The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal: Book IX: II. Some Alleged Secret Schools of the Middle Ages
Perhaps no Christian sect has been the subject of more foolish misapprehension than the Albigenses, and this on all sides, but more especially on the part of writers who represent the borderland of mystic thought. Against the iniquity of Albigensian persecution in the past, we have later the folly, not unmixed with dishonesty, of the Protestant apologists; but worse perhaps than the rest is that folly which has attempted to connect the sect and its exponents in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the literature of the Holy Graal. The initial impulse in this direction is found in speculations, criticisms and modes of interpretation with which France made us familiar about the middle of the nineteenth century, and this leading has been followed by a few writers in England who scarcely know their subject, and offer reflections of opinion which has risen up in obscure and unaccepted places. For the purpose of this investigation I care nothing whether the Albigenses were pure Christians, as pure Christianity is understood according to sectarian canons, or whether they were Manichæans. The all-important question is the light under which they presented Eucharistic doctrine, and from this standpoint it is certain that they could have had no connection with the development of the Graal cycle. If they were Manichæans, they had a voided and tinkered Eucharist, from which nothing follows in connection with that mystery. If, on the other hand, they were the Protestants of their period, they would as such deny most of the sacraments, and in respect of doctrine, at least, they would have tampered doubtless with the Eucharist. Setting aside for a moment some Parsifal and Titurel are representative of the entire literature. As regards chivalry, his thesis can be stated shortly: The actual, historical, feudal chivalry was an institution more or less savage, and the chivalry set forth in the romances had no existence on earth. This is equivalent to saying that the heroes and heroines of Mrs. Radcliffe, the modes and manners which she depicts, the spirit which characterises her episodes, perhaps even the scenes which she describes so graphically at hearsay, are never found in real life, though sentimentalism is always sentimentalism, mountains are always mountains, and as regards the Pyrenees in particular they are situated indubitably between France and Spain. The thing goes without saying in each case, for the romance, one would say, is--well, precisely a romance. But on the basis of this transparent fact, M. Aroux builds his theory that the books of chivalry were the corpus doctrinale and literary body-politic of the Protestantism of its period, reduced to this resource because of the intolerant powers that were. And this is just what appears to be so highly ridiculous, not because a literature cannot have concealed motives, or that of the Graal among them, but because it could be shown in a still more conclusive manner that the Confessional of the Black Penitents was the final rescript of the followers of Manes. And this seems to be intolerable. Speaking generally as to the canon of criticism, it isSOME ALLEGED SECRET SCHOOLS OF THE MIDDLE AGES
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