The Last Gospel (31 page)

‘And he’s talking about Britain,’ Costas said.

‘Gildas was implying that Christianity came to Britain very early on, in the first century AD,’ Jeremy said. ‘He’s even implying that the emperor himself brought it, in person. That’s what’s really fascinating. It’s only through being here ourselves, on the trail of an emperor, that those lines of Gildas suddenly take on a new significance, a real authority. His
De Excidio Britonum
was exclusively a book on Britain, not some wider history.’

‘What’s the other evidence for early Christianity here?’ Costas said. ‘From archaeology, I mean?’

‘Just like in the Mediterranean region,’ Jack replied. ‘Incredibly elusive until the second century, and it’s not until the fourth century that you start to see churches, burials, overt symbols of Christianity, after it becomes the state religion. But early Christianity was a religion of the word, not of idols and temples. It was secretive, and often persecuted. If it wasn’t for the Gospels and a few Roman sources, we’d know nothing at all about Christianity in the first century AD. Remember our shipwreck off Sicily? That scratched chi-rho symbol was the only overt evidence we saw there of Christianity, yet we’re talking about the ship of St Paul, one of the key episodes in early Christian history.’

‘And remember who we’re looking at in early Roman Britain,’ Jeremy added pensively. ‘There were the immigrants, traders and soldiers who may well have brought the idea of Christianity with them, and may have come to worship Christ as others did Mithras or Isis. But the majority of the population were natives, Romanized to some degree but retaining much of their Celtic way of life and customs. Their religion has left almost no archaeological trace. These were not people who were inclined to build temples and altars or to make statues of their gods. Archaeology was never going to tell us much.’

‘Okay.’ Costas narrowed his eyes. ‘But if there was Christianity in early Roman Britain, why would the Anglo-Saxon Church want to deny it? I mean, wouldn’t it have been something to celebrate, that their religion had been in place hundreds of years before?’

‘But it wasn’t their religion,’ Jeremy said quietly.

‘Huh?’

‘The time of Gildas, the time of King Arthur, wasn’t just a formative period in the political genesis of Britain,’ Jeremy said. ‘It was also a time when a conflict within the Christian communities of Britain first began to play out in a big way. Everyone knows about King Henry the Eighth, his break with the Roman Church in the sixteenth century. But the roots of the English Reformation under Henry go way back to this period, to the time when the British Church stood up against Rome and proclaimed their direct connection to the Holy Land, to Jesus the man.’

‘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.’

A
n hour later, Jack and Costas crouched again inside the small chamber of the crypt, this time behind the glare of two portable tungsten lights. An IMU De Havilland Dash-8 aircraft had freighted all the equipment they needed from the Cornwall campus to London City airport, including a fresh pair of e-suits to replace those they had left with Massimo in Rome. Jeremy had obtained immediate permission from the church authorities for an exploratory reconnaissance beyond the bricked-up wall in the side of the chamber. In a huddled conversation with a cleric in the crypt they had agreed on the need for absolute secrecy, and their equipment had been brought in from a borrowed television van in the guise of a film crew. Above them, the lunchtime concert had ended and they could hear Gregorian chant wafting down from choristers practising in the nave, a sound Jack found strangely reassuring as they contemplated another dark passage into the unknown.

‘Okay. It’s done. There’s definitely a space behind there, but I can’t see much without getting in.’ Jeremy had been creating a hole in the wall, pulling out the bricks and stacking them to either side. The wall turned out to have been poorly constructed with mortar which had not properly set, allowing him to remove the bricks with ease.

‘Good,’ Jack said. ‘Your job now is to hold the fort.’ Jeremy nodded, walked over to check the bolt on the door into the crypt and then sat back against the wall, watching them kit up.

‘We could be going below the water table.’ Costas was staring at an image on a laptop computer as he checked the neck seal on his suit. ‘We’re about three metres below the present level of the Guildhall Yard, about two metres above the Roman layers. Below that, there’s a tributary of the Walbrook stream somewhere just in front of us. With all this rain it’s likely to be pretty wet.’

‘We’re going to need the suits anyway,’ Jack said. ‘Could be pretty toxic down there.’

Costas groaned. ‘Gas leaks?’

Jack gestured around the burial chamber. ‘Two thousand years of human occupation, Costas. I’m not going to spell it out for you.’

‘Don’t.’ Costas leaned over and flipped down Jack’s visor, then adjusted the regulator on the side of his helmet to verify the oxygen flow. He quickly did the same to his own helmet. Suddenly they were sealed off from the outside world, only able to hear each other through their intercom. ‘The oxygen rebreathers should give us four, maybe four and a half hours,’ he said.

‘We could be back here in ten minutes,’ Jack said. ‘It could be a dead end.’