Memories & Inspirations of Templarism: Lisieux
One of the finest representations of the crucifix that I’ve seen resides in the cathedral at Lisieux in France.
It towers high, shaped and detailed to replica real wood. The most interesting feature is the snake twined around the vertical. Throughout Christianity the symbol of a snake has represented temptation and evil but it’s pre-Christian symbolism has been hidden and is the most relevant in its representation of rebirth and new life, through how the snake sheds its skin. This powerful symbology correlates to the rebirth of Jesus, as he shed his Earthly, humanoid body and ascended into spiritual form.
When exploring spirituality and faith you must be prepared to research patterns and symbols of mystic that most would not consider. At Lisieux there is an intriguing mysticism to the storytelling of the life of Saint Theresa who founded the mission.
In the story below I was interested in the statement that they required a trinity of poses and that of all the possible witnesses it is that of the gardener who is referenced. This is significant in that when Jesus is reported as having appeared to Mary in the garden of his burial, Mary mistook him for the gardener. Was her comment intended for his ears because it was only a murmur but he heard the words and it could be understood as a a comment directed at him, encouraging him to take her spirit through death.
There is also the comment of Therese’s naming being sounding a though she is a child of Jesus, a theme of a number of the stories recounted throughout the church. It was on 10 January 1889 when Saint Therese was given the habit that she received the formal name of Thérèse of the Child Jesus.
It is this that intrigued me to look further and exploring this suggestion further finds some other interesting contributions such as Saint Therese being popularly known as "The Little Flower of Jesus" and she is regarded as one of the most popular saints in the history of the church.
Saint Therese is regarded as a highly influential model of sanctity for many catholics. Together with Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Thérèse is one of the most popular Roman Catholic saints since apostolic times. Pope Saint Pius X called her "the greatest saint of modern times".
Saint Therese’s parents remain the first and only married couple to be canonized.
Louis Martin, Thérèse’s father gave pet names to his children and Therese was his petite reine, little queen, to whom all treasures belonged.
It was Christmas Eve of 1886 that Thérèse her "complete conversion." Years later she stated that on that night she overcame the pressures she had faced since the death of her mother and said that "God worked a little miracle to make me grow up in an instant ... On that blessed night … Jesus, who saw fit to make Himself a child out of love for me, saw fit to have me come forth from the swaddling clothes and imperfections of childhood"
After her death Therese’s body was exhumed in September 1910 and the remains placed in a lead coffin and transferred to another tomb.
Saint Therese was recognised as a Doctor of the Church, a title given by the Catholic Church to saints whom they recognize as having made significant contribution to theology or doctrine through their research study, or writing. This title is an English interpretation of the original Latin title in which Doctor means Teacher, a title be which Jesus was commonly known.
Other Doctor’s of the Church include Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 20 August 1153), a French abbot and a major leader in the reform of Benedictine monasticism that caused the formation of the Cistercian order. In the year 1128, Bernard attended the Council of Troyes and created the Rule of the Knights Templar, which soon became the ideal of Christian nobility.
In 1895 Saint Theresa composed the poem "My Heaven down here", was this in reference to Theresa having knowledge of heaven and how it could be transposed on Earth? In the poem Therese expresses the notion that by the divine union of love, the soul takes on the semblance of Christ. By contemplating the sufferings associated with the Holy Face of Jesus, she felt she could become closer to Christ. She wrote the words "Make me resemble you, Jesus!" on a small card and attached a stamp with an image of the Holy Face. She pinned the prayer in a small container over her heart.
On her death-bed Saint Therese said, "I only love simplicity. I have a horror of pretence", was this perhaps a reference to her own pretence of her own relationship with Jesus?
Pope Benedict XV dispensed with the usual fifty-year delay required between death and beatification and on 14th August 1921, he promulgated the decree on the heroic virtues of Thérèse declaring her "Venerable". She was beatified on 29th April 1923. Therese was canonized on 17th May 1925 by Pope Pius XI, only 28 years after her death.
It is interesting that Thérèse was declared a saint five years and a day after Joan of Arc. As yet the reason for the exactness for this timing is not clear.
However, the 1925 celebration for Thérèse "far outshone" that for the legendary heroine of France. Pope Pius XI revived the old custom of covering St. Peter's with torches and tallow lamps. According to one account, "Ropes, lamps and tallows were pulled from the dusty storerooms where they had been packed away for 55 years. A few old workmen who remembered how it was done the last time, in 1870, directed 300 men for two weeks as they climbed about fastening lamps to St. Peter's dome." The New York Times ran a front-page story about the occasion titled, "All Rome Admires St. Peter's Aglow for a New Saint".
According to the Times, over 60,000 people, estimated to be the largest crowd inside St. Peter's Basilica since the coronation of Pope Saint Pius X, 22 years before, witnessed the canonization ceremonies. In the evening, 500,000 pilgrims pressed into the lit square.
She rapidly became one of the most popular saints of the twentieth century. Her feast day was added to the General Roman Calendar in for celebration on October 3rd. In 1969, 42 years later, Pope Paul VI moved it to October 1st, the day after her dies natalis (birthday to heaven).
In 1944 Pope Pius XII decreed her a co-patron of France with Saint Joan of Arc. The principal patron of France is the Blessed Virgin Mary.
By the Apostolic Letter Divini Amoris Scientia (The Science of Divine Love) of 19th October 1997, Pope Saint John Paul II declared her the thirty-third Doctor of the Church, the youngest person, and one of only four women so named, the others being Teresa of Ávila (Saint Teresa of Jesus), Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena.
This small group of women becomes of great interest to focus the research on Saint Theresa’s peer group to further explore the understanding of the importance and relevance of her being made a Doctor of the Church and associated with them.
Teresa of Avila is a particularly interesting individual with whom to start. Teresa is also known as Saint Teresa of Jesus who lived 28th March 1515 – 4th October 1582 was known as a prominent Spainish mystic; mysticism being in strong association with pre-Christian faiths.
Her paternal grandfather, Juan Sánchez de Toledo, was a marrano (a Jewish man who was forcibly converted to Christianity). When Teresa's father was a child, Juan was condemned by the Spanish Inquisition for allegedly returning to the Jewish faith, but he was able to convince them otherwise and re-assume a Christian identity. A Jewish family legacy brings Teresa’s lineage closer to a possible connection with the blood line of Jesus.
When her mother died, Teresa found comfort in a deep devotion to the Virgin Mary as her spiritual mother, perhaps a natural calling.
Teresa’s connection to an older religious faith manifested in her widening learning of spiritualism. As the Catholic distinction between mortal and venial sin became clear to her, she says she came to understand the awful terror of sin and the inherent nature of original sin. She also became conscious of her own natural impotence in confronting sin and the necessity of absolute subjection to God.
Around 1556, various friends suggested that her newfound knowledge was diabolical, not divine. This knowledge could have been an indicator of Teresa’s learning of a secret or hidden knowledge shared through her lineage, through the relationship of her blood line.
She began to inflict various tortures and mortifications of the flesh upon herself. But her confessor, the Jesuit Saint Francis Borgia, reassured her of the divine inspiration of her thoughts. On St. Peter's Day in 1559, Teresa became firmly convinced that Jesus Christ presented himself to her in bodily form, though invisible. These visions lasted almost uninterrupted for more than two years. In another vision, a seraph drove the fiery point of a golden lance repeatedly through her heart, causing an ineffable spiritual and bodily pain:
“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it...”
This vision was the inspiration for one of Bernini's most famous works, the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.
By Alvesgaspar - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43527951
This iconic work of art which was used as an inspiration for Robert Langdon investigation of the path to Illumination in Angels and Demons. As in the movie is this a hidden message that directs your attention to the truth of a connection of the illuminati to Teresa and her pre-Christian heritage, which carries the power of knowledge that could threaten to bring down the mysticism and power of the church.
Another of the earlier female Doctors of the Church was Hildegard of Bingen 1098 – 17 September 1179 a German Benedictine abbess, writer, composer, philosopher, Christian mystic, visionary, and polymath.
Saint Hildegard wrote Liber Divinorum Operum "Universal Man" about 400 years before the image and interpretation of the mystery of man was immortalised in Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
This was Saint Hildegard's last and grandest visionary work had its genesis in one of the few times she experienced something like an ecstatic loss of consciousness. As she described it in an autobiographical passage included in her Vita, sometime in about 1163, she received "an extraordinary mystical vision" in which was revealed the "sprinkling drops of sweet rain" that John the Evangelist experienced when he wrote, "In the beginning was the Word..." (John 1:1). Hildegard perceived that this Word was the key to the "Work of God", of which humankind is the pinnacle.
The Book of Divine Works, therefore, became in many ways an extended explication of the Prologue to John's Gospel.The ten visions of this work's three parts are cosmic in scale, to illustrate various ways of understanding the relationship between God and his creation. Often, that relationship is established by grand allegorical female figures representing Divine Love (Caritas) or Wisdom (Sapientia). The true, overwhelming influence and power of femininity is divine in many aspects.
The first vision opens the work with a salvo of poetic and visionary images, swirling about to characterize God's dynamic activity within the scope of his work within the history of salvation.
The remaining three visions of the first part introduce the famous image of a human being standing astride the spheres that make up the universe, and detail the intricate relationships between the human as microcosm and the universe as macrocosm. This culminates in the final chapter of Part One, Vision Four with Hildegard's commentary on the Prologue to John's Gospel (John 1:1-14), a direct rumination on the meaning of "In the beginning was the Word..." The single vision that comprises the whole of Part Two stretches that rumination back to the opening of Genesis, and forms an extended commentary on the seven days of the creation of the world told in Genesis 1-2:3. This commentary interprets each day of creation in three ways: literal or cosmological; allegorical or ecclesiological (i.e. related to the Church's history); and moral or tropological (i.e. related to the soul's growth in virtue).
Finally, the five visions of the third part take up again the building imagery of Scivias to describe the course of salvation history. The final vision (3.5) contains Hildegard's longest and most detailed prophetic program of the life of the Church from her own days of "womanish weakness" through to the coming and ultimate downfall of the Antichrist.
This incredible work of vision and divine inspiration could be some of the greatest wisdom ever bestowed upon humanity. Imagine for a moment if just one of these visions were real and a true message from God through Hildegard. This and her other works of vision interpretation reveal the meaning behind creation, our relationship to divinity and the universe pre-Bible scripture.
Saint Hildegard’s inspired knowledge and wisdom are clearly expressed through her medicinal and scientific writings, though thematically complementary to her ideas about nature expressed in her visionary works, they are different in focus and scope. Neither claim to be rooted in her visionary experience and its divine authority. Rather, they spring from her experience helping in and then leading the monastery's herbal garden and infirmary, as well as the theoretical information she likely gained through her wide-ranging reading in the monastery's library, a library no doubt of great wealth in ancient, pre-Christian knowledge. As she gained practical skills in diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment, she combined physical treatment of physical diseases with holistic methods centered on "spiritual healing." She became well known for her healing powers involving practical application of tinctures, herbs, and precious stones. She combined these elements with a theological notion ultimately derived from Genesis: all things put on earth are for the use of humans. In addition to her hands-on experience, she also gained medical knowledge, including elements of her humoral theory, from traditional Latin texts.
Hildegard cataloged both her theory and practice in two works. The first, Physica, containg nine books that describe the scientific and medicinal properties of various plants, stones, fish, reptiles, and animals. The second, Causae et Curae, is an exploration of the human body, its connections to the rest of the natural world, and the causes and cures of various diseases.
In the first part of Causae et Curae there is the context of the creation of the cosmos and then humanity as its summit, and the constant interplay of the human person as microcosm both physically and spiritually with the macrocosm of the universe informs all of Hildegard's approach. Her hallmark is to emphasize the vital connection between the "green" health of the natural world and the holistic health of the human person. Viriditas, or greening power, was thought to sustain human beings and could be manipulated by adjusting the balance of elements within a person. Thus, when she approached medicine as a type of gardening, it was not just as an analogy. Rather, Hildegard understood the plants and elements of the garden as direct counterparts to the humors and elements within the human body, whose imbalance led to illness and disease.
Thus, the nearly three hundred chapters of the second book of Causae et Curae "explore the etiology, or causes, of disease as well as human sexuality, psychology, and physiology." In this section, she give specific instructions for bleeding based on various factors, including gender, the phase of the moon (bleeding is best done when moon is waning), the place of disease (use veins near diseased organ of body part) or prevention (big veins in arms), and how much blood to take (described in imprecise measurements, like "the amount that a thirsty person can swallow in one gulp").
In the third and fourth sections, Hildegard describes treatments for malignant and minor problems and diseases according to the humoral theory, again including information on animal health.
The fifth section is about diagnosis and prognosis, which includes instructions to check the patient's blood, pulse, urine and stool. Finally, the sixth section documents a lunar horoscope to provide an additional means of prognosis for both disease and other medical conditions, such as conception and the outcome of pregnancy. For example, she indicates that a waxing moon is good for human conception and is also good for sowing seeds for plants (sowing seeds is the plant equivalent of conception). Elsewhere, Hildegard is even said to have stressed the value of boiling drinking water in an attempt to prevent infection.
As Hildegard elaborates the medical and scientific relationship between the human microcosm and the macrocosm of the universe, she often focuses on interrelated patterns of four: "the four elements (fire, air, water, and earth), the four seasons, the four humors, the four zones of the earth, and the four major winds."
Although she inherited the basic framework of humoral theory from ancient medicine, Hildegard's conception of the hierarchical inter-balance of the four humors (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) was unique, based on their correspondence to "superior" and "inferior" elements, blood and phlegm corresponding to the "celestial" elements of fire and air, and the two biles corresponding to the "terrestrial" elements of water and earth. Hildegard understood the disease-causing imbalance of these humors to result from the improper dominance of the subordinate humors. This disharmony reflects that introduced by Adam and Eve in the Fall, which for Hildegard marked the indelible entrance of disease and humoral imbalance into humankind. As she writes in Causae et Curae c. 42:
“It happens that certain men suffer diverse illnesses. This comes from the phlegm which is superabundant within them. For if man had remained in paradise, he would not have had the flegmata within his body, from which many evils proceed, but his flesh would have been whole and without dark humor [livor]. However, because he consented to evil and relinquished good, he was made into a likeness of the earth, which produces good and useful herbs, as well as bad and useless ones, and which has in itself both good and evil moistures. From tasting evil, the blood of the sons of Adam was turned into the poison of semen, out of which the sons of man are begotten. And therefore their flesh is ulcerated and permeable [to disease]. These sores and openings create a certain storm and smoky moisture in men, from which the flegmata arise and coagulate, which then introduce diverse infirmities to the human body. All this arose from the first evil, which man began at the start, because if Adam had remained in paradise, he would have had the sweetest health, and the best dwelling-place, just as the strongest balsam emits the best odor; but on the contrary, man now has within himself poison and phlegm and diverse illnesses.”
Saint Hildegard is the first recorded female Doctor of the Church, a record of spiritually inspired, women who are revered, even officially by the church, for their expansion and exploration of spiritualism, even though this challenged doctrine and sanctioned Christian belief or was this acceptance how the church continued its millenia of the assimilation of the truth of the bloodline of Jesus and the truth of the nature of the divine symbiotic relationship and harmony between all life.
