betrayed by his disciple Euphrates, and a plot was laid against him.
Straightway he took ship for Rome, to confront the tyrant in his palace.
In Rome he was thrown into prison, and treated with much harshness; but
he defended himself with great spirit against the charges brought by his
accuser, and was acquitted. Thereupon he uttered a tirade of reproaches
against Domitian’s satellites, and suddenly vanished miraculously from
the judgment hall, appearing the same day in the vicinity of Naples,
where he had friends. From Naples he went to Ephesus; there, in ecstasy,
he saw the assassination of Domitian, at that moment taking place in
Rome; then he died. None knew what age he had attained, whether 80 years
or 100, nor the time, nor the place, nor the manner of his death.
According to Philostratus he appeared after his death to a young man of
his native town, Tyana, who doubted the immortality of the soul, and
invoked Apollonius to explain the matter; but he was invisible to the
other persons present.
2. ALEXANDER THE FALSE PROPHET.
It is no matter of surprise that the cold, austere virtue and wisdom,
the rather hollow religion, and the clumsy miracles of Apollonius
neither built up a school for him nor kept the heathen religion on its
feet; and though the emperors of the third century, from Caracalla to
Diocletian, consecrated temples to him, and one of them, Alexander
Severus, placed his bust, with those of Moses, Socrates and Jesus, in
his private chapel, nevertheless the Sage of Tyana was soon forgotten,
and with him, alas! the memory of his noble courage in the presence of
tyrants. On the other hand, the charlatanry he practiced became more and
more the order of the day, till at last it threw off all disguise.
Whether this result is chargeable to his disciples, who, like the
disciples of another master, prized his miracles more than his
teachings, is a question that cannot be decided; but the fact is that
soon after his death (the close of the first century) a number of
impostors, wearing the cloak of religion, began to ply their trade. The
satirist Lucian, who lived in the second century, and who made sport of
everything—religion and philosophy, gods and men, heathen and
Christians—has immortalized the tomfooleries of these pseudoprophets.
Of these the best known was Alexander of Abonotichus, in Asia Minor, a
man greater in fraud, says Lucian, than his namesake, the son of Philip,
in heroism. He was a large, handsome man, and by scrupulous care of his
complexion, his hair, and his beard, enhanced the advantage nature had
given him. But his character was “a compound of mendacity, fraud,
perjury, and low tricks of every kind.” In his boyhood he was
apprenticed to a quack of Tyana, a renegade disciple of Apollonius
(whose life, by the way, Lucian, who lived nearer to him than
Philostratus, calls a “comedy”), and by him was instructed in all the
artifices whereby one can outwit and defraud his fellows. After his
master’s death Alexander went into business on his own account. In
Macedonia he procured one of the large harmless serpents found in that
province and went back to his native town—Abonotichus—there to set up an
“oracle factory,” as Lucian calls it. At Chalcedon he secretly placed on
a roadside a tablet bearing the inscription that the god Aesculapius,
with his father, Apollo, was soon to be at Abonotichus; the finding of
this tablet caused great excitement. Meanwhile Alexander, in his native
place, went about with his long, curling locks falling over his
shoulders, wearing a purple robe with white stripes, and armed with a
sabre. His stupid fellow townsmen, though they knew his parents, who
were poor, believed him when he claimed descent from Perseus, and when
they heard of the tablet set about erecting a temple to Aesculapius.
Between the foundation stones of the temple Alexander secretly placed a
goose-egg shell containing a newly-hatched snake; then with the wild
gesticulations of a god-inspired enthusiast, hastened to the
market-place, and there announced to the people that Aesculapius had
just been born at the temple in the form of a serpent. To prove his
oracle true he held up before them the egg with the snake. On the
publication of this wondrous news, the populace flocked to the
market-place. Alexander had a hut of boards erected, within which he
seated himself in a reclining chair; then taking up the large snake
already mentioned, which he had kept out of sight, he laid it on his
breast, drew over its head a linen mask, painted to resemble a human
face, the mouth of which would open and shut on pulling a string, and
gave out to the people that the newborn god had already grown to that
great size, and was now ready to give oracles. From all Asia Minor and
Thrace the people came in thousands to witness the miracle. The mystic
semi-obscurity of the hut and the magical effects of artificial light
magnified the impression that the charlatan and his snake made on the
people. Whoever wished to receive an oracle of the god had to write his
question on a tablet, which was then to be sealed with wax and handed to
the prophet. When the people had retired he melted the seals, read the
questions, wrote the answers, then sealed the tablets again, and gave
them back (with the answers) the seals apparently intact. The tariff for
oracles was a drachma and eight oboli (about 25 cents), and the annual
receipts amounted to seventy or eighty thousand drachmas (say $15,000),
but he had out of this sum to pay a host of assistants and confederates.
When the temple was completed Alexander carried on his business there.
But his title to public regard did not pass unchallenged. The
Epicureans, who detested all trickery, and who believed that enjoyment
was the only end in life worth thinking of, manifested their hostility
to the prophet, and were, in turn, denounced by him as atheists and
Christians. To safeguard his reputation he added to his repertoire.
First, he began to give oracles viva voce, a confederate behind a screen
speaking the responses into a tube terminating at the mouth of the
snake’s mask. But the charge for such oracles was higher, and they were
elicited only for the behoof of persons of eminence. Alexander’s fame
spread even to Rome, and dupes from that seat of enlightenment came to
consult the serpent-god. One of these addle-pate pilgrims from Rome
asked the oracle what manner of woman he should take to wife. The oracle
named the daughter of Alexander; so he married her, and offered
hecatombs to his mother-in-law, his bride’s mother, in her capacity of
moon-goddess, for such Alexander gave her out to be. Encouraged by many
successes not inferior to this, the prophet instituted many mystic
festivals, from which he excluded all unbelievers in God, as Epicureans
and Christians. At these festivals the birth of Aesculapius and the
nuptials of Alexander and the Moon-Goddess were represented
dramatically, though perhaps a trifle too realistically. The prophet
also claimed to be a reincarnation of Pythagoras, and in proof showed
his thigh encased in gilded leather. His life was a continuous debauch.
In time he began to hold what we should now call “dark seances;” that
is, he would sit in absolute darkness and make response to questions
submitted in writing on sealed tablets. As he could not read the
questions at all, his answers (the oracles) were expressed for the most
part in unintelligible language. Lucian once tested his powers by
submitting to him the one question, “When will Alexander be caught at
his tricks,” written on eight tablets; he got eight different answers,
all irrelevant. He missed no opportunity of unmasking the rogue, and of
teaching the people by the evidence of their own senses that the man was
a vulgar impostor. The knave affected a mild friendship for his
adversary, but he bribed the helmsman of a vessel on which Lucian sailed
to throw him overboard; this the man had not the courage to do. Lucian
wished to have the impostor put on trial for this crime, but the
proconsul advised him not to invoke the help of the law, Alexander being
too high in favor with the officials and the public. The city of
Abonotichus had coins struck bearing the effigy of the Aesculapius
serpent, and the pseudoprophet attained the age of seventy years,
enjoying to the end the undiminished respect of the people.
Many were the impostors that sprang up after Alexander, and wherever
there was any lack of real ones, fictitious pseudoprophets were imagined
by satiric writers, Lucian’s Peregrinus, for example, a renegade
Christian who devotes himself to a death by fire to win fame. It was a
mad world then. New mysteries were invented in plenty, and people came
in crowds for initiation. The “Golden Ass” of Apuleius is a striking
satire on this mystery furore. To this period belong the Gnostics, whose
doctrines were a mixture of Judaism, heathenism and Christianism; the
Manichees, who gave a Christian varnish to the Persian fire worship; the
Kabbalists, who heaped a vast amount of rubbish together, got out of the
Hebrew Bible by juggling with its sentences, words, letters and numbers.
Amid this tangle of doctrines the heathen religions sank, Judaism lost
its native land, and Christianism fell into an incalculable number of
sects—an evil that was not to be corrected even by the artificial unity
of the Church under the Apostolical See.
_PART SIXTH._
_The Knights Templar._
1. THE MIDDLE AGE.
With the spread of Christianism the heathen mysteries came everywhere to
an end, and the Christian mysteries took their place. The Christians, it
is true, no longer constituted a secret society, after their faith had
become the creed of the state; but there was plenty of mystic doctrine,
nevertheless, and incessant strife of parties and sects, Arians and
Athanasians, Pelasgians and Semipelagians, Nestorians, Monophysites and
Monothelites, Adoptionists, Priscillianists, and Donatists, to name no
more, over Christ’s nature, on the question whether the Holy Ghost
proceeds only from the Father or equally from him and the Son; whether
the soul is saved by good works or by grace of God, and so on
interminably. This wrangling so occupied the minds of all that there was
no longer need of secret societies. Theology, i. e., the struggle for
creed, and war, i. e., the struggle for power, were the occupations of
the Middle Age. Monks and knights were the two great classes of that
time, with the Pope as supreme head on one side, and the Emperor on the
other.
All the available knowledge was in the Middle Age employed in the
service of the Church, and hence science slept from the migration of the
barbarians till the invention of printing. During that period of a
thousand years no addition was made to the sum of human knowledge.
Arabian and Jewish physicians alone labored to save the intellectual
wealth inherited from the ancient Greeks. As for Christendom, it was
involved in profound intellectual darkness, and the Doctrine of Light
that had been published by the Carpenter’s Son, was lost amid petty
controversies and inane interpretations, till at last its strictly
monotheistic groundwork was forgotten, and there remained visible only
the superstructure of ethnic mysticism and of doctrines, as the Trinity,
Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension, borrowed from Egyptian and
Grecian mythology.
And this ethnico-mystic structure acquired a splendor and a power never
before equaled, so that the system was credited to divine intervention,
whereas its purely human origin might easily have been traced. The root
idea of the ethnic mysticism was to seek the supposedly “lost deity,” to
find him, to be unified with him. And the self-same idea underlay the
Christian mysticism, and it was by calling that idea into play and by
giving it expression in brilliant achievement, that this mysticism won
its highest triumph, and, aided by the Papacy, its widest influence.
This new embodiment of the mystical idea was seen in the Crusades, in
which the Christian mystics joined, going forth to seek the lost
sepulchre of their God, and to obtain control of it. Possession of the
sepulchre would be the surest guarantee for the unification of godhead
and humanity.
In this undertaking the two most powerful estates of the Middle Age took
part—the monks and the knights. The monks, under orders from the Pope,
joined the armies of the cross; the knights, commanded by the Emperor,
marched to the Holy Land and conquered it. After the conquest, when
there was a kingdom of Jerusalem after the model of the kingdoms of the
West, there arose, as the necessary summit of medieval aspiration, the
union of monkery and chivalry, in the monkish orders of knights, whose
members wore the sword of the knight and took the monastic vows of
poverty, chastity, and obedience.
These organizations had their origin in the gradual assumption of
knightly elements by the monastic orders. Some merchants of Amalfi,
oldest commercial emporium of Italy, had, as early as 1048, founded a
monastery and a church at Jerusalem, and in conjunction with these a
hospital in honor of John the Baptist. There the monks cared for
pilgrims who were poor or ailing. Pope Paschal II. granted them a
monastic constitution in 1113, and Godfrey of Bouillon, soon after the
capture of Jerusalem, endowed them with considerable properties.
They took the title of Brothers Hospitalers of Saint John of Jerusalem;
their habit consisted of a black mantle with a white cross. A few years
later (1119) the Knights Hugo of Payns, and Godfrey of Saint Omers,
associated themselves and six other knights, all French, in a military
league, under the style “Poor Knights of Christ,” pledging themselves to
keep the highways of the Holy Land safe for pilgrims, and to observe the
rule of Saint Benedict. The members were favored by King Baldwin I. and
the Patriarch of Jerusalem, and came to be called Templars, because
their convent stood on the site of the Solomonic Temple. The Templars
received from the Synod of Troyes in 1128 recognition as a regular
order, a monastic rule, a monastic habit, a special banner, etc. About
the same date the Hospitalers, Johannites, or Knights of Saint John of
Jerusalem, became invested with the knightly character. After the
Hospitalers came the German Knights, whose theatre of action was
principally the region of the Baltic Sea, but they also saw service in
Spain in the war against the Saracens. Other knightly orders were those
of Calatrava, of Alcantara, of Santiago de Compostella, in England the
order of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, etc.
2. THE TEMPLARS.
None of these orders rose to higher distinction than the order of the
Templars, or of “the Poor Companions of the Temple of Jerusalem,” as it
was styled in its rule. In those days it was full of the spirit of
lowliness, but the time came when the knights were no longer called
themselves “Poor Companions,” but “Knights Templar.” At first the
brethren begged their bread, fasted, were diligent in attendance on
divine worship, performed the duties of their religion, fed the poor,
cared for the sick. Plain and unadorned was their attire, in color
either black, white or brown; and the brother who tried to get the
finest habit got the shabbiest. The hair and beard were close cropped.
The chase was not permitted, except for the extermination of beasts of
prey. Women were not allowed to live in the houses of the order; the
brethren might not so much as kiss their female relations. But their
mode of life became in time very different. They became rich in worldly
goods, and so broke the vow of poverty. As an order and as individuals
they followed their own inclinations, and thus was their vow of
obedience made nought; and their vow of chastity fared not better; while
the specific vow of the order—protection of pilgrims to the Holy
Land—became a nullity through their negligence, or even by their
treasonable surrender of posts to the Saracens.
The candidate for admission to the order was required to be of noble
birth, though sometimes illegitimate sons of knights were received.
Furthermore, the candidate must be unmarried and unbetrothed; but this
rule was circumvented by taking married candidates as “affiliate”
members; they also admitted minors and even small boys. Lucre was the
impelling motive of this disregard of their rule; money was their god.
No other order of knights was in such disrepute for lewdness, duplicity,
even treason. Originally all Templars were of one rank and degree—that
of knights. But in time ecclesiastics were admitted to attend to the
spiritual affairs, and these ecclesiastics were made independent of the
ordinary jurisdiction of diocesans. Thus was formed a second rank or
degree, subordinate to the knights, and mere dummies on festival and
ceremonial occasions. Then was added still another class, Servientes,
who were the personal attendants of the knights, or were otherwise
employed for the benefit of the order, as mechanics, laborers, etc. The
class Affiliates comprised persons of all ranks in life and of both
sexes. They were not bound by all the vows of the order; they were
required to make the order heir of their property; but they did not live
in the houses of the order. These several classes were distinguished by
their attire. Knights wore a white mantle with an eight-pointed red
cross over the left breast. Clerics wore the cassock, with brown mantle
(the mantle of the higher clerics was white). Servientes wore a brown
garb. The members called each other Brother, and indeed they stood by
each other like brothers; in battle their personal bravery was
irreproachable.
All these religious orders of knights possessed great power in the
Middle Age, their grandmasters ranking next after Popes and monarchs. In
fact they recognized no emperor or king as their lord, but only the
Pope. The orders were favored by the Pontiffs, who loaded them with
praise and privileges, though they feared them. If the Popes had now the
arm of the flesh and not of the spirit only to defend them against the
secular power, they owed that advantage to the knightly orders. And
specially were they beholden to the Templars in this regard. The
Templars were free from all Church tribute, and by the Pope’s favor had
the right to harbor excommunicated knights, to conduct divine service in
churches that were under interdict, to found churches and churchyards;
which privileges brought down upon them the enmity of the clergy. As the
order was exempt from all episcopal jurisdiction and subject only to the
Roman See, the bishops endeavored to have that and other like privileges
abated by the Lateran Council in 1179. At the time of their suppression
the Templars possessed an empire of five provinces in the East and
sixteen in the West, with 15,000 houses of the order. In possession of
such resources, they aimed at nothing short of making all Christendom
dependent on their order, and to set up a sort of military aristocratic
commonwealth, governed ostensibly by the Pope, but really by themselves,
with their grandmaster at the head. The grandmaster of the Templars was
elected by a college of eight knights, four servientes and one cleric.
The Grandmaster was only president of the Council and its
representative; but in war he had supreme command; as the Pope’s deputy
he had jurisdiction over the clerics. A splendid retinue attended him,
and he had a treasury at his disposal. Next in rank after him stood the
Seneschal, his deputy for civil affairs, and the Marshal for military,
the Treasurer, the Drapier. The Council (Conventus) consisted of the
Grandmaster, his assistants (i.e., the grand officers just mentioned),
Provincial Masters who might be present, and such knights as the
Grandmaster might summon. By addition of all eminent Templars the
Council became the General Chapter; this was the legislative body. The
other knightly orders were organized on a plan not essentially
different. What interests us most at present is those features of the
Templar order which marked it as in some respects a secret society.
The order took its first steps in this direction in the thirteenth
century, moved thereto by desire to safeguard its riches and power. Its
secret doctrines or tenets were borrowed from the heretical sects of the
time—Albigenses and Waldenses—or were such beliefs as were held in
secret by many of the most enlightened men. Such views were shared by
religious men, scholars, and worldlings alike, by the first class out of
indignation against the moral degeneration of the rulers of the Church;
by the second, because they suspected that the Church’s dogmas were but
inventions of Popes and councils, and by the third, because in rejecting
the Church’s authority and accepting the heretical doctrines, they
fancied that they were freed from the obligations of morality. But the
Templars, who were neither pious nor learned, but of whom many were very
worldly indeed, found the enlightened new opinions to coincide well with
their interest, which prompted them to care rather for their numerous
possessions in the West than for the few they held in lands occupied by
the Moslem. God, said they, showed his favor to the Mohammedans in the
Crusades, and evidently willed the defeat of the Christian arms. So by
adopting the more enlightened views, they prepared the way for a
withdrawal from the useless Crusades, and a return with bag and baggage
to Europe, where they could rest from their glorious but hard and
thankless martial labors, and devote themselves to the service of
princes, or pass the time in the splendid houses of their order, amid
Oriental luxury, and surrounded by gardens like Fairyland, beguiling the
hours with gaming and the chase, with songs and lovemaking, the while
not neglecting their political interests. But the Templars were rapidly
nearing their downfall.
3. THE SECRETS OF THE TEMPLARS.
The Arcana of the Templars consisted of a secret doctrine and of a cult
based on the same. The doctrine, which had no ground in scientific
research, seems to have been akin to the doctrine of certain sects,
specially the Albigenses, who worshiped a superior god of heaven and an
inferior god of earth, and ascribed to the latter the origin of evil.
For the Templars, Christ was no Son of God, had worked no miracles, had
neither risen from the dead nor ascended into heaven; he was, in fact,
often spoken of as a false prophet. The Church’s doctrine regarding the
transubstantiation of the bread in the mass was for them crass
superstition, the eucharist only a commemorative rite, the sacrament of
penance a priestly imposture, the Trinity a human invention, veneration
of the cross an act of idolatry. That the opposition of the order to the
last-mentioned custom led on festival occasions, and particularly when
new members were admitted, to overt acts of contempt for the cross, to
spitting on the cross, for example—accusations like that are grave not
only from the point of view of the Church, but even of common propriety,
and they played an important part in the prosecution of the Templars.
That postulants were compelled by force of arms and other violent means
to perform such highly reprehensible acts is not to be discredited
entirely, for they may have been part of a test of the postulants’
willingness to obey superiors: and besides, the objectionable ceremony
was not practiced everywhere, but only in France. More excusable was the
offense of the Templars in looking on the cross broidered on their
mantle, not as the sign of redemption, but as a double T, the initial
letter of the name of their society. They were said also to have
substituted John the Baptist in the place of Jesus as the order’s
patron, because John did not pretend to miraculous powers nor declare
himself the Messiah. The clerics of the order must have approved these
heretical opinions and practices. There were at that time many
enlightened churchmen, and it is to be presumed that the Templars would
adopt such of them as were at variance with the hierarchy and took
refuge in the order.