Note 281 — Chapter V · POLITICAL HERESY UTILIZED BY THE STATE.

Wilcke, II. 424.—Procès des Templiers, II. 218.—The flimsiness of the evidence which suffices to satisfy archaeologists of this kind is seen in the laborious trifling of M. Mignard, who finds in a sculptured stone coffer, discovered at Essarois in 1789, all the secrets of gnostic Manichæism, and who thereupon leaps to the conclusion that the coffer must have belonged to the Templars who had a preceptory within eight or ten miles of the place, and that it served as a receptacle for the Baphometic idol (Mignard, Monographie du coffret de M. le duc de Blacas, Paris, 1852.—Suite, 1853).

It is impossible to listen without respect to Professor Hans Prutz, whose labors in the archives of Valetta I have freely quoted above, and one can only view with regret the efforts of such a man wasted in piecing together contradictory statements of tortured witnesses to evolve out of them a dualistic heresy—an amalgamation of Catharan elements with Luciferan beliefs, to which even the unlucky Stedingers contribute corroboration (Geheimlehre u. Geheimstatuten des Tempelherren-Ordens, Berlin, 1879, pp. 62, 86, 100). It ought to be sufficient to prevent such wasted labor for the future, to call attention to the fact that if there had been ardor and conviction enough in the Order to risk the organization and propagation of a new heresy, there would, unquestionably, have been at least a few martyrs, such as all other heretical sects furnished. Yet not a single Templar avowed the faith attributed to them and persisted in it. All who confessed under the stress of the prosecution eagerly abjured the errors attributed to them and asked for absolution. A single case of obstinacy would have been worth to Philippe and Clement all the other testimony, and would have been made the pivotal point of the trials, but there was not one such. All the Templars who were burned were martyrs of another sort—men who had confessed under torture, had retracted their confessions, and who preferred the stake to the disgrace of persisting in the admission extorted from them. It does not seem to occur to the ingenious framers of heretical beliefs for the Templars that they must construct a heresy whose believers will not suffer death in its defence, but will endure to be burned in scores rather than submit to the stigma of having it ascribed to them. The mere statement of the case is enough to show the fabulous character of all the theories so laboriously constructed, especially that of M. Mignard, who proves that the Templars were Cathari—heretics whose aspiration for martyrdom was peculiarly notorious.

I have not been able to consult Loiseleur’s “La Doctrine Secrète des Templiers” (Orleans, 1872), but from Prutz’s references to it I gather that it is grounded on the same false basis and is open to the same easy refutation. Wilcke’s speculations are too perversely crude to be worth attention.