Update

Sorry once again that things have sort of ground to a halt out here in cyberspace. We've had several major trips: in particular our ten day long spring break and an even more recent excursion to Venice, Florence and Assisi, so I'm both recouping from those and cooperating with my professors' need to catch up on all the work we haven't done so far. To boot, I'm sick. Not much, but there's an important history paper due in two days and to my chagrin I've only written three well-edited paragraphs of the thing.

Anyway, more later on all the brilliant things that happened, and on a few of the not so brilliant misadventures of spring break. For now, I return immediately to study in hopes that it will finally be effective despite a general fogginess currently pervading my brain. (This last sentence could possibly be offensive to Gilbert Ryle, the under-publicized but incredibly perceptive 20th century philosophy whose work we're now studying in philosophy.)

Ireland

We're here in Ireland and having a marvelous time. The center here has computers, so I'm writing from one of those. We spent almost all yesterday wandering around Dublin and seeing some of the more well known sites, such as the James Joyce and Molly Malone statues, the Oscar Wilde House, the now-protestant Christ Church (built in 1038) and St. Patricks (built around 1100), Dublin castle, St. Stephen's Green, O'Connell St., and a few other things. The city is absolutely charming, especially compared to the sketchiness of Rome - very clean (street cleaners everywhere), quite colorful, and filled with lovely brick architecture and brightly painted doors. We ate at a bakery for lunch, where they made us sandwiches and tea (at long last, tea again!), and everyone was very friendly.

At the center where we're staying (perhaps a half-hour bus ride outside of Dublin), everyone is also extraordinarily friendly, as is usual in such places, and even more talkative. Mary's friend, Noreen, came all the way across the island from Galway to welcome us for the day, and we talked to her about the various sites and history of the places we were considering a visit too. This house here is gigantic: it rooms about 70 people in various corners.It's ancient and cracked in places, but the chapel is lovely and made with lots of green marble, the breakfasts (which Meg, Chelsea, and I helped prepare this morning) are delicious, and as I've said already, the friendliness is like nothing I've seen before.

The general plan for today was to catch a bus down to Glendalough to see the ancient monasteries there, but as it turned out, we got back to Dublin too late to catch the latest bus. So instead we went to Enniskerry, a tiny town rather near Glendalough and the Wicklow mountains, and headed for the famous Powerscourt Waterfall there. The guy at the bus stop in Dublin said it was a bit of a walk from the stop in Enniskerry to the waterfall. It ended up being about 5 miles out, so we walked all told, well over 10 miles total today. It was a lovely walk through some very green sheep country, and despite the fact that the road was exceedingly narrow and had no shoulder, we finished the journey in no more than six pieces.

The day ended uneventfully in a pub, where two of us ate some very delicious Irish lamb stew with Guinness bread, and others had either chowder or lamb-and-vegetable pie.

The Church of St. Nicholas at Bari

The iconography at this church was occasionally rather unusual. One example is this sculpture of two oxen on either side of the church's main door as if they were dragging the church along behind them, just as two real oxen had transported St. Nicholas' relics to Bari in the first place.

The Problem with Learning

At several points throughout the Platonic dialogues, the “learners paradox,” also known as “Meno's paradox,” is raised as the foremost problem any epistemological investigation must face. “How,” it queries, is learning possible if one does not know to begin with what one must learn?” (Meno, 80d). Whatever solutions have been offered since Plato's time, and whatever their merits, the paradox remains in the background of any discussion of how we acquire knowledge. Indeed, one might even say that the paradox does not merely present a problem in its own right, but rather in its own way expresses the most fundamental problem that all investigation of this sort faces: how is it possible for us to come to know the world in the face of the chasm that exists between our sensory experience and our knowledge? According to the paradox, we do not know reality, yet somehow seem to be capable of coming to know it; how can our sensory experience be any help at all to us in this endeavor if we do not already know what we seek? Unlike later philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, do not try to solve this problem by denying our ability to come to know reality: rather, they affirm despite all odds that there is a reality which exists independently of us which we can somehow come to know. Thus, if the learner's paradox really is as fundamental and problematic as it seems, judgment of either philosopher's epistemology will at some point find it necessary to examine how well they provide an answer to this puzzle.

The model for acquisition of knowledge implicit in Plato's Phaedo is in certain respects remarkably similar to Aristotle's. The discussion midway through the dialogue of the “Theory of Recollection” assumes, just as Aristotle does, that knowledge of the reality of things is reached through sensory experience of particulars through which one is able to abstract universal truths. “Surely,” Socrates remarks, “this conception of ours derives from seeing or touching or some other sense perception, and cannot come into our mind in any other way” (Phaedo, 75a). Likewise Aristotle observes that men “by nature desire to know” and thus take “delight. . .in [their] senses” which allow them to acquire knowledge (Metaphysics, I,1).

Beyond this core similarity, however, there are many obvious discrepancies between the arguments, most notably the language of recollection present in Plato but absent in Aristotle. For Socrates, it is important that his epistemology retain this language, at least in the Phaedo, because his argument is in the first place trying to prove the immortality of the soul. Thus one central motivation for using this language turns out to be incidental to Plato's actual view of the soul's learning process. But there nonetheless must be more compelling reasons to preserve this manner of speaking, as it is a common thread of multiple dialogues (Phaedo, Meno, and Phaedrus, for example), becoming, at least apparently, characteristic of Plato's philosophy. This more compelling reason is his need to answer the learner's paradox. According to a literal reading of the texts, Plato's solution to this conundrum is to deny that there is anything at all that we do not know. “There is nothing” Socrates claims, “that [the soul] has not learned”; all knowledge is present in the soul by virtue of its long experience and many reincarnations (Meno, 81c). Our seeming ignorance on earth is merely the result of our immortal soul's descent into a body, a material object which so muddles and confuses it that it forgets all its certain knowledge at birth. The solution to the paradox is in essence then, a claim that we both know and do not know everything we will experience. As a soul alone we know the forms of all things, but as a human being, we must struggle through possibly misleading sensory experience to “recall” that which we have now forgotten.

This solution is unthinkable for Aristotle. His hylomorphic view of the human person is central in his philosophy, and the belief that the soul is the form of the body makes recollection from a pre-corporeal existence is impossible. At a time when there was no body, there could have been no soul existing separately and possessing knowledge in its own right as a substance independent of the body. However, if Aristotle must reject Plato's solution, his theory of learning is faced afresh with the problem of the paradox. Nonetheless, we have examined Plato's solution only in a literal sense thus far. As it will turn out, there is a way of interpreting Plato's epistemology which brings it even closer to Aristotle's, and this reconciliation may perhaps prove useful in directing our approach to determining whether Aristotle's philosophy can present a viable solution to the learner's paradox.

Plato's literal solution relies exclusively upon the language of recollection, yet evidence from Phaedrus points to another possible interpretation of how we can understand recollection to begin with. Though he uses the image of a person remembering what he has known in a pre-corporeal state in both Meno and Phaedo to clarify his point, in Phaedrus Plato presents the object of “recollection” as “the Idea, a unity gathered together by reason” (Phaedrus, 249c). In other words, recollection perhaps is not so much remembering as the ability to recognize a thing according to its place in the universal sum of knowledge by means of the logical apparatus and capacity to recognize truth which are in man by nature. Phrased this way, in admittedly non-Platonic language, the position reveals its similarity to Aristotle's. Aristotle understands the mind as the sum of all knowledge, a concept remarkably similar to Plato's “unity gathered together by reason”. He even goes so far as to call it “the place of forms”, the forms being both for him and for Plato, the truly knowable aspect of a being (De Anima, III,4). The mind is, moreover, the single aspect of the soul which lives on after death, a point which recalls Plato's assertion that the soul, the proper knower of all things, is immortal (De Anima, II,2). Thus the two philosophers agree that the soul is the true location of all knowledge and that the soul understood in this sense is immortal: Aristotle's epistemology does not differ from Plato's in these respects, at least. Though this has taken us a long way towards reconciling the two epistemologies however, it turns out that it does not really solve our initial problem. In order to effect this reconciliation, I had to employ essentially Aristotelean language to explain Plato's position. Only when the language of potentiality and actuality is introduced and applied to this statement does it begin to sound like the full solution Aristotle's ideas can lead us to.

Aristotle's introduction to Western thought of the distinction between actuality and potentiality is the single major difference between the two philosophers that I will address here. Meno's paradox presupposes that we can be in only two states with respect to our knowledge of a given thing: one of positive knowledge or one of complete ignorance and unfamiliarity. Plato points towards Aristotle's solution by presenting a sort of “third manner” of knowing: knowing perfectly in the soul while the human person as a whole knows imperfectly but can recollect the knowledge of the soul given sufficient help. Applied to the learner's paradox, Aristotle's theory of knowledge takes the idea of a “third way” even further. All human beings, he says, are fully capable of knowing all truth. That is, we by nature are innately receptive of truth: we have the intrinsic ability to receive truth when presented with it, even if not previously knowing it in action. Actual knowledge may be absent, but it is absent in such a way that when presented with it, we are able to tell what it is and where it belongs. This is a round about way of expressing the idea that all knowledge of truth “is present”—though such language is inadequate to express the nature of potentiality—potentially in our souls. Acquisition of knowledge is simply actualization of this potential.

Thus, we see that Plato can be read as pointing towards a theory of knowledge that Aristotle later develops by introducing the distinction between actuality and potentiality. Though we cannot accept Plato's original model of the soul as a separate, all-knowing entity whose knowledge we remember over the course of a muddled lifetime if, like Aristotle, we want to preserve the idea that the soul is the form of the body, the alternate interpretation of Plato hints at Aristotle's resolution of this difficulty by altering our understanding of what recollection consists of. Knowledge is in some sense “in” the mind for Aristotle as well as for Plato. The literal answer to the learner's paradox—that we know all things anyway because our soul has already encountered them—must be discarded in light of the Aristotelean understanding of the human person. However, in establishing the language of potentiality and actuality, Aristotle in turn can provide a resolution to the problem of how to gain knowledge by expressing our potential to receive knowledge as our means of “knowing” what we don't know, and therefore as the grounds for its eventual drawing out and actualization.

Greece

Greece was marvelous. This is the verdict that will unabashedly color the rest of my accounts of the ten day trip our class took to the area of the Gulf of Corinth.

We took two buses down the Italian peninsula to the coastal city of Bari, where we made a brief stop at the church of St. Nicholas, which contains his relics and a Russian Orthodox chapel donated to that Church by John Paul II. Not much later, we were on a gigantic ferry heading over to the Greek port of Patras.

As it happened, we hit the stormiest weather on the way that any UD class has seen within the memory of the current faculty. This made the ride very amusing and interesting - for the about 10% of the group who didn't get violently ill. I spent lots of time out on deck, a little inside reading, and felt fine. There were two enormous water spouts that passed within a mile of the ship, and that was pretty entertaining to see. It's also very amusing to stand out on deck and let yourself fall forward into the wind: generally, it's strong enough to entirely support you.

We stayed overnight onboard and didn't land until 2:30 p.m. because of some delays due to the storm. More bus rides followed until we finally made it to Olympia, ancient site of (you'll never guess...) the Olympic games. The hotel was nice, the food was good (probably the most Greek that we'd get over the course of the trip).

Our next day was devoted to exploring the museum and archaeological site just on the outskirts of the rather shabby and obviously not wealthy town. Olympia had been a major pilgrimage site in ancient Greece, and its Temple to Zeus was one of the largest in the ancient world. There would have been bath complexes, multiple temples, treasuries, etc. - the games had a religious origin, and preserved this connotation far into the later years of ancient history. In early Christian times, the site was combined with a Christian shrine, and remained something of a pilgrimage site until an earthquake leveled everything in the time of the late Roman empire. The stadium is still extant, and the best part of the trip was when we got to race three times there: one men's race, one women's and one mixed relay.

The prettiness of the area completely validated our decision to come in the spring. There were daisies, bright red wild poppies, and some type of unfamiliar purple flower all through the ruins. Also, I ought to observe that olive trees are remarkably pretty and are everywhere.

Cucumber Melon

I always get a kick out of the general tenor of people's reactions when I touch on anything we study here at UD. Ancient literary classics, Euclid, Aristotle, Church Fathers. . .'how boring!' Well, not really. It doesn't take an excessive amount of natural astuteness, really not even a grand degree of nerdiness, to begin to find these texts vastly amusing.

You perhaps don't believe me. Perhaps you mutter to yourself various epithets describing me as an excessive nerd. Perhaps you think my testimony is unreliable.

Read this.

Just for a bit of background, this is an excerpt from the writings of St. Irenaeus' massive work Against Heresies. He's attacking the absurdity of the Gnostic myths explaining the creation of the world, and in so doing uses this hilarious example.

Iu, Iu! Pheu, Pheu!— for well may we utter these tragic exclamations at such a pitch of audacity in the coining of names as he has displayed without a blush, in devising a nomenclature for his system of falsehood. For when he declares: There is a certain Proarche before all things, surpassing all thought, whom I call Monotes; and again, with this Monotes there co-exists a power which I also call Henotes,— it is most manifest that he confesses the things which have been said to be his own invention, and that he himself has given names to his scheme of things, which had never been previously suggested by any other. It is manifest also, that he himself is the one who has had sufficient audacity to coin these names; so that, unless he had appeared in the world, the truth would still have been destitute of a name. But, in that case, nothing hinders any other, in dealing with the same subject, to affix names after such a fashion as the following: There is a certain Proarche, royal, surpassing all thought, a power existing before every other substance, and extended into space in every direction. But along with it there exists a power which I term a Gourd; and along with this Gourd there exists a power which again I term Utter-Emptiness. This Gourd and Emptiness, since they are one, produced (and yet did not simply produce, so as to be apart from themselves) a fruit, everywhere visible, eatable, and delicious, which fruit-language calls a Cucumber. Along with this Cucumber exists a power of the same essence, which again I call a Melon. These powers, the Gourd, Utter-Emptiness, the Cucumber, and the Melon, brought forth the remaining multitude of the delirious melons of Valentinus. For if it is fitting that that language which is used respecting the universe be transformed to the primary Tetrad, and if any one may assign names at his pleasure, who shall prevent us from adopting these names, as being much more credible [than the others], as well as in general use, and understood by all?

Cinque Terre, part II

The morning after our arrival, one of my friends and I got up at 5:00 am to see how things looked at about that time. We walked around in some rather icy wind for about 2 hours until the sun came up and the rest of our group was ready to head out for the day, but the area was gorgeous at that time: everything was quiet except for the sea and the wind, the moon was high over the bay, and the harbor with all its moored boats was lit only by two yellow lamps.

These pictures give a general idea of how things looked as the sun came up. I know the last one is crooked.









Anyway, early in the day we went shopping for food. There were three small grocery stores on the street which had their produce displayed out in front, and there was a fish truck on the side of the same street. We bought foccaccia and brie for lunch, and then for dinner ended up with two fresh fish (scales and everything still on them), several tomatoes, butter, a clove of garlic, pasta, zucchini, more bread and cheese, a bottle of wine, and a few other things perhaps. It was a bit tricky buying exactly enough food to use up in one night, which explains why we used butter instead of a huge jug of olive oil.

We left all that in the kitchen of the hostel, bought some tickets to get into the national park area, and went hiking. The hike was breathtaking. It still is, presumably, but our weather made it particularly nice. It basically consists of a walk (not much of a hike at all to be honest - it's too flat and easy) along the very edge of the cliffs of Cinque Terre, and connects all the towns. Unfortunately, only one part of the path was open at this time, because it was off-season, and rockslides had completely knocked the path off the cliff face in most of the rest of the park (which, to those who were wondering, is one of the reasons we couldn't have jumped the fence and walked back anyway, even had we been able to get unanimous assent to such an activity). We finished the walk and ate lunch on the way (recall the lovely bread and brie - a half kilo for only eight euro!). In the neighboring town we just strolled around the paths through the terraced areas and explored a bit before my foot began to get sore and we turned back. (Ah yes, that... for the record, I sprained my ankle playing capture the flag about a month ago: it's still sore, but I can walk on it no problem now. Then it was only a week after it happened, and my foot was still about 1 and a half times its normal size.)

We spent the rest of the afternoon reading the Oresteian trilogy and studying for a Theology test on the beach at Riomaggiore, and after watching the sunset (absolutely spectacular in itself; see below), we made dinner.

Ahhh, dinner. It was marvelous, despite the lack of basil or oregano for the sauce. We used garlic and some of the rosemary that we picked (it's used as groundcover here: it grows everywhere!) along with the tomatoes and zucchini to make a pasta sauce. The one guy who came with us (the brother of one of my roommates) scaled and cooked the fish, and other people watched the pasta. Then we roasted some garlic and mixed it with melted butter, spread it over the bread, and toasted it in the oven to get garlic bread. Incredibly simple and delicious.

Cinque Terre

So here's the promised but long denied scoop on Cinque Terre.

Hands down it's a great place to go. Especially if, like my group, you go when it's not the height of tourist season. Cinque Terre is a series of five tiny towns sandwiched among mountains on the shore of the Mediterranean. Or to be more accurate, the Tyrrhenian sea. It's pretty gorgeous naturally, which is one of the reasons the area is now a national park. And its national park status is in turn much of the reason that it's a huge tourist attraction. Despite that, the national park status has been very nice in the sense that the towns in the area are preserved in a remarkably traditional manner. They're tiny and crowded and brightly colored, with the surrounding hillsides covered from the summit to the place where the buildings stop climbing the hill completely terraced for olive trees and vineyards. Of course, the town itself is designed to be easily accessible to English-speaking tourists, but there wasn't a touristy feel to the place so early in the off-season, and everyone was very friendly.

My friends and I stayed in a tiny hostel tucked away in a narrow street near the harbor in the town of Riomaggiore. Actually, we had a rather amusing time getting there. We took a train from Rome to the north, and then switched trains with the help of an Italian lady whom we got to know rather well on the four hour ride, despite the fact that she knew no English whatsoever and we hardly any Italian (she had been in Rome to see the Pope and was delighted to hear that we were Catholic and wanted to see the Pope too). We successfully boarded the train to Riomaggiore, but when it stopped at that station, it stopped behind the platform for our car - we were still in the tunnel in the hillside and couldn't get out. We explained this to the next conductor, who let us off at the next stop, five towns up the coast. All well and good, but there were only three options for getting back: breaking into the national park area and hiking, swimming the whole way, or taking a returning train.

It's hard to buy return train tickets when the machine is out of order and the ticket booth worker has decided to skip out for the night.

Not knowing what to do, we made a dash for the next train which was pulling up at the opposite platform just then. It was probably quite a sight, all seven of us running madly towards the head of the train (not getting on the thing; we didn't want to be fined for not having tickets!) lugging backpacks and schoolbooks. However, there wasn't anyone there to see it but the conductor, who got out at that point to check the platform and sound his very official conductor's whistle.

We collared him, and tried to explain our situation, but he kept motioning us to get on the train; "We don't have tickets, no tickets" we kept explaining. He responded "Tre stop, Riomaggiore".

You should know at this point that rules in Italy are by no means hard and fast laws. Their implementation is almost always at the discretion of the worker you encounter that day. So this conductor, apparently, decided that tickets didn't really matter for seven desperate American students who needed a ride back on his nearly empty train.

However, we didn't hear him quite right, and some of us thought he said "one stop". So at the next stop, the wrong one, we all piled off, very quickly, to avoid being stuck on the train again like at Riomaggiore the first time. The conductor came rushing out of his car. "No NO! Due stops!!" TWO stops! He rather bellowed it, and we sheepishly climbed back on board.

When we finally got off at Riomaggiore, he came out of his compartment again, beaming at us and spreading his arms wide. "This is Riomaggiore!" he announced.

And so it was. Many more interesting things happened before the night was over. We got slightly lost looking for the office to our hostel, but as there are only two major streets in town, this was easily cleared up. At the office, we found a letter and a key waiting for us. The former gave us detailed and cryptic directions to our hostel, which was located in a totally different part of town. Rather like one of those kids' treasure hunts, you know.

Anyway, the hostel was very nice, though, as I said, very tiny. It "fit" 11 people into a space where US fire codes might have allowed three. But it was very clean, nicely decorated, had two bathrooms (one of which was accessed by going outside, down some steep stairs, and into a closet underneath the main doorstep), and had a kitchen. This last will figure prominently in the next installment of this tale.

For now I must sleep.

Aeschylus

Aeschylus - what a name! Apparently, it's pronounced "ehss-kih-lus", so I've learned something new about the guy so far at any rate. In high school I recall, I didn't even bother trying to pronounce it.

His Oresteian Trilogy is, of course, world famous by now. It was world famous back in his day too, but at that time the "world" consisted of the Mediterranean shoreline, so I think we can say this is a bit of a step up for this particular Greek playwright.

All joshing aside, the plays are marvelous. And yes, I tend to have a similarly enthusiastic response to nearly all the literature I read (with the very definite exception of Hemingway and a few others). Nonetheless, I am not alone in this reaction, although perhaps the generally nerdy - in the best of senses - population of UD is no more reliable a gauge for some purposes than I am.

The plot draws heavily upon traditional Greek mythology, so I'll basically recount the story as it's told there. We open in the play with the return of the Mycenaean king, Agamemnon, to his home after the Trojan War. He's coming back to a house and family - the "House of Atreus", as its called - which has been cursed for several generations now. The family patriarchs have a habit of committing gross violations of the natural order of things: Agamemnon's own father, Atreus, is guilty of having killed his own brother's children and tricked the poor guy into eating them (for the record, this was meant to be just revenge for the "poor guy's" affair with Atreus' wife). Agamemnon himself has the grisly record of having sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, in order to win fair winds so that he can sail to Troy, kill some Trojans, and return a conquering hero.

Anyway, as the play begins, we very soon learn that the cycle of violence and vengeance in Atreus' house is not about to disappear anytime soon. Agamemnon's wife, Clytaemestra, has been conspiring with her lover, Aegisthus (the only surviving son of Atreus' brother) to avenge the deaths of Iphegenia and Aegisthus' siblings. They succeed in their plot, but the integrity of their motives is called into question when they promptly seize power and exile Orestes, Clytaemestra's son, and begin to mistreat her daughter, Elektra.

Resenting her mother's bad behavior, Elektra, about ten years later, prays for a champion to come and avenge her father's death. The next thing we know, Orestes shows up, bearing a firm order from Apollo to kill his mother or die trying. He does, and what follows is a vastly fascinating trial which poses the Furies against the gods in a struggle to decide Orestes' fate.

There's a whole lot of complexity in the actual play itself, but the central question is "What is justice, and how do we achieve it?" The play vacillates until the final judgment (and, I would argue, offers no firm conclusion even then) between reading justice as a dark, retributive force meant to restore order to the deepest elements of the world, and seeing it as primarily obedience to the will of the gods.

There's a lot that comes from this question, but I have no space to examine any of that here, obviously. I'd be very much surprised if it doesn't come up again very soon, however. In the meantime, I must say - read this yourselves! It's pretty short, even with all three put together: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and Eumenides. Definitely worth your time.

Today was a perfectly charming day. A friend and I walked to Castel Gandolfo, the Pope's summer residence, after a hour+ long wait for a bus that never came. It was a bit of a hike - about an hour uphill - especially considering that both of us had injured feet (I sprained my ankle Thursday night). But the town and the view at the top was definitely worth it. Castel Gandolfo itself is a lovely town, with a single small piazza surrounded by the Pope's residence on one end, a church on another side, and a bunch of small shops and a very nice cafe on the other. There are a couple of very small and very quiet streets (although they're probably swarmed during tourist season) running parallel to the rim of the lake crater. Oh yes, there's a lake here too. This has formed in the neighboring craters of two extinct volcanoes, in the middle of the Alban Hills - it's called Lake Albano - and thus the area just around the lake is ridge with a very steep grade leading down to the lake.



On the walk up

Castel Gondolfo

View of Lake Albano from the ridge

Today, after buying some delicious, hot chocolate (cioccolata calda), extremely thick, almost like melted chocolate bars, and only barely sweetened, we studied in the back of the cafe for several hours, talking about the Oresteian Trilogy, the nature and relationship of tragedy and comedy, and the . . . you guessed it . . . the meaning of life (ha!). It was great. Then we hiked down a steep, winding path nearly till we got to the lake itself, before having to get back up to the Church at the piazza for Mass.



The Cafe on the piazza

Oh, on another note, unrelated to all this Castel Gandolfo stuff, I have to mention something I learned yesterday. Early in the morning, a group of us got up to go to daily Mass at St. Peter's. Afterwards, Msgr. Fucianaro, our campus chaplain, showed us around a bit. Among other nifty things, he pointed out this enormous circular bit of porphyry inlaid in the floor. Porphyry is one of the hardest stones in existence, and you could see how the marble around it had worn down over the years while it remained unaffected. Also, there's no more porphyry left unused in the world, apparently. Anyway, this particular bit of porphyry is the very stone on which Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD! Can you believe it?

Pompeii

Having stayed the night in the “small” (by some standards) town of Stabiae, the place where the Roman Admiral Pliny the Elder died after inhaling poisonous fumes from the looming Vesuvius, we turned our attention to Pompeii on Saturday. There is, remarkably enough, a modern town of Pompei (the modern version drops the extra “i”) built practically on top of the ancient one. The volcano, and the fact that it's by now quite overdue for another eruption, doesn't seem to bother them.

The ancient version everyone knows about was incredible. It's much larger than I had anticipated – nearly all of it has been excavated by now, and so the area is about the size of a large but densely populated city. When I say large, I mean there were probably about 25,000-50,000 inhabitants, which isn't bad at all, especially if you're living in the ancient world, where a city of over a million would have been gargantuan. (Apparently, cities in the million+ population range are pretty common nowadays. Or so they tell me. They still seem anomalous.)

There are some cordoned off areas at the site, but one of the best aspects of it is the fact that for the most part you can wander through the streets and into houses and shops at will. Varying states of preservation can be found, as you might imagine. Some places look just like conventional ruins – you know, the type that to an untrained eye looks like a rather boring pile of rock. Others were magnificently preserved: their first floor-level roofs intact, their gardens flourishing with plants that would have been here in 79 AD, fountains bubbling, and wall paintings and mosaics very much intact.

It's remarkable to picture the ancient world in color, and Pompeii helps one do that. When you consider that these oh-so-aesthetically pleasing statues, now pristine and white, were once rather garishly painted, it rather alters your immensely high opinion of their taste. None of that is to say that the sculpture isn't great. And the murals on the walls and the mosaics on the floors would all have been even brighter than they currently are. But the paintings are very nice in themselves. To those of us retaining an image of a pure, clean, white ancient city, however, the reality would be rather startling, I should think.

Naples Museum

So by now, I'm long overdue in giving an account of our class trip this past weekend to the southern Italy region of Campania. We took buses down to the notorious city of Naples on Friday for a tour of the Naples Archaeological Museum led by our Art and Architecture teacher, Dr. Flusche. The museum was great - one of the best archaeological collections in the world, with hundreds of mosaics, statues and other artifacts from the ancient cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The museum itself is a palace that once belonged to the Spanish Bourbon family, who initiated excavations at Pompeii. Much of the collection was once theirs, while another significant portion was once the property of the Farnese family, who were responsible for digging up lots of interesting artifacts at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome.

In the olden days, archaeology was about the equivalent of the modern hobby which involves running a metal detector over a beach in hopes of finding a lost pirate stash. (The Bourbons and Farneses were more successful than your average modern treasure hunter.) Due to the unscientific attitudes of the searchers, a good many of the sites they found so fascinating are now in less perfect condition than many modern archaeologists might hope. Nonetheless, it was rather nice of them to leave us museums full of the stuff, and I rather wonder if the artifacts would have been nearly so well preserved if it had lain in the ground being buffeted by proximate building projects for another few hundred years.

Here are some photos from the Museum now. I'll have to ramble on about Pompeii a bit later, since I want to get up at 4:30 to go to Mass at St. Peter's tomorrow morning.




The Farnese Bull, a very famous sculpture





Farnese Hercules - This was supposed to be a rather humorous statue, since you've got a picture of Hercules, the strongest man to ever live, looking quite wiped out. Doubly humorous was the fact that it stood at the doorway of the workout room at the Baths of Caracalla.




A piece of the Alexander mosaic, found at Pompeii. The mosaic as a whole, which I didn't get a good picture of, depicts Alexander defeating the Persians.





Athena! Best goddess ever!




Now, this was my favorite.

Marino Schools

So, today was my first day on what is known as the "Marino Schools Volunteer Project". Essentially this program is set up to bring University of Dallas students into contact with fifth grade kids from the schools in a neighboring town. The idea is for us to try to teach them some English through total immersion...obviously this "total immersion" stipulation encourages enrollment, considering that perhaps 5 to 10 kids on campus speak Italian with any real aptitude.

The experience today was fantastic. A group of about 20 students (which is nearly a quarter of our campus population) went to Marino and the bus dropped us off in three different groups at three different schools. Before it was jolly well possible to take a deep breath, I was in charge of five Italian ten-year-olds. They were marvelous. A bit shy at first, but by the time we got onto the topic of jumping out of airplanes with parachutes and being buried in volcanoes and playing tic-tac-toe, they were shouting and laughing and talking volubly in Italian with a degree of loquacity only younger children possess.

By the time we were ready to leave, several of the boys were jumping up and down, asking us to come back soon and so forth. And that we will be within a week.

Greek Art and the Pursuit of the Ideal

In both artistic and philosophical endeavors, as well as their daily activities, the ancient Greeks displayed a preoccupation with rational living and the pursuit of ideals. These spirits of rationalism and idealism ingrained in the culture found a natural corollary in Greek humanism, and surviving examples of Greek architecture and sculpture highlight the cultural search to reflect these ideals in a manner accessible to the senses.

The Parthenon, an example of Greek architecture at its pinnacle, shows us how the Athenians of the fifth century BC sought through their temples to bring order to the chaos of space. Their careful attention to symmetry and proportion, which went so far as to cause them to make extensive, yet infinitesimal visual compensations (for example, knowing that perfectly straight columns, when built very large, would appear bowed to the human eye, they designed these columns to bow slightly outward naturally so that to observers they would appear straight) points to their faith in mathematical reason to effect the concretization of their ideal.

In the realm of sculpture we have the Doryphorus. This statue of a young spear-bearer is the work of the sculptor Polykleitos, who is also known to have authored a treatise on aesthetics called his “Kanon.” Breaking down the human body into segments, he gave proportional measurements for each one, which when put together would, he believed, exemplify the ideal human form. As is the case with the Parthenon, the Doryphorus and Polykleitos' other sculptures are based on very definite mathematical proportions which seek to display the subjects in their most ordered forms. Again, this is a concrete instance of human reason seeking the ideal.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Greek attitude towards art is the humanism it displays. To posit the reality of ideals is one thing, an exercise common to many cultures; to say that such ideals can be discerned through the efforts of human reason is another. Such a belief requires them to rank human ability to recognize the aesthetic ideal when presented with it very high. Greek art, as seen in the Parthenon and the Doryphorus, reveals that the Greeks not only believed in a theoretical perfection of things encountered in day-to-day life, but that they firmly believe that this ideal can be reached towards and ultimately recognized by the workings of human reason.



The Parthenon



Doryphorus of Polykleitos

Rome on Sunday

These were pretty much all taken at or around Saint John Lateran.