The knights who prayed
The Knights Templar founded
Twenty years after the Crusaders take Jerusalem, a small group of French knights approaches the Patriarch of Jerusalem with an unusual proposal. They want to take monastic vows — poverty, chastity, obedience — while continuing to serve as warriors, protecting pilgrims on the dangerous roads from the coast to the holy city.
Hugues de Payens and eight companions are given quarters in the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount — which the Crusaders are using as a palace — and they become the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. The Templars.
The founding of the Templars creates something new in Christian history: the warrior monk. A man who takes the monastic vows and fights. Who prays the canonical hours and rides into battle. Who renounces personal wealth and fights under the banner of the cross.
Bernard of Clairvaux writes a treatise defending them — In Praise of the New Knighthood — that argues the Templar has solved the problem of the soldier's violence: killing the enemy of Christ is not homicide but malicide, the killing of evil.
The argument is theologically dubious. But the Templars become extraordinarily powerful — they develop the first international banking system, finance multiple Crusades, own vast properties across Europe, become a state within states.
In 1307 the King of France arrests them all, tortures confessions out of them, and burns their leadership at the stake. The order is dissolved in 1312.
The warrior monk experiment ends badly. It usually does.
“The knight of Christ, I say, may strike with confidence and die yet more confidently, for he serves Christ when he strikes, and serves himself when he falls.”
— Bernard of Clairvaux, In Praise of the New Knighthood, c. 1130 AD
“No soldier on service entangles himself in the affairs of life, that he may please him who enrolled him as a soldier.”
The Templars tried to solve the tension between the monastery and the battlefield by combining them. The experiment lasted two centuries and ended in flames.
The tension they were trying to resolve is real: how does a person of faith engage with violence when violence seems necessary? How do the calls to peaceable self-giving and the responsibilities of protection coexist in a single life?
Bernard's answer — that killing the enemy of Christ is not homicide — has not held up well. But the question he was trying to answer has not gone away.
Every generation has to find its own account of how the way of the cross relates to the way of the sword — not by dissolving the tension but by holding it honestly, refusing easy resolutions in either direction.