Punishments were moderated as the state expanded its power.

Enforcement's brunt bore down ever less on its citizens' bodies, both in outright physical pain and in the psychic anguish of time lost in prison. Yet the state did not step back from probing and controlling its subjects' lives.

The state had little ability to plumb its subjects' true state of mind. By torturing, it could elicit confession or repentance but never know how sincere. How far into the individual psyche could the state pen­etrate, and why should it bother? The state could hope for outward conformity, and it often rested content with that. But even in secu­lar modernity, the state has shown an interest in what goes on in citizens' minds, seeking to penetrate and influence that.

With overt, tangible offenses, human law could and eventually did handle matters. But thought crimes—not easily known—tested secu­lar law's limits. Speech and writing expressed underlying thoughts and beliefs and, by being public, could influence others in unwanted ways. But because subvocal, thoughts were definitionally without effect on others, their very presence unknown. Why pursue such an offense? And how? The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 speci­fied that unknown crimes should not be subject to inquisition. Only those publicly charged with heresy were to be pursued, not offenders accused in secret, much less those who kept their thoughts private.

How could the state or church police an interior state of mind when it knew only outward signs—acts or words? Even if it knew of an interior transgression, what could it aspire to? Punish the thought or conviction retroactively? Ensure that whatever hetero­dox believers really thought, they at least mouthed the right opin­ions? Or seek to change the offender's actual beliefs and thus future acts as well as thoughts? With conventional transgressions by act, no one expected offenders to become good and never offend again. Retribution cared only that they suffered. Deterrent punishments naturally sought to prevent future crimes, but more by terrifying potential offenders into obedience than by necessarily chang­ing their dispositions. From society's utilitarian vantage, whether citizens behaved out of fear or goodness mattered less than that they toed the line. In modern parlance, society was a behaviorist— concerned with outward acts more than with inward beliefs. Yet rehabilitation at its starkest, as in totalitarian brainwashing, did in fact seek to change past offenders into a future law-abiding and right-thinking citizens.³ Citizens' inner and outer states were to cor­respond, both acting and being good or at least in conformity to the law. Such attempts to penetrate deeply into citizens' psyches therefore provoked opposition as violating human autonomy, or— overreaching—they simply tended to fail.

Retributive punishment for thought offenses made little sense, given that no one had been harmed by purely private ideas.

In Islamic law, male apostates were jailed for three days in hopes of reviving their faith. If they did not then reaffirm it, they were to be executed. In the Middle Ages, Dominicans tortured suspected her­etics less to find out what they thought than to make them recant.⁴ At the end of their travails, the monks remained equally ignorant of the heretics' true convictions. In seventeenth-century Virginia, the authorities' inability to do much beyond eliciting outward signs of conformity was laid painfully bare. Those who absented themselves from twice-daily prayer were first punished by loss of wages, whip­ping, and the galley, and those who spoke against the Christian faith were executed. These measures, however, judged only on external indications. Ministers therefore also interrogated suspected heretics on their faith and knowledge of it. Those who refused to submit were whipped and made to confess to the congregation. For a third infraction, they were flogged daily until they confessed, asked for forgiveness, and sought instruction from the minister.⁵ Despite this escalation, the religious authorities still remained uncertain what their victims actually believed.

Authorities have always found it hard to know who entertained heretical ideas, how firmly they held them, and if they could be dis­suaded. Crimes of thought were inherently harder to detect, much less eradicate, than conventional offenses by act. Much normal crime is opportunistic, succumbing to a momentary weakness.

Since their religions made no exclusive truth claims, polytheistic regimes of the pre-Axial age could most easily accommodate variant beliefs. The Romans folded deities from conquered cultures into their pantheon of cults and gods. Not every belief was taken equally seri­ously, but they all could be accommodated so long as they tolerated one another. A single god, demanding unwavering adherence, how­ever, undermined polytheism's workaday toleration. The Abrahamic monotheisms made exclusive and mutually incompatible claims to absolute truth, all while refusing to consider polymorphous beliefs worthy competitors. For the Jews, Jupiter was not just a foreign god, but no god at all.⁸ Christianity was even more universalizing than Judaism, less attached to any particular nation. Universalizing ideologies—whether religious or, later, political—saw ideological dis­sent in binary terms. They were ecumenical in the sense that any­one willing to believe was welcome as an adherent but intolerant in insisting on the sole truth of their way, the falsity of any other.

Many more people would ultimately be killed for political princi­ples than for theological beliefs.

Heretics also had the advantage over many political dissidents in appealing to ultimate authority. A common claim of religious trans­gression was that it understood the truth, which—as orthodoxy— had become encrusted by institution and ritual. Only the heretic tapped straight into the godhead.¹⁰ The heresies that eventually became Protestantism shared a belief in their direct access to God's truth. Hence, they rejected many sacraments, the cult of saints, pil­grimages, salvation by good works, and above all the clergy as inter­mediaries between the laity and God.¹¹ The most extreme sects lost even a sense that sin was possible, allowing them to believe that unbridled sex, including incest, would restore their lost purity.¹²