[Mb-civic] Lessons from a fallen empire - James Carroll - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Lessons from a fallen empire

By James Carroll  |  September 26, 2005

ROME
TO BE IN Rome is to stand, as it were, before a canyon wall on which the 
tell-tale marks were made by human hands instead of wind, sun, and rain. 
The primordial world lives in the ruined Forum, the 
stripped-to-the-brick facades of temples and theaters, the surviving 
arches of long-gone aqueducts and imperial palaces.

The legacy of that civilization is a structure of thinking that informs 
the very words on this page, which attempt to do for ideas what 
lightning rods do for electricity in the sky. Polarities between 
republic and empire, beauty and decay, order and tyranny, expression and 
silence -- these are the tensions which found balance in ancient Rome 
and uphold still the pillar of culture.

In the post-Constantinian Rome of Christianity, holiness found its match 
in power, and the match is not over. Its archaeology is in the street. 
Basilicas began as palaces and became cathedrals without dropping an 
arch. Emperors became popes and, as they say here, vice versa. The 
monumental tombs make the point. Yet the message of love found its way 
into stone as well. Try dismissing belief in Rome's new gospel in the 
presence of Bernini's ''Saint Teresa in Ecstasy." Nor has any critic of 
religion ever surpassed the humanist fervor of Michelangelo's ''Last 
Judgment" -- in the stern presence of which the newest pope was chosen.

In Rome, that is, the corruptions of all that is meant by ''church" are 
obvious. But the grace undefeated by those corruptions is magnificent, 
too. Indeed, what is the Renaissance but the moment when corruption 
itself became the occasion of grace, when the fully human emerged at 
last from the translucent shell of the will to be divine? The world we 
know and love came next.

Rome may be the ultimate display of memory, but it is also the world 
capital of style. Sleek-suited men, supremely composed women, designer 
cars, the burnished leather of shoes and bags, the front edge of 
personal invention -- modernity congratulates itself here. The future is 
as palpable in the people as the past is in the stone. Because the 
contrast between the present and what precedes it is so dramatic, every 
trip to Rome requires a reassessment of impression. But such 
reassessment is precisely the endless work of history. The past is not 
dead, as Faulkner said; it isn't even past. Memory, therefore, is more 
about today than yesterday, which is why we visit the so-called foreign 
country of the past every chance we get.

School children learn to think this way by reading Caesar, and then, 
perhaps, by learning of Luther. Across millennia, the lesson is 
absolute. The educational value of glorious Rome is that it fell, and 
fell again. And each time that happened, out from the ruins crawled the 
people who had borne the full weight of the imperial structure -- the 
ones who had actually paved the famous roads, and quarried the infinite 
supply of marble, and heaped coals on the fires that cut the chill of 
palace floors; the ones who had faced the inquisitors, questioned 
orthodoxy, chosen conscience over obedience.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/09/26/lessons_from_a_fallen_empire/
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