Never let anything as trivial as facts get in the way of a good story.

I don’t know how much I’ve properly written about my time in Rome. Most of my writing about it was posted to a class blog that I may have linked here, but all the same there remains a great deal I can say about this experience. I wanted to talk about one of the more incredible experiences I had in the Eternal City, one which I would recommend to anyone should they find themselves in the area. I am speaking, of course, about the Necropolis that lay buried under St Peter’s for quite literally thousands of years. If I recall, this is a story I’ve shared with my readers before, so I will spare you the finer details. Instead, I was hoping to labour on the point that nobody truly knows whether or not it was St Peter buried beneath the basilica bearing his name. It is, after all, impossible to verify with certainty that the remains found there are those of St Peter. So, I ask: does it matter whether or not those are his true remains?

Having reflected precisely on what it was that so moved me, I have begun to think that it had very little to do with St Peter at all. Rather, it was this sense that all of us there were a part of a story—that is, the Christian story: one of depravity and redemption, tribulation and vindication. To visit the tomb of one who played such a prominent role in the story we believed, however true or untrue it might be, was to find ourselves immersed in it. No longer was the death of St Peter something to be found in dusty accounts of antiquity. It was something very real. In fact, it happened some short distance from where we were standing, and we understood ourselves as a continuation of it. In those moments, history was connected, progressive, and ultimately fated for a certain purpose in a manner like that of Fukuyama’s declaration of the “end of history” as the USSR fell.

Fukuyama, too, understood history as a progression towards a certain goal (in his case that is the “victory” of liberal democracy), and so was primed to understand historical developments in those terms. His declaration, as it turns out, was flat-out wrong, and history has continued in the strangest of ways. All the same, in both cases one’s interpretation of history—however true or illusory—set the scene for the drama of human life. Like any play, there is a conflict, climax, and resolution replete with characters and themes and motifs as well as all manners of literary devices. Or, to put it another way, there is a purpose, a direction, a meaning to it. The stories and myths we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it are instructive of how we feel we ought to live and what we ought to value.

Do you know, for example, why Rome was great? Well, in fact, it wasn’t. I can guarantee if you took the most ardent admirer of the Roman Empire and plopped them in ancient Rome they would be begging to leave. It was quite horrible in many ways. There were crucifixions, vicious deaths in gladiatorial combat, poor social mobility, slavery, disease, and so on. That’s not to say there was nothing good about Rome (far from it), however it is important that we remember these many flaws as they seldom find a place in the mythic Rome we read about in history books. You see, when I think of Rome, I don’t think of any of these horrid things: instead I think the technological innovations they had, the cultural diversity of the Empire, the sense of belonging, the literary works of great poets like Ovid, and of course the meditations of Marcus Aurelius. I have a crisp and clean mental image of the city, but having been there, I can assure you that this is not the case, not even today. No, Rome is as stubbornly imperfect as they come, but regardless I cannot help but love her for it.

The stories we tell ourselves no doubt have an impact, for good or evil, true or false. Narratives operate at the expense of others, though it would be unrealistic to expect otherwise. Instead, I hope to have demonstrated, first, that truth is often of secondary importance to what we really crave, which is meaning; and second, that history at its best is not only about what happened but the stories we have told and the stories we’d like to tell. Standing below St Peter’s in that City of the Dead, I encountered one of these stories and what it is like to take them to heart.