In the writing that Christian tradition handed down as the Second Epistle of Peter, the old fisherman warned against the dangers that could arise when the claim was made to interpret the Gospels in too free and personal a manner. Against all personal constructs in the matter of Jesus, Peter raised a simple and immediate truth, that is, what he had seen:
For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty [...]. knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of private interpretation.[42]
Eighty years after his death, things had gone far beyond, and many independent churches had spread, to which the human part of Jesus, the body, was not just secondary but negative, to be discarded. They tended to feel that it was impossible that the Spirit of God, of whom the celestial Christ had been forged, could remain caged in a human body that fell sick and died; so Christian thinking was tending to suppose that the Spirit had at some point taken possession of this mortal detritus in order purely to communicate with human beings, teach them the way of knowledge, only to then rid himself as soon as possible of this embarrassing physical carrier, before it was undone by crucifixion. These churches called themselves Gnostic, from the Greek word gnosis, knowledge, because according to their religious views, the salvation of man depended not from Jesus’ sacrifice, which had never really taken place, but from his preaching alone, thanks to which men came to the knowledge of God. Docetic and Gnostic currents would strongly separate the earthly Jesus from the heavenly Christ, as if they were two separate and irreconcilable entities. The mortal Jesus, the Jesus of Nazareth, was an empty and irrelevant container of no importance, the temporary abode of the spiritual Christ; to some sects, he was just another man, to others not even a man of flesh and bone, but some sort of ectoplasm. To both, at any rate, the Resurrection had never happened, because the heavenly Christ could neither suffer nor die; there had been no sacrifice to redeem mankind, and the Eucharist was a meaningless ritual and so should not be celebrated. God had sent this celestial Messenger of his among men under the false appearance of a mortal man, of a commonplace individual, so that he could preach to mankind and so redeem it from their false opinions; the physical baggage of the Messenger was nothing but a kind of visual delusion needed so that people could see him, but of no real consistency. Certain extremist Gnostic groups went as far as to say that it had actually been Simon of Cyrene who had been crucified: for at the right moment God had as though dazzled the soldiers, to force them to get the wrong man.[43]
Apart from these exaggerations, the Gnostic movement had its own fascinating theology which exalted the spiritual greatness of the Christ and celebrated the way in which the human soul, through his mediation, carried out a great path of ascesis till it came to contemplate the face of God. From the end of the first century till the age of Constantine, even Catholic Christianity was more than once attracted by this intellectual and spiritual vision of Jesus, which underplayed the value of his human nature and interpreted every bit of the gospels allegorically. Several representatives of these views moved constantly on the edge of orthodoxy, such as the theologian Valentinus, who had lived in Rome during the reign of Hadrian, of whom we are left a fragment of great religious poetry:
When the Father, the sole good being, tuns to it his glance, the heart is sanctified and shines with light; and so he is made blessed who has such a heart, for he will see God.[44]
Already from the end of the first century, Christians felt this kind of idea very keenly, and their attraction was reinforced by the fact that Gnostics lived exemplary ascetic lives. Valentinus had a special intuition, and he seemed to somehow have set into motion that theological debate which was later to ripen into the dogma of the Trinity. The beauty of his religious thought, joined as it was with an overwhelming power of eloquence, had let much of the clergy of Rome to propose him as a future Pope; something, however, had gone wrong, and in the another candidate, of no great theological gift, but who had given an impressive witness of faith in his daily life, had been elected instead. The reasons for this choice must be found in a peculiarity of Gnostic thought already denounced by St. Ignatius of Antioch, who had a major role in the Christian community in the reign of Trajan (98-117 AD): Gnostics neglect to help the poor, the sick, widows and orphans. That was the inevitable result of their theological apparatus: if flesh is nothing but sin and corruption, why cure the sick? If life is nothing but incarceration and exile, why help the poor live longer? In short, their exaggerated ascetic ideal made Gnostics pretty nearly inhuman. Jesus, on the other hand, had been very clear: following his path meant helping anyone who needed help, whatever the cost. The primitive Church had been, before it had been anything else, a group of religious volunteers made up of people who held their goods in common to feed the poor and care for the sick; there was no doubt that this was the will of Jesus, since this happened when he was still with the Apostles and had guided them. These sects interpreted the message of Christ as though it were pretty much a school of philosophy, and ignored charity to the needy. Even if they were pure of any stain, Gnostics ended up betraying the essence of Christianity.[45]
Disappointment at missing the Papacy caused Valentinus the theologian to develop a violent resentment against the Roman clergy; it seems that he left the capital for the East, and that he started to write works widely different from what he had previously published, expounding aggressively Gnostic theories against the human body of Christ, which he had perhaps already worked out without ever making them public before. Peter’s vision, which had handed down a cult of Jesus as the Christ announced by the prophets and still a man of flesh and bone, ended up prevailing, and Gnostic doctrines were refuted; Gnosis however did not altogether vanish, for its roots were deep both in the East and in the West. Modern historians have trouble seeing the differences between one sect and another, because notices are few and as often as not they come from contemporary Christian intellectuals, who had it in for those doctrines because of the confusion they sowed among the public: some leaders of major Gnostic schools had circulated heavily-edited versions of the gospels, or even gospels of their own writing and devising. The text of John, peculiarly full as it is of symbolic expressions, was their favourite target.[46]
There were great differences between one Gnostic school and another, although in the end they all went back to a common idea that basically denied the humanity of Christ. To the writers of the early Church, Gnosticism was like the hundred-headed hydra, a monster with ancient roots and yet everlastingly capable of turning up again with a new face.[47]
Survivals
Constantine had decided to legalise the Christian cult both out of personal sympathy and out of political calculation, but obviously he wished for a united and peaceful church, a solid organism that could serve his projects; he therefore outlawed dissident sects. Gnosis survived; especially in north Africa and some areas of the Middle East, it came back into favour in the time of the Manichees, one of whose members, in his youth, had been none other than St. Augustine of Hippo. During the Byzantine age, enclaves survived in various patches of the Empire’s vast hinterlands; then the current picked up strength again inside the larger iconoclast movement, that intended to destroy icons because they bore the human image of Christ and it wished instead to worship only the gospels, which bore his word. In the centuries VIII and IX, several Byzantine emperors found themselves having to fight the Paulicians, so called because they followed the Gnostic doctrines of Paul of Samosata: Michael I (811-813), Leo V (813-820), Theodora (842-856), who outlawed Icon-smashing, and finally Basilius I, who defeated them in the year 871. Because these dissenters were excellent soldiers, they had been settled in Thrace and Macedonia as a border shield to the Imperial territories; there the movement grew again and spread widely into Bulgaria, into the Balkans and in certain regions of Russia. By the middle of the 10th century, they had taken the name of
Bogomils, from the name of their spiritual head Bogumil, which meant “Dear to God”.
Like a returning wave, this stream of thought in which religious dissent tended to marry political protest during the 11th century, had reached the capital once again: in the time of the imperial house of the Komnenoi, Gnostic-derived heresy grew powerful, and merciless measures of repression were adopted. Anna Komnena, daughter of the Emperor Alexius I and author of a famous Chronicle, tells that in the year 1117 a kind of conspiracy was discovered, organised by the leaders of these Gnostic churches, whose reach had come as far as the verge of the Imperial throne and lurked among the most trusted officials. To deliver a really exemplary lesson, Alexius condemned them to be burned at the stake, but he had two different burning pits prepared: one overlooked by a Cross, the other not. The Cross was the mark of true faith, and to accept it meant to accept the real humanity of Jesus, his real and freely willed sacrifice, and all its beneficent effects for the salvation of human kind. Some of the heretics chose to die under the Cross; the Emperor took this for a sign of conversion on the point of death and granted them amnesty.[48]
In the 11th century, some members of the Gnostic Bogomil movement crossed over into Western Europe, taking their teaching with them, and it took hold very swiftly, especially in southern France, northern Italy and Germany. The Midi, that is the whole central and southern area of modern France, became the home of a swift-growing Gnostic church. In the year 1167 they even held a general council of this new independent church at Saint-Félix-de-Caraman in Languedoc; they called themselves the Cathars, from the Greek katharòs, meaning “pure”. Several Catholic bishops adhered to it, going over to its particular creed and taking all their faithful with them, and a kind of union was agreed between the Western and Eastern Cathars; the leader of a Greek church, called Niketas, and who wore the significant title of papas, took part in the council.[49] A dangerous doctrinal confusion had also reached into the hierarchies of the Catholic Church; a theologian of the level of Pope Innocent III found himself forced to write a crop of letters and treatises addressed, not to ordinary people, but to bishops whose ideas seemed to be tottering on matters as central and basic as sacraments. At the same time, Innocent III expended a great deal of energy to underline the significance of the cult of relics, especially those that related to the life of Christ. Just as it had happened to the Byzantine Emperors Romanus I and Constantine VII when they found themselves facing the heretics, he had understood an important point: these objects may well be poor things tied to popular devotion, but to tradition they represented the concrete evidence that Jesus had really lived as a human being, had suffered the Passion and had died. In the face of those who preached that the Celestial Christ had been a pure spirit, a concept, an abstract being, even relics of the most everyday things, even the milk of the Virgin, served as fundamental evidence for ordinary people, evidence that heretics considered not true.
As I already tried to explain, the truth of a relic is something our mental attitude cannot take in as the old world used to: the men of the Middle Ages, from the professor at the Sorbonne to the last beggar, perceived it with very great strength, and that cannot simply be ascribed to their stupidity. It is true that any amount of fakes circulated, and we know the famous quotation ascribed to Erasmus or Calvin, that one could load a whole ship with the wood from the relics of the true Cross of Christ scattered around Christendom. No doubt they were right, but mostly about the shocking abuse made of these objects in their time, to collect alms from pilgrims; and something of the kind was also violently denounced by a 12th century churchman, the Cistercian Abbot Guibert de Nogent. Both Guibert and Calvin or Erasmus were however neglecting a matter of some relevance to modern historians: if for instance the Emperor of Constantinople wished to make a gift to some church a piece of the True Cross, he would not hack off a large chunk, but rather shave of a minute part, often a bare sliver. The value of relics was spiritual, and did not depend on weight. The only thing that mattered was whether that wood had been drenched in the blood of Christ; whether it was a tiny fragment or the whole patibulum arm, it was still a witness of the Passion. Of course one could not exhibit to the prayers of the faithful some thin wooden fibre, impossible to see once it was sealed within the reliquary; so the holy fibre would be placed within a larger piece of wood, trying to select the same kind of material from which the original fragment had been taken. The more recent wood carrier became itself sacred by contact, and the sliver once inserted in it would be lost and become all but impossible to distinguish; but in all this there was no intent to deceive or defraud. Most relics of the Cross circulating in the Middle Ages were at least authentic in this sense, that is derived from an authentic lift of material from the greater relic that tradition said St. Helena had retrieved in Jerusalem.
The study of relics is a very fascinating chapter in the history of culture, so long as it is done with sufficient respect. For it is a matter of cultural processes that today’s historian must be able to record without claiming to eviscerate them in the light of a realism that is both too recent in origin and too distant to properly judge. Besides, the modern world may well be said to have something that looks very much like the ancient hunger for relics: it is the curiosity towards the so-called “historical Jesus”, that is all the research that aims to reconstruct the human and terrestrial figure of Jesus of Nazareth in the most realistic manner possible. Born from Positivism, from relativism and also from a certain faddish 1900s scepticism, the culture of the early third millennium claims to be able to separate the historical man, a Galilean subject of Herod Antipas and of Tiberius Caesar, from the mysteries bound with his person which have made him the centre of a new religion. To do so, the Gospels are sometimes sliced like hams, dismantled and recomposed in different ways because it is hoped to be able to get back to the “actual words” spoken by Jesus.[50] I am not able to assess the sense of this on a theological level, but certainly as historical method it has none. A man who proposed to go to a conference on Dante and propose to move the Paolo and Francesca episode from Canto V of Hell to Canto V of Paradise would end up covered in obloquy. A historian finds such an idea unacceptable: it is like a crazed restorer intending to destroy a painting by Giulio Romano with acid because he is certain he shall find, hidden behind it, a sketch by Giulio’s master Raphael. At any rate, even if it shows itself in paradoxical and laughable forms, the modern desire to reach the Jesus of history so as nearly to be able to look him in the face is actually very similar to mediaeval man’s morbid affection for all the remains of his terrestrial passage.
Himself a lover of relics and certain that they were a mighty weapon against heresies, Innocent III wrote a hymn to celebrate the Veronica, a famous image of the Face of Jesus kept in Rome. Its tradition was tied up with the mandylion’s: the Veronica was also an acheropita image, that is, a miraculous portrait not made by man. It was said to have been miraculously made when a compassionate woman had approached Jesus on the way to Golgotha, to clean his face, dripping with blood and sweat.[51] The Templars knew that this Pontiff loved, or rather itched, to collect Christ’s relics, because of their meaning, and Popes who followed were just as eager. A famous case that may give a feeling for the times was that of the miracle in Bolsena cathedral, in 1263. A German priest who was going on pilgrimage to Rome was saying Mass on the altar of St. Christina, but at the back of his mind (like many priests of his time, perhaps) he felt a doubt about the Host being really the body of Christ. Suddenly he saw blood coming out of the bread, and dripping down to stain the corporal. The event, of course, made an enormous amount of noise, and Pope Urbanus IV ordered its memory to be celebrated with the feast of Corpus Domini.[52]
The order of the Temple owed everything to papal favour; what is more, as we already mentioned, its own statutes said in so many words that the Roman Pontiff was its lord and master. Once he had learned that the Templars kept such a relic, there is every likelihood that the reigning
Pope would have let the Grand Master understand that he wanted it in the Roman Curia. The Templars could not have said no; and it was probably also to ward off such a prospect that it was decided that it was best to keep silent.
In southern France, at the same time, a lethal association was arising between the Cathar religious ideal, followed by many with sincerity, and political opposition to the King. Philip II Augustus was working to unify the territory of his kingdom politically, so as to make it a stronger monarchy, and this obviously implied that the great southern fief-holders would lose their autonomy.[53] Besides, the north, the langue d’oil, was a very different culture from the south. The connection between ecclesiastic and political autonomy became very strongly felt, and was amplified by the unworthy lifestyle often enjoyed by Catholic hierarchs, as opposed to the exemplary austerity of Cathar bishops. The idea itself of heresy was recklessly broadened: to protest a bishop’s authority, or to refuse to pay tithe, was counted as disobedience to the Catholic Church and evidence of support for the heretics.[54]
The opposition was thus animated by a certain reforming spirit that gave it a potent moral charisma and drove many people to Cathar churches. At first it was attempted to end the conflict with religious weapons alone, thanks in part to the fervid preaching activity of St. Dominic de Guzman; but this could not ward off the disaster. On 5 January 1208, the Papal legate Peter of Castelnau was murdered by a subject of the Count of Toulouse and his murder went unpunished: the murderer was tied to the Cathars, his lord seemed to be protecting him, and the whole matter was very suspicious. Whatever the truth, this crime was the spark that exploded the gunpowder store. Philip II Augustus promoted a true civil war that caused the massacre of thousands upon thousands of Frenchmen and the military conquest of Provence and above all of Languedoc. It was called the Albigensian crusade because one of the most tragic events of repression took place in a town called Albi, and because political propaganda demanded that this butchery be misrepresented as a crusade. The operation achieved its political goal, but did not manage at all to uproot the Cathar church of the Midi, which went on existing for over a century there and elsewhere: according to Raniero Sacconi, born and raised in a Cathar family but who later converted and joined the Dominicans, in 1251 the spread of this parallel church was stunning. It was still flourishing in the later twelve hundreds; the last leader of whom we hear, by name Guillaume Bélibaste, died at the stake in 1321.[55]
The Templars and the Shroud of Christ Page 19
