In one of my favorite romantic comedies, Four Weddings and a Funeral, a woman receives an unconventional sartorial compliment: “Fabulous dress. The ecclesiastical purple with the pagan orange symbolizing the magical symbiosis in marriage between the heathen and Christian traditions.”
When I began this spoken Latin program with the Paideia Institute, I felt as though I was experiencing two different versions of Rome. I would immerse myself in the Classicist’s Rome during class, in surreal and unforgettable site visits to the cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, the Capitoline Hill, and Mount Vesuvius. During my own time I would play the pilgrim in the Catholic’s Rome, visiting St. Peter’s Basilica and hunting down the relics of my favorite saints.
It wasn’t until a day trip to Ostia, an ancient Roman sea port, that I realized the very obvious— my love for Latin and my love for the Church don’t have to be separate. The Paideia program has a philosophy of “loci in locis” which means “the passages in the places.” In practice, this means that we read beautiful works of literature, in Latin, in the historical places to which they refer. On this particular day, my teacher led our group into some unassuming ruins in Ostia, and we read from the ninth book of Augustine’s Confessions, in which Augustine speaks with his mother Monica soon before her death. I’ll offer you a quote from our reading and a very rough translation of my own:
“Quarebamus inter nos apud praesentem veritatem, quod tu es, qualis futura esset vita aeterna sanctorum, quam nec oculus vidit nec auris audivit nec in cor hominis ascendit. Sed inhiabamus ore cordis in superna fluenta fontis tui, fontis vitae, qui est apud te, ut inde pro captu nostro aspersi quoquo modo rem tantam cogitaremus.”
“Between us we were discussing, in the presence of the truth, which you are, what the future eternal life of the saints would be like, which neither eye has seen nor ear has heard nor the heart of man reached. But we were gaping with the mouths of our hearts at the heavenly flow of your font, the font of life, which is in your presence, so that we might then contemplate so great a matter in accordance with our ability, in whatever way possible, and be sprinkled with its waters.”
I’ve read that passage several times, but it never moved me like it did on that day. I was reading the words of Augustine in their original language, in the town where he and his mother stayed, across from a window much like the one he and his mother must have looked through as they contemplated things unseen. I felt connected to the past and the people who inhabited it as never before— only a dead language could have such power.
If the relationship between Christian and heathen traditions is a marriage, it’s certainly a complex one. The marriage seems to be thriving when the two parties share ideas, when Augustine interacts with Plato’s ideas or Aquinas with Aristotle’s. On the other hand, the marriage seems to be a power struggle if you look in the Piazza Colonna, for example. The statue of St. Paul perched atop a column depicting Marcus Aurelius’ military triumphs looks less like a healthy marriage and more like a woman trying to shush her loud and slightly embarrassing husband at a dinner party. I look forward to exploring this relationship more, and spending more time with the pagans, politicians, popes, and rhetoricians who wrote in the language that I love.