Earthly Powers

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Somebody, probably Carlo himself, that expert in ecclesiastical history, set out the whole story. Pelagius, a British monk in Rome in the early fifth century, was deeply disturbed when he heard a bishop quote from Augustine’s Confessions: “Thou commandest continence; grant what thou commandest and command what thou wilt.” This seemed to Pelagius to be a denial of moral responsibility. At the same time a commentator on the epistles of Saint Paul usually named Ambrosiaster, seemed to affirm that the transmission of Adam's sin was effected biologically, human souls being derived, like human bodies, from the parents. “In Adam all sinned as in one lump.” Pelagius, upset by this, wrote his own Pauline commentary and asserted that there was no hereditary transmission of sin, since this would be a denial of free will. Man sinned by an elected imitation of Adam’s sin, not through an inherent fault of human nature. Jn all sin. said Pelagius, there had to be personal assent. The consequence of Adam’s sin was a mere bad example which his successors voluntarily embraced. infants had to be baptized into the faith, but the baptism was not a device of absolution from inherited sin. All this caused a hell of a row. Jerome called Pelagius a fat dog weighed down with Scotch porridge, his brains thick and quddied, a stupid rather than sinful denier of elementary truths-the necessity of infant baptism as an expunger of hereditary sin, the saving power of God’s erace. the comparative impotence of man as a free agent thinking himself capable, without that grace, of voluntarily embracing the good. Augustine, expectedly, went wild. 

Pope Innocent I said: Heresy. Augustine was happy. Then came Pope Josimus (417-18). Zosimus was rather pleased with Pelagius’s emphasis, in a new book, on free will, as well as his lofty view of morality and papal authority. He told Augustine and the rest of the Africans that Pelagius must be adjudged orthodox. Augustine, expectedly, went wild. But Pelagius had, in Sicily (how these people got around), written a socialistic pamphlet denouncing the irresponsibility of the rich toward the poor and the sinfulness of the maintenance of governmental power by means of torture and wanton execution. Augustine drew the attention of the Emperor at Ravenna to this preaching of social revolution. On April 30, 418, an imperial edict banished Pelagius and _ his followers from Rome as a menace to peace. Zosimus had to bow to the ultimate secular authority. He formally condemned Pelagius as a heresiarch, and the Church ever since had endorsed that condemnation. But, Carlo (it had to be Carlo) seemed to say, the condemnation, being made under duress, had no true validity, and there were grounds for accepting (he was discreet and cautious here) the Pelagian thesis as more consonant with the True Reformed premise of the goodness and dignity of man than the Augustinian doctrine of his natural depravity. I had got to that word depravity when Carlo came out with a snore that seemed devised by his unconscious to wake him.

And 

“Ah,” as Mario, having forgotten first to remove the meat dishes, brought the cheese in, no Gorgonzola there but nearly everything else, a stinking anthology of Italian caseation, “that must remain a secret.” And then, carving himself a sunk of lactic decay, he said solemnly, “Death.” 

“It does smell like death, yes. The corpse of milk, Jim Joyce used to call it

“Tom,” I said, “was a saint.” Val Wrigley had said that, but he’d been right. 

“What do you think you mean by a saint?” 

“Tom was a man who did no harm to anyone, who brought a good deal of harmless pleasure into people’s lives, who was chaste and charitable, who suffered pain uncomplainingly, who died saying God’s will be done.” 

“He said that?” 

“No, he made jokes. He made the doctors laugh and the nurses cry at his courage. He insisted on dying undoped. He wanted to meet God, he said, as he used to meet his audiences-smiling but bemerding himself with fear. He was too good, perhaps. His wife left him because of that. Women can’t stand goodness. Some people said it was she who was the saint. Always going to mass and confession and saying her bloody rosary. Talking about the delights of chastity. And then she went off with a low comedian.” Carlo frowned at the technicality. “Tom was what is known as a light comedian. Without a red nose. Not dirty. Not like George Robey who peels a banana and says one skin two skin three skin five skin.” Carlo’s blank face reminded me of the temperamental and cultural gap between us. He would not be a humorous pontiff. 

“A saint,” he said, “is something different from what you seem to think. I’ve known cats and dogs that were saints by your definition. A saint,” he said, “has to modify the world in the direction of being more aware of the presence of God In it.” 

“Feeding an illusion,” I said with some bitterness. “God’s removed himself from the world. As we’ll see. 

And

He, who spent some time in Malaya, will confirm the existence in the Malay language, as also in the Chinese, of a feature called the numerical coefficient. The Malay word for one is satu, the Malay word for a house is rumah, but you don’t translate one house as satu rumah. |t has to be sa-buah rumah, where the buah literally means a fruit but is used here to signify something bulky. Biji literally means a seed, but one egg is translated as sa-biji telor, biji being the right numerical coefficient for a small smooth object. According to Benjamin Lee Whorf, the Navaho Indians have an even subtler system of classification. The Navaho world of inanimate objects is split into long things and round things, and these affect the verb stems of the language. You need one verb stem for a round thing and another for a long.