (not by way of refuting, but of substantiating the gloss of the Canonists).
For it is well known to all through common practice that the first essential of a heretic is an error in the understanding; but two conditions are necessary before a man can be called a heretic; the first material, that is, an error in reasoning, and the second formal, that is, an obstinate mind. S. Augustine shows this when he says: A heretic is one who either initiates or follows new and false opinions. It can also be proved by the following reasoning: heresy is a form of infidelity, and infidelity exists subjectively in the intellect, in such a way that a man believes something which is quite contrary to the true faith.
This being so, whatever crime a man commits, if he acts without an error in his understanding he is not a heretic. For example, if a man commits fornication or adultery, although he is disobeying the command “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” yet he is not a heretic unless he holds the opinion that it is lawful to commit adultery. The point can be argued in this way: When the nature of a thing is such that two constituent parts are necessary to its existence, if one of those two parts is wanting the thing itself cannot exist; for if it could, then it would not be true that that part is necessary to its existence. For in the constitution of a house it is necessary that there should be a foundation, walls, and a roof; and if one of these is missing, there is no house. Similarly, since an error in the understanding is a necessary condition of heresy, no action which is done entirely without any such error can make a man a heretic.
Therefore we Inquisitors of Germany are in agreement with Blessed Antoninus where he treats of this matter in the second part of his Summa; saying that to baptize things, to worship devils, to sacrifice to them, to tread underfoot the Body of Christ, and all such terrible crimes, do not make a man a heretic unless there is an error in his understanding. Therefore a man is not a heretic who, for example, baptizes an image, not holding any erroneous belief about the Sacrament of Baptism or its effect, nor thinking that the baptism of the image can have any effect of its own virtue; but does this in order that he may more easily obtain some desire from the devil whom he seeks to please by this means, acting with either an implied or an expressed pact that the devil will fulfil the desires either of himself or of someone else. In this way men who, with either a tacit or an expressed pact, invoke devils with characters and figures in accordance with magic practice to perform their desires are not necessarily heretics. But they must not ask from the devil anything which is beyond the power or the knowledge of the devil, having a wrong understanding of his power and knowledge. Such would be the case with any who believed that the devil could
