Reflections on Ancient Marvels: From Haughty Eyes to Humble Hearts
#blessedbythegods
As I begin to type today’s edition of The Unfiltered Scribe, I’m sitting on the 17th deck of a cruise ship docked in the Port of Piraeus. I’m on the starboard side, the side on which the ship is docked, and as I look out in the distance, all of Athens, Greece lies before me. My family and I spent the day on a quick bicycle tour of the city, which is a great way to see a lot of the city, but not a great way to experience it with any sort of intimacy. Nonetheless, the experience got me thinking about my perspective on the world and my faith.
I’d heard that traveling the world is the best education one can receive.
I’m not comfortable calling myself a world traveler yet, but our recent trip to Italy and Greece proved the old adage true for me.
I didn’t need an in-depth tour of Athens to begin probing the depths of how I view the world and find some fallibility in my own perspectives.
In 1983, my family moved to Malden, Massachusetts. Among the first things we did when we moved to the area was visit Plymouth rock and Plantation. Through the years, I’d also visit Old Sturbridge Village, Lexington and Concord to see the site of the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, and various sites of important to the birth of the United States. When I was married in 1997, my wife and I spent a few days in Williamsburg, Virginia, and took in some of the history there as well. The sites were quaint villages, and their diminutive size was part of what made the birth of this nation akin to a David and Goliath story.
As I visited all of these little towns, history became “quaint” to me. That is, physical locations were always small and undersized compared to what they actually might have been. While learning about United States history, I began to let my understanding of peripheral details of US history leak into how I understood world history. So, as I learned about Pompeii, I pictured a quaint village and not the reality of the large, bustling city which Pompeii had been. To a great degree, I even did this with ancient Athens and Rome even though if I thought about it for a bit, logic may have adjusted the visual images conjured up in my mind.
I also tended to be a bit condescending as to what the ancients were able to accomplish. I believed they were of limited intellect. After all, the ancient Greeks and Romans believed in what we now understand are mythological gods.
How silly.
I mean, given their worship of fake gods, what could we really expect them to accomplish with so little knowledge of how the world really works?
Prior to our cruise, we spent a few days in Rome. While there, we visited the Pantheon. I had heard of the Pantheon, but wasn’t really sure what it was. Usually, when I heard the word “Pantheon” it was in relation to ranking the best of a group of something. For instance, we might ask, “Who is in the Pantheon of all-time NFL players?” We would then answer by listing Tom Brady, followed by the second-greatest and on down the line.
The literal Pantheon was a temple built to honor the 12 most important Roman Gods. So any figurative pantheon list would include 12 of the best. You know, Tom Brady then 11 others.
There’s no way to deny the Pantheon is a marvel of art and architecture, ancient or not. As we squeezed into the building with hundreds of other tourists, our tour guide explained the features of the building, including how the dome is still the largest in the world (or something like that) even after standing for roughly two thousand years. I was taken aback by the intricacies in the stonework and the vast size of the building created by people so long ago. As far as I know, they didn’t have cranes or hydraulics, and the realization that these ancient people had the intellect to design such a building and knew how to do it without the muscle of our modern machines was humbling.
I felt the same way as we toured Athens.
Part of our bike tour through Athens took us to a place where we could see the Parthenon sitting prominently atop the Acropolis. We didn’t visit it, but had a good view. As I sat on the deck of the cruise ship I scanned the city to see if I could find the Parthenon. I could, and it wasn’t difficult. It was the largest building in the ancient Acropolis, and today the remains towering above the modern city, perhaps as history’s reminder as to just how much the past influences the present.
I took the three pictures below, and the Acropolis and Parthenon are visible in each. Each picture is gradually “zoomed in” on the site to help. In the first picture of the city, it can be hard to find if you’re unfamiliar. It’s located on the strip of green just to the right of the large dark-gray building, center/left. I also found an interactive 3D picture image of what the Acropolis would have looked like back in the day. (Use this link to play with it.)
The Parthenon was built to honor Athena, the Greek god of Love and was one of scores of temples built around the city to honor the gods.
I won’t bother to give you a rundown of the gods of Greek mythology. If you’re anything like me, the Greek Mythology section of your 10th grade English class bored you to tears. So, I’m not sure you’d be interested even if I was able to explain it to you. But as I looked at the ancient temples built to honor these gods we now understand to be mythological, I’m struck by one concept.
The people who built these temples weren’t building them in honor of fake gods. They built them to honor gods they believed in.
That is, they believed they were real. They believed the gods lived at the top of Mount Olympus in a different part of Greece. What today we believe to be a silly notion was not silly to the ancient Greeks. They lived to please their gods, and they were willing to kill or be killed in the name of their gods. The architectural marvels I am witnessing on my trip were built with heartfelt action by the people alive at the time, and one that took a significant amount of time and effort.
This was also evident when we visited Olympia, which is different than and some distance away from Mount Olympus, where the gods were supposed to live. Olympia was where the original, Ancient Olympic Games were held, an athletic tournament dedicated to…you guessed it, the ancient Greek gods. I mentioned in a previous post that the ancient Greeks would offer trinkets to the Gods in an effort to earn the favor of the gods. They built a gigantic sculpture of Zeus at Olympia. This sculpture was one of the 7 Ancient Wonders of the World.
WE cannot separate ancient Greek culture from Greek mythology religious beliefs. The temples were everywhere and were fabulous, even by modern standards. We can say the same about Romans and their ancient culture. Just like in Athens, we can’t separate the ancient Roman culture from Roman mythology religious beliefs.
An interesting and important aspect of the Pantheon in Rome is that it stands as a microcosm of the development of a part of humans through history. While it was built to honor Roman gods, the 12 major Roman gods were adopted from the 12 major Greek gods. Zeus became Jupiter, Athena became Minerva, and so on. An example of the progression of religious beliefs of the ancients.
As I stood in these buildings or looked at the remnants of buildings and sculptures which were built and crafted thousands of years ago, by people with incredible intellectual capacity and know-how, my pride in my modern worldview and achievements began to seem a bit vainglorious in light of the foundation I was standing on, literally and figuratively. I was awestruck by what the ancient civilizations had produced. It’s different, and the technology we use is more efficient, but I’m not sure that makes it better or more impressive than what the ancients accomplished.
The Pantheon is a Christian church now, Roman Catholic, sitting just miles from the capital of the Catholic world, Vatican City. My thoughts turned to the faith of my own upbringing. I grew up Christian, in a small arm of the American evangelical movement. I am a pastor’s son, and it’s fair to say my life was devoted to pleasing the God. My religious beliefs guided and directed my family and me. I have this in common with the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans.
But the roots of my faith, those that extend deeper than I learned about on our trip to Vatican City1, began elsewhere. If you think about it, Christianity isn’t particularly Roman.
It’s an unexpected offspring of Judaism.
The Jews (Hebrews at the time) were different. They held to Pantheon of one. There might be other gods out there, but their god insisted His followers keep Him first. It was the first of the Ten Commandments.
This made sense during that time. The gods were everywhere. Moses never said other gods didn’t exist. Perhaps … there might have been room somewhere in that ancient culture for other, lesser gods2?
At any rate, it was a step towards the monotheism of my family’s faith today. It was a progression from worshiping any number of gods depending on what you fancied, to worshiping one God with specific demands on God’s followers.
I wonder though…
Did the ancient Greeks and Romans (not to mention the scores of other people groups around the globe) have the same confidence in their religious beliefs mythology that I have for mine, or at least the confidence I did growing up?
I mean, two thousand years from now, will there be some arrogant-blogger-dude using strike-through text to describe my system of beliefs?
(Silly me. I don’t need to wait that long now, do I? These voices exist now.)
It’s easy for me to stand here a couple of millennia later and view the ancients with haughty eyes.
Is my insistence that we must “accept Jesus” in order to receive eternal security all that much different than leaving trinkets to Zeus to obtain his favor? Just what is it I was accepting, anyway?
Hashtag blessed anyone?
Next: How I lost my faith…or not.
We did visit Vatican City. I saw the Sistine Chapel (more on this in a future post) and St. Peter’s Basilica. I walked along the road, which tradition tells us is the one Peter ran away from Rome, and then back to Rome to face his crucifixion. We have a lot of “traditions.” The one about Peter’s non-escape route seemed to be pretty rock-solid. The road was there when he was, and was a direct route out of the city. No “grain of salt” with this story for me.
If you’ve ever wanted to experience a self-induced writing headache, try writing a blog post where you try to determine when to capitalize “god” without triggering the wrath of your readers. I’m 99.9% sure I failed to do it correctly at least a couple times in writing this.