The Templar Legacy

Steve Berry

New York: Ballantine Books, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-345-47616-6. Pp. 487, interview, maps

The name of Abbé Bérenger Saunière and the mystery of Rennes-le-Château should be familiar to anyone who has ever read anything about Languedoc, heard about The Da Vinci Code, or skimmed through the magnum opus of alternative history-that-never-happened-but-would-it-not-be-cool-if-it-had that was Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The long story made short, the good abbé was tending an unremarkable church in a sleepy and all but forgotten village in Southern France at the end of the 19th century. The buildings were falling apart on account of the villagers being unable to afford to restore them, and the depredations of the Revolution had not left much worth selling anyway. Then, somehow, the abbé found a way to finance the project. And not just that. He rebuilt the church, then proceeded to adorn its interior with custom-made sculpture, woodwork, and paintings, and even managed to built himself a nice villa where he continued to celebrate Mass as a free priest for a decade after refusing a transfer to another parish ordered by his bishop.

Where did he get the money? Why did he refuse to move? Why was he ordered to move? All good questions. Unfortunately (for novelists), they all have pretty simple and unexciting answers. You see, the good abbé ran an old-fashioned scam: he advertised his masses, and charged to say them (sort of like a chantry mill). The bishop must have started wondering just how many masses at the going rate the abbé had to perform to fund his extravagant flights of architectural fancy. The list would run over hundreds of pages and unless the abbé was speed-reciting and not sleeping, there was no way for him to perform all the masses he was charging for. The bishop ordered him to stop but he would not listen. So he ordered him transferred, and the abbé refused. He was tried for trafficking masses and this put a cramp in his grand style. He died broke. Of course, this story might make for a mild accounting scandal that would rate a footnote in a local history book, and would hardly bring tourist business to the region. So a local hotel owner by the name of Corbu came up with a better story: the abbé discovered an ancient treasure when he began excavating the church. Since he inconveniently died without revealing the secret to anyone, and because conspiracy thrives on the unprovable -- in this case, one cannot prove that he did not find anything -- a much more intriguing story was born. The fact that the abbé died in penury does not seem to discourage treasure hunters.

Berry joins the Saunière bandwagon by borrowing heavily from some of the legends popularized by Brown: there's not just a treasure but a secret. Naturally, revealing this secret would shake the foundations of Western civilization or at least of the Catholic church. Of course, every such secret must be old (probably to increase the culpability of the pope) and it must also preferably involve the Templars. The Templars, by the way, had themselves passed comfortably into historical oblivion before getting resurrected by 20th century propaganda. It was a powerful order but it ran afoul of the French crown at a time when the king controlled the pope (who lived in Avignon), so the latter had little trouble suppressing, sometimes violently, the order. Such a spectacular rise and sudden fall make for excellent drama and intense speculation (I wonder when someone would come up with a conspiracy to explain the equally dramatic rise and fall of the Heike clan in Japan).

What explains the Templars' ability to catapult themselves to the dizzy heights of European finance from the somewhat less than auspicious beginning raking hay in the former stables of King Solomon in Jerusalem? The inability to prove a negative comes to the rescue again: they must have found a secret in the Holy Land that would cause the pope to shake in his slippers. Suddenly, they had his personal blessing, they were exempt from local taxes, and so on and so forth. (We shall leave aside the pesky details that the Templars were not the most prominent banking network, the Italians were stronger or the fact that there are other monastic foundations with similar tax and authority privileges, e.g. Cluny, which, incidentally, grew and prospered for centuries). The debate still rages about what secret the Templars uncovered. Since they did not uncover anything, this debate is unhindered by any necessity to refer to actual historic data. When it isn't the Holy Grail, it must be the Lost Gospel of Someone Who Is The Only True Witness to Christ and Contradicts All Later Gospels. In this case, this someone is Peter. Yep, the first pope. Of course, he did not know he was the first pope. Neither did the Romans who killed him. Who can blame them?

And the secret that would shake the foundations of the Church? Jesus was a man. I am sorry, I had to say it. Otherwise there would not be much to gripe about in the rest of this review. Let me get this straight. The Templars, who even Berry contends were utterly devoted to the Christian cause, find out that their religion is basically a sham, nothing more than a new age feel-good weekend faith that today would be packaged in a book and sold by its author in speaking engagements and self-help seminars. No miracles, no fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, nothing. Just a dude with some nice things to say and who got killed for his trouble. No resurrection, unfortunately. Ok, so the first Templars find this out, and promptly blackmail the pope into granting them privileges. The pope, another sincere believer in Christ, agrees. Now, why would he do that? Why not, for instance, tell the Templars to go to hell (remember at this point, they are just a few guys who had been cleaning stables for a while)? What, exactly, are they going to do? Show the gospel to a largely illiterate world? And how would that differ from the hundreds of apocryphal writings that did not make it into the canon? Produce the skeleton of Jesus? And who, exactly, would be able to verify what it was? And how, exactly, would one go about verifying such a thing? Heck, even today we would have no clue. The best we could do would be to find out whether we could date it to the first century, and perhaps say how he died. And if we found he was crucified? Hmmm... let's see... oh wait! I know: we have such a skeleton (found in 1968). Unfortunately, somewhat younger than Jesus's supposed age, and the name did not match. It beggars imagination that the pope would not laugh the Templars out of Rome. And even if he did not, the subsequent pope suddenly found the nerve to agree to suppress the order? What happened to the good old blackmail?

In Berry's story, the Templars have survived their famous destruction in the 14th century and are minding their business in a remote monastery in the Pyrenees. They are unaware of the secret, it having been lost with the sudden imprisonment of Jacques de Molay, or the fabulous treasure, which was apparently spirited to safety but without leaving so much as a map. Well, ok, clues were left. That's what the abbé discovered. And not only that, but he deciphered them, found the treasure, and then proceeded to... no, not to shake the foundations of Western civilization or at least the Catholic church... just to build a gaudy local church. He also contrived to die forgotten and penniless. Talk about a tragedy. Anyway, after Corbu lit the fuse on speculative fiction about Rennes-le-Château, the Templar leadership had secretly followed the main scholar Lars Nelle in an attempt to free ride on his research. When the guy inconveniently commits suicide, the Master hatches an even more implausible scheme: he is going to lure the man's estranged foul-mouthed widow from the US. She is going to come, despite consistently despising her husband's work, and finish his job, despite having zero training in history, archaeology, or even linguistics. And why? Because the Master has set up an even more bizarre scheme to ensure that the leadership of the Order does not go to the ruthless marshal but to the Seneschal, and I am not going to bother telling you his identity (although you'd be forgiven to have guessed a halfway through the book).

There is a lot of chasing, in and out of Denmark, but mostly in southern France, which I always like. There are some puzzles, complete with inscriptions on gravestones and references to paintings whose reproductions are not provided. How predictable. The main character, Cotton Malone, is somewhat likeable although he is a bit slow. His boss, the widow, is truly annoying, mostly because for all her intelligence, all she does is run around like a headless chicken and spout profanities. Berry is not one to create strong female characters, at least not in the couple of novels I have read thus far. To prove my point, consider the mysterious beautiful lethal acrobatic smart cultured Muslim woman who lives in a French chateau, busies herself building a medieval castle using only medieval techniques (there is, in fact, such a project), and... well, hunting for the secret that would dethrone Christianity. She is a Muslim (with the decidedly un-Islamic name of Cassiopeia), but what really gets her goat is that Christianity came to dominate the West, which of course it did, but not without Islam's centuries-long attempt to snuff it out. But I digress.

Bad writing abounds. As usual for these novels, characters often interrupt their frenzied running, shooting, and puzzle-solving to explain to each other some historical detail or other. Case in point is the long discussion on p. 337-40 and 343-46 where the case is laid out for the gradual accretion of the divine into the Gospel. What I like to call the Theory of Creeping Divinity. Cassiopeia ventures that the Christians had to compete with many existing religions in order to attract followers, so Christ had to be made more than a "mere prophet" (324). This neglects the simple fact that the early Church labored hard to do precisely the opposite: "blend in" was its motto or else it was the lions in the coliseum. Ever wonder where the accommodation with the temporal rule came? "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's" and all that? It was attracting converts by word of mouth, by its appeal to women in particular and universal message (courtesy of Paul) in general. It is not at all clear to me that the early Christians had to put much stock in the literal story of the resurrection (Arianism, with its insistence that Jesus is not the same as the Father but came later, is just one of many versions that ranked Jesus lower than God).

And then there's the constant harping about inconsistencies in the Bible, a subject on which the equivalent of three tropical forests have been sacrificed. The whole thing about the inconsistencies in the Bible and Catholic conspiracies is the puzzle of the... inconsistencies in the Bible. If the Vatican was really as powerful, deceitful, and manipulative, it could have eradicated them, right? It could have agreed that only perfectly consistent writings would make it into the Bible, and then it could have the rest declared apocryphal. But it did not. One explanation is that it could not but another is that it did not care about these inconsistencies because nobody read the Gospels as historical narratives but as divinely inspired revelations.

Let me conclude my rant with a personal message of annoyance. When the author consistently refuses to use names for some characters, you just know there's something going on. It is a dead giveaway. Why did the first templar commit suicide when Malone chased him to the top of the tower (and cried out the Templar motto doing that!)? We are told that he did this to avoid exposing the Order. So, yelling beauseant and then leaping off the tower is somehow more inconspicuous than getting collared for attempted pickpocketing? And the Master's near-prophetic understanding of the human psyche? Please! He predicted everybody's moves with such uncanny perspicacity that he must have read Berry's first draft of the novel. And why, in the world, would he make Geoffrey keep secrets in the endgame? To hamper the cooperative effort to fulfill the very plan the Master had devised? My head hurts.

Overall, entertaining brain candy. You'd have to jog for 5 hours to do penance for all the empty calories you ingest reading it.

May 2, 2009