ROME, FLORENCE, AND AN INCARNATIONAL FAITH
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
Yes, I know: It's been a while--six weeks now--since the last E-Letter was sent out. Chalk it up to the Catholic Answers pilgrimage and cruise: intensive preparation, then time abroad, and time convalescing from the trip (I returned to the States with a head cold that debilitated me for a week).
Being in Rome and the eastern Mediterranean turned my mind toward things European--thus the following reflections, which, while not directly on apologetics, have an apologetical angle.
EUROPE AND THE FAITH
Ours is an incarnational religion. It is not simply a collection of propositions, nor is it a religion (such as Islam) that posits a God so distant from mankind that he takes no real interest in us and is disinclined to engage in any real converse with us. Christianity is about a personal God who humbled himself to become man, to become one with us.
He did so at a particular time and in a particular place. The time was "the fullness of time" and occurred almost exactly twenty centuries ago. The place was an arid place not unlike arid places near which I live.
Although we don't know the exact date of the Incarnation, it had an exact date. Although, for the most part, we don't know exactly where our Lord placed his feet, we can be sure that we can walk very near where he walked and possibly, in a few places, on the very same flagstones.
The incarnational aspects of our religion did not end at the Ascension because Christianity did not end there. Christianity continued--and continues--through the Church that Christ established.
The Church, over the centuries, has been a tangible, living thing made up of tangible, living people who have lived at certain times and certain places. The Church began where our Lord walked but grew chiefly elsewhere. It came to maturity in Europe, which is why Hilaire Belloc was able to write that "Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe."
He did not mean, of course, that the faith did not extend outside of Europe or that non-European contributions to the faith were trivial. But the extension of the faith beyond the wider Mediterranean world has been relatively recent, mainly within the last 500 years. Before that, the Church grew in a European context--and Europe grew in a Christian context.
This means you can't understand Europe apart from the Church, and you can't understand the Church apart from Europe.
HOMEWORK
When I have an opportunity to visit a place far from home, whether it is in my own or a neighboring state or in a foreign country, I prefer not to show up ignorant of the place. The more homework I do beforehand, the more I get out of the trip.
This applies even to my backpacking trips. Most of them take place in the High Sierra or in the Grand Canyon (where I hike when it is too cold to hike in the High Sierra). I always try to read a book about the one or the other before hitting the trail. It may be a book on the pines and firs of the Sierra or on the geology of the Grand Canyon, or it may be about John Muir's adventures climbing "fourteeners" or John Wesley Powell's adventures down the Colorado River. If I fail to get through a new book before hoisting my pack, I feel a bit guilty, as though I've squandered my time.
So it is with travel overseas. I don't like to find myself in another country without having read up on its history and culture and without having made a stab at acquiring some of its language. I'm not always successful in this. One of the stops on our cruise was Dubrovnik. I tried to apply myself to the study of Croatian but did not get very far in the weeks prior to leaving home. I knew only enough to give shopkeepers the erroneous impression that I could carry on an intelligent conversation.
Later in the year I will have occasion to spend time in Florence, and so I have been reading up on the city. I am not waiting until the last minute, as I did with Dubrovnik. I have been to Florence already, but this time I want to make a more concerted effort to know it before showing up at the apartment I will be renting.
A few days ago I finished reading R.W.B. Lewis's "The City of Florence," written in 1995. Lewis, who taught at Yale and died in 2002, and his wife paid frequent long visits to Florence over fifty years. The first part of the book is a historical, architectural, and artistic look at Florence. The second part is mainly about where the Lewises resided (stays, usually of several months, in a variety of apartments), how they got on, where they shopped and ate, and whom they met. While well written, the book does not quite hang together, since its two parts are disparate; the one book really ought to have been fleshed out into two.
Be that as it may, Lewis has made me think of Florence in relation to Rome, which was where we spent the first several days of the Catholic Answers pilgrimage and cruise. When a Catholic thinks of going to Europe, he thinks first of visiting "headquarters." There is a temptation to think of Rome in purely Catholic terms, and that is a mistake.
For my part, as a tour leader in Rome, I chose to emphasize not the Christian but the ancient Roman aspects of the city because I wanted those in my charge to understand that Christianity was not planted in a barren field but in a field already cultivated.
I don't think you can understand the history of the Church in Rome unless you understand the pre-Christian history of Rome. Thus, as I led a group from the Arch of Constantine through the Roman Forum and up to the Capitoline Hill, I explained how Rome was when Christianity first came to be planted there.
Florence (the name comes from the Latin for "flower") began as an outpost of ancient Rome. As Christian Rome declined after the fall of the Empire, Florence prospered. At one point it was the second most populous city in Europe, after Paris. Its chief wealth was from the wool trade.
Despite seemingly interminable feuds and warfare, the city became Italy's cultural center, and it remains the country's artistic center even today. Most of that art is strictly Christian, so on that account alone Florence remains important. (You can learn much of the faith simply by studying Lorenzo Ghiberti's bronze panels on the baptistery doors.)
APOLOGETICS BUT NOT APOLOGETICS ALONE
By necessity, for many years my studies were circumscribed. I had to focus on apologetics and on theology in general, at least until I felt I had achieved a level of proficiency that warranted my having gone into this work full time. Eventually I had the liberty to go back to other areas of interest. In recent years most of the books I have read have fallen into disciplines other than religion: history, art, culture, language, science, architecture, and so on.
I think this has helped rather than hindered my religious understandings. Just as all work and no play can make Jack a dull boy, so all apologetics and no other studies can make him a skewed apologist. I know of apologists, Catholic and non-Catholic, who seem to spend all their time figuring out how to "win" apologetic debates. Their focus is so narrow that their apologetics ends up dissociated from real life.
It might do them good, I think, to pay a visit to Florence or Rome--or even to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, which happens to be where I am hiking as you read this.
p.s., If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' discussion forums at
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