I had to shake my head, for in truth I could not bring myself to believe that he was right. That he was serious and believed himself to have the right of it, I had no doubt, but my sanity demanded that he be mistaken.
"Shake your head all you like, Caius, but disabuse yourself. It is the truth. These things are happening, and they have come to Camulod. That disgraceful debacle in the dining hall last night was proof of it."
"What debacle? What are you talking about?"
"How can you not know? We almost had a riot here last night over this question. How could you be unaware of it?"
"I was away last night. I returned this morning, met with you and have been on the run ever since. What is going on?"
"Good God, Cay! You have to stay more aware of what's going on. I spent three hours this afternoon talking with priests of both factions—our British ones and their Roman ones—Pelagian and orthodox, as these zealots would have it! They have, among diem, issued me—and all of us—with an ultimatum: salvation or damnation, on the terms of the Church in Rome, without any recourse to trial. That is what's going on!"
I was bewildered and admitted it. "I'm sorry, Father. I had no idea. Have we a choice?"
He snapped open his mouth to shout at me, I could see it in his face, and then subsided, looking down at the table top in front of him.
I continued speaking. "I mean, what are we to do? It sounds as though the battle lines between these two schools of thought are clearly drawn. Are we in a position to debate them?"
He sighed, a long-drawn and distressing sound. "I don't know, Cay. I simply do not know. The only thing I do know with any certainty is that this whole question has sprung up suddenly, although it has been fermenting for years. I believe it is the biggest and the most vexatious question any of us will face in our lifetime, or in the lifetimes of our children. How are we to proceed from this day on in the way we live our lives and worship our God?" He was silent again for a short space, and then continued, "I wish my father were still alive. His was a mind fashioned for abstractions like this. Mine is not. How can I take this question to the Council? It would tie all of us up in argument for years. If we accept the dictates of the Pope in Rome and the Bishop of Hippo, we must—and I have to emphasize the imperative—we must abandon completely all of the rules we have been taught to live by until now. That involves the certain condemnation of Bishop Alaric and his kind, who adopted the teachings of Pelagius in good faith. But on a far- more subtle level, it involves the surrender of our will to the dictates of the men in Rome, and that is what Pelagius was against from the beginning. His contention and his fear were that the so-called men of God were taking unto themselves the attributes of God. They were taking the teachings of the Christ Himself and interpreting them to suit their own requirements. And Pelagius was right, Cay! He was right! And they have proved him right by excommunicating him. They have condemned him to eternity without salvation. The Christ whose faith they follow would never condone such extreme punishment. Yet these men, who live in Rome in luxury, I'm told, have taken to themselves the power to tell all others how to live, and to condemn them to perdition if they do not obey." He stopped, and drew another deep breath.
"Pelagius was simple in his teachings. There is nothing anti-Christ in him. He teaches us that we must choose between the laws of God and the ways of licentiousness. He says it rests in us to choose to follow the Christ or to spurn him. He tells us we are made in God's image, with the innate ability to aspire to joining God's heavenly host. That innate ability is at the centre of this controversy. Our will is free, as was the will of him we call Satan. The temptations we face are the same as Lucifer's. But Pelagius gives us hope in ourselves, and dignity, and a sense of worth."
I was fascinated by this new view of my father. I listened, spellbound, as he went on.
"The followers of Augustine of Hippo, on the other hand, deny us that sense of worth. We are born in sin, they say, already doomed to our fate, unless we subjugate ourselves to their ways, begging their intercession with the Divine to give us grace." He was waxing angry again, outrage swelling in his face. He slammed his hand down on the table top and drew himself to his full height. "Do you have anything of great importance to look to now?"
I shrugged my shoulders. "No, nothing that will not wait until tomorrow."
"Good. Let's get out of here and go for a ride. I want to shout and rave and vent my bile, and there's no profit to be gained by doing it where I can be overheard. Do you mind?"
"Not at all, lead on."
While we walked to the stables in silence and saddled our horses, I thought about all my father had said and about the conflict that had so suddenly consumed him. I knew it was important then, but I had no idea that the past hour and the hour to come were to affect me so strongly that they would influence the evolution of an entire country in the course of coming years.
On leaving the fort we took the new road to the villa, but left it at the bottom of the hill and struck south towards the forest's edge. We rode in silence, each of us with his own thoughts, until the silence of the forest cloaked us and all sounds from Camulod were long lost behind us. We rode through a series of dense thickets, which had kept us both busy trying to stay in the saddle, and emerged from the last of them to find ourselves in a beautiful, gladed area with wide expanses of open grassland, from which sprang magnificent beech trees. The thought occurred to me that this must be a holy place to the Druids, and that brought the question of excommunication back into my mind. Most of my Druid friends were not Christian, so they had no worries about salvation or eternal life. Some of them, however, had become converted to Christianity in recent years and yet lived a life that was little altered from their traditional ways. This new direction from Rome, I felt, could be ominous to these people, whose conversion had come directly from the compatibility of the humanity of Pelagius's beliefs and the mellow benignity of the Druidic ways. Some of these men might have been in the fort the previous night, and I wondered if they had been affected by what my father had described as a riot. Finally, when I had gone over everything my father had said for about the tenth time, I could stand his silence no longer.
"Father?" He turned to me. "What happened last night? You said there was almost a riot. What caused it? Who was involved?"
"Priests caused it, Christian priests fighting with Christian priests. I wasn't there. I ate in my quarters with Titus and Flavius. We were disturbed at our meal by a messenger sent to us by your friend Ludo. The common dining hall was crowded, as it always is at that time of night, and an argument broke out when a group of priests who had just * arrived that afternoon refused to be seated at the same table as two of your Druid friends. Popilius, the senior centurion, was in the hall. He offered to reseat them at another table at which some other priests were already seated. They refused to sit with these people, either, and one of them started shouting about damnation and anathema. Popilius tried to shut him up, but one word led to another and these two groups of priests actually came to blows! Can you imagine?
"Well, by the time poor Popilius had gathered his wits enough to call up the guard, the whole place had degenerated into an armed camp. Can't blame Popilius. He simply did not anticipate violence from churchmen, especially among themselves. It got out of hand too quickly for him. But that Ludo's a bright one. As soon as he saw which way the wind was blowing, he sent word to me. By the time I got there, the guard had all of them under restraint."
"So what did you do?"