All day I pored over scrolls written by the forefathers of our faith, by the Essenes and others whose tenets had mixed with those of our founder, Mani. I realised that they all spoke of the same thing – of two Messiahs. Parchment after parchment described two children! I was astonished. There it was for anyone who cared to see! Why no one had understood it in all these years I could not guess! But you see, I was conveniently forgetting that I had not seen it myself!
The next night, when Lea came again, I told her of my discoveries and my thoughts. She listened with quiet interest.
‘Do you know what this means?’ I told her, ‘It means that our two sides, Cathars and Romans, have each held one part of the truth!’
‘Yes, pairé…together you would have the whole truth,’ her eyes regarded the fire, ‘and yet you are not together, one side sits here upon this mountain, while the other is below throwing shots from their catapults and mangonels.’
I frowned, she had thrown the calm waters of her wisdom over the fire of my enthusiasm and I was now forlorn, when before I had been so elated.
‘What is there to do then?’ I said, in dismay.
‘Men must come to know the contents of the Fifth Gospel, that is all,’ she said.
‘That is all! You say that is all, but that is impossible! Because it is not written down!’
‘Not until now.’
‘But no man will believe what I write since I am not one of the apostles!’
‘But pairé, no man would believe it even if you were an apostle,’ she said, evenly. ‘Look at those parchments and proofs you hold in your library, they would not last in the hands of the inquisitors even a wink, for they would burn them as heretical lies.’
My head and my heart ached with these contradictions. ‘Yes, yes…quite right, quite right…so why am I bothering to stain my hands, if there is no man that will believe what I am writing?’
‘There is hope…in wisdom.’
Wisdom? I looked at her, ‘All my life I have desired knowledge, but wisdom, well, that is something else…so far it eludes me and look at how old I am!’
‘Wisdom does not come by thinking about things, pairé, it comes when you become ripe for true judgement; when you can allow the truth to meet you from out of the things themselves. But you must be desire-less, for the more you desire wisdom, the less you will find it,’ she said. ‘When you no longer desire it for your own sake, it will find you. That is when wisdom becomes revelation. Men will need to see it for themselves, it will be revealed to them.’
‘Well,’ I said, put out, ‘I do not see much good in such a thing that is revealed only when you don’t want it and a book that no man will believe!’
‘The desire for knowledge feeds the self…but one must love wisdom not for the self, but for the sake of wisdom itself, pairé – that is what it means to be a philosopher, and only a true philosopher can see the Fifth Gospel.’
A sudden understanding came then, and with it an uncomfortable feeling of shame. She was talking to me, yes, that learned man that I thought I was! She was telling me that I must let go of this learned man (who loved learning for his own sake) if I ever wished to become wise, or to see these things she recounted for myself. I was chided, yes, bewildered certainly, but at the same time I was struck by a sudden desire to let go of all I thought I knew in order to become a philosopher.
10
JESUS OF NAZARETH
He often reproached me and instructed me like a child. And yet every night I looked forward to her coming and I grieved when dawn came, always sooner than I wished it.
In the day, when amongst my many duties I thought on all that Lea had told me, I felt both fear and joy. Fear that I was losing my sanity, and joy for what I was gaining because of it. Unable to reconcile these two disparate emotions, I kept myself busy.
Countless days passed devoted to our survival. Sometimes I was so exhausted I could hardly walk and yet each night, by some miracle, I came awake when I heard her say,
‘Shall I continue?’
My heart would give a leap then and I would answer, ‘By all means, my dear!’ My ears would fall receptive to her words and I would pick up my quill again with anticipation.
One such night, she continued to tell how Mary could not find her son, Jesus, upon their journey home from Jerusalem,
‘She did not know that Jesus was missing,’ she said, ‘until they had reached Sichem. It was the eighth day after the great Feast of Passover and the company from Nazareth had lawfully left the city to make their way home by way of Jericho, to avoid passing through Samaria – a land defiled.’