PaddlingPadre

Some fifty years or so before the birth of Christ, Julius Caesar was on campaign in Gaul. Now at this point in his career, Caesar was not yet the dictator that he would become, but was instead, in those ailing years of the Roman Republic, one of several major players vying for power, and in fact he had many powerful enemies. Thus, his campaign in Gaul, which roughly corresponds to modern day France, was undertaken above all so that Caesar could win for himself riches and prestige back in the capital. And so it was, particularly in order to win the popularity of ordinary Roman citizens, that he wrote an account of his conquests wherein he detailed all that he did during the war.

Now the striking thing for us in this, when we look back at what Caesar wrote, remembering, again, that he is writing in order to impress his fellow Romans, is that he remorselessly describes what, to our eyes, are the very worst sorts of atrocities. It is no exaggeration to say that Caesar’s conduct in Gaul was, at times, genocidal. Entire tribes were left to freeze and starve to death. Men, women, and children alike were mercilessly put to the sword. By the time the conquest was finished in the year 50 BC, Caesar boasted of having killed over a million Gauls and of having enslaved a million more. And again, accounts of this butchery come to us, not from the pens of Caesar’s enemies seeking to smear him, but rather from Caesar’s own hand, from his calculated attempt to win the favor of his countrymen.

From this it is rather clear, I think, that Julius Caesar’s values were different from ours. His were Roman values, pagan values. His was a logic according to which power was everything, where one rewarded one’s friends and punished one’s enemies, where the strong lorded it over the weak because the strong were strong and the weak were weak. But let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless. Caesar’s atrocities in Gaul were, to his eyes, not atrocities, but rather the stuff of a Roman Triumph: the complete destruction and subjugation of Rome’s enemies.

And so how remarkable is it that the empire which emerged from Caesar’s conquests, as well as from the conquests of his adopted son, Augustus, an empire built on the strength of Roman arms and Roman brutality, was itself thoroughly conquered, not by the razing of its cities or by the enslavement and slaughter of its people, but rather by the preaching, the witness, and the example of a new people, drawn together from across the empire and from every nation, who, against this worldly logic of power, proposed a revolutionary notion of what true power, and true triumph, looked like: the Son of God, dying shamefully on a cross.

To the Romans nothing could have been more shocking, and we, for our part, have grown so accustomed to the crucifix that it takes some real work of imagination to appreciate this point, but there is, in this image, nothing of that Roman understanding of power by which Caesar had conquered the world. Christ commanded no armies, he took no cities, he subjugated no peoples. Yet what he did do, on that cross, which is at once both the place of his battle and the instrument of his victory, though he was truly the Son of God and could have by appeal to his Heavenly Father summoned to his side more than twelve legions of angels, was that he there did not regard that equality with God something to be grasped. But rather he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness, and being found human in appearance, he thus humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even death on a cross. It is in this infinite distance that he covers on the cross, the distance between the heights of the Godhead and the depths of a criminal condemned, a distance which he covers in order to reach us in our own infinite alienation from God in order to reconcile us with the Father, wherein the infinite love of God that spans that infinite distance is revealed to us, wherein the enormous and liberating weight of those blessed words is driven home: That God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.

It is there, in the Triumph of the Cross, that the logic of love triumphs over the logic of power, or, rather, that true power is revealed to consist precisely in perfect love, for the all-powerful God is, on the cross, revealed to us as infinite love. And so it was that the Christian people, supernaturally transformed by and configured to this love that is in fact the true logic, the true logos, of creation, came by their love to conquer the world. For here is something revolutionary: that the last shall be first and the first shall be last, that God himself had chosen the least place, and was, for that reason, closest to those who were least. That in him all barriers of nation and status had lost their significance; that in him there was neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for Christ died for all. Now, in the light of the cross, in the light of Christ’s sufferings, there is no human being who doesn’t matter, there is no class of people that can be disregarded or wantonly destroyed. In Christ, it is not strength over one’s enemies that matters, but charity. It was by the rescuing of infants exposed to die, by concern for the poor, by compassion for slaves, by sexual restraint, and by the blood of the martyrs that that old and terrible order of power and death, the order of the pagan Caesars, was overthrown. For all of these Christian practices proceeded from the order of love, and it was love that proved the stronger, for the order of love is the order of life, and it was this, this triumph of life over death, that Christ achieved on the Cross.

Now this Triumph of the Cross is, ultimately, a triumph that is singular and definitive. It was on Golgotha two-thousand years ago that life triumphed over death for all time. And yet, in a real sense, this battle between life and death, between the law of love and the law of might, is a battle that must be fought anew in every human life and in every human society. The cross, that is to say, must be triumphant, individually, in each of us. Because it is always possible that we turn from this logic of love and embrace again that ancient logic of power. It is a constant temptation for us to think as Caesar did, to forget or to deny that Christ died for all, and to succumb to darkness in the exaltation of power. To turn on our enemies and opponents with a murderous savagery that forgets our common brotherhood. For make no mistake: it was only with the coming of Christ that human life was at last recognized as being universally valuable. It was only in his suffering for all that that we learned to look past the divides of tribe and party.

And so when we find ourselves surrounded by darkness, and indeed, there has so much darkness lately, when we hear the refrain that might is the only law of right, and when death, which is the bitter fruit of such thinking, seems to surround us, whether it be in Ukraine or Gaza or Charlotte or Utah, be assured that goodness and humanity have been forgotten in those places because Christ has been forgotten first, for when Christ is forgotten, goodness becomes, for us at least, unknowable.

But for all this gloominess, take heart. For in Christ was life, and the life was the light of the world. And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness hath not overcome it. For our part, we must allow the light of Christ to shine in us, we must allow the cross to triumph in us. Hatred and violence can have no place in our hearts, but rather charity must rule us, so that then, being the salt and leaven and light of the world, we can announce Christ’s triumph, the Triumph of the Cross, to all the earth, with our joy in him being the antidote to a world in despair.