thoughts in the Roman Forum

Last Friday and Saturday I was in Rome. Not Rome New York, but the real Rome, the original Rome, the Rome that gave us so much of Western Civilization from words like “republic” and “senate” to the traditions of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

CRT Chair Lord Brennan and I were there to call on Jean Paul Cardinal Tauran, the president of the Pontifical Council on Inter-religious Dialogue. A member of our World Advisory Council, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick had suggested the meeting so that we might brief the Council on our very exciting and constructive work on Qur’anic guidance for good governance with scholars at the International Islamic University Malaysia.

After our call on the Cardinal, John Dalla Costa very kindly came down from Tuscany where he is writing so that we could visit and catch up. John has been very helpful to the CRT and has written wonderfully insightful books on ethics and business.

John took me to see a bronze statute of St Francis of Assizi near the Basilica of St John in the Lateran. Then we went to walk around the old Forum of Rome. John wanted to see the mural on the Arch of Titus where Roman soldiers after sacking Jerusalem are marching off with a sacred menorah. We reflected on all the sadness that has flown from that event, down to today’s bitterness, violence, and intransigence in the Holy Land.

We walked along the Via Sacra towards the Capitoline hill and stood by the Senate building. We walked where Cicero had walked and Ceasar, Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Brutus and Mark Antony too. In that building Cicero had called out Catiline and delivered his damning speeches on Antony’s brutal vulgarity and excessively covetous ambition.

We stood where, the story goes, Ceasar’s body was burned and riots broke out seeking vengeance against his assassins.

We stood where the Roman Republic was born and where it died.

Cicero in a casual letter to his friend Atticus put his finger on the cause of death. It was July 59 BC; the Republic was not yet dead, but the political cancer of military dictatorship that would finally kill it was already metastasizing among the Romans. Cicero in writing to Atticus pointed to a cultural change that opened the door to the growth of that cancer. He said that Romans were still free in their thoughts and words to criticize abuses of power, but that their “virtue was in chain” – virtutem adligatatem.

They had lost efficacious will and the resolve to stand up and do what needed to be done. The energy nourishing civic virtue was evaporating.

Loss of virtue is a disease of our time as well. The WTO can’t get agreement on elimination subsidies for agriculture; the G8 leaders can’t act on global warming; the EU is powerless in front of Russia’s hegemony over Abkazia and South Ossetia. Financial intermediaries have given us another round of turmoil, losses, and crisis in global credit markets.

Lord Brennan said to me in Rome that the developed world seems overcome by greed and the developing world by corruption.

So, how do we invigorate civic virtue? How do we keep our own personal virtue “unchained”?

The Caux Round Table can only succeed in a world where such virtue counts for something. Interest and material prosperity can only go so far as moral causes and they must, by the nature of their superficiality, fall short of giving us a foundation for genuine leadership.

Rome gave me some needed clues about the source of virtue. We get it through religion.

In the Forum John and I passed the temple of Vesta, the cult of a patroness founded by Numa Pompilius, Rome’s founding king who grounded community identity and culture on something divine. Religion, a cult, liturgy, prayers, flames guarded day and night by virgins from elite families, confidence, something to value and protect – Numa set in place a complex of reassurance, motivation, guidance through the use of religious inspiration and imagery.

So too the Athenians in their heyday had the cult of Athena in the Parthenon; Hammurabi grounded his code of laws on divine inspiration. More and more examples of similar human dynamics came to my mind as I looked at the surviving ruins of Numa’s little round temple.

Later Roman religiousity sustained the theme. Walking back to my hotel, I popped in and out of several great churches, including St Peter’s. Statues and pictures of Christian martyrs glorified in these churches somehow stood out in my mind. It was their religious faith that gave them purpose, courage and sustaining willfulness. The tomb of the founder of the Jesuit order seemed another case in point on the link between faith and dedication to service.

This conclusion is far from satisfactory. Religion is divisive; it gives rise to intolerance, to obscurantism, to the eclipse of reason and common sense; it seduces us into pride and hubris that we are righteous and select – saints chosen by our God to do his or her work here on earth.

Moreover, today, conversations about religion are uncomfortable and avoided. For some good reasons, may I add. Those who need virtue in lay and secular undertakings – say, business, politics, government, journalism, academia – are more and more cut off from public affirmation of the deepest and best source of meaning and purpose. We live with disenchantment and suffer for it.

I wonder what Cicero would recommend under the circumstances? After all, his efforts to save his republic came to naught.