“The Passion of Pope Formosus” by LC von Hessen

Behold, sinners, and quail in terror, as the Holy Man emerges from his tomb! Borne on the broad shoulders of four strong friars, his mitre jostled, his robes caressed, as the palace doors fling wide, as the chamber’s great throng parts in a Red Sea of gasps, whispers, and living flesh before the grim procession. Before the withered corpse of Pope Formosus is settled once again on the pontifical throne.

Thus begins the Synodus Horrenda.

The air is white with smoke throughout the council chamber, nuggets of frankincense shoveled into censers to conceal the twin stenches of shame and the grave. White smoke above the troubled susurration of tonsures and beards, hairshirts and silks, echoing through the cold stone walls. White smoke obscuring mosaics of lapis and gilt, sage faces of the Apostles frowning down upon the stern form of Stephanus Septimus, the dead man’s successor. The dead man’s inquisitor.

“Ave, my children!” speaks the living Pope. “Look upon him, and despair!”

At the end of his protruding index finger sits Formosus, cadaver. A denizen of the necropolis for not even a year, his body had baked in the Roman summer until his mortal humours wept away, evaporated, crumbled to dust, melted into a scum of alchemical resin, leaving a concave chest and brittle limbs, his skin grey parchment wrapping crooked scrolls. His jaw has come loose in the tumult of his disinterment from the depths of the Lateran Basilica, whence grinned the doughty skulls of Paul and Peter; and with the distant collapse of his eyes and nose, he appears scarce more than a skull himself. The old man’s bones, once lifted from the grave, were clad in all the proper raiments of his earthly station, down to the slippers on his broken, toeless feet; and in this curious pantomime he is more fearsome and strange than had he appeared in the tattered fragments of a pauper’s shroud.

The young monk Frater Iosephus quavers behind a column, the beads of the rosary twined in his fist, the spines of the cilice pricking his thigh. His gaze, his mind, are fixed upon the late Pontiff as firmly as a nail pounded through the Savior’s palm.

His Holiness faced down by His Holiness, Formosus Pontifex Maximus versus Stephanus Septimus. The face of posthumous judgment on Earth. His dark brows, his withered chin, his miser’s mouth. His accusing finger, spearing the misty air.

“In this, the fifth year of the reign of Lambertus Spoletensis,” he begins, “I decree the papacy of this man, Formosus, illegitimate!”

The young monk gasps. He had scarcely any traffic with the accused, while Formosus still lived: the latter was due respect and obedience for his position of Divine authority alone, yet Frater Iosephus, barely more than a novice, had known but little of his character.

And yet.

In death he has lost his age, wrinkles smoothed and wattles taut; has become glorious and eternal as the seraphim. Formosus lay in his grave for the length of a woman’s parturition: the womb of the catacombs has birthed him forth desiccated, tender, and without sin. Cleansed of the weakness of warm, wet, living flesh, he is preserved in a state of utter perfection.

“Such a spirit of ambition,” sneers Stephanus Septimus. “Thou pretender, thou perjurer! Flagrantly defying canon law, grasping at power with the jaws of an adder! A base layman, posing as bishop; the Throne of Peter should have been as near to thee as the Kingdom of Heaven to an heresiarch!”

A deacon scarce older than Iosephus himself has been appointed to answer for the accused. With bowed head and nervous hands, he stands beside the throne in the sober black robes of a bailiff. Would that I, too, could suffer, thinks Iosephus. Would that I, too, could endure. This flash of jealousy is followed by a flash of heat, and a sheen of sweat slicks through his rough robes.

Formosus, who has no tongue to hold, whispers nothing in the ear of his young counsel. He does not flinch from these harangues and jeremiads on neckbones tilting his skull permanently heavenwards. His sightless sockets alone are fit to witness the Almighty. His crooked, gaping jaw, fixed in the silent scream of the dead, might resound with an endless chant of holy, holy, holy. A beam of light pours over him from a window above and in the eyes of Iosephus light surrounds him, light wavers around him, light emanates from him, a living halo for the body of the Child of God.

“Formosus, the sirer of bastards!” rails Stephanus Septimus, who sees not. “He whose acts and ordinations were mere bastard children trotted out in the open! He who crowned a bastard descendant of Charlemagne!”

And did he not, thinks Iosephus, ordain Your Holiness as well?

“Bishop of Porto, dispatched to the land of the Bulgars, to perpetuate vulgarities.” He thinks himself clever. He is mad. “Hast thou nary a word to say, Thy Holiness, in thine defense? Wouldst thou see these good people flee, screaming, in terror?” The deacon, ruddy-cheeked, remains silent throughout.

The Holy Father’s ravings pass through the ears of Frater Iosephus like so much chaff through the threshing sledge. Let Purgatory burn away the late Pontiff’s sins of life; let the Almighty be his judge. Such a little man of hubris, this present Pope: a thought he would once have considered a great blasphemy. But a higher power yet controls him. Iosephus watches with waves of love resounding through his skull in the presence of true sanctity; a chill through his bones, a burning through his blood, a bead, then a trickle, of phlegmatic humour at the tip of his swelling member—

“Damnatio memoriae!”

The verdict echoes through the chamber, harsh as a Commandment. “Rend the sacred garments he has defiled. Sever his fingers of benediction. Tear apart his bones, that they may not be esteemed as relics; consign them to the Tiber. Let he who seeks the office of the Fishers of Men instead fill the stomachs of our Roman fish. Formosus, Bishop of Porto, damnéd be his name!”

His regal vestments, torn away by cardinals’ scarlet fingers; his own right hand’s middle and index fingers, his thumb, snipped off with gilded shears and tossed into the crowd as robes and foreheads ripple backwards in their wake, fearing an infernal blessing from the dead.

And the body begins to tremble.

As gasps and moans mingle with the smoke in the air, the earth itself begins to rumble, to shake, beneath the feet of the assembled. Some stagger, fall into one another; some drop to their knees in ardent orisons; some run, screaming, to clot the open doorway. Candles bleed, murals flake, censers drop their coals, arches rain down dust. Is the Hellmouth opening, here, in this holiest of spaces, in the wake of papal sacrilege?

And yet Stephanus Septimus urges them ever onward.

“To the Tiber!” he shrieks above the tumult. The stripped and defamed body of Formosus Pontifex Maximus is dragged through the palace, hoisted above heads, limbs split apart like kindling before wafting tapestries and gilded mosaics upon which the saints bow their heads in shame.

Forgotten on the floor in the din of the quake and the exodus from the chamber, Iosephus pockets two fingers of benediction, stuck together by the glue of decay, and scurries back to his cell.

***

Far from pandemonium, the earth stilling its tremors, the palace halls strewn with rubble, the jeers and screams and mad laughter of the crowd resounding from banks and bridges, Frater Iosephus sits alone on his stone bed. With bitten nails he scratches the rising stubble of his tonsure.

His vocation affords little time for idleness. Those hours not allotted for prayer and devotion are spent tending to the monastery’s herb garden, grinding grain, baking bread. Of late he has oft beheld a curious purple in the barley, a royal hue foretelling a monarch in the rough, and on its heels a further omen in the fevers and chills that befall him without warning, one atop the other, a tempest within his flesh.

The young monk Frater Iosephus, sequestered here behind stone walls in the heart of Christendom, the Sacrum Imperium Romanum beyond menaced at latitudes by Northmen and Saracens. As above, so below. And so within.

Hanging beside the humble cross above his bed is the knotted scourge, fashioned of hempen rope woven by his own hands, to strike out the taint of concupiscence that summons demons in the night: succubi who play about his yard in the guise of comely young men, to steal his seed; incubi, also in the guise of comely young men, who steal his seed through more complicated means.

The omnipresent scent of petrichor on the stone walls of his cell makes it simpler to imagine his own memento mori, arms crossed above his chest and face placid while drawing the slime of worms and frogs, incubating the seed of flies, playing host to all the slithering things of the ground cursed to crawl on their bellies in perpetuum, his anonymous bones in the ossuary sinking into their brothers much as his own voice is swallowed by the choir during devotional chant.

He removes the secreted relics from the folds of his robe.

He caresses the brittle nails, kisses the flaking knuckles, traces his own eyelids and bones and lips with the benedictory finger-pads. He shivers down to the soul.

Upon unlacing their twin leather thongs, the metal barbs of the cilice are carefully unwound. The whorls of the fingertips, pressed to the pinprick wounds of the cilice banding his thigh, are anointed in his gently-spilt blood, tracing a cross on his brow. Trails of light assemble before him, white to gold to red to flaming violet, in the form of the crucifix, wavering impressions of the suffering of the Lord.

“Bless this fickle organ of Man’s ruin,” whispers Iosephus as he lifts his robe to the waist, a hitch in his breath as the dry, fragile flesh of death meets pliant, moistened flesh of sinful life, gently tracing every curve and vein, painting haloes around his orifices, absolving him of temptation in thought.

Behind his eyes flash the physical passions of the martyred saints. The skin of Bartholomaeus, the eyes of Lucia, the entrails of Erasmus. Formosus has known his greatest torments in a frame that cannot feel: that can, therefore, withstand any abuse.

Convulsions of ekstasis shoot through the young monk, knocking him on his back, scattering the straw padding his bed. His teeth lock, toes and fingers clench, vision dances in a tableau of Divine hues, as bursts of cold, wet humour purge themselves from his loins.

Iosephus lies back until the tremors cease. Quieting the earthquake within.

He reaches for the scourge to mortify his impure flesh. Seven knotted cords across his back to strike the sins of pride, of greed, of envy.

He dares not speak of lust.

***

The young monk Frater Iosephus walks along the banks of the Tiber, tasked with dispersing alms to the blind and mangled poor of Roman streets. The stripes down his back burn and sing and glow redder-than-red. He considers the river beside him, that antediluvian Tiber that has carried off early Christian martyrs and vile heathen emperors alike.

In the folds of his robe, the fingers twitch to life.

Bone calls to bone, marrow to marrow. Bones wash up, scuttle, dance end over end out of the depths. The severed fingers leap from Iosephus’s palm and knit themselves into their brother bones, assembling an auto-reliquary.

Behold! Formosus, exhumed a second time.

Violet flames lick the air around the floating cadaver. His river-bleached bones and ornamental scraps of skin are once again clothed as befits his station. A scythe-headed crosier glistens in his hand, his chasuble as gold as the sun, as the Son.

“Be not afraid, my child,” says the Holy Man to the devotee on his knees in the sand.

He raises his hand in the sign of benediction.

“I crown thee . . . Iosephus Pontifex Maximus!”

The blessing burns into the young monk’s skin and fevered skull as gaping stigmata erupt over the length of his body. He would weep and sing with joy if he still had eyes or tongue.