A Walk Through Rome

Reflections on Communism, Animal Farm, and the Divine Comedy

“Signora?”

I glanced up from my study of the Roman cobblestones to see “COMMUNISTO” draped elegantly across a newspaper page. I followed the brown hand holding the paper, up to a pair of dark Italian eyes. “You want?” he asked.

What a question. Did I want communism?

For many the answer is yes.

Many, including the dark-eyed young man with the paper, see communism as a system which will improve the working man’s way of life; a bloody revolution which will beckon in an age equality and social justice. All will be equal. All will be free. No more will some fogey man in a suit jacket be able to steal the livelihood of an entire town.[1] In reality, it’s much more complicated than that.

“No grazie,” I muttered, and hurried away.

Yet there is definitely something wrong I mused, as I returned to my in-depth study of the cobbles. The homeless population in Rome is shockingly large, and the amount of cardboard homes which ring the Vatican and the piles of moldy blankets which slump in front of the grand basilicas paint the terrible picture of inequality.

How many of these lost their homes because of loss of work, taken from them because of a capitalist society? Marx whispers, “These laborers, who must sell themselves like piecemeal are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition to all the fluctuations of the market.”[2]

Yes. I thought, passing the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist. Something was definitely wrong with the system. People should not be a commodity to be done with as they wish. People should all have the same opportunities and benefits as those around them.

And what is the system that is so broken? What is it that runs the world? I glance up to cross the street, and am immediately confronted by a middle-eastern looking man with a small plaster statue of Michaelangelo’s David.

“Signora! You like? I give you good price!”

Ah yes. There’s the system that runs the world. At least, the system Marx claims runs the world.

Economics.

Economic determinism is the way Fulton Sheen defined it: “culture and civilization are all determined by economics.”[3]

Not just that, but a specific kind of economics, according to Marx. “Society as a whole,” he claims, “is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”[4] This is the class conflict: Us vs. Them.

For Marx, the small plaster David would be evidence of this. Not only is it mass-produced in a factory somewhere – a poor imitation of a masterpiece – the statue also has no relevance for the tourist of Rome, as the statue itself is in Florence. It is made by the poor proletariat in an effort to survive against the thronging tourist bourgeois crowds.

“Owing to that extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman.”[5]

At times all charm for the consumer too, I thought, gazing at the disproportioned cheap chunk of plater.

“No grazie,” I muttered once more, and continue to cross the street, where I turn left, and start to walk along the Tiber. Man is meant to be more than just a cog in the machine, they are meant to work creatively and intelligently as individuals.

As I glance down the steep walls into the muddy river, I am reminded of something Dante wrote in his Divine Comedy. Virgil tells Dante, as they make their way down the steep embankments of hell: “your own art, as far as it can, follows Nature as the pupil his master. Your art, then, is a kind of grandchild of God. By Nature and Art, if you remember the opening verses of Genesis, the human race must endure and prosper.”[6] For Dante too then, man is meant to mirror God in his creativity and art.

But is communism really the answer to the problem of inequality?

According to Fulton Sheen, the problem with communism is the fallacy of condition and cause. Communists believe economics to be the cause, both of society and of all of society's problems. Rather, economics is merely a condition of society.[7]

There is something wrong with the system, but it goes deeper than economics. On my left as I walk along is the Jewish quarter, (and my favorite pastrami place). For many the Jewish people are a symbol of wealth, but glancing at the beautiful synagogue at the center, I am reminded that it is their faith that makes the Jews “God’s chosen people.”

Assuming that one believes in a creator, one would naturally believe in some kind of hierarchy. The creator is above creation, and we owe him our obedience. In fact, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan could only rebel because he maintained a vincible ignorance about the divine nature of the second person of the Trinity. “Remember’st thou thy making, while the Maker gave thee being? We know no time when we were not as now; know none before us, self-begot, self-raised by our own quickening power when fatal course had circled his full orb, the birth mature of this our native Heaven, Ethereal Sons.”[8] Satan claims to believe the son of God to be the same and he, and so he rebels – because he “thought himself impaired.”[9]

Too many people have thought the same. I turn to cross the Tiber on the same bridge Julius Caesar is once thought to have trod, crossing over onto Tiber island. For so many people in the modern world, to think oneself impaired involves griping at the hierarchy, desiring that everyone be equal. I glance to my right at the hospital, and to my left at the church of St. Bartholomew. Beneath the Church there are catacombs with the bodies of those who were found dead in the Tiber. Everyone’s equal when they’re dead.

If there is a hierarchy between creature and creator, then there seems also to be a hierarchy of creation as well. I glance from the travertine stone to the tall sycamores which line the Tiber, to the seagulls screaming overhead, before finally looking to the couple leaning on the wall kissing. There must be some kind of hierarchy.

Like the animals of Orwell’s Animal Farm, the modern world wants to create a new religion in which all are treated equally nominally, but in reality there remains a hierarchy between those who keep everyone “equal” and those who are kept “equal.”[10] Even within the perfect communist society, there is still a hierarchy – the hierarchy of totalitarianism.[11]

Even if it were the case that all could be equal, that we could give man enough bread and cheese and meaningful work to satisfy, Jordan Peterson believes that this would not be enough. It seems there is something in man that craves hierarchical structures.[12]

In Dante there is a hierarchy as well. The hierarchy of virtue and vice. One descends from the bodily sins to the intellectual sins before finally meeting Satan himself at frozen bottom. In purgatory, he ascends and gradually burns away the sin, beginning with the ‘worst’ and ending with lust. Dante is concerned, therefore, more with the ordering of the internal man, and less with the ordering of classes of men.

I take a right, and this time begin strolling along the Tiber in the opposite direction, the dome of St. Peters floating ethereally above the tile roofs of Trastevere.

The true problem, I muse, is not one of hierarchy, but one of justice. People are not receiving their due. We are correct in wanting to seek justice and equality of dignity, but it cannot be done by ordering economics or by trying to disrupt a hierarchy (though at times there may need to be adjustments to the system). As Fulton Sheen said we cannot treat economics as a cause when it is merely a condition. Economics are cold numbers. To attempt to order people and their needs, wants, and desires based on cold numbers in an attempt to make people equal will not give them individuality (as Marx seems to hope and Dante think important) but rather degrade them to sub-human.

As St. Peter’s grows larger and larger before me, the Bernini’s colonnade extends its arms, I consider that it is not so much the system that is the problem – though it could stand to improve – but rather the people.

In a post-Christian society man wants to no longer see himself as a hierarchy within which to operate. He no longer wants to see himself as a creature under a creator. In that way he is like Milton’s Satan, who sees himself impaired because he refuses to examine the true nature of the second person of the Trinity. The modern man does not see himself as Dante does, a pilgrim on a journey towards self-mastery and surrender to grace. For Dante man was on a journey toward heaven. For Milton, man fell from grace and was on a journey to reclaim paradise. With God no longer in the picture, and no where to journey to, man attempts to make his own paradise.

The marble of the façade is a pale blue as the shadows start to fade. The most beautiful building on earth, or at least in Rome. Yet it was not created as an attempt to form a utopia. Rather, the eyes of those who enter St. Peter’s are immediately drawn upward, towards our true home.

Like Dante, we should be pilgrims on a journey, doing our best with the years we have, but not attempting to create paradise where it does not belong. In addition, we should not treat others as though they have no agency, as though they and their work are numbers on a spreadsheet. Everyone is on their own journey and all we can do is treat them with the dignity they deserve as fellow pilgrims on their way towards heaven.

I turn from the façade of St. Peters and begin to head back up the Via de Fornaci towards the villa where I am staying. On the way, I drop a euro in the cup of a homeless woman.

“Grazie signora.” She tells me, smiling and clutching a cheap plastic rosary.

“Prega per me, per favore.” I ask, glancing once more at the shadow of St. Peters against the darkling sky.

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[1] Roger and Me, directed by Michael Moore (Warner Brothers 1989).

[2] Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 18

[3] Fulton Sheen, “Life Is Worth Living | Episode 111 | Communism | Fulton Sheen,” YouTube. May 12, 2021.

[4] Marx, Manifesto, 15

[5] Marx, Manifesto, 18

[6] Dante Alighieri, Steven Botterill, and Anthony Oldcorn. Inferno, trans. Stanley Lombardo, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2009), 107

[7] Sheen, “Life is Worth Living,”

[8] John Milton, Paradise Lost, (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2005), 113.

[9] Milton, Paradise Lost, 109

[10] George Orwell, Animal Farm, (Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc., 2005)

[11] Jordan B. Peterson, “Jordan Peterson’s Critique of the Communist Manifesto,” Www.youtube.com, 17 Apr. 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_MXSE3wUT4.

[12] Peterson, “Critique,” 22:53.