The Templars and the Shroud of Christ

by Barbara Frale

  Eusebius of Caesarea, the very learned bishop who was Constantine the Great’s spiritual adviser, inserted the episode in his Church History, but with no mention of any image. In fact, this may well be due to Eusebius’ own intervention, selecting from tradition only what he appreciated, and eliminating (or simply ignoring) what struck him as less worth sharing. We know that the bishop of Caesarea was strongly opposed to image-worship. There is a famous letter of his to Empress Constantia, who had heard that some Christian groups owned the true portrait of Jesus of Nazareth and asked the bishop to use his influence to let her have a copy. His answer was an undiplomatic, unmitigated reproof:

  And yet if thou now declarest that thou askest me not for the image of the human form turned to God, but the icon of His mortal flesh, just as it was before His Transfiguration, then I answer: knowest thou not the passage where God commands that no image should be done of anything up in the heavens or down on earth?[45]

  Such an attitude may strike us as over-cerebral, indeed unpleasant; but we must try to put ourselves in those people’s shoes and watch carefully the realities of their time. Eusebius was certainly no unbeliever, but both a great theologian and most devout person: his basic concern was to ward off the danger of idolatry, a risk which Christians felt to be most serious and ever lurking. In the Roman Empire it was a widespread custom to make realistic portraits of the dearly departed, and the tablets found in the necropolis of Fayyum in Egypt show that they worked hard to make these portraits as close to the original as possible; many are so accurate that they seem like photographs. The monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai preserves a couple of superb icons from the age of Emperor Justinian (527-565) representing Jesus and Saint Peter, which clearly come from this very tradition of Roman imperial-age portrait. Even a layman can tell that they are drawn from realistic portraits: the icon of Peter bears on top three round frames which hold the portraits of Saint John (shown as a young man of about 15), then Jesus and Mary, whose facial features are strikingly similar.[46] From the earliest days, Christians used to keep portraits of Jesus, and also of Peter and Paul, in their homes, but Eusebius did not approve: for many Christians were freshly converted from paganism on account of Constantine’s religious policy, and tended to worship these images no differently from the pagan idols they had worshipped until shortly before then. Christianity required a total change of mentality, of the way to look at the world, and that could hardly be done in a few months. Meanwhile, as long as the neophytes had not developed a wholly Christian conscience, it was wiser to break altogether away with what had been part of their old pagan cult. Following this reasoned judgment, Eusebius preferred not to have realistic figures of Christ at all, only ideal and symbolic figurations. Maybe for the same reason, Christian art from centuries I-IV preferred not to portray Jesus, but rather represent him by symbols (the fish, the anchor), by particular figures that hearkened back to the parables (the Good Shepherd), or again as a young god like Apollo, impersonally and perfectly beautiful, with a beauty that has nothing to do with the portraiture of an individual. [47]

  Around the year 400, the legend of Abgar reappeared in a new version, inside an unknown author’s text called The Doctrine of Addai: besides writing a letter to Jesus, according to this tale, King Abgar had sent him a painter who was able to make a very faithful portrait, “picked out in marvellous colours”; then, about a hundred years later, Armenia’s historian Moses of Korene spoke of the mandylion as of an image painted on a silk curtain. In the course of the sixth century, and particularly when Edessa suffered a Persian conquest, people began to speak of the mandylion no longer as of a painter’s portrait, but as of an acheropita, an image made not by human hands but by miracle; according to the Byzantine historian Evagrius, who lived in that period, the people of Edessa thought it a relic of immense power and used it in certain rituals thanks to which they had been saved from the enemies.[48]

  It was only with the expedition of General John Curcuas under Romanus I in the year 943, and the transfer of the image to Constantinople, that the mandylion’s tradition started to be filled with references to the Passion of Christ. These references were very clear, yet there was a clear attempt to gloss over them in embarrassment: clearly they had found out that the image of Jesus on cloth was the image of a dead Jesus, a detail of no small importance which tradition had left unmentioned. Gregory the Referendarius and Curcuas the general had gone to Edessa with an army to bring back to their homeland a truthful picture of Jesus of immense fame; what they surely expected was an effigy of “Christ Pantocrator”, the mighty Lord of the Universe, smiling and bless the faithful from the shining gold of the mosaics on the wall of great churches: an image on whose pattern the Emperor of Constantinople had been represented since the days of Justinian, and in a way since Constantine had been celebrated as Christ’s Vicar on Earth and equal to the Apostles.[49] Gregory the Referendarius and John Curcuas expected to see the portrait of a divinely handsome face, a portrait of a living Jesus capable of developing the most profound sense of majesty, such as pertains only to the Lord of the World and his earthly follower, the Emperor. Instead they were faced with the frightful imprint of a dead man, the corpse of a man killed by the cross, with his whole body tormented with wounds. There was blood on the mandylion: not a few drops here and there, but a vast flood, as visible as what can come out of a human chest torn open. Instead of the King of Kings, they met in Edessa the Man of Sorrows. Nothing could have been further from the glory of the Byzantine Emperor than that pitiful view, almost the very symbol of mankind defeated by suffering and by death. And yet the mandylion had an ineffable quality the sources don’t describe for us, and that something gave the two officials the nerve to appear before the Emperor with an object so radically different from anything that had been expected. The documents telling of its arrival contain curious details, hard at first to understand: the children of the Emperor Romanus look at the relic but cannot distinguish the details, while his son-in-law Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who was to inherit the throne, immediately sees every detail and feels an immense emotion. What does that mean? When compared with the Shroud of Turin, as Ian Wilson wishes, this account seems very credible, because it is well known that the image of the Shroud has the curious optical property already mentioned: it is visible only if one stands at least two metres from it, but swiftly vanishes when one tries to get closer. It is my own personal view that there is something more to be read there: that is, that Constantine VII can see the image because he can accept it as it is: for a special reason, unlike so many of his contemporaries before him, he can appreciate a portrait of Christ with the unmistakable signs of suffering and death. Discovering the mandylion’s “true identity” was surely a shock, and also raised the delicate issue of explaining and justifying how tradition seemed to have kept it hidden behind the notion of a simple portrait; nonetheless Gregory the Referendarius certified it as authentic, for he was sure that the Emperor would have welcomed it with great satisfaction, even after he had discovered the incredible news. Romanus I had had a long hard struggle against Paulicians and other heretical groups that sprang up here and there throughout the Empire and exploited religious ideas to challenge the imperial authority. Paulicians and other sects of the same kind derived their beliefs from the ancient Gnostic heresy that had spread great confusion in the first centuries of the Christian era, especially among eastern churches. Though divided into separate groups that followed different Gospels, Gnostics had in common one strong belief: Jesus had not really been a man of flesh and bone, but a pure spirit, a kind of angel who appeared on earth who did not possess a human body but only a human appearance. The Christ was both a symbol and a celestial messenger who had become manifest among men to teach them how to reach the knowledge of God (in Greek, gnòsis); and once his mission had been accomplished, he had returned to his original dimension. According to the Gnostics, the Christ had never been incarnated, had never suffered Passion, had never died,
and of course, he had never been resurrected.[50] The Emperor Romanus I had understood that a religious struggle could not only be fought by armed power, but that a confrontation on the level of ideas was also necessary. Even the famous mandylion of tradition could have helped refute the heretics, since it was a realistic portrait of the face of that Christ of whom they said that he had never had a real human body; this weird, disquieting object from Edessa also showed him in the form of a dreadfully human nature, a stunning and agonized realism. Owning his funeral shroud with all the marks of the Passion, to the point of being soaked with the flow of blood from his ribs, meant proving to the whole world that the heretics preached a falsehood.

  Gregory the Referendarius was a regular at Romanus’ court because of his diplomatic duties, and he certainly knew the mind and attitudes of the whole imperial family. He was a diplomatist and an expert in politics; he judged that the relic could also be a most powerful weapon in the ideological struggle against the proliferating heresies, and at least a few of Romanus I’s relatives was sure to appreciate it. It was a smart decision: within a few months, young Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus rose to the Imperial throne of Byzantium and made the mandylion the most worshipped and celebrated object in the whole Empire.

  It is in fact during this man’s very long reign that Byzantine religious thinking experienced a remarkable development, which placed to the forefront in both liturgy and theology the figure of the suffering Christ, the dead body tormented by the Passion, whereas before it had extolled practically only the risen one, shining with glory. They also introduced a new piece of liturgical apparel called epitàphios, a cloth bearing the embroidered or painted image of Christ in the Sepulchre before the Resurrection, with its hands joined over the pubis just as they are seen in the Shroud of Turin.[51] It is very difficult, perhaps even historically impossible, that this change should be independent from what they had just discovered about the nature of the mandylion. What could be seen on the cloth once unfolded impressed contemporaries so strongly as to stimulate theological research towards hitherto unexplored directions, so powerful as to change the religious sensitivities of a world. Byzantium rediscovered the Crucifix as the image of a man annihilated by the violence of other men, naked, bloodied, his head fallen down on a no longer breathing chest. For centuries they had represented him with the open eyes of a living man and with a serene face showing no hint of pain, often even richly dressed in purple and wearing a golden diadem instead of a crown of thorns. For nearly a thousand years the faithful had worshipped the illogical image of an emperor in sumptuous dress, finding himself near the cross almost by chance, majestic and impossible; in the end, even without having to drift into heresy, the idea that the Chosen of God could be executed like a common criminal had trouble being accepted. Now, however, the theologians looked to a new dimension of the faith, and mystics found themselves weeping at the wounds of Jesus.[52]

  Four times double

  Once this new reality with its valuable political aspects was accepted, the problem remained not to make gaping breaks with tradition: the ancient tale of the mandylion could hardly be discarded and on the other hand there was no desire to renounce what had just been newly discovered. In 944 an anonymous intellectual at the court of Constantine VII, or possibly even the Emperor himself, who was a talented writer, wrote a new version of the legend of Abgar. The ancient tale was preserved, but the miraculous formation of the icon was now set exactly during the Passion: no wonder, then, if the linen cloth of the mandylion showed thick drops of blood. The new version had a very sick Abgar resolving to send to Jesus a messenger of his, one Ananias, who also happened to be a painter; Jesus cannot go to Edessa because his mission in Jerusalem is coming close to its fulfilment, so he decides to let Ananias paint his portrait for the King to have. Ananias tries desperately to render his features and fails, because that Face seemed to change mysteriously in shape; then Jesus, touched and wishing to help the ailing King, takes a handkerchief and, on his way to Golgotha, rubs it over his face, so that his features remain miraculously impressed. An interesting and possibly not casual coincidence: a magnificent Byzantine miniature from the 14th century represents the arrival of the mandylion in Constantinople, and the Emperor Constantine VII receives from Gregory the Referendarius, not a simple towel, but a very long cloth where can be seen the image of the Holy Face.

  The new version of the legend of Abgar sought to reconcile as much as possible the discrepancies between the tangible form of the mandylion, bearing the imprint of a man with his chest torn by a spear-blow, and the older tradition, which made of it only a realistic portrait for which Jesus had sat while alive.[53] The result is naïve and hardly believable: Jesus is staggering towards Golgotha, surrounded by mocking soldiers who will not let anyone near him, and those are the conditions in which he would have a towel handed to him to be able to leave his portrait to the King’s envoy. At that time the image was supposed to have formed by miracle; but the spear-thrust that can be seen on the mandylion was only inflicted later, after Jesus had died on the Cross. That it was judged acceptable to manipulate the story to this extent surely has an important historical significance. What meaning does this curious contradiction have?

  Ian Wilson has noticed that as early as the Doctrine of Addai, the mandylion was described by a strange adjective, tetràdiplon, that is to say “folded double four times”. It is an adjective that cannot possibly make sense if the mandylion had really been a piece of linen the size of a towel or of a handkerchief: once that had been folded eight times, what would be visible would be smaller than a school notebook, and could not allow anyone to see anything. When folded in eight parts, as the ancient sources describe the mandylion, the Shroud of Turin takes exactly the appearance of a towel, and all that can be seen is the imprint of the face alone. Linen, if kept long enough folded in the same way, will keep its imprint in the shape of slight deformations that can be seen very well by a grazing, sideways light source: the Shroud keeps the marks of these ancient foldings, and among them there is precisely an eightfold one which, once completed, shows only the face just as it appears in ancient reproductions of the mandylion.[54]

  Therefore, Ian Wilson feels that in Edessa the cloth was kept in an eightfold form and concealed inside a wooden case covered by a textile covering which bore on its front an opening through which the head alone could be seen. It was a reliquary, but at the same time also a kind of mask designed to show only the most indispensable features, and above all conceal the most striking bloodstains, which it left inside. We are allowed to have a fairly clear idea of the form of this case, which bore decorations similar to those of royal clothes in ancient Turkey: according to Ian Wilson, it was Abgar V himself, or else one of his descendants, who prepared this purpose-made reliquary to disguise the real nature of the object and make it seem a towel.[55]

  This trick was probably thought up because the Edessa region was rife with Monophysite ideas, and tended to see Jesus as a being of wholly and only divine nature: an image showing him as a corpse riddled with wounds would have seemed disgraceful, and risked even being destroyed. One of the finest representations of the mandylion can be found in the manuscript Rossiano Greco 251 of the Vatican Apostolic Library, and presents it curiously twice over in a peculiar manner, as if it were the negative imprint of a positive real object. This expensive Codex was made in Constantinople in the 12th century, and at that time the theology of icons had triumphed long since, even so, a vandal’s hand has ripped into the magnificent Byzantine miniature. This tells us much about the long survival of a certain kind of bitter hostility against the cult of images.

  Once it had been triumphantly placed as the central and most precious part of the imperial collection of relics, the mandylion was not touched again even by the Emperor himself, and its obstension only took place rarely and in special circumstances. The sanctuary of Pharos chapel was inviolate, its security awe-inspiring. Experience taught that it ha
d to be defended both from the greed of potential thieves and from the fanaticism of believers. After Helena, the mother of Constantine, had rediscovered the pieces of the True Cross in Jerusalem, these relics used to be freely exhibited to the faithful, who could touch and kiss them without protection; but it was soon realised that this freedom needed limitation, since a pilgrim pretending to kiss the Cross managed to bite off a bit of wood. Sometimes, during ceremonies of particular solemnity, the Emperor could grant some illustrious guest, ambassador or head of State, the supreme honour of a visit to the chapel of Pharos; a privilege certainly granted in 1171 to Amaury, the King of Jerusalem, when he visited the court of Emperor Manuel I Komnenos, according to the chronicle of William of Tyre, while an Arab writer called Abu Nasr Yahya had been able to see the mandylion exhibited in Hagia Sophia during a solemn procession in 1058.[56]

  The original container made in Edessa was probably preserved, to judge by the many artistic reproductions, but it is possible that at some point the Emperors may have chosen to have an identical copy of the Shroud’s face to place in this ancient reliquary, so as to be able to exhibit the Shroud wholly open, for the purpose of showing the whole picture of the body; in fact, many ancient authors describe a shroud in Constantinople’s imperial collection that looks much like that of Turin, and speak of it and of the mandylion as of two different objects. This however might have a very simple explanation. According to some Byzantine sources, the usual place for the mandylion was the imperial chapel at Pharos, where it was kept together with another famous relic: the keramion, that is the tile which, in the city of Edessa, closed the hideout where the miraculous icon of Jesus had been kept for a long time. According to tradition, the image of Christ’s face had been miraculously impressed on the tile’s terracotta, so the keramion had also been taken to Constantinople to be exhibited to the veneration of the faithful; placed one next to the other, the two relics formed an impressive whole that focused minds on the Passion. But the Flemish crusader Robert de Clari, the last witness who ever saw the shroud before the great looting, describes a peculiar ceremony of obstension: