seminars & retreats
Orvieto, draped over a mesa (photo credit Dan Nystedt)
Virtue & Vice: Explorations in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Thought and Art
Orvieto, Rome, Florence, Siena
December 28, 2021 – January 11, 2022
The Jerusalem & Athens Winter Seminar in Orvieto opens to a wider circle of college students (who earn academic credits), alumni of Gordon College and adult learners the theme for which the College’s Jerusalem and Athens Forum honors program is named: “What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” Posed by the early church father Tertullian in his Prescription against Heretics, this enduring question remains as much alive today as it was in 198 A.D. when Tertullian posed it.
Every Jerusalem & Athens Winter Seminar (JAF291, as a course) focuses on one important aspect of the Christian digestion of the rich intellectual and cultural heritage of the classical world.
The January 2022 version takes up the concepts and vocabulary of the virtues and vices of human character (for example, the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude, described and analyzed with care and precision by Aristotle and Cicero), and explores how this moral vocabulary was adopted and adapted by thinkers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to render it compatible with Christian faith and the doctrines of human sin and sanctification.
Participants will read various classical and Christian authors – from Aristotle and Cicero to Thomas Aquinas and Dante – who addressed questions such as: What is a good life? What is a good society? What is virtue and how does one acquire it? What is vice and how can one avoid it? What is the relationship between the pursuit of virtue and the pursuit of salvation? What is the relationship between individual virtue and public/social responsibility?
A crowd seeking the prayers of St. Peter Martyr, a gifted preacher in the early generation of the Dominican Order, whose tomb is faced with five of the Virtues, frescoed on one of the walls in the meeting room of the Dominican monastery in Florence, Santa Maria Novella.
Yes, this course opens up some of the classic philosophical and literary texts that shaped the Western intellectual tradition concerning ethics and the moral life. But we will also witness the pervasive visual depiction of the virtues and vices in public art in medieval and Renaissance Italy – an important means by which the vocabulary of virtues and vices got into the eyes, ears, minds and psyches of ordinary people as guides to perception, judgment, and choice-making in real life.
Excursions to Rome, Siena, Florence, and in Orvieto itself will give material grip and context to our study.
Guest teacher Dr. Thomas (Tal) Howard (founder of the Jerusalem & Athens Forum honors program at Gordon, now Professor of Humanities and History, and holder of the Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics, at Valparaiso University) takes up the theme of moral understanding (ethics) in the classical and Christian traditions, with a focus on their co-mingling in late medieval and early modern Europe (ca. 1200-1600).
Program Director Dr. John Skillen (director of the Studio for Art, Faith & History, and founding director of Gordon’s semester program in Orvieto) leads day-long excursions to Rome, Siena, Florence – along with Orvieto itself – exploring the tangible testimony of these questions in art and architecture.
Location and Lodging
The home-base for the Winter Seminar is a renovated thirteenth-century monastery, leased by Gordon College, in the cliff-top town of Orvieto, situated between Florence and Rome, and surrounded by the Umbrian countryside. The nine double rooms in the residential wing come with private baths. The library-classroom is bright and airy. Chef Maria takes pride in presenting the best of Umbrian cuisine.
