Gildas the Sage, Part One

My home office is a total shambles this morning.  Carpet layers are coming to install new carpeting in the spare room.  Waking up I realized the binder with information on Gildas was probably buried behind the stacks of stuff I’ve stored here.  Still, I went looking for it and to my delight, there was the bright red binder within stretching reach.

 So here we are.

When I was doing my research about king Arthur, the name of Gildas kept cropping up.  There are few records from this time period we are talking about, 450 – 600 A.D.  Most records alluding to the legend of king Arthur, like the history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, were written centuries later.  Even the ancient historian Nennias writes in the 700’s A.D.  But Gildas work is dated 546 A.D.  We couldn’t get an original source any closer. 

Trying to find Gildas work, however, was difficult.  The public libraries were woefully inadequate, so I took myself up to the library at the University of Utah and set about to see what I could find.  Gildas was listed there.  Writing down the reference number and location I set out to find, “Six Old English Chronicles,” a collection of works translated from the Latin and published by George Bell and Sons, London, 1900.

I found myself in a quiet part of the library, hardly another soul in sight.  Pulling the book off the shelf, I found a study desk, sat down, opened the book – and there it was, “The works of Gildas, surnamed ‘Sapiens,’ or the Wise.”  I began to read.

“1. Whatever in this my epistle I may write in my humble but well-meaning manner, rather by way of lamentation than for display, let no one suppose that it springs from contempt of others, or that I foolishly esteem myself as better than they:--for, alas! The subject of my complaint is the general destruction of everything that is good, and the general growth of evil throughout the land:…”

My pulse began to quicken.  This was language I understood.  The Bible is full of this kind of language.  Was my belief that a remnant of Israel was to be found in the British Isles about to be validated?  I kept reading.  That this man was a Christian, there is no doubt, for he started quoting both the Old and New Testament, as if appealing to these scriptures for support of the condemnation he would begin to heap upon the people.  A couple of pages later I read:

“If God’s peculiar people, chosen from all the people of the world, the royal seed, and holy nation, to whom he had said, ‘My first-begotten Israel,’ its priests, prophets, and kings, throughout so many ages, his servant and apostle, and the members of his primitive church, were not spared when they deviated from the right path, what will he do to the darkness of this our age, in which, besides all the huge and heinous sins which it has in common with all the wicked of the world committed, is found an innate, indelible, and irremediable load of folly and inconsistency.”

Simply put, Gildas laments, if God had so punished the Children of Israel for their crimes, what is He going to do to us for our crimes?

I was dancing in the aisles.  I kid you not.  I wanted to yelp with excitement, but I was in a library, so I got up and did a little jig.  This was a prophetic voice of warning in the best Old Testament tradition.

“Six Old English Chronicles” could not be checked out of the library, so I went to the Public Library and requested in inter-library loan.  Some weeks later, a tattered copy from the University of Dayton Roesch Library arrived.  Since the book was published in 1900, I figured it was now in the public domain.  I put a photocopy machine to good use.

I was on my way to the greatest discovery I had yet found, linking Ancient Israel with king Arthur, Merlin and the legends of the British Isles.

Next:  Gildas the Sage, Part Two.