Eco: Foucalt's Pendulum (9 page)

"Where else? I belong to
a lost generation and am comfortable only in the company of others
who are lost and lonely.''

Li frere, li mestre du
Temple

Qu'estoient rempli et
ample

D'or et d'argent et de
richesse

Et qui menoient tel
noblesse,

Ou sont ils? que sont
devenu?

¡XChronique a la suite
du roman de Favel

Et in Arcadia ego. That
evening Pilade's was the image of the golden age. One of those
evenings when you feel that not only will there definitely be a
revolution, but that the Association of Manufacturers will foot the
bill for it. Where but at Pilade's could you watch the bearded
owner of a cotton mill, wearing a parka, play hearts with a future
fugitive from justice dressed in a double-breasted jacket and tie?
This was the dawn of great changes in style. Until the beginning of
the sixties, beards were fascist, and you had to trim them, and
shave your cheeks, in the style of Italo Balbo; but by ¡¥68 beards
meant protest, and now they were becoming neutral, universal, a
matter of personal preference. Beards have always been masks (you
wear a fake beard to keep from being recognized), but in those
years, the early seventies, a real beard was also a disguise. You
could lie while telling the truth¡Xor, rather, by making the truth
elusive and enigmatic. A man's politics could no longer be guessed
from his beard. That evening, beards seemed to hover on
clean-shaven faces whose very lack of hair suggested
defiance.

I digress. Belbo and
Diotallevi arrived tense, exchanging harsh whispers about the
dinner they had just come from. Only later did I learn what Signer
Garamond's dinners were.

Belbo went straight to
his favorite distillations; Diotallevi, after pondering at length,
decided on tonic water. We found a little table in the back. Two
tram drivers who had to get up early the next morning were
leaving.

"Now then," Diotallevi
said, "these Templars..."

"But, really, you can
read about the Templars anywhere..."

"We prefer the oral
tradition," Belbo said.

"It's more mystical,"
Diotallevi said. "God created the world by speaking, He didn't send
a telegram."

"Fiat lux, stop," Belbo
said.

"Epistle follows," I
said.

"The Templars, then?"
Belbo asked.

"Very well," I said. "To
begin with..."

"You should never begin
with ¡¥To begin with,' " Diotallevi objected.

"To begin with, there's
the First Crusade. Godefroy worships at the Holy Sepulcher and
fulfills his vow. Baudouin becomes the first king of Jerusalem. A
Christian kingdom in the Holy Land. But holding Jerusalem is one
thing; quite another, to conquer the rest of Palestine. The
Saracens are down but not out. Life's not easy for the new
occupiers, and not easy for the pilgrims either. And then in 1118,
during the reign of Baudouin II, nine young men led by a fellow
named Hugues de Payns arrive and set up the nucleus of an order of
the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ: a monastic order, but
with sword and shield. The three classic vows of poverty, chastity,
and obedience, plus a fourth: defense of pilgrims. The king, the
bishop, everyone in Jerusalem contributes money, offers the knights
lodging, and finally sets them up in the cloister of the old Temple
of Solomon. From then on they are known as the Knights of the
Temple."

"But what were they
really?"

"Hugues and the original
eight others were probably idealists caught up in the mystique of
the Crusade. But later recruits were most likely younger sons
seeking adventure. Remember, the new kingdom of Jerusalem was sort
of the California of the day, the place you went to make your
fortune. Prospects at home were not great, and some of the knights
may have been on the run for one reason or another. I think of it
as a kind of Foreign Legion. What do you do if you're in trouble?
You join the Templars, see the world, have some fun, do a little
fighting. They feed you and clothe you, and in the end, as a bonus,
you save your soul. Of course, you had to be pretty desperate,
because it meant going out into the desert, sleeping in a tent,
spending days and days without seeing a living soul except other
Templars, and maybe a Turk now and then. In the meantime, you ride
under the sun, dying of thirst, and cut the guts out of other poor
bastards."

I stopped for a moment.
"Maybe I'm making it sound too much like a Western. There was
probably a third phase. Once the order became powerful, people may
have wanted to join even if they were well off at home. By that
time, though, you could be a Templar without having to go to the
Holy Land; you could be a Templar at home, too. It gets
complicated. Sometimes they sound like tough soldiers, and
sometimes they show sensitivity. For example, you can't call them
racists. Yes, they fought the Moslems¡Xthat was the whole
point¡Xbut they fought in a spirit of chivalry and with mutual
respect. Once, when the ambassador of the emir of Damascus was
visiting Jerusalem, the Templars let him say his prayers in a
little mosque that had been turned into a Christian church. One day
a Frank came in, was outraged to see a Moslem in a holy place, and
started to rough him up. But the Templars threw the intolerant
Frank out and apologized to the Moslem. Later on, this
fraternization with the enemy helped lead to their ruin: one of the
charges against them at their trial was that they had dealings with
esoteric Moslem sects. Which may have been true. They were a little
like the nineteenth-century adventurers who went native and caught
the mal d'Af-rique. The Templars, lacking the usual monastic
education, were slow to grasp the fine points of theology. Think of
them as Lawrences of Arabia, who after a while start dressing like
sheiks...But it's difficult to get an objective picture of their
behavior because contemporary Christian historiographers, William
of Tyre, for example, take every opportunity to vilify
them."

"Why?"

"The Templars became too
powerful too fast. It all goes back to Saint Bernard. You're
familiar with Saint Bernard, of course. A great organizer. He
reformed the Benedictine order and eliminated decorations from
churches. If a colleague got on his nerves, as Abelard did, he
attacked him McCarthy-style and tried to get him burned at the
stake. If he couldn't manage that, he'd burn the offender's books
instead. And of course he preached the Crusade: Let us take up arms
and you go forth..."

"You don't care for
him," Belbo remarked.

"If I had my way, Saint
Bernard would end up in one of the nastier circles of the inferno.
Saint, hell! But he was good at self-promotion. Look how Dante
treats him: making him the Madonna's right-hand man. He got to be a
saint because he buttered up all the right people. But to get back
to the Templars. Bernard realized right away that this idea had
possibilities. He supported the nine original adventurers,
transformed them into a Militia of Christ. You could even say that
the heroic view of the Templars was his invention. In 1128 he held
a council in Troyes for the express purpose of defining the role of
those new soldier-monks, and a few years later he wrote an elogium
on them and drew up their rule, seventy-two articles. The articles
are fun to read; there's a little of everything in them. Daily
Mass, no contact with excommunicated knights, though if one of them
applies for admission to the Temple, he must be received in a
Christian spirit. You see what I mean about the Foreign Legion.
They're supposed to wear simple white cloaks, no furs, at most a
lambskin or a ram's pelt. They're forbidden to wear the curved
shoes so fashionable at the time, and must sleep in their
underwear, with one pallet, one sheet, and one
blanket..."

"With the heat there, I
can imagine the stink," Belbo said.

"We'll come to the stink
in a minute. There were other tough measures in the rule: one bowl
for each two men; eat in silence; meat three times a week; penance
on Fridays; up at dawn every day. If the work has been especially
heavy, they can sleep an extra hour, but in return they must recite
thirteen Paters in bed. There is a master and a whole series of
lower ranks, down to sergeants, squires, attendants, and servants.
Every knight will have three horses and one squire, no decorations
are allowed on bridles, saddles, or spurs. Simple but well-made
weapons. Hunting forbidden, except for lions. In short, a life of
penance and battle. And don't forget chastity. The rule is
particularly insistent about that. Remember, these are men who are
not living in a monastery. They're fighting a war, living in the
world, if you can use that word for the rat's nest the Holy Land
must have been in those days. The rule says in no uncertain terms
that a woman's company is perilous and that the men are allowed to
kiss only their mothers, sisters, and aunts."

"Aunts, eh?" Belbo
grumbled. "I'd have been more careful there...But if memory serves,
weren't the Templars accused of sodomy? There's that book by
Klossowski, The Baphomet. Baphomet was one of their satanic
divinities, wasn't he?"

"I'll get to that, too.
But think about it for a moment. You live for months and months in
the desert, out in the middle of nowhere, and at night you share a
tent with the guy who's been eating out of the same bowl as you.
You're tired and cold and thirsty and afraid. You want your mama.
So what do you do?"

"Manly love, the Theban
legion," Belbo suggested.

"The other soldiers
haven't taken the Templar vow. When a city is sacked, they get to
rape the dusky Moorish maids with amber bellies and velvet eyes.
And what is the Templar supposed to do amid the scent of the cedars
of Lebanon? You can see why there was the popular saying: ¡¥To
drink and blaspheme like a Templar.' It's like a chaplain in the
trenches who drinks brandy and curses with his illiterate soldiers.
The Templar seal depicts the knights always in pairs, one riding
behind the other on the same horse. Now why should that be? The
rule allows them three horses each. It must have been one of
Bernard's ideas, an attempt to symbolize poverty or perhaps their
double role as monks and knights. But you can imagine what people
must have said about it, two men galloping, one with his ass
pressed against the other's belly. But they may have been
slandered..."

"They certainly were
asking for it," Belbo interrupted. "That Saint Bernard wasn't
stupid, was he?"

"Stupid, no. But he was
a monk himself, and in those days monks had their own strange ideas
about the body...I said before that maybe I was making this sound
too much like a Western, but now that I think about it...Listen to
what Bernard has to say about his beloved knights. I brought this
quotation with me, because it's worth hearing: ¡¥They shun and
abhor mimes, magicians, and jugglers, lewd songs and buffoonery;
they cut their hair short, for the apostle says it is shameful for
a man to groom his hair. Never are they seen coiffed, and rarely
washed. Their beards are unkempt, caked with dust and sweat from
their armor and the heat.' "

"I would hate to sleep
in their quarters," Belbo said.

"It's always been
characteristic of the hermit," Diotallevi declared, "to cultivate a
healthy filth, to humiliate his body. Wasn't it Saint Macarius who
lived on a column and picked up the worms that dropped from him and
put them back on his body so that they, who were also God's
creatures, might enjoy their banquet?''

"The stylite was Saint
Simeon," Belbo said, "and I think he stayed on that column so he
could spit on the people who walked below.''

"How I detest the
cynicism of the Enlightenment," Diotallevi said. "In any case,
whether Macarius or Simeon, I'm sure there was a stylite with
worms, but of course I'm no authority on the subject, since the
follies of the gentiles don't interest me."

"Whereas your Gerona
rabbis were spick and span," Belbo said.

"They lived in squalor
because you gentiles kept them in the ghetto. The Templars, on the
other hand, chose to be squalid."

"Let's not go
overboard," I said. "Have you ever seen a platoon of recruits after
a day's march? The reason I'm telling you all this is to help you
understand the dilemma of the Templar. He had to be mystic,
ascetic, no eating, drinking, or screwing, but at the same time he
roamed the desert cutting off the heads of Christ's enemies; the
more heads he cut off, the more points he earned for paradise. He
stank, got hairier every day, and then Bernard insisted that after
conquering a city he couldn't jump on top of some young girl¡Xor
old hag, for that matter. And on moonless nights, when the simoom
blew over the desert, he couldn't seek any favors from his favorite
fellow-soldier. How can you be a monk and a swordsman at the same
time, disemboweling people one minute and reciting Ave Marias the
next? They tell you not to look even your female cousin in the eye,
but when you enter a city, after days of siege, the other Crusaders
hump the caliph's wife before your very eyes, and marvelous
Shulammite women undo their bodices and say, Take me, Take me, but
spare my life...No, the Templar had to stay hard, reciting
compline, hairy and stinking, as Saint Bernard wanted him to. For
that matter, if you just read the retraits..."

"The what?"

"The statutes of the
order, drawn up rather late, after the order had put on its robe
and slippers, so to speak. There's nothing worse than an army when
the war is over. At one point, for instance, brawling is forbidden,
it's forbidden to wound a Christian for revenge, forbidden to have
commerce with women, forbidden to slander a brother. A Templar
could not allow a slave to escape, lose his temper and threaten to
defect to the Saracens, let a horse wander off, give away any
animal except a dog or cat, be absent without leave, break the
master's seal, go out of the barracks at night, lend the order's
money without authorization, or throw his habit on the ground in
anger."