A Collegiate Way of Life at Baylor University

Memories of the cool, clean air of our Monday in Δελφοί linger in my mind. What we experienced firsthand, and what we also imagined of ancient days when visits to Apollo’s oracle made the city famous, stay with me. Moreover, reflection on our time in Delphi gives me an inspiring vantage point from which to observe, alas more drearily, the political chaos and spiritual lethargy into which modern Greece is descending.

Here, at the navel of the earth under the regal gaze of Mt. Parnassus, we cast our eyes toward the deep blue Ionian Sea far below the mountainside village, foregrounded by the blue green hue of an olive grove of over a million trees. By early afternoon, the Nine Muses, or maybe but a few of them, must have descended the mountain and whispered gracious words to us, for everything we saw, smelled, ate, heard and said seemed charmed. I mean it truly.

The ruins of Delphi themselves keep a solemn silence that not even the passing tourist buses completely drown out with their diesel clatters and whining, downshifting gears. In long gone centuries, when suppliants shuffled up the Sacred Way seeking the always ambiguous counsel of the Pythia, their quiet passages must have been punctuated too, by metallic clinks of chisels on marble, the calling out of greetings, and far harsher noise during games and festivals.

Here, in ancient Delphi, history witnessed more plainly than anywhere else I know the flowering of a Panhellenic political identity that was tightly bound together with shared religious understanding and practice. The lavish monuments and treasuries along the Sacred Way constructed by Greek cities near and far, put together with widespread regard for the cult of Apollo and readiness to seek the oracle’s counsel, produce the impression of an ancient Panhellenism that overshadows today’s modern nation-state.

That last comment needs explanation. I have two things in mind.

The first is that the Greeks seem more divided now than they have been in nearly forty years, when the oppressive dictatorship of the military junta ended in 1974. Sights and sounds of tearing social fabric confront us all around. We have seen the worst of the political garment-rending only on television broadcasts of the riots in Athens’ Syntagma Square, all of which transpired after our group safely left Athens. We are now in Thessaloniki, and here we see protest graffiti and signs adorning every conceivable surface, mounds of uncollected garbage (because of the strike), and the semi-permanent pitched tents of squatting local demonstrators adjacent to the White Tower.

Although the MPs in Parliament, whatever their position on the newly proposed austerity measures happens to be, appeal to Greek identity and national ideals as warrants for their votes, it all appears more like an individualistic free-for-all so far as I can discern. In fact, taking the last five decades as the measure, modern Greece has fairly well exemplified the two worst political regimes that Plato identifies in the Republic. Tyranny by a few unjust leaders (the junta of the late sixties and early seventies), and tyranny by the excessive desires and mistaken self-interests of everyone (post-1974 Greece) are both politically tragic. Apart from a more substantive and more widely shared sense of the common good, life is bound to become all the more trying for the Greeks.

Unfortunately, the second thing I have noticed is that one of the great past resources for Panhellenic identity, the sort that might underwrite a sustainable commonwealth, seems to be used up. Even when Athenian hegemony over lesser cities of the fifth century B.C. divided Greek against Greek and played out in thirty years of debilitating conflict in the Peloponnesian War, everyone kept up the practice of the old pagan sacrifices. Devotion to the gods grew during those difficult days. The Greek Orthodox Church of the twenty-first century seems relatively less important.

Obviously, wondrous Byzantine basilicas and churches dot Greece today, and we have visited a few of them. On Tuesday we saw the gravity-defying monasteries perched atop the outstretched geological fingers at Meteora, and again, we visited a few of them. But in every case they have too much the quality of museums and too little the character of places of popular prayer.

I do not question the piety of the few that gather in these holy settings and make their abject confessions, earnest petitions, and sincere thanksgiving to God. May the Lord have mercy on them and bless them. Yet they are too few in number, and they are too little accompanied by the majority of the Greeks, to give me hope for a revived Panhellenic life reshaped by fidelity to Orthodox Christianity.

Will Delphi be joined by new Greek ruins, by places where fallen columns and faded memories remind travelers centuries from now of a people whose time has passed? For the sake of the warm, hospitable people in whose company we have delighted these past few weeks, I hope the answer is όχι, or at least not yet.

Our morning began earlier than usual today, with a seven o’clock boarding of our bus bound for the port of Piraeus. We’ve undertaken a day cruise of three nearby islands: Poros, Hydra, and Aegina. What the day ahead holds we don’t yet know, but at the very least we’ll have abundant opportunity for people watching.

For instance, the surreality all around me is well beyond my ability to capture in words. I’m sitting on the upper deck of the cruise ship at a four-topper, located under an awning that gains us a bit of shelter from an already sweltering Aegean sun. For nearby company I’ve got not only Michele and Zachary, but also Scott Moore and Anne-Marie and Jeff Schulz. The undulating blue sea, azure skies, and sun-lit island mountains give us lovely sights, especially to the starboard side.

Yet natural beauty notwithstanding, many of our fellow passengers, oblivious to the scenery, have lost themselves in bacchanalian dancing of hilariously poor quality. To what music do they dance? The kind that is produced by an over-amplified cruise ship band comprised of an electronic keyboard, a tenor sax, an accordion, and a tambourine, and that caters to an internationally motley assortment of passengers. Gathering in front of the bar, the old, the decrepit, and those that should by time’s long passage know better are juking, jiving, and making merry.

To move things from the ridiculous to something well short of the sublime, in the midst of it all Zachary is reading a children’s adaptation of Greek myths, I’m reading Plato’s Gorgias, Anne-Marie is reading Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, Scott is reading Odysseus Elytis’ Το Άξιον Εστί, and, to top it all off, an African tourist at an adjacent table is reading Leo Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Illich. (“‘Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,’ it suddenly occurred to him. ‘But how could that be, when I did everything properly?'”)

Imagine, then, those books, topics, and readers surrounded by the glory of the heavens that have no words yet pour forth speech of God, the sounds of a raucous band, and the gyrations of the senior citizens, and you come up with a impossibly incongruous scene.

More plausibly and indeed more pleasantly, yesterday, on Saturday, we divided our day between Corinth and Mycenae, with a short stop en route to look out over the canal between the Aegean and Ionian Seas.

Corinth brought us a treat in the form of an insider’s tour of the archaeological site by a scholar long associated with architectural studies in Greece. Robin Rhodes, one of Benjamin Moore’s architecture professors at Notre Dame, graciously hosted our group for two hours of thrilling conversation that took place in intolerably hot sunshine.

What we learned under his tutelage is that the Temple of Apollo at the heart of the ancient city, much discussed in all of the literature about the city, is not in fact a temple of Apollo at all. It is, as he argued persuasively, a temple with two cella built for the worship of Zeus and Hera. The architectural evidence for two separate chambers is as plain as can be, even for complete amateurs, given a little bit of guidance in seeing what’s there. Combined with ambiguous and easily misinterpreted lines from Pausanias’ ancient travel journals, it’s not hard to see how errors in the identification of the temple have arisen. The facts are interesting enough, but more fascinating still was the experience of being led so capably by Professor Rhodes through a problem-solving dialogue that eventuated in the general conviction that the temple could not possibly have been for Apollo. Our students experienced a tremendous exhibition of scholarly acumen combined with teacherly qualities of the first rank.

The balance of our afternoon was taken up by time in another of the most significant cities of the Peloponnese. I know that visions of ancient Mycenae, the great mountain citadel of Agamemnon (at least as the stories have it), will now always animate my reading and teaching of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. This rocky fortress–with its so-called cyclopean walls (the stones are so large the race of cyclopes must have set them in place, they say), high tower vantages, arresting lions’ gate, and overall sense of impregnability–makes an impressive sight.

Was it here, from the watchtower, that a sentry once saw a signal fire ablaze on the neighboring mountain, telling of the Greeks’ conquest over the Trojans? Did Agamemnon return home to this place as an honored hero and king, deign to tread decadently upon lavishly spread clothes that no mere mortal should spoil, and walk thereafter into a murderous trap planned in guile by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus? Were Electra and Orestes reunited somewhere in the vicinity as they paid restrained respect to the memory of a dead king and father? Whatever actually occurred here, I have little doubt that Aeschylus’ play cycle gains dramatic purchase on its readers and interpreters to the extent that its setting is understood akin to the real city of Mycenae.

Coming back to the present, at the end of a full day of cruising the Greek islands, let me add a brief comment about the conclusion to our day. We heard Joshua Bell play a violin concerto in the reconstructed Odeon of Herod Atticus, followed by a performance of Mahler’s 6th Symphony. Under the softly lit, crumbling ruins of the Parthenon high above on the acropolis, the bleakness of the final movement, with its ostensibly fatalistic and nihilistic trajectory, fit the setting about as well as could be imagined.

As the symphony labored on ponderously toward its conclusion, Athena’s glorious temple may as well have received the concussive hammer blows of fate each time the percussionist let his gigantic mallet fall. Here, in this place and time, forgetting about Mahler’s personal torments, the third and last blow recalled to my mind the Venetians’ recklessly launched cannonball, the one that brought the Parthenon to ruination so many years ago.

Yet I at any rate do not feel despair, but instead a reminder of God-loved, not godforsaken, fragility of this mortal life and the things we make. “As for man, his days are like grass, for he flourishes like a flower of the field; the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place knows it no more. But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting . . . .”

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.