The Heretic’s Apprentice

The Heretic’s Apprentice (1989) Ellis Peters

Set in England in 1143.

William of Lythwood has returned from his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in a coffin. He died of illness on his return home, and his attendant Elave has brought his body back to his family. However, a visiting cleric raises doubts as to whether the man should be buried at the abbey when he learns that he was once chastened for heretical views.

‘There were certain small points at issue,’ Serlo said submissively, ‘as I remember it. Two in particular, besides his doubts concerning the baptism of infants. He had difficulty in comprehending the Trinity…’

Who does not! thought Cadfael. If it were comprehensible, all these interpreters of the good God would be out of an occupation. And every one of those denies the interpretation set up by every other.

These views soon reach out to tar Elave as well, and when a body appears, things begin to look at the darker for the young man.

‘I do not deny divine grace. The grace is in the gifts he has given us, free will to choose good and refuse evil, and mount towards our own salvation, yes, and the strength to choose rightly. If we do our part, God will do the rest.’

Saint Augustine, of whom Cadfael was not as fond as he might have been. There is a certain unbending rigidity about Augustine that offers little compassion to anyone with whom he disagrees. Cadfael was never going to surrender his private reservations about any reputed saint who could describe humankind as a mass of corruption and sin proceeding inevitably towards death, or one who could look upon the world, for all its imperfections, and find it irredeemably evil.

Not that Cadfael doesn’t have heretical leanings himself, but he does his best for the young man, whom he believes is being unjustly persecuted.

And as always, there is no black and white, no evil at the root of murder and divisiveness.

Cadfael had a sudden startling insight into a mind utterly alien to his own. For the man really had, somewhere in Europe, glimpsed yawning chaos and been afraid, seen the subtleties of the devil working through the mouths of men, and the fragmentation of Christendom in the eruption of loud-voiced prophets bursting out of limbo like bubbles in the scum of a boiling pot, and the dispersion into the wilderness in the malignant excesses of their deluded followers. There was nothing false in the horror with which Gerbert looked upon the threat of heresy,

‘I do believe we have been given free will, and can and must use it to choose between right and wrong, if we are men and not beasts. Surely it is the least of what we owe, to try and make our way towards salvation by right action. I never denied divine grace. Surely it is the greatest grace that we are given this power to choose, and the strength to make right use of it. And see, my lord, if there is a last judgement, it will not and cannot be of God’s grace, but of what every man has done with it, whether he buried his talent or turned it to good profit. It is for our own actions we shall answer, when the day comes.’

I think I actually enjoyed the theology here even more than the mystery.
Rating: 9/10

Published by Mysterious Press

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