Temple of the Grail(20)

As my lips intoned those first words, ‘Hear me call, O God of my righteousness: thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress.’ I felt a calm sweetness. In humility there is constancy, I concluded, and in obedience there is also peace. Perhaps if my master were more obedient he would find calmness of spirit?

After the four prescribed psalms, the abbot took his place at the pulpit. He began with a short, eloquent speech in which he once again welcomed the pope’s envoy to the monastery, declaring the innocence of the abbey, and further adding his unswerving belief in God’s protection during the forthcoming inquiry. And because Completorium was a time for reflection, a time for the examination of the conscience, as spiritual father, he also publicly forgave all those who were responsible for bringing the terrible calamity upon them, and cautioned the brothers of the order to take a moment to examine their hearts for any feeling of ill will that may have taken root there. He then announced that, for this reason, the reading would not be taken from Jeremiah, chapter 14, as was customary, but from the Book of Revelation which, he stated, should serve to remind us of our task against evil, of the battle that is waged in the soul against pride, and envy, and vainglory. He announced that Brother Sacar of Montelimar, the master of music, should give the lesson, and he stepped down.

I stifled a yawn as the monk climbed into the pulpit and began his sermon. Despite his subject – horrifying descriptions of hell and death – and despite his inspired phrasing – the phrasing of one accustomed to melodic formulas – my eyes, God forgive me, were growing heavy. The brother’s words seemed to escape from his lips like phantoms whose natures were one with the spectres created by the light from the great tripod, and I fancied I could see many hovering above, tumbling and frolicking with the echoes of words deflected by the high vaults of the church. Not only did I see words, but also thoughts meeting those words! They danced along the arches of the temple, sliding down the columns like little children and coming to rest above the many cowled heads in the choir. Flames, each differing in colour and hue, rose from each brother. I saw pride welling up from the secret corners of the heart, forming (or so I thought) the shapes of animals. Before my eyes a lion entangled with a dragon, a serpent curled hissing around the form of an eagle, here a lamb, there a cow!

Above the inquisitor, I imagined an ugly little devil with two heads, clinging to his shoulders, each head whispering into one of his large ears. Above the Cistercian emissary sat a viper, on the friar a monkey . . . on the bishop a pig! Had I been awake (thank the Lord God I was not) I would have laughed. However it was in a kind of perfect dream-lucidity that I witnessed weakness, desire, and hatred, as a painter sees colours laid out upon his palette. Incredulous, I contemplated the likelihood of a young novice having such visions, but I remembered having heard that devils were responsible for many things. One monk wrote that they made him cough and sneeze in church, and that one troop of devils spent all their efforts weighting his eyes and closing his eyelids, and others snored in front of his nose, so that the brother next to him believed that it was he who was snoring and not the devils. Indeed, devils are said to make monks sing badly, for one tells of seeing a devil like a white-hot iron come out of the mouth of a monk who had started a higher note by mistake. And so, I wondered with detached calm if this monk speaking before me had created such spectres – by the aid of some infernal magic – to confound the inquiry? Perhaps it was a good thing that the inquisitor was here? Perhaps there was a terrible power at work in this abbey? I was weary, my eyes sought the solace of that moment of dark peace, and soon the world around me became drops in a pool, rippling, embracing and diffused, until I could no longer distinguish or define anything. I felt the flame pale to a comfortable glow, only to awake to a chorus of gasps. I looked around sleepily to find that Brother Ezekiel was standing at the end of the row of stalls. He uncovered his white skull with one translucent hand, and turned his gaze to a point in the distance above all our heads, perhaps to an imaginary landscape where his eyes saw an eternity of damnation . . . on the other hand, he may have been seeing the same visions that I had seen only moments before!

‘Heed ye sinners! The antichrist is at hand!’ There was a sudden terrible silence. ‘And it was John,’ he continued, ‘the one whom Jesus loved, who beheld the beast coming up out of the earth with two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon; and he exerciseth all the power of the first beast causing all to receive a mark on their right hand, or on their foreheads that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name . . . Blessed is he who can name the number of the beast for it is the number of a man!’