Conon, like every other knight, has no temptation to unbelief. The doctors of the Church know all about religion, just as the king's falconers know all about hawking. It is sensible to trust the expert. If you ask idle questions, you merely risk your soul, as do the followers of Mahound, the false prophet. The baron frequently denounces the arrogance and covetousness of the clergy and resists their pretentions, but he nevertheless trusts them to supply him with the Sacraments and bless his death and burial so that his soul may pass promptly through purgatory into paradise—where existence presumably is one grand admixture of a marriage feast in a fine garden and of a magnificent tournament. Plenty of knights are lax and blasphemous, but they hardly are deliberately unbelieving.[84] Good knights ought to hear mass every morning; venerate holy objects and places; hate Jews and Saracens; worship the Virgin and the saints; also keep most of the major fasts and other special occasions of the Church. Conon does all these things. He is "a good Christian." But he is exempted from any serious thinking for himself upon mysterious matters.
A GROUP OF PRIESTS, THIRTEENTH CENTURY
The one who is near the altar is wearing a chasuble and the second and third are clad in the dalmatica, or deacon's gown. The second carries the consecrated wafer and the third a sort of fan. (From a manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale.)
When Conon prays in the morning, if not hurried he lies down with his head turned toward the east, and his arms stretched out like a cross. He recites the favors which God has shown him in the past, beseeches Heaven to continue favorable. Often he adds a Credo and a certain paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer then very common—"Our Father, who desirest that we all be saved, grant that we acquire Thy love even as have the angels who do thy pleasure on high; and give us our daily bread—for the soul the Holy Sacrament, and for the body its needful sustenance." Yet if his mood is not unusually humble and contrite, he is likely to conclude patronizingly, "And I confide also in the strength of my heart, which thou hast bestowed, in my good sword and my fleet horse, yet especially in Thee!"
Many a cavalier breaks into blasphemies when things go wrong. Such men are like William Rufus of England, who cried, "God shall never see me a good man—I have suffered too much at His hands!" Or Henry II, who, on learning that his son Henry had revolted, cried aloud, "Since Thou, O God, hast taken away from me that which I prized the most, Thou shalt not have what Thou prizest most in me—my soul." And even Conon, once when hard beset, had exclaimed, like a certain crusading lord: "What king, O Lord, ever deserted thus his men? Who now will trust in or fight for thee?"
Nevertheless, one should deal mercifully with such sinful words, for, after all, is not the world very evil and the temptation to rail at God extremely great? It is true that things are not as they were in the year A.D. 1000, when even the wisest felt very sure the Last Day was at hand. Eclipses, comets and famines had then seemed foreshadowing this. People crowded the churches in agony, expecting to hear the Seven Trumpets announce Antichrist. Repeatedly since then, when the years have been calamitous, monks and old wives have stirred multitudes by vehement predictions that the plagues of the Apocalypse and the other preliminaries to the millennium are not to be delayed. As late as A.D. 1200 the monk Rigord, at the abbey of St. Denis, wrote: "The world is ill; it grows so old that it relapses into infancy. Common report has it that Antichrist has been born at Babylon and that the Day of Judgement is nigh."
A Fearful Excommunication
Fears like this restrain even reckless seigneurs and sodden peasants from proceeding to inconceivable crimes. The agonies of the damned will be so dreadful! The preachers understand very well that it is of little use to try to restrain the wicked by talking of "the love and mercy of God." If King Philip had only used love and mercy upon his vassals he would be now a king without a kingdom. It is the dread of the eternal burning which apparently keeps a large part of all Christendom tolerably obedient to the more essential mandates of morality and of the Church.