Fifth Gospel (2 page)

A
utumn had not passed quickly and those messages of support that came now and again from the Count of Toulouse were a welcome diversion. I kept my uncertainty to myself. I feared that these messages falsely raised the hopes of the people of the fortress and waited to see what would happen. The messages came to Raimon de Parella by way of his brother, the Templar Preceptor of Montsaunes, whose preceptory formed part of a network of secret messengers created during the early years of the war. Through these, news came and went by way of troubadours, and ours was a man called Matteu.

I
owe much to Matteu, a man I have known for a long time. If I am honest, I must say I have always envied him a little, God forgive me, because for him it was possible to live life to the full while possessing a willingness to die without a fear in the heart. This has lent a certain poignant tenor to his songs; songs of journeys to far off places, and of unimagined adventures, which greatly entertained the old people, brought a blush to the faces of the young girls, and fired up the courage of the lads, who for days afterwards repeated his tales, acting out those parts, which amused them.

Sometimes
he sang of something called the Grail – a stone struck from Lucifer’s crown, a stone of the greatest beauty and purity that had the power to bestow eternal life. At other times he sang of the bleeding Spear of Longinus, the spear that had pierced the side of Christ and was said to make any man who held it a king. I considered songs that spoke of eternal life and kingship contrary to our faith, and often told Matteu so.

But
what is our faith?

L
ooking back now I realise that we are no better than our enemies. Like them we have only known one half of the truth, though we have defended it differently: we have been willing to die for ours while they have been willing to kill for theirs.

I
n truth, in that far off future in which you live, our faith will not be understood, since only the interpretations of our enemies will have survived and so, I beg your indulgence, for I will sing to you a little of the tenets of our beliefs, and how at Pamiers, in civilised debates, we explained our doctrine to the representatives of the Roman Church.

In those days, s
itting beside Esclarmonde de Foix (that great lady perfecta) I listened as Guilhabert told the Catholics how Satan had created the world and all its creatures, including man. I smiled to myself to see their faces as he explained, with unequalled equanimity, that a Son of God could not, therefore, have entered such a world to live in the corruptible body of Jesus. I held my head high as he pointed out to them that this meant three things: that Christ, a God, could not have died on the cross; that Jesus’ body of corruption could not have been resurrected; and that his mother, being only a woman, could not be called the Mother of God.

The
Romans were aghast and incensed, for these tenets formed the very foundation of their faith!

As far as I could
then see, the entire argument revolved around the difference between two words – similar and same. We Cathars believed Jesus was only similar to Christ – while the Romans believed Jesus was the same as Christ.   

That
is one reason why the Romans feared the Cathar Church and persecuted it, but there is yet another, a ritual called
Consolamentum
.

T
he Romans believe this ritual to be evil because alongside the arguments of
similar
and
same,
came the arguments of
through
and
from
– which began in the 3
rd
century, and concerned the origins of the Holy Spirit, whom we call the
Consoler
. I will not dwell on these arguments for they were many and varied, but I will tell only as much as can help you to understand how they have led to our present troubles.

S
ome time ago the Roman Church decreed that a man could not have a spirit at all – despite the assertion that the man Jesus had become one with the spirit of Christ! Since then, any man who dares speak of a
human spirit
is threatened with excommunication and is pronounced to be ‘anathema’ which means, cursed by God. Our faith, on the other hand, argued that the spirit can be conferred on any man by way of the laying on of hands – this, despite
our
assertion that Christ’s spirit could not have entered into a man’s corruptible body!

Do you
see how subtly, imperceptibly, each side has fallen into error? Each forming from out of the small and intricate contradictions of the past an erroneous foundation for new and more confusing contradictions in the present, until no man in the future will know if the ground he stands upon will collapse into an abyss!

Oh my!
The foolishness of knowledgeable men! And I should know, for the Lord God has given us each a weakness and the foremost of my many weaknesses is that I have always considered myself a man of learning! Yes…I may have sacrificed the love of a woman, marriage and children, meat and eggs and milk, and a wondrous life singing songs like my friend Matteu, but until recently I had not, God forgive me, sacrificed my thirst for knowledge. In truth, night after night I had dreamt of a great library that expanded to infinity and in which there were not a thousand manuscripts but one great book; a book that held the answers to all questions of religion – a book that could prove to the world the veracity of the one true faith: ours of course!

What a
pleasant dream! But I was speaking of the debates and how the years passed. Yes, each side could not convince the other and this eternal round of argument continued until one fateful night, near forty years ago, when a papal legate was murdered. That is how ill begets ill, for such a crime gave Pope Innocent, a cannon lawyer before he took up the keys of Peter, the pretext he needed to convince the French King of the lawfulness of a Crusade against us.

Fight the heretics and rob them of their lands and their goods! Those who take up arms against these plague-ridden un
-believers will be granted heaven by God!

Ah b
ut the men of the south are proud! They would not be cowered and took our part and have defended us ever since; paying for their loyalty with the slaughter of their citizens, the sieges of their castles and the burning of their friends and relatives – God bless them. That is why a small part of me cannot blame the vassals of Pierre Roger for killing those inquisitors at Avignonet, even though it has set me upon this path, which you shall soon know, for you see, now that I have an understanding of everything, I realise that it could have been no different, and to illustrate this, I will sing of the night I met Lea.

It was midnight and all was quiet
after a day where nothing was heard save the pounding of shots from below and the shouts of the soldiers from the parapets. Seeking solace, I came again to the meeting room situated at the top of a long set of circular stairs in the keep. It was my custom to come here on sleepless nights so as to read from the contents of our sizeable library. Here, I could read not only the precious writings of the fathers of our church, but also a number of ancient texts brought over from Syria and other far off places. This night, mindful of Guilhabert’s request, I was engaged in copying the Apocalypse (that part which speaks of the woman standing on the moon with the sun in her belly and the stars crowning her head) onto some parchments that I had prepared, when I heard a noise, no more than a whisper of a sound.

There was a small fire in the hearth and
only a meagre light from my candle and so when I looked up I saw only a shadow standing outside the threshold of the room. When the shadow stepped into the lighted space I realised that it was a young woman. As far as I could tell she had azure eyes, wide-set and shining beneath fine curving brows in a face that was moulded into a serious expression, as if she were a pure child, bruised by a cruel world. I dismissed this fancy and set down my quill and rubbed my eyes, for surely I had fallen asleep and was dreaming.

‘What is it
, my child?’ I asked her.

‘
I would speak with you,
pairé,
’ the dream answered, in a quiet voice, ‘if that is permissible to you.’

I gestured to a
place near the fire and her eyes flickered past me to an ample bench. As she walked to it, I had a moment to observe her better.

She
was small of frame but the slender neck carried her head well, and this gave her an air of nobility. Her hair was the colour of wheat and tumbled in curls from beneath a clean napkin, framing a face fine boned and fair. To look at her, this apparition seemed neither young nor old, like every woman and yet not a woman at all…Perhaps, I mused, she was a goddess trapped in the body of a woman, or an angel of mercy come to take me to my death! Whoever or whatever she was, she seemed to be touched by a recollection of the divine, by a memory of the soul before it fell to earth and entered into a corruptible body. And so, when her gaze returned to me, my old heart gave a leap.

Q
uite irrationally, I thought:

Here
stands the very limits of blessedness!

Well
, that was something new to me. How such an illogical thought had found its way into my dream I did not know, but I tried to dispel it by turning practical. I would treat the dream as if it were real and perhaps this would entice it to disclose its message.

‘
Who are you, my child, the daughter of one of our perfects…or a believer?’

The shaking of he
r head was almost imperceptible but her eyes were steady, each perfectly matched in the spirit of a disconcerting purpose.

‘Who in this world can truly call themselves perfect
,
pairé
? And what good is belief if one does not have eyes to see?’

These words
confused me. My back was stiff and I rubbed it, my thin legs had gone all pins and needles, and my head, for its part, felt like a feather blown by the wind. By these incontrovertible signs I discerned that I was not asleep but very much awake and this made me full of vexation. For how could this girl think herself capable of speaking to a venerable bishop as if he were a simple minded man in need of instruction?

I cleared my throat.
‘If you do not trust in perfection,’ I said, sniffily, ‘nor set much store in belief, why have you come to speak with a
perfect,
a believer
?
’

‘
To show you something…if you wish to see it.’

She
waited with an exaggerated patience for me to say something in response, but I did not know what to say so I leant on the staff of procrastination. ‘Can it wait till morning, my dear? My head is light and I shall soon faint from exhaustion.’

‘
Secrets are best shown in the night,’ she said, emphatically. ‘Both Orpheus and Virgil knew this.’

S
ecrets? Orpheus? Virgil?

I cleared my throat
. ‘What sort of secrets do you mean my child?’

‘
Have you heard,
pairé
, of such a thing as a
Libro Secretum
?’

I
sighed. Secrets and books were nothing new. There were books locked away in the repositories of many monasteries, hidden from the eyes of the inquisition, such as those kept in our library; books that did not agree with the dogmas of the Catholics and so were deemed heretical. But what could such an elfin girl know about books in any case? Books were precious and not easy to come by, moreover they rarely fell into the hands of women, as few women could read.

‘
Is your secret that you know this book exists?’ I said, peering at her.

‘
No…there are many who know that it exists, though it remains unseen.’

‘
But you said…didn’t you just say that you have seen it yourself?’

‘
I see it always,
pairé.
In truth, anyone may see it.’

My faculties
were bewildered. I changed my mind again – this was no woman, this was a dream apparition and a curious one at that!

‘
If anyone can see this book, then it cannot be a secret,’ I pointed out quite logically, knowing that this would surely wake me up since logic had no place in dreams.

‘
This reasoning is reserved for ordinary secrets,’ she said, with a polite smile, as if she had read my mind and would put it to rights. ‘But this is not an ordinary book which I shall show you. Reason cannot explain it, only philosophy.’

Philosoph
y! A love of wisdom! I was pricked in my heart! This word recalled to mind my promise and I sat forward with attention. ‘So, when you say it is not an ordinary book…what do you mean?’

‘It is a
book…and no book at all. It is invisible…and yet it is visible to any man, for it is everywhere and nowhere at once. It lives in the very skies, in the cloud libraries of God, but it also lives in the memory of the heart. The question is, do you want to see it,
pairé
?’