In Rome’s Palatine Museum, built atop the excavation site of Emperor Domitian’s palace and not far from imperial residences of Tiberius and Augustus, there is a curious bit of masonry that was rediscovered in 1820. This artifact is exhibited alongside terra cotta heads of Jupiter and marble sculptures of Apollo, all of the grand detritus of a lost civilization housed in a former monastery. At the corner of one of the museum’s galleries sits this short altar chiseled from granite that’s slightly worn from the elements and framed with a modest curled design where a statue might sit. No idol is framed by the base; no statue of strong Jupiter or beautiful Apollo sits atop the altar. It is rather simply dedicated to Agnostos Theo — the “Unknown God.” Where a deity would normally be present is rather a sacred and beautiful nothingness.
These altars were not uncommon in the ancient Mediterranean. The most famous reference to them is in a homily delivered by the Apostle Paul in the Book of Acts, in which he claims that an altar to the Unknown God on the Areopagus Hill in Athens was actually in honor of Christ (the Athenians, ripe for conversion, Paul thought, had yet to fully understand that). Arguments have been made that the altars honored the undepictable God of the Jews, or that they’re a bit of pragmatic hedge-betting for any deities who should be worshiped but that have escaped the attention of the otherwise pious. Regardless of the exact intent of their makers, the altars for the Unknown God present an arresting memorial — the blessing of a lacunae, the sacralization of an absence.
The altar to the Unknown God also provides an opportunity for us to think about memorialization and memory. This has been an iconoclastic summer, as there has been welcome progress in taking down statues dedicated to Confederate generals, as well as the beginning of a more nuanced discussion of figures like the founding fathers. Contrary to the retrograde claim that statues are simply “history,” a memorial is always an argument, and rarely an ambivalent one.
For example, the statue of Augustus of Primo Porta, housed in the Vatican Museums not far from the Palatine Hill, makes a very specific argument. Almost seven feet tall, the emperor is represented with an arresting beauty, the breastplate depicting his diplomatic and military victories that resulted in Pax Romana, and symbols associated with Venus and Mars that conflate Augustus with divinity. Augustus of Primo Porta’s sculptors made a claim about their subject just as the designers of the statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis that line Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., made an argument about their subject.
How we determine who is deserving of honor and think about representation is often complicated by the altar. The Augustus of Primo Porto’s argument is about the glory of imperial Rome and the divinity of the emperor; the Confederate memorials of Monument Avenue make an erroneous claim about the righteousness of the “Lost Cause.” The altar to the Unknown God’s claim is different — there’s a humility in its design, an ambiguity in its meaning and even an uncertainty in its subject. The historian Alain Besançon explains in “The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm” that the tradition of avoiding images of God are born from “two incoercible facts about our nature: first that we must look toward the divine … and, second, that representing it is futile, sacrilegious, inconceivable.” The sculptors of statues and memorials promise us gods and heroes, but those who created the altar at the Palatine Museum achieved a far greater verisimilitude regarding those subjects, and they did it by depicting nothing.
Any statue — be it of Christopher Columbus or Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson or Frederick Douglass — makes a statement about who is worth preserving in bronze. To make a statue of a recognizable subject is to venture something about that subject, but an altar for nothing argues that its subject is so all-encompassing, so universal, so grand that it can’t be circumscribed in mere stone. Christian theologians speak of a methodology called “apophasis,” whereby the divine is discussed in terms of what can’t be known about it, where definition is always deferred and thought can’t be put into mere words. In some ways the altar to the Unknown God is a form of apophatic sculpture, whereby nonexistence is a heftier material than steel or bronze.
I’d also suggest that the apophatic is precisely the mode in which we should think of our national future, for if God is a lofty subject, then so are “freedom,” “democracy” and “America.” We are better served in memorializing the contradictory, conflicted and hypocritical history of this nation not in monumental equestrian statues punctuating traffic roundabouts but in a humbler idiom that paradoxically expresses an inherent greatness in all the more remarkable of a way.
This would be nothing new for the United States as a nation. One of the most popular memorials on the National Mall already considers its subject in an apophatic way. When Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial was completed in 1982, it was met with great controversy. It is an ascending V-shaped wall of polished black granite inscribed with the names of the more than 58,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam War. Lin intended there to be no statues of men atop tanks, no sculptures of brave soldiers traipsing through the jungle (the inclusion, against her wishes, of just such a depiction at the edge of the memorial speaks to the controversy, despite its popularity).
Unlike Lincoln’s Parthenon or Washington’s obelisk, Lin’s memorial ventured no argument other than the sheer unimaginable depth of the war’s toll. Abstraction has been used to great effect in other modernist memorials, such as the Oklahoma City National Memorial, the Flight 93 National Memorial in Stoystown, Pa., and especially the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Ala., where each of 805 hanging steel rectangles represents an American county where a lynching is known to have taken place.
Like the altars to the Unknown God, these memorials make their arguments in subtler and ultimately more powerful ways than does a statue of a man astride a horse. They tell us something about language and image and the ways in which some things are so huge that they defy traditional description. Imagine an altar to the Unknown America doing something similar, where a potential vision of a country that has yet to exist could be gestured toward in sacred silence; where an expansive understanding of America that mourns its past without mistaking villains for heroes allows for the possibility of redemption. Not in a mythic great past but in a utopian future that has yet to be lived, but that can be imagined in every individual soul.
Ed Simon is a staff writer at The Millions.His latest book is “Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance’s Radicalism.”
Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.
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