by Timothy Egan
Myths help us understand our experience, give shape to shapeless events, order to our fears and desires, narrative to chaos. The huge step that Homo sapiens took away from Neanderthals in the Cognitive Revolution of 70,000 years ago was made possible by the ability of our species to collectively imagine things, as Yuval Noah Harari argues in his book on human origins. Is it wrong to pass on the fictional story of a good man risking his life to bring back the head of a slain man for a higher purpose? All religion is informed by myth, as are most cultural bonds, from Ulysses to Game of Thrones. “Mythology is not a lie,” said Joseph Campbell. “Mythology is poetry, it’s metaphysical. It has been well said that myth is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words.”
None of this makes the image of Grat walking around with the head of John the Baptist any less weird to Sophie.
“Are Catholics required to believe this stuff?” She asks this without a hint of cynicism. But again, her question is a result of my negligence as a parent, leaving our kids somewhat spiritually illiterate.
“You can take what you want from each of these saints, or take nothing at all. Italians pray to saints more than they pray to God, though you’re not supposed to worship them—that would be idolatry. It’s nice to have a supporting cast, don’t you think?”
* * *
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GLIMPSES OF AOSTA, still way down the valley, appear through a forest that gives way to orchards and homes with gardens of oversized produce. I’ve never seen squash so big outside of Alaska, and everyone has piles of them, stacked like firewood. Rows of wooden trellises hold lipstick-red tomatoes. This region is stocked with castles and clock towers as well, nary a high point without a well-tended fortress or a copse of turrets. I drink freely from little fountains that bubble up outside these residences, ignoring to my peril the non potabile signs in front of some of them. I’m sweating heavily, and can’t resist the cold mountain water. I had taped my heels, as usual, but did nothing to protect my toes. Big mistake. And when I broke in these new boots at home, I didn’t think of trying them out on a prolonged downhill hike. I feel rubbing and squishing with each step, but we’re close enough to the end that it’s not worth a medical stop. At one orchard with a view back at the fresh snow on the roof of Europe, we pause to pluck a pair of apples from a tree. Sophie pleads with me to tend to my feet, but I choose to suck it up.
After another couple of hours, I stop to take off my shoes. I’m in a lot of pain, and have trouble moving. The toes on my right foot are a throbbing mess of bubbled blisters. Why, why, why didn’t I listen to her? The best I can do is wrap them in tape and treat the skin later with antiseptic and cushions. This leaves me with one last Oscar Wildeism to carry forward at day’s end: “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.”
Near sunset, we breach Aosta’s city boundaries, the broken twenty-foot-high walls built to surround a classic Roman rectangular urban design, with forum, temple, and stadium in the middle, guard towers in the corners, four main gates. Aosta is a little mountain kingdom of 35,000 people that is Shangri-La to a pair of tired hikers, built at the confluence of two rivers. We cross the smaller of the streams and stagger over to the most prominent landmark in this 2,100-year-old town: the Arch of Augustus. It was erected in 25 BC, after Augustus had enslaved an indigenous tribe of Latin Celts, the Salassi. It’s a single arch, Corinthian columned, on a pedestal of stones moved into place by my conquered Celtic ancestors. The monument is a tribute to the man who reigned for forty years, and did more than any other Roman ruler to expand the Empire’s roads, rules, and religions. We plop ourselves down on the lawn and take in the last light on the flanks of the arch. I don’t think I will get up again. Hail, Augustus, and the city of thy name!
The emperor does not need mythic enhancement. Born in 63 BC, a great-nephew to Uncle Julius Caesar, he was a superb man of war, with a first-rate mind and a nose that could smell the slightest whiff of deadly intrigue from any of the Seven Hills of Rome. After his conquests of rivals foreign and domestic—most notably, the besting of Antony and his lover Cleopatra—he took the name Augustus the Exalted One, the first Roman emperor. He turned Rome from a republic into an empire, but he offered his subjects citizenship, even for freed slaves. He had the eighth month of the calendar named for him, following the lead of Julius, who claimed the month before. He restored the massive temple to the god Jupiter Optimus Maximus, the largest in the capital. And making use of a blend of water, quicklime, sand, and volcanic ash—concrete—to go with marble and tufa, he oversaw construction of the Eternal City. His territorial legacy would remain in some form for the next 1,500 years. He ushered in Pax Romana, the two centuries of stability, expansion, and rule over a third of the world’s inhabitants. At its peak, the Empire collected taxes from nearly 100 million people. On his deathbed in AD 14, a very old man of seventy-five by classical standards, he is said to have uttered words that served as a proper tribute: “I found a Rome of clay, I leave it to you of marble.” Postmortem, the Roman Senate declared him a god.
Augustus passed on to divine status in a year when a great empire was in ascendancy. He was unaware of a teenage boy growing up in hardscrabble Nazareth at that same time, in a carpenter’s house at the southeastern fringe of the Roman realm. Today, nobody worships a deity named Augustus, or Jupiter for that matter. But as I lay exhausted on grass beneath the Arch of Augustus, I see that boy now as a dying man nailed to a cross, holding the monument together. You can’t miss the crucifix at the gate of a town that Augustus oriented toward the deities who lived above the mountains—the gate into one of the oldest outposts of the Via Francigena. We end our day on a part of the trail where all roads now lead to Rome. But what waits at the end is something that has outlasted every empire of the last two millennia, a force that is, by design, not of this world.
It’s a trait we humans have developed over our spiritual evolution, and no small skill, to fuse one god to another, to borrow the better bits of fading mythologies and weave them into a story that fits our times. Rome’s Pantheon, built by slaves a century after the death of Augustus to honor all the gods of the Empire, stands today as it did 1,900 years ago, though now it is dedicated to “Saint Mary and the Martyrs”—the first pagan temple to be transformed into a Christian church. To throw out the old entirely would be saying our ancestors were wrong, and to realize that future generations will say the same thing about us. So we keep the best parts, and believe little lies in service of a larger truth, or so we hope.
TWENTY-FOUR
PROVING THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
On the main, cobbled street of Aosta is a residence, barely a quarter mile from the emperor’s arch, at 66 Via Sant’Anselmo—three stories of weathered beige concrete and stone, connected to other similar-sized buildings in the quiet centro storico of the old outpost of the Roman frontier. At this address in the year 1033, a boy was born into a wealthy and well-connected family. He was sent to good Benedictine schools and grew into a budding scholar of theology, language, and history. At fifteen, he had a dream in which he spoke to God, and God spoke back. He tried to join a monastery, but his parents restrained him. His father wanted him to be a politician. His mother, a noble Burgundian, thought he might take up something in the courts of Europe. He rejected both overtures. And so, like many children who chafe at a life that is set for them before they’ve had a chance to chart their own way, he left home just past his twentieth birthday and started to wander.
For three years this young man, Anselmo, traveled around Europe. It was a time of relative peace and stability, allowing an increase in literacy and scholarship. Mostly he wanted to argue about the existence of God, going back to his conversation in the dream. In the abbeys of the late Dark Ages, Anselmo found plenty of people willing to engage him. It was in Normandy, in the village of Bec at the far northwestern coast of France, that he finally put down his walking stick and took up residence at a monaste
ry staffed with some of the brightest minds in Europe. Anselmo was determined to show, through reason and deduction, that God existed. Even with the church at the height of its control over all elements of European society—its reach felt in law, in schools, in civil courts, governments, family structure, royal families—some matters of the soul were not entirely settled. Sure, Pontifex Maximus in Rome had proclaimed the great issues to be settled. But Anselmo, and many like-minded Christians, believed people should not just accept the reality of a creator because others told them to, under threat of damnation, or because of Scripture.
The argument that Anselmo developed was simple, though complex enough to engage philosophers to this day. His motto was Faith Seeking Understanding. In his Proslogion, he made his plea for spiritual wisdom:
“I do not even try, Lord, to rise up to your heights, because my intellect does not measure up to that task; but I do want to understand in some small measure your truth, which my heart believes in and loves. Nor do I seek to understand so that I can believe, but rather I believe so that I can understand.”
He presented his formula, also known as Discourse on the Existence of God, in 1077. Here’s the short version:
God is defined as the greatest possible thing that can be imagined.
This concept of a “being than which no greater can be conceived” exists in the mind as an idea.
Even if you believe that God doesn’t exist in reality, the fact of being able to imagine such a formulation proves . . .
The existence of God.
Anselmo’s theory was something even a fool could grasp, said the suffer-no-fools theologian. His argument for God’s existence, he said, was self-evident to him, and should be to anyone who gave it a deep thought. Two centuries later, Saint Thomas Aquinas expanded on this foundation, putting forth five proofs of the divine. The most convincing of those was the idea that creation needed a first mover—“everything that is moved is moved by something”—and that had to be God. This contention has drawn the best minds of modern times as well.
People long ago figured out that the earth is not the center of the universe, but rather a tiny planet in a distant galaxy in a vast universe—putting biblical literalists to shame. In the seventeenth century, an Irish archbishop, James Ussher, had famously calculated that the earth was created in the year 4004 BC—at six p.m. The consensus now is that the universe began almost 14 billion years ago with the Big Bang. Our own solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. Primitive life showed up 3.5 billion years ago, and cells evolved into more complex organisms 2.5 billion years past. Early mammals similar to us arrived 100 million years ago; 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens moved out of caves and the savannah to form cultures. Recorded history is a mere 10,000 years old.
“The one remaining area that religion can now lay claim to is the origin of the universe,” wrote the cosmologist Stephen Hawking, just before he died. He asked, as did Aquinas and Anselmo, what triggered the whole process—that is, energy and space combusting into matter, ultimately leading to the particles of nature that make up humans. Hawking cited Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: space and time are not absolutes, but dynamic quantities. “Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang so there is no time for God to make the universe in,” he wrote. Hawking concluded that “the simplest explanation is that there is no God.” But he couldn’t prove that.
So we are back with Anselmo and proof by deduction. After the Normans, those descendants of Viking raiders living in the northwest part of France, conquered England, Anselmo was asked to move across the Channel and become the archbishop of Canterbury. His position of power allowed him to promote the question that had obsessed him. It stirred a number of well-argued responses, including one from the fool. Gaunilo, a monk and contemporary of Anselmo, wrote Book on Behalf of the Fool Who Says in His Heart There Is No God. Others pointed to an obvious fallacy: one can imagine, say, a frog the size of a castle, and just because that image exists in the mind does not prove the existence of a frog the size of a castle.
Some of these same questions followed Napoleon as he marched out of Aosta, a few years before he was crowned Emperor of France. At the start of the Revolution, Napoleon supported purging church authority. He went along, for a time, with the new societal order built on logic and reason, a pretentious new calendar, the supremacy of ideas backed by terror. After waltzing into Milan, he assembled two hundred priests for theological debate. He told them he was favorably disposed toward their faith, perhaps an influence of his mother. Or it could have been convenience; Napoleon said he was open to whatever religion of the country he was conquering.
“No man is considered just and virtuous who does not know whence he came and whither he is going,” he said. Well, did he believe in God? “Simple reason,” he said, is not enough for belief, ruling out conversion by Anselmo’s principle. Yet “without religion, one walks continuously in darkness.” He didn’t want to walk in darkness, nor would those millions of people newly under Napoleonic rule have to. But he remained a skeptic until his death.
He was not persuaded by the bottom-line argument of another Frenchman, the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal. Suppose belief was a bet, he wrote in “Pascal’s Wager”—an early advancement in probability theory. If you bet against a God and lost, you missed out on the joys of life-affirming faith and risked eternal damnation. If you bet on God’s existence and won, you gave up very little in life and got the much greater reward in the afterlife. There was more upside in belief.
I took up this issue of finding God through logic on the advice of Father John of Flavigny. He told me that during his wrestling-with-the-soul-and-mind period, while still a medical student, he found Anselmo’s proof compelling. In Aosta, after the long hike down the mountains, though I could hardly move, Sophie persuaded me to rally. And then, at a twilight dinner outside, surrounded by an amphitheater of alpenglow, we found ourselves within a few feet of 66 Via Sant’Anselmo—birthplace of the wandering ontologist. I owed it to serendipity, or the convergence of hints, to engage Anselmo’s argument further.
Mildly self-medicated with an Aostan wine and a dish of eggplant and melted fontina from the cows we had seen earlier in the day, I attempted to explain Anselmo’s theory. I played the advocate. Sophie poked the same holes in the argument as did I while thinking about it earlier, which shouldn’t surprise anyone given how much DNA we share. She asked whether being on the V.F. had changed my mind on these things.
“I mean, you still believe in God, right, Dad?”
I tried to explain, as Anselmo had pleaded with the fool, as Napoleon argued with the atheists of the Revolution, as Hawking engaged his readers from his final days in a motorized chair, that thinking people owe it to themselves to ask the questions that tormented the man from Aosta. This stop on the Via Francigena settled for me one part of the questioning. Pope Francis said God is not someone who waved a “powerful magic wand,” to effect creation and all that followed; he’s not a magician. But nor can God be deduced by an exercise of the mind. Damn.
TWENTY-FIVE
A FAREWELL TO AUGUSTINE
The spirit was willing, but the feet were not. The expedition to breakfast, one flight of stairs and a shuffle to a small buffet counter, convinced me that I was not going anywhere with these toes. This filled me with self-loathing. What kind of wuss was I? Anselmo, Labre, and Francis of Assisi—these guys crisscrossed a continent in slippers. Joan of Arc crushed the English on foot and horse. A Roman legionnaire was expected to march twenty-two miles in five hours, in fifty pounds of armor and supplies—every day. I had the finest melding of technology, leather, and craftsmanship, and still I was stalled. So I made cutouts just larger than Cheerios, placed them on antiseptic-lubricated blisters, and mummified my toes. If I stayed hydrated, and kept off the pavement, I’d have a fighting chance. We caught the train to Ivrea, sixty miles away, moving out of th
e mountains and into Piemonte with the best protected feet in northern Italy.
Ivrea, established in 100 BC, hosts one of the strangest festivals in the world. In the dead of winter, the town imports 500,000 pounds of oranges from Sicily. Then, two sides spend three days in open warfare, drenching the city and each other in hurled citrus, ending on Fat Tuesday—forty days before Easter. The food fight goes back to the twelfth century, centering around the story of a miller’s daughter who refused to allow a local duke to rape her on her wedding night. This was the custom, similar to droit du seigneur in France. But in Ivrea the story took a twist: the heroine fought back, beheading the entitled bastard who was trying to force himself on her. Now, every year leading up to the Battle of the Oranges, a young woman is chosen to play the role of the miller’s daughter. Her forces fire oranges at the duke’s guard, who dash around town in medieval carriages. The orange war is part of Italy’s Catholic heritage, in that Carnival is a Christian-tolerated bacchanal leading up to the Lenten penance. Ivrea has a very low crime rate, so perhaps the soft violence is merely war by other means, as they say about international soccer.
