I have been traveling in Italy and out of wifi range for the past couple of days. I just landed back in the US from Rome, and will be working on a fresh post while I wait to connect to Baton Rouge. Here is a recent dispatch I sent to readers of my Substack subscription-only newsletter, which focuses primarily on spiritual matters, though I did have some travel stuff on it when I was in Italy. It will give you and idea of what I’ve been up to. — RD

Hello friends. It has been a busy week. Had a meeting about Live Not By Lies in Rome with some journalists and intellectuals, then jumped on a train to Milan. Spoke to a large group at a movie theater there, and the next morning did an interview with a local journalist. Over lunch, I saw that an interview I did with a journalist in Rome was published (see above photo).

There was gelato too. Lots of gelato. Two of the happiest words in my vocabulary are “nocciola” (hazelnut) and “pistacchio” (pistachio).

Then on to Ferrara, a lovely city, with an early Renaissance castle at its heart. It was the first Italian city of the Renaissance to be developed according to an urban plan. This is urbanism at its finest; I don’t think we have improved on what the Italians of the Renaissance accomplished.

Ferrara was the birthplace, in 1452, of Girolamo Savonarola, a fiery Dominican known for preaching fire and brimstone in Florence. He railed against clerical and civic corruption, and the exploitation of the poor. He defied the corrupt pope, Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia, the most decadent of all the Renaissance popes), and launched what is known today as the Bonfire of the Vanities, in which penitent Florentines were called upon to bring out objects that tempted them to sin – things as minor as cosmetics, up to books and paintings — and throw them onto a bonfire. Savonarola was a fanatic and a theocrat who eventually wore the city out, and was burned at the stake. Nevertheless, one has to admit that the Medici family, his sworn enemies, and the rottenness of the Church at the time gave Savonarola a lot to work with. He didn’t come from nowhere.

Here’s a statue of Savonarola outside the Ferrara castle.

You half expect to see lightning bolts issuing from his fingertips. Savonarola is not to the taste of a weak old aesthete like me, but in all honesty, today we could use a bit of what the old boy had.

Yesterday we took the train from Ferrara to Verona. I had never before been to this northern Italian city. Francesco Giubilei, my publisher, took me on a brief walkabout before my speech. After dinner last night, my host, an Italian MP from the city, and his wife took Francesco and me on a longer walking tour of the historic city center. Lord have mercy, I was reduced to babbling like a child at a Christmas market by the time it ended. The only more beautiful city in this world, in my experience, is Venice, but Venice is not of this world at all, so Verona is it. I thought Siena was unsurpassable, but, well, go to Verona.

Here is a view from the old Roman bridge. Imagine living in this apartment overlooking the Adige River:

In the city center, the first thing I noticed was the presence of a massive Roman arena, right in the heart of the city. I didn’t know these things still existed. It’s as if a Caesarian mothership transported itself through time and landed on the town square.

Get this: it’s not a ruin, but is still a working venue. Last night they performed “Turandot” there. We heard the orchestra and the singers from the street. As we passed by, we caught some cast members out back on a break, checking e-mails between acts:

The main street in the old town is a pedestrian-only zone, and – incredibly – it is paved with marble. The sheer gracefulness of this venerable city filled the air, almost like perfume. We stopped for gelato, of course. The gelato maker had some fig sorbetto, which, given my love of figs, I had to try. It instantly put me back under my father’s fig tree. I bought a cornetto topped with a scoop of fig, and a scoop of fior di latte gelato. It is something else to confront the amazing fact that you can buy so much joy for so little.

My host had been told that I am an admirer of Dante. The poet took refuge for a time in Verona, in exile, at the home of Cangrande della Scala, an illustrious local big dog. We saw the family castle where Dante lived, right in the heart of the city. This statue graces a square outside the Palazzo Cangrande, Dante’s home for a few years.

One impossibly charming square opened onto another in Verona…

… and I found myself gape-mouthed that humanity was ever capable of producing urban spaces like this. We are far richer than the Veronese were at the height of their powers, but we can only produce mediocrity, or worse, ugliness. Verona is a palimpsest of Roman, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern architecture, all of it harmonizing in a gorgeous polyphony that ravishes the senses and elevates the spirit. If you despair of humanity, go to Verona, and see what we can be.

We passed the house that supposedly belonged to Juliet, of Shakespearean fame. There is a balcony there where Juliet is said to have stood. It’s nonsense: the balcony was added in the 20th century. From what I can tell, we don’t really know that this was the house, nor do we know for sure of Romeo and Juliet existed. But we can say that the Montecchi and Cappelletti clans – the models for the warring Montagues and Capulets – were often at each other’s throats in the nearby Piazza della Erbe. In fact, Dante puts them in the Commedia. It doesn’t really matter. Verona is a fine setting for the tale of the star-crossed lovers. Too much reality should not spoil the fantasy.

In this detail of Piazza della Erbe, notice the Lion of Venice atop the pillar. Verona was once part of the Republic of Venice:

I vowed repeatedly, and most sincerely, to my host to return to his city as soon as I can. When I do, I want to visit the Cathedral of St. Zeno, Verona’s patron. Incredibly, I didn’t know who St. Zeno of Verona was until last night. He was a Christian born in Mauretania (Roman Africa) in the year 300. It is thought that he was a follower of the Alexandrian patriarch Athanasius, who visited Verona in 340. However he arrived in the city, he lived there as a monk until 362, when he was made bishop. He died in 371, likely a victim of Julian the Apostate’s persecution. Today, you can visit the bishop’s body kept inside a glass crypt in his cathedral. He is dressed in episcopal finery. The saint’s body is a fleshly link to the early church. When I return to Verona one day, I am going straight to the altar and pray before his relics.

As an American Christian, I never tire of the opportunity to pray in settings like this. The body of St. Zeno is a material link to the ancient church. The fact that it has been preserved for seventeen centuries by the faithful of Verona is a testimony to the importance of the Incarnation. We revere the earthly remains of this holy bishop because he was an icon of Christ, the Son of God, who raised the dignity of our flesh by taking fleshly form.

St. Zeno is often depicted with a fishing pole. He is said to have enjoyed fishing in the Adige for his own supper, but I read that the pole is more likely a reference to his great success at winning converts to the faith. I understand why, theologically, Protestants have trouble with the cult of the saints, and of relics, but if I were an Evangelical, I think I would still marvel at the opportunity to spend time near the body of a great evangelist from the early church. We Christians have been around for a very long time.

Now: on to Tuscany, where I will be visiting a friend and going at last to pray at the Abbey of San Galgano, and at the site of the miracle of his sword in the stone.

Learning To See

After my speech in Ferrara, I met a very anxious man, Andrea. He was my age, though his silver mop of hair suggested someone older. His son is 18, and he frets about the young man losing his faith. The boy hasn’t done it yet, but Andrea said that his heart breaks for the kid, because it’s so hard to be a faithful Christian when almost nobody around you in your peer group believes.

“What can I say to him?” Andrea said. I don’t think he was really asking me for advice as much as he was lamenting the impotence of words.

I mentioned to him my favorite observation from Benedict XVI: that the best arguments the Church has for itself are the art it produces, and the saints. The point is that an encounter with radical beauty and/or radical goodness, both inspired by God, can open a person’s mind to the propositional truths of our faith. Conversion begins with the experience of awe. Stealing a line from the philosopher Elaine Scarry, I said, “Maybe our jobs as fathers is to do our best to make sure our children are looking at the sky when a comet passes.” What else can we do?

This week I’ve been making my way slowly through Philip Sherrard’s Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition. I can’t remember which one of my friends or readers recommended it to me as research for this new book I’m planning to work on, but it was absolutely the right thing. It’s dense but very, very rewarding.

As I mentioned the other day, Sherrard was an English convert to Orthodox Christianity, and a man of profound insight. In the first chapter of this book, he writes:

Everything in human life, as regards it being done rightly or wrongly, depends on our religious beliefs. Clearly, unless we first know ourself we cannot know anything else either, and in that case we are bound to act towards other things in a way that will violate and abase them.

Sherrard said we have forgotten that we are sacred beings formed in God’s image. “Having in our own minds desanctified ourselves, we have desanctified nature, too, in our own minds.”

The fundamental error, according to Sherrard, is to understand nature as somehow separate from God. The purpose of art is to reveal spiritual realities and make it possible for us to commune with them, because they – originating in God – are the source of all vitality. To know this and to not make the search for God the center of one’s existence, says Sherrard, is to manifest poor judgment.

Why have we moderns become so insensate to the presence of the Divine? The fact that we have done so, and have reduced ourselves to a state that was not known to men of past ages, is a sign of crisis. He writes:

This might not be of great importance if the reality in question were merely one alternative among many possible levels of reality, each of an equal or neutral value. But when what is at issue is a matter of existence – our life or death – and when what has been lost is the capacity to commune with the sources on which that existence depends, then there is a consequence for us which cannot be dismissed. If the values according to which we have formed the modern world are those which have led to this state of affairs, it is surely important that there should be some reassessment and, if it is not too late, some fundamental change of mind.

In other words, repentance.

But what kind of change of mind? Changing from what to what?

Drawing on St. Maximus the Confessor, Sherrard says that all created things are ontologically “rooted in the one divine and universal Intelligence, that is to say, in the divine and universal Logos.” He goes on:

Through what is sensible we may perceive what is intelligible, provided we have cleansed our organs of perception. But any real knowledge of the sensible realities must depend entirely on our knowledge of their intelligible or spiritual essences. Indeed it may even be said that he who only sees what is sensible does not really see anything at all.

In simpler terms, Sherrard is saying that the divine is immanent in created things, things we can know through our senses (“the sensible”), but we can only perceive that if we have purified our ability to perceive. If the only thing you can see when you look at the world are mere things – that is, if the grove of trees there in the near distance is only a grove of trees – then you are not seeing what is really there.

This, of course, is the challenge of my book, as I see it now: to teach us (including myself) how to see what is really there.

Sherrard draws a distinction between “the spiritual intellect and the natural reason.” The former is in the heart (speaking symbolically); the latter is in the head. The heart (in this symbology) “is not simply a classifying faculty but is the mirror of the divine Intelligence, which fills it with the knowledge in the light of which it perceives the underlying spiritual identify of visible, material things.”

This immediately brings to mind Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s writing on the left brain and the right brain. You’ll remember from recent newsletters that the psychiatrist claims we in the West have become far too dependent on left-brain reasoning, and have allowed our intuitive, right-brained faculties to atrophy. It seems to me that McGilchrist and Sherrard are getting at the same point with different language.

For Sherrard, the heart (spiritual intellect) “is capable of a direct perception of the intelligible and inner, or real, nature of everything that is, of which the sensible [material] form is but the outward manifestation. Its way of knowing is through spiritual experience and intuition and not through concepts and discursive reasoning.”

How can we awaken our spiritual intellect? According to Sherrard – and this is just basic Orthodox spirituality – we can’t hope to do it unless we first of all free ourselves from

alien hostile attachments and persuasions, false and self-centered ideas and habits, and submit ourselves to what surpasses us, to the source of light and of the divine ideas which only then can illumination our mind. When the mind is cut off from this source, when it has lost its roots in the heart (and this is the condition of our “fall” and of our “fallen” state), our experience and intuition of what always is, really and unchangeably, is lost, and all that is possible are purely conjectural and hypothetical theories about things.

…[T]he condition of any real knowledge is our purification of ourselves to the point at which our intelligence becomes again receptive to the light of the divine Intelligence, to the grace fo God, the point at which the mind, satellite of the heart, is brought back to the heart, where it is truly rooted in the source of light and fully vivified by its power.

If we lose direct contact, through our hearts [that is, through our intuitive faculty], with God, we cannot participate in His life. We begin to regard ourselves as self-sufficient, as having no need for God. Man, not God, becomes the measure of all things. Sherrard:

It is possible to trace, through those three crises of modern Europe which we still call the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Age of Enlightenment, this movement of a mind which has broken with a reality of a spiritual or metaphysical order, and has more and more asserted its own self-sufficiency.

For Sherrard, Solzhenitsyn’s claim that the civilizational catastrophe of the Bolshevik revolution happened because “men had forgotten God” is precisely true. When a people forgets that its life is rooted in participating in the life of God, then it will fall apart. Sherrard talks about this happening to a society, but I think it also happens to individuals. Sherrard:

And this is but another way of saying that such a decline is inescapable when once the thoughts and actions of the members of a particular society are no longer determined above all by their allegiance and adherence to the norms of a sacred tradition. When these norms cease to be effective for the majority of its member, society simply disintegrates. In other words, the integrity of a society and the communal effectiveness of a sacred tradition are inseparable.

Why is this the case? Sacred tradition in the highest sense consists in the preservation and handing down of a method of contemplation. A method of contemplation, in its turn, is what makes it possible for us to transcend our bodily, psychic and merely ratiocinative life, to go beyond our sensations, feelings and argumentative logic, in order to attain through intellectual vision a knowledge of and communion with the Divine, the source of all things. A corollary of this is that it permits us to perceive physical things as symbols of what lies beyond them. It permits us to perceive the hidden workings of reality, the spiritual essences that all things enshrine and of which they are the visible and tangible manifestations.

Heavy stuff. These words reveal why Orthodox Christianity is less a body of thought or an institution than a contemplative way for all Christians, not just monastics. It throws me back onto my little quest on this journey to the site of San Galgano’s conversion. He resisted the call to leave the world to devote himself to the contemplation of God, until he was thrown off his horse. According to the story, Christ called him to leave the world, but he said it would be easier for him to plunge his sword into a stone than to leave the world. Yet, by the grace of God, he miraculously did just that.

Maybe God is calling me to purify my own eyes and ears by an act of sacrificial faith. We’ll see. It kind of scares me, to be honest. To be unhorsed against my will.

[Readers, that’s the end of the Substack newsletter. If you’d like to subscribe, click here. — RD]