Pietas and the Origins of Western Culture

ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURES of the Latin language is its intimate involvement with the spiritual and moral history of our civilization. A Latin student who is familiar only with the ancient Romans may miss out on the wider relevance more or less assumed in earlier centuries, when Latin was used for almost all topics. In this essay I would like to illustrate the connection between Latinity and Western civilization by studying the experience behind the word pietas, the source of English "piety," but also of "pity," and Italian pietà. Like most Latin words, pietas began as an ancient Roman word. But the reality the Romans would eventually capture in the word pietas was in existence before the Romans, and would flower long after them, giving new depths to the word before it passed into modern English. Hence the meaning of the Latin word is not simply Roman but involves Greek precedents as well as subsequent Christian and medieval transformations: the field of view reaches out beyond the usual disciplinary precincts to the more-than Roman reality of the first millennium or so of Western culture, that is, from about 500 years before Christ to about 700 years after Christ. A panoramic perspective seems necessary, despite its disadvantages, if we are concerned not simply with a Latin word but with the recovery of a sense of our own cultural roots as children of Western European Christendom. Indeed, it would seem worthwhile--an act of pietas, in fact--to spend a little time understanding what was actually meant by the word in the ancient and early medieval periods.

My plan is to trace this progress by visiting our ancient past at three selected places. Our first stop will be the fifth century before Christ, to visit the classical Greeks, and their Panhellenic athletic competitions; the second stop will be five centuries later, at the heyday of the Roman Empire, when it ruled, as Gibbon said, "the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilized portion of mankind"; our third and final stop will be another five or six centuries after that, to witness one scene (among many possible) of the birth process of Western Christendom, in the foundation of Eichstätt, the site of Germany's sole Catholic University today. ¹ The journey must be selective in both theme and chronological scope: my intention is to capture something of the reality of pietas, to isolate a certain mysterious quality behind the changing and diverse manifestations. Through primary texts and recent scholarly interpretation, we can go a certain way in recreating an ancient spiritual and moral atmosphere, and renew our grasp of pietas today, for today's conditions.

Before our departure on this journey, I would like to equip you with a "traveling kit," a handy image of classical Latin pietas, as illustrated by Rome's greatest poet, Vergil. It is a broader notion than "formal religious devotion." It is the image of a "family man": a man carrying his father on his back and leading his son by the hand. The part of Vergil's Aeneid that tells of the Fall of Troy, the Trojan Horse, and the rest, reaches its climactic moment in this image (Book II, lines 699-729), which the poet is supposed to have adapted from popular artistic renditions of his time. ² The scene is particularly significant because it marks a great moment of conversion in the soul of the hero Aeneas: for instead of fighting to the death to defend the lost cause of burning Troy, instead of "going down with the ship," Aeneas has finally taken heed of the divine portents--a shimmering light on his infant son's head, a blazing meteor in the sky--and has at last resolved to leave his homeland with his immediate family and the city gods (small statues rescued from the city shrine, carried...