The above photo is of Trajan's Market, part of his Forum in Rome. The blades in the center of the picture are clearly modern, and like so much of our art, resist immediate visual interpretation. Are they weapons of war or carving knives? I can't tell you because I didn't go on the tour. I didn't go on the tour in part because of this exhibit, which struck me as ridiculous. More to follow below. It's a little long, so you may want to grab a coffee or other refreshment to help you on the way.
Near the end of the academic year, I often ask my AP English Literature students to select the book from our reading list they least enjoyed and to explain in a brief essay what deficiencies in their backgrounds or tastes might have led to this dislike. (This idea is not original; I stole it from a book written by another teacher). As an example, I tell the students of my own reaction to opera. Works like La Traviata, Don Giovanni, or Carmen clearly constitute some of our greatest cultural treasures and continue to move the hearts and passions of millions of people. Why not mine?
I then explain to my students that part of my operatic distaste stems from my ignorance and indolence. If I cultivated these great works by studying the plots and listening to the music, I might grow to love opera. My failure, I add, might also stem from impatience. With a few exceptions, when I was young I became irritated with Hollywood musicals, for just as the plot thickened, one of the actors would break into song. So perhaps I am stuck in some adolescent aversion to this sort of art.
Most of the students find this exercise rewarding. Their chosen book becomes a mirror in which they search out their own blemishes. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, for example, has earned high praise from many literary critics, and the author eventually won the Noble Prize. The students who select this novel as their mirror must explain what personal deficiencies prevent them from sharing this appreciation. The idea behind this self-examination is to move the student from declaring “The Sound and the Fury stinks” to “I dislike The Sound and the Fury.” In a sense, then, this exercise forces students to ask whether they are worthy of the book in question.
This past spring, some parents and former students banded together, raised money, and packed me off to Europe, a generous gift for which I will be grateful the rest of my life. After two weeks in England, with a side trip to Edinburgh, I arrived in Rome and am two weeks into my month-long stay here. In this time, I have tramped the city, becoming happily lost in the winding streets and bumping into many unexpected delights. I have visited historical sites, marbled churches, and piazzas jammed with tourists and hucksters.
Perhaps because I am alone on this sojourn and so spend much of my day without conversation, my interior thoughts, like my legs, have received an overdose of exercise. Whatever the reason, Rome has roused some long thoughts. A question that daily occurs to me is similar to the one raised in my classroom: Am I worthy of this ancient city?
Better yet, I think: Are we who are living right now worthy of this city?
Let me illustrate my question by taking the churches of Rome for my example.
Since my arrival, I have visited fifteen or twenty of Rome’s nearly 1,000 churches. Each of these churches offers its visitors beauty, grace, and with the exception of Saint Peter’s, peace from the bustle of the streets outside. Some critics doubtless consider the artwork inside these places of worship gaudy, cluttered, and ostentatious, but whatever aesthetic we carry through the church door, we must admit that those who designed and built these houses of worship cared deeply about architecture and art.
On June 30th, I bumbled—I have become an adept bumbler—into a small museum right on Saint Peter’s Square. This long, narrow gallery was associated with the Museo Vaticano, and this particular display, which was closing that very day, was called in English “Precious Sculptures.” The exhibit featured gold and silver processional crosses, chalices, and reliquaries made from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century by craftsman in the province of Lazio, which my Latin students know as Latium, the area around Rome. The guidebook for this stunning exhibition begins with this unusually blunt comment:
“Travelling round this Italian province one continually comes across newly built churches of everyday ugliness. Inside these churches it is easy to find furnishings (sacred vessels, liturgical vestments, polychrome glass, reliefs in the ambo, and altar-frontal) of the same incredible ugliness. And yet there was a time which saw beauty enter all the churches of the towns and the countryside, even in the most marginal places and the poorest areas. Every rural parish, every village confraternity, was capable of offering its people a small portion of gratuitous beauty.”
Rome—the heart of Rome—was built by pagans and popes. The Roman emperors constructed their temples, palaces, basilicas, and baths to honor themselves, the Roman people, and their gods. The Renaissance popes did the same with their churches and their patronage of the arts. Whatever their failings, such men had a love for beauty, an eye for space, an understanding of the human need for worship and wonderment, and the sensibility to build monuments and buildings intended to last for centuries.
Sometimes this sensibility immigrated to America as well. In my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, I attend the Basilica of Saint Lawrence, a ten-minute walk from my apartment. Designed and built by Spanish-born Rafael Guastavino, an architect who worked on the Biltmore House, Saint Lawrence is beautiful for the same reasons its European counterparts are beautiful: the statuary, the marble, the art, and the dome, reputed to be the largest freestanding elliptical dome in North America. With its beauty and its quiet play of shadows and light, the basilica announces itself as a holy place, inspiring silence and a reverential awe in its visitors.
But this church is now well over a century old. What of the last fifty years? Are our buildings in general worthy of those erected by more primitive methods three hundred, four hundred, two thousand years ago? Do we not see what the writer of the Vatican Museum pamphlet sees: “newly built churches of everyday ugliness?” In the last past half-century, we Catholics have thrown together cheap, glass-and-plastic churches more akin to a MacDonald’s eatery than to the chapels, churches, and oratories of yesterday. Thankfully, this trend has slowed in recent years, and some parishes have reexamined their ideas of church architecture, understanding once again that they are erecting a house to honor God.
My point here is not to promote the stupendous or the ornate. In the hills around Asheville, the ubiquitous white plank Baptist churches with their tall steeples offer a lovely reflection of the aims of their builders. The old Congregational churches of Connecticut and a small adobe church in the hills outside of Santé Fe, New Mexico have at other times created in me a feeling of awe and beauty.
Of course, my original question of worthiness extends far beyond church architecture, becoming deeper and broader in its ramifications. Are we worthy of our ancestors themselves? We Westerners have spent the last fifty years kicking our predecessors around like cans in the gutter, deconstructing them, ripping them one after the other from their pedestals, but do we pay them homage as well? Do we listen to what they have to tell us? Do we avoid their mistakes while yet admiring their great deeds? Do we recollect, as Sir Isaac Newton once said, that we stand "up on the shoulders of giants?"
In the past century, Americans have given the world our own special monuments. In the last seventy years alone, Americans have won a world war, created two of the world’s strongest democracies—Germany and Japan—defeated polio and a host of other illnesses, put men on the moon, cleaned up the environment, helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, and revolutionized communications around the world, all the while going about the daily tasks of living. Ponder just for a moment the immensity of these achievements. Yet we have become so imbued from some quarters with the cultural criticisms of our country that we seem to have grown either cynical or uncaring about our history and about our future as a nation.
Some of our difficulties, not only in the United States but also throughout the West in general, surely stem from our lack of faith in our culture, and in what used to be our God. Take Rome, for example: What function do these magnificent churches perform? Do they stand as living testaments to worship and faith or do they constitute, like the Roman Forum or the Coliseum, a graveyard of brick, mortar, and marble? A great majority of Italians claim to be Catholic, but in the last ten years, the number of those actually practicing their faith has gone from 39% of the population to about 25%. A 14% drop since 2006 reveals a people who are swiftly abandoning their God, not for another faith but for revelry in the secular world. This worship of materialism has, incidentally, also given Italy one of the lowest birthrates in the world. “We are a dying country,” Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin announced this past spring.
We no longer venerate our ancestors, as did the Ancient Romans, and we no longer worship our gods. Today we worship only ourselves.
In the two weeks I have lived in Rome, developments have occurred in the United States indicating our own disdain for our institutions and our past. The Supreme Court declared gay marriage a right. With such a ruling, which seems to have less to do with the Constitution than with conformity to fashion, there will come a sea of litigation, ranging from suits against churches refusing to perform homosexual weddings to the rights of polygamists and others to marry. Marriage, which was already a wounded institution, will begin to die. The word will become more and more meaningless, and once words lose their meanings, the idea associated with that word dies as well.
In the second instance, following the murders by a racist lunatic in Charleston, South Carolina, equally lunatic government regulators and private corporations have set out to ban the sale or display of the Confederate battle flag. Some are seeking to ban the Academy Award winning film, Gone With The Wind. (This wiping away of history is nothing new: “Dixie” was banished long ago from the public square, and Disney’s Song of the South has not appeared on a screen since my childhood). Some are even demanding the destruction of all Confederate monuments. If we go that route, then why not tear down the Washington and Jefferson Monuments? Both men owned slaves. And rather than debate the political correctness of the Washington Redskins, shouldn’t we change the name of Washington D.C. itself?
Where does the madness end?
In a broader assault, our high school and university history departments either reconstruct our past in terms of gender, class, and race, or else teach the subject so poorly that students emerge ignorant from the classroom. If you doubt me, ask some of the young people around you what event we celebrate on Independence Day. If that term confuses them, ask them why we celebrate the Fourth of July.
I am, I readily confess, a poor defender of Western tradition and history. Like so many rambling tourists here in Rome, I am ignorant of many of the sites I pass. Yet even in my ignorance I am struck again and again by our haphazard regard for those who came before us. Many tourists stride around Rome in shorts, tank tops, and sunglasses, looking for all the world as if these streets and this city existed solely for their pleasure. Back home, whether in Denmark, Japan, or America, many more demand certain rights without even bothering to whisper the truism that rights of any kind are automatically accompanied by duties.
A people without that sense of duty, a people without some sort of faith in something beyond themselves—Italians, English, Germans, Americans—may live on the fruits of their past for a time. But if they neglect duties while demanding rights, if they bury their history through derision or censorship, if they are unable to look with gratitude for their existence to something beyond themselves, they will at best become a little people, small in their ambitions, afraid of risk and failure, lacking the guts and the heart to meet new challenges. At worst they will simply cease to exist. Those peoples who refuse to honor what Thomas Babington Macaulay long ago called the ashes of our fathers and the temples of our gods will be reduced to the creatures found in T.S. Eliot’s “Choruses From the Rock”:
“And the wind shall say: “Here were decent Godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”
I then explain to my students that part of my operatic distaste stems from my ignorance and indolence. If I cultivated these great works by studying the plots and listening to the music, I might grow to love opera. My failure, I add, might also stem from impatience. With a few exceptions, when I was young I became irritated with Hollywood musicals, for just as the plot thickened, one of the actors would break into song. So perhaps I am stuck in some adolescent aversion to this sort of art.
Most of the students find this exercise rewarding. Their chosen book becomes a mirror in which they search out their own blemishes. Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, for example, has earned high praise from many literary critics, and the author eventually won the Noble Prize. The students who select this novel as their mirror must explain what personal deficiencies prevent them from sharing this appreciation. The idea behind this self-examination is to move the student from declaring “The Sound and the Fury stinks” to “I dislike The Sound and the Fury.” In a sense, then, this exercise forces students to ask whether they are worthy of the book in question.
This past spring, some parents and former students banded together, raised money, and packed me off to Europe, a generous gift for which I will be grateful the rest of my life. After two weeks in England, with a side trip to Edinburgh, I arrived in Rome and am two weeks into my month-long stay here. In this time, I have tramped the city, becoming happily lost in the winding streets and bumping into many unexpected delights. I have visited historical sites, marbled churches, and piazzas jammed with tourists and hucksters.
Perhaps because I am alone on this sojourn and so spend much of my day without conversation, my interior thoughts, like my legs, have received an overdose of exercise. Whatever the reason, Rome has roused some long thoughts. A question that daily occurs to me is similar to the one raised in my classroom: Am I worthy of this ancient city?
Better yet, I think: Are we who are living right now worthy of this city?
Let me illustrate my question by taking the churches of Rome for my example.
Since my arrival, I have visited fifteen or twenty of Rome’s nearly 1,000 churches. Each of these churches offers its visitors beauty, grace, and with the exception of Saint Peter’s, peace from the bustle of the streets outside. Some critics doubtless consider the artwork inside these places of worship gaudy, cluttered, and ostentatious, but whatever aesthetic we carry through the church door, we must admit that those who designed and built these houses of worship cared deeply about architecture and art.
On June 30th, I bumbled—I have become an adept bumbler—into a small museum right on Saint Peter’s Square. This long, narrow gallery was associated with the Museo Vaticano, and this particular display, which was closing that very day, was called in English “Precious Sculptures.” The exhibit featured gold and silver processional crosses, chalices, and reliquaries made from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century by craftsman in the province of Lazio, which my Latin students know as Latium, the area around Rome. The guidebook for this stunning exhibition begins with this unusually blunt comment:
“Travelling round this Italian province one continually comes across newly built churches of everyday ugliness. Inside these churches it is easy to find furnishings (sacred vessels, liturgical vestments, polychrome glass, reliefs in the ambo, and altar-frontal) of the same incredible ugliness. And yet there was a time which saw beauty enter all the churches of the towns and the countryside, even in the most marginal places and the poorest areas. Every rural parish, every village confraternity, was capable of offering its people a small portion of gratuitous beauty.”
Rome—the heart of Rome—was built by pagans and popes. The Roman emperors constructed their temples, palaces, basilicas, and baths to honor themselves, the Roman people, and their gods. The Renaissance popes did the same with their churches and their patronage of the arts. Whatever their failings, such men had a love for beauty, an eye for space, an understanding of the human need for worship and wonderment, and the sensibility to build monuments and buildings intended to last for centuries.
Sometimes this sensibility immigrated to America as well. In my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, I attend the Basilica of Saint Lawrence, a ten-minute walk from my apartment. Designed and built by Spanish-born Rafael Guastavino, an architect who worked on the Biltmore House, Saint Lawrence is beautiful for the same reasons its European counterparts are beautiful: the statuary, the marble, the art, and the dome, reputed to be the largest freestanding elliptical dome in North America. With its beauty and its quiet play of shadows and light, the basilica announces itself as a holy place, inspiring silence and a reverential awe in its visitors.
But this church is now well over a century old. What of the last fifty years? Are our buildings in general worthy of those erected by more primitive methods three hundred, four hundred, two thousand years ago? Do we not see what the writer of the Vatican Museum pamphlet sees: “newly built churches of everyday ugliness?” In the last past half-century, we Catholics have thrown together cheap, glass-and-plastic churches more akin to a MacDonald’s eatery than to the chapels, churches, and oratories of yesterday. Thankfully, this trend has slowed in recent years, and some parishes have reexamined their ideas of church architecture, understanding once again that they are erecting a house to honor God.
My point here is not to promote the stupendous or the ornate. In the hills around Asheville, the ubiquitous white plank Baptist churches with their tall steeples offer a lovely reflection of the aims of their builders. The old Congregational churches of Connecticut and a small adobe church in the hills outside of Santé Fe, New Mexico have at other times created in me a feeling of awe and beauty.
Of course, my original question of worthiness extends far beyond church architecture, becoming deeper and broader in its ramifications. Are we worthy of our ancestors themselves? We Westerners have spent the last fifty years kicking our predecessors around like cans in the gutter, deconstructing them, ripping them one after the other from their pedestals, but do we pay them homage as well? Do we listen to what they have to tell us? Do we avoid their mistakes while yet admiring their great deeds? Do we recollect, as Sir Isaac Newton once said, that we stand "up on the shoulders of giants?"
In the past century, Americans have given the world our own special monuments. In the last seventy years alone, Americans have won a world war, created two of the world’s strongest democracies—Germany and Japan—defeated polio and a host of other illnesses, put men on the moon, cleaned up the environment, helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, and revolutionized communications around the world, all the while going about the daily tasks of living. Ponder just for a moment the immensity of these achievements. Yet we have become so imbued from some quarters with the cultural criticisms of our country that we seem to have grown either cynical or uncaring about our history and about our future as a nation.
Some of our difficulties, not only in the United States but also throughout the West in general, surely stem from our lack of faith in our culture, and in what used to be our God. Take Rome, for example: What function do these magnificent churches perform? Do they stand as living testaments to worship and faith or do they constitute, like the Roman Forum or the Coliseum, a graveyard of brick, mortar, and marble? A great majority of Italians claim to be Catholic, but in the last ten years, the number of those actually practicing their faith has gone from 39% of the population to about 25%. A 14% drop since 2006 reveals a people who are swiftly abandoning their God, not for another faith but for revelry in the secular world. This worship of materialism has, incidentally, also given Italy one of the lowest birthrates in the world. “We are a dying country,” Health Minister Beatrice Lorenzin announced this past spring.
We no longer venerate our ancestors, as did the Ancient Romans, and we no longer worship our gods. Today we worship only ourselves.
In the two weeks I have lived in Rome, developments have occurred in the United States indicating our own disdain for our institutions and our past. The Supreme Court declared gay marriage a right. With such a ruling, which seems to have less to do with the Constitution than with conformity to fashion, there will come a sea of litigation, ranging from suits against churches refusing to perform homosexual weddings to the rights of polygamists and others to marry. Marriage, which was already a wounded institution, will begin to die. The word will become more and more meaningless, and once words lose their meanings, the idea associated with that word dies as well.
In the second instance, following the murders by a racist lunatic in Charleston, South Carolina, equally lunatic government regulators and private corporations have set out to ban the sale or display of the Confederate battle flag. Some are seeking to ban the Academy Award winning film, Gone With The Wind. (This wiping away of history is nothing new: “Dixie” was banished long ago from the public square, and Disney’s Song of the South has not appeared on a screen since my childhood). Some are even demanding the destruction of all Confederate monuments. If we go that route, then why not tear down the Washington and Jefferson Monuments? Both men owned slaves. And rather than debate the political correctness of the Washington Redskins, shouldn’t we change the name of Washington D.C. itself?
Where does the madness end?
In a broader assault, our high school and university history departments either reconstruct our past in terms of gender, class, and race, or else teach the subject so poorly that students emerge ignorant from the classroom. If you doubt me, ask some of the young people around you what event we celebrate on Independence Day. If that term confuses them, ask them why we celebrate the Fourth of July.
I am, I readily confess, a poor defender of Western tradition and history. Like so many rambling tourists here in Rome, I am ignorant of many of the sites I pass. Yet even in my ignorance I am struck again and again by our haphazard regard for those who came before us. Many tourists stride around Rome in shorts, tank tops, and sunglasses, looking for all the world as if these streets and this city existed solely for their pleasure. Back home, whether in Denmark, Japan, or America, many more demand certain rights without even bothering to whisper the truism that rights of any kind are automatically accompanied by duties.
A people without that sense of duty, a people without some sort of faith in something beyond themselves—Italians, English, Germans, Americans—may live on the fruits of their past for a time. But if they neglect duties while demanding rights, if they bury their history through derision or censorship, if they are unable to look with gratitude for their existence to something beyond themselves, they will at best become a little people, small in their ambitions, afraid of risk and failure, lacking the guts and the heart to meet new challenges. At worst they will simply cease to exist. Those peoples who refuse to honor what Thomas Babington Macaulay long ago called the ashes of our fathers and the temples of our gods will be reduced to the creatures found in T.S. Eliot’s “Choruses From the Rock”:
“And the wind shall say: “Here were decent Godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”