Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 14.djvu/553

 TEMPLE

495

TEMPLE

secular arm, but, by a rigid interpretation of this provision, those who had withdrawn their former confessions were considered relapsed heretics; thus fifty-four Templars who had recanted after having confessed were condemned as relapsed and publicly burned on 12 May, 1310. Subsequently all the other Templars, who had been examined at the trial, with very few exceptions declared themselves guilty. At the same time the papal commission, appointed to examine the cause of the order, had entered upon its duties and gathered together the documents which were to be submitted to the pope, and to the general council called to decide as to the final fate of the order. The culpability of single persons, which was looked upon as established, did not involve the guilt of the order. Although the defence of the order was poorly conducted, it could not be proved that the order as a body professed any heretical doctrine, or that a secret rule, distinct from the official rule, was practised. Consequently, at the General Council of Vienne in Dauphine on 16 October, 1311, the majority were favourable to the maintenance of the order. The pope, irresolute and harassed, finally adopted a middle course: he decreed the dissolution, not the condemnation of the order, and not bj' penal sentence, but by an Apostolic Decree (Bull of 22 March, 1312). The order having been suppressed, the pope himself was to decide as to the fate of its members and the disposal of its possessions. As to the property, it was turned over to the rival Order of Hospitallers to be applied to its original use, namely the defence of the Holy Places. In Portugal, how- ever, and in Aragon the possessions were vested in two new orders, the Order of Christ in Portugal and the Order of Montesa in Aragon. As to the members, the Templars recognized guiltless were allowed either to join another military order or to return to the secular state. In the latter ca.se, a pension for life, charged to the possessions of the order, was granted them. On the other hand, the Templars who had pleaded guilty before their bishops were to be treated "according to the rigours of justice, tempered by a generous mercy".

The pope reserved to his own judgment the cause of the grand master and his three first dignitaries. They had confessed their guilt; it remained to reconcile them with the Church, after thej- had testified to their repentance with the customary solemnity. To give this solemnity more publicit}', a platform was erected in front of the Notre-Dame for the reading of the sentence. But at the supreme moment the grand master recovered his courage and proclaimed the innocence of the Templars and the falsity of his own alleged confessions. To atone for this deplorable moment of weakness, he declared him- self ready to sacrifice his hfe. He knew the fate that awaited him. Immediately after this unexpected coup-de-thedtre he was arrested as a relapsed heretic with another dignitary who chose to share his fate, and by order of Philip they were burned at the stake before the gates of the palace. This brave death deeply impressed the people, and, as it happened that the pope and the king died shortly afterwards, the legend spread that the grand master in the midst of the flames had summoned them both to appear in the course of the year before the tribunal of God. Such was the tragic end of the Templars. If we con- sider that the Order of the Hospitallers finally inher- ited, although not without difficulties, the property of the Templars and received many of its members, we may say that the result of the trial w;is prac- tically equivalent to the long-proposed amalgamation of the two rival orders. For the Knights (first of Rhodes, afterwards of Malta) took up and carried on elsewhere the work of thi- Knights f)f the Temple.

This formidable trial, the gre.itrst ever brought to light whether we consider the large number of accused,

the difficulty of discovering the truth from a mass of suspicious and contradictory evidence, or the many jurisdictions in activity simultaneously in all parts of Christendom from Great Britain to Cyprus, is not yet ended. It is still passionately discussed by historians who have divided into two camps, for and against the order. To mention only the principal ones, the following find the order guilty: Dupuy (1654), Hammer (1820), Wilcke (1826), Michelet (1841), Loiseleur (1872), Prutz (1888), and Rastoul (1905); the following find it innocent: Father Le- jeune (1789), Raynouard (1813), Havemann (1846), Ladvocat (1880), SchottmuUer (1887), Gmelin (1893), Lea (1888), Fincke (1908). Without taking any side in this discussion, which is not yet exhausted, we may observe that the latest documents brought to light, particularly tho.se which Fincke has recently extracted from the archives of the Kingdom of Aragon, tell more and more strongly in favour of the order.

In chronological order, tlif ino^t irntiMrtnit unrks are: Dupcis, Hist, rlc VoTdrc mititairc fl< ,'"/>/)■ l^[i^ I'i''^): Lejeune, //i^^ critique el apologHiir" ^ -^nHrrs (2 vols.,

P.-iris, 17.S9); Wiix-KE, ft- ' ; J vols... 2nd ed.,

H^ill.-. IMUIl: I'Hi-Tz. Bii'u '. '. /, ,/.-■ Trmpel-

or,l.'. .1',. rliri 1 ssM ; f.MKr I ■,. > ' !■ mpcl-

Muri-I.

des

ilc du

tim,.l.' (I'.UL-. isslli; Dir urs/.rii.;-... i ., ... . .ijulburg,

190.3); VlOLLET, Les intcrrogatoircs dc Jacques dc Molaii (Paris, 1910). See also Clement V.

Charles Moeller.

Temple. — The Latin form, lemplum, from which the English temple is derived, originally signified an uncovered area marked off by boundaries; especially a space marked off bj' the augurs to be excepted from all profane uses. Among the Romans the precinrfs of a temple were always quadrangular in ground plan; hence the so-called temple of Vesta, one of the most famous sanctuaries of Rome, being circular in plan, was not strictly a temple, but only an (rdcs sncrn, or sacred building. When the augurs had determined the boundaries of a temiile-enclosure, the boundary lines could not lawfully be interrupted except at one point, which was to serve as an entrance. To mark these boundaries no walls were needed; a formula S])oken by the augur was sufficient, and from this cere- mony, came the phrase ef[ari locum, literally, "to pro- claim a place", hence, to define and dedicate.

It is certain that the Indo-Germanic peoples orig- inally had no buildings for the worship of their gods, but worshipped the gods upon mountains, as Herodo- tus expressly says of t he Persians, or believed the super- natural beings were present in groves and trees. Consequently among the ancient Germans the con- ception of a grove was identified with that of a temple. Among the Greeks, also, the worship of trees seems to be indicated by the word for temple, va6s, which, ac- cording to some authorities, signified originally "tree" or "tree-trunk". It is certain that the Greeks be- lieved that at Dodona they heard the voice of the gods foretelling the future from the rustling of the sacred oaks. In the Homeric age, the temple as a space set apart and containing an altar, which was perhaps shaded by a group of trees, was more com- monly found than the temple built bj- man. If actual temples are ment ioned in Homer, as at Troy and the fabulous city of the Phffacians, the circumstance is probably attributable to Oriental influence. The pagan Gennans were never able to bring themselves to give up their original worship of the gods in groves to any such extent as the Greeks and Romans did under the influence of the East. Still the German peoples were hardly entirely without temples, any more than the Scandinavians, although these temples could only have been of wood. The beginnings of stone temples among the Germans probably go back to the first Christian centuries and are attributable to the influence of their neighbours, tlie Gauls.

When new temples were built precincts already con-