Gates of Fire

   On the way back from Dallas on Tuesday, I finished Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire.  It's an old historical fiction story about the battle of Thermopylae, the Spartan battle against the Persian invaders that helped preserve Europe from decimation at the hands of Xerxes and his troops.  The movie 300 tells the same story about how an outnumbered Greek force held the Persians off for days, at the eventual cost of all of their lives, although the movie mostly made me feel vastly inferior for not spending every waking hour at the gym.

  It's a sobering thought to watch the movie or read the book and think about those brave Greek soldiers stoiclly going to their deaths, bravely resisting a horde many times their number, offering their lives to preserve their country, even with the knowledge that they would perish in the effort.  It reminds me a bit of the end of the movie Glory, when the soldiers are on the beach about to charge, facing overwhelming odds and with little hope of being alive at the end of the day.  What does one think about in such moments of peace before the trumpets of war sound and violence reaches up from the pit to ensnare its victims in the icy grip of death?  What memories abound in the heart while the eyes take in the sights and sounds of weapons at the ready?  How do the feet obey orders while the soul screams?

  There's an interesting discussion related in the book.  Pressfield writes from the perspective of a squire attached to one of the Spartan leaders, and at one point, the Spartan is asking his fellow soldiers what the opposite of fear is.  I don't know what comes to your mind -- courage is the easy answer, but it's not the conclusion reached here.  No, the opposite of fear, Pressfield suggests, is love.  The Spartans stay in the fight and overcome the desire for self-preservation because of a love stronger than fear, a love for the soldier next to them and a love to preserve their homeland.

  I think about this in relation to Augustine's thoughts that the essence of sin is disordered loves.  We love the wrong things, and so we find ourselves enveloped in sin, because those loves lead us to places we wouldn't have planned to go where we do things we never thought that we would do.  If we loved things properly, if we loved God first and others next, then we'd love and serve and worship in a way that made humanity sing with harmony.  But we love ourselves and pleasures more than these, and so we cheat one another and selflessly pursue for ourselves.  We plunder and brawl to get, rather than serving to give.  Because our loves are disordered, we're driven by fear.

  The best line the Spartans have, which I think is discussed in Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episode on the Persian Empire (King of Kings III), is when Xerxes (which is a fantastic name for a dog, in my opinion) comes and asks the Spartans for their spears, imploring them to serve him rather than end up dead beneath the wheels of the Persian war machine.  King Leonidas' reply?  Molon Labe, which means "Come and take them."