This Thomas spoke about a task that he had to perform, he said something about Christianising Aristotle.’
‘Indeed, your mind works wonders in your sleep!’ he exclaimed and I knew there was no point in pursuing it further. ‘We were speaking of the heresies.’ He scratched his greying head and pulled at his beard. ‘Come outside.’
We turned away from Gilgamesh, leaving the comforting smells of the stables and walked to the garden, now blanketed in snow. Andre glimpsed a bush, now covered in the smallest leaves, and picked one or two. Rubbing them between the palms of his hand, he sniffed the scent lightly. A moment later, he remembered me and continued as before.
‘To begin with, we must consider Christianity. Since the holy death in Palestine things have changed, Christian. In the first centuries men still had a knowledge of Christ, but this knowledge became corrupted. Some began to doubt that a God could have died on the cross, that is to say, Christ could not be born nor could He die since He could not have lived in a mortal body whose very essence is, to their way of thinking, sinful. You and I know, however, that Christ did indeed die on the cross, but his cross signifies life, not death, as the church would have us believe. As time passed, Christian, men have become dull of spirit and clearer of mind, and this means they need to make everything comprehensible, in a tangible way. So the church comes up with all manner of dogma and stupidity to explain things that cannot be explained. It tells us that Jesus was born to a virgin, when it is well known that Mary was inspired by the heavenly Sophia who comes from the region of the Virgin in the starry heavens! The church no longer knows the meaning behind the sacraments, or the reason behind the partaking of the wafer and the wine. It has lost the knowledge of why the monstrance is decorated with the sun and a sickle moon. The Cathars have a sentiment for this, you see? They have come into contact with an old Gnostic wisdom that understands what the church has forgotten. They know that Christ has come to us from the sun and that we partake of wafer and wine to remind us of that, because the wafer and the wine are products of sun forces. The monstrance depicts the forces of the sun, or Son, Christian, as they gain victory over the old forces of the Father, or the moon wisdom of the Jews.’
‘But master –’
‘Listen, they have become empty rituals now, and the church seeks to protect itself from what scraps of wisdom still exist in the world.’
‘In the name of power?’
‘Yes, Christian. There is a vast empire to protect and the pope has become its new caesar. He is the new pontificus maximus, you see he even retains the name! It should not surprise me if in the future he makes himself a god, infallible. Is he not almost a god? When the pope tells us that a black cross is the symbol for Christ, then we must accept it, is that not so? Or else prepare our carcasses for the pyre.’
‘So we do not believe in the black cross, master?’
‘Our cross, as I have just told you, is a red cross, it is a living cross, Christian! It tells us that Christ lives in our blood.’
‘And so you are telling me that the heretics know more about Christ than the church and this makes the church despise them?’
‘Cathars know many things even if their wisdom has become distorted as we have said, and it is worth keeping that in mind. There is distortion everywhere, it is inevitable.’
‘Then everyone is wrong and the world shall fall into ruin.’ I was crestfallen, my heart weighed down and my mind filled with thoughts like an anthill is filled with ants.
‘In time man shall forget that there was ever a Christ and shall remember only Jesus.’
‘I cannot believe that, master.’
‘Now, now, there is hope, Christian. As men become clearer of mind they begin to question everything. They seek to know the reasons for things, the fundamental principles. Perhaps their questions are not always the right ones, but the important thing is that they question! The church struggles because it has no answers. It has forgotten the old wisdom and interprets everything wrongly. Then it gets into further trouble by expounding lies in order to cover up preposterous things. You see, that is why in the end it comes to despise men who strive after truth, it seeks to destroy them.’
‘But God is the embodiment of truth. Is that not what you have always told me?’
‘Yes, but the church believes that only it may say what is true and what is not. It wants to rule men’s minds. It has forgotten about God altogether! You heard our conversation at the table last evening? It does not limit itself to the heretical orders, it also persecutes the educated men in the universities because the church believes, as we have heard, that knowledge breeds discord and doubt. The church condemns the search for knowledge because to see the truth leads one to discern it from what is untrue, and that is why lay people are prohibited from owning copies of the Bible.’
‘But master, where do lay people find copies of the Bible when most can hardly read?’
‘Those who can read have been known to make and disseminate their own translations. The council of Narbonne had to pass a law forbidding this practice by the Waldensians. You see, the church seeks to prevent men from questioning.’
‘I think it is wise, for how can the ignorant man know anything of doctrine? If what you say is true and the old wisdom is lost, then only error can result.’
‘Man must regain wisdom, perhaps in a different way than before.’
‘But if you educate the ignorant man he will be like those learned men who are also condemned of heresy!’
‘That is so, but I believe it is far better to suffer in knowledge than to suffer in ignorance . . . or perhaps it is worse? I don’t know.’
‘But I am a little wiser now, and yet I find myself knowing very little.’
Andre smiled with affection. ‘Wisdom is gained in a lifetime, Christian. Even the greatest fathers of our faith have been known to have felt this way because they knew that man himself is imperfect! They understood that man carries within himself the polarity of good and evil, and so is bound to all that is divine and noble, and yet bound to dogmatism and opinions that may be erroneous. Remember our discussion that first day I warned you that in the coming days you would hear many opinions. Only trust what you know truly in your heart. Augustine himself has said that he would not have believed the gospels were he not constrained to do so by the authority of the church.’
‘But master!’
‘Do not look so surprised! Only four hundred years ago the pope himself allowed a form of heresy to enter into the matters of doctrine.’
‘How?’
‘He denied the spirit, and so he allowed a form of Arabic thinking to enter into the body of belief.’
‘But man has a soul, is that not spirit?’
‘No, Christian. The spirit is something higher. In this revelation, the pope decided that he should deny the spirit in man. He did not think clearly, however, because if you deny the spirit in man then you also deny the possibility of revelation through man, for it is the inner spirit that can, in turn, recognise the outer spirit, et par conséquent, what is revealed through it. Do you see how ridiculous it is?’
‘I am once again confounded, master. Why should he deny it?’
‘It is merely that he had lost the ability to see it, Christian.’
‘Then who is right and who is wrong?’
‘Right and wrong, like good and evil, are rarely what they seem.’
‘I see . . . So it is the Devil’s deception that makes good men seem bad and bad men appear good, so that even pious men are fooled?’
‘Yes. Believe only what is in your heart, and yet it must come from a deliberation without emotion, for more often mistakes are made when men are driven by a feverish zeal . . . on both sides.’
‘As in the case of Eisik?’
‘Unfortunately, yes, for as Alcuin tells us, the righteousness of a crowd is always very close to madness. That is, often times there is a kind of frenzy enjoyed by men in the anonymity of a crowd. That is why the inquisition
was formed in the first instance, to introduce a logical and practical way of dealing with such things! Without laws we lose the ability to hold together savage men in a society of civilised human beings. However, even as I say this, there are also those whose zeal is ignited by singular power. Inquisitors are not immune to such things.’
‘And yet I remember a Scythian prince having said that ‘Written laws are like spider’s webs; they will catch the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.’’
‘Very good, Christian. Religious fervour requires a fine balance. This is true of both heretics and the most devoutly orthodox men who call what they approve, good, but what they do not approve, evil.’
‘What then, master? Will we see justice done?’
‘I don’t honestly know. As men of science, however, we must not look at what is good or bad, wrong or right, we must rather search for the facts, find the cause, and treat the disease. And so too if we are to take the right path to solving our mystery.’
‘Like you knew the right path the day of our arrival?’ I offered.
‘Yes!’ he cried jubilantly, ‘which only goes to show that I am usually right.’
‘But not always,’ I dared to say.
‘Well, my impertinent boy,’ he fired at me so suddenly that I nearly reeled, ‘perhaps I should leave it all to your illiterate and clumsy faculties . . . Where would we be then?’
I looked down, knowing I had indeed been impertinent.
‘Come on then, boy,’ he said, seeing my distress, ‘it may be that I prove not so worthy of praise. This, too, remains to be seen.’
I stood, chastised, shuddering as something cold fell on my face. I looked up and the sun had disappeared and a grey pall had overtaken us. It was now snowing lightly and I followed my master to the church, feeling tormented by doubt, watching as more and more snowflakes floated gently onto the ground before me.
8
Capitulum
Mass
A young man is ruled by antipodes. He either loves in abundance or he hates vehemently, his spirit glides confidently on a joyous breeze of hope one moment, or is plunged into the gulfs of despair and doubt the next. He is guided, we are told, by exalted notions because life’s artistry has not yet humbled him or shown him his limitations. Now as an old man living by memory rather than by hope (could the little life left to me ever compare with the long past now gone and yet lovingly remembered?) I tend to smile, feeling a little pity for that poor young man, for I was in morbid contemplation of discrepancies and inconsistencies which threatened to overwhelm me.
The more my youthful-self reasoned, the greater my doubts became, like an object that casts a darker shadow the more one sheds light upon it. My master, because he was a man in his prime and, as Aristotle tells us, not guided so much by what is solely noble, but also what is useful, had during our discourse challenged many things that I had previously accepted unquestioningly – things that formed (albeit unknowingly) the cohesion of my existence – and I believed at that moment that I understood the origins of dissent and the metaphor of the seed. A little knowledge, I now surmised, was food for this odious germ, which then only requires a suitable medium in which to thrive and to grow until it becomes a tree of suspicion and mistrust. I felt that perhaps the inquisitor was right. What good is learning if it drives one away from the grace of God’s love?
And so, it was in this mood that every word of the Sunday mass, every ritual, every formula posed a question: is this the work of God, or only the desire of man, in his vanity, to mimic him? As the abbot ascended the altar and we sang ‘Judica me Deus’ from Psalm 42, kissing it as the sacred repository of saintly relics, I wondered from what inexhaustible source were so many relics recovered? Indeed how many fragments of one holy cross could there be? Andre once said – I believe to shock me – that five churches in France pledged they held the one genuine relic of Christ’s circumcision, and that the churches of Constantinople purported to have some hairs of the Lord’s beard. When I asked him about the heart and body of the martyr St Euphemia, kept at ‘Atlit by our order, he told me that it was said to have miraculous properties, and that it drew in many pilgrims. Raising one brow he then added that it was exceedingly good business too. How could one keep one’s faith from crumbling like so much dust?
Before too long I found myself joining the others in reciting the credo in unum Deum and I wondered how I could sing it? ‘Credo in unum Deum, that is, I believe in one God.’ But did I truly believe?
At some point the abbot consecrated the wafers of bread and the chalice of wine into the body and blood of Christ, and was bidding us to lift up our hearts to God; ‘sursum corda’, I heard myself answer ‘abeamus ad Dominum’, followed by the triple Sanctus, the Agnus Dei and the Pater noster, with a special emphasis on ‘deliver us from evil’, and I thought that these words must have been meant for me alone, for I was once again faced with further cause for distress. What if my master was right? What if there was no magic that allowed a man to turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ? Moreover, what if the one whose duty it was to perform this monumental and awe-inspiring task, was tainted with sin, corruption and irreverence? Did this result in the failure of the ritual, or did the blood and the body become tainted with the stain of his sin, so that all those who partook of it became stained also? Perhaps the Waldensians were right when they refused to take communion from those whom they saw as impure? Oh, what anguish! It was only by the barest margin that I managed to keep from shouting out ‘no!’ Then, almost overcome with guilt, I prayed for the Lord to pacify the ravenous, unrelenting beast that consumed my faith, with a sign of his universal omnipresence, his eternal and infinite goodness. God, I was convinced, was aware of my pain, and in his benevolence could restore my faith by rallying the elements to do his bidding. Soon, I was certain, a bolt of lightning would shatter the abbey, cataclysmically tearing asunder the church in an arc of blinding light that, landing squarely on the altar, would irradiate with its illuminance the void that was now my faithless heart. I would then know that God dwelt in heaven and on earth and in every place, and that he heard the feeble cry of a young, confused novice.
I waited, but God remained silent.
In that moment of deep despair my master leant in my direction a little and whispered, ‘A pair of organs.’
‘Organs.’ I was shaken out of my misery for a moment.
‘The instrument, boy, the instrument,’ he said jerking his head towards a massive structure of pipes to our right and behind us. I had not noticed, but a young monk had been
playing it, accompanying the service.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘but I only see one, master.’
‘Don’t be a goose, Christian, they are called a pair because they reproduce the operation of the lungs.’
‘It is very large indeed,’ I whispered back.
‘Large!’ he replied amused, for this afforded him the opportunity of instructing me further. ‘I have heard of such an instrument at Winchester cathedral so majestic in size that it has no less than four hundred pipes! Indeed its keys are so large that the organists are forced to strike them with fists protected only by padded gloves!’
I smiled despite my anxieties, because it is characteristic of the young that although they suffer a great deal it is only for the shortest time, unlike the old, who for a long time do not feel their passions so intensely. And so it was that my master, being the cause of my misery, was also albeit unknowingly its alleviator.
After the benedicamus Domino, we answered ‘Deo gratias’, and the brothers filed out in silence. We remained seated and, once alone, my master drew my attention to the master of music.
The brother stood by the altar, going through some musical element of the liturgy with a young acolyte, both engrossed in their duty.
‘Yes,’ I answered, remembering the spectres that I had seen when he gave his discourse the night Ezekiel had died, and so for this reason I eyed him suspiciousl
y.
‘Mashallah . . . he is a genius,’ Andre said, and I wondered if he intended this to be complimentary, for not unlike his outward demeanour whose characteristics were often contradictory, he would sometimes say one thing, where he meant its exact opposite.
‘He is a musical genius. Come . . .’ He stood, tugging at my arm, and as we walked to the altar, at that moment, the young acolyte began to sing.
What a voice it was! It was as if all the choirs of heaven had been embodied in one individual. I stood transfixed. My master also paused to listen as the boy sang in a voice whose liquid perfection was almost intoxicating to the ear.
The master of music had his back to us, his arms outstretched, swaying gently to the waves, the flow of currents created by the holiest of human instruments.
The young man was singing the first responsory of Advent Sunday.
‘Beholding from afar, lo, I see the coming power of God, and a cloud covering the whole earth. Go to meet him, saying: ‘Tell us if you are the one who will rule over the people of Israel.’’
To which the older man responded. ‘All you men of earth and sons of men, both rich and poor . . .’
Without turning, as though expecting us, and, in anticipation of our approach, the master of music then said, ‘Dulcis cantilena divini cultus, quae corda fidelium mitigat ac laetificat.’ With this he turned to greet us, fixing my master with his energetic blue eyes filled almost to the brim with tears. He was slight and tall, with fine features though his nose was more prominent than classically acceptable. His every movement seemed strangely fluid, in harmony with some inner music.
‘Jubilate Deo, omnis terra servite Domino in laetitia,’ my master replied, quoting eloquently from the great book.
‘Amen,’ the brother concluded.
There was a pause in which we further listened to the sweet voice, and then my master added, ‘The sound of singing does indeed make one glad . . . as you have said, even during such difficult times.’
TEMPLE OF THE GRAIL - a Novel Page 14