Some have claimed he is either Scottish or Irish, even Welsh - not that the people named themselves as such at the time - but to my way of thinking he was a Romano-Britian from an assimilated family. I can't see any other explanation for him being accepted by the early Christian church to receive an education in Latin and Greek. He would have been a leading member of the early church heirarchy in Roman occupied Britain by the time he started his travels, taking with him a distinct early British Christian theology.
The early Church won in the end, his ideas found heretical and he apostate. He ended in Africa somewhere and wasn't heard of after c.420AD. So what were his ideas and why a threat? Number one; Adam did not commit original sin. Number two; everyone has the will to choose whether to be good or bad. "If I ought. I can."
So, Woman wasn't schemeing slut, bend on corrupting the creation of God with a bit of fruit. Was not evil incarnate. But how did Pelagius come to such an idea, besides it being been pointed out to him like it has to every man who has ever existed at least once! Ratzinger and Williams please note.
To try and find just one answer requires a slight detour through paleoanthropology, neurology, evolutionary biology and archaeology, after having been dipped into the strangeness of my mind. It may seem arrogant, conceited even, writing about such subjects having had no formal training in their specialised vocabularies and I may very well make a lot of errors but then writing is a process of learning. Anyway I'm a poet/essayist/photographer not a scientist and considering my admiration for them I hope they excuse me for taking some extrapolations of their research to far toward speculation to be considered altogether empirically persuasive at present.
The place to start is Africa, the dark continent and mire of our ignorance, prejudice and fear for the Other. Where we wallow in guilt for our European fore-fathers atrocities and the land where Pelagius got lost. A place difficult to admit into our white, eurocentric foundation myths yet the place it all begins. The intellectual convolutions we make in trying to justifying our supposed superiority requires a rather convoluted response.
Originally we were hairy. Had fur. During a warm period 200Kya (thousand years ago) our species, homo sapien arose and about twenty-thousand years later (180Kya) the world entered an ice age lasting fifty-thousand years and for which the fur came in handy. Then about 135Kya the Earth started to get warmer again and entered an interglacial lasting another twenty-thousand years. It was much warmer than the present interglacial. 114Kya, about the time the interglacial warm period ended and we entered the last Ice Age, parasitic human body lice diverged from human head lice, indicating that we had lost our body hair because the mis-named body lice actually only live in clothing. (From research on lice DNA by Mark Stoneking and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology via Sharon Begley, MSNBC,
Newsweek 19 March 2007 ). It seems we lost our fur during the twenty-thousand years of the interglacial previous to the present one and which achieved temperatures 3 - 4 degrees centigrade higher than today. A more efficient way of regulating our body temperature was found by shedding the fur and relying on perspiration, black skin, shade, loads of water and no physical exertion when the Sun's at its highest and hottest during the day. This is Africa after all. Fortunately we had the nous to use other animals furs and fashion them to keep warm when we entered the last Ice Age, which would last almost one-hundred-thousand years. Unfortunately it doubled the species of lice parasitic to us! (Did I mention that we were a prey species once, a highly desirable one for big cats - no fur to chomp through. Don't! I've got to lighten this up somehow, even if its only for me.)
The previous paragraph is an indication of what awaits, though some of what is to come may seem a bit disjointed and to incredible to be accepted as sane - but then, by now you probably think I'm bonkers anyway.
The growth of the homo sapiens brain and how it works required a change in diet from that of the other primates. Some like the Chimps have an ability to use tools to extract foods, like an anvil to break nuts or sticks to poke crevasses and holes for grubs. What they don't have that we have is an opposable thumb with the dexterity that allows for using and crafting a wider range of tools. An early hominid of the genus homo, thought an ancestor of ours living 2.5 - 1.8 million years ago,
Homo Habilis has been found with stone tools. The Leakeys found bones of a hand of Homo Habilis that on reconstruction was discovered to be
capable of precise manipulation . (Richard Leakey has disputed putting Habilis in the homo genus and would prefer to include it with the more distant hominids, Australopithecine)
This dexterity opened up a wider diet capable of being exploited, especially bringing within reach new foods harvested from river and shore. From a hard diet predominently comprising of nuts, leaves, fruits and roots, with some occassional raw meat, to a softer diet comprising in the most part meat and seafood, easily caught stuff like tortoise and oysters, and probably cooked by the time
Homo Erectus came along about 1.8 million years ago.
The change of diet allowed for the jaw muscles to get smaller and less powerful. In the earlier hominid genus,
Robust Australopithecine (10 to 5 million years ago) the temporalis muscle - the upper jaw muscle - is attached to a ridge on the top of the skull, the 'Sagittal crest'. The muscle is massive
compared to ours and, along with the Masseter muscle, indicates a very hard, rough-tough diet, but the muscle also acts as a compress to the skull denying any expansion. Incrementally over many generations and through to the homo genus, the jaw muscle attachment moved south because the reason for the muscle's mass, a rough tough diet, was no longer the dominant food source. The muscle was no longer energy efficient and its move south allowed the skull to expand. I am not saying that we are directly descended from Australopithecine but that the process of evolutionary change which has got us to where we are can be read in such a fossil. Transitional periods always seem to be bit foggy.
The release of the compression didn't necessarily mean the skull would spring up. Its expansion would require the brain itself to also expand and grow, else it would start to wobble and bang around bequeathing to us a permanent hangover without the previous night's alcohol induced enjoyment. It took the brain to grow for the skull to expand and vice versa. Fortunately the new softer foods contained nutrients and trace elements which encouraged the neurons to multiply such as iodine. This again occured incrementally over many, many generations, and through the rise of many different examples of the genus homo, including Erectus,
Heidelbergensis and of course
Neanderthal . It took millions of years to get to us, not that we are necessarily directly descended from these fossils. This happened in Africa and where, about 200Kya we, homo sapien sapien arose through this kind of evolutionary process during a
relatively long interglacial - though not as warm as this present one.
None of the previous hominids to us could speak, that is make words to name and number things. It did not take a genetic mutation for humans to be able to name and number things, put words to ourselves, the environment and abstract ideas, to make language as Chomsky has claimed. The neural architecture capable of producing speech was already in place even before the earliest Australopithecine left the trees and strode the land.
Part of the brain of a long distant primate relative of ours, the
macaque monkey (whose range extends from East Africa to Japan) and which is responsible for its ability to communicate emotional states with an extraordinary variety of facial expressions, is '
architectonically comparable ' to the area in the human brain,
Broca's area , responsible for our ability to make words that make sense.
"...........human brains reveal their ancestry. Their basic biochemistry was essentially fixed at the dawn of evolutionary time, with the emergence of cells. Their basic neurophysiology, with its membrane potentials and signalling by way of chemical messengers, predates the appearance of nervous systems. Neurons were invented aeons before they were assembled into brains. The puzzle of contralateralism, requiring nerves to cross over, connecting right body to left brain and vice versa, appears even in early vertebrates and their successors have had to live with it ever since. New design solutions do occasionally appear, as in the inversion of white and grey matter, which solved the neuronal packing problem by putting the cells on the surface to form the cortex, and tucking their nervous inputs and outputs within, insulated in their myelin sheaths. However, the cumbersome multilayered cerebral regions, with their seemingly overlapping or redundant functions, such as thalamus and cortex, track the steady dominance of forebrain over midbrain during vertebrate evolution, in which structures are rarely abandoned, merely overlaid by and subordinated to others. A camel, it has been said, is a horse designed by committee. A visitor from Mars, contemplating this ramshackle brain-building with its inconvenient access, rickety staircases, odd extensions - and amazed that it worked so harmoniously at all - might draw a similar parallel."
From 'The 21st-Century Brain - explaining, mending and manipulating the mind' by Steven Rose. Published by Vintage. Page 206.
Looking at
the head of Neanderthal, chronologically closer to us than the macaque and with whom we shared occupation of the planet for a while, two of the most prominent features are the large eye-brow ridges and robust jaw more adapted to crushing and grinding than chewing. The jaw indicates that the diet is still fairly rough-tough and the skull therefore should still have some constraint on it - there is a pronounced difference in the configuration between their and our skulls, as can be seen in the last link. The prominent spongy eye-brow ridges indicate, to me anyway, that the Neanderthal was still predominently dependent on social communication through facial expression similar to that of the noisy macaque monkey. Neanderthal obviously had other means of communicating, including vocally with the ability to change pitch and tone and volume. They could probably hum, whistle - make music, whoop & holler, laugh and sigh as well as pass information through dance and mimicry. They had a complex social interaction. But they could not articulate an abstract with a word. Still not able to objectify their environment by naming it. The nearest they came to consciousness of themselves were the rudimentary burials of their dead. They had fire though so they could possibly be Prometheus and the others in the pantheon of Titan Gods, mythologised as oral history started to be passed on by us to us. Just kidding. Or maybe not?
We were like that too when we first arose. Wordless and furry and being stinky, not very cuddly by todays sensibilities. The neural architecture was there but had not yet been accessed for the production of words as a means of social communication.
At a dig in South Africa on the south coast in
Blombos Cave , artifacts dated to 78Kya, at least, have been found including worked stone and bone tools, shells used as beads and evidence of the use of ochre. These are the oldest know bone tools attributable to anatomically modern humans and were found amongst a mass of shellfish remains. Shellfish with their high iodine content is a major contributor to the thyroid's ability to stimulate neuron growth especially in early foetal and post-natal development. (
Pdf ,
Pdf page two table.) At the layers of the dig below this a 'lithic assemblage' - very early stone tools - dating before 100Kya is presently being studied. There doesn't seem to be any worked bone in this level.
About 58Kya we started to spread out
from Africa ,(link requires free registration to NYT) hunting/gathering as we went. Originally moving east through Asia - the road of least resistance, as going north into Europe was difficult it still being largely covered by ice and tundra. That is a bit facile but, like the head/body lice, the genetic record of divergence of the gut bacteria come to all humans,
Helicobacter pylori gives a clue to the sequence of human migration out of Africa. From Africa to Asia to Europe and island hopping across the Pacific.
Our tool set had become quite intricate with awls, needles, hooks, arrowheads and included materials other than stone like bone, shell etc. (Compared to Neanderthal's tool kit it would seem like the difference between the abacus and the laptop). We had started painting, depicting the world around us on rocks and in caves, objectiving the environment and which helped in the co-ordination of productive social activity and adorning ourselves with colour and jewellery, becoming aware of ourselves, becoming self-conscious. We had also cracked the ability to add words to, and integrate them as a proto-language with our other means of communication, which included vocally like whistling etc. After 140,000 years in the African incubator, we had outgrown the continent and were fully intellectually equipped, though not fully conscious. The future would be practise and use, and slowly, incrementally building visual and vocal vocabularies.
All of these expressions, these activities grew together, fed off each other, reinforced each other because they created positive feed back loops with beneficial outcomes for our species. Slowly, incrementally over millenia and generations they all helped increase the food supply, improve the health and growth in numbers of early homo sapien. They also strengthened social cohesion through more extensive, wider ranging families. Complex culture an advantage in accessing food resources and reproduction, probably at the expense of other homo like Neanderthal whom we co-existed with in Europe for a while. This is the environment forcing an evolutionary adaptation of neural architecture which could only be achieved within a social matrix. There was no turning back once Broca's area started to generate regularised sounds imbued with meaning for depicting place and thing - words. We haven't stopped talking since.
To try to explain. As our communication by voicing words increased and became more complex the use and relative size of the corresponding neural architecture would increase and the need to communicate with facial expression decrease. To give an example of what I mean. Neurological research led by Dr Eleanor A. Maguire, senior research fellow in neuropsychology at the Wellcome Department of Cognitive Neurology, UCL, has shown that an area of
London Taxi Drivers brains - yes they do have them - grew due to the increased, specialised use for navigation, compared to that of people who weren't London Taxi Drivers. The area, the hippocampus is responsible for our spatial ability - knowing and having memory of where we are in space. The volume of the posterior hippocampus increased while that of the anterior hippocampus decreased. The longer a London Cabbie was in the job the bigger the posterior hippocampus. In other words the more you use it, the fitter the area becomes to carry out the function in a sort of positive feedback loop. The more Broca's area was used for producing words that made sense the fitter it would be for that function. The need for pronounced eye-brow ridges would decrease with less use, as would the jaw line change allowing the mouth and tongue to shape and finely tune sound around new words and meanings.
We still use and interpret facial expression when making sense of words, more so when we had a small vocabulary which would be the case when first stumbling upon the ability. The animation of the eye-brows; shape of the mouth; position of the tongue; angle of jaw, the subtle visual changes in expression that allow us to understand the emotional sentiment as well as intellectual content in the words, all enhance our understanding of what has been said and that which is not said. We still see as well as hear the spoken word.
Dr Eleanor A. Maguire was awarded the
Ig Noble medicine prize in 2003 for the piece of reasearch on London Cabbies. The awards are for scientists whose work "first makes people laugh - then makes them think".
Fast forward to the more recent past, 5,000 years ago and the building of Stonehenge.
In the 1960s a wood henge was discovered 3km from Stonehenge at Durrington Walls aligned with the midwinter solstice, complementary to Stonehenge's alignment with the midsummer solstice. Durrington Walls was built at the same time as Stonehenge which was started about 5,000bp. Both Stonehenge and Durrington Walls are considered as one vast religious/ceremonial complex.
Recent excavations, reported in January this year by archaeologists from Sheffield University working on the
Stonehenge Riverside Project, have uncovered at least 25 houses at the wood henge. The place is littered with a mass of pig and some cattle bones. The pig teeth date the pigs at 9 months old when ate, which has made the archaeologists think it is the ceremonial site of a midwinter feast. It's also thought the dwellings were used by the builders of Stonehenge.
A site that could have been permanently inhabited with a seasonal mass inflex to partake in a great protein binge and help with the construction of Stonehenge in celebration and honour of their dead. It's thought that alcohol was brewed. Think lewd and bawdy builders, raunchy party animals celebrating the end of a years work building with stone tools. Lots of babies born here one would have thought. Nothing better for nursing mothers than nutritious roasted pig. This is logical! The end of the harvest is the optimum time to give birth in neolithic society and would be synchronised - thought out. A big creche one component of the site. They certainly had an intellect and we were clever once.
(Christ's birth in winter represented the majority of the births of early neolithic society. The identification of one's own child with whom you want to take forward all that which is good makes for a powerful association.)
The midwinter could have brought people throughout the British Isles on 'pilgrimage' at least once in their life for both the midwinter and midsummer festivals. Different henges for different family and singles age cohorts at different times of the year. They would be representing and considered the best and brightest of their extended families; emissaries bringing with them tributes of food, skills, tools, stone and even an exchange of workforce.
It would also allow the opportunity for communities to extend their genetic diversity, swap members. The taboo of incest between siblings would have long been present. It would have been very noticable when hunting/gathering that the infant mortality rate amongst the offspring of siblings was far higher than the equivalent between non-siblings.
Allegiance to the complex, its religion and mores stretched from West Wales where some of the stone was quarried and possibly the Orkneys where similarly designed stone houses as the wood ones at Durrington Walls date from the same period. Smaller versions of these feasts and festivals would be happening in communities all over the British Isles, witness the range of local henges and burial earthworks. This was an island wide culture whose unifying theme was a diety of the seasons.
The agricultural surplus given as tribute to the diety would also be used to sustain a permanent caste of religious leaders, the masters/mistresses of ceremony and the teachers, throughout the year. The intellectuals of their day responsible for remembering a complex mythology/cosmology of life and death based on the seasons and for passing it on by training the future MCs, teachers and builders. Early students who would eventually return to their communities with new skills and knowledge. It was communal property and the community inherited. That is if the concept of property was even present in those times.
Even the intellectuals could not read or write. Just like everybody else they could talk, they had a language, limited by a small vocabulary, but they were able to name and number things. These early Britons had not yet written down their foundation myths. Writing was being invented in modern day Iraq at the same time as the start of the construction of Stonehenge. It would take another 2,300 years for it to arrive in the British Isles. And we're all complicit in committing genocide against the descendents of the inventors of writing today.
The neolitihic inhabitants of the British Isles vocally articulated their unifying myths in poetry, dance and music performed at ceremony and ritual; chanted rhythmic instructions to builders.
There would have been ups and downs, times of drought and flood, crop failures etc. But overall a stable few thousand years which saw the Stonehenge/Durrington Walls religious/political complex the unifying element capable of sustaining a growing, surplus producing society. This was not a Golden Age or Garden of Eden, life expectancy was short, 35 years at most. The life was hard but made for an increasing population obvious in the growth of Stonehenge, a massive achievement in the landscape. There were a million people tops at it's zenith. The British Isles was one of the last places in Eurasia reached with the expansion of neolithic production from the Middle East. And one of the last to pass. Hence a world heritage site.
Where had these people originally come from before starting Stonehenge? Some genetic evidence is being interpretated as pointing to
northern Spain . It makes me wonder if a lineage can trace back to north Africa and the Straits of Gibralter crossing. Wow, maybe some of the earliest inhabitants of these isles were North African. Black even! Whatever, they were an early neolithic people from mainland Europe moving north as the Ice Age retreated. Using stone tools to slash and burn, clear areas and exploit the soil till nigh barren, over grazed and hunted out before moving on. Hard but successful work for a small but smart population of extended families to grow and expand into uncultivated but fertile land. Their superior mode of production absorbing or pushing out any hunter/gathering societies they encountered.
The society centred around Stonehenge started to decline about 3,000yrs ago which coincides/overlaps with two major innovations, one in the physical division of land and the other in the production of tools. Both brought in by trading or another wave of neolithic peoples from Europe with more advanced farming skills. The first innovation was the construction of reaves, the second was metal replacing stone.
I'm assuming now - probably a mistake but - that the property relations at the height of Stonehenge's success were communal, expressed in a cultural life and cosmology that had Stonehenge as its focus and which represented the sum of the knowledge they had at that time. The community inherited.
About 3,500 years ago reaves - field boundaries - started to be built. Previously farming had been done on a form of slash and burn. Extended families would exploit an area of land till exhausted and move on to more fertile land in a fairly restricted geographic area, say the size of Dartmoor. Returning a few generations later when the land had regained its fertility. A sort of proto rotational field system on a generational time scale. The start of building reaves was about a 1,500 years after the start of Stonehenge.
The reaves were probably initially used as a means to corral stock during such times as pigs farrowing and for crop rotation. A more productive use of land where surplus would have increased, more than was needed to sustain the complex at Stonehenge. Over time the reaves and the land they enclosed would come to signify private ownership in so far as it was private to the local extended farming families. The surplus was available to exchange in trade and, unknowningly, the abstract 'value' of labour time was starting to be placed on things.
This I think weakened the dominant religious/political world view as seen in the ceremonies and rituals of Stonehenge and led to its decline as the unifying cultural focal point of these isles. It didn't happen overnight but was a process and it wasn't seen as a threat to this society as it increased production and population size to the benefit of all, but it opened the way for the concept of private ownership to replace communal inheritance. An inheritance that was not gender determined.
Trade with mainland Europe brought with it bronze tools followed by knowledge of bronze manufacture as well as being brought in with new settlers at around the same time as the start of the reaves. With the move to private ownership, knowledge itself would also be considered as private. None more so than with the knowledge of metal production.
Stone tools were a disposable 'commodity', in that their fragility ensured inbuilt obsolesence and a short live span. In the late stone age, tool production started to look like a communal factory line with a communal product. Whereas metal lasts and can be maintained, cleaned and re-sharpened. It stayed with the user and would end up being treated as 'personal property' even if the concept was unknown. Though jewellery could have had the same effect for the wearer and 'seeded' the idea to other things.
Bronze-smiths became a power within neolithic society, or their knowledge did. Nascent scientists breaking the monopoly of understanding, of a world view promulgated by a religous caste which was probably both male and female. The demand for such prized tools required intensive labour time and whoever did it couldn't do childrearing at the same time. The health risks precluded women from the work,
arsenicosis (arsenic was added to the bronze to harden it) was an occupational disease causing deformity, lameness, cancers and early death. Not a very good job for child bearers.
(I think that knapping flint was a male and female activity in both stone age hunter/gather and early neolithic societies by which time it would have become a full time occupation for some. Men/boys making tools for their work and women/girls making such things as stone sickles for theirs.) previous post.
Metal production was a male centre of knowledge and power that would eventually lead to a 'secular' arm of the state, (which by the time of Republican Rome would result in the exclusion of women from voting or participating in 'politics'). How important bronze-smiths were in neolithic society can be seen by their elevation to the pantheon of Olympian Gods in the mythologised shape of Hephaestus. The alchemy of it!
Only a minor god. But bronzesmiths with their apprentice sons learning by example and trial & error, would be treated as Gods, revered during the length of their very short lives. The smiths knowledge, initially, was in the service of their society's world view, its leadership, despite the ability such knowledge had in undermining the dominant ideas which gave cohesion to the society. It would eventually become controlled by other emerging centres of power as the idea of private ownership started to consolidate. Inchoate with the innovation of the reaves, the idea of private ownership was to become a material force with the growth and spread of metal production.
Stonehenge represents the zenith of stone-age neolithic society but the new innovations meant communal ownership could not survive, was not able to confront private ownership because of its ability to increase production. It was 'progressive' in that populations increased as production increased.
About 2,700 years ago the Celtic influence started to be seen and felt. The Celts had not come as the warriors of yore but through trading and as settler/farmers in small numbers. Stonehenge as the centre of an isles wide culture was long dead. From out of the decayed and fractured Stonehenge society where the extended families were able to 'prosper' with their new technologies, a regionalised tribal society started to develop, probably influenced by the arrival of these 'Celtic' people bringing this form of social organisation with them when they settled.
It also brought with it iron, an easier ore to find and process. Harder and stronger. More tools produced in the same amount of time as bronze and more work done with iron in the same time for bronze, greatly increasing agricultural production.
They brought something else too. They were literate, or some at least. They had a rudimentary written alphabet. It was this that finished off the already weak and fractured society of Stonehenge along with its intellectual leadership who relied on two-dimensional and three-dimensional images and constructions, memory and oral transmission to relay history. With the shift toward private as opposed to communal ownership, the skill of writing and reading became a highly valued commodity for passing down foundation myths, history and information.
With the arrival and accruing of private ownership came power and organised aggression to secure it. With the Celts the landscape started to be populated with hillforts as a means to protect the communities/tribes from conflict with other tribes.
Then the pagan Romans invaded.
"Land is the repository of memory and keeps traces of the past in the absence of a strong written tradition. It is perceived as an open book from which anyone can read and learn about local history: place names, old roads, legends and stories attached to places. For local people, bulldozing the landscape is seen as erasing their history, and disturbing social organisations and traditions."
'Land concessions for economic purposes in Cambodia, A human rights perspective. Page 27. United Nations Cambodia Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. November 2004.'
From; Land and Natural Resource Alienation in Cambodia, author Shalmali Guttal, at
Focus on the Global South .
They, the Romans had taken the concept of private property to the level of objectiving people as commodities able to be privately owned. Ruled by an Emporer via a standing army, Roman Italy was a slave based plantation economy with a large 'free' mob. Men exercised secular power and slaves came from all over the empire just like the composition of the Roman Legions. Black people were in Britain at least by the time of the Romans.
The first Celts they encountered couldn't stand against Roman military science when their own warriors were merely tribal farmer/militias, not a professional army. The Celts still retained a modicum of free will being more farmer than warrior; didn't have the advanced military training and drills that Roman affluence allowed itself with a centralised state and professional army. The Romans were flattening hillforts and killing thousands as they went. On the capture of Caratacus most of the Celtic tribes became client chiefdoms or subjugated.
On the death of the Iceni's tribal chief Prasutagas 17 years after the invasion, the real nature of Rome was laid bare. Prasutagas had made a will which divided his wealth between Rome and his wife and daughters, in an attempt to placate Rome. The Romans took it as a sign of weakness and proceeded to try to take all and implant a settler occupation with retiring legionnaires from around the empire. When complaining of this, Prasutagas' widow Boudicca was flogged and her daughters raped.
Boudicca raised the Iceni in an alliance with the Trinivantes and sacked Colchester, London and St Albans showing no mercy to those thought collaborators with occupation, probably with iron-smiths among them. Unfortunately this was the only alliance she managed to make. The one unifying force amongst the Celtic tribes, the Druids and the power they had with the written word was killed off by the Romans on Anglesey in 60AD. Writing became Latin. The territory of the Iceni was laid waste when Rome finally got its act together. The revolt did though frighten the hell out of Rome and they had to make concessions to the other client chiefdoms to keep them onside, while fomenting civil war between those tribes who still maintained some independence and who were at the boundary of Roman controlled Britain.
I think some of those concessions included the indigenous property relations and inheritance not being gender specific. It was not long after this that the slave economy started to shift toward serfdom as the Roman empire moved from expansion to the defending of borders when Rome reached its geographic limits and began its long decline.
Christianity was not a hegemonic religion till late in the life-time of the Roman Empire. When Pelagius was about forty in 392AD the Roman Emperor, Flavius Eugenius appointed three pagans to prominent positions in the state and who started to rebuild pagan monuments and commission pagan festivals and games.
The Bible did not exist in Pelagius' time but hundreds of written stories, essays of their day, circulated about Christ and Christianity. Witness the recent controversy about the
Gospel of Judas .
Pelagius was not a pagan but a minority monotheist who would have read some of the most popular of these stories, as well as carrying with him beliefs inherited from a mixture of pre-Roman and Roman paganisms, and which were still believed and practised; a part of the political/cultural fabric of his times and society. I think he was trying to place the new monotheism he encountered within a specific historical experience while honouring his ancestors and their thinking.
Pelagius was considered austere in his life style and was reportedly shocked by the decadence he found in late Imperial Rome. His biggest supporters and followers there were women, the wives and daughters of senators and the affluent, whose educational role in transmitting Roman history to its sons was indispensible. They were excluded from political participation and from voting. Their influence though was quite extensive in that they weren't locked away but had a social life. Which probably helped Pelagius defeat the first attempts by the early Church to make his ideas heretical.
The church was becoming a property owner with a vested interest. So it was little wonder he had the support of women when he was preaching an early Christianity opposing the moves by the early church leaders, such as Ambrose, Bishop of Milan while Eugenius was Emporer, who were trying to destroy the pagan relationship with property and in which was imbued some of the remnants of womens public political power. Women were practioners as well as participants of pagan ceremony and ritual and they had already been excluded from the male run 'secular' politics and military affairs of the state since its inception with the start of metal production. It was not for nothing that the bronze age was named the age of war!
It would be another hundred years before the written stories/gospels would be brought together in what we now know as the Bible. It was edited down from as many as 200 different stories/gospels in a political process for power to control the property of the newly institutionalised Church, played out in competing interpretations of Christianity. Unfortunately Pelagius was not one of those whose ideas survived this process. The ones who did codified the demonisation of woman as the witch, seducer and corrupter of God's creation in 'justification' for the hegemonic consolidation of property relations that can now be described as patriarchy. A patriarchy that has an historical material basis to it and not due to a character defect in men.
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