Visitors to the Past: A Cultural Historian Unlocks the Mysteries Behind Five Sacred Shrines

By Elizabeth Bruening Lewis

VISITORS TO THE PAST is not intended to give you a detailed map to the places featured within its pages, or give you suggestions to the best local cafes, shops or other trendy treats. The focus of this book is altogether different. The author wants you to step into the past, to meet the people associated with the monument you are visiting, and to see it in the context of the history of its time. Escaping the hustle and bustle of Rome to drive up the Via Nomentana to the Mausoleum of Santa Costanza, or winding ones way through the verdant fields of Frances Loire Valley to Germigny-des-Prs, the tourist is rewarded with exploring treasures of the past enjoyed in a tranquil setting. All quite satisfying and refreshing but not the whole tale. Behind the calm of today lie the turbulent passions of the pastlove, hatred, jealousy, envy, and all the emotions we know so well. The Mausolem of Santa Costanza, daughter of Constantine the Great (the first Christian Roman emperor), a woman born in a world of conflicting ambitions, vicious family feuds, betrayal and murder, may have been planned as a quiescent resting place for the dead. However, around it swirl the anything but tranquil realities of its time. Germigny-des-Prs was envisioned as a place of peace for a man of God. Yet the challenges of the timeintellectual, spiritual, and physical, never strayed far from the door. And so it goes. The five sites chosen for this book have great merits as seen today. But visitors to the past will find that this is only part of the story. So enjoy these experiences in the company of the historical figures abounding the pages of this book. Perhaps some knowledge of the past, of its people and events, will bring additional insight into the present. At the very least, your visits should provide you with more than a checkmark to indicate that youve been there on your busy itinerary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Oct 2, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466954359

Elizabeth Bruening Lewis

Elizabeth Bruening Lewis has written three interrelated works of suspense fiction, yet by no means are they all fiction. Fans say that her work should be read both for fast-paced entertainment and for many hard facts it contains. Romance and humor play their part as Abby Taylor, David Neale, and their little corgi dog dodge evil ones and are pursued by murderers. Yet these fictional characters navigate a very real world with threats to the environment, incurable kidney disease, dialysis, and other challenges. Lewis combines a background as varied as the challenges her characters face. She is a journalist, a PhD historian, has taught at the university level, and has been an active volunteer in her community, including her nine years on the board of the Arizona Nature Conservancy. In her writing, Lewis also draws on her own personal experience including hiking much of Arizona, dialysis, and kidney transplant. She has published five books, three fiction and two nonfiction, and has won three national awards. Lewis and her husband of forty-seven years, along with their corgi Terrwyn, divide their time between Phoenix and Prescott. They have two children and four grandchildren.

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© Copyright 2011 Elizabeth Bruening Lewis

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ISBN: 978-1-4669-5435-9 (ebk)

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Trafford rev. 09/28/2012

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This book is written for the educated reader, but not the specialist.

It is written in the belief that, while history is of interest for its own sake,

knowledge of the past helps us put the present

in better perspective.

Book Design by Robert Aulicino

Maps, illustration and photo research by Marianne Murdock

Visitors to the Past

A Cultural Historian

Unlocks the Mysteries

Behind Five Sacred Shrines

Elizabeth Bruening Lewis

Dromedary Press

Phoenix, AZ

Table of Contents

Introduction

Preface

Chapter 1

The Mausoleum of Santa Costanza

Chapter 2

Th e Mausoleum of Galla Placidia

Chapter 3

Skellig Michael

Chapter 4

Germigny-des-Prés

Chapter 5

St. Savior in Chora

Dedication

To my husband Orme who shared all these monuments with me,

made keen observations and telling comments.

Without him this book would never have been written.

Introduction

by William Atkins McWhirter

The scholar and author Elizabeth Bruening Lewis obviously loves a good mystery—whether set in her detective fiction of modern day Arizona or her remarkable historical works of the Renaissance and Middle Ages. From desert sands to the buried shards and mosaics of the centuries, there is this fascination with the cultural forces that shaped who we are and the events in the span of human behavior that help to explain how we got here, from the noblest aspirations toward the divine to the basest (and most human) fears and desires. They co-exist in both beautiful and frightening parallel worlds, the spiritual and the profane, beauty and bloody hands. And often there is a murder in the center of it all.

In this compelling (and deceptively slender) volume of both ancient and modern travels of a different sort, Ms. Lewis is again sleuthing in the territory she knows so well, offering up both inspiring physical symbols of the best within human potential and plenty of unsettling examples of just the opposite. It is not the kind of comfort offered up by contemporary tourism—Lewis is clearly a physical adventurer herself, even if one who might prefer a sun bonnet and walking staff, one who believes that travel should indeed be broadening and not just thickening. Of course, the first mystery is why she has chosen such out-of-the-way and overlooked sites: the mausoleums of Santa Costanza and Galla Placidia, the religious shrines identified with two noble daughters of emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, which Lewis makes clear often neither holy nor always that imperial nor even Roman; Skellig Michael, a rocky monastic retreat hugging the Irish Sea; Germigny-des-Prés, another sanctuary in the Loire Valley of France, and St. Savior in Chora, whose remains are still cradled in Istanbul or the old Constantinople of Byzantine glory.

They are not to be found in standard guidebooks, and inquiries to cruise lines and booking agencies are likely to draw only dumfounded responses. And that, of course, is one of Lewis’ main themes: do not think that because we travel more than almost any society on earth that we know better, or that we are living in another Age of Enlightenment and Scholarly Inquiry. In some cases, we haven’t come that far at all. Not only do we read of brutal wars and atrocities elsewhere, but we have the family whacking Sopranos and unspeakable parents as our own neighbors. And so Lewis introduces us to some of those still surviving places where our own times began.

Lewis’ selected sites have much in common—sometimes there is the outward presence of sheer beauty, at others, a simpler inward grace and serenity. Within the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Lewis finds the multitude of gold stars in the dome which revolve through a deep blue sky around a Latin cross of gold… the eagle (John), the lion (Mark), the winged ox (Luke) and the winged man (Matthew)… The message of the cross is being carried to the four corners of the world.

They are often the material consequences from rare historical moments of true greatness and leadership, men (and women) who sought redemption from their own times (and sometimes even their own less noble actions). Lewis introduces us to a pantheon of such historic greatness: Charlemagne (Charles the Great), who may have rescued Europe in the 8th century from its greatest educational, religious and cultural abyss; Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor who established Sunday as a day of rest, abolished the cruelty of crucifixion, and summoned the first unifying ecumenical council, as well as founding the majestic seat gateway of Constantinople, or Theodulf, the scholarly diplomatic envoy who established the sanctuary of Germigny-des-Prés for study and prayer. But even such heroes of legend were not able to rise above their own darker acts (and bloody hands): Constantine had his own eldest, promising son executed, as well as ordering the murders of a young nephew and a brother-in-law while arranging for his second wife to be scalded in her bathtub.Despite Constantine’s acts of greatness, Lewis notes descriptively that he could be vain, egotistical, selfish, a show-off, ruthless and quick tempered. Even the often steadfast and valiant Galla Placidia, who sacrificed her own fate to maintain the crumbling order of the empire, was capable of her own acts of cruelty, turning over a guardian (if disliked) cousin for political homicide.

Intrigue and family murders often went hand in hand with the political follies of one hapless emperor after another: Lewis notes that of a parade of 26 emperors in the half century between 235 and 285, only one or two actually died a natural death. One later wonderful fool named Augustus Honorius preferred to remove himself far from the hazards of Rome to raise his beloved flock of chickens in the marshy town of Ravenna. When informed that Rome had been sacked by the Visigoth invaders, Honorius confused its fate with that of his prized fowl of the same name. But I just fed her with my own hands, he sighed and was greatlyrelieved to learn it was Rome the city and not Rome the bird that had perished.

Lewis’ true heroes seem to be that hardy band of anonymous monks who sustained themselves in the island cliff dwellings of Skellig Michael off the Irish Sea, preserving both Latin and Greek scholarship from the vulgar decline of both language and scholarship throughout much of the rest of Europe during the long period commonly depicted as its Dark Ages. Such meticulous preservation was, says Lewis, the true Golden Age of Ireland. In her opening passages, Lewis says the mission of sharing her travels with her readers is to allow them passage from one world into another, from the world in which we live our day-to-day lives to one beyond space and time, from the mundane to the spiritual. She seems to have found that place, at least for her own journey, on Skelling Michael itself. It is not too difficult for the visitor who relaxes in the ambience of Cell B to imagine a monk working there not only in the relatively benign months of summer but also (we hope provided with a cup of warming wine) among the high winds and growing cold of winter, the sea below running high, its salty odor permeating the air, while over the summit of Skellig Michael the wild goose raised its lonesome cry. Perhaps our industrious man is studying one of the Gospels, but he could equally well be reading of the death of Hector on the Plain of Troy or copying the Tain, an Irish epic.

How does Lewis solve her own Grand Mystery to avoid such fates of decline, disarray and disintegration, and build and preserve the places of learning and divine meaning for generations of those future travelers who may follow us to the great shrines of our own time? She offers up an impressive millennia of clues from the ages, but the solutions, she also seems to be warning, are up to us.

In his four decades as a foreign correspondent for Time Magazine, Mr. McWhirter covered many of the present-day conflicts fought on the same lands found in this book, from Asia to Africa and Europe.

Preface

Many fine guidebooks exist which cover the sites selected for this book. This is not one of them. You will not be given exact instructions as to how to reach a site, told about its hours and gift shop, informed as to the delights of its tea room (should it have one). The intent of Visitors to the Past is altogether different. The author wants you to step into the past, to meet the people associated with the monument you are visiting, to see it in the context of the history of its time.

If the author has done her part successfully, you will share the humor and the tragedy of bygone eras, see how individuals have handled challenges well, and not so well, discover how they created beauty and meaning in their architecture and art. For example, the mid-fourth century Mausoleum of Santa Costanza (Rome) may (or may not) be the final resting place of final resting place of the daughter of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire. What made this man embrace the new religion? Was his daughter a saint as santa Costanza implies? Or was the woman a she-devil? And how was Christianity able to turn the art/architecture of the pagan era toward its own purposes?

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (Ravenna, Italy) is not just a splendid visual experience, though this it certainly is, UNESCO experts having pronounced it one of the most artistically perfect of mosaic monuments. The small building is a fitting tribute to the life of a bright, adventuresome woman who played a major role in her world, a world which was falling apart and transitioning into something altogether different.

The monastery of Skellig Michael, perched high on an imposing pile of gray rock jutting into the Atlantic Ocean eight miles off the southwest coast of Ireland, provides the adventuresome visitor to the past with an entirely different experience. There are no frescos or mosaics, but beehive huts so well constructed that they are quite habitable even today. And there is no specific person with whom we can identify like Costanza or Galla Placidia, but the spirits of industrious and creative monks of the past do seem to linger. Thomas Cahill may have been overstating things when he claimed that the Irish saved civilization. However, their contribution was critical. Skellig Michael gives us the opportunity to connect with this remarkable moment of the past.

Theodulf, a key player in the of the world of Charlemagne ( r. 768-814), was an advisor to the great king and conqueror, served as one of his trusted royal envoys, and played an active role in the efforts of Charles to improve the literacy and educational standards in his empire. In the process Theodulf, who was extremely interested in both art and theology, became involved in a controversy concerning the nature and role of religious imagery. When he built his oratory (place for prayer) at Germigny-des-Prés in the verdant Loire Valley of France he came up with his own highly original solution to this perplexing problem, as we shall see.

And finally we arrive in Constantinople/Istanbul. There we have come full circle in a sense because Constantinople (a refounding and expansion of the small town of Byzantium on the Bosphorus) was the creation of Costanza’s father, Constantine the Great. The city endured for more than a millennium. St. Savior in Chora, the