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On the Ruin of Britain
St Gildas, tr. Williams, 1899
38. Part III
Part III
Quotations from Scripture, made consecutively in the order of books, denouncing wicked Princes.
The first to meet us is Samuel, who by the command of God founded a legitimate kingdom, a man dedicated to God before his birth, a true prophet to all the people of Israel from Dan to Beer-sheba, known by indubitably wonderful signs. From his mouth the Holy Spirit thundered to all the powers of the world, when denouncing Saul, the first king of the Hebrews, for the simple reason that he had not fulfilled certain commands of the Lord. His words are: Thou hast done foolishly, nor hast thou kept the commandments of the Lord thy God, which He commanded thee. If thou hadst not done this thing, God would now prepare thy kingdom over Israel for ever; but thy kingdom shall arise no further. What then is there like to the crimes of this time? Did. he commit adultery or murder? Not at all. He, however, made a partial change of the command, because, as one of ourselves1 has well said, “the question is not respecting the kind of sin, but respecting the transgression of a command.” And when he was attempting to disprove the charges, as he thought, and weaving apologies, as is the custom with men, after the following plausible manner: Verily I have hearkened to the voice of the Lord, and walked in the way by which He sent me; the prophet punished him with such a censure; as the following: Doth the Lord, he says, desire burnt offerings or victims, and not rather to obey the voice of the Lord? For obedience is better than victims, and to hearken is more than to offer the fat of rams, since resistance is as the sin of witchcraft, and as the crime of idolatry is the refusal to obey. Therefore, because thou hast rejected the word of the Lord, He hath also rejected thee from being king. And a little after: God hath rent, he says, the kingdom of Israel from thee to-day, and hath given it to thy neighbour, better than thou. Truly the Victor in Israel will not spare, and by penitence will He not be bent; for He is not man, that He should repent, that is to say, because of the hard hearts of the wicked.
We must, therefore, observe that he says, the refusal to obey God is the crime of idolatry.2 Let not those wicked ones applaud themselves, when they do not publicly sacrifice to the gods of the Gentiles, since by treading under foot, like swine, the costliest pearls of Christ, they are idolaters.
Notes
- Quidam nostrum. Cf. c. 62: ut quidam ante nos ait; and c. 92, sicut bene quidam nostrorum ait. Gildas seems to be quoting from some British writer or writers. It would be extremely interesting to discover what man or men he thus designates as “one of ourselves.”
- Idolatria, idolatrae. “Omnino in libris scriptis frequentissimum, pallatim et sermo vulgaris recepit et propagavit in linguas recentiores.” Tisch. These forms, distinct from the more correct idololatria, idololatra, are found in the writings of Cyprian, and the Pseudo-Cyprian De Aleatoribus. Idolatria occurs twice in Salvian’s Ad Eccles., i and 60. As a form of common Latin it passed, in English and French, into idolatry, idolatrie.