by Jay Weidner
Perhaps this is more than coincidental, as there are political considerations as well. At the treaty of Vienne (another ancient imperial city up the Rhône) in 1177, Frederick had been forced to acknowledge the authority of Pope Alexander III, effectively ending Frederick’s bid to reestablish an empire in the West. Accepting the crown of the ancient imperial province of Arles, with its echoes of Constantine, was for Frederick I Barbarossa, already Holy Roman Emperor, a kind of lateral move that can be considered a way to establish connections between the two military orders, and through them with an even more ancient, and perhaps more legitimate, form of Christianity. His coronation in the spring of 1178 at the newly finished cathedral of Saint Trophime signaled a shift in focus, one that would lead, a decade later, to Frederick’s taking charge of the Third Crusade and his death in the wilds of Armenia.27
Behind these political machinations can be glimpsed the string pulling of the Knights of the Temple. Provence had been, since the earliest days of the order, one of its major locations and sources of wealth and support. The Templars held at least twenty-nine major commanderies and over one thousand smaller properties, such as farms and small landholdings, in Provence by the late thirteenth century. In the years before the Third Crusade, as much as half of all Templar revenues that can be accounted for came from Provence. The commandery at Arles was one of the oldest in Europe, having been ceded to the Templars in the 1130s by James I of Aragon.28
In addition, Provence was the home of the other major military order, the Knights of Saint John of the Hospital, also known as the Hospitallers in the same way as the Knights of the Temple became the Templars. Founded by papal bull in 1113, fifteen years before the Templars, the Knights of the Hospital were the creation of a single knight, Gerard, whose family name and birthplace are unknown. Like the later Templars, the Hospitallers also held Saint John as their patron. Exactly which Saint John is open to some doubt, but most likely Saint John the Baptist. Their rule, provided by Raymond of Provence in 1130, says nothing about any military role at all. That changed over time, and the Hospitallers were at least the equals of the Templars in battle during the last days of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and their bitter rivals in its politics.29
In contrast to the situation in Outremer, both orders of knights, white with red crosses for the Templars and black with white crosses for the Hospitallers, flanked Frederick I Barbarossa at his coronation as king of Arles in 1178. In Provence, this closeness continued even after the fall of Jerusalem, resulting in several calls during the thirteenth century for their unification. The Templars remained a powerful presence in the region; even after the pope and the French king Philip ordered their arrest. In 1311, four years after the arrest, supposedly, of every Templar in France, nine knights from Provence showed up to defend the order at the Council of Vienne.30
They were actually successful. The Church never officially declared the Templars guilty of anything, but King Philip, who was on the scene with a large contingent of troops, carried the day, and the Templars were dissolved as a religious order and then subjected to the secular justice of the French king. The leaders went to the stake, but the regular knights, particularly in Provence, were allowed to join another chivalric order to avoid arrest. In this way, many commanderies of the Templars passed with all hands directly to the Knights of Saint John, soon to become the new Knights of Rhodes, and then finally the still surviving Knights of Malta.
Did the Templars and the Hospitallers use the political ambitions of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa as a way to promote a new spiritual agenda within the framework of a revised Christianity? The Church never challenged the Grail romances perhaps because they were, after all, a hobby of the nobility, with limited influence outside the noble families who copied them and had them read or sung by the court minstrels. But when the spiritual agenda of the Grail romances became the dominant view of both the nobility and the common folk, then the imperial and orthodox Church was forced into action. Just as the Grail legends reached their apotheosis in Wolfram’s Parzival, the Church launched a new crusade, this time against its fellow Christians in southern France, the Cathars or Perfecti.
THE PERFECTI
The Grail romances tell us of an alchemical secret, transformative even in its most Christian forms, that is held by a family group of initiates or knights of the Temple. The secret, and the genealogy of its guardians, is explicated in an ancient book, which can be read only by those who, like Parzival, understand the language of the birds, the green language of alchemy and astronomy. This is the basic consensus of all the various Grail romances of the period, as we saw above, and may be considered the core of the legend as seen by its contemporary audience.
Like all great and essentially timeless ideas, the Holy Grail is a product of a specific time and place, a specific and exact set of enabling conditions that allowed the emergence of this seminal myth. To understand the impact of the Grail romances, we must look to the times in which the legend emerged, the late twelfth century. These thirty years, from roughly 1185 to 1215, marked, in many ways, the nadir of medieval Christianity. The papal squabbles of the midcentury, along with the general sense of discouragement after the failure of the Second Crusade, created a religious vacuum into which more “heretical” forms of Christianity stepped. The heresies took root so quickly because of the contrast they presented with the Church of Rome. The Cathar priests lived with and cared about their flock. It was common for Roman prelates to spend their whole tenure in absentia, while the lower clergy was often as venal and corrupt as the local landowner.
The decline of the Church had been given an extra push in the 1160s and 1170s by the wide circulation of Abelardian rationalism. Abelard, best remembered today for his romance with his pupil Héloise, had discussed the superstitions of the Church, in the 1120s, with such clearheadedness that two generations later many intellectuals agreed that change was necessary, even essential.
If the Second Crusade had been disappointing, then the fall of Jerusalem in the autumn of 1187 was devastating. It was seen as a sign of God’s disfavor. A crusade was proclaimed, joined by such personages as the kings of Germany, France, and England. Frederick Barbarossa died along the way, and even though Richard I of England pursued the crusade with all the force of his fiery personality, Jerusalem remained in the hands of the infidels.31
Richard the Lion-Hearted was something of a troubadour himself and gave his own stamp of approval to the new mode of romance. He seemed to embody the Matter of Britain and its chivalric traditions. We can be sure that the new poetry of the Grail accompanied the Crusaders because Richard’s nephew and Marie’s son, Henry of Champagne, was elected king of Jerusalem. It is tempting to envision the poet Gautier de Danans chanting his continuation of Chrétien’s masterwork in the great hall of Acre, with Richard and his queens, his sister Johanna and his wife Berengaria, nodding their approval.
Around 1200, Robert de Boron, following the popularity of the continuations of Chrétien, produced Joseph of Arimathea, the prequel to the series that ties it all very neatly into the Holy Family myths. He reveals the themes of a hidden or inner teaching given to Joseph after Christ’s Resurrection. These teachings center on the Grail, here called a chalice, and constitute the heart of the “mysteries.” There is a murkiness to this version not found in Wolfram’s work, for instance, perhaps as a result of trying to tell the important parts (for those with ears to hear) and still stay within certain defined limits that would allow the Roman Church to ignore the tale. Things had changed by 1200. A powerful new pope, Innocent III, had regained the upper hand in his struggles with the Holy Roman Empire and began to turn his attention to unifying the whole world under his spiritual rule.
And this led directly to the most disgraceful incidents in the history of the Roman Church. The Fourth Crusade and the Crusade against the Cathars were waged against fellow Christians. The Fourth Crusade ended with the sack of Constantinople in 1203. The crusaders, tricked by those crafty and godles
s Venetians, fell upon the first city of Christendom and plundered and sacked with a vengeance, while Innocent III rejoiced in the “unification of the Church.”32
The resurgence of a Gnostic heresy in the south of France, however, threatened to become the majority religion of the region, and Innocent responded in the manner he knew best: calling out the troops. The extermination of heretics in the south of France would continue for almost half a century, long after Innocent III went to his just rewards in whatever afterlife awaited him.
Why did the Church want to exterminate the Cathars, or the Perfecti, as they called themselves?
It boiled down to a question of legitimacy. Even the Greek or Eastern Church, newly sacked by Western crusaders, adhered to a common and recognizably biblical version of Christ. The Cathars, however, posed a direct threat to the authority of all organized Christianity by declaring that the Church Fathers had it all wrong. Essentially, the Cathars were a Gnostic form of the Jewish Messianic tradition that came perhaps directly from the early Christians in Provence. As such, their view of Jesus as Christ differed radically from that of the orthodox and apostolic imperial Church, which they saw as a tool of the demiurge, the Rex Mundi.33
The Cathars considered themselves Christians, but they had their own version of the sacraments as well as a kind of yogic spiritual training and initiation. Jesus for them was a prophetic messiah, not a divine being, and they utterly rejected the Crucifixion. Women were held in high regard, were ordained as priestesses, and were even politically influential in the latter portion of the struggle. The aim of the Perfecti, the inner ranks of the priesthood, was to transcend the cycle of birth and death, to escape from the clutches of the Rex Mundi, and to this end they discouraged marriage, using the energy of sexuality for the purposes of spiritual transformation. Like the Gnostics, they believed in a Great Return, when all the light imprisoned in matter would be released, and there is some evidence that they were chiliasts as well. There is also evidence that the Cathars believed in metempsychosis, or reincarnation.34
Just from this brief glimpse of their beliefs it is not hard to see why the Roman Church hated them. Their teachings were deeply antithetical to those of Catholicism; add to that the claim of being the true Christianity expressed by the practical ministry of the local Perfecti, and you have a spiritual force capable of taking on Rome and perhaps winning. It is not surprising that Pope Innocent III, flush from his almost accidental success over Constantinople, should seize upon the murder of a papal legate outside Toulouse in 1208 as a pretext for a full-scale crusade against the civilization of southern France.35
Between 1208 and 1244, the fall of the last Cathar stronghold at Montségur (see fig. 6.9), over half a million people went to the stake, or were killed in the series of terrible conflicts, out of a total population of around two million. Whole populations in cities such as Albi, Béziers, Carcassone, Toulouse, and Foix were brutally massacred in the first example in the West of an organized attempt at genocide. Out of this campaign developed the Church’s secret police, the Inquisition, which survived with the power to punish heretics until 1835. In the Cathars, the Inquisition found its most implacable opponents. In the fifty-year record of the Inquisition in Languedoc we find only four heretics who recanted their beliefs.36 Most, like the martyrs of Montségur, marched proudly into the flames and died for their faith. They might well have echoed the saying of the Donatists, persecuted half a millennium before by Saint Augustine: “The true church is the one that is persecuted, not the one that persecutes.”37
What was the source of such powerful beliefs? Most scholars have, until recently, speculated about other Gnostic-influenced groups, such as the Bogomils, as a source for the Cathars’ beliefs. But this has never been convincing, as the Bogomils died out almost a century before anything resembling Catharism appeared in Provence and Languedoc.
Figure 6.9. Montségur, last stronghold of the Cathars, and the temple of the Grail on the Mount of Salvation. (Photo by Vincent Bridges)
The similarities in the broad cosmology of both the Bogomils and the Cathars can be seen as borrowings from the same Gnostic sources, not as direct influences. The Cathars of southern France have distinct qualities, such as the belief in reincarnation, that separate them from other Gnostic survivals. Also, the Bogomils gained influence in Bulgaria as part of a peasant uprising, not by going head-to-head with the official Church in terms of philosophy and spirituality. When the uprising was crushed, in the early tenth century, the original Bogomils faded away.38
Remnants of a dualistic heresy similar to and perhaps inspired by the Bogomils survived, however, and by the eleventh century had spread to pockets in northern Italy and southern France. These were “Bogomils” only in the eyes of their orthodox persecutors, as all dualistic, anti-Roman heresies were classed during the era. By the middle of the twelfth century, the change to “Cathar” was under way when Bulgarian bishops arrived from Constantinople to ordain the growing and public heretical movement as true Bogomils. This, of course, would not have been necessary if the Cathars had actually descended from the earlier heretics. From this point on, the movement had a new official name, the Albigensian heresy, named for the largest group of delegates, those from the town of Albi in Languedoc.
So if the Bogomils can be considered a peripheral and parallel influence, then where did the Catharism of Provence and southern France get its sense of spiritual certainty? The local traditions of a kind of primitive Christianity are one obvious source. By perhaps semimiraculous means, two copies of the Catharist outer ritual have survived, one in French and one in Occitan. A prayer from this ritual points us directly to an early form of very Gnostic- and Hebriac-flavored Christianity: “Holy Father, Thou just God of all good souls . . . Grant us to Know what Thou Knowest, to Love what Thou Lovest; for we are not of this world, and this world is not of us, and we fear lest we meet death in this realm of an alien god.”39 This alien god is the Gnostic Demiurge.
This prayer ends with an interesting twist on the source of divinity in the Catharist view: “ . . . and God came down from heaven . . . and took ghostly shape in Holy Mary.”40 To the Cathars, Mary was not the physical mother of a physical divine being, but the gateway or portal through which the Gnosis, the unveiling in the original meaning of the Greek apokalypsis, entered the world. In this sense, she was Sophia, or the Jewish concept of the Shekhinah.
The twentieth-century French historian of the Inquistion Jean Guiraud proved that even with the most critical and reductionist view of the evidence, the Cathars did indeed possess certain most ancient documents, which were directly inspired by the traditions of the early Church. He concluded that the similarities between the neophyte ritual of the Cathars and the second-century Baptism of the Catechumens were such that they were essentially the same ritual.41 Except, of course, for the fact that the renunciation of Satan in the Baptism is mirrored in the Cathar rite by a renunciation of the Roman Church. By these lights, it was the Roman Church that was heretical, and the Cathars, with their early and more immediate view of Christianity, were actually the “one true church.”
Did the nobles who joined the Templars and listened with such intensity to the Grail romances see them as part of this Gnostic revival? It is likely that they did, because the first and greatest of all the Grail poets, Chrétien de Troyes, was in all probability a Cathar. In his early work, Erec et Enide, from 1170, Chrétien expresses the core idea of both the troubadours and the Cathars. “What can I say of her beauty? In truth, she was made to be gazed upon: / For in her one could have seen himself as in a mirror.”42
For Chrétien, as for all believers in the “court of love,” the beauty of the beloved was a mirror of God’s beauty. This echoes the Jewish mystical idea of the bride of God, the Shekhinah, which is in fact the “beauty” of God’s creation praised in the Song of Songs attributed to Solomon. Among the Shia Sufis, this concept of the Shekhinah became the teaching that “feminine beauty is the theophany par excellence,” cit
ing as support of this position the saying of the Prophet: “I have seen my God under the most beautiful of forms.” In Hindu Tantra, we find the same idea: “Every naked woman incarnates prakrti.” Although from the perspective of their opponents, the orthodox Church of Rome, the Cathars were seen as aesthetics and dualists who found this world irredeemably evil, that is not the perspective found inside the religion itself. What few remnants remain of their liturgy and practices seem to suggest a belief in the perfectibility of matter, not in its ultimate evil. So for the Cathars, as for the troubadours, both of whom valued this meditative contemplation of “beauty”as the ultimate perfection of matter, the beloved served as the middle way between debauchery and aestheticism.43
The troubadours of southern France invented a lifestyle and a form of poetry based on the ideals of romantic love at a time, the turn of the twelfth century, when one might expect that the literature of Europe would be focused on the martial zeal of the Crusades. They developed at the same time and in the same location as the Cathars, and their poetry expressed some of the same view of the world. Whereas the Perfecti tended to the people, the troubadours sang almost exclusively for the nobility, who had in most cases strong Cathar leanings themselves. Their influence would be felt in the works of Dante and of Petrarch, who commented that Bertrand de Ventadour’s love songs to Eleanor of Aquitaine were almost as good as his own.44
The word troubadour itself is somewhat puzzling. It seems to come from the provençal trobar, “to find” or “to invent,” giving the idea of seeking, whether for love, for the Holy Grail, for enlightenment. There is also a possible derivation from the Arabic tarraba, “to sing,” and some of the lyrical styles used by the troubadours do have Arabic meters and rhyme schemes. The aubade, or albi, a string of rhymed couplets where the last line always repeats or rhymes, is a form still used by Bedouin minstrels and Arab pop music.45
