‘The Pelagian heresy,’ Jack murmured.
Jeremy nodded. ‘A lot of the Church schisms are obscure, but this one was straightforward, a really profound one. It went right to the heart of Christian belief. It also went right to the heart of the Church as an institution. It frightened a lot of those in power in Rome. It still does.’
‘Pelagian?’ Costas said.
‘Pelagius was another monk in Britain, earlier than Gildas, possibly Irish by birth, born about AD 360, when the Romans were still in control of Britain. By Pelagius’ time the Roman Empire had been officially Christian for several decades, since the conversion of Constantine the Great, and efforts were being made to establish the Roman Church in Britain. Pelagius himself went to study in Rome, but was very disturbed by what he saw there. He came into direct conflict with one of the powerhouses of the Roman Church.’
‘St Augustine of Hippo,’ Jack said.
‘Author of the Confessions and the City of God. The earlier Augustine, not the one who brought the Roman Church to Britain, the one whose bible you saw in the British Library, Costas. Augustine of Hippo came to believe in the concept of predestination, that Christians were utterly dependent on divine grace, on the favour of God. In his view, the kingdom of heaven could only be sought through the Church, not by free volition. It was a theological doctrine, but one with huge practical benefits for the Roman Church, for the newly Christian state.’
‘Domination, control,’ Jack murmured.
‘It made believers subservient to the Church, as the conduit of divine grace. It made the state stronger, more able to control the masses. Church and state were fused together as an unassailable powerhouse, and the stage was set for the medieval European world.’
‘But Pelagius was having none of that,’ Jack said.
‘Pelagius probably thought of himself as a member of the original Christian community which existed in Britain before the official Roman Church arrived, the community who traced themselves back to the earliest followers of Jesus in the first century AD,’ Jeremy said. ‘What we’ve just been talking about, the Ecclesia Britannorum, the Celtic Church, many of them probably Romanized Britons of Celtic ancestry. Pelagius is virtually the only evidence we have for their beliefs. It seems possible that they took the concept of heaven on earth at face value, the idea that heaven could be found around them, in their earthly lives. To them, the message of Jesus may have been about finding and extolling beauty in nature, about love and compassion for its own sake. It would have been a morally empowering concept, completely at odds with what Pelagius saw in Rome. When Pelagius was there he stood up against Augustine of Hippo, denied the doctrine of predestination and original sin, defended innate human goodness and free will. It was a hopeless battle, but he was a beacon for resistance and his name resounded through the centuries, in hidden places and secret meetings when any hint of it could have meant arrest, torture, even worse.’
‘What happened to him?’ Costas said.
‘Pelagianism was condemned as heretical by the Synod of Carthage in AD 418,’ Jack said. ‘Pelagius himself was excommunicated and banished from Rome. It’s not clear whether he ever got back to Britain. Some believe he went to Judaea, to Jerusalem, to the site of Christ’s tomb, and was murdered there.’
‘There were uncompromising forces already within the Roman Church, ready to stop at nothing to carry out what they saw as divine justice,’ Jeremy said. ‘But they couldn’t control what went on in Britain. After the Roman withdrawal in AD 410, after the Roman towns of Britain had crumbled and decayed, the Church which had been brought by Constantine’s bishops seems to have virtually died out. That’s what Gildas was lamenting. He himself was probably one of the last monks in Britain of the Roman Church of the fourth century, though a pretty confused one. With the edifice of the state removed, the Roman church no longer held sway over a people who were not attracted by Augustinian doctrine. Then the Anglo-Saxons invaded. They were pagan. That’s where we come to the second Augustine, St Augustine of Canterbury. He was sent by Pope Gregory in AD 597 with forty monks to convert King Aethelbert of Kent, and after that the Roman Church was here to stay.’
‘But Celtic Christianity somehow survived,’ Costas said.
‘It survived the first Augustine, and it survived the second,’ Jeremy said. ‘There was something in its philosophy that spoke to the Celtic ancestry of the Britons, something they also believed was true to the original teachings of Jesus. Something that told a universal truth, about freedom and individual aspiration. Something which had been taught to them by the first followers of Jesus to reach these shores, perhaps even by the emperor dimly remembered by Gildas. A wisdom they had kept and cherished, a sacred memory.’
‘People having control and responsibility for their own actions, their own destiny,’ Jack said.
‘That’s the nub of Pelagianism,’ Jeremy agreed. ‘When Pelagius came to Rome, he saw moral laxity, decadence, and he blamed it on the idea of divine grace. If everything is predestined and the whim of God, why bother with good deeds, or with trying to make the world a better place? Pelagianism was all about the individual, about free will, about moral strength. In his view, Jesus’ example was primarily one of instruction. Jesus showed how to avoid sin and live a holy life, and Christians can choose to follow him. And what’s really fascinating is how these ideas may also represent a continuity from Celtic paganism, which seems to have championed a person’s ability to triumph as an individual, even over the supernatural.’
‘What I don’t get is how this early Celtic Christianity survived the Dark Age after the Romans,’ Costas said. ‘I mean, you’ve got the Anglo-Saxons invading, then the Vikings, then the Normans. This Celtic ancestry stuff must have been pretty fringe by then.’
‘It’s something to do with the kind of people who chose to come to Britain,’ Jeremy responded. ‘Not just those famous invasions, but later migrations too, the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain, the Huguenot Protestant refugees from France and Holland. Some common thread, character traits needed to succeed here. Independence, wilfulness, stubbornness, endurance in the face of authority, strength through hardship. Everything about this place where we are now, the history. The Blitz spirit. All of it makes those ideas espoused by Pelagius seem particularly British.’
‘I think it’s something to do with the weather, myself,’ Costas grumbled. ‘You’ve got to have something extra to survive this place.’ He paused. ‘So you think this church, St Lawrence Jewry, has all this history in it?’
‘There’s no proof there was a church here before the eleventh century, when the Normans arrived,’ Jack said. ‘But nobody knows where the churches of late Roman London were located. Before then, Christian meetings were secretive, and even after Christianity became the official religion in the fourth century AD, congregational worship never really took hold in Roman Britain. But I believe St Lawrence Jewry is a very likely spot. Right next to the amphitheatre, a place that would have been associated with the martyrdom of Christians. And churches were often built on sites of pagan ritual. There may have been more going on here, something very old, sacred long before Roman London. And this place may have concealed an extraordinary secret.’
‘The heart of darkness,’ Costas murmured, looking at the bricked-up wall at the end of the chamber.
Jack followed his gaze, excitement coursing through him. He glanced at his watch. The music had finished upstairs in the nave, and there was a knock on the door. He got up, took a deep breath and slung his bag over his shoulder. ‘I think we might be just about to find out.’