The wounded side of Jesus, from which according to the Gospel of John had come blood and water, has moved Christian emotions deeply from the most ancient times. They were certain that it had an immense value, and that it was in some way a mark of the divinity of Jesus: some scholars argue that the evangelist himself who tells the story also ascribes to it a strong theological significance, since in his culture water is the symbol of the Holy Spirit. Christian tradition claims that the Church itself had been born from that wound, just as a child is born from the pain and the love of a mother. Most monks were ignorant, but among the dignitaries there were some educated persons; we can mention, for instance, the poet Ricaut Bonomel, who wrote a poem on the fall of the Holy Land that became and remained famous; or the chaplain Peter of Bologna, an outstanding legal expert who struggled to defend his Order during the trial. At any rate it took no great intellectual to understand that that wound on the side was the source of the Eucharist, which the priest celebrated on the altar exactly by mixing wine and water in memory of that Gospel passage.[15]
For several reasons I will explain comprehensively later on, the Templars were deeply fascinated by that wound through the ribs, and in their eyes it had incomparable value. Perhaps they thought it too holy for anyone to dare to touch it, at least anyone who was not a Templar of the modest rank of the man who had left his witness to the Carcassonne enquiry.
The information that the Templars worshipped the image of a man on a linen cloth clearly spread and ended up rousing the curiosity of the commons, perhaps much more widely than the sources would let us know today. In fact, it was even recorded in the Chronicle of Saint-Denys, the vast book of memories written by the Parisian abbey that was particularly bound with the Crown of France. The monks of St. Denys did not see the Templars’ idol either as a likeness of the Devil or as a portrait of Mohammed, but rather described it in essentially two different forms:
And shortly after they began to worship a false idol. According to some of them this idol was made from a very ancient human skin, that seemed embalmed [une vieille peau ainsi comme toute embasmeé], or else in the shape of a washed cloth [toile polie]: in it do the Templars place all their most vile faith, and in it they believe blindly.[16]
In the end, the matter of the notorious Templar idol was a real fiasco for the prosecution, especially when they tried to colour this object with the dark tints of sorcery. Nogaret had felt it from the beginning: during the first interrogation, carried out in Paris by the Inquisitor of France, the ground had been tested, but Templars who knew anything about it were too few and gave wildly confused descriptions. So the royal lawyers had decided to pass over the matter and aim instead for charges that nearly every brother would be ready to admit. The inquisitors of the Midi, true professionals of the witch-hunt, gave the Templar idol the connotations of incarnate evil according to their own peculiar mentality: maybe they acted in the most complete bad faith, or maybe they had themselves somehow fallen under the spell of their ghastly profession, prisoners of the spectres created by their minds even as they heard out the confessions of unfortunate victims. At any rate, the idol as an image of the Devil or a portrait of Mohammed did not travel very far beyond the grand inquiry of Languedoc, which was beyond argument the most bloodthirsty in the entire trial. Later on, when, after the summer of 1308, Pope Clemens V managed to hand the investigations over to commissions made up of local bishops, the idol’s nature grew clearer, an increasingly detailed compound picture of two liturgical objects: the first was a reliquary in bas-relief containing the remains of some saint or other, the other a very strange linen cloth which bore the mark of the whole figure of a man in monochromatic drawing, a kind of imprint with ill-defined features.
The power of contact
Whoever the mysterious man worshipped by the Templars may have been, he was regarded as so sacred and mighty that someone, at some still unknown point of Templar history, had thought it best to make sure that his charisma should reach and protect Templars physically throughout their lives. And this even without their knowledge, thanks to a small object that kept and passed on his power. The trial sources include many statements ascribing to the Templars’ little linen strand a very special kind of sacredness, derived from contact with an object worthy of the highest reverence: very few of them knew that it had been consecrated by the power of a most highly venerable object, and within this narrow circle someone was aware that the strands were themselves potent relics, for they had been made holy thanks to contact with the “idol”.[17]
The use of wearing always, even at night, a little strand of linen above one’s shirt had been introduced as early as St. Bernard’s Rule, approved in Troyes in 1129. It meaning was chiefly symbolic, for it was a kind of warning to keep the vow of chastity. Sleeping with one’s pants on and with the tight belt over one’s shirt was seen as a very decent thing, since the brothers slept in dormitories with their beds next to each other; the light of little lanterns would burn all night, to protect honest intimacy and discourage the ill-intentioned of any kind, including persons looking for undesirable encounters.[18]
As time went on, though, the awareness of this ancient meaning was lost, to the point where at the time of the trial only a few remembered it. At some point in the 13th century, a new symbolic tradition to do with the linen strand arose and spread, because the original tradition was at this point obsolete; by 1250, the Templars used to consecrate the strands in their habit by placing them into contact with the most important places in the Holy Land connected with Jesus’ life, or else with individual relics kept in Outremer and greatly venerated in the Order.
The knight Guy Dauphin, Preceptor of the Temple in the French region of Auvergne and member of the General Staff, explained it clearly during the trial:
he said they would wear a thin strand over their shirts with which they slept as a sign of chastity and humility; the strands he himself wore had touched a pillar that stood in Nazareth, exactly in the place where the angel made his annunciation to the Virgin Mary, while others had touched precious relics kept beyond the sea, such as those of Sts Polycarpus and Euphemia.[19]
Guy Dauphin had been received among the Templars in 1281, but the habit of consecrating the strands through contact with relics was older. The knight brother Gérard de Saint-Martial, an old man at the time of the trial, had joined the Temple in 1258 and said that it was usual to turn the strand into a relic by consecrating it with the sacred charisma of the Basilica of Nazareth, in the place where the archangel Gabriel had taken to the Virgin the news of Incarnation.[20]
How is this habit to be explained? The answer is very simple and may already be found in the Bible, which expresses the religious mentality of Hebraism, from which comes that of Christianity. When God appeared to Moses on Mount Horeb in the shape of a burning bush that was not consumed, he ordered him to remove his sandals, for that was holy ground (Ex 3, 1-6). The place would always have kept some of the power of that Supreme Being who had manifested Himself there, and to touch the holy soil would always have been of great benefit for the faithful. After 1250, Jerusalem having been lost for decades and the chance of recovery growing ever more remote, the Templars felt the need to keep physical contact with the place of Christ’s life; so they got into the habit of making individual relics to carry constantly on their bodies, as a defence against sins of the soul and dangers of battle. This, after all, suited well their nature of military and religious order, and St Bernard also had underlined that the Templar is always fighting, on two fronts, all the days of his life. During the previous decades, when Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre had been guarded by Christians, the Templars would go to the great basilica to celebrate particular nocturnal liturgies of which the sources tell us nothing: probably they consecrated their linen strands, the symbol of the religious vows of the Temple, resting them on that very stone where the corpse of Jesus had been placed after the Crucifixion.[21] If that is the case, they
would make them priceless relics of the Passion of Christ, to be kept for ever on oneself, guarding one’s physical and spiritual salvation. Later, having lost the Sepulchre to Saladin’s re-conquest, they had to resign themselves to consecrating their strands with something different; other Holy Places of the Christian Kingdom, which however certainly did not have the same value of the Sepulchre, or else relics that the Order had acquired, which in the second half of the 1200s formed a treasure kept in the city of Acre.
Among the Templars, a rumour kept going around that the mysterious “idol” was kept exactly in the treasury of Acre, and everything leads us to believe that its identity was kept secret from most of the monks. [22] Whatever it was, there were several copies owned by the Order and scattered among its commands; these simulacra seem to have been exhibited to be worshipped by Templars, but also by secular faithful who used the Order’s churches, as if they belonged to some mysterious sacred figure who protected the Order especially. The portrait was considered more like a relic than a simple image, it was kept and exhibited together with other Templar-owned relics, and the liturgy by which it was honoured included the ritual kiss traditionally given to relics.[23] According to some Templars, the idol was called “the saviour”; it was prayed to not for material benefits such as wealth, success in love, or worldly power, but rather for the highest Christian goal, salvation of the soul.[24]
Can we know with any degree of certainty who the man represented in the portrait was? Fortunately, we can. In 1268, Sultan Baibars conquered the fortress of Saphed from the Templars; he was certainly astonished to find, in the fortress’ main room – the one where the order’s charter was held – a bas-relief featuring the head of a bearded man. The Sultan could not understand who that man was supposed to be, and unfortunately modern historians are no better off, for the monument was destroyed. There are however other figurations of the same character, found on objects that certainly have belonged to the Templars, objects preserved to this day and which allow us to see, we might even say touch with our hands, the identity of the mysterious man: some seals of Temple Masters kept in German archives, and bearing on the verso nothing else than a portrait of a bearded man, and a wooden panel found in the church of the Templar mansion of Templecombe, in England.
Without any doubt, these are copies of the Face of Christ, represented without aureole or neck, as if the head had been somehow separated from the rest of the body. It is a fairly rare iconographic model in mediaeval Europe, but extremely widespread in the East, for it reproduces the true aspect of Christ such as it appeared in the mandylion, the most precious of all relics owned by the Emperors of Byzantium. A very ancient tradition told that it was a portrait of Christ made not by human hands, but created miraculously when Jesus had passed a towel (Greek, mandylion) over his face; that is, it was not properly speaking a portrait, but an imprint. Kept in the great sacred treasury of the Imperial palace in Constantinople, the mandylion was copied in countless frescoes, miniatures, icons on wooden boards, and the tradition of this miraculous portrait eventually spread slowly to the West. To this day, some of Europe’s greatest basilicas have works of art that reproduce it, such as the icon on cloth known as the Holy Face of Manoppello, those kept in Genoa, Jaen, Alicante, the one preserved in St. Peter’s Vatican inside the chapel of Matilda of Canossa; all copies of the mandylion, made in the East.[25]
What is particularly interesting about the table of the Templar church of Templecombe is that it reproduces the very shape of the display reliquary in Constantinople, as it is shown in many representations, of which the best is the magnificent miniature on the codex Rossiano greco 251 of the Vatican Apostolic Library: the Face seems to be inserted in a kind of rectangular container that has the very dimensions of a towel, more long than broad, and this container has an opening in the centre that allows only the sight of the Face of Jesus, separated from the neck and from the rest of the body. In the icon of Templecombe, this opening that shows the human features of Jesus and separates them from the cover, is an elegant geometric four-leaf-clover motif widely appreciated in the east, and used by Byzantines at least since the ninth century.[26]
The Templars’ mysterious idol, then, was nothing more in and of itself than a portrait of Jesus Christ, of a most unusual type; but in the mess of interrogations, tortured or even only terrified by inquisitors, many monks ended up describing anything that could somehow resemble that strange male head on which the torturers wanted information at all costs. It was a portrait that followed an Eastern iconography, imported from Constantinople but little known in Europe, and it was present in many commands of the order in different forms: as an icon painted on wood, as a bas-relief, as a linen cloth which however bore the representation of the whole body. The last of these was only seen by a few monks in southern France: it did not look like a painting, but rather an image with ill-defined limits, and monochromatic. This was an absolutely peculiar kind of portrait, impossible to understand for anyone who was not aware of certain facts: it represented Christ in a tragically human dimension, enormously distant from that of the Risen Saviour to which the Templars were used. And everything suggests that the leaders of the Order had good reasons of their own to keep its existence secret.
A Physical Icon
Ian Wilson argues that the Shroud, folded so as to show only the image of the face, had actually been an object once owned by the Eastern Roman emperors, and considered as one of the most precious and venerable icons of Christianity: an authentic image of Jesus’ face, reproducing faithfully its physiognomy. Stolen during the terrible sack of Constantinople in April 1204, the priceless relic ended up in the hands of the Templars, who kept worshipping it in its original container but preferred to keep silent about its existence, since it had reached them by less than clear methods.[27] The next pages will follow Wilson’s reconstruction in its essential lines, but I thought it necessary to discuss several points over again and open a few new parentheses, to make the context clearer.
There was a very long theological tradition connecting this portrait closely to the Gospels and to the life of Christ; in a way we might say that to many authoritative theologians of the ancient world that object was almost a manifesto of Christianity itself.[28] In the ancient town of Edessa, present-day Urfa in Turkey, there was worshipped an image of Jesus on a cloth that was said not to have been made by human hands (acheropita); the portrait, always called mandylion (in Greek, “hand towel” or “handkerchief”), was the holiest of objects to the local Christian community. In 943, the emperor Romanus I Lecapenus sat on the throne of Byzantium, and just in that year the city was celebrating an especially important anniversary. One hundred years before, in 843, an important Imperial decree had finally outlawed and declared heretical the theological current called Iconoclasm, literally “image-smashing”, which had been favoured by several previous Emperors over a matter of decades, and which had destroyed through religious fanaticism an incalculable amount of works of art. The iconoclasts, the image-smashers, based their views on an interpretation of Jesus Christ that was not the one defined by the Council of Nicaea of 325, which had fixed the Christian statement of faith. The Nicene creed stated that Jesus was true man and true God, that he bore in himself both a human and a divine nature; but the iconoclasts were monophysites, from the Greek monophysis or “one nature”; according to their view, the human nature of Jesus, mortal and base, had been absorbed and taken into the divine one, eternal and infinitely superior. The Christ, that is, had only one nature, the divine one. Like God in all things, Jesus was not to be represented visually, because it was not legitimate to represent God; hence all his images were to be destroyed. On 25 March 717, Leo III Isauricus was crowned Eastern Roman Emperor. He had reached the throne from the army, having previously been the commander of the great unit of Anatolia. Leo was of Syrian origin and had took with him from his native country a certain tendency to look with suspicion on image-worship, for it could contain the seeds
of idolatry, which Christians and other Eastern peoples had always been concerned to avoid. When he became familiar with the usages of Constantinople, Leo III realised that the cult of images had taken a fundamental role even in liturgy, and had practically become one of the main forms of Byzantine religiosity. That hurt the sensibilities of some extreme theologians, who saw Christianity as a spiritual religion and therefore condemned the cult given to images, which are objects made of matter. Leo III embraced this doctrine, but his choice made the public hostile to him; on 19 January 729, some fanatics even defaced one of the capital’s most famous icons of Christ, and the people rose in revolt, which Leo III had bloodily suppressed. This also led to a break in relationships with the Church of Rome, led in those years by Popes Gregory II (715-731) and his successor Gregory III (731-743): both believed that the human nature of the Christ deserved without any doubt to be represented and worshipped by the faithful through the contemplation of sacred art.[29] In actual fact, the worship of images was rooted in a very ancient tradition, going back to the very beginnings of the Church. In the fourth century AD, bishop Athanasius of Antioch extolled the images of Jesus by quoting the Gospel passage in which Christ had said: “He who has seen me, has seen the Father”; therefore, owning faithful portraits of Jesus was a patrimony for the Christian community, and to contemplate his human form could be a valid help in prayer.[30] Not much later, St. Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea (330-379 AD), the founder of a monastic movement that spread all over the East, had written a work titled A Treatise on the Holy Spirit in which he explained this theological concept with a very effective example. According to St. Basil, when the subjects pay homage to the statue of their Emperor, the affection and admiration they bear goes from the statue to the person of the Emperor himself; so too the cult that Christians offer to the portrait of Christ is aimed to the Person of Jesus, that is, it is not idolatrous. In another work, St. Basil maintained that the images of martyrs are able to drive demons off, an idea shared with his brother St. Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, according to whom representations of saints induce the faithful to imitate them: therefore “the silent pictures painted on church walls can in fact talk, and are of great advantage”.[31]
The Templars and the Shroud of Christ Page 9