by Glen Craney
“Arnaud de Crampagna, if it be any of your womanly concern. The man is a Waldensian, a fallen soul. Yet so assured is our victory that even a stray dog will choose God’s path over the briars of heretical iniquity.”
Esclarmonde backstroked to the far bank. “I will convey your request, but I cannot promise to do justice to its condescending tone.”
Oblivious to her sarcasm, Dominic lugged his meager belongings over his shoulder. “It is your misfortune, sister, that you’ll not witness the glorious refutation. Many eyes and ears shall be opened.” He looked up and for the first time saw the torches atop Montsegur’s temple. “What is that shining tower?”
“A lighthouse. Built to guide those like you who are cast adrift.”
As Dominic disappeared into the forest, he twisted his face in confusion, unable to comprehend the need for such a beacon with no sea nearby.
The temple’s dedication was delayed by Esclarmonde’s report of the Castilian’s challenge. The Cathar hierophants hurriedly convened in their new adytum to decide if they should agree to the proposed disputation. Among them were Pons Jourdaine de Verfeil, Benoit de Termes, Arnaud Othon de Cabaret, and Lady Giraude de Lavaur, the perfecta who had nursed Esclarmonde to health. The Marquessa, Corba, and the girls remained in the bailey with those who had not been initiated into the higher mysteries.
“This monk Guzman is called the Spanish Mangonel for good reason,” warned Bertrand Marti, the filius major, second in rank for the Cathars behind Bishop Castres. “He hurls curses like shots from engines. The challenge is a snare set by the Cistercians!”
“If entrapment is indeed their intent,” said Castres, “then their bait is the hope that we’ll lose the resolve to risk our faith against their theologians.”
“I have met this Waldensian they’ve chosen to arbitrate,” said Giraude. “He loves the jangle of coins and cannot be trusted.”
“Transcripts of the disputation will be circulated across Christendom,” said Castres. “We’d reach thousands who might never hear us otherwise.”
“Ours is a faith of the heart, not the mind,” reminded Giraude. “We have never excelled in the hairsplitting arguments of the Romans.”
“If one soul might be saved,” asked Castres, “is it not worth the risk?”
As the eldest of the initiates, Giraude was afforded great respect in her counsel. She contemplated the dilemma for an extended moment before cautioning the Bishop, “Guzman hails from a family steeped in the military orders of Santiago. He will attack us like a caballero against the walls of Toledo.”
Castres was given pause by her concern. He turned to Esclarmonde and asked, “Child, you looked into his eyes. Do you think him honorable?”
“He sleeps on the bare earth and ignites the leaves with his smoldering faith,” said Esclarmonde. “He is also full of himself and schooled in the artifice of rhetoric. But I don’t believe him to be deceitful.”
“Then we shall accept the challenge,” said Castres.
Marti came to the Bishop’s side to show his support for the decision. “Who else shall accompany us?”
“I will take only one,” said Castres.
“We will be overwhelmed!” said Marti. “At least allow Pons or Arnaud to join us.”
Castres braced his longtime subordinate with a hand to the perfect’s shoulder. “Take no offense, Bertrand ... but I intend to have Esclarmonde with me.”
The initiates met that announcement with a stunned silence. Marti had always accompanied the Bishop on the preaching tours. Humble as he was, he could not dissemble his wounded pride. “She is untried,” said Marti. “And the Catholics will not suffer a woman to debate theology in their presence.”
“She is more versed in Scripture than any man here,” said Castres. “If the Romans refuse to accept her participation, the rot of their spurious religion will be exposed.”
With a manner of grave concern, Giraude took the Bishop aside for a private conference. “This confrontation may well determine our fate, Guilbert. No one denies that she has a quick wit and an impressive knowledge of the gospels. But she has never been subjected to the ruthless tactics that the Cistercians will bring against us. You must choose wisely.”
Castres pressed Giraude’s hands in great affection, but he remained firm in his decision. He then announced to all, “Now, we must not allow our day’s celebration to be delayed further. Esclarmonde, you said you have something to present to us on this momentous occasion?”
From behind the altar, Esclarmonde brought forth a draped frame and removed its covering. The Easter sun broke through the embrasure and bathed the Mandylion sydoine with a brilliance so intense that the chamber dazzled.
The perfects descended to stunned genuflections. Castres approached the relic with tears of joy. “I saw this precious cloth as a boy in Constantinople. It is the remembrance of the Master’s Robe of Light.” He turned to Esclarmonde in amazement. “How did you come into its possession?”
“The Templar brought it back from the East.”
With palsied hands, Castres reached into his knapsack and unrolled the Nasorean gospel that he had carried with him since coming to Occitania. “Could there be a more profound sign of the righteousness of our mission?” He read aloud from a passage in the gospel:
And then, on Easter morning, the disciple Thomas approached Jesus and placed his hand upon the shining Robe of Light. ‘Master,’ said Thomas, ‘You have risen from the dead.’
‘Do you not yet understand?’ lamented Jesus. ‘Those who say that they will die first and rise are in error. Be not deceived. They must receive the resurrection while they live.’
Deeply moved by the benefice, the perfects exchanged the Cathar Kiss of Peace as they walked in emotive silence to the outer sanctum. Lining the path from the chapel were hundreds of credentes and lay Occitans who knelt and petitioned the blessing of the Touch from the holy ones.
When Giraude reached the horseshoe-shaped western gate, she turned back for one last look at the magnificent edifice that Esclarmonde had inspired. “Permit me a moment. I’ll not have the strength to make this ascent again. ”
The venerated lady began shuffling her feet, turning slowly and swaying with her eyes closed. She was performing the sacred whirling, the dance that she had demonstrated for Esclarmonde years ago in Lavaur. It was the same ritual that the Magdalene had performed in the Jerusalem Temple, the same ecstatic movement that the first Christians had called the Dance of Jesus.
The Marquessa intertwined arms with her old friend Giraude and joined in the dancing. Esclarmonde clasped hands with Corba, Phillipa, and the girls, and together they surrounded the two grande dames, whirling and fusing the Midnight Sun with the serpent of the mountains, as Pyrenean women had always done in bygone days when great stones were brought together.
Now seekers after knowledge must know exactly how to make out true orthodoxy for themselves by using natural examples; and especially such as we draw from our very selves, for they are surer and are a true means of proof.
- St. Gregory the Sinaite, Discourse on the Transfiguration
XVIII
Pamiers
May 1207
This is a leper colony of the faithless!”
The audience crowded within the great hall of Apamea Castle turned toward the monk who had shouted that incendiary charge.
Jangling from a chain strapped to his loins, Dominic Guzman strode through the rear doors. Halfway to the dais, he fell to his knees in an ecstatic seizure. Those spectators who were perched on the rafters leaned down for a closer glimpse of the infamous Castilian whose neck crawled with the strands of a hair shirt. After nearly a minute of this inert prostration, the monk arose in a whirl of flailing arms, his exerting face pigmented in the shade of breath-deprived aubergine. “Mutilate my limbs! Display my hacked arms before my eyes! I beg to share the agony of Christ!”
Dominic’s entrance had the scattering effect of a hound sticking its nose into a chicken coop. Y
et the animus of the Occitans at this fulmination paled in comparison to that ignited by the arrival of his fellow Catholic disputants. Crowned with a miter, Folques walked down the aisle basking in the indignation. Accompanying him were Bishop Diego de Osma, an ancient Spaniard with a haggard face, and Peter de Castelnau, a sneering firebrand sent by Rome to monitor the proceedings. A column of Cistercian monks trailed the delegation with the disciplined step of a conquering legion.
Roger de Foix erupted from his seat to confront Folques. “I told you never to set foot in this county again.”
“As I predicted,” said Folques. “The cloggers have no stomach to stand against us.” He taunted Roger to reach for his sword, welcoming any pretext to impose harsh measures on the recalcitrant Southern nobles.
Arnaud de Crampagna, the Waldensian mendicant chosen to judge the debate, separated them. “This is a day for the clash of theologies, not arms.”
“If it were my decision, we wouldn’t waste breath arguing with fools,” said Folques. “Be advised, Wolf. The Holy Father has ordered King Philip to cleanse the festering heretic squalor on his borders.”
“That provocation will be met in kind!” warned Roger.
Dominic silenced their squabbling. “I am here to save souls!”
Folques shunted Roger aside and resumed his advance toward the dais. He paused at the front row expecting to find Esclarmonde seated with Phillipa. “I see your consort in sin chose not to attend. No doubt she foresaw the outcome.”
Phillipa refused him the satisfaction of a glance. “Perhaps she detests the company of kidnappers.”
Folques ignored the insult and stepped grandly onto the rostrum. With a sweep of his white-gloved hand, he pointed to the two empty chairs set opposite the Catholic position. “Can they find only two heretics in all Occitania willing to submit to our scrutiny?”
The Catholics laughed and hooted—until Castres emerged from the side door with Esclarmonde at his side.
Folques had removed his mitre and was about to lower to his chair when he froze in mid-descent. “You expect us to contend ... with her?”
“If a minstrel can be transformed into a bishop,” asked Castres, “are not all things possible?”
Dominic circled Esclarmonde, his chains chiming with each step. Suddenly, her face came back to him from their encounter below Montsegur. He turned away from her with sour disdain as if by a feat of concentration he could remove her from God’s creation. “Had Christ meant for the weak of mind to preach the Word, He would have been born a woman.”
“And if He wished both men and women to preach?” asked Esclarmonde. “Would he have entered the world with a beard and a bosom?”
The crowd roared with laughter. Castres chastened her with an admonitory eye for the quip. She had been instructed to limit her participation to whispering scriptural references, but she could not allow such inanities to go unchallenged.
“Our Lord took no females as apostles,” insisted Dominic.
“Mayhaps the writers of your gospels chose not to reveal them,” she said.
Dominic raised his fluttering eyes to the heavens as if channeling the saints. “St. Paul wrote in Timothy 2:12: ‘I permit no woman to teach or have authority over men. She is to keep silent.’”
She countered, “He also wrote in Galatians 3:28: ‘There is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ Apparently he could not make up his mind. One wonders why we women are always accused of inconstancy.”
“Go back to your spinning, widow!” shouted Castelnau.
The Occitan nobles shot to their feet, incensed by the papal legate’s contumely. Bernard de Grenac, a knight from the Count of Toulouse’s court, leapt to the dais and drove Castelnau against the wall. “Speak basely to this lady again and I’ll show you a religion forged of steel!”
Castelnau fought him off. “Your liege stinks of the heresy!”
Esclarmonde had fully expected the Catholics to foment violence. Her Cathars had the most to lose if the disputation were suspended; the Romans would cite such an altercation as evidence that its arguments for orthodoxy could not be countered. She stepped between the two men before blows could be landed and shouted above the din of threats, “Jesus Himself said that to achieve perfect consciousness, male and female must be perceived as one!” Her tactic had the desired effect—all turned on her in astonished silence.
“Nowhere in the gospels is such vile statement to be found!” said Dominic.
“That is because your gospels do not contain the full truth,” she said. “There are other accounts of Christ’s teachings. Suppressed accounts.”
“Polemics fabricated by schismatics,” dismissed Castelnau. “Judgment was rendered on the sins of the Greeks when Constantinople fell.”
“And did your god also order the nuns of that Christian city to be raped and murdered by the Holy Father’s crusaders?”
“The Church sheds no blood!” insisted Folques.
“No, you exhort the butchery with assurances of Heaven’s attainment,” she said. “But you shed no blood.”
Dominic resorted to rapid-fire retorts in an attempt to overwhelm her. “You judge against rightful wars?”
“We judge against all wars.” Her initial nervousness gave way to a rising confidence. All of the years she had spent in secret study of Scriptures now seemed in preparation for this moment. She knew she could stand with these men. “Did not Our Lord command Peter to sheath his sword in the Garden of Sorrows?”
Dominic played on the sentiments of those present who had taken up the Cross. “This woman would allow the infidel to trample the Holy Sepulcher!”
“And where was your god during that star-crossed quest?” she asked. “The Latin Kingdom has been reduced and Jerusalem is lost.”
Folques was so eager to rebut her that he shoved Dominic aside. “If you have writings on these matters, produce them. We will test them against the ordeal of fire. If they leap from the flames unscathed, God’s sign of their righteousness will be confirmed.”
“Cast your own gospels first,” said Esclarmonde. “If what you propose is a true test and they levitate unharmed, we’ll match the demonstration.”
“I’ll stoke the flames!” shouted the Marquessa.
Thrown on the defensive, Dominic turned to the Waldensian and insisted, “The woman must be banned from debating God’s word!”
The arbiter took careful measure of the tinderbox mood in the hall. After a hesitation, he ruled, “The lady seems capable enough. She may participate.”
The assembly clamored its approval, galvanized by the prospect of a bedazzling agon between the famous monk and priestess.
Esclarmonde nodded in gratitude to the Waldensian. She wondered if Giraude had in fact misjudged him. He was the leader of a harassed sect from Lyons who, like her Cathars, sought to spread Holy Writ in the vernacular. She suspected that the Cistercians had chosen the mendicant as arbiter because he did not wish to split from the Church of Rome, only reform it. They no doubt based their choice on the old adage that rival heretics were like cats in a sack: They would claw each other to death before attacking the rat. Yet she began to hold out hope that the Cistercians had been too clever by half.
Folques stood in front of Castres to prevent Esclarmonde from coming to his aid. “Admit that you deny the stain of original sin.”
“Nowhere in your own canon is the responsibility— ”
Dominic cut off the Cathar bishop’s attempt to respond. “In Genesis! Adam was seduced by Eve!”
Castres’s inchoate thought splintered into lost fragments. He struggled to regain his faltering focus, having never confronted the sharp-elbowed style polemics in which disputants teamed to hurl ripostes. He stammered in an effort to counter the Castilian who spit his points like a hissing snake.
Esclarmonde led her bishop to his seat and answered for him. “The Old Testament is the chronicle of the Demiurge. We do not recognize the legitimacy of the work or the archon that aut
hored it.”
Dominic blinked rapidly as if flipping scriptural pages across his mind’s eye. “The dualist rears her dragon’s head! A god who is not unique is not god.”
Esclarmonde had trained for the disputation by walking alone in the woods and projecting her voice to the birds, mimicking the dramaturgical elocution of the troubadours who drew their verses from deep within the viscera. She now put that practice to the test. “A god who is all-powerful cannot abide suffering and still be good.”
Dominic had never heard a woman speak with such authority on theological matters. “A righteous God is Yahweh!”
“And jealous god, by His own admission,” she said. “Is He not also all-powerful and all-knowing?”
“He is! And He sees your evil ways this day!”
Folques edged up on his chair to warn the Castilian against traveling down that slippery slope. “What Brother Dominic means—”
Esclarmonde pressed the point home before Dominic could be saved. “So, if God is both all-knowing and jealous, there must be other gods. Otherwise, He would have no reason to be jealous, for he could not be jealous of an inferior being. There is another god. The God of Light. The God who opposes Yahweh of the Pharisees.”
Folques glared at Dominic with disgust. The reckless Castilian had fallen for the same trap that snared him years ago in the Foix court of love. He had replayed that fateful exchange a thousand times. Had he kept silent that day, he and Esclarmonde might still be lovers. Now the Lord had given him a second chance. He walked across the dais to demand that the feeble Castres answer his question. “If there are two gods, as this woman claims, what proof is there that yours is not the God of Darkness masquerading as the beneficent deity?”
Castres looked to Esclarmonde for assistance. She leaned to whisper a suggested answer, but Folques quashed her attempt, insisting, “You must speak directly to the assembly! Those are the rules!”
Caressing her bishop’s hand, Esclarmonde spoke this time in such a subdued voice that the Catholics were required to tilt closer. “I was suggesting to him that we might benefit from examining how Yahweh treated His people. But I must confess that I am as perplexed by your wishes as I am of your Church’s commandments. First, you order me to remain silent. Now you instruct me to speak louder so that all might hear.”