From the issue dated March 28, 1997
NOTES FROM ACADEME
A Maltese Academic Mixes Religion, Law, and Opera
By Peter Monaghan
Msida, Malta -- You'll find the Rev. Peter Serracino Inglott in a converted 200-year-old farmhouse on the campus of the University of Malta, a few miles from the country's massively fortified capital, Valletta.
Step through the low doorways and you arrive at a central courtyard, a refuge from the elements. Across the yard is Father Peter's study.
He's famously busy; if you visit, get to the point.
Which will be, most likely, to ask how he's managed to find time to conceive and write librettos for two operas while heading a university that had been severely depleted during 16 years of socialist rule.
He created the operas in collaboration with Malta's most renowned composer, Charles Camilleri. Their first, Compostella, opened in 1993 in Valletta's baroque Manoel Theatre. Its name, Father Peter explains, refers to the Spanish town of Santiago de Compostela, which was the destination of a great medieval pilgrimage. "It was finis terra -- the frontier of the earth," he says. "It was believed no traveler who'd gone beyond it had ever returned." A philosopher and Catholic priest, Father Peter is soft-spoken yet intellectually imposing. His speech is as measured and ripe as fine prose: "There you contemplated the ocean: the vast infinite space, which to attempt to cross was death. You were on the boundary of the finite and the infinite."
The pilgrimage theme would, he knew, resonate with Maltese audiences. In the Middle Ages, pilgrims sailed here to worship St. Paul, who reputedly had ministered to the Maltese from a grotto chapel.
If that chapel really did exist, it would most likely have been constructed from blocks of the nation's celebrated globigerina limestone. Most every building here is, including Father Peter's farmhouse. Once cut, the globigerina quickly weathers to a honey-yellow in the Mediterranean elements -- winds from both ends of the sea, or from the North African desert only 200 miles to the south. Malta, whose three main islands amount to a mere 122 square miles, and whose population totals fewer than 400,000, is just north of Libya.
The farmhouse, on the main island, is in fields partitioned by low stone walls. Just uphill are buildings constructed since 1968 for the new campus of the 400-year-old university, which had been located in old Valletta. The new buildings mimic the island's traditional limestone-block architecture, which dates back 6,000 years to the megalithic temples whose ruins dot the riverless, mountainless terrain.
Until last summer, Father Peter was rector of the university, a post he had held for eight crucial years. He revived the institution after 16 years of difficult Labour Party rule. He courted the centrist government that replaced the Labour Party in 1987, restored departments the socialists had closed, and expanded enrollment to 6,000 from 600. Along the way, he found time to write two operas, and published extensively on the arts, culture, and religion.
Even before the socialist era, many Maltese intellectuals, Father Peter among them, left Malta to seek higher degrees in Europe and North America. After taking holy orders, he went to Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar to study philosophy, politics, and economics. He has since taught in Ottawa, Cincinnati, Palermo, Venice, and Milan.
On the walls of his office are memorabilia of his travels: an African mask, a Native American spirit catcher. ... With pride, he points out an Inglott family crest, which includes a symbol for Norwich, a traditional point of embarkation for English pilgrims, and a shell motif, signifying pilgrimage to Spain.
More directly than Compostella, Father Peter's 1995 opera, The Maltese Cross, deals with Maltese themes -- specifically, the Great Siege of 1565.
Throughout its history, Malta, due to its position in the Mediterranean, has been prized as a strategic holding -- by the Romans, Arabs, French, and others.
From 1530 to 1798, it was ruled by the Knights of Malta, a pan-European order dedicated to protecting Christian preserves from Muslim armies.
In 1565, a massive Turkish fleet attacked the meager forces of Grand Master de la Valette, the Maltese ruler, whose troops included Italian and Spanish soldiers. In a series of ferocious battles, they held the Turks off for four months, until help arrived from Spain. All but 600 of the Christian garrison of 9,000 men died, along with 30,000 Turks.
For Father Peter, the siege exemplifies supreme human perseverance. It prompts him to call on European nations to value their shared heritage.
Therein lies his opera's link with his own past.
In 1964, when Malta gained independence after 160 years of British rule, Father Peter had just returned from Oxford, where he wrote a prize-winning thesis on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Aware of Father Peter's intellectual repute, Malta's then-Prime Minister, Giorgio Borg Olivier, asked him to take on a daunting task: "He sent for me and told me, 'Now, try to see what a small country like Malta, a ministate, can do at the United Nations.'"
Father Peter and Malta's U.N. ambassador, Arvid Pardo, a passionate advocate of greater balance in power and privilege among nations, cast about for an issue that would provide them with leverage.
At that time, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other industrialized nations realized that technology would soon enable the harvesting of vast mineral deposits from the seabed.
Father Peter and Mr. Pardo saw that the vague international laws of the sea would allow the larger, industrial nations to grab all the seabeds' wealth. So Father Peter developed the philosophical framework for the argument -- presented by Mr. Pardo at the U.N. -- that the seas were a common heritage of mankind, and that their wealth should be shared.
"That was rather a bold call at the height of the Cold War," Father Peter recalls. Histories of the U.N. relate that it served to rally many nations that were newly independent from imperial powers.
Father Peter drew the common-heritage concept from three intellectual sources. One, Pope John XXIII's encyclical, "Peace on Earth," reflected Malta's staunch Catholicism. It had called for international cooperation even at a time of great rivalries.
The second recalled a historic European convention. "In the medieval situation," says Father Peter, "there had always been a category of goods -- in Britain it was called 'the commons': meadows, streams, other resources -- which everybody could use but no one could make their own."
The third piece of his argument was a key aspect of Wittgenstein's theory of logic. The 20th-century Austrian philosopher proposed that the ability to communicate, which in humans is so developed as to set them apart from other species, is dependent, ultimately, on social agreements. As Father Peter puts it: "You can't produce rules for correct thinking in the abstract, outside a context." And that context is social. Words are "about ways of life."
To those rationales for common heritage, Pardo added the argument that the U.N. should jointly manage the seas' wealth on behalf of all mankind, including poorer nations and future generations.
The proposal had "a disarming effect," Father Peter recalls. In fact, it was accepted only in part. But it set the course for subsequent sea law, and it was Malta's finest hour at the United Nations. For once, as history records, Malta was, rather than military plunder, the source of a sea change in thinking.
Copyright © 1997 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
