Raptor (5 page)

“To God all things are possible,” he was reciting in Gothic—“Allata áuk mahteigs ist fram Gutha”—when I interrupted:

“If everything is possible to God, Brother Methodius, and if God made everything for the good of mankind, then why did God make bedbugs, niu?”

“Um, well, one philosopher once suggested that God created bedbugs to prevent us from sleeping overmuch.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps God originally intended for the bugs to torment only the pagans and—”

Again I interrupted. “Why are unbelievers called pagans, Brother Methodius? Brother Hilarion, who is teaching me to talk Latin correctly, says the word ‘paganus’ means only ‘a simple countryman.’ “

“So it does,” said the monk, sighing and then taking a deep breath. “The countryside is harder for Mother Church to purge of misbeliefs than are the cities, so the Old Religion has persisted longest among the countryfolk. Hence the word ‘pagan,’ meaning a rustic, came also to mean anyone who is still mired in ignorance and superstition. The country clods are also oftenest guilty of heresy and—”

Again I interrupted. “Brother Hilarion says the Latin word ‘haeresis’ means only ‘a choice.’ “

“Akh!” grunted the monk, grinding his teeth a little. “Well,
now
it means an
evil
choice, believe me, and it has become a
filthy
word.”

Again I interrupted. “If Jesus were still alive today, Brother Methodius, would he be a bishop?”

“The Lord Jesus?” Methodius sketched the sign of the cross on his forehead. “Ne, ne, ni allis! Jesus would be—or rather, he is—something infinitely grander than any bishop. The cornerstone of our faith, the sainted Paul calls him.” Brother Methodius consulted the Gothic Bible he held on his lap. “Ja, right here, St. Paul says to the Ephesians, regarding the divine purpose, ‘Af apaústuleis jah praúfeteis—’ “

“How do you know, Brother, what St. Paul says? I did not hear the book say any words at all.”

“Akh, liufs Guth!” groaned the monk, almost writhing. “The book says nothing aloud, child. It says its words in strokes of ink. I am reading what it says. What St. Paul has said.”

“Then,” said I, “you must teach me how to read, Brother Methodius, so that I too can hear the words of Paul and all the other saints and prophets.”

So there began my secular education. Brother Methodius, perhaps in simple self-defense, commenced teaching me to read the Old Language, and I persuaded Brother Hilarion to teach me to read Latin. To this day, those are the only two languages of which I can boast any considerable command. Of Greek I have learned only enough to hold my own in conversation, and of other tongues only a smattering. But then, consider: in all the world, no one has ever been fluent in
every
language, except the pagan nymph Echo.

My Latin reading Brother Hilarion taught me by using the Vulgate Bible that St. Jerome had translated from the Greek of the Septuagint Bible, and St. Jerome’s Latin was quite comprehensible, even for a beginner. But learning to read Gothic was a matter of more difficulty because, for his teaching, Brother Methodius employed the Bible rendered into the Old Language by the Bishop Wulfilas. Before that bishop’s time, the Goths had had no mode of writing except the age-old runes, and Wulfilas found those inadequate for a proper rendition of the Holy Scriptures. So he
invented
an entire new alphabet for the Gothic language—making some of its letters from the runic futhark, some from Greek, some from Roman—and that alphabet has been widely in use among most of the Germanic nations ever since.

Once I had some grasp of the art of reading, I found in the abbey’s scriptorium books less difficult and more interesting—the
Biuhtjos jah Anabusteis of Gutam,
which was a compilation of the “Laws and Customs of the Goths,” and the
Saggwasteis af Gut-Thiudam,
which was a collection of many of the “Epic Songs of the Gothic Peoples”—and numerous other works, both in Gothic and in Latin, relating to my ancestors and kinfolk, such as Ablabius’s
De Origine Actibusque Getarum,
which was a history of the Goths from their earliest encounters with the Roman Empire.

In mentioning such works, I use the word “was” because I have reason to suspect that I and others of my generation will have been the last persons ever to read any of those books I have cited. Even when I was first perusing them, the Church had for long been frowning darkly on every work written by a Goth, or written about the Goths, or written in the Old Language, whether in the futhark runes or in the more modern alphabet concocted by Wulfilas.

The Church’s disapproval was founded, of course, on the fact that both the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths were of the detested Arian faith. Over the years, all those books have been ever more fervently preached against by Catholic Christian clerics, and more relentlessly banned, burned, obliterated from existence. After my time, I fear, there will remain not so much as one written fragment of Gothic history or heritage, and the very name of “Goth” will have become only one more among the long roster of peoples extinct and unworthy of remembrance.

Dom Clement was as steadfastly opposed to Arianism as was every proper Catholic Christian cleric, but he had what most churchmen do not: a loving regard for the sanctity of books in themselves. That was why he allowed those various works dealing with the Visigoths and Ostrogoths to remain in St. Damian’s scriptorium. During his years as a seminary teacher, Dom Clement had acquired a considerable library of his own, and had brought with him to our abbey a whole cartload of his codices and scrolls. He had continued ever since to procure for us more and more works, until we had a library that would have been admired by any book-collecting rich man.

Of course the religious instruction and secular education of any postulant like myself was supposed to be restricted to the study of only pious works to which Mother Church could not take exception. Dom Clement never forbade me to open any book I might discover in the scriptorium. So, while I dutifully read the Latin writings of the Church fathers and those works sanctioned by the Church fathers: Sallust’s histories, Cicero on oratory, Lucan on rhetoric, I also read many that were discountenanced by the Church. In addition to the comedies of Terence, approved because they were “uplifting,” I read the comedies of Plautus and the satires of Persius, disapproved because they were “misanthropic.”

As a result of my voracious curiosity, my young mind eventually teemed with a mishmash of contradictory beliefs and philosophies. I even came upon books that refuted not only the Church-approved chorographies of Seneca and Strabo but also the evidence of my own eyes. Those books denied that the earth is what it looks to be—what all the far-travelers who have wandered over this world have found it to be—an expanse of land and waters stretching limitlessly east and west between the forever-frozen north and the forever-sizzling south. Those books averred that the earth is a round ball, meaning that a traveler who left home and went far enough eastward—farther than any man has yet gone—would eventually find himself again approaching his home, but from the west.

What amazed me more, some of those books maintained that our earth is not the centerpiece of all Creation, with the sun vaulting over it and ducking under it to provide us with day and night. The philosopher Philolaus, for instance, who wrote some four hundred years before the time of Christ, solemnly stated that the sun
stands still
while the sphere called earth simultaneously turns on its own axis and revolves once a year
around
the sun. And Manilius, who lived about the same time as Christ, said that the earth is as round as a turtle’s egg, a fact which is evident from the circular shadow it casts on the moon during an eclipse, and also from the way a ship sailing off from harbor gradually dips and disappears beneath the far horizon.

Never, at that time in my life, having seen an eclipse, a harbor, a sea or a ship, I asked one of my tutors, Brother Hilarion, if those phenomena really did occur and really did prove the earth to be a sphere.

“Gerrae!” he growled in Latin, and then repeated it in the Old Language, “Balgs-daddja!” both of which words mean “nonsense!”

“Then you have seen an eclipse, Brother?” I asked. “And a ship going to sea?”

“I do not
need
to see any such things,” he said. “The mere idea of a ball-shaped earth contravenes Holy Scripture, and that is sufficient for me. It is nothing but a pagan notion, that the earth is other than what we see and know it to be. Remember, Thorn, those ideas were put forth by the ancients, who were not nearly so educated and wise as we Christians are today. I might also remark that if any philosophers
were
uttering such things in this enlightened modern age, they would be liable to a charge of heresy.” He concluded, somewhat ominously, “And so would any persons who paid heed to them.”

Before my time was up at St. Damian’s, I fancied myself quite as brimming with erudition as any
twenty
-year-old of noble family. I probably was, too; twenty-year-olds of whatever social status are not overfraught with knowledge and wisdom, however good and expensive their education. Like them, I was crammed full of juiceless facts and rote arguments and categorical absolutes. And foolish pomposity. On any of the topics I had been made to memorize, I could discourse at length, either in the Old Language or in quite good Latin, but in my preposterously piping twelve-year-old voice:

“Brothers, we can find in the Scriptures every trope and schema of rhetoric. For example, notice how Psalm Forty-three illustrates the use of anaphora, or deliberate repetition:
You have made us turn… you have given us up… you have sold your people… you have made us a reproach…
Psalm Seventy is a perfect instance of ethopoeia, or the delineation of character…” All of that precocious posturing greatly pleased my instructors, but my talent for rhetoric proved, in my later life, to be of no use whatever to me or to anyone else.

Also, most of the facts I had been made to learn I would in time find to be untrue, most of the absolutes to be baseless, most of the arguments to be specious. And a lot of what a child might learn to its advantage, no monk could or would teach. For example, it was continually drummed into me that sexual activity was sinful, sordid, evil, never to be thought of, let alone indulged in. But no one ever taught me what it
was
that I was supposed to beware of—hence my imbecilic ignorance when I encountered first Brother Peter and later Sister Deidamia.

However, if much of my education was sheer dross, and much else of it totally neglected, I did learn to read and write and use numbers. Those abilities—and Dom Clement’s tolerance in allowing me free run of the scriptorium—enabled me, while still at St. Damian’s, to ingest a good deal of information and opinion not included in the approved curriculum. And what I thus learned, on my own, in turn enabled me at least to question and challenge—mentally, I mean; I seldom dared to do so aloud—many of the postulates so piously fed me by my teachers. I was able in time to learn much more for myself, and to unlearn the deadweight misinformation and pathetic falsehoods those tutors were impelled to teach.

And, a year or so before I left St. Damian’s, my education-beyond-my-age made it possible for me to get my first vicarious glimpses of the world outside the abbey and the valley and the surrounding highlands and even outside the Burgund nation. Our Brother Paulus, the swift-writer who was Dom Clement’s exceptor, was afflicted with an aposteme, and before long was bedridden. Despite all our prayers and the best ministrations of our infirmarian, Brother Paulus suffered and dwindled, and at length he died.

Dom Clement then did me the unexpected honor of appointing me to the post of exceptor (or, rather, to have me take it on in addition to my numerous other duties). I was by then adept at reading and writing—and in both the Old Language and Latin, which none of the preceptores in the scriptorium or chartularium could claim to be, so those monks muttered and grumbled only a little at my having won preferment instead of one of them. I hardly need remark that I was nowhere near as quick and accurate as Brother Paulus had been at catching the abbot’s utterances on wax and then transcribing them onto vellum. But Dom Clement made allowances for my inexperience. He dictated more slowly and precisely than heretofore, and he had me first write drafts of his dictation, on which he could correct any mistakes, before I did the finished writings.

Much of Dom Clement’s correspondence dealt with minuscule points of Church doctrine and interpretations of scriptural arcana. And not all of the views I thus got of the Church’s ways and workings were inspiring of boyish admiration. There seemed to me to be something wrong about a letter from Bishop Patiens in which he unnecessarily reminded Dom Clement of Christ’s words in the Book of John: “The poor you have always with you.”

“And happy it is for us Christians that we do,” wrote the bishop. “By giving alms to the poor we do our souls much good, and lay up for ourselves a reward in the hereafter. Meanwhile, looking after the poor makes a worthy avocation for our women who might otherwise be idle. As we ourself tell the rich families who hospitably open their doors to us when we travel, ‘Whatever you give to another, you are sending on before you into heaven.’ And so, where once a wealthy man might have built an aqueduct for his town, now, heeding our preachments, he builds for us a fine church. As is well known, the rich always have the most sins to atone for, and we ourself are ever ready to give our best prayers toward the palliation of the sins of a rich and liberal patron. Needless to add, it is far more profitable than our tithing of the common folk.”

I was even inclined once to view askance my own abbot, whom I otherwise loved and respected, when he dictated to me a letter to be sent to a recent graduate of the Condatus seminary, where he had once taught. That young man having just been ordained a priest, Dom Clement was moved to give him some advice on how best to address his congregation:

“One must preach without overpassing the simple folk; to them give milk—but without boring the more intelligent; to them give meat. However, nothing should be made too clear; therefore, stir the milk and meat into a gravy. If the laity ever were able to comprehend the Word of God unaided, if they ever were able to pray without an intermediary, what need then of the priest’s benediction? Of his authority? Of the priesthood itself?”