Temple and Contemplation brings together for the first ... - ImagoMundi

The Imago Templi in Confrontation with
Secular Norms
I. The Imago Templi at "the meeting-place of the two seas"
A great Jewish writer of our time, Elie Wiesel, has chosen as the epigraph
to one of the most poignant of his books, Le serment de Kolvillag, 1 the
following quotation from the Talmud: "If peoples and nations had known
the evil they were inflicting on themselves by destroying the Temple of
Jerusalem, they would have wept more than the children of Israel." I was
still pondering the far-reaching implications of these lines when, in a
recent work, 2 I came across another epigraph, taken this time from the
historian Ignaz von Dollinger: "If I were asked to name the dies nefastus in
the history of the world, the day that would come to my mind would be
none other than October 13, 1307" (the day when Philip the Fair ordered
the mass arrest of the French Templars). A few pages further on, the same
work makes mention of "a legend whose setting is the amphitheatre of
Gavarnie in the Pyrenees, where six knights of the Temple lie at rest in a
chapel. Every year, on March 18—the birthday of the last Grand Master
of the Order— a knight of the Temple is seen to appear, whose shroud is
replaced by the famous white cloak with the four-triangled red cross. He is
in battle apparel and holds his lance in rest. He walks slowly towards the
centre of the chapel and utters a piercing call, which re-echoes around the
amphitheatre of mountains: 'Who will defend the holy Temple? Who will
deliver the tomb of Christ?' At his call, the six entombed Templars come
alive and stand up, to answer three times: 'No one! No one! No one! The
Temple is destroyed.'" 3
The lamentations of the Talmudist sages and the doleful cry resounding
1 Elie Wiesel, Le Serment de Kolvillag (Paris, Ed. du Seuil, 1973), p. 6.
a Pierre Mariel, Guide . . . des Templiers (Paris, Table Ronde, 1973), p. 7.
3 Ibid., pp. 131-132.
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