If You Want Peace, Prepare for War: A Meditation on the First Week of Advent

“Something is hidden behind your meek words, philosopher. Yours and your fanatical fisherman’s. They strike at Rome and Roman law. I warn you, if ever Roman rule is threatened, you'll feel my sword” (Quo Vadis?, 1951 film).

In Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel of first century Rome, the legion commander Marcus Vicinius is confronted by the power of that apparently benign Christian philosophy of peace, love, and universal freedom, which he hears from the Jewish-Christian “philosopher”, Paul of Tarsus. Enemies are to be loved. Slaves are to be freed. Love of the God of Jesus Christ is the guarantee and savior of the eros between man and woman, who no longer begin in worship of one another, but in worship of the one God whose love Christ revealed on the cross.

Marcus sees all of a sudden that this new philosophy is a threat to the empire more dangerous than any Parthian, Mede, or Persian invader. This realization dawns upon him in the context of his frustrated pursuit of Lygia, the beautiful Christian maiden, adopted by a Roman patrician family which has embraced Christianity. Marcus has fallen into the merciless grip of Venus and Lygia is the object of his desire. But his desire is all-consuming, his love about total possession. He will not share the heart of his beloved with her carpenter-god, Christos. To humor Lygia’s idiosyncratic religious affectations Marcus the tolerant Roman pluralist will happily make a shrine to Christos for his would-be wife.

“In our gardens in Sicily, we'll put up a big cross, higher than the roof. I'll put up a special pedestal and crown it with a figure of your Christ, carved from the finest marble….Why not? It’s no trouble. There's such an army of gods these days we can always find room for another.”

Marcus doesn’t understand Lygia’s relationship to her religion, but he’s beginning to learn. She carries her god in her heart and her god carries her in his, not as one among many sculpted artifices in a pantheon, a temple of all-varied divine suitors to be honored and enjoyed when the mood strikes or convenience arises, but as one person to another, in flesh and blood truth and fidelity.

He knew now that her religion made her different from other women, and his hope that feeling, desire, wealth, luxury, would attract her he knew now to be a vain illusion. Finally he understood this….that the new religion ingrafted into the soul something unknown to that world in which he lived, and that Lygia, even if she loved him, would not sacrifice any of her Christian truths for his sake….Every other woman whom he knew might become his mistress, but that Christian would become only his victim. And when he thought of this, he felt anger and burning pain, for he felt that his anger was powerless….He was equally sure that, in view of her religion, he himself with his bravery was nothing, that his power was nothing, and that through it he could effect nothing. That Roman military tribune, convinced that the power of the sword and the fist which had conquered the world, would command it forever, saw for the first time in life that beyond that power there might be something else; (H. Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis? chap. 21).

With the multiplication of gods the Romans have become cynical about their reality and increasingly dedicated to self-worship—the worship of human genius and power. Marcus attempts to seduce Lygia into the cult of Venus by fascinating her with his strength, wealth, power and influence—in reality the cult of Marcus himself. As a quid pro quo he offers her his worship as well, but she refuses both because her heart is satisfied. She can love Marcus out of the abundance of heart which is the gift of Christ to her, but in her uncompromising devotion to Christ she presses the limit of Marcus’s cosmopolitan tolerance, for Marcus alone will be Lord of Lygia’s heart, and will allow no challenge to his power.

But thou, O Roman, learn with sovereign sway
To rule the nations. Thy great art shall be
To keep the world in lasting peace, to spare
humbled foe, and crush to earth the proud.

Every educated citizen of first century Rome knew this great retrojected prophecy of the national poet, Vergil (Aeneid VI, 850-853). But by the time of Nero the nobility and citizenry were drowning in the increasing hypocrisy and cynicism required to maintain pious allegiance to the Roman ideal. Rome had become proud and merciless, and its Pax Romana a sham enforced by bureaucratic mandate and backed by the sword of the Legion. Rome was ripe for revolution, but not a revolution of this world, although certainly one in it. Says the prophet Isaiah in the first reading from the first Sunday of Advent:

For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
    and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations,
    and shall decide for many peoples;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
    and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
    neither shall they learn war any more (Isa 2:3b-4)

The revolution that would come to Rome was a revolt of the heart against inhumanity, and while its leader would not carry a sword, he would command a Legion prepared to suffer as he did the merciless violence of Rome. When the empire had exhausted its fear, pride, and vengeance upon the courage of those whose allegiance was to the one “meek and lowly in heart” (Mt 11:29), it submitted to his law and found a new hope for a truly universal peace—the peace that comes to the one reconciled to God.

But first, Rome brought the sword, and the cross. The Roman persecutions of Christians were not sustained but intermittent between the late first and early fourth centuries A.D. when Constantine finally brought them to an end. Rome could never quite decide how to handle the new religion which was insinuating itself anywhere and everywhere in society, which refused state worship and military service and willingly suffered death in its monomaniacal insistence on the emptiness of all the gods save one—the God of that other stubborn counterforce in Roman life, the Jews.  
Christianity began in Judaism and from the outside it appeared as a movement within Judaism. It also quickly became apparent that Christianity was something like a universalizing of Judaism and thus anyone could become a Christian and this is what Rome feared: that Christianity would spread and overwhelm the established order like a virus, that one day the empire would awake to find itself Christian.

And one day, it did. And it may do so again, if there remain any Christians in it yet willing to oppose the prideful, materialistic, vain and violent order of things while willingly suffering that violence to play itself out against its witness (martyrdom).

 

Fr. Byron S. Hagan is the Parochial Vicar of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Northeast Minneapolis.