Welcome back book lovers to the second in a series of diaries about the
23rd annual Miami Book Fair International - henceforth
MBFI - held each year in November. Hailed and recognized worldwide as the biggest and best of book fairs, the
line-up of visiting authors for 2006 is stunning!
All diaries in this series are first-hand accounts of the events I attend over the next seven days. "Don't get frustrated with me because you have to make choices," said Book Fair co-founder and godfather extraordinaire, Mitch Kaplan, as he opened the week with welcoming remarks celebrating the literary arts. And I echo his sentiment. To please you (and myself!) I'll be trying to catch novelists, historians, politicians, and writers of as many "species" as one person can when having to choose among hundreds. Then I'll bring you the stories.
Now, let's spend time - Medieval time - with Thomas Cahill while he discusses Mysteries of the Middle Ages.
Before we dive in I want to tell you that Thomas Cahill was in the front row of the audience the night before last listening to
Frank McCourt expound on the
miseries of being a high school teacher for thirty years. Fellow Irishmen clan together? I don't know how true that may be because I didn't see Frank at Tom's lecture.
Cahill, an unprepossessing man dressed in a quiet suit and tie, arrived prepared with notes and slides to deliver his lecture on his latest book. It is number five of his projected seven-volume series on the history of Western Civilization, called The Hinges of History. [Books in this series will be listed at the end of this diary.] Little did the several hundred who had gathered to hear Cahill know that this Jesuit-educated scholar was about to provide his listeners with a 12th C. immersion.
"I've spent the last few years of my life in the Middle Ages," he opened. Cahill is renowned for his dedicated scholarship in producing his books. A graduate of Fordham University, he has an MFA in film and dramatic literature at Columbia University, and has studied scripture at New York's Union Theological Seminary and the Hebrew Bible for two years as a Visiting Scholar at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America before writing The Gifts of the Jews. He also holds an honorary doctorate, reads French and Italian, served as the North American education correspondent for the Times of London, and was for many years a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Where did he find the time to spend in the Middle Ages?
"When all's said and done, what stands out to me are two qualities of Medieval life: the playfulness and the heightened state of visual awareness. The idea of incarnation, especially as illustrated by Jesus' birth and resurrection, takes special place. It was during this time that the mankind decided that life is a comedy, not a tragedy, unlike the attitude of the Classical Era," Cahill began. From that point, he used examples of literature, art, architecture, drama, and religion to illustrate his thesis.
Slides projected on two sides of the room showed companion visual aids to his points, proving, I suppose, that tonight's Miami audience had at least one shared characteristic with their predecessors. Cahill and we listeners plunged into the night's program.
He led off, citing the illuminated manuscripts done by Irish monks (who saved civilization!) that exhibit playful capital letters, exaggeratedly ornate; the marginalia contain whimsical drawings of twining vines, diving birds, cavorting sheep; the corner margins often hold insets of goofy little Medieval faces peeking out from behind leaves. For example, the Book of Kells, on a page of "begats" tracing Jesus' genealogy, the illuminator has included a self-portrait. "He's no beauty," Cahill remarks, and we see he's right, "nor does he bother to idealize himself." The figure is rather stiff and awkward, but an Etruscan smile plays around his lips.
Cahill uses the pointer and directs everyone's eyes to the figure's lap. "But he recognizes that, like Jesus, he is able to regenerate himself, so he's pulled out his own generative organ. . ." And everyone laughs at the figure's erect penis. Fun over, Cahill drives home his intent, "Incarnationalism - God becoming one of us, being of us - brought about the end of Roman brutishness: the eradication of gladiatorism, crucifixion of prisoners, the lighting of human torches to illuminate their evening frolics. The unbending Romans metamorphosed into the life-loving Italians we know today."
Cahill elaborated the idea of incarnationalism by discussing the naturalizing of the Madonna during the Middle Ages. An early image of her from this time shows a seated, robed woman, her head tilted, with a gentle and expressive mouth, who is seen cradling an infant on her lap and offering her breast in a pose as ancient as man himself. The forbidding chilly Virgin of Byzantine portrayals becomes Everyman's Mother in Medieval Europe. Child and mother are approachable because they are of the people, a perfect rendition of the sentiment from a hymn of the time, "God is born from the guts of a girl."
Even the adult Jesus morphs from the down-at-the-mouth steely-eyed god seen in Byzantine icons, becoming, as the golden mosaic ceiling of Santa Maria of Trastevere's dome beautifully displays, a relaxed Italian male, big feet planted firmly on the ground, legs splayed apart, his affectionate mother, just ascended to heaven where they are once again reunited, is embraced by his powerful arm that drapes across her shoulders, his right hand cupping her to him. Jesus' face, inclined toward his mother, is open, youthful, full of soft love as well as obvious good humor. Cahill emphasizes, "You almost see the Italian youth, capriccioso. He seems to be about to murmur, 'Mama' in her ear. In this single instant, western art is freed from iconic representation. It tell us, 'If saints can hug, so can we,'" said Cahill.
Consider the Cathedral at Chartres, decades in the making. It seems to have been built by everyone in Europe who could get there. Men, women, even children; peasants, scholars, tradesmen, and nobles were united in undertaking this gargantuan task pitched in. "Before beginning work, all made confession. Then they harnessed themselves to their carts which were variously filled with bricks, or stones, or grain, or tools - whatever they could bring to the project - and pulled their load to Chartres," Cahill tells us. "One witness to that moment in history writes in a letter to a friend, 'All is accomplished in such silence that nothing of a human voice is heard. One would think not a person is present.'" It was an era when stained glass depictions of Biblical tales functioned as the Bible itself to the illiterates who could "read" the windows when they couldn't read the page.
Feminism asserted itself, epitomized by women such as Hildegard of Bingen and Eleanor of Aquitaine. One a writer, the other a ruler. Both were highly educated women who occupied positions of power - the first a religious advisor and the second a queen. Both women were sexually liberated - Hildegard writing a description of female orgasm, Eleanor, discarding a boring French husband-king and ensnaring a younger, more virile and ambitious English husband-king. Eighty-two when she died, nearly six feet tall when she lived, Eleanor's supine effigy reclines on her tomb, head propped comfortably on a stone pillow, diadem at just the right angle, still beautiful in age (a snood helps keep the chin up!), reading an open book that is propped in her hands and resting on her tummy. A smile of pure enjoyment illuminates her intelligent oval face. She is the epitome of the "lady" of her age and a person we would consider modern today.
Cahill lectured for nearly an hour and a half, highlighting the importance of symbolism in the art of the Middle Ages, indicating how 12th C. Christians "defused" the past potency of pagan gods by depicting them as baby Jupiter or baby Neptune. Demystifying mythologies in drawings of unicorns bathing their horns in water supposedly to purify it before a virgin either bathed or drank. Creating visual metaphors for their current mythologies in drawings flooded with creatures nourishing one another or themselves among the myriad branches of a giant acanthus, signifying the spiritual nourishment received from God's love for man and all the world's creatures.
But it is in the life of St. Francis that Cahill, the historian, finds is both the Exception and at the same time the Exemplar of his Age. Francis, the first hippie. Beyond his impact on Pope Innocent III, who had a dream in which his church was leaning, about to tumble into a destroyed wreck to the ground, Francis was a force. In the dream, only one man was able to prop the pope's endangered cathedral back up. Francis of Assisi, who had in real life disrobed himself in front of the Pope and the entire citizenry of his home town was a showman. Embarrassed at his son's insistence on dressing only in a raggedy wardrobe and angered at Francis' rejection of him and the mercantile life he had hoped the young man would take over one day, the father dragged his son into the court of the public square. Francis agreed that he had wronged his father, stepped away, disrobed, placed a bag full of money on the pile of discarded clothes and presented all to his father, standing naked in the sun, rejecting his earthly father for his heavenly one and his wealth for vows of total poverty. Pope Innocent covered the naked defendant with his own great cloak had granted him his religious order.
Francis also influenced the break-out painter of his day. It is Giotto who painted his portait and depicted the life of St. Francis in touching scenes that showed the simple humanity of one of the world's saintliest men. St. Francis said, "Don't be surprised if one day I turn up with children of my own." We see the possibility of that being true in Giotto's painting of St. Clare at the side of her dearest friend's corpse, whose face is tender and humane in death, totally earthly in expression despite the stigmata visible on his hands. And we know these two must have been very good friends indeed.
The Middle Ages was an era during which more and more people enjoyed the luxury of free time that prosperity brings. The world had rebounded in hope from the verge of collapse in the Dark Ages; civilization appeared safe once more. It did not anticipate reeling nearly to destruction once again from the Black Death that would eliminate a full third of Europe's population two centuries later. It was, in a sense, a mini-Renaissance. People traveled, visiting newly burgeoning cities like Paris, going off to the new universities in Padua, making trips to visit the relics in the proto-Gothic churches of Siena. Pilgrimages were the "cruise vacations" of the day. "My hope," concluded Cahill, referring to Mysteries of the Middle Ages, "is that you will read the book itself and sign up for the full pilgrimage." Many of us went home last night sure that we would.
Books in the Thomas Cahill series Hinges of History
How the Irish Saved Civilization
The Gifts of the Jews
Desire of the Everlasting Hills
Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea
Mysteries of the Middle Ages
Next Installment: Edward P. Jones NYT best-selling author, MacArthur Fellow, and Penn-Faulkner Award winner.