Constitutional?

Any readers hoping for a continuation of the travelogue of our Turkish travels—supposing that there might be any such—will have to wait a while.  I must this week answer the siren’s invitation to join with a couple million of my fellow bloguistes in the great bloviation contest called “The Health Care Debate”.  For as I write this, much of the nation is on tender hooks, as a neighbor of mine used to call them, awaiting the judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States concerning the “constitutionality” of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

            I do have ideas concerning health, health care, individual mandates, interstate commerce, the social contract, broccoli, the lameness of our Congress as exemplified by the names assigned to pieces of legislation and numerous other topics of potential relevance.  However, worry not; I have no intention of inflicting them upon you.  They are utterly lacking in originality or authority.  My more neglected topic is “constitutionality” on its own, or would be if constitutionality ever traveled on its own.  In fact its hermeneutical sibling, “unconstitutionality,” never leaves its side.  So what are constitutionality and unconstitutionality?

            Much of the lightless heat of the Health Care Debate arises from an imperfect understanding of that question, and therefore necessarily of its correct answer, the correct answer being that constitutionality and unconstitutionality are the solemnly stated majority views of the Supreme Court at any particular time.  It matters not a whit whether such opinions “defy common sense,” “reflect flawed thinking,” “find no support in the plain language of Article Whatever,” or any of other characterizations of them to be found in the editorial pages of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

            According to one effusive Democrat “Obama Care” (the popular sobriquet for the PP&ACA of 2010) must be regarded as a “national glory”.  Well, Lewis Carroll knows all about that.

“I don't know what you mean by ‘glory’,” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant ‘there's a nice knock-down argument for you’!”

“But ‘glory’ doesn't mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” 

That’s sort of how it is with constitutionality and unconstitutionality.  We hope that the justices will avoid the more flamboyant indeterminacies of contemporary literary criticism and will abstain from the “jouissance” of the “free play of signifiers” and that sort of thing.  Indeed if their judgments were found by a large majority of the citizenry to be consistently wacky—if for example they confused the noun tenter (an obsolete device used in stretching fabric) with the adjective tender—we might soon enough have riots in the streets.  But that hasn’t happened yet.

            If you agree to play a game according to rules, you are stuck with the decisions of the duly constituted arbiter of the rules—Hoyle, the Marquis of Queensbury, the American Chess Federation, the line-judge, the first-base umpire, or whatever.  You have to do that even if from your first-row seat you had a clearer view of the play than he did.

            If what the arbiter is arbitrating is a written document, differences of opinion are practically inevitable, and probably even desirable.  What is the more interesting game—back to baseball—the one in which the score is 9-0, or the one in which the score is 5-4?  The more certain one is of the meaning of the controlling document, the more certain there will be controversy.

            The Constitution is our secular Holy Writ, and what is “constitutional” is very like what is “scriptural”.  Briefly consider the Roman doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation.  (If you find the analogy bizarre, think broccoli.)  This doctrine maintained, and sometimes still does, that the priest’s intentional words effect a supernatural transformation of the “elements” of the Eucharist—that is, the bread and the wine.  Although the bread and the wine continue to manifest their familiar “accidents” (taste, touch, smell, visual appearance) their “substance” (what they really are) has been changed into the Body and Blood of Christ.  Note in passing that even to engage with the doctrine you must accept the Aristotelian metaphysical vocabulary of substance and accident.  But is the doctrine scriptural?  Well, Jesus is reported in Scripture as saying, while distributing bread and wine to his friends, “This is my body…This is my blood…”

            “So what?” said some of the Reformers.  Jesus also said in Scripture that he was a light, a door, a vine, and a pathway, among several other things.  He was not talking Aristotelian metaphysics; he was using figurative language.  One of the Anglican articles of religion (1562) says this:  “Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions.”  The arguments on this issue could be quite sanguinary, leading to unpleasant trips to stake or gibbet.  In time, fortunately, they softened.  Not too long ago a commission of Roman Catholics and Anglicans published a joint statement of shared belief in the Eucharist that contained elements for the espousal of which both Roman Catholics and Anglicans been executed in the sixteenth century.

            Queen Elizabeth I decided the issue thus, in an internal vote of 4.6 to 4.4:

Christ was the Word that spake it.
He took the bread and break it;
And what his words did make it
That I believe and take it. 

"It says in the Bible..."

           

 Most of the problems of the world have been caused not by uncertainty but by certainty.  Our politics are full of very certain people, and these people seem to have a huge appetite for power.  Great power animated by absolute certainly can be an awful thing.  The framers of the Constitution, knowing this to be true, did as much as possible to delimit political power.  When asked whether she was certain that her PP&ACA of 2010 was “constitutional”, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was incredulous that anyone could so much as ask the question.  Are you serious? I fear there was nothing rhetorical or disingenuous about her shock.  She honestly couldn’t believe that an intelligent person could fail to share her own certainty—a certainty so compelling that she seems never before even to have entertained the question.  I myself am uncertain.  I'll have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

Cappadocian Alterity

As we were planning our Turkish trip, we knew that the offerings were so rich that we would have to make a list of priorities; and we quickly agreed on a few destinations that we regarded as musts.  The first of these was Cappadocia, though in retrospect I realize I didn’t know the half of it.  I wanted to see the ancient Christian remains there.  The three great “Cappadocian fathers” of the fourth century (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa) are famous figures in late antique intellectual history, and each played an important role in the efflorescence of monasticism.  I wanted to see where they hung out.  With the help of some of Joan’s splendid photographs, and one or two others, you can see too.

            For one of the central subjects of my life’s work as a scholar is the cultural significance of Christian asceticism in pre-Reformation Christendom.  For something like a thousand years monks and nuns had a near monopoly on the means of literary and artistic production.  For example, there is but one writer of Anglo-Saxon whom we can name who was not a monk, and that one, King Alfred, was the lavish patron of monks and monasteries.  The monastic vision naturally left a spiritual imprint on all they did.  Medieval women in particular would have practically no artistic history were it not for the religious houses that, in confining them, gave them a protected arena for the exercise of their talents.

            Monastic life in the ancient Near East was rigorous, dramatic, and to the later European imagination lurid.  The Egyptian anchorite Anthony, whose biography remained a bestseller for several centuries, inspired generations of desert-dwellers (the meaning of the word hermits) who competed with each other in physical austerities, living among the rocks, in caves, in the abandoned lairs of wild animals, atop the pillars of ruined temples.  Hundreds, thousands followed his example.  The old monks had a motto: The desert a city!  That was not a bad description of the Thebaid in Egypt, of parts of the Palestinian desert, or of Cappadocia.  There is in the Uffizi in Florence a charming painting by Gerardo di Jacopo Starnina (ca. 1400) imagining the busy desert of the Thebaid.

The desert a city (Starnina's "Thebaid")

             We like to see our world in terms of sharp distinctions and differences.  So-and-so, we hear said “must be living on a different planet.”  In fact, from a historical-cultural point of view the differences between Rush Limbaugh and Paul Krugman are minute and those between Barak Obama and Mitt Romney nonexistent.  Historians and anthropologists have had to shape a technical term to talk about real cultural difference.  It is alterity (differentness), based in the Latin alter, something really other, so other that it’s hard to imagine: the religious troglodytes of ancient Cappadocia, perhaps.

            The ancient monks thought of their enterprise as a quest for moral perfection, but so other was their way of thinking that the great nineteenth-century historian W. E. H. Lecky (high on my list of Victorian sages) could write thus concerning Antonine eremitism in his History of European Morals:

There is, perhaps, no phase in the moral history of mankind, of a deeper or more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates or Cato. For about two centuries, the hideous maceration of the body was regarded as the highest proof of excellence. St. Jerome declares, with a thrill of admiration, how he had seen a monk, who for thirty years had lived exclusively on a small portion of barley bread and of muddy water; another, who lived in a hole and never eat more than five figs for his daily repast; a third, who cut his hair only on Easter Sunday, who never washed his clothes, who never changed his tunic till it fell to pieces, who starved himself till his eyes grew dim, and his skin "like a pumice stone," and whose merits, shown by these austerities, Homer himself would be unable to recount.

What Homer cannot recount it would be unwise of Fleming to attempt.  But I can tell you that in my experience internal Turkish air travel is inexpensive and efficient.  The flight from Izmir to Kayseri, where we arrived in the dusk, was brief but pleasurable.  Kayseri (ex-Caesarea, Basil’s hometown) is from what I could see in the gathering dark a large, dingy, modern city.  We were met by a driver, who immediately took off for Göreme, the “cave” city that is the tourist heart of Cappadocia.  It’s called a “cave” city because it is set among about a thousand caves carved out in ancient times from the geologically weird pinnacles and pillars that give the place its lunar appearance.  Everything in this place is cave-like.  There are “cave houses,” “cave restaurants,” and “cave hotels”.   Some of these actually once were, at least partially, caves; others were the products of cave-envy.  This proved problematical, since we were theoretically booked in something called the “Göreme Cave House Hotel”. The driver could not find it, because it did not exist.  There was a “Göreme Cave” Hotel, and there was a “Cave House” Hotel.  After quite a bit of increasingly spooky driving around inthe dark we found the “Göreme House Hotel” where the proprietor, having been rousted by loud bells, cheerfully explained that (a) we were indeed expected, and (b) only a fool would confuse his handsome Ottoman mansion with a cave.

 Bloguiste caving

            The village of Göreme is practically overwhelmed by its touristic vocation.  There is a superfluity of souvenir shops, travel agencies, balloon agents (I’ll explain in a minute), Internet cafés, restauranteurs, and rug salesmen.  The latter two categories are pretty aggressive, though mere pikers by Istanbul standards.  The streets are clogged with backpacking youth and rented motorcycles.  It nonetheless was not without its charm, and the hotel breakfasts were to die for—probably literally, could I have stayed longer.  But the great thing about Göreme is its situation, at the center of the surrounding cave churches and monastic remains.  The place is rightly a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  At the “Open Air Museum”—a short walk from the town, though everybody seems to travel by minivan—one can visualize what the motto “the desert a city” really meant.

 Karanlik Church: Give 'em a fish, or teach 'em to fish?

            Many of the churches have preserved at least some of their wall paintings--the guides invariably call them “frescoes,” which some indeed seem to be--and in a couple they are spectacular.  In general I was surprised by evidence of the comparative moderation of Muslim vandalism in the post-Christian centuries.  Yet more interesting for me than the ecclesiastic art was the evidence of the intimacy of the “domestic” and the “sacred” parts of the desert city, an intimacy so marked as in essence to negate the distinction.  How long this treasure can be preserved is anybody’s guess.  The crowds are huge and oppressive—a kind of “national parks syndrome” in an acute form.  I may be generalizing on the basis of insufficient evidence, but I did get the impression wherever we went that the Turkish government was more interested in the maximization of the tourist revenue stream than in protection and preservation of the monuments.  The “Open Air Museum” is gradually being worn away by its admirers.

           

      In a brief blog essay I can barely touch upon the cultural richness of the place, or give an account of our truly heroic hike, at risk to septuagenarian life and limb, through some volcanic wilderness; but I must mention one other highlight.  I earlier alluded to “balloon agents”.  In fact ballooning is another great tourist activity in Cappadocia.  On our final full day there, a Saturday, we got up at the crack of dawn to join many dozens of other enthusiasts in a great balloon flotilla that sailed out at rooftop height over the strange “chimneys” of the Göreme plain.  For about an hour we enjoyed a perspective on the old desert city that its original inhabitants never could have had.  The balloons are so large and sturdy that my normal fear of heights was easily contained.  Each gondola held sixteen people, four in each of four separate compartments.  Our travel companions were a couple of young Bulgarians who seemed less into monastic rubbernecking than necking of the more conventional, adolescent sort, but to each his own.  I found myself thinking with renewed admiration of old Saint Basil, and a scriptural verse from the Basilian liturgy: “They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”  Poor old Lecky, for all his brilliance and erudition, missed that part.

Some Sounds of Sirince

 Sirince Village as seen from our breakfast nook and...

the nook itself

We were in Turkey for less than three weeks, and I shall not be so preposterous as to suggest that such a brief experience left me with any reliable understanding of the place.  It left, instead, very vivid impressions; and vivid impressions may be the better stuff of blog entries.  I, at least, tire of reading essays by people who “understand” things.  Our time was divided, more or less equally, among four of the more prominent tourist areas: the archaeological sites around Kusadasi on the Aegean, Cappadocia, Antalya (roughly the Turkish Riviera), and Istanbul.  With the help of some of Joan’s splendid photographs I’ll try to touch on each of them over the next few weeks.

            The classical remains in Turkey are opulent, but the jewel in the crown must surely be Ephesus, an archaeological site nearly overwhelming in its size, variety, and impressiveness.  But there are many more in Ionia alone, including Priene, Miletus, and Didyma.  We wanted to see them all, but so did several thousand other people; under these circumstances we wanted a relatively quiet and unfrequented “home base” from which we could strike out each day, and to which we could retreat in the evenings.  We found it in Sirince village, up a winding mountain road for Selçuk (the modern version of Ephesus).

             Library of Ephesus

Visiting Scholar at Library

The term “ethnic cleansing” became malodorous in the 1990s, but in earlier times it was regarded as an admirable ideal by such high-minded outfits as the Presidium of the USSR, the British Empire, and the League of Nations.  Following the horrors of the Great War, the League promulgated a famous “Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations”.  There were large numbers of Orthodox Christians living in Turkey, and large numbers of Muslims living in Greece.  “Oil and water,” said the League of Nations.  “A powderkeg waiting for a lighted match.”  So they took some preventive care.

            The first article of the Convention reads as follows: “As from the 1st May, 1923, there shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory, and of Greek nationals of the Moslem religion established in Greek territory.  These persons shall not return to live in Turkey or Greece respectively without the authorization of the Turkish Government or of the Greek Government respectively.”

Some Franciscans and Others at the Virgin Mary's House (suburban Ephesus)

            In 1923 the entire population of Sirince, an agricultural village with a substantial number of houses and a big Orthodox church, was forced to remove to European Greece.  There were many such, including, of course, Turkish villages in Greece.  That was Sirince’s past.  Its present can probably be summed up in the single word “tourism.”  And a lovely tourist spot it is.

            Wherever we traveled in Turkey, the place exercised the senses.  The exercise was usually pleasant, though if you are still using a drainage system put in place in the Hellenistic Age you may have to tolerate a whiff or two of Antiquity from time to time.   The countryside—whether in the green luxuriance of the western coastal hills or the strange, arid concavities of Cappadocia—is visually vivid and arresting.  You have probably already heard a good deal about the subtle succulence of the Turkish cuisine, which achieves the improbable trifecta of being exotic, scrumptious, and healthy.  But my most lasting sensory impression of beautiful Sirince concerned the place’s sounds.

            The overnight flight from New York to Istanbul requires the better part of ten sleepless hours.  At Istanbul airport we had to hustle to buy our visas (an efficient and fairly inoffensive shakedown) before catching a connecting flight to Izmir (ancient Smyrna).  By the end of the day I was ready for the sack, and might have stayed in it longer than usual had I not been summoned to sentience about four in the morning, by the very loud, but also very beautiful Arabic chanting emanating from the nearby mosque.  This was a recording.  There have to be some real-life muezzins somewhere, but we never encountered one.  They cannot all be in a recording studio in Mecca, can they?  The theory seems to be that if you can have some Enrico Caruso tapes and a powerful amplifier, why bother with local talent.  There are five daily calls to prayer, and they are so engrained in the social fabric as literally to have become background noise.  The only people who seem actually to hear them are tourists—sort of like the police and ambulance sirens in New York, which only non-New Yorkers hear.

            Later in the morning—if five a.m. can be called “late”—began a pleasing symphony of animal noises.  They bray of a donkey is not a sound soon forgotten.  The last time I had heard one was probably forty years ago.  Well, it turns out that donkeys still exist, and they still bray.  We have a pretty fair “dawn chorus” even here in suburban New Jersey, but Sirince had a huge avian choral society in which the domestic rooster vied to a standoff with the twotteromg rooftop sparrows and quacking ducks.  Dogs barked.  Goat-bells tinkled.  Soon it would be time for breakfast—and what a breakfast!

Home again!

 the old: Aspendos  aqueduct

East, West, home’s best.  That’s what I was taught in my childhood and am still inclined to believe, even if the belief is less certain than it once was in my schooldays, when we had to memorize Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Collosus”, the poem now adorning the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor: 

           

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"                                   

            I know a good deal more about “Greek fame” than I did when I set out three weeks ago.  The archaeological sites of Anatolia are stupendous.  In fact I found Turkey so remarkable in so many ways that it will take some serious rumination before I would ever attempt to write anything very serious about it.  But I do have a few reflections concerning the homecoming itself.

            There was a certain amount of grumbling among the Delta SkyMiles Medallion Program members (Gold, Platinum, and now even a Diamond division) jockeying for position around the gate for Flight 25 (Istanbul’s Atatürk to New York’s JFK) when the first passengers allowed to board were a gaggle of swarthy nondescripts, including several startled-looking children who seemed unlikely to be so much as Pewter-Card holders.  The word “allowed” is actually inappropriate.  These people were being herded.  They were, we were told, “an immigration group,” none of whom had ever before been on an airplane and as a consequence needed a brief introduction to seat belts, tray-tables, and seat backs in their original upright position.

            Most of the rest of us were returning after sun-drenched days or weeks among Turkish delights—cultural, topographic, gastronomic, commercial, or sybaritic.  I very much hope that those bright-eyed strangers will find a light held high beside the golden door.  However, finding a door of any kind at the Delta terminal at JFK is no easy thing.  The place is under construction, though the affect is much more of a place under siege.  Large signs promise wonders beginning in May, 2013.  At the moment you have to be bused about a quarter of a mile just to get to the entrance of the plywood tunnels that debouch into what might be a large air-raid shelter or abandoned bowling alley.  The terminal looks more ruinous than many of the fantastic archaeological sites we visited in Turkey—only far less evocative and romantic.  Passport control is expeditious enough, at least for those in the American citizens line—I lost sight of the “immigration group”.  Baggage claim, on the other hand, is nightmarish for all.  Is there any other country in the world where it costs five dollars to get a luggage trolley?  The little carts are held captive by a mechanical device that yields only to cold cash.  They actually have a coin slot on the wretched thing, apparently assuming that arriving visitors will have their twenty quarters at the ready.

            The Lares and Penates of your wretched refuse may be so meager as to render irrelevant any question of baggage trolleys, but your average native-born or naturalized septuagenarian, even when traveling light, might legitimately hope for some fixed-axle relief after a ten-hour flight.  Never mind.  There was one customs agent, tacitly encouraged by three uniformed but neutral onlookers, to “examine” the baggage of a couple of hundred passengers.  He demonstrated that it is perfectly possible to be perfunctory without in any way compromising ponderousness.

            Yet despite such ambiguities, we were soon enough at our daughter’s Greenwich Village apartment hanging out with our delightful granddaughters.  Thus refreshed, your bloguiste proposes to return to his regular pattern of postings next week.

and the new: Delta terminal at JFK
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!