Raptor (8 page)

After the homily, Dom Clement prayed, still in the Old Language, for the Holy Catholic Church, for our Bishop Patiens, for our Burgund Kingdom’s two co-ruling brothers, for their queens and their families, for the commonfolk of the kingdom, for the harvest here in the Balsan Hrinkhen, for widows, orphans, captives and penitents everywhere. He concluded in Latin: “Exaudi nos, Deus, in omni oratione atque deprecatione nostra…”

The congregation responded, “Domine exaudi et miserere,” then went silent, while the monks acting as exorcist clerks herded all the sin-stained penitents out of the room and the doorkeeper clerks barred the portals against them. Next there came the Procession of the Oblation. The monks acting as deacon and acolytes brought into the chapel the three bronze vessels—each covered with a fine white veil of the cobweb cloth called goose-summer—the chalice of the wine-and-water; the paten bearing the Fraction, those being bits of the Host arranged on the tray in the shape of a human body; and the tower-shaped pyx in which was reserved the rest of the consecrated bread.

After the Eucharistic Prayer, the body-shaped Fraction was dismembered and the fragments distributed to Dom Clement, his assistant celebrants, the other monks, myself and any properly baptized guests that the monastery may have been entertaining that Sunday. Then Dom Clement did the Commixtio, dipping his bit of bread into the chalice, and pronounced the Benediction. The rest of the Host, from the pyx, was distributed to the congregation, each man receiving it in a bare hand, each woman in a hand covered with the dominical linen cloth she had brought with her. As each communicant swallowed the Host and was given a sip from the chalice, the others of the congregation chanted the Trecanum: “Gustate et videte…!”

When all had partaken, Dom Clement recited the Thanksgiving, but then, before pronouncing the Dismissal, he interposed a message that was not in the liturgy. You see, it was the custom of many among the congregation to swallow only a particle of the Host given them, then to take the remainder home and receive bits of it privately after their family prayers during the week. And Dom Clement warned those communicants, every Sunday, against leaving that consecrated bread carelessly about their houses, where a rat or a mouse—“or worse, some person not baptized in the Holy Catholic Church”—might accidentally or atrociously eat of it. Then he dismissed the worshippers: “Benedicat et exaudiat nos, Deus. Missa acta est. In pace.”

Although I had heard him utter that caution about the Host innumerable times, never before had I thought to wonder why there should be any
but
Catholic Christians among the local folk. As I have told, I had for long been seeing the peasants do various things that seemed to me not quite—or not at all—in accord with Christian custom and practice. I had also long ago noticed that there were a good many folk of the Balsan Hrinkhen who did not attend our church services even on high holy days. Of course, in any community there are a few energumens, those “possessed by demons,” which is to say insane, who are
forbidden
entry to a church. I had assumed that most of those who ignored our services were merely impious and lazy louts. But the very next day I learned that some were guilty of a waywardness far more to be reprehended.

At the appointed hour, I took my wax tablets to Dom Clement’s quarters, to sit down and do the exceptor work of transcribing his correspondence. As he usually did on Mondays, the abbot asked if I had any questions about what he had preached at the previous day’s mass. I replied that yes, I did, but I tried not to sound audacious or disrespectful as I said:

“Those Hebrew tribes mentioned in the psalm, Nonnus Clement—you told the congregation how their names derived from the Latin tongue or from an old Roman demon-god. Surely, Nonnus, those Old Testament peoples named themselves long before Romans occupied the Holy Land and brought to it their language and their pagan gods…”

“Good for you, Thorn,” said the abbot, smiling. “You are maturing into a very alert young man.”

“But… then… how could you utter what you knew to be an untruth?”

“The better to convince the congregation of the sinfulness of those enemies of the Lord,” said Dom Clement. He had ceased to smile, but he spoke without anger. “I trust God will overlook that small deception, lad, even if you do not. Most of my congregation are simple folk. To persuade such rustics to keep the faith, Mother Church allows her ministers occasionally to assist the cause of truth with the aid of pious artifice.”

I pondered this, then asked, “Is that also why Mother Church set Christ’s birthday on the same date as that of the demon Mithras?”

Now the abbot frowned. “I fear I may have been allowing you too much liberty, my boy, in your choice of studies. That question might have been posed by a pervicacious pagan, not a good Christian who believes the Church’s teachings. Of those teachings, one is this:
If it ought to be, it will be. If it is, it ought to be.”

I mumbled humbly, “I stand chastised, Nonnus Clement.”

“Whatever you have read or heard about Mithras,” he said, more kindly, “wipe it from your mind. The superstitious belief in Mithras was doomed even before Christianity overwhelmed it. Mithraism could never have survived, because it excluded females from its worship. To grow and thrive, a religion must appeal, above all, to those most easily led, those most amenable to paying tithes, those most susceptible and even gullible—meaning women, of course.”

Still humbly, I nodded, then waited for a moment before I said, “Another thing, Nonnus Clement. That warning you speak every Sunday—about the people taking care not to let the consecrated bread be eaten by a person not a Catholic Christian. Are you speaking of woefully errant Christians? Or merely tepid Christians?”

He gave me a long, appraising look, and at last said, “They are not Catholic Christians at all. They are Arians.”

He said it quietly, but I was inexpressibly shocked. Remember, during all my life I had been taught to hate and condemn the Arianism of the Goths. And I had let myself learn well that hatred and contempt, not so much for the Goths themselves (since I probably
was
one) as for their odious religion. Now, suddenly, I was being informed that real, living, breathing Arians could be found within a few stadia of where Dom Clement and I were conversing. He clearly realized my astonishment, for he continued:

“I believe you are old enough now, Thorn, to know. The Burgund people, like the Goths, are
mostly
of the Arian persuasion. From the brother kings, Gundiok in Lugdunum and Khilperic in Genava, down through their princelings and nobles and courtiers, to the majority of their subjects. I would estimate that about a quarter of the villagers and peasants here in our Ring of Balsam are Arians, and another quarter are still unregenerate pagans. Those include even many of the people who raise crops or livestock on land belonging to St. Damian’s, and who pay our abbey a share of their harvests.”

“And you
allow
them to be Arians? You let Arians work side by side with our Christian brothers?”

Dom Clement sighed. “The fact is that our monastic community and our congregation of Catholic faithful constitute something like an outpost in an alien land. We exist only through the toleration of the surrounding Arians and pagans. Look at this sensibly, Thorn. The rulers of this kingdom are both Arians. Their administrators and soldiers and tax collectors are Arians, At Lugdunum, in addition to our bishop’s Basilica of St. Justus, there is another, even loftier church, on the cathedra of which sits an Arian bishop.”

“They too have bishops?” I muttered, dazed.

“Fortunately for us, the Arians are not forever vigilant against the least divergence from what they consider their true faith, as we are in respect to what we
know
is the true faith. Nor are they forever ready, as we are, either to convert or relentlessly to extirpate the unbelievers. It is only because the Arians are so lackadaisically lenient about others’ beliefs that we Catholics can live and work and worship and proselytize here.”

“I can scarcely comprehend it all so suddenly,” I said. “Arians everywhere around us.”

“It was not always so. As recently as forty years ago, the Burgunds were merely pagans, the ignorant victims of superstition, revering all the teeming pantheon of pagan gods. They were converted by Arian missionaries from the Ostrogoth lands to the eastward.”

I may still have been thunderstruck, but my usual curiosity had not been diminished. “Excuse me, Nonnus Clement,” I ventured to say. “If the Arians hereabout are so many, and we Christians so few, is it remotely possible that the Arian god
is
of some worth and—?”

“Akh, ne!” the abbot interrupted, raising his hands in horror. “Not a word more, lad! Never even
speculate
on the legitimacy of the Arians or their beliefs or anything else about them. The councils of our Church have declared them evil, and that is sufficient.”

“Can it be wrong of me, Nonnus, to wish to know the adversary better, so that I may the better contend against him?”

“Perhaps not wrong, son. But one must not even do
right
if it is the devil who provokes one to do it. Let us now leave that ugly subject. Come, take up your tablet.”

I obediently bent to my exceptor work, but I was not yet ready to abandon the “ugly subject” Dom Clement had so abruptly thrust into my consciousness. When the abbot dismissed me, I went on to my next appointed activity of the day, my instruction in ethics by Brother Cosmas. Before he could commence one of his juiceless lectures, I asked him if it did not bother him that we were but a few Christians among a population mostly Arian.

“Oh vái,” he said, and mockingly. And he dealt me the second shock I endured that day. “With all your furtive reading and prying, you have not descried for yourself that the Arians also are Christians?”

“Christians?!
They? The
Arians?”

“Or so they claim to be. And in truth they were, originally, when the Arian Bishop Wulfilas converted the Goths from—”

“The Wulfilas who wrote the Gothic Bible? He was Arian?”

“Ja, but that was no disgrace at that time, when Wulfilas turned the Goths from their age-old worship of the Germanic pagan gods. It was only later that Arian Christianity was damned as a heresy, and Catholicism decreed the only true Christianity.”

I must have been reeling where I stood, for Cosmas gave me a look and said, “Here, sit down, young Thorn. You appear to have been much affected by these disclosures.”

Brother Cosmas was rightfully vain of his knowledge of ecclesiastic history, so now he was pleased to tell me:

“In the early years of the last century, Christianity was woefully fragmented by schisms into a dozen or more disparate sects. The disputes between bishops were numerous and complex, but I will simplify them, for the purpose of this discussion, by saying that the two bishops who were eventually to be most influential and controversial were Arius and Athanasius.”

“I know that Christians—or
we
Christians—follow the Athanasian teaching.”

“We do, ja—Bishop Athanasius’s true teaching that Christ the Son is of one
substance
with God the Father. But Bishop Arius contended that the Son is only
like
the Father. Since Jesus was tempted as a man can be tempted, suffered as a man suffers, and died as a man must die—he could not be equal to the immutable Father who is beyond temptation and pain and death. He had to have been
created
by the Father, as a man is.”

“Well…” I said uncertainly, for I had never before meditated on any such distinction.

“Well, Constantine was then the emperor of both the Western and the Eastern Empire,” Brother Cosmas went on. “He saw the adoption of Christianity as a means of cementing his empire against disintegration. But he was no theologian to understand the vast gulf between the Arian and Athanasian creeds, so he convened a Church council at Nicaea to determine which was the true belief.”

“Frankly, Brother Cosmas,” I said, “I do not entirely understand the difference either.”

“Come, come!” he said impatiently. “Arius, clearly inspired by the devil, asserted that Christ was only a creation of God the Father. Inferior to the Father. In effect, no more than a messenger of the Father. But if that were so, you see, then God might at any time send to earth another such redeemer. If another messiah were even remotely possible, then Christ’s priests would have no unique, unrepeatable, uncontestable truth to preach. And so Arius’s scandalous notion naturally horrified most of the Christian priesthood, because it would have abolished their very reason for being.”

“I see,” I said, though I myself would have rejoiced in the hope that God might send another Son to earth in my own lifetime.

“The Nicene council rejected the Arian thesis, but did not then condemn it thoroughly enough. So Constantine tended to lean toward Arianism throughout his reign. As a matter of fact, the Eastern Church—the so-called Orthodox Church—
still
inclines toward some of the Arian teachings. While we Western Christians rightly regard sin as vice, and its cure as discipline, the insipid Eastern Christians regard sin as ignorance, and its cure as education.”

“So when was Arianism finally condemned?”

“About fifty years after Arius died, when a synod was convened at Aquileia. Happily, the sainted Bishop Ambrose had the foresight to weight that synod with other Athanasian bishops. Only two Arian bishops attended, and they were literally shouted down, vilified, anathematized and expelled from the Christian episcopate. Arianism was overthrown, and the Catholic Church has had to suffer no stain of that heresy ever since.”

“Then how did the Goths become Arians?”

“Sometime before Arianism was made anathema, the Arian Bishop Wulfilas went as a missionary into the wilds where the Visigoths had their wolfish dens. He converted them, they converted their neighboring brother Ostrogoths,
they
converted the Burgunds and other outlanders.”

“But surely, Brother Cosmas, there must also have been Catholic missionaries going among the outlanders.”