Feature
All Things New
Pagan Despair Ends with the Hope & Charity of God in Christ
I was standing before a hundred or so people, parents and students, giving a special Family Day lecture, to show what sorts of things we talk about in our Development of Western Civilization program and, more than that, to show just a bit of what can happen in a school whose classrooms are all marked with a crucifix.
“Where is hope to be found?” I asked, remarking that at the end of Rome’s civil war, with the accession of Augustus Caesar, the poet Virgil had attempted to resuscitate in epic poetry the old Roman virtue of pietas. That virtue had embraced one’s duty to one’s father, to the patria or fatherland, to the household gods (tutelary ancestral shades), and to the great gods. But in Virgil’s vision it seems also to embrace what the Italian language, centuries later, would mean by pieta: mercy for weak and suffering mankind.
Virgil at times suggests that if there is any hope for us in this world of labor and tears, it is in the practice of pietas. So in the Aeneid he defines his hero Aeneas not by the implacable wrath of Achilles, nor by the cunning of Odysseus, but by piety. “ Sum pius Aeneas,” says the hero, without any trace of pride—“I am pious Aeneas.” He fights when he needs to, and not for the delight of battle. He gives up his desire to die with the fall of his native Troy, and instead follows the will of the gods to lead his refugee people to a new land. He does not concoct fine plans for the defeat of his enemies, but consults with his aged father Anchises, both on earth and even in the underworld, for advice on where he should sail, or whom he should seek for an ally in Italy, where the Trojans have disembarked.
Bernini sculpted Aeneas in his emblematic moment of piety: leading his father and young son safely out of Troy. He carries his crippled father, having thrown a lionskin over his shoulders for the old man’s comfort, while the father carries the holy figurines of the household gods. Ascanius, Aeneas’s son, follows closely behind, carrying a small lamp.
A Difficult & Unhappy Life
Aeneas has defined his life by piety. What has he gotten for it? He watches as the flames devour Troy. From the ramparts of the palace he sees the son of the now dead Achilles battering down the king’s door, to rape and pollute with blood the penetralia, the sacred womb of the house, its hearth and shrine. He loses his wife in the chaos as they flee the city. He loses his father before they reach Italy. He falls in love with the Carthaginian widow, Queen Dido, only to be told by the gods that he must leave her; she, driven mad by desire and wrath, pronounces a curse of unending enmity between his people and hers, and takes her own life.
He visits his father in the underworld, and attempts to embrace him, but his arms pass through the shadow as through air. He strikes a marriage agreement with the daughter of the Italian king, Latinus, but that provokes a war between the Trojans and Turnus, the daughter’s former betrothed. He allies himself with a Greek émigré named Evander, “Good Man” in Greek, and promises to bring his son Pallas back safe from the battlefield; it is a promise he proves unable to keep, as Turnus kills the lad in battle and strips him of his belt.
Time and again, Aeneas loses those he loves the most. His life is difficult and unhappy, and it is prophesied that it will also be short. On the morning before he is to decide the war with Turnus by single combat, he utters these words of a loyal but weary father:
True work and manhood learn from me, my son;
Good fortune you can learn from someone else.
The Impossible Conflict
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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