Ephesus and Miletus

Until today’s welcome day of rest in Kuşadası, our recently passed days have kept us busy morning, noon, and evening. Even today, listed on the schedule as “free,” I gathered both of my classes for an hour or so apiece to discuss Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Plato’s Meno.

Beyond that, I couldn’t ask more of students clamoring for an opportunity to bask in the Mediterranean brilliance and play in the briny Aegean, taking in sun and sea with the languor of youth. About the inimitable, irrecoverable days of youth’s languor, Evelyn Waugh has Capt. Charles Ryder reflect memorably, even nostalgically, in Brideshead Revisited. I wonder if Benjamin, David, Ellie, Kara, Linh, and Niha one day, decades hence, will find themselves turning over in their minds days like the one they experienced today, taking pleasure and finding refreshment in their remembering.

Two days ago we came back to the Aegean Sea in order to visit Mary’s house, St. John’s Basilica, and Ephesus. We also enjoyed two strikingly different bonus visits to a Turkish carpet school and to the Ephesian hillside grotto of St. Paul and Thekla, the convert and friend of St. Paul. Yesterday, we visited Miletus, Didyma, and Priene. Leaving much out of account, I’ll comment on the grotto, high above Ephesus, and the city of Miletus.

Grotto of St. Paul and Thekla. Due to the excellent planning and personal connections of Tutku, our Turkish tour company, we met a pleasant elderly Turk whose archaeological work has been conducted alongside the Austrian excavation team working in Ephesus. About halfway through our tour of the city, just before the glorious Ephesian library, we turned off the street, climbed a long set of stairs adjacent to a semi-permanently covered excavation site, and began a half-mile hike up the hillside.

The trail was steep and overgrown with tall grass. Some of the thistles, mostly in bloom, were taller than me; fortunately they were for the most part growing well to the side of the trail. Had the trail been fully clear, it would have presented our group with a bit of adventure. Given how overgrown it was, it gave us all the real physical work we were ready to tackle. In short, it called for a strenuous bit of scrambling.

For our effort, we were repaid well by way of a sight that few visitors to Ephesus experience. Perched three-fourths of the way up the mountain is a small cave, no more than six feet in width though perhaps thirty feet deep, onto the front of which, once upon a time, had been built an additional stone room. In this place, or at least in these precincts, St. Paul visited Thekla and her mother, nurtured their Christian faith and discipleship, and gained the encouragement of their solidarity and prayers. With the iron gate to the cave unlocked for us, repeated cautions to look out for the low-hanging lentil, and help from Cenk, we entered the humble grotto.

Within we saw simple, piously painted pictures of Paul, Thekla, and her mother; Abraham and Isaac; David; and Christ surrounded by the apostles and patriarchs. Some of the paintings date from the fourth century, while others may be as late as the twelfth century.

All of the paintings speak of humbled holiness and quiet vigilance. Here in Ephesus, St. Paul’s missionary efforts prompted a dangerous riot in the theater when promoters and profiteers of Artemis’ cult heard in the Apostle’s message a threat to their way of life. “Great is Artemis of Ephesus,” Demetrius and his compatriots shouted for two hours straight, full of anger at the prospect of waning interest in their silver idols of the goddess. Although Ephesus in time became more hospitable to Christians, even providing a first-century home for St. John and St. Mary–and in later centuries hosting an ecumenical council of the Church–I imagine the faithful traipsing up the hillside, year after year, visiting Thekla’s home in prayerful repose, and giving silent thanks for the blessings of the Lord.

Miletus. Located near the edge of a large, fertile plain sporting thousands of acres of cotton, the ruins of Miletus to the uninformed appear to arise in the middle of nowhere. In 685 B.C., when Thales of Miletus predicted a solar eclipse, the city was situated in a seaside location and nestled between two small harbors. Centuries of effluence from the Meander River not only silted up the harbor, but they now separate Miletus about fifteen kilometers from the Aegean Sea. More than a hundred square miles of rich river bottom soil now fill the bay.

The ruins of Miletus bear special significance to those of us that claim the practice of philosophy as our own. The city’s greatest son, Thales, the “father of Western philosophy,” has pride or place in the narratives of the presocratics whose natural philosophy marked a shift from the mythoi of Homer and Hesiod to the logoi of the Ionian philosophers. What is the archÄ“ that helps us apprehend meaning out of the multiplicity of things we encounter every day. Is it Thales’ water, or is it Anaximander’s apeiron, or is it Anaximenes’ air? The Milesian philosophers disagreed among themselves, but they shared a love for rational explanations that didn’t depend only upon enigmatic stories received through the alleged ministrations of the Muses.

Sitting in the city’s well renovated theater, we thus mused together, in our own philosophically oriented manner, about the legacy of the Milesian thinkers whose names are found at the very beginning of every thorough history of Western philosophy.

I continue to wonder about them. What, in these environs, caused them to raise the questions they pursued? How did they come to the answers they proposed? Why did they make the assumptions that they did, the “monistic assumption” foremost among them, so that the One was favored over the Many? To what extent do we continue or stand apart from their project in our age? Do the logoi of the Milesians bear any practical implications for the conduct of life? Most of all, are they guilty of the criticism Aristotle levies against them, viz, they are so preoccupied with material causation that they neglect interest in efficient causes and even more so in formal and final causes?

Whatever the faults of Thales and his Ionian intellectual progeny, we owe them an honest measure of honor for raising good questions and seeking better answers than the ones conventionally given in their day. Modern Miletus may be in the middle of nowhere, but in the course of human history this all-but-forgotten ancient city has shaped most every aspect of life as we know it today.

This entry was posted in Books, Travel. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *