Tuitio Fidei

The salient characteristic of the vocation created by the Blessed Gerard was, as has been said, its practical emphasis, and this is what enabled it to assimilate the military service, at first linked to the vocation of protecting pilgrims but soon extended to functions that might appear incongruous with the religious life. Yet under that seeming incongruity was a harmony of vision: not merely because of the marriage of the chivalric and the hospitaller ethos that has been described, but because the two tasks were preeminently the new needs of the time and place, and therefore natural objects for a young order to address itself to.

Both the Hospitallers and the Templars began their military work in the service of pilgrims, and Brother Gerard at least cannot have envisaged any other function for the soldiers who wore the habit of St John. It is therefore to Raymond du Puy that we must attribute the addition of tuitio Fidei, the protection of the Faith, to the original duty of obsequium pauperum, the service of the poor. By the end of his magistry the two had reached approximately equal importance in the Order’s work. Raymond, like Gerard, is honoured among the Blessed of the Order, and it is significant that a man of his saintly character should have turned the Hospitallers to a warlike role. The ideal of the soldier dedicated to Christ

And to the protection of the weak was just emerging to take hold of men’s imaginations and to discipline the lawlessness of the feudal nobility; it was an ideal akin to Brother Gerard’s vocation of service, and could appeal to the same men of active instinct and pious aspiration. In their double vocation implanted by Raymond du Puy the Hospitallers came to exemplify the best elements in the age of the crusades.

By the middle of the twelfth century the Hospitallers and the Templars stood as examples of a new military and religious vocation which the crusades contributed to the tradition of the Roman Church. Writers only tenuously acquainted with ecclesiastical matters are inclined to describe the military orders as ‘fighting monks’, thus giving a misleading idea of their character. The Hospitallers (still less the Templars) were never a monastic order; they began as a lay brotherhood and developed into a religious order of a wholly new kind. The Knights of St John were not monks who fought but soldiers who took vows. Their origins and training were those of warriors, and it was to be expected that the view they took of their calling was military rather than religious. They no more doubted that they honoured God by dedicating their craft to Him than did those master masons whose handiwork, equally vigorous and often equally marked by a robust sense of earthly reality, glorifies the great churches of medieval Europe.

At the same time the knights of the crusading orders devoted themselves in a special fashion to the service of the faith. They took vows which were the common standard of Christian abnegation for all religious men, but which punished especially the normal expectations of their rank: poverty, when a nobleman’s consequence derived from the breadth of his acres; celibacy, when his glory was in the long continuance of an ancient name; obedience, when it was his prerogative to go into battle as a commander of men. The Hospitaller vocation carried the ideals of chivalry to their most generous expression: service became an undertaking of perfect self-dedication; the knightly obligation of protecting the weak found its fulfilment in a life of humble service to the poor and the sick.

The young man who wished to embrace the life of a Hospitaller was taught his obligations in these words:

Our Lords the Sick

Good friend, you desire the company of the House and you are right in this, for many gentlemen earnestly request the reception of their children or their friends and are most joyful when they can place themselves in this Order. And if you are willing to be in so excellent and so honourable company and in so holy an Order as that of the Hospital, you are right in this. But if it is because you see us well clothed, riding on great chargers and having everything for our comfort, then you are misled, for when you would desire to eat, it will be necessary for you to fast, and when you would wish to fast, you will have to eat. And when you would desire to sleep, it will be necessary for you to keep watch, and when you would wish to stand on watch, you will have to sleep. And you will be sent here and there, into places which will not please you, and you will have to go there. It will be necessary for you therefore to abandon all your desires to fulfil those of another and to endure other hardships in the Order, more than I can describe to you. Are you willing to suffer all these things?

When he had expressed his acceptance the novice laid his hand on the missal and made his solemn undertaking; ‘I vow to God, to the Blessed Mary ever Virgin, Mother of God, and to St John the Baptist, to render henceforth and for ever, by the grace of God, a true obedience to the Superior whom it shall please Him to give me and whom our Religion shall choose, to live without property and to guard my chastity.’ The knight who performed the investiture, before clothing him with the habit, pointed to its white linen cross and asked, ‘Do you believe that this is the Holy Cross upon which Jesus Christ was nailed and died for the redemption of our sins? This is the sign of our Order, which we command you to wear always on your garments.’ The novice kissed the Cross and received the habit, fastened by a cord around his neck: ‘Receive the yoke of the Lord, for it is sweet and light, under which you will find rest for your soul. We promise you no delicacies, but only bread and water, and a modest habit of no price.’ When the ceremony was over the new knight, in token of the poverty he accepted, sat on the floor of the refectory and was served by this brethren with water, bread and salt.