(We bloggers have been enjoined to post this summer on travels that we have taken to Europe. The reflection below was derived from a trip to Italy [Rome, Florence, and Oriveto] and Istanbul, Turkey.)<\/p>\n
In the late 900s, the Byzantine Emperor Basil (\u201cthe Bulgar Slayer\u201d) led an army from Constantinople against the Bulgars who had invaded his territories in Greece. Defeated at first, he raised new armies and kept returning to the fray. The turning point finally came in 1014 when his imperial troops managed to capture fifteen thousand Bulgar warriors. Instead of killing his captives, he decided to blind them, except for one in every one hundred, whom he left with one eye each so that they could lead their comrades back home.<\/p>\n
One hundred and fifty eyes short of the blind leading the blind, the image of the mutilated Bulgars marching home, defeated, possesses an arresting, suggestive power. Those of us who attempt to know the past and claim that knowledge of it affords some guidance to the present might well identify with the one-eyed Bulgars: we see in part and we have a capacity to lead; but we recognize our defeats and limitations, the stubborn lacunae of what we cannot see and do not know. <\/p>\n
This awareness was driven home to me recently on a study trip abroad, in which I led several former students to Italy, to the cities of Orvieto, Florence, and Rome. Afterward, I continued traveling on my own to Istanbul, Turkey, the erstwhile \u201cNuova Roma\u201d or Constantinople (330) until its sack by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, a red-letter date in world history. It was this latter, personal leg of the journey that prompted me to read up on the history of Istanbul, during which I encountered the curious story of Basil and the eyeless Bulgars.<\/p>\n
But for the theme of this essay\u2014the imponderability of the past\u2014the first part of the trip with the students and the solo one afterward must be understood together. For the study trip to Italy, we had selected as our topic: \u201cVirtue and Vice: Explorations in History, Ethics, and Art, and Place,\u201d a capacious set of foci, I admit. Our joint readings included Dante\u2019s Purgatorio and some short works by the twentieth-century Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, notably one of his classics, The Four Cardinal Virtues<\/em>. In it, Pieper discusses the cardinal or classical virtues of Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance, which first appear in Plato\u2019s Republic<\/em>. They were later baptized into Christian thought, most influentially in Thomas Aquinas\u2019s Summa Theologiae<\/em>, and subordinated to the New-Testament theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love. <\/p>\n