una pizza, per favore
So I’m back from Rome. Quite the trip! This was the first non-backpacking vacation I’ve taken in about three years so it was a nice change of pace for me, even though I did end up walking between fifteen and twenty miles every day. Like most good leisure time, I learned a lot on this trip and like most good experiences, I came away from it with a somewhat broader perspective on the world. Oh, and I managed to have the whole week in Rome for about five hundred bucks, including hotels and airfare. I rule.
Rome is a very interesting place. It seems that around 150 AD the Romans said, “hey, let’s define Western Civilization.” They kept this up for about five hundred years, and then took a nap. The briefly woke up again for about a hundred years in the sixteenth century, redefined the world again, and then went back to sleep. EVERYTHING in Rome is either ancient or renaissance. With the exception of one building, Rome seems to have skipped Gothic architecture entirely. Mussolini barely brought neo-classicism to Rome about two centuries after the rest of the world had finished with it, and the baroque and modernist buses didn’t even bother stopping. Quite a strange place.
Here are some highlights of the trip:
~I got to go on a private tour of the excavations beneath St Peter’s Basilica, seeing the original Vatican hill, the tomb (and bones) of St Peter, and the pagan necropolis. It’s kind of difficult to get in to that stuff and I had to have a long conversation with the Ufficio Scavi explaining who I was and why I wanted to see it, so I consider myself very lucky.
~Went into the Catacombs and got to see a great deal of first century Christian symbology, wall scratchings, etc. Also got to see an early representation of Christ wearing a Greek toga and driving a four horse chariot. If it weren’t for the halo and the Chi Ro, you’d think the figure was Helios. Which was kind of the point, I guess, for a community in hiding.
~Saw the Pantheon, which surprisingly evoked the strongest emotional reaction of anything I saw. Aside from being a truly gorgeous building, it’s really easy to imagine how Roman worshippers trembling in awe and wonder as they entered this place. I truly believe in a basic “god instinct” in humanity, and I find the lengths people go to in order to answer that need to be incredibly moving.
~Attended mass within arms’ reach of The Ecstasy of St Theresa.
~Took a guided tour of the Imperial Palace, where my character in Gloria Mundi currently lives.
~Jogged a lap around the Circus Maximus.
~Said, “Sono vegetariano - il piatto e senza carne e senza pesche?” about nine billion times.
This trip gave me a lot to think about. I’m still digesting most of it, but here’s a taste:
The Church and its history of opulence has always made me very uncomfortable. I’ve always had a hard time seeing it as anything other than a sign of greed on behalf of a power-hungry, educated elite who had forgotten their role as agents of God’s transforming love in the world. I’ve had difficulty looking at soaring cathedrals and magnificent works of art without thinking, “this money could have done so much good in the world - why did we use it to decorate our buildings?” I’m someone who can worship in jazz club or on the subway, so having nine kinds of marble and original Caravaggio frescoes seems unnecessary to me.
The Church’s use of all this art and majesty, however, is more easily understood when you consider that they were in a pre-literate society. In an age when people couldn’t read scripture for themselves and worship was conducted in a language which had been dead for a thousand years, artwork was the best means of proclaiming the gospel. The Sistine Chapel is an excellent example of this. On one level, it’s a magnificent masterpiece of Renaissance brushwork. On another level, it’s downright gaudy. On a third level, it’s an exercise in Michelangelo’s humanism and celebration of the human form.
On a final level, however, it’s an incredibly lucid expression of Christian thought in pictorial form. A series of frescoes depicting the life of Moses is contrasted frame by frame with a series of frescoes depicting the life of Christ. The burning bush, the baptism of Christ, the ordination of Aaron, the giving of the keys to Peter, etc. Meanwhile the entire of story of creation and the fall stretches across the ceiling, eventually contrasting Adam’s eating the apple with the Crucifixion. It’s the gospel for the illiterate.
And so while I am still quick to condemn decadence in the church, I have a stronger understanding of why the Church chose to patronize Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, and the other masters. They were simply translating the Bible into the language of the people, four hundred years before Vatican II. Incredible.
Another thing to think about: I’ve never been into relics. I have a very protestant mentality of, “physical objects cannot have supernatural powers,” and therefor relics, fetish objects, talismans, rabbits’ feet, etc have never had any appeal to me. The closest I come is cooking with my great-grandmother’s apron.
Relics are big in Rome, though. People love to build Basilicas over tombs, they love to build alters on graves, etc. As I said, I got to see the bones of St Peter buried beneath the Vatican. Now, before I went, I was extremely skeptical of both the claim that those were St Peter’s bones and even the claim that he was ever buried there. After learning more about the history of the place, though, I came to believe that he probably was buried there at some point after all, and the bones certainly COULD be his, although they are probably not.
But here’s the thing - if I truly believe in the mundane nature of relics, does their validity matter as long as they successfully fulfill their function? In other words, if a pile of bones elicits an emotional reaction in a pilgrim and helps him have a humbling and transforming experience, does it really matter whose bones they really are?
The analyst in me screams, “yes! I want truth at all costs!” But not everyone has as empirical a faith as I do, though, and I can’t invalidate the faith of those who are moved by passion rather than by thought.
Rome is a very interesting place. It seems that around 150 AD the Romans said, “hey, let’s define Western Civilization.” They kept this up for about five hundred years, and then took a nap. The briefly woke up again for about a hundred years in the sixteenth century, redefined the world again, and then went back to sleep. EVERYTHING in Rome is either ancient or renaissance. With the exception of one building, Rome seems to have skipped Gothic architecture entirely. Mussolini barely brought neo-classicism to Rome about two centuries after the rest of the world had finished with it, and the baroque and modernist buses didn’t even bother stopping. Quite a strange place.
Here are some highlights of the trip:
~I got to go on a private tour of the excavations beneath St Peter’s Basilica, seeing the original Vatican hill, the tomb (and bones) of St Peter, and the pagan necropolis. It’s kind of difficult to get in to that stuff and I had to have a long conversation with the Ufficio Scavi explaining who I was and why I wanted to see it, so I consider myself very lucky.
~Went into the Catacombs and got to see a great deal of first century Christian symbology, wall scratchings, etc. Also got to see an early representation of Christ wearing a Greek toga and driving a four horse chariot. If it weren’t for the halo and the Chi Ro, you’d think the figure was Helios. Which was kind of the point, I guess, for a community in hiding.
~Saw the Pantheon, which surprisingly evoked the strongest emotional reaction of anything I saw. Aside from being a truly gorgeous building, it’s really easy to imagine how Roman worshippers trembling in awe and wonder as they entered this place. I truly believe in a basic “god instinct” in humanity, and I find the lengths people go to in order to answer that need to be incredibly moving.
~Attended mass within arms’ reach of The Ecstasy of St Theresa.
~Took a guided tour of the Imperial Palace, where my character in Gloria Mundi currently lives.
~Jogged a lap around the Circus Maximus.
~Said, “Sono vegetariano - il piatto e senza carne e senza pesche?” about nine billion times.
This trip gave me a lot to think about. I’m still digesting most of it, but here’s a taste:
The Church and its history of opulence has always made me very uncomfortable. I’ve always had a hard time seeing it as anything other than a sign of greed on behalf of a power-hungry, educated elite who had forgotten their role as agents of God’s transforming love in the world. I’ve had difficulty looking at soaring cathedrals and magnificent works of art without thinking, “this money could have done so much good in the world - why did we use it to decorate our buildings?” I’m someone who can worship in jazz club or on the subway, so having nine kinds of marble and original Caravaggio frescoes seems unnecessary to me.
The Church’s use of all this art and majesty, however, is more easily understood when you consider that they were in a pre-literate society. In an age when people couldn’t read scripture for themselves and worship was conducted in a language which had been dead for a thousand years, artwork was the best means of proclaiming the gospel. The Sistine Chapel is an excellent example of this. On one level, it’s a magnificent masterpiece of Renaissance brushwork. On another level, it’s downright gaudy. On a third level, it’s an exercise in Michelangelo’s humanism and celebration of the human form.
On a final level, however, it’s an incredibly lucid expression of Christian thought in pictorial form. A series of frescoes depicting the life of Moses is contrasted frame by frame with a series of frescoes depicting the life of Christ. The burning bush, the baptism of Christ, the ordination of Aaron, the giving of the keys to Peter, etc. Meanwhile the entire of story of creation and the fall stretches across the ceiling, eventually contrasting Adam’s eating the apple with the Crucifixion. It’s the gospel for the illiterate.
And so while I am still quick to condemn decadence in the church, I have a stronger understanding of why the Church chose to patronize Michelangelo, Raphael, Bernini, and the other masters. They were simply translating the Bible into the language of the people, four hundred years before Vatican II. Incredible.
Another thing to think about: I’ve never been into relics. I have a very protestant mentality of, “physical objects cannot have supernatural powers,” and therefor relics, fetish objects, talismans, rabbits’ feet, etc have never had any appeal to me. The closest I come is cooking with my great-grandmother’s apron.
Relics are big in Rome, though. People love to build Basilicas over tombs, they love to build alters on graves, etc. As I said, I got to see the bones of St Peter buried beneath the Vatican. Now, before I went, I was extremely skeptical of both the claim that those were St Peter’s bones and even the claim that he was ever buried there. After learning more about the history of the place, though, I came to believe that he probably was buried there at some point after all, and the bones certainly COULD be his, although they are probably not.
But here’s the thing - if I truly believe in the mundane nature of relics, does their validity matter as long as they successfully fulfill their function? In other words, if a pile of bones elicits an emotional reaction in a pilgrim and helps him have a humbling and transforming experience, does it really matter whose bones they really are?
The analyst in me screams, “yes! I want truth at all costs!” But not everyone has as empirical a faith as I do, though, and I can’t invalidate the faith of those who are moved by passion rather than by thought.