I just returned from a visit to Northern Italy with my
family. We spent most of our time in
Verona, the home of a childhood friend and his Italian wife. I had visited cities along the rhumb line from
Milan to Venice over the years when I was editor of Bicycling magazine,
primarily to meet with frame-makers such as Colnago, Cinnelli, and De Rosa, as
well as components manufacturer Campagnola. I liked the story line: small custom Italian
framemakers, the last of the artisans, were holding out against the generic and
undifferentiated product line from Asia. From what I could tell from observing hundreds
of bikes around Lake Garda in the pre-Alps, the Italian bike industry is doing
just fine. Much as the cyclists annoyed
drivers on the narrow roads around the lake, there was something aesthetically
pleasing about this scene, but no more than observing smart women in Verona
commuting to work by bike. Beauty is
afoot. Venus must be close.
On our return to New York, I read that Pope Francis might be
considering choosing a woman as one of the next cardinals. The Holy See Press was quick to squash this
rumor, adding that a woman cardinal was “theoretically possible.” Pope Francis, in his remarks about women,
nuns, and the Church’s preoccupation with sexual issues, has made it clear that
he understands the importance of bringing the feminine principle into the
Church for theological and psychological reasons. The hierarchy is old, white and crusty and in
need of Aphrodite’s influence. And she’s
closer than the vicars think.
In Italy, we made our pilgrimage to Venice and shouldered
our way through the narrow streets, competing with the thousands of tourists
offloaded from at least five cruise ships. Venice is a bazaar, and the route from the St.
Lucia train station to the famous St. Mark’s Square was past the inevitable
barkers selling enough trinkets to sink this delicate city. But this city is also alleys and canals and
surprises, such as strains of Verdi’s La Traviata coming from the Opera House,
the understated and beautiful St. Paul’s, a 9th century Russian
orthodox church, and the masked parishioners appearing out of nowhere on their
way to celebrate their version of the Day of the Dead, which is beginning to
look a lot like Halloween.
As much as possible—and guided by our knowledgeable Italian
friends, we stayed away from the popular tourist watering holes, though we
couldn’t help returning a few times to the bronze statue of Juliet underneath
the requisite balcony that was without Romeo and lacked any particular
historical license. But that didn’t matter.
What began as a nod to Shakespeare’s
play and an attempt to attract a few more tourists’ euros, this statue has
become a shrine for lovers from around the world. Social media is populated with “selfies” of
young men and women, posing with Juliet, and, as if on demand, rubbing her
right breast with such passion and tenacity that the poor thing will require
augmentation in the need future.
At the entrance to this shrine the walls are covered with
thousands of signatures, hearts, and statements of youthful undying love. The authorities made this space available to
discourage tourists from attaching messages to the walls with chewing gum. Now that the tourists have run out of wall,
they are attaching small locks available at a store nearby to a metal wall
board. The locks carry hearts and names
of lovers. My Italian friend said the
“love lock” craze started after the publication of a novel Three Meters above the Sky, where this activity suggested undying
and unbreakable love. During the last
decade, love padlocks have been attached to bridges in Florence, Dublin, Cairo
and dozens of other cities where they are increasingly seen as emblems of
vandalism rather than lasting love. Perhaps
so, but we probably need to recognize Aphrodite in whatever form she chooses to
appear in.
After a day of visiting a half a dozen churches in and
around Verona, my friend asked me my impression. I said it was as if a “pandemonium of images”
visited me. I didn’t mean that as an
exaggeration. Verona has some of the
most beautiful and oldest churches in Italy. These include: Basilica De S. Zeno, Duomo, Basilica
de S. Anastasia, and the Chiesa de S. Fermo. The Renaissance churches are active and
alive, with services generally trumping the needs of tourists. But this is Italy and the churches can’t help
themselves. The paintings and the
frescoes offer startling imagery above the melancholy devotional chants. The
statue of Jesus in the Duomo seems voluptuous; the figure almost seems
pregnant. The saints are showing a
little too much leg. The cherubs are
just too cute.
I write these words as a Catholic, a student of religious
culture, and an academic with a PhD dissertation on “Aesthetics and the
Religious Mind in Three Catholic Novelists: Francois Mauriac, Graham Greene,
and Flannery O’Connor.” My first book of
poems was That Kingdom Coming Business,
about religion’s role in war. I explored
this more deeply in The Archetype of the
Gun, a Kindle e-book, about the religious, mythological, and psychological
underpinnings of the gun debate. So I’ve
wrestled with these issues for a long time.
In Italy, I was reminded of the centrality of the image and
that beauty cannot be outlawed by edict or canon. I am indebted to the late psychologist James
Hillman and his exploration of this theme in ReVisioning Psychology, one of the most important books of this
genre in the last fifty years and grounded in the Italian Renaissance. Hillman reminds us that in the middle of the
sixteenth century, as a response to the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic
Church “removed substance and virtue from all holy images.” Also banished were the myths, the demons, and
the Gods from Olympus. Hillman notes
that “Personifying was driven out of churches and into the madhouse.”
But not completely in Italy where, due to cultural forces
still shaped by the Renaissance, the sacred and the profane can still rest
comfortably alongside one another. Hillman goes back to Marsilio Ficino, “a
loveless, humpbacked, melancholy teacher” from Florence for his text because it
was Ficino who wrote that soul-making, rather than being the exclusive province
of the religious, was central to our imaginings, creative life and culture. Hillman takes this a little further. In ReVisioning
Psychology, he defines soul as: that unknown component that makes meaning
possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a
religious concern. “By ‘soul’ I mean the
imaginative possibilities in our natures, the experiencing through reflective
speculation, dream, image, and fantasy—that mode that recognizes all realities
as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.”
In September 2007, James Hillman gave an address on the
island of Capri, Italy, in Italian entitled “Aphrodite’s Justice,” a plea to
invite Aphrodite into psychology; more beauty and less of the theoretical. In his invocation to Aphrodite (Greek) and
Venus (Latin), Hillman reminds the Goddess of “Those who follow your train and
traffic with your gifts—poets, lovers, musicians, craft persons and colorists
of many tastes, and those who would make each moment in their day show a sign
of Venus in manner, odor, décor, dress and speech, those who bring charm,
sensuality, lightness of touch, frivolity even, and the madness of passion—have
for too long been relegated in our civilization to a lesser, trivial place,
neither serious nor moral.”
It is not surprising that Hillman, beloved in Italy, gave
this presentation there. The
sensuousness he describes is part of the fabric of Italian life, often found in
the small and the obscure. Outside the
medieval church, Pieve di San Giorgio, north of Verona, were located a stack of
granite boulders from a Roman ruins—ancient Rome asserts itself everywhere in
the region. Tucked in the side of this
construction was a black, somewhat abstract rendition of the Madonna and Child
about the size of man’s hand. It was not
under lock-and-key; it wasn’t secured in any way. Just there, as it were, in hiding in plain
view.
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