The Templars and the Shroud of Christ (13 page)

The imperial collection at Pharos filled with testimonies of every kind, including some (like the nappies of Baby Jesus or the milk of the Virgin) that make us smile today; but this must not make us forget the huge historical value of their presence. It had certainly not been ignorant peasants who had wanted them there and made them precious, but the greatest intellectuals of their times. There was something like a sense of deep emotion in rediscovering this human dimension of Jesus, something that the Eastern Christian world had neglected for centuries. After all, the absolute novelty of Christianity was that God had come to walk among ordinary people: the Greek text of the gospel of John says literally: “the Word was made flesh, and pitched his tent among us”.
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To contemplate Baby Jesus’ nappies was to be reminded that Christ had been a new-born baby like everyone else, and that Mary, whom the Byzantines called the Mother of God, had looked lovingly after him just as other mothers did with their children. Some objects show that God looks after man from close by, and is within his reach. And those of the Passion also had another thing to say: there is surely something of the divine in the sick, the dying the person crushed by suffering – in the faces of all those whose faces, in the adversities of life, can be superimposed on that unrecognisable face of Christ.

The transfer of the
mandylion
to the capital was a memorable event, during which a considerable amount of writings was produced. The study of all these sources proves of special interest: for the description of the
mandylion
and of its history, as narrated in the days of
Constantine VII, does not quite agree with what we know from the oldest sources. Several different things appear in it: details that seem custom made to “update” the legend in the light of a new and disconcerting truth.

Of flesh and blood

In 1997, the Roman historian Gino
Zaninotto noticed that inside a 10th century Greek manuscript of the Vatican Apostolic Library there was preserved a solemn speech written by
Gregory the Referendarius, the archdeacon of the cathedral of Hagia Sophia in
Constantinople who looked after the relationship between the Emperor and the Patriarch. Gregory went himself to Edessa in John
Curcuas’ mission to recover the
mandylion
in 944 and carefully investigated the city archives looking for the ancient documents telling the story of the image; he then wrote this homily, in which he celebrated the relic’s importance and gave a synthetic account of its history. The Referendarius’ account was thus far unpublished, one of many unknown treasures in the Pontiffs’ library, and it was published by Byzantine scholar André-Marie
Dubarle in the specialist periodical
Révue des Études Byzantines
.
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According to archdeacon
Gregory, the image is in fact an imprint, and is beautified by the drops of blood that fell from Christ’s wounded side: precedent tradition usually described the
mandylion
as a small piece of linen, as large as a hand-towel, as the name itself implies, which bore the only imprint in existence of the face of Jesus. But the homily of codex
Vaticanus Graecus 511
describes it as an imprint showing the chest with the mark of the spear and the flow of blood that had issued from that wound, that is, there was an image of the body at least from the waist up. According to the most ancient tradition, the
mandylion
had nothing to do with the death of Christ: it was simply his portrait when alive. The first records of this legend spoke of an exchange of letters between Jesus and
Abgar King of Edessa, identified as
Abgar V the Black; the sovereign had heard stories of Jesus’ great fame as healer, he knew that he was being sought to be killed, and so had a messenger to offer him a safe refuge in his city.

Eusebius of Caesarea, the very learned bishop who was Constantine the Great’s spiritual adviser, inserted the episode in his
Church History
, but with no mention of any image. In fact, this may well be due to
Eusebius’ own intervention, selecting from tradition only what he appreciated, and eliminating (or simply ignoring) what struck him as less worth sharing. We know that the bishop of Caesarea was strongly opposed to image-worship. There is a famous letter of his to Empress Constantia, who had heard that some Christian groups owned the true portrait of Jesus of Nazareth and asked the bishop to use his influence to let her have a copy. His answer was an undiplomatic, unmitigated reproof:

And yet if thou now declarest that thou askest me not for the image of the human form turned to God, but the icon of His mortal flesh, just as it was before His Transfiguration, then I answer: knowest thou not the passage where God commands that no image should be done of anything up in the heavens or down on earth?
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Such an attitude may strike us as over-cerebral, indeed unpleasant; but we must try to put ourselves in those people’s shoes and watch carefully the realities of their time.
Eusebius was certainly no unbeliever, but both a great theologian and most devout person: his basic concern was to ward off the danger of
idolatry, a risk which Christians felt to be most serious and ever lurking. In the Roman Empire it was a widespread custom to make realistic portraits of the dearly departed, and the tablets found in the necropolis of Fayyum in Egypt show that they worked hard to make these portraits as close to the original as possible; many are so accurate that they seem like photographs. The monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai preserves a couple of superb icons from the age of Emperor Justinian (527-565) representing Jesus and Saint Peter, which clearly come from this very tradition of Roman imperial-age portrait. Even a layman can tell that they are drawn from realistic portraits: the icon of Peter bears on top three round frames which hold the portraits of Saint John (shown as a young man of about 15), then Jesus and Mary, whose facial features are strikingly similar.
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From the earliest days, Christians used to keep portraits of Jesus, and also of Peter and Paul, in their homes, but
Eusebius did not approve: for many Christians were freshly converted from paganism on account of Constantine’s religious policy, and tended to worship these images no differently from the pagan
idols they had worshipped until shortly before then. Christianity required a total change of mentality, of the way to look at the world, and that could hardly be done in a few months. Meanwhile, as long as the neophytes had not developed a wholly Christian conscience, it was wiser to break altogether away with what had been part of their old pagan cult. Following this reasoned judgment,
Eusebius preferred not to have realistic figures of Christ at all, only ideal and symbolic figurations. Maybe for the same reason, Christian art from centuries I-IV preferred not to portray Jesus, but rather represent him by symbols (the fish, the anchor), by particular figures that hearkened back to the parables (the Good Shepherd), or again as a young god like Apollo, impersonally and perfectly beautiful, with a beauty that has nothing to do with the portraiture of an individual.
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Around the year 400, the legend of
Abgar reappeared in a new version, inside an unknown author’s text called
The Doctrine of Addai
: besides writing a letter to Jesus, according to this tale, King
Abgar had sent him a painter who was able to make a very faithful portrait, “picked out in marvellous colours”; then, about a hundred years later, Armenia’s historian Moses of Korene spoke of the
mandylion
as of an image painted on a silk curtain. In the course of the sixth century, and particularly when Edessa suffered a Persian conquest, people began to speak of the
mandylion
no longer as of a painter’s portrait, but as of an
acheropita
, an image made not by human hands but by miracle; according to the Byzantine historian
Evagrius, who lived in that period, the people of Edessa thought it a relic of immense power and used it in certain rituals thanks to which they had been saved from the enemies.
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It was only with the expedition of General John
Curcuas under
Romanus I in the year 943, and the transfer of the image to
Constantinople, that the
mandylion’s
tradition started to be filled with references to the Passion of Christ. These references were very clear, yet there was a clear attempt to gloss over them in embarrassment: clearly they had found out that the image of Jesus on cloth was the image of a dead Jesus, a detail of no small importance which tradition had left unmentioned.
Gregory the Referendarius and
Curcuas the general had gone to Edessa with an army to bring back to their homeland a truthful picture of Jesus of immense fame; what they surely expected was an effigy of “Christ Pantocrator”, the mighty Lord of the Universe, smiling and bless the faithful from the shining gold of the mosaics on the wall of great churches: an image on whose pattern the Emperor of
Constantinople had been represented since the days of Justinian, and in a way since Constantine had been celebrated as Christ’s Vicar on Earth and equal to the Apostles.
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Gregory the Referendarius and John
Curcuas expected to see the portrait of a divinely handsome face, a portrait of a living Jesus capable of developing the most profound sense of majesty, such as pertains only to the Lord of the World and his earthly follower, the Emperor. Instead they were faced with the frightful imprint of a dead man, the corpse of a man killed by the cross, with his whole body tormented with wounds. There was blood on the
mandylion
: not a few drops here and there, but a vast flood, as visible as what can come out of a human chest torn open. Instead of the King of Kings, they met in Edessa the Man of Sorrows. Nothing could have been further from the glory of the Byzantine Emperor than that pitiful view, almost the very symbol of mankind defeated by suffering and by death. And yet the
mandylion
had an ineffable quality the sources don’t describe for us, and that something gave the two officials the nerve to appear before the Emperor with an object so radically different from anything that had been expected. The documents telling of its arrival contain curious details, hard at first to understand: the children of the Emperor Romanus look at the relic but cannot distinguish the details, while his son-in-law Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who was to inherit the throne, immediately sees every detail and feels an immense emotion. What does that mean? When compared with the Shroud of Turin, as Ian
Wilson wishes, this account seems very credible, because it is well known that the image of the Shroud has the curious optical property already mentioned: it is visible only if one stands at least two metres from it, but swiftly vanishes when one tries to get closer. It is my own personal view that there is something more to be read there: that is, that
Constantine VII can see the image because he can accept it as it is: for a special reason, unlike so many of his contemporaries before him, he can appreciate a portrait of Christ with the unmistakable signs of suffering and death. Discovering the
mandylion’s
“true identity” was surely a shock, and also raised the delicate issue of explaining and justifying how tradition seemed to have kept it hidden behind the notion of a simple portrait; nonetheless
Gregory the Referendarius certified it as authentic, for he was sure that the Emperor would have welcomed it with great satisfaction, even after he had discovered the incredible news.
Romanus I had had a long hard struggle against
Paulicians and other heretical groups that sprang up here and there throughout the Empire and exploited religious ideas to challenge the imperial authority.
Paulicians and other sects of the same kind derived their beliefs from the ancient
Gnostic heresy that had spread great confusion in the first centuries of the Christian era, especially among eastern churches. Though divided into separate groups that followed different Gospels,
Gnostics had in common one strong belief: Jesus had not really been a man of flesh and bone, but a pure spirit, a kind of angel who appeared on earth who did not possess a human body but only a human appearance. The Christ was both a symbol and a celestial messenger who had become manifest among men to teach them how to reach the knowledge of God (in Greek,
gnòsis
); and once his mission had been accomplished, he had returned to his original dimension. According to the
Gnostics, the Christ had never been incarnated, had never suffered Passion, had never died, and of course, he had never been resurrected.
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The Emperor
Romanus I had understood that a religious struggle could not only be fought by armed power, but that a confrontation on the level of ideas was also necessary. Even the famous
mandylion
of tradition could have helped refute the heretics, since it was a realistic portrait of the face of that Christ of whom they said that he had never had a real human body; this weird, disquieting object from Edessa also showed him in the form of a dreadfully human nature, a stunning and agonized realism. Owning his funeral shroud with all the marks of the Passion, to the point of being soaked with the flow of blood from his ribs, meant proving to the whole world that the heretics preached a falsehood.

Gregory the Referendarius was a regular at Romanus’ court because of his diplomatic duties, and he certainly knew the mind and attitudes of the whole imperial family. He was a diplomatist and an expert in politics; he judged that the relic could also be a most powerful weapon in the ideological struggle against the proliferating heresies, and at least a few of
Romanus I’s relatives was sure to appreciate it. It was a smart decision: within a few months, young
Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus rose to the Imperial throne of Byzantium and made the
mandylion
the most worshipped and celebrated object in the whole Empire.

It is in fact during this man’s very long reign that Byzantine religious thinking experienced a remarkable development, which placed to the forefront in both liturgy and theology the figure of the suffering Christ, the dead body tormented by the Passion, whereas before it had extolled practically only the risen one, shining with glory. They also introduced a new piece of liturgical apparel called
epitàphios
, a cloth bearing the embroidered or painted image of Christ in the Sepulchre before the Resurrection, with its hands joined over the pubis just as they are seen in the Shroud of Turin.
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It is very difficult, perhaps even historically impossible, that this change should be independent from what they had just discovered about the nature of the
mandylion
. What could be seen on the cloth once unfolded impressed contemporaries so strongly as to stimulate theological research towards hitherto unexplored directions, so powerful as to change the religious sensitivities of a world. Byzantium rediscovered the Crucifix as the image of a man annihilated by the violence of other men, naked, bloodied, his head fallen down on a no longer breathing chest. For centuries they had represented him with the open eyes of a living man and with a serene face showing no hint of pain, often even richly dressed in purple and wearing a golden diadem instead of a crown of thorns. For nearly a thousand years the faithful had worshipped the illogical image of an emperor in sumptuous dress, finding himself near the cross almost by chance, majestic and impossible; in the end, even without having to drift into heresy, the idea that the Chosen of God could be executed like a common criminal had trouble being accepted. Now, however, the theologians looked to a new dimension of the faith, and mystics found themselves weeping at the wounds of Jesus.
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