The Templars and the Shroud of Christ

by Barbara Frale

  But probably the most passionate defender of image worship was the monk John of Damascus (about 650 -749 AD), one of the most brilliant minds in 2,000 years of Christian history. He had lived in Syria when it was ruled by Muslim Arabs, and paradoxically this had left him free to express his religious views with much greater freedom than his brother monks living under the power of Constantinople: for the Arabs forced Christians to pay a special tax, after which they were free to follow their own cult without their rulers meddling in dogmatic issues. John’s Treatise on Images described these practices of devotion with great theological subtlety and a most agile, even poetic language: in a word, he had been able to reflect the warm love borne by the common people to the most important representations of Christ, of the Virgin, and of the saints. John of Damascus started from a very simple truth, which everyone could understand: to the Christian believer, Jesus was also a terrestrial, concrete and material reality. In his life, he had walked through the roads of Palestine, and his feet had left their prints in that sandy land; after his death and resurrection, through the power of the Spirit, Christ went on living and acting in the lives of his faithful, as he had promised in the Gospel of Matthew: “Behold, I am with you all days, until the ending of the world”.[32]

  The portrait of Jesus preserved by tradition symbolises and reminds the Christian of this physical, daily and terrestrial presence, and that contact is the greatest comfort in the difficulties of life. This opportunity of a personal relationship could not be taken from the people in the name of a very abstract piece of reasoning. It was not right; besides, that strange view of faith promoted by certain ultra-refined thinkers was not even close to the original dictates of the Gospels, which had clearly stated that even after his resurrection, Jesus had a concrete and tangible body that could be seen and touched. According to John of Damascus, Jesus is a “physical icon” of the Father (èikon physikè), a living image full of Holy Spirit and capable of bringing man closer to God by purifying his soul and thoughts. [33]

  “Et habitavit in nobis”

  In the early eighth century, the theological line that extolled the spiritual value of icons found a strenuous supporter in the monk Theodore, abbot of the monastery of Studion in Constantinople, one of the most splendid centres of Byzantine culture. Theodore the Studite was able to fight both intellectually and politically to reassert the need to worship images: if man had been created in the image of God, then surely there was something divine in the art of making sacred images. With amazing insight, he was able to underline a perennially valid, timeless fact: forbidding the cult of images can be very dangerous, for it lays the groundwork for the growth of heresies. Rejecting images in the name of a religion made only of ideas, of mental concepts, prevents contact between the faithful and the human aspect of Jesus: this leaves the faithful exposed to the ever-lurking danger of taking Jesus Christ as nothing but a spiritual entity, a symbol of the possible contact between man and God. Jesus, though, was also a concrete flesh-and-bones person; it was nothing but his human suffering that have brought about the redemption of others: “As a perfect Man, Christ not only can but must be represented and worshipped in images; deny this, and the whole economy of salvation in Christ is virtually destroyed”. [34]

  Theodore’s thought triumphed in the great Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea of 787. At the centre of debate was placed, exactly, the mandylion, the most ancient and venerated image of Christ. The term used to describe it is “print” (charactèr), the same used for coining money: the word describes the negative image formed thanks to the contact of an object. The Council of Nicaea was also highly concerned with the precise regulation of the role of images in the life of the Church, so that their cult should not issue in the end in the sin of idolatry: it specified that it was forbidden to worship them, for worship belongs exclusively to God, but it recommended a carefully balanced honouring. It insisted that God is certainly not a matter for images: faith is born from Scripture, that is the Word of God, and nobody must ever feel at ease with his conscience for the fact alone of being devoted to a sacred image, whichever it is. Sacred representations have essentially an educational function, useful to make dogmas somehow accessible to the majority of the faithful with insufficient cultural resources; furthermore, they belong to the Christian tradition, which is itself venerable and a carrier of truth. For all these reasons, there was a detailed settlement of the kind of liturgy to be followed when holy icons were venerated, the same used for relics: it was based on kissing, lighting lamps and proskìnesis, kneeling with one’s forehead to the ground, still in use today among Muslims. That was how the Christians of the Holy Land venerated the relic of the true Cross, and the same did the Templars with their “idol”, prostrating themselves with their faces to the ground: certainly, in 14th century Europe this practice must have left the curious astonished.[35]

  The achievement of the Council of Nicaea was the theology of the icon, which is still in place and widely popular to this day: an icon is not merely a portrait of Jesus or of other characters in sacred history, but rather a place of the Spirit, a sanctuary in itself, approaching which the faithful step with one foot in the dimension of the divine. Contemplation of the icon is communication with God. Only a few people are allowed to paint icons, and they must follow a very ancient ritual governed by cast iron rules, because the result must be faithful to traditional models. Everything begins with a period of fasting and spiritual purification that the painter is obliged to undergo before he so much as starts the work, and it ends with the addition of the writings: they can only be done by using a liturgical language. The writing seals the truth of the portrait to its original and declares that what can be seen with human eyes is verily and indeed present, and takes part in the heavenly liturgy. Of course these captions that appear on icons are subject to absolutely fixed rules established by Church doctrine. Some cannot be touched: no painter was allowed to alter them even with the consent of a bishop or of a patriarch, because they had been studied to render synthetically certain unarguable dogmas of religion. The first and probably the most ancient is the one shortened as IC-XC, which refers to the image of Jesus and is formed by the first and last letters of the Greek words IHCOYC XPICTOC, “Jesus Christ”. It appears in icons as early as the ninth century, and contains in itself a whole confession of faith – that Jesus was the Son of God, the Messiah (in Greek, exactly, christòs) awaited for centuries by the people of Israel, that was the first, essential, untouchable truth of Christianity, the basis itself on which the Church had been built.[36] Possibly the second most ancient and widespread motto was the one that accompanied the image of Mary, MP-TY: it stood for MHTHP TEOY, “Mother of God”, and it was also obviously the codification in a simple form of a dogma. It came from the Council of Ephesus of 431, in whose sessions had raged a furious debate exactly because this title, born among the ordinary people and used from time out of mind, had been placed in doubt. Bishop Nestorius, who held the important office of Patriarch of Constantinople, wanted to change Mary’s title from theotòkos (“mother of God”) to christotòkos, that is “mother of Christ”: for in his view the Virgin had given birth to the human nature of Jesus, but it could not be possible that a young woman, herself a created thing, could possibly give birth to the divine nature of Jesus, that is to the Logos, that was immensely superior to her.

  Nestorius’ proposal did not at all go down well with theologians such as St. Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, because in practice it amounted to breaking in two parts – one weaker and the other perfect – the unity of the Person of Jesus Christ. Even less did it please the commons: tradition had it that it was just to Ephesus that the Apostle John had taken Mary, entrusted by Jesus on the cross to his care. The people were long used to honouring her as Mother of God: all those abstruse reasonings they neither understood nor wanted to understand. The proposal to downgrade the Virgin from “Mother of God” to “Mother of Christ” was rejected under a hail of excommunic
ations, and the city was lit up as if for a festival. The bishops who had defended the traditional title of theotòkos were escorted to their homes by a solemn procession with torches and incense smoke, as if they were themselves icons of saints.[37]

  The expression Jesus Christ (in Greek, Ièsus Christòs) on the other hand was never challenged, because it was too ancient, too vital, and too central. The Gospels took it back to the time itself of Jesus’ preaching: one day the Nazarene had asked his disciples: “Who do people say I am?” Peter had eventually answered: “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.” That had been the first Christian profession of faith, synthetic but complete. In the circle of the first Christians, what today’s exegetes and theologians call the “post-Paschal Church”, already a very short time before the death and the events that followed, the two words Jesus (a very widespread man’s name) and Christ (a sacred adjective) had become indissoluble, one and the same.[38]

  In March of 843, the empress Theodora, widowed from a husband who had once more persecuted the defenders of images, made a wholly opposite choice and established a solemn ceremony, the Feast of Orthodoxy, meant to remember for ever the final victory of the holy icons.[39] And in the year 943, first centenary of the Feast, the emperor Romanus I decided to solemnise that anniversary by taking into the capital city of the empire the most famous and venerated of all images of Christ, the one kept in Edessa; he therefore entrusted the recovery mission to the best of his generals, John Curcuas. The town was then held by the Arabs, and Curcuas was forced to negotiate the handover of the mandylion. In exchange for this single object, the Byzantine emperor set free 200 high-ranking Muslim prisoners, paid 12,000 gold crowns, and furthermore gave the city a guarantee of perpetual immunity. After long examinations – for the Arabs had tried to stick the general with a fake – the famous image was taken into Constantinople on 15 August, the day of the Dormition of Mary, in a memorable procession, and placed in the church of the Blachernae, dedicated to the Virgin. The following day it was placed on an imperial ship on which it sailed around the city, being finally placed in the imperial chapel of Pharos. This inaccessible sanctuary was a colossal reliquary, where the emperors had been collecting for centuries all the most precious relics of the lives of Jesus, of the Virgin and of the saints. Several mediaeval visitors who had been allowed in, and had been able to contemplate the collection, stated that the collected objects included all the relics of the Passion, from the bread consecrated in the Last Supper to the sponge with which the soldiers had offered Jesus vinegar, apart from a number of other important memories; the long result of a centuries-old campaign of tooth-comb searches that had started as early as Helena, mother of Constantine.[40] This patient, continuously and wildly expensive operation is easily explained: since at a certain point in history contact with the Holy Land had become difficult, it was necessary to keep in any situation a physical and concrete relationship with the testimonies of Christ’s life. Within barely four years (636-640 AD) the Arabs, led by Caliph Omar tore from the emperors of Byzantium most of Lesser Asia, including the region of Syria and Palestine; from that moment on, visits to the Holy Sepulchre and to the other Holy Places only became possible under special diplomatic agreements between the court of Constantinople and their new masters, and at any rate it was impossible to stop the basilica of Anastasis itself, where the Sepulchre was, from being utterly devastated. So they studied ways to transfer everything from the life of Jesus that could possibly be moved away, so as to create a new Jerusalem on the Bosporus, with all the fundamental proofs. In 1201 the imperial guardian of relics, Nicholas Mesarites, had to defend the great Byzantine sanctuary from the danger of looting when a palace revolution was trying to seize power; he managed to calm the spirits of rebels because he told them that that chapel was an utterly sacred place, a new Holy Land to honour and respect beyond any political issue:

  This temple, this place, is a new Sinai; it is Bethlehem, Jordan, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethany, Galilee, Tiberias; it is the basin, the Supper, Mount Tabor, the praetorius of Pilate, the Place of the Skull called in Hebrew Golgotha. Here Christ was born, here was He baptized, here did He walk on water and here He has walked on the land, He made wonderful miracles and lowered Himself to washing feet [...] Here He was crucified, and those who have eyes can see the rest for His feet. Here he was also buried, and the rolled stone by his grave bears witness to it to this day. Here he rose again, and the shroud with the grave-linens prove it to us. [41]

  After being transferred to the capital, the mandylion remained in Constantinople and soon became the symbol itself of the city, a kind of supreme protector that featured even on the army’s standards; the Byzantine religious mind identified it with the Eucharist; that is with the Body of Christ, and reproduced it in countless copies. From then on, the Byzantine world developed a great passion for the physical features of Jesus: it was a bit like reacting against centuries of a culture that had for so many different reasons ignored if not even refused it. Through the study of relics they had worked out how tall he was: outside the Hagia Sophia cathedral they had erected a life-size reproduction of the Cross, called “Cross of the measure” (crux mensuralis), which allowed everyone to envisage him as he was.[42]

  The imperial collection at Pharos filled with testimonies of every kind, including some (like the nappies of Baby Jesus or the milk of the Virgin) that make us smile today; but this must not make us forget the huge historical value of their presence. It had certainly not been ignorant peasants who had wanted them there and made them precious, but the greatest intellectuals of their times. There was something like a sense of deep emotion in rediscovering this human dimension of Jesus, something that the Eastern Christian world had neglected for centuries. After all, the absolute novelty of Christianity was that God had come to walk among ordinary people: the Greek text of the gospel of John says literally: “the Word was made flesh, and pitched his tent among us”.[43] To contemplate Baby Jesus’ nappies was to be reminded that Christ had been a new-born baby like everyone else, and that Mary, whom the Byzantines called the Mother of God, had looked lovingly after him just as other mothers did with their children. Some objects show that God looks after man from close by, and is within his reach. And those of the Passion also had another thing to say: there is surely something of the divine in the sick, the dying the person crushed by suffering – in the faces of all those whose faces, in the adversities of life, can be superimposed on that unrecognisable face of Christ.

  The transfer of the mandylion to the capital was a memorable event, during which a considerable amount of writings was produced. The study of all these sources proves of special interest: for the description of the mandylion and of its history, as narrated in the days of Constantine VII, does not quite agree with what we know from the oldest sources. Several different things appear in it: details that seem custom made to “update” the legend in the light of a new and disconcerting truth.

  Of flesh and blood

  In 1997, the Roman historian Gino Zaninotto noticed that inside a 10th century Greek manuscript of the Vatican Apostolic Library there was preserved a solemn speech written by Gregory the Referendarius, the archdeacon of the cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople who looked after the relationship between the Emperor and the Patriarch. Gregory went himself to Edessa in John Curcuas’ mission to recover the mandylion in 944 and carefully investigated the city archives looking for the ancient documents telling the story of the image; he then wrote this homily, in which he celebrated the relic’s importance and gave a synthetic account of its history. The Referendarius’ account was thus far unpublished, one of many unknown treasures in the Pontiffs’ library, and it was published by Byzantine scholar André-Marie Dubarle in the specialist periodical Révue des Études Byzantines.[44]

  According to archdeacon Gregory, the image is in fact an imprint, and is beautified by the drops of blood that fell from Christ’s wounded side: precedent tradition usuall
y described the mandylion as a small piece of linen, as large as a hand-towel, as the name itself implies, which bore the only imprint in existence of the face of Jesus. But the homily of codex Vaticanus Graecus 511 describes it as an imprint showing the chest with the mark of the spear and the flow of blood that had issued from that wound, that is, there was an image of the body at least from the waist up. According to the most ancient tradition, the mandylion had nothing to do with the death of Christ: it was simply his portrait when alive. The first records of this legend spoke of an exchange of letters between Jesus and Abgar King of Edessa, identified as Abgar V the Black; the sovereign had heard stories of Jesus’ great fame as healer, he knew that he was being sought to be killed, and so had a messenger to offer him a safe refuge in his city.