On this blog I have occasionally had opportunity to make reference to the excellent Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, a series of murder mysteries set in twelfth-century Wales and the English West Country, written by Edith Pargeter under the nom de plume of Ellis Peters. These novels are charming and cleverly-crafted whodunits in their own right, with the eponymous Welsh Benedictine brother using his knowledge of medicines and herbalism, his vast and varied experience of human nature and his stores of human sympathy and patience to solve the mystery. He is aided by the wry and quick-witted Hugh Beringar, a young Norman landowner who works his way up the ranks in King Stephen’s service to become his sheriff in Shrewsbury. Even though he’s the voice of the law, he is both fair-minded enough and curious enough to be an equal partner in these endeavours rather than a rival or an adversary – even though Cadfael sometimes has to be devious in keeping the too-obvious suspects who engage his sympathy well out of Hugh’s way when he is duty-bound to find them but doesn’t want to.
I’ve been rereading these books straight through, in part inspired by this series on the English and Welsh saints that I’ve been doing – in particular Saint Gwenffrewi, who is herself something of a major character in the series. And then I stumbled back over The Heretic’s Apprentice, the sixteenth (or seventeenth, depending on which version you read) entry in the series. Quite accidentally, I seem to have unearthed one of the fragmentary signposts that has led me on my current path. Edith Pargeter seems to have given me a little nudge along the road in this direction.
Seven years before the events of The Heretic’s Apprentice, a wool merchant, William of Lythwood, left Shrewsbury and took his clerk Elave with him on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. William of Lythwood was known to have expressed certain doubts about the Trinity in the presence of a parish priest, who recommended to him that he undertake the pilgrimage for his own soul’s sake. Elave, when he went along with, kept his ears and eyes open all the way along. As The Heretic’s Apprentice begins, Elave returns from Jerusalem, pushing a cart with a coffin – containing William of Lythwood, seeking rest in the abbey graveyard after his long travels.
Elave seeks an audience with Abbot Radulfus, who is playing host to a high-ranking Augustinian canon named Gerbert, representing Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. He brings his master William’s last request before the Abbot, though Gerbert is wary of any attempt to have the merchant interred – the more so when he discovers that William had given voice to hæretical opinions in the past. Though William is discovered to have died absolved and is granted his grave in abbey ground, Elave’s troubles do not end there.
He brings back another, smaller box – this one for William’s foster-daughter Fortunata, meant to be her dowry. This box is an intricate piece, carven and inlaid with silver and ivory, and featuring a Byzantine icon on the front which Anselm, one of the abbey monks, believes may be Saint John Chrysostom. This box, brought into the merchant’s household – now run by William’s brothers Girard and Jevan – also brings covetousness and anxiety. The family’s chief shepherd, Conan, admires the box and wonders what it contains – and notes that the owner of the box, Fortunata, has eyes only on Elave when he comes back. And the family’s clerk, Aldwin, remembering Elave’s prior influence with the Lythwood family and fearing for his position, wants him driven out. Conan and Aldwin conspire to brand Elave a hæretic so Gerbert will chase him off; but Aldwin, later learning that his position was never in any danger from Elave, regrets the conspiracy and goes to Gerbert to attempt to put the record right. Aldwin never gets there – he is stabbed in the back and thrown into the Severn. Hence, the murder mystery around which the book revolves.
But what interests me particularly is that, when Conan and Aldwin attempt to get Elave to express his ‘hæretical’ opinions, he instead posits ideas which are wholly in line with Orthodox Christian thinking. This makes sense within the world of the story, as he just came back from Jerusalem and Syria. Here, though, is the relevant passage:
William’s wake was well supplied with ale, wine and mead, and went the way of most wakes, from dignified solemnity and pious remembrance to sentimental and increasingly elaborated reminiscence, while discreet voices grew louder and anecdotes borrowed as much from imagination as from memory. And since Elave had been his companion for seven year while he had been out of sight and often out of mind of these old neighbours of his, the young man found himself being plied with the best ale in the house, in exchange for the stories he had to tell of the long journey and the wonders along the way, and of William’s dignified farewell to the world.Let’s take a look at the exact beliefs that got Elave in trouble with the Augustinian Canon Gerbert in the novel. Though there is a certain degree of anachronism in Pargeter’s ascription to concerns that are very specifically sixteenth-century in provenance to churchmen of the twelfth, the theological stakes here examined are quite real and Elave’s concerns seem to be very specific.
If he had not drunk considerably more than he was accustomed to, he might not have given direct and open answers to oblique and insinuating questions…
“According to one of the brothers down there,” said Aldwin earnestly, “the little anxious grey fellow that runs so busy about the prior, it was a question whether the old man would be let in at all. Somebody there was for digging up that old scuffle he had with the missioner, to deny him a place.”
“It’s a grave matter to disagree with the Church,” agreed Conan, shaking his head. “It’s not for us to know better than the priests, not where faith’s concerned. Listen and say Amen, that’s my advice. Did ever William talk to you about such things, Elave? You travelled a long way and a good many years with him. Did he try to take you along with him down that road, too?”
“He never made any secret of what he thought,” said Elave. “He’d argue his point, and with good sense, too, even to priests, but there was none of them found any great fault with him for thinking about such things. What are wits for unless a man uses them?”
“That’s presumption,” said Aldwin, “in simple folk like us, who haven’t the learning or the calling of the church men. As the king and the sheriff have power over us in their field, so has the priest in his. It’s not for us to meddle with matters beyond us. Conan’s right, listen and say Amen!”
“How can you say Amen to damning a newborn child to hell because the little thing died before it could be baptised?” Elave asked reasonably. “It was one of the things that bothered him. He used to argue not even the worst of men could throw a child into the fire, so how could the good God? It’s against his nature.”
“And you,” said Aldwin, staring curiosity and concern, “did you agree with him? Do you say so, too?”
“Yes, I do say so. I can’t believe the reason they give us, that babes are born into the world already rotten with sin. How can that be true? A creature new and helpless, barely into this world, how can it ever have done wrong?”
“They say,” ventured Conan cautiously, “even babes unborn are rotten with the sin of Adam, and fallen with him.”
“And I say that it’s only his own deeds, bad and good, that a man will have to answer for in the judgement, and that’s what will save or damn him. Though it’s not often I’ve known a man so bad as to make me believe in damnation,” said Elave, still absorbed in his own reasoning, and intent only on expressing himself clearly and simply without suspicion of hostility or danger. “There was a father of the Church, once, as I heard tell, in Alexandria, who held that in the end everyone would find salvation. Even the fallen angels would return to their fealty, even the devil would repent and make his way back to God.”
He felt the chill and the shiver that went through his audience, but thought no more of it than that his travelled wisdom, small as it still was, had carried him out of the reach of their parochial innocence. Even Fortunata, listening silently to the talk of the menfolk, had stiffened and opened her eyes wide and round at such an utterance, startled and perhaps shocked. She said nothing in this company, but she followed every word that was spoken, and the colour ebbed and flowed in her cheeks as she glanced attentively from face to face.
“That’s blasphemous,” said Aldwin in an awed whisper. “The Church tells us there’s no salvation but by grace, not by works. A man can do nothing to save himself, being born sinful.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Elave stubbornly. “Would the good God have made a creature so imperfect that he can have no free will of his own to choose between right and wrong? We can make our own way toward salvation, or down into the muck, and at the last we must every one stand by his own acts in the judgement. If we are men we ought to make our own way towards grace, not sit on our hams and wait for it to lift us up.”
“No, no, we’re taught differently,” insisted Conan doggedly. “Men are fallen by the first fall, and incline towards evil. They can never do good but by the grace of God.”
“And I say they can and do! A man can choose to avoid sin and do justly, of his own will, and his own will is the gift of God, and meant to be used. Why should a man get credit for leaving it all to God?” said Elave, roused but reasonable. “We think about what we’re doing daily with our hands, to earn a living. What fools we should be not to give a thought to what we’re doing with our souls, to earn an eternal life. Earn it,” said Elave with emphasis, “not wait to be given it unearned.”
“It’s against the Church Fathers,” objected Aldwin just as strongly. “Our priest here preached a sermon once about Saint Augustine, how he wrote that the number of the elect is fixed and not to be changed, and all the rest are lost and damned, so how can their free will and their own acts help them? Only God’s grace can save. Everything else is vain and sinful.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Elave loudly and firmly. “Or why should we even try to deal justly? These very priests urge us to do right, and demand of us confession and penance if we fall short. Why, if the roll is already made up? Where is the sense of it? No, I do not believe it!”
Aldwin was looking at him in awed solemnity. “You do not believe even Saint Augustine?”
“If he wrote that, no, I do not believe him.”
- Elave disbelieves that newborn babies who die before baptism will be damned to hell, asserting that it is against God’s personality.
- He disbelieves that babies are born rotten with the sin of Adam.
- He considers – considers, but does not endorse – Origen’s version of apōkatastasis.
- He believes in human free will.
- He asserts a model of salvation in which works and grace both matter.
The Orthodox Church does not teach that unbaptised babies are condemned to hell. We have the iconography of the Holy Innocents to prove it, as well as the authoritative witnesses of Saint Gregory the Theologian, Saint Gregory of Nyssa and Mâr ’Afrâm as-Sûryâni. Indeed, we have also the authoritative testimony of Patriarch Dositheos II of Jerusalem attesting to the idea that God’s personality is such that He does not will anyone’s condemnation. The Orthodox Church also does not teach that babies are born rotten with Adam’s sin – a sin for which Adam and Eve only are responsible – even though all of us who are born into a fallen world must deal with the consequences of that first Fall.
It’s also interesting what Elave has to say on the subject of apōkatastasis. It’s worth noting that later in the book, when he comes before the court of Abbot Radulfus and Canon Gerbert and the witnesses to his opinions are cross-examined, that he does not endorse the teachings of Origen on salvation; he merely notes, with interest, that they exist. (It is in fact Abbot Radulfus who mentions Origen by name.)
From an Orthodox perspective Elave gets into a little bit of trouble, doctrinally speaking, when it comes to the question of grace and works – but there the whole question is framed in such a way as to make it hard for anyone to escape trouble, at least if they come at it from the perspective of human reason alone. Elave is grappling, in fact, with many of the same questions of spiritual discipline that Abba Cassian – whose leap-day feast we just celebrated! – grappled with in his entrance into the disputes between Augustine and Pelagius, and on the same grounds. Elave narrowly manages to preserve himself from the charge of Pelagianism here, by asserting that the free will by which a man can choose to cooperate with God in his own salvation is a gift of that same God. But there’s little else in the passage for Abba Cassian or for later Orthodox authorities to disagree with, unless it is that overly-hasty ‘I say they can and do!’ which is his retort to Aldwin’s exaggerated Augustinianism. There indeed he is reflecting an overly-rationalistic, Western perspective on matters of faith.
I read this book first when I was in high school, and I think Pargeter’s very Anglican objections, through her strong-minded pilgrim Elave, to an overly-zealous and -legalistic read of Augustine impacted me more than I then knew. Even as an Anglican, I had quibbles with the ideas of infant damnation and the directly-imputed model of original sin that found better articulation within the realm of Orthodox theology. Reading through this book again was like going back and excavating a part of that road.
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