The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (23 page)

There were great differences between one
Gnostic school and another, although in the end they all went back to a common idea that basically denied the humanity of Christ. To the writers of the early Church, Gnosticism was like the hundred-headed hydra, a monster with ancient roots and yet everlastingly capable of turning up again with a new face.
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Survivals

Constantine had decided to legalise the Christian cult both out of personal sympathy and out of political calculation, but obviously he wished for a united and peaceful church, a solid organism that could serve his projects; he therefore outlawed dissident sects. Gnosis survived; especially in north Africa and some areas of the Middle East, it came back into favour in the time of the Manichees, one of whose members, in his youth, had been none other than
St. Augustine of Hippo. During the Byzantine age, enclaves survived in various patches of the Empire’s vast hinterlands; then the current picked up strength again inside the larger iconoclast movement, that intended to destroy icons because they bore the human image of Christ and it wished instead to worship only the gospels, which bore his word. In the centuries VIII and IX, several Byzantine emperors found themselves having to fight the
Paulicians, so called because they followed the
Gnostic doctrines of Paul of Samosata: Michael I (811-813), Leo V (813-820), Theodora (842-856), who outlawed Icon-smashing, and finally
Basilius I, who defeated them in the year 871. Because these dissenters were excellent soldiers, they had been settled in Thrace and Macedonia as a border shield to the Imperial territories; there the movement grew again and spread widely into Bulgaria, into the Balkans and in certain regions of Russia. By the middle of the 10th century, they had taken the name of
Bogomils
, from the name of their spiritual head Bogumil, which meant “Dear to God”.

Like a returning wave, this stream of thought in which religious dissent tended to marry political protest during the 11th century, had reached the capital once again: in the time of the imperial house of the Komnenoi,
Gnostic-derived heresy grew powerful, and merciless measures of repression were adopted. Anna
Komnena, daughter of the Emperor Alexius I and author of a famous
Chronicle
, tells that in the year 1117 a kind of conspiracy was discovered, organised by the leaders of these
Gnostic churches, whose reach had come as far as the verge of the Imperial throne and lurked among the most trusted officials. To deliver a really exemplary lesson, Alexius condemned them to be burned at the stake, but he had two different burning pits prepared: one overlooked by a Cross, the other not. The Cross was the mark of true faith, and to accept it meant to accept the real humanity of Jesus, his real and freely willed sacrifice, and all its beneficent effects for the salvation of human kind. Some of the heretics chose to die under the Cross; the Emperor took this for a sign of conversion on the point of death and granted them amnesty.
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In the 11th century, some members of the
Gnostic Bogomil movement crossed over into Western Europe, taking their teaching with them, and it took hold very swiftly, especially in southern France, northern Italy and Germany. The Midi, that is the whole central and southern area of modern France, became the home of a swift-growing
Gnostic church. In the year 1167 they even held a general council of this new independent church at Saint-Félix-de-Caraman in Languedoc; they called themselves the
Cathars, from the Greek
katharòs
, meaning “pure”. Several Catholic bishops adhered to it, going over to its particular creed and taking all their faithful with them, and a kind of union was agreed between the Western and Eastern
Cathars; the leader of a Greek church, called
Niketas
, and who wore the significant title of
papas
, took part in the council.
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A dangerous doctrinal confusion had also reached into the hierarchies of the Catholic Church; a theologian of the level of Pope
Innocent III found himself forced to write a crop of letters and treatises addressed, not to ordinary people, but to bishops whose ideas seemed to be tottering on matters as central and basic as sacraments. At the same time,
Innocent III expended a great deal of energy to underline the significance of the cult of relics, especially those that related to the life of Christ. Just as it had happened to the Byzantine Emperors
Romanus I and
Constantine VII when they found themselves facing the heretics, he had understood an important point: these objects may well be poor things tied to popular devotion, but to tradition they represented the concrete evidence that Jesus had really lived as a human being, had suffered the Passion and had died. In the face of those who preached that the Celestial Christ had been a pure spirit, a concept, an abstract being, even relics of the most everyday things, even the milk of the Virgin, served as fundamental evidence for ordinary people, evidence that heretics considered not true.

As I already tried to explain, the truth of a relic is something our mental attitude cannot take in as the old world used to: the men of the Middle Ages, from the professor at the Sorbonne to the last beggar, perceived it with very great strength, and that cannot simply be ascribed to their stupidity. It is true that any amount of fakes circulated, and we know the famous quotation ascribed to Erasmus or
Calvin, that one could load a whole ship with the wood from the relics of the true Cross of Christ scattered around Christendom. No doubt they were right, but mostly about the shocking abuse made of these objects in their time, to collect alms from pilgrims; and something of the kind was also violently denounced by a 12th century churchman, the Cistercian Abbot Guibert de
Nogent. Both Guibert and
Calvin or Erasmus were however neglecting a matter of some relevance to modern historians: if for instance the Emperor of
Constantinople wished to make a gift to some church a piece of the True Cross, he would not hack off a large chunk, but rather shave of a minute part, often a bare sliver. The value of relics was spiritual, and did not depend on weight. The only thing that mattered was whether that wood had been drenched in the blood of Christ; whether it was a tiny fragment or the whole
patibulum
arm, it was still a witness of the Passion. Of course one could not exhibit to the prayers of the faithful some thin wooden fibre, impossible to see once it was sealed within the reliquary; so the holy fibre would be placed within a larger piece of wood, trying to select the same kind of material from which the original fragment had been taken. The more recent wood carrier became itself sacred by contact, and the sliver once inserted in it would be lost and become all but impossible to distinguish; but in all this there was no intent to deceive or defraud. Most relics of the Cross circulating in the Middle Ages were at least authentic in this sense, that is derived from an authentic lift of material from the greater relic that tradition said St. Helena had retrieved in Jerusalem.

The study of relics is a very fascinating chapter in the history of culture, so long as it is done with sufficient respect. For it is a matter of cultural processes that today’s historian must be able to record without claiming to eviscerate them in the light of a realism that is both too recent in origin and too distant to properly judge. Besides, the modern world may well be said to have something that looks very much like the ancient hunger for relics: it is the curiosity towards the so-called “historical Jesus”, that is all the research that aims to reconstruct the human and terrestrial figure of Jesus of Nazareth in the most realistic manner possible. Born from
Positivism, from relativism and also from a certain faddish 1900s scepticism, the culture of the early third millennium claims to be able to separate the historical man, a Galilean subject of Herod Antipas and of
Tiberius Caesar, from the mysteries bound with his person which have made him the centre of a new religion. To do so, the Gospels are sometimes sliced like hams, dismantled and recomposed in different ways because it is hoped to be able to get back to the “actual words” spoken by Jesus.
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I am not able to assess the sense of this on a theological level, but certainly as historical method it has none. A man who proposed to go to a conference on Dante and propose to move the Paolo and Francesca episode from Canto V of
Hell
to Canto V of
Paradise
would end up covered in obloquy. A historian finds such an idea unacceptable: it is like a crazed restorer intending to destroy a painting by Giulio Romano with acid because he is certain he shall find, hidden behind it, a sketch by Giulio’s master Raphael. At any rate, even if it shows itself in paradoxical and laughable forms, the modern desire to reach the Jesus of history so as nearly to be able to look him in the face is actually very similar to mediaeval man’s morbid affection for all the remains of his terrestrial passage.

Himself a lover of relics and certain that they were a mighty weapon against heresies,
Innocent III wrote a hymn to celebrate the Veronica, a famous image of the Face of Jesus kept in Rome. Its tradition was tied up with the
mandylion’s
: the Veronica was also an
acheropita
image, that is, a miraculous portrait not made by man. It was said to have been miraculously made when a compassionate woman had approached Jesus on the way to Golgotha, to clean his face, dripping with blood and sweat.
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The Templars knew that this Pontiff loved, or rather itched, to collect Christ’s relics, because of their meaning, and Popes who followed were just as eager. A famous case that may give a feeling for the times was that of the miracle in Bolsena cathedral, in 1263. A German priest who was going on pilgrimage to Rome was saying Mass on the altar of St. Christina, but at the back of his mind (like many priests of his time, perhaps) he felt a doubt about the Host being really the body of Christ. Suddenly he saw blood coming out of the bread, and dripping down to stain the corporal. The event, of course, made an enormous amount of noise, and Pope
Urbanus IV ordered its memory to be celebrated with the feast of Corpus Domini.
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The order of the Temple owed everything to papal favour; what is more, as we already mentioned, its own statutes said in so many words that the Roman Pontiff was its lord and master. Once he had learned that the Templars kept such a relic, there is every likelihood that the reigning Pope would have let the Grand Master understand that he wanted it in the Roman Curia. The Templars could not have said no; and it was probably also to ward off such a prospect that it was decided that it was best to keep silent.

In southern France, at the same time, a lethal association was arising between the
Cathar religious ideal, followed by many with sincerity, and political opposition to the King. Philip II
Augustus was working to unify the territory of his kingdom politically, so as to make it a stronger monarchy, and this obviously implied that the great southern fief-holders would lose their autonomy.
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Besides, the north, the langue
d’oil
, was a very different culture from the south. The connection between ecclesiastic and political autonomy became very strongly felt, and was amplified by the unworthy lifestyle often enjoyed by Catholic hierarchs, as opposed to the exemplary austerity of
Cathar bishops. The idea itself of heresy was recklessly broadened: to protest a bishop’s authority, or to refuse to pay tithe, was counted as disobedience to the Catholic Church and evidence of support for the heretics.
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The opposition was thus animated by a certain reforming spirit that gave it a potent moral charisma and drove many people to
Cathar churches. At first it was attempted to end the conflict with religious weapons alone, thanks in part to the fervid preaching activity of St. Dominic de Guzman; but this could not ward off the disaster. On 5 January 1208, the Papal legate Peter of Castelnau was murdered by a subject of the Count of Toulouse and his murder went unpunished: the murderer was tied to the
Cathars, his lord seemed to be protecting him, and the whole matter was very suspicious. Whatever the truth, this crime was the spark that exploded the gunpowder store. Philip II
Augustus promoted a true civil war that caused the massacre of thousands upon thousands of Frenchmen and the military conquest of Provence and above all of Languedoc. It was called the Albigensian crusade because one of the most tragic events of repression took place in a town called Albi, and because political propaganda demanded that this butchery be misrepresented as a crusade. The operation achieved its political goal, but did not manage at all to uproot the
Cathar church of the Midi, which went on existing for over a century there and elsewhere: according to Raniero
Sacconi, born and raised in a
Cathar family but who later converted and joined the Dominicans, in 1251 the spread of this parallel church was stunning. It was still flourishing in the later twelve hundreds; the last leader of whom we hear, by name
Guillaume Bélibaste, died at the stake in 1321.
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Curiously and surely not by chance, the area of
Catharism’s highest popularity agrees with that where we find the most numerous testimonies of these simulacra of the Face of Christ among the Templars.

Between Provence and Languedoc

We know that at the time of the sack of
Constantinople, when the Shroud vanished from the imperial collection, a small group of Templars were present in the Byzantine capital. Their leader was called
Jacopo Barozzi, a knight from one of Venice’s most prominent families, who at the time held the important office of Preceptor of the Temple for the province of Lombardy (meaning most of northern Italy). What they were doing there is not quite clear, and the only certain thing is that they were there under orders from the Grand Master. In fact, these Templars took no part in the sacking of the city, nor would they have been allowed to; for on the one hand
Innocent III had excommunicated all those who had been guilty of aggression against other Christians, and on the other the Templar regulations themselves ordered that anyone who had been guilty of violence against other Christians was to be expelled from the Order, immediately and irrevocably.
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