Temple of the Grail(8)

‘Ahh!’ the old man was suddenly irritated. ‘The floor was colder than the crypts at Augustus. The Lord is not with us today. As you know, the antichrist roams the abbey.’

‘The antichrist is everywhere, dear brother, that is precisely why he is so formidable an opponent . . . now come,’ Setubar coaxed paternally.

‘No . . . no . . . you must tell the preceptor about him . . . tell him!’ He coughed then as though something had caught in his throat. ‘He is a Templar, Setubar . . . they are here!’ There was a desperation in his voice that the German brother tried to mask, by placing an arm over Ezekiel’s shoulders and directing him away from us hastily. ‘Come, you are tired. I shall take you to your cell.’

‘The boy . . .’ the monk said to the other, ‘does he not look like . . .?’

‘He looks like an angel. Youth is angelic, brother, precisely because it is young . . .’ Having delivered himself of this statement he directed the other man away from us and out of the church.

This strange encounter left me a little unsettled and I began to look about me in the shadows. My master, sensing my apprehension, diverted my mind with other considerations, showing me the church, and telling me about the architecture of the Cistercians, but this only soothed me a little.

‘That man . . . do you believe that he speaks the truth?’

‘Perhaps there was something to what he was saying,’ Andre said.

‘What? That the antichrist roams the abbey? That there are men here who have been seduced by the Devil?’ I asked incredulously.

‘No, of course not!’ he snapped. ‘I believe he is frightened, but then it is also known that the old live in constant fear. However, he mentioned a martyr and I did see the fresh grave. Something has happened here and I begin to find myself curious. Come, let us look about, let us see what we can see.’

So we left the sanctuary through a door in the pulpitum and, once through the rood screen, we found ourselves in the area reserved for the laity.

If the sanctuary was the head and heart of a church then this before us was the main body, the limbs. My master told me that this church, no doubt built before the times of master masons and artisans, had been – like so many scattered all over Europe – constructed by the monks themselves. It was a great achievement, though it was indeed a curious church because of its peculiar orientation. I queried my master on this point and he concluded that it may have been unavoidable, considering the aspect and the mountain. One other church he knew of in the area was built similarly, the monastery church at Arles-sur-Tech whose sarcophagus of its patron saints Abdon and Sennen is said to fill mysteriously with holy water. Even a tiny amount of this liquid, he told me, had been known to cure the most vile disease. I thought, and said as much, that no matter what vile disease I contracted, nothing could persuade me to drink the water from a sarcophagus. He pointed out to me that if I were willing to drink the blood of Christ to save my soul, why not the water of Abdon to save my body?

It was a good question.

So we stood, our eyes leading us down a central aisle or nave, whose flanking colonnades supported arches, curving to meet across the ceiling vault. The rood screen became its central point, and standing in front of it, I had the impression that numerous and converging arches were rushing towards me in fast succession. Like waves of water, they seemed to defy the earthly forces of attraction, rising with an unbridled momentum before collapsing upon the calm and quiet shores of a delicate crucifix.

I remembered fondly our visit to Reims where my master had shown me the marvellous carved reliefs on the capitals of the columns and I recalled being spellbound and I confess that I very nearly risked worshipping the creation more than the creator, having to remind myself of what St Bernard tells us about this very sin. For I could have spent a whole day gazing at such details in preference to meditating upon God’s laws! St Bernard believed, as do many others, that the murals and statues, so often employed by the Benedictines in their churches, interfered with sound meditation and training in religious gravity. And yet here in this fine Cistercian model, my eyes sorely missed the statues, individual in their grace and pose, they missed the fantastic murals where artists, armed with powders and tinctures of unequalled perfection, added flesh to gods and saints. Where were the golden candlesticks? Nowhere did I see ornate tripods of silver, lovingly encrusted with gemstones of brilliant hues!

‘A Cistercian monastery,’ my master said, reading my thoughts, ‘must adhere strictly to the ideal of poverty, to the ideal of the universal that shuns the individual. Even their habit, if you are attentive, Christian, will illustrate this point, for these monks can abandon differentiation from those things that surround them by the use of grey, which allows them to diffuse into the stone of the walls, into the dirt of the floor, indistinct even from the grey mist that descends downward from a grey sky whose milky blanket comes to rest on the greyness of the compound.’