Roman Waters

The Catholic Thing

The English poet John Keats spent the last years of his short life in Rome, wrote most of the handful of great poems that have made him famous in the Eternal City, died - and is buried - there. His tombstone in the Protestant Cemetery (in Italian, wonderfully called the Cimitero Acattolico, i.e. "A-Catholic" = Non-Catholic Cemetery) bears the inscription "Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
An admirer of the poetry - which at its best is quite worth remembering (it's October and "To Autumn" is a good read) - might like to think that the line is not just a whiny, last Romantic poet's blast at unnamed "enemies," who are also mentioned on the tombstone. Other meanings than the poet intended might also be quite possible. In any event, the significance of that line goes far beyond Keats because all of our names are written in water - unless they're written in the Book of Life.
Perhaps it's sheer weariness as the Synod on Synodality spluttered to its laborious end, but I think there's a great deal of wisdom in contemplating the transitoriness of human existence, wisdom that makes us live better in this world too. And helps us to better consider the mission of the Church, synodal or otherwise.
Memento mori. Remember that you will die. The second-century Christian Tertullian wrote that when a pagan general entered Rome in a glorious "triumph" after a victory, someone in the chariot with him would whisper, "Look to yourself. Remember you are a man. Remember that you will die." (Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori.)
There's a dispute among scholars - what else is new? - about whether this is, historically, true. But there's no question that both the great ancient pagan philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, and the early Christians all agreed that it's good for us to have a healthy sense of the shortness of life, the inevitability of death, and the vastness of eternity.
In Rome, it's often easier to sense that than elsewhere. In a strange paradox, the very decay and partial survival and jumbled co-existence of so much ancient, medieval, Renaissance, modern - simultaneously, in every nook and cranny - conveys the truth that all earthly things are imperfect, pass away, and yet something - not easy to grasp, but almost visible - escapes the grip of time.
When you're in Rome, you always want to pray at the tomb of St. Peter. But I've often also made it a kind of parting ceremony, on my last evening of each visit in Rome, to go to the place on the Capitoline Hill where Edward Gibbon, listening to the monks chanting vespers in the Forum below, conceived the idea of writing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. For all its beautiful language and grandeur, scholars are not in disagreement that a good part of that great work is wrong in its Enlightenment assumptions and arrogance, not least its animus against the Church. But it was in that same spot that, centuries later, the great convert Christopher Dawson, as a nineteen-year-old young man, conceived the idea of writing his own magnificent history of Catholic culture.
Both men intuited at some deep level that the waters of history, highly significant waters, had flowed through that spot and the forum beneath. (The Mamertine Prison on that side of the hill, which you can still visit, held St. Paul and maybe St. Peter at some point.) In fact, literal waters - the Aqua Marcia - one of the three major aqueducts the ancient Romans built, still flow from a tap there.
It took me years finally to track this down, but it seems that Pius IX renewed the ancient stream in 1870. With the result that you can drink - as I often have on those parting evenings - cool, clear waters from the Tiburtine Mountains, just as an ancient Roman pagan - or St. Peter or Paul - might have around the time of Jesus.
There was a time - within my lifetime I think - when the Catholic Church suggested to many people something like those living waters. You didn't have to know much about ecclesial hi...