Thoughts on Romans, Arthur, Christianity (2007)

I pasted photos from the Warwick promotional pamphlet of the double-eagle Roman troops into my journal. The Romans were gone so many centuries before the next armoured groups of soldiers that it is hard to imagine them.

But I guess Romans were actually everywhere on this island except in the far North. They are so far back in time that they are almost magical—except that their artifacts are everywhere.

I wonder if Arthur really was Brit/Roman, in his actual incarnation. How can a mostly illiterate population maintain an advanced culture through centuries after the culture is gone, and under the onslaught of the Norse? And the Saxons. And the Normans. I wonder if Arthur really was Christian? He must have been an extraordinary personality—or have been eulogized by an extraordinary poet—to have made such a long-lasting impression.

Jesus was no earlier than the Romans in Britain, and I suppose in some ways Jesus was as much a child of the Romans as Arthur was. But the Arthur story includes Jesus of course.I had a thought about war imagery—expressed in its most silly form as “we’re fighting for peace.” I wonder (as we sing Sullivan’s “Onward Christian Soldiers”), if Jesus himself used such imagery. He said, “I bring not peace but a sword.” Maybe I need to look it up and see the context. Paul used the “whole armour of God” imagery. But in general Jesus used the language of peace—“resist not evil,” “love your enemies,” etc. Easy to forget that, or to believe it applies to our personal lives only and not nationally or in the collective. As Pres. Kimball said, “we are a warlike people.”