A Quick Trip to Italy, Part X

No cameras are allowed in the Sistine Chapel, and the people who try to get around it are hunted down by the attendants and the tour guides! So we will have to rely on something other than my own pictures to talk about the Chapel.

The Sacellum Sixtina was originally just called the Larger Chapel, Capella Maggiore; it received its current name because it was rebuilt by Pope Sixtus IV in the fifteenth century. Its importance lies in the fact that it is the official chapel of the Capella Pontificia, which is one of the two bodies making up what is called the Papal Household -- the body of people whose responsibility is to assist the Pope in his day-to-day ceremonial duties. The Pontifical Chapel in particular is concerned with the Pope's liturgical duties.

The ceiling of the chapel was originally a blue sky with stars -- very expensive, actually, since pure heavenly blue required the use of lapis lazuli in the paint; this expensive work would be undone to make way for Michelangelo about two to three decades later. The side walls had paintings by Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, and others, some of which still exist. They are in a band containing two cycles, the Life of Moses (to the south) and the Life of Christ (to the north); above these were painted a Gallery of Popes.

The most famous part of the Chapel, of course, is Michelangelo's painting, made between 1508 and 1512. He topped the Gallery of Popes with the Ancestors of Christ, put prophets and sibyls in the large pendentives, and painted panels on the ceiling itself of the Creation, the Fall, and the Deluge.

Much of the basic scheme would, however, be partially disrupted by the painting of the Last Judgment above the altar (by Michelangelo toward the end of his life), which ended up eliminating the Nativity of Jesus and the Finding of Moses, as well as several of the Popes and Ancestors.

Much of the work is excellent in its own right, but everyone comes for the ceiling:


(You can click to see more detail, and you can see a labeled version here.)

There are nine Central Stories, in three groups. I add the commentary of Giorgio Vasari from his Lives

1. The Separation of Light and Darkness
2. The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Earth
3. The Separation of Land and Water

...in order to display the perfection of art and also the greatness of God, he painted in a scene God dividing Light from Darkness, wherein may be seen His Majesty as He rests self-sustained with the arms outstretched, and reveals both love and power. In the second scene he depicted with most beautiful judgment and genius God creating the Sun and Moon, in which He is supported by many little Angels, in an attitude sublime and terrible by reason of the foreshortenings in the arms and legs. In the same scene Michelangelo depicted Him after the Blessing of the Earth and the Creation of the Animals, when He is seen on that vaulting as a figure flying in foreshortening; and wherever you go throughout the chapel, it turns constantly and faces in every direction. So, also, in the next scene, where He is dividing the Water from the Earth; and both these are very beautiful figures and refinements of genius such as could be produced only by the divine hands of Michelangelo.

4. The Creation of Adam
5. The Creation of Eve
6. The Temptation and Expulsion

He then went on, beyond that scene, to the Creation of Adam, wherein he figured God as borne by a group of nude Angels of tender age, which appear to be supporting not one figure only, but the whole weight of the world; this effect being produced by the venerable majesty of His form and by the manner of the movement with which He embraces some of the little Angels with one arm, as if to support Himself, and with the other extends the right hand towards Adam, a figure of such a kind in its beauty, in the attitude, and in the outlines, that it appears as if newly fashioned by the first and supreme Creator rather than by the brush and design of a mortal man. Beyond this, in another scene, he made God taking our mother Eve from Adam's side, in which may be seen those two nude figures, one as it were dead from his being the thrall of sleep, and the other become alive and filled with animation by the blessing of God. Very clearly do we see from the brush of this most gifted craftsman the difference that there is between sleep and wakefulness, and how firm and stable, speaking humanly, the Divine Majesty may appear.

Next to this there follows the scene when Adam, at the persuasion of a figure half woman and half serpent, brings death upon himself and upon us by the Forbidden Fruit; and there, also, are seen Adam and Eve driven from Paradise. In the figure of the Angel is shown with nobility and grandeur the execution of the mandate of a wrathful Lord, and in the attitude of Adam the sorrow for his sin together with the fear of death, as likewise in the woman may be seen shame, abasement, and the desire to implore pardon, as she presses the arms to the breast, clasps the hands palm to palm, and sinks the neck into the bosom, and also turns the head towards the Angel, having more fear of the justice of God than hope in His mercy.

7. The Sacrifice of Noah
8. The Great Flood
9. The Drunkenness of Noah

[Vasari assumes, not surprisingly, that (7) is the Sacrifice of Cain and Abel, but it is usually thought today to be the sacrifice of Noah after the Flood, the sequence of stories being displaced in order to allow a greater amount of room for the Flood itself.]

Nor is there less beauty in the story of the sacrifice of Cain and Abel; wherein are some who are bringing up the wood, some who are bent down and blowing at the fire, and others who are cutting the throat of the victim; which certainly is all executed with not less consideration and attention than the others. He showed the same art and the same judgment in the story of the Deluge, wherein are seen various deaths of men, who, terrified by the horror of those days, are striving their [Pg 35] utmost in different ways to save their lives. For in the faces of those figures may be seen life a prey to death, not less than fear, terror, and disregard of everything; and compassion is visible in many that are assisting one another to climb to the summit of a rock in search of safety, among them one who, having embraced one half dead, is striving his utmost to save him, than which Nature herself could show nothing better. Nor can I tell how well expressed is the story of Noah, who, drunk with wine, is sleeping naked, and has before him one son who is laughing at him and two who are covering him up—a scene incomparable in the beauty of the artistry, and not to be surpassed save by himself alone.

Above the altar is the famous Last Judgment, in which all are stripped naked, having nothing but their souls, some falling to hell and others rising to heaven:



Michelangelo's extensive use of nudes throughout his work stirred up quite a bit of controversy, and at least once almost led the ceiling being stripped entirely and redone.

After the Sistine Chapel we headed toward St. Peter's. Along the way there are statues in high niches. This one was particularly noticeable because it was right where we cam out:

The inscription on the base is in Latin and Armenian and identifies the statue as St. Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia. St. Gregory preached the gospel in Armenia, and in 301 he baptized the king and all his court, thus making Armenia the first officially Christian nation in the world. In 2001, Pope John Paul II was visiting Armenia for the 1700th anniversary, and agreed to a request by the Armenian Catholic patriarch to put up a statue of St. Gregory in the Vatican somewhere. A design contest was launched, and the winner was the Parisian Khachik Kazandjian, himself of Armenian background. The statue was put in the last niche that had not yet been filled, and that is where we saw it.

And so on to St. Peter's.

to be continued

Links of Note, Noted

I think I'll extend the Fortnightly Book another week so I can have time to get through all of The Return of Tarzan; last week was much, much busier than I was expecting.

* Thony Christie criticizes the tendency to inflate Galileo's achievements.

* Karl Ameriks on Kant and the historical turn

* Samuel Gregg on Benedict XVI's account of law

* How the ancient Greeks learned Latin

* An article at Aeon talks about the role of repetition in music, including the speech-to-song illusion, in which repetition of words begins to sound like singing. I'm inclined to think the phenomenon is entirely misnamed; there is no illusion at all. What is singing? Singing just is speaking with additional features like repetition, prolonging of vowels, and projection of voice, in various combinations. If you listen to Leonard Cohen, he's obviously singing, but it's also quite clear that what he is doing is not anything radically different from speaking.

* Peter Kwasniewski discusses an interesting instance of manuscript variation in the manuscript tradition for Thomas Aquinas.

And speaking of which, autograph manuscripts of Aquinas are now available at the Vatican Library website. Aquinas's handwriting is notoriously bad, so good luck to trying to read it without specializing in it.

* Elizabeth Lopatto discusses the many puzzles of lichen.

* Some half-joke philosophy articles:

David A. Horner, Whether Augustine’s Name Should Be Pronounced AW-gus-teen or aw-GUS-tin?, done in the spirit of a medieval disputation.

Garry DeWeese, Quid ergo Hipponium et Floridensis? Or, Does Horner Succeed in Referring? A Rejoinder, responding to the previous one in the style of Quine

I particularly like DeWeese's final footnote:

I want to thank David Horner, whose loyal friendship more than makes up for his locutionary failure; colleagues who tried but failed to teach me what is important to argue about; and the many students over the years whose well-intended “corrections” of my pronunciation filled much-needed voids.

Such half-joke articles, I think, serve an important function, since they pull back a bit from questions of material content to look at form, function, and method, which is something that needs to be done anyway, but is sometimes difficult to do properly in serious matters precisely because we take them seriously. That, I think, is one strand of the need for a sense of humor in intellectual life.

People have been talking about these things recently in part because of Tyron Goldschmidt's recent article, "A Demonstration of the Causal Power of Absences", which is one of the few Dialectica articles you can get complete and for free.

* Speaking of which, Goldschmidt has an interesting paper on "The Argument from Numbers"; Plantinga had suggested you could argue for God's existence from the nature of numbers, and Goldschmidt explores the strengths and weaknesses of one possible way someone might go about doing that. He doesn't really get very far, but he does rightly note the modal parallels between mathematical truths and moral truths, and the relevance of the Euthyphro problem to both.

* Andrew Ayers argues that Atticus Finch was never the sterling hero some readers made him out to be. (PDF)

* Janice Nadler, Expressive Law, Social Norms, and Social Groups (PDF)

* Cases in which King Arthur shows up in various medieval Lives of Saints.

* Nicholas Stan, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, at the SEP

* A brief debate between Bertrand Russell and G. K. Chesterton.

* MrsD on human restlessness

* An article on Henry Clay Brockmeyer, America's Hands-On Hegelian.

* Samuel Gregg on Benedict XVI's Regensburg Address

* A relatively recent blog: Medieval Logic and Semantics. It has already entirely justified its existence with a discovery of this musical version of the famous syllogistic mnemonic:



Disamis, Datisi, Disamis, Datisi, Bocardo, Bocardo, Ferison, Ferison, Ferison...

* A handy site on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

* Why Medieval Torture Devices are Not Medieval. Like a very large number of bad things pinned on the Middle Ages, they were usually invented in the modern period, although occasionally they were ancient devices of which we have no record of being used in the medieval period. Medievals did have torture -- they did not, as we have a weird tendency to do, think of it as a method of investigation, but they did regard it as sometimes justified as a punishment when the evidence against someone was considered conclusive and the person was refusing to confess in a situation in which it was important to get a confession. As the article notes, medieval torture generally consisted of unimaginative things like binding you tightly with ropes or making you stand out in the sun all day; really imaginative torture is almost always very ancient or very modern.

* And a brief article on medieval eyeglass technology.

* Researchers have discovered evidence that stories told in hagiography about how St. Eric of Sweden died have at least some truth to them.

* S. Adam Seagrave, The National Parks: 'America's Best Idea'

* Christopher Kaczor, Is Speciesism like Racism and Sexism?

* Eugene Marshall, How — and why — should we teach modern philosophy surveys to undergrads?

* An online course for learning basic Classical Chinese.

* An interesting article on recent work discovering otherwise unknown species in natural history museum collections.

A Quick Trip to Italy, Part IX

After the Hall of Muses, we passed into the Round Hall. It was quite crowded, so I didn't get a good picture of the whole hall, but you can see a picture here. The most famous sculpture in the room is the Braschi Antinous, of which I didn't get a picture. The room itself is indeed round; it's actually an homage to the Pantheon and was finished in 1779 by Michelangelo Simonetti. There is a striking basin, made of red porphyry, in the center of the room. The most remarkable thing is the floor, however. While the floor as it exists is entirely eighteenth century, it is pieced together out of 3rd century mosaics that were discovered in various parts of Italy.

Here is a detail of one of the horse's heads:

From the Round Hall we moved to the Greek Cross Hall, also designed in the 18th century by the architect Michelangelo Simonetti; it happened at the time to be the entrance to the Pio-Clementine Museum. It was also quite crowded. On each side of the hall is a massive red porphyry sarcophagus. Here is the one that is thought to have been the sarcophagus for St. Helena:

The other sarcophagus is that of one of the Emperor Constantine's daughters, probably Constantia.

Through all of this we were heading slowly to the Sistine Chapel; but as you get closer and closer to the Sistine Chapel, the crowds get thicker. Outside, it's quite noisy, while inside you're not allowed to talk more than a bare minimum. So our guide had us duck briefly into the Gregorian Etruscan Museum to talk about the Sistine Chapel. The Etruscan Museum was largely empty. Poor Etruscans! The archeological museum in Florence, which was, like the Gregorian, mostly focused on Egyptian and Etruscan exhibits, was also sparsely visited. Nobody goes sightseeing for Etruscan artifacts, apparently.

The Gregorian Etruscan Museum was founded by Pope Gregory XVI in 1837; there had begun to be a bit of a resurgence in excavation for ancient remains, and a large number of Etruscan artifacts had come into the Vatican and Lateran collections, largely from ancient Etruria (modern-day Latium), which was part of the Papal States. With the destruction of the Papal States in 1870 that flow more or less stopped, except for occasional donations and purchases. We never went further than Room I, which is concerned with the remnants of early Etruscan history (6th century BC and before). But there was a very nice piece that showed that even at that period the Etruscans could do serious artwork:

The little knobs on the bottom part are actually rows of tiny birds; they are so finely done that I could not get a good picture of them, because the camera had a difficult time focusing on them. But I did get some detail of the top part:

Having had some prior discussion of the Chapel, we then headed down that way. But as this was the Vatican, even walking in the direction of the Sistine Chapel was quite scenic. We saw some interesting ceiling paintings; there were two that were Thomas Aquinas-themed. Here is St. Thomas presenting his theological works to the Virgin Mary:

And here (my favorite) is a painting of St. Thomas's Summa Contra Gentiles, Summa Theologiae, and commentaries on Scripture defeating the philosophers of the world:

The physical representation of philosophical refutation is priceless; it almost looks at first glance like the angels have been hitting the philosophers upside the head with the books. The theme of the Triumph of St. Thomas over philosophers and heretics is a fairly common theme in paintings of the Common Doctor, but this one is interesting because it doesn't actually depict St. Thomas; it is the books themselves that are subjugating the philosophers.

We then passed by a long series of beautiful tapestries. The detail work on some of these tapestries was truly incredible, and confirms my view that tapestry should be considered one of the great fine arts:

The second of the two is almost indistinguishable from a painting if you are just glancing at it. And a very good painting, for that matter. You walk by it, and Christ's eyes follow you. What is more, wherever you are standing, no matter the angle from which you view the tapestry, Christ seems to be coming directly toward you.

After the tapestries, we came to the Gallery of Maps:

The maps along the hall show by parts the entire peninsula of Italy, with special focus on the Papal States as they existed in the sixteenth century. They should seem somewhat familiar; they were painted by Ignazio Danti, O.P., and we've come across his work before -- it was he who painted the maps in the Stanza delle Mappe geografiche in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The Palazzo Vecchio maps were painted in the very early 1570s, while the Vatican maps were painted in the early 1580s. Danti had left Florence to become a professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna; Pope Gregory XIII invited him to Rome to serve on the commission for calendar reform and making him the pontifical mathematician, and while he was serving in that capacity, he painted the maps.

And so we came to the Sistine Chapel itself.

to be continued

Travel Through the Land

The disposition which is fond of learning is inquisitive and exceedingly curious by nature, going everywhere without fear or hesitation and prying into every place, and not choosing to leave anything in existence, whether person or thing, not thoroughly investigated; for it is by nature extraordinarily greedy of everything that can be seen or heard, so as not only not to be satisfied with the things of its own country, but even to desire foreign things which are established at a great distance. At all events, they say that it is an absurd thing for merchants and dealers to cross the seas for the sake of gain, and to travel all round the habitable world, not allowing any considerations of summer, or winter, or violent gales, or contrary winds, or old age, or bodily sickness, or the society of friends, or the unspeakable pleasures arising from wife, or children, or one's other relations, or love of one's country, or the enjoyment of political connections, or the safe fruition of one's money and other possessions, or, in fact, anything whatever, whether great or small, to be any hindrance to them; and yet for men, for the sake of that most beautiful and desirable of all possessions, the only one which is peculiar to the human race, namely, wisdom, to be unwilling to cross over every sea and to penetrate every recess of the earth, inquiring whenever they can find anything beautiful either to see or to hear, and tracing out such things with all imaginable zeal and earnestness, until they arrive at the enjoyment of the things which are thus sought for and desired. Do thou then, O my soul, travel through the land....

Philo of Alexandria, On the Migration of Abraham, XXXIX.216-219.

A Quick Trip to Italy, Part VIII

On Thursday we headed off to meet our guide at another major attraction, one that is both in the city of Rome and in another country.

The Vatican Museums owe their existence to the fact that Pope Julius II, mostly famous for being a very arrogant leader and a very bellicose ruler, nonetheless also had excellent artistic taste. As Cardinal della Rovere, Julius had begun developing a collection of sculptures; when he became Pope, he moved his collection to the courtyard of the Villa Belvedere, a small papal summer house that had been built by Antonio del Pollaiuolo for Innocent VIII. As Pope, Julius recognized the genius of a number of the major artists whose works practically define Renaissance art at its height -- Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante.

We can see the dome of St. Peter's rising above it all. When Julius became pope, he brought with him the best architect he had discovered when he had been cardinal, Donato Bramante, and commissioned him to design a new St. Peter's, which had fallen into some decay.

Soon we came to the Cortile della Pigna. Here we are looking across the courtyard toward the dome of St. Peter's and can see a bit of modern sculpture, as well, one of the versions of Arnaldo Pomodoro's Sfera con sfera:

The Cortile della Pigna is, of course, most famous for the Fontana della Pigna:

The Pigna was originally a sculpture set near the Pantheon as part of a fountain (it was designed so that water would come out of the top). It was at some point moved in front of the old St. Peter's Basilica, and was moved to its current location in 1608. It stands in an immense niche, the nicchione, designed by Pirro Ligorio, which was the largest niche that had ever been built. The peacocks on each side of the pinecone were copied from examples found at Hadrian's tomb the Castel Sant'Angelo). The pinecone, famous in its own right, was granted immortality in Dante's Inferno, Canto XXXI, in which Dante, who had seen it while it was in front of the old St. Peter's, refers to it in order to explain how large the giant Nimrod is:

La faccia sua mi parea lunga e grossa
come la pina di San Pietro a Roma,
e a sua proporzione eran l'altre ossa....

The Courtyard of the Pinecone is a part of what once was a much larger courtyard. While the new St. Peter's was being built, Julius also asked Bramante to design a way of connecting the Villa Belvedere with the Vatican Palace, and the Cortile del Belvedere was born. It was not a minor project, since the sides of the Vatican Palace and the Villa Belvedere were out of parallel and were separated by a steep slope; and thus the relatively regular appearance was quite an achievement. Bramante himself did not live to see the completion of it; that was done by Pirro Ligorio. Pope Sixtus V, however, would break up the unity of the courtyard and the general integrity of the design by running a wing of the Vatican Library across the middle of the courtyard. (It is widely said that he did so deliberately in order to shield the pagan statues from view.) The upper terrace is the current Cortile della Pigna, and the lower terrace retains the name of the Cortile del Belvedere. The main Vatican Museums are along the wings of the original courtyard.

We only saw part of the Vatican Museums, but we did get a good look at parts of the Museo Pio-Clementino, which is focused on sculpture. Here, for instance, are a great many classical busts:

The primary attraction of the Pio-Clementine, however, is the Octagonal Court, formerly known as the Cortile delle Statue. In this one space we have some of the purest typical expressions of classical and neo-classical sculpture. Two of these are especially important. The first is the Apollo Belvedere:

The history of this statue is a bit murky. We know that it was already in Julius II's possession when he became pope, but we don't know how he got it. It is usually thought to be an AD second-century Roman copy of a fourth-century BC Greek statue by the great Greek sculptor Leochares (whose patron was Alexander the Great). The left hand and part of the right arm had been lost through the centuries, and the ones currently in place were added by a student of Michelangelo. Once Julius II put it on display in the courtyard, it became widely copied by Renaissance artists, and it would become the exemplar work for neo-classical sculpture. Napoleon stole it during his 1796 campaign, where it was housed in the Louvre; Rome got it back in 1815 after Napoleon's exile.

The second major work in the Octagonal Court is the Laocoön:

Laocoön was a priest of Poseidon; there are a large number of different stories about why Poseidon punished him by having him and his sons destroyed by great serpents. Sophocles says it was because Laocoön married; Virgil says it was because he tried to prove that the Trojan Horse was a trap. This group of figures is usually thought, on the authority of Pliny the Elder, to have been the work of three sculptors from Rhodes, assuming that we have the same statue (Natural History, XXXVII, 4):

Beyond these, there are not many sculptors of high repute; for, in the case of several works of very great excellence, the number of artists that have been engaged upon them has proved a considerable obstacle to the fame of each, no individual being able to engross the whole of the credit, and it being impossible to award it in due proportion to the names of the several artists combined. Such is the case with the Laocoön, for example, in the palace of the Emperor Titus, a work that may be looked upon as preferable to any other production of the art of painting or of statuary. It is sculptured from a single block, both the main figure as well as the children, and the serpents with their marvellous folds. This group was made in concert by three most eminent artists, Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, natives of Rhodes.

The group we have is not, in fact, sculpted from a single block, but consists of seven interlocking pieces, but it could very well be that Pliny was simply mistaken. In any case, the association with the one described by Pliny has lingered with the statue since it was rediscovered in a vineyard near St. Mary Major in 1506; Julius II, hearing about it, sent Michelangelo and Giuliano da Sangallo to see if it was worth buying. Since it obviously was, Julius II bought it, and it was his putting it on display along with the Apollo that is the first step in the creation of the Vatican Museums. Like the Apollo, the Laocoön was taken to France by Napoleon and returned to Rome after Napoleon's defeat.

A third sculpture is also of note, the Peseus Triumphant, which was sculpted at the turn of the nineteenth century by Antonio Canova, and which shows what neoclassical sculpture was able to accomplish on the basis of its inspiration by these works:

From the Octagonal Court we moved to the Hall of Muses, where one can find the Belvedere Torso:

According to legend, Julius II asked Michelangelo to complete the fragment, but Michelangelo refused because it was too beautiful to modify. And it is arguably the only classical sculpture that has been even more influential and important than the Apollo and the Laocoön.

All of this was great indeed, but we were hardly begun.

to be continued

A New Poem Draft and a Poem Re-Draft

This World of Woe, So Wonderless, So Bland, So Sad

This world of woe, so wonderless, so bland, so sad,
blasé in worldly wisdom, yet unwise,
will blather words of love, for words are all it's had,
and never will have else, for love it does despise.

The worldly sages sigh in unfulfilling dreams;
they build up vanities to light a raging blaze.
Their meanings are banal, no matter how they seem,
for love is flame so bright it would their vision daze.

Amen, I say to you, they have their one reward.
The only love they have is symbol of their hearts,
a snake that eats its tail, a self-inflicting sword,
a legacy soon lost to folly, part by part.

And you -- take care to love, not love as madmen rave,
but love that seeks the good, that by the good can save.


Angels with Their Feline Faces

Angels with their feline faces
soaring through the empty spaces
meow a song like godly graces;
they sport in ecstasy.

Every wing like wild flowers
sparkles with some hidden power,
turning minute into hour
and aeviternity.

   Play the tambrel and the drum;
   Juda's lion is now come.

Whiskers white with zeal are burning
in the wheels of love now turning,
emblems of some endless yearning,
in spheres most heavenly.

Eyes like slits of searing fire,
sparks of infinite desire,
pour out light in swaying gyre
of cosmic liturgy.

   Lions roar above my head,
   praising Zion newly wed.

Like a shawm for holy masses
like wind through spiring garden grasses,
prayer of the saints now passes
through angelic harmonies.

Every halo like a story
wraps around the world with glory,
burning like the heavens hoary
with frosty dignity.

   Send the message far and wide:
   the Lion-Lamb has wed his Bride!

These ministers of wind and flame,
moving in their spirit-game,
praise the everlasting name
of true divinity.

A purr goes out throughout the ages:
though the dragon shouts and rages
his doom is writ in sacred pages
of God's vitality.

   Rejoice, for they have slain the Beast;
   rejoice and join the wedding feast!

Making a Peaceful and Decent Future a Little More Probable

If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.

George Orwell, "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad"

Feast of the Incarnation

The Feast of the Annunciation is unusually late this year for everyone on the Gregorian calendar, because March 25 fell across Easter Triduum, which are the most holy days of the year and thus capable of displacing even so ancient and important a feast as Annunciation. The Annunciation then gets displaced to the next appropriate day. It was last Tuesday for the Maronites, but the Latin Church only gets to it today. The reason for the difference is the Easter Octave. Venerable feasts of especially great importance were extended out, so to speak, as eight-day feasts. Thus the full week after a feast takes on something of the importance of the feast starting the octave. The custom became especially popular in the West, which began to have so many octaves that it became quite unruly, which led to attempts at organization in the nineteenth century (which were not especially successful) and finally, in 1955 Pius XII eliminated all octaves except for three: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. [In the Ordinary Form, the Pentecost Octave was also eventually eliminated (which was arguably a mistake, since it included some of the most venerable and influential prayers in the calendar).] So we have been in Easter Octave, with each day its own solemnity and extension of Easter itself, with the result that, in the Latin Church, today was the first day that could take the Feast of the Annunciation.

Feast of the Annunciation
by Christina Rossetti

Whereto shall we liken this Blessed Mary Virgin,
Faithful shoot from Jesse's root graciously emerging?
Lily we might call her, but Christ alone is white;
Rose delicious, but that Jesus is the one Delight;
Flower of women, but her Firstborn is mankind's one flower:
He the Sun lights up all moons thro' their radiant hour.
'Blessed among women, highly favoured,' thus
Glorious Gabriel hailed her, teaching words to us:
Whom devoutly copying we too cry 'All hail!'
Echoing on the music of glorious Gabriel.

Edmund Duncan Montgomery

Last week I happened to go to the Elisabet Ney Museum here in Austin. Elisabet Ney (1833-1907), who was grandniece of Marshal Ney of the Napoleonic Wars fame, was a German sculptor. She had wanted to be a sculptor since she was young (perhaps because her father was a stonecarver himself); her parents opposed it, so she went on a hunger strike, and was serious enough about it that her parents finally sent her to the Munich Academy of Art. She opened a studio in Berlin in 1857 and began to have various important men sit for her. One of the museum's important pieces is a bust of Arthur Schopenhauer. Elisabet married (reluctantly, because she was opposed to marriage as an institution, and while the marriage seems largely to have been a happy one, she continued to treat the fact of being married as a legal technicality and nothing more) a Scottish philosopher and doctor named Edmund Montgomery, and Montgomery, who saw Schopenhauer and his poodles regularly, convinced the pessimist to have his features sculpted. Among her other commissions were busts of Jacob Grimm, Otto Bismarck, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Richard Wagner. She eventually emigrated with her husband to Texas, where the Texas state legislature eventually began paying her for various sculpted portraits. Her works are found throughout the world, and there are a fair number in the Texas State Capitol and the U.S. Capitol, but the Elisabet Ney Museum has the largest collection. The Museum itself was the studio she set up in Austin, which she called Formosa.

Obviously, one of the things I found interesting was the philosopher Edmund Montgomery (1835-1911), about whom I don't think I had heard before. It turns out he was well respected and rather prolific, with a large number of articles in Mind, The Monist, and the International Journal of Ethics. There was a brief resurgence of interest in him in the 1950s, but other than that he seems to have faded completely from view (as many respected philosophers at that time have). He continued his scientific work to the end (at one point studying protoplasm and one-celled organisms every day for five years straight). He was a sort of vitalist, and so one of the running themes in his scientific work is that it is impossible for life to be nothing but an interaction of cells. One of his usual points, found, for instance, in "Are we 'Cell Aggregates'?" (Mind 7.25 (1882): 100–107), is that by definition a cell is a relatively autonomous unit, so the claim amounts to saying that all activities of living organism consist of nutrition and very limited cell-to-cell stimulations, which leaves mysterious how any of it gets coordinated at all. One of the things he was particularly interested in, on this point, was the capacity of complex organisms to rebuild and reconstitute themselves. His conclusion was that organisms are in fact relatively fundamental unities; composed of many molecules, they nonetheless in some ways function as if they were single molecules. His position seems to me to be sometimes misrepresented -- his claim is not that there weren't biological units we could call cells, but that it is not possible to understand cells fully except as parts of living organisms -- even with unicellular organisms, it is their integrative activity as organisms, not their relative autonomy as cells, that is the primary principle of explanation. His own view was that biological phenomena strongly indicated that life consisted in an "identical, indivisible, perdurable, and self-sustaining substance" (“The Substantiality of Life”. Mind 6.23 (1881): 321–349), a sort of monad integrating the various phenomena we associate with living things. He often calls this the vital organization, thus leading to the name occasionally given to his philosophy -- the Philosophy of Organization.

Another of his ideas, closely related to this, was that psychology was the purest science, because it was the only one in which the phenomena are directly observed -- all other sciences are built entirely on psychological phenomena and our assumptions about them. (See on this point, for instance, “The Unity of the Organic Individual”. Mind 5.20 (1880): 465–489, particularly 488-489.) He was also firmly opposed throughout his philosophical career to the notion that we could have any kind of a priori knowledge, so he thought that psychology could only serve in this role if it recognized that consciousness was interacting with a real world:

I am confident that positive proof of the existence of a world of efficient powers beyond our conscious content -- a world to which our own efficient Subject belongs -- can be readily given to all who admit the existence of other beings like themselves. For it is incontestable, and in keeping with the forceless character of psychical occurrences, that we become conscious of the existence of other beings, not in the least through awareness of anything forming part of their conscious content. When we perceive another human being, this perception does not contain any of his conscious states.

[“Mental Activity”. Mind 14.56 (1889): 501-502; emphasis in original]

In a sense, he can be seen as trying to find a middle way between idealism on the one side and mechanical materialism on the other; this aspect of his view he often calls Naturalism.

Despite his prolific publication, Montgomery was relatively isolated from the main streams of intellectual activity, and has occasionally been given the epithet 'the Hermit Philosopher of Liendo', Liendo being the name of his plantation in Hempstead, Texas.

A Sort of Translation

Reason itself was there in the beginning, and Reason was with God, and Reason was God; he was with God in the very beginning. Everything was made through him, and nothing that was made, was made without him. There was life in him, and that life was light to the human race. That light shines in darkness; darkness could not grasp him. A man named John, sent from God, came for testimony, to testify about the light, so that through him everyone might believe. That man was not the light, but he did testify about the light.

The true light enlightens everyone born into the world. He was in this world, which was made through him, but the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his; what was his did not accept him. But those who did accept him, who believed in who he was, received from him the authority to become God's children, not by blood, not by physical impulse, not by voluntary choice, but by God. So Reason itself was made physical, living among us; indeed, we saw his splendor, a splendor belonging to the Father's one offspring, full of blessing and truth. About him, John testifies out loud, 'Here is the one about whom I said that the one after me came before me, for this man was before me.'

We have received blessing upon blessing from his abundance. Torah was given through Moses, but blessing and truth come from Jesus Christ: No human eye has ever seen God, but the Father's one offspring, who is in his Father's heart, has told of him.

(John 1:1-14)

Maronite Year XL

The Second Sunday of the Resurrection is usually called New Sunday in the Maronite Church, although in typical Maronite fashion, they also use the Latin Church name of Divine Mercy Sunday. The focus of the Sunday is on the appearance of Christ to the disciples after the Resurrection.

New Sunday
2 Corinthians 5:11-21; John 20:26-31

When the goodness of our Savior God appeared,
not by our justice but by His mercy He saved,
washing us clean with the baptismal waters,
anointing us with the renewal of the Spirit
who pours forth with glory from Christ our Savior,
adopting us heirs to a life everlasting.

Who is in Christ, a new creation becomes;
the old man is vanished in rebirth of new life,
as God, who has justified us through His grace,
is reconciling us to Himself through Jesus.
For the kindness of our Savior God has come,
bringing us resurrection of soul and body.

By Your resurrection, Lord, You joined all things,
uniting heaven and earth into one great choir.
In the Upper Room You manifested truth,
bringing peace and consolation from Your rising.
Therefore we confess Your true divinity,
Your humanity, and Your generosity.

Tear-Mingled Smiles

April
by Ella Higginson

Hey, pretty maid! Whence comest thou
With violets linked about thy brow,
And zone of buttercups' own gold?
The currant blossoms round thee fold
Their delicate beauty, red and sweet,
And star-flowers faint beneath thy feet.

Thou dear coquette! A tear, a frown,
Dark lashes drooping shyly down,
To bid one hope the while he fears,
Then sudden laughter thro' thy tears;
May all thy sweethearts now take care,
And of thy ravishments beware.

See how the soft wind kisses thee,
And how the rough wind misses thee,
And fruit trees blow and bend and sigh
When thy glad feet come twinkling by;
And thou dost laugh thro' sparkling tears
And kisses fling at hopes and fears.

Ah, May is fair, and June is sweet,
And August comes with loitering feet;
July's the maid to lie and dream,
Beside some blue and lilied stream;
But April's sweetheart never yet
Could her tear-mingled smiles forget.

Philosophy, Academic Research, and Practical Engagement

I hope that after this week I'll be able to get back into more of the usual kinds of posts; the past three weeks have been hectic and this week hasn't been any sort of slow-down at all.

However, I notice that Frodeman and Briggle's argument that philosophy has lost its way continues to stir up some discussion. Besides Soames's response, which I questioned here, skholiast at "Speculum Criticum" had two posts commenting on the discussion:

* Philosophy Departments, Nihilism, Psychic Research, and the Continental / Analytic Divide. And a few other things you didn't think were related. Part i
* Philosophy Departments, Nihilism, Psychic Research, and the Continental / Analytic Divide. And a few other things you didn't think were related. Part ii

Recently there has been some back-and-forth on the subject in Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective:

* Maring, Luke. “Abandoning the Academy is the Single Worst Thing Philosophers Could Do: A Reply to Frodeman and Briggle.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 5, no. 3 (2016): 54-58.

* “Comments on Luke Maring’s Post Regarding ‘When Philosophy Lost Its Way'”, Bob Frodeman and Adam Briggle.

* “Philosophy, the Academy, and the Public: A Reply to Frodeman and Briggle”, Luke Maring

* “Is Anyone Still Reading? A Second Response to Maring”, Adam Briggle and Bob Frodeman

* Bowman, W. Derek. “Philosophy Hitherto: A Reply to Frodeman and Briggle.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 5, no. 3 (2016): 85-91.

* "Toward New Virtues in Philosophy: A Reply to Derek Bowman," Bob Frodeman and Adam Briggle.

They also reposted a discussion (of the original article and Soames's response) by Steve Fuller at ABC Religion and Ethics.

Maring's arguments, I think, make a significant misstep in assuming that philosophical participation in academia necessarily means participating in academia in the way in which philosophers happen to do so now; but as has been pointed out by a few people, in fact the way philosophers participate in academia currently is largely the result of historical contingencies -- the narrowing of philosophy discipline-wise did not occur simply by philosophical participation in academia (which, in any case, happened for centuries, during some of which philosophy was absolutely thriving) but by a particular philosophical group (those that opposed the treatment of psychology as a science and especially the creation of Psychology Departments) getting the funding and institutional recognition of themselves as the Philosophy Department, and then others, usually at first with similar views, doing the same. The whole thing is a result of a particular set of moves in academic politics at a certain time, not an inevitable result of academic engagement.

Maring also has a conception of the ideals of academic research that I regard as problematic, although I don't think it is as central to the issue at hand:

But, as I explained before, that is not how academic research works. Even if they do not directly impact the public, our small individual contributions create the milieu that makes really impactful work possible. To repeat an example: John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice has been hugely influential; Rawls was in a position to write his book only because he was immersed in an academic back-and-forth, most of which the public never saw. The public does not read most philosophical scholarship (or scientific scholarship, or anthropological scholarship, or…). That is not a problem; that is how academic research is supposed to work.

This is how it often does work, to be sure. That this is how it is "supposed to work" is much more dubious, however. If you look at cases where you can really and indisputably see the kind of thing that Maring has in mind, what you generally get are cases where either (1) the ideas are of very little general interest in the first place and thus almost entirely ivory tower; or (2) the ideas are in fact important to society, and disasters build up because the academic field struggles to keep the public informed and so the public responds by filling the void with whatever seems good at the time. I can hardly imagine that Maring thinks that the ideal of academic research is to study evolutionary theory that the public continually misunderstands so that biologists are constantly having to deal with the consequences of the misunderstanding. But this is one perfectly good example -- and not at all isolated -- of exactly the sort of thing he is describing. And arguably the lesson that has been learned is that ordinary everyday biologists can't just sit around waiting for people to come into the classroom to learn these things.

Nor, it should be pointed out, has this always been seen as the way academic research should work in the first place. If you look at a lot of nineteenth-century academics, they often saw themselves, or at least described themselves, as partners with the public in their inquiry. Natural history in the nineteenth century flourished because it consisted of a constant cooperation and interaction between university researchers and a broader public outside of academia -- yes, the researchers often did the work of hammering out the difficult technicalities, but they were technicalities arising out of a broader discussion rather than just an academic one, and those technicalities were only of value to the extent that they could be brought back to that broader discussion. It wouldn't have made much sense to see it in Maring's way -- to do something on the scale of natural history, particularly at the time when collections were often just getting started and field work could sometimes be quite expensive and time-consuming, you needed the help of more than just a few researchers at universities even to deal with the basics. So why not get the gardeners and hikers, and the public generally, involved in collecting and identifying specimens? A lot of the great work in nineteenth-century natural history was done by amateurs working with experts, either immediately or by correspondence. Nor is natural history the only area of academic interest in which this was the case. Bringing scientific results to the broader public was part of what scientists saw themselves as doing; there's a reason why a lot of top nineteenth-century academics are often out and about talking to people outside of academia -- indeed, not uncommonly, people who may not have had more than a basic education in the first place. And, on the other side, there's a reason why things like Faraday's Christmas lectures were immensely popular.

Nor is it even the case that this is the way it has always been seen today. Academic mathematicians often deal with the most technical of technicalities; a lot gets done that only experts with time on their hands explicitly devoted to the problem can do. But mathematics has always had an important, non-stop interaction between experts and amateurs -- indeed, for very much the same reason that natural history in the nineteenth century did. Mathematics is an endless field; no matter how expert you are, it's a sign of irrationality to think you and a small band of others can always on your own do all the work that needs to be done. The dabbling of mathematical amateurs has often made very useful discoveries in mathematics; and the amateurs in making those discoveries have freed up the professionals to build on them and do other things that need to be done to get the math in good order. And in other fields, there is a slow increasing appreciation of the work of non-academics -- citizen science and the like.

And indeed, this is precisely the problem with Maring's characterization: he assumes that "the milieu that makes really impactful work possible" is necessarily an academic one. But historically it has sometimes been the interaction between academics and the broader public that actually created this milieu. And fields in which this has not been the case have tended to be very narrow fields in the first place. Big, sprawling fields like natural history or mathematics have at times had to spill out of academia to get the research done in the first place. Now, perhaps the conditions of philosophy are different, or maybe the conditions of academia have changed enough that it should now be usually done differently even if there are exceptions like certain fields of mathematics. (Certainly it's true that natural history started freezing the amateurs out toward the end of the nineteenth century and the more recent attempts to start up active cooperation have been sporadic and limited.) But the point is that Maring's conception of academic research is not written in stone in the foundations of the halls of learning. It's just the status quo. And precisely the point of Frodeman and Briggle was that the status quo requires treating philosophy as a narrow and very limited discipline. If we are talking about how academic research is supposed to work, Maring's claim can't be taken uncritically; it is precisely the thing that would need to be established.

I think Bowman's argument starts on a stronger foot. He argues that "reluctance to engage with practical affairs was a feature of philosophy long before the advent of the modern university" and then sets out to show that in fact philosophers are doing a lot of practical engagement anyway. The problem is that his example of the reluctance to engage with practical affairs -- Socrates and Plato -- doesn't seem to involve any actual reluctance to engage with practical affairs. Yes, philosophers were sometimes ridiculed -- but the ridicule itself is part of the actual engagement between the philosophers and the public. Aristophanes' The Clouds was not some obscure little work in an obscure venue; it was a criticism of Socrates, who was already a public figure, in the most public venue in the ancient Greek world. It's true that Plato's Socrates is clearly limited in his options as to how he can operate, but this is quite clearly not put forward as a restriction by Socrates himself, but simply by the unwillingness of the citizens of Athens. (And notably, Socrates in Plato's Gorgias says that he's the only one of his contemporaries who practices the true politics.) And the reluctance of Plato's philosopher-kings to rule is quite clearly just due to the fact that the Kallipolis is rigged so that corruptions leading to injustice are difficult to find -- just as parenthood is obscured to make nepotism impossible, and the noble lie is perpetuated simply to make bribery impossible, so the only people allowed to rule are those who aren't motivated simply by a desire to rule, so that self-aggrandizement is impossible. But there's nothing even here about a reluctance for engagement in practical affairs; 'practical affairs' is much broader than 'ruling the city'. What Bowman actually seems to be picking up on is the ancient view that philosophy requires leisure, that philosophy should not be subordinated to other affairs simply because the latter get labeled as more 'practical' or 'useful'. This is not ambivalence about practical engagement; this is an insistence that philosophy has value in its own right.

Frodeman and Briggle seem to be running out of steam at this point; their responses have been getting weaker as time goes on. But, of course, the question is still worth considering.

Maronite Year XXXIX

The Feast of the Annunciation is normally on March 25, but, of course, this year that occurred during Triduum, which takes precedence. So it was shifted to the next open day after, which, because Easter Monday is treated as an extension of Easter Sunday, is today.

While Annunciation is important, the structure of the Maronite calendar tends to de-emphasize it somewhat; the primary commemoration of the Annunciation is in Advent, feasts that don't fall on Sunday tend to be de-emphasized in general, and the existence of this feast of the Annunciation is primarily a testimony to a combination of the great age of the feast and the tendency of Maronites to recognize Latin holidays as well as their own. However, these are both powerful influences, and while March 25 tends for Maronites to be in practice the secondary celebration of the Annunciation, they certainly do celebrate it and treat it as important.

The Feast of the Announcement to Mary
Galatians 3:15-22; Luke 1:26-38

The Angel went to Nazareth, Alleluia:
"Peace, O Mary, maiden given great grace,
blessed are you among women, greatly favored!
Have no fear! Your God is gracious to you,
and you shall conceive a Son whose name is Jesus."

Mary was with wonder filled: "I am but a girl,
a maiden; how can I bear a son?"
"Mary, the Holy Spirit overshadows you,
with divine might is descending on you,
You shall bear God's Son. With God all is possible."

Then did the holy Virgin say, "Let it be so,
for I am the handmaiden of the Lord!"
O Mary, receiving peace from God, you give peace;
you restored Eve's children to their true place;
in you the Word was made flesh to dwell among us.

O Lord, we do not understand and are amazed;
we are blinded by Your eternal flame.
The incense of our prayer alone can we give;
we hide behind its smoke in Your presence,
for great is the might that comes upon Your altar!

A Quick Trip to Italy, Part VII

Across from the House of the Vestal Virgins is the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina:

In July of 138, Emperor Hadrian died, leaving Antoninus as his heir. Antoninus's wife, Faustina, was widely admired and imitated among Roman women. When the Empress died in 140, Antoninus convinced the Senate to deify her and to build a temple to her in the Roman Forum. After Antoninus Pius died in 161 and was deified as well, Marcus Aurelius had Senate re-dedicate the temple to both Antoninus and Faustina. The inscriptions reads, "Divo Antonino et Divae Faustinae Ex S.C.", i.e., "To divine Antoninus and divine Faustina, by decree of the Senate". At some point in the early Middle Ages, the temple was repurposed as a church, the church of San Lorenzo in Miranda. (Nobody knows the origin of the 'Miranda' part of the name.) In the fifteenth century, Pope Martin V gave the church to the Collegio degli Speziali, a guild of chemists and herbalists, giving it its full name of San Lorenzo de' Speziali in Miranda, and a descendant institution, the Collegio Chimico Farmaceutico, still makes use of the nearby guildhall. Not long after parts of the temple were hauled off to help repair St. John Lateran. The building was returned to its character as ancient temple for the visit of the Emperor Charles V in 1536, but the church still exists inside part of the temple, accessed from the other side. After that point, the general area became a cattle market, which is why one of its Italian names for the longest time was Field of Cows; the return to display of ancient remains began in serious in the nineteenth century.

One of the great architectural mysteries of the temple is why there are angle doubled grooves cut into the pillars of the temple; nobody knows why this was done. An old theory is that at some point in the Middle Ages this was done in a failed attempt to destroy the portico, the grooves being cut for ropes, but this is purely speculative, and, as some people have pointed out, it's unclear, if you were trying to pull down the pillars, why anyone would attempt to do it in this way -- or, indeed, why, failing to do it in this way, they would not have simply tried another until they succeeded. More recently people have suggested that they may have been cut to help support a temporary structure at some point, or that they might have been a side effect of the occasional building of other structures around the gateway.

A little farther on, also across from the House of the Vestal Virgins, you can see the remains of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine:

It was the largest building of its day, and the largest ever built in the forum, and its large groin vaults were closely studied by architects in the Renaissance who worked with large buildings. The effect of the size is quite impressive even now, but nothing of the Basilica survives except its north aisle -- as many large buildings are, it was vulnerable to earthquakes, and over the centuries it has had to endure a few. (Its only surviving great column was carted off in the seventeenth century after one of these earthquakes to St. Mary Major, where it still stands in the Piazza.)

Walking along in the general direction of the Colosseum one soon comes to the Arch of Titus:

'

The Arch is an interesting monument in its own right. It was constructed by Domitian in the 80s to commemorate the victories of his elder brother Titus, and in particular the victory in the Siege of Jerusalem in AD 70. Thus the northward panel depicts Titus in triumphant procession, led by Valor and crowned by Victory:

But the southward panel is even more interesting, because it shows Titus bringing home the spoils, and one of the looted trophies is very, very recognizable:

Notice the Great Menorah from the Temple. Other objects that are identifiable are the golden trumpets, the firepans for the altar, and the Table of Shewbread. There's good evidence that these trophies in the panel were originally painted golden-yellow.

There are some inscriptions on the arch. On one side is, Senatus Populusque Romanus divo Tito divi Vespasiani filio Vespasiano Augusto, "The Roman Senate and People, to divine Titus Vespasian Augustus, son of divine Vespasian". Another is Insigne religionis atque artis, monumentum, vetustate fatiscens: Pius Septimus, Pontifex Maximus, novis operibus priscum exemplar imitantibus fulciri servarique iussit. Anno sacri principatus eius XXIV, "The monument, notable for religion and for art, had weakened with age: Pius VII, Supreme Pontiff, by new works in imitation of the ancient exemplar, commanded it to be reinforced and preserved in the 24th year of his sacred reign."

Soon after we came to the most famous sports stadium in the world:

The Flavian Amphitheater, the largest amphitheater built in the ancient empire, was begun by Vespasian in 72 and was finished by his son Titus in 80. It could hold approximately 50,000, perhaps as many as 80,000, spectators. Nobody knows how it got its most common name, the Colosseum (or Coliseum); the most common suggestion is that there was a statue, or colossus, associated with it at some point.

Domitian remodeled it and put in the hypogeum, the underground tunnels for the animals and slaves.

The fortunes of the Colosseum went up and down throughout the Middle Ages, with the building being used at times for various odd functions and at other times for a quarry. A turning point was reached under Pope Benedict XIV in 1749; he argued that it was a site of Christian martyrdom, and thus forbade its use as a quarry and consecrated it to the Passion of Christ. There is in fact no evidence that any Christians were ever martyred there, although it is certainly possible that some were. It's even rare for there to be any attribution of martyrdom to the building in legend; Ignatius of Antioch, by a very late tradition, is sometimes said to have been fed to lions here, but that's almost all, and medieval pilgrimage guides tend not even to mention it at all. (Most Christians who were martyred seem actually to have been martyred at the Circus Maximus.) The association with martyrdom seems to have been an entirely modern idea, beginning to gain ground in the sixteenth century. However, the idea meant that people stopped using it as a source of stone and that money and effort were put into maintaining it. A cross was placed in it (fairly recently, I believe):

Pope Benedict XIV also began to do Stations of the Cross in the Colosseum, and every evening of Good Friday the Popes have continued the tradition. They were doing preliminary set-up for this when we were there.

After the Colosseum, we went searching for the Circus Maximus. We walked past the Arch of Constantine:

The Arch, the last and largest of the great Roman triumphal arches, was dedicated in 315 to celebrate Constantine's victory over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. Famously it is a mix of new work and spolia from other arches, since, it is sometimes said, Constantine could not find sculptors up to his standards. In reality, there are any number of things that might be true here; the Arch may have been rushed into construction, so the spoliage could perhaps have been a time-saving maneuver. Some people have even suggested that the Arch was actually built by Maxentius, and Constantine just repurposed it after his victory, using parts from other monuments to get it together in short order. Because the Arch is such a mix of styles, it has long been a key evidence in attempts to reconstruct the history of art, and its possible decline, in the late Roman Imperial period. The main inscription:

It reads in English: "To Emperor Caesar Flavius Constantinus, greatest, pious, and blessed Augustus: because he, inspired by the divine and by greatness of mind, has delivered the state from the tyrant and all of his followers at one time, with his army and just force of arms, the Senate and People of Rome have dedicated this arch, decorated with triumphs."

And finally we came to the Circus Maximus. At one time it was the greatest entertainment venue in the world, although now it is little more than a large ditch:

Now a public park, it still functions occasionally as an entertainment venue for concerts, and it seems to be common enough for people to incorporate it into their evening walks.

Thus we had toured a bit of ancient Rome.



Returning from the Circus Maximus to our hotel, we got turnd around a bit and passed by the Theatre of Marcellus:

It was originally planned by Julius Caesar, but he died before construction could begin, and it fell to Augustus to finish it. It was later used as a fortress and then as part of a residence for the Orsini.

In all the wandering, I also snapped a quick picture of some churches. Here is the Basilica di Sant'Anastasia al Palatino:

It is one of the stational churches for Lent. There has been a church on this site since the third or fourth century; the current one is a seventeenth century restoration. According to a very old tradition, Saint Jerome said Mass here. Despite its history, it almost ceased to exist in the early twentieth century because no one ever went there. A restoration in the 1960s revived it a bit. But it had to be closed in the eighties and nineties because its foundations were crumbling; they have since been restored. Since its re-opening it has become one of the most flourishing churches in the area.

Here is a relatively minor church, Santa Maria della Consolazione:

I didn't even know what church it was; I had to search online for it. It used to be near an execution site for criminals; an icon was put here to console them while they were being executed, and thus the name. That's a story you would never expect beforehand. It became a notable spot in the fifteenth century when someone was being hanged nearby; the man had claimed he was innocent, and when they tried to hang him, it somehow failed. So, as was common, since he had survived the attempt to kill him, they cut him down. He claimed to have had a vision of the icon, with the Virgin reaching out her hand and supporting him. So a church was built to house the icon. It was rebuilt in the sixteenth century, when it was connected to a hospital, which itself was associated with a number of saints. The hospital no longer operates and is now a police station; and the streets around it have been restructured, leaving this once flourishing church in a very bustling piazza no more than a very lonely and isolated church in the middle of a zigzag of narrow streets.

And above is the church of San Nicola in Carcere. Nobody knows for sure where it got the 'in prison' tag; since it incorporates the remains of previous temples, some have suggested that there was a jail associated with them. It is one of the stational churches for Lent and is famous for its celebrations of Our Lady of Pompeii and Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is said to have a reproduction of the tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe that was sent here in 1773. Mussolini's meddlings with Rome and the twentieth-century passion for ancient remains led to the destruction of most of the medieval neighborhood of the church and a restructuring of the area that left this ancient parish church with almost no parish. So it was made a dependent church of Santa Maria in Portico in Campitelli.

It was by accident, but the three churches happen to make an interesting study of the lives of old churches.

One last picture for the day, the Quirinal Palace shining over the rooftops:

And that was Wednesday.

to be continued

Fortnightly Book, March 27

I have been puzzling over what to do for the next fortnightly book. My original idea was Tristram Shandy, but there are some reasons for not doing that now. (1) On my trip to Italy, I took Sigrid Undset's massive Kristin Lavransdatter to read, and I am about two-thirds of the way through. Given other things I have to do, I don't think I'm up to finishing Kristin and starting Tristram simultaneously. (2) The past three weeks have been utterly exhausting for me, so it might be a good idea to start up the series again with something lighter.

So I am going with Tarzan of the Apes. It was first serialized in 1912 in All-Story Magazine, with the book published in 1914. It was an instant hit, and provided a perfect material for the newly developing cinematic arts -- since the first silent Tarzan movie in 1918, it has come to the screen again and again. Edgard Rice Burroughs would eventually write twenty-three Tarzan novels.

If I have time, I will also read the sequel, The Return of Tarzan, in which Tarzan tangles with the last outpost of Atlantis.

Maronite Year XXXVIII

Resurrection Sunday needs no particular introduction. But Easter opens a special week, the Week of Hawareyeen, or, as it is often translated, White Week. During the weekdays of White Week, also called the Week of Weeks, the readings celebrate the appearances of Christ after His resurrection: to Mary Magdalene (Monday), at the Sea of Tiberias (Tuesday and Wednesday), the Road to Emmaus (Thursday), the Upper Room (Friday and Saturday). The running theme through the week is that the joy of the Resurrection never ends.


Great Sunday of Resurrection
Philippians 2:1-11; Matthew 28:1-10 (Midnight)
1 Corinthians 15:12-26; Mark 16:1-8 (Morning)

I.

O great Savior, You reconciled heaven and earth,
shedding Your own blood on the wood of the cross.
Through Your rising You brought joy to heaven and to earth,
You brought peace and faithfulness where there was none.
Make Your faithful, O Lord, rejoice always in Your peace.

Your mercy is great, Lord, beyond all words;
with Your resurrection You gladden us.
Let us rejoice in the day You have made,
the dawning day that sent the night fleeing.
On this crowning jewel of all days and feasts,
grant us forgiveness of all of our sins.
Through the incense of prayer grant justice,
through the sacrifice of praise grant comfort.
Make your children radiant with true light
that we may celebrate the greatest feast,
the feast that never ends, with all Your saints.

Treasury of reconciliation,
Source of peace, send us the Spirit of peace.
By peace was Noah saved from the great flood;
by peace the dove led him to the sure land.
By peace the sea parted for Israel;
by peace they crossed over to Your freedom.
By peace the angel came to the Virgin;
by peace You gave peace through the Word made flesh.
By peace You calmed the storm upon the sea;
by peace You calmed the fear in quaking hearts.
Your peace You gave us, Your peace You left us,
a peace that surpasses understanding;
may Your church be one in the kiss of peace.
that Your justice may ever be our way
and Your peace our foundation in all things.

O Lord, Your death has put to death the oldness in us;
through Your resurrection we are clothed anew.
Let us celebrate passover with unleavened bread,
the sweet bread of sincerity and justice,
and not with the old leaven of our old deeds.


II.

Light from Light, God from God, You endured death of body,
yet You live forevermore in the Spirit.
By this day of Your great resurrection from the dead,
grant us blessings without end, hope without failing,
turn us from the death of sin that we may praise Your name.

You made us in Your image, O Lord God,
and the Son of God restores that image,
through Your compassion bringing salvation.
Source of life, You became a man for us,
descended to the dead to bring great joy;
You who raise the dead obeyed to the death,
led human captivity to freedom,
dispelled all darkness and awoke the just.
Destroying death, You brought glory and peace,
calling forth nations to sing God's praises.
Maker of life, by Your rising grant life;
Crafter of men, sculpt us in Your image,
restoring our marred features to true form.
Adorn us with the vestment of glory,
that in Your light we may see divine light.

The sharp blade entered Your side on the cross;
the baptismal waters pour forth today.
A crown of thorns You wore upon Your head;
You crown us with immortal life today.
Darkness covered the earth at Your dark death;
the world is radiant with light today.
The disciples fled, scattered with terror;
they are brought together in hope today.
Creation groaned with anticipation;
gladness covers the universe today.
The omnipotent was nailed to the cross;
by Your power the dead have life today.
All people mocked the Lord with scoff and scorn;
throughout the world the church is heard today.
Your resurrection is a fount of joy,
a joy that surpasses understanding;
may Your church shout forth the joy You have brought,
that the world may know the message of hope,
and that You have made all things new today.

For three days You were buried in the tomb for us all;
by Your resurrection You broke death's cold bonds.
Through Your grace, break the bonds of sin that enslave our souls.
Invest us with immortality and light,
that we Your children may give You glory forever.