A Temple for Gladiators

When I woke up at six, it was raining again. Or perhaps the rain had continued through the night. When I had gone to bed, the sky had looked an uncertain, washed-out violet sheathed with an impenetrable layer of clouds. Cardinal Pell was saying one last mass at San Clemente that morning before his return to his see in Australia, and I was hoping to meet my antipodean friends one last time. I slipped into a side door after a long trudge down the rainy Via S. Giovanni in Laterano. And I was lost in the silence of the ancient church.

Beneath the basilica's ornate, porphyry-inlaid floor, three levels of churches and crypts and pagan catacombs had lain undiscovered until a century-and-a-half ago by a Dominican archaeologist named Mullooly who is buried amid his Roman maze. At the deepest point lies a cavelike Mithraeum, the cult hall of a strange and sinister sect known as the Mithraists. It was the only of their temples not to be purposely destroyed after the collapse of paganism.

I slipped into the choir enclosure, glimpsing a few familiar faces from the reception two nights ago, and sat down on one of the wooden benches. Around me, the ancient stone walls rose up, enclosing us securely within the church's pillared nave. A chamber within a chamber. The light was vague as twilight, serenely uncertain, and the golden mosaics of the apse sparkled slightly in the sparse floodlights.

They say Romanesque, with its simple balance and perpetual stasis, is the most prayerful of architectures. And even ithe whirling green mosaic vines that sprouted from the foot of the great lapis-blue cross seemed to have a solemn hypnotic solemnity.

Between them sat the four evangelists in black and white, looking curiously like the Dominican priests that served the basilica. Below them the deer panting for the stream quenched his thirst alongside the many-eyed peacocks of immortality. Overhead swarmed the oxen and eagles of Revelation while the hand of the Father reached down from an exotically literal tent of the heavens to plant the cross of His Crucified son on the earth.

Mass was said in the high, raised sanctuary by the Cardinal and twenty white-robed priests, some with monastic capuces under their chausibles. The Cardinal stood enthroned in their midst at the center of the apse, the light glittering on the silvery embroidered shoulders of his robes. His face was in incipient shadow. The faint wintery glow of the four tapers set on the altar seemed to fill the little pillared ciborium over the altar like a lantern set in the half-darkened church. He was enclosed like we were, secure in a small sanctuary of grace.

A reading from St. Paul was recited from the high inward-facing ambo of the choir, and then after one of the clerics had chanted the Alleluia verse, the Gospel was proclaimed as well. Cardinal Pell gave his homily from the lofty altar, speaking of the sactrifices of St. Clement, patron of the church. His anchor sigil was everywhere in the basilica.

It was a sign of the virtue of hope, but here it was a sign of the blood of martyrdom. St. Clement's violent grave had been a watery one, cast originally into the depths of the Black Sea before his relics had been returned to Rome by St. Cyril. I remembered the prayers of the Consistory urging the new Cardinals to defend the faith with their blood, and I then glimpsed the tiny scarlet dot of the Cardinal's skullcap.

The cantor intoned a Gregorian Sanctus and I found myself swept up into the solemn, still song as my lips made simple notes I thought I didn't know. Then came the Canon, recited by the Cardinal with a surpliced assistant on his left hand and another bishop on his right. Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus.

After mass, we were led down to the crypt by an Irish friar. Down to the deepest, darkest level of the Mithraeum. A few grates glimmered in the ceiling far overhead. Green lichen clustered weirdly on vague, crumbling coffered vaults, while a stagnant pool of water gathered beneath the entrance to the Mithraean cave. An altar stood at the far end of the sanctuary, flanked by facing benches, not unlike the choir where we had just heard mass.

The Mithraeans are a mystery, a dark and sinister mystery. We know little of their religion, save for that their initiates were gladiators and soldiers, all male. Persian writings speak of their myths and Roman remains of their worship, but only fleetingly.

A hero named Mithras had sprung like a spark from an immaculate rock, and only he could bring universal peace by slaying bloodlessly a cosmic bull. Instead, a scorpion had bitten it. Blood had been shed, and chaos and sin infected the world. There were seven levels of initiation into the cult, each more secret than the next, while the rite of entrance itself was a grotesque baptism in the blood of sacrificed cattle.

The Mithraeans are only mentioned twice in any known Latin text, in Origen, where he notes their meal of bread and wine was not truly a Eucharist. We know little else of them save that their sanctuaries were the only pagan temples purposefully razed after the fall of Rome rather than falling into simple decrepitude.

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung, in one of the darker, occult moments of his youth, fell into an obsession with Mithra and claimed that Christianity and Mithraism, extinct as it was, were locked in a perpetual combat. He thought, perhaps, he might be the messiah to revive the cult. Mercifully, he did not, though he lived to do other mischief.

Indeed, perhaps, there are similarities between our rites and theirs, but their myths seem a pale hopefing for the blood of the cross. It is as if the Mithraists were groping towards some primordial truth that they knew they could not grasp and could never hope to understand. Like the Sibyls and the preincarnate Logos of the Greeks, their prophetic moment came and went, and perhaps they never realized it themselves.

The most dangerous errors are the ones that seem close to the truth. Julian the Apostate, in his war on Christianity, sought to reestablish the cult. Perhaps this is the reason those bloodsoaked temples were buried under tons of soil and forgotten.

The similarities are superficial in retrospect. The Mithraists were a religion of warriors, and only for warriors, a secretive male world. But the Church has Her own gladiators, the martyrs, and these witnesses come from all walks of life. I recalled St. Clement in his tomb or St. Catherine in the frescoes of the upper church, straight and slim in a nunnish black shift as she ticked off a string of philosophical arguments on her fingers. Not far away in the newer basilica was a prayer scratched in spidery, caligraphic Greek on an image of St. Christopher. A prayer for safe return from the Crusades.

We moved into the original, middle basilica after passing through a bizarre subterranean maze of dead-end rooms and crumbling Roman cement that almost seemed, in the pale green-blue light, like stalagmites and stalactites. We paused to hear our guide speak as the weird luminous colors transfixed his long white robes like tanslucent alabaster. However, the old church was pale and well-lit, with orderly Roman brick vaults. Retaining arches for the upper basilica had obscured the nave, but the scheme had a familiar clarity that the dim crypts below had lacked. It was a relief, as luminous as the coming of Christ.

I looked down into a grilled opening and saw the lower chambers beneath me washed in an eerie blue light and looked up to see a fragmentary, jeweled Byzantine Madonna, her head encircled by a flat, Asiatic yellow halo. Two female saints stood on either hand, the martyrs Catherine and Euphemia. Two more gladiators for the Faith, the universal Faith open to all, men and women alike.

And Cardinal Pell, this stocky, prelatial ex-footballer, he was a gladiator too, for sport once and for God now. I was glad to have him with us on the tour, his strong, heavy features cut by the sharp shadows of the crypts. I'd looked up at him as he smiled, and he smiled back.

It was soon time to leave, and we all dispersed into the driving icy rain. I said a final fairwell to my Australian friend as he ducked into the subway station near the Colosseum to take the metro back to meet his wife and child at the hostel. Then I bought an umbrella from an immigrant vendor uninterested in bargaining and slowly trudged back into the everyday. Though maybe it's not so simple as that, since gladiators need an arena, and sometimes that arena is beyond the threshhold of our temples.