Tag: city (page 1 of 1)

April 17, 2025

Moses the roadgiver

As I was drafting my previous post about the changes that the middle of the 20th century brought about, I realized that it was long past time for me to read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. So now I have read it, and it is as great as everyone says — or almost everyone anyway. Some of those who have criticized the book write as though it merely denounces everything Robert Moses did, but while the book is indeed fierce in its exposure of Moses’s arrogance, cruelty, and short-sightedness, it’s not a hatchet job.

What Caro shows is a man whose desire to improve life for the residents of his native city was sincere and genuine — as was his belief that he knew better than anyone else in the world what improvements were needed and how they might be implemented. Over time, his compassion and desire to serve the public gradually withered as his arrogance metastasized. After many years in power, Moses lost the ability to distinguish between what he wanted to do and what needed to be done, and became completely unreflective about such questions – a thoughtlessness best manifested in his mantra-like recital of the cliché that you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

As Caro points out, even if Moses had wanted to take time to reflect he could not have done so, simply because he had so many obligations, held so many positions, ran so many organizations. Of course, he only carried so many burdens because he sought the power that they made possible, so what you see in The Power Broker is the precise way in which a brilliant and at least initially compassionate man drives himself into a doom-loop of libido dominandi. But even as Caro describes the spiral of this doom-loop, he nevertheless always also shows the great benefits that accrued to many from Moses’s endeavors. He shows you both those who benefited from what Moses built and those whose lives were effectively destroyed by it, and allows you to draw your own conclusions about how much of what Moses did was justified, and how much we would keep if we could.

For instance: Moses built a series of state parks that gave pleasure to countless millions and became models for parks in many other states — and built roads that enabled city-dwellers to get to those parks — but could only do so through an astonishingly complex set of legal and political and administrative maneuvers to appropriate the relevant land from the mega-rich who were hoarding it, from feckless and clueless local administrators who had no clue what to do with it, and, yes, from farmers who made a living from it. Would you wish those parks unmade, and the land still held by plutocrats, or turned into subdivisions? The question has to be asked because no one other than Moses would have or could have achieved what Moses achieved. No one else had the necessary combination of skills, coupled with endless energy and determination.

Some of the best passages in The Power Broker capture both sides of the story at once. For instance:

During the 1930’s, Robert Moses reshaped the face of the greatest city in the New World. He gouged great gashes across it, gashes that once had contained houses by the hundreds and apartment houses by the score. He laid great swaths of concrete across it. He made it grayer, not only with his highways but with parking fields, like the one on Randall’s Island that held 4,000 cars, the one at Orchard Beach that held 8,000 and the one at Jacob Riis Park that held 9,000, that together covered with asphalt a full square mile of the 319 in the city. And he made it greener, planting within its borders two and a half million trees, shrubs and vines, bringing a million others back to bloom, reseeding lawns whose area totaled four square miles and creating a full square mile more of new ones. He filled in its marshes and made them parks. He yanked railroad trestles off its avenues, clearing an even dozen from Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue alone as part of a grade-crossing elimination program he considered so minor that he seldom mentioned it.

And:

Part of Moses’ Long Island formula — the vision and the viciousness, the imagination and the ruthlessness, the drive, the urgent, savage thrust, the instinct for the magnificent and the jugular that overrode purely selfish opposition, shortsightedness and red tape to turn vision into reality — was needed in the city, needed desperately, for without it the city would never be able to build parks and roads and bridges — or, for that matter, housing or hospitals, sewers or schools — on the scale its citizens needed. But Moses’ formula could be successful in the city only as the basis of a new, vastly more complicated and subtle and sophisticated formula, one that would turn public works into a far truer reflection of the subtle and complicated human needs they had to serve in the city. A whole new input — a factor of humanity — would have to be added. And Moses would not allow it to be added.

Caro constantly keeps these two visions before our eyes.

The method that Caro develops in The Power Broker is continued and improved — I am tempted to say perfected — in his biography of LBJ. To take but one example: Many readers have been moved by Caro’s admiring and heartwarming portrait of Coke Stevenson, the immensely popular governor of Texas who lost to LBJ in a Senate race in 1948 – or rather, had the election stolen from him by LBJ. There is absolutely no doubt at this point (partly because of Caro’s deep research) that the election was indeed stolen, and that a nasty, dishonest, manipulative, and power-hungry man stole it from an honest and upright public servant. But Caro portrays the character contrast between the two men so in such contrastive terms because he wants us to understand that if Coke Stevenson — who was an honorable man, but also was a garden-variety Southern racist — had won that campaign it almost certainly would have meant the end of LBJ’s political career, which in turn would have meant that the civil-rights legislation that helped to overcome centuries of structurally-embedded racism in this country would not have happened — or would have been delayed perhaps for decades. (It was precisely because powerful Southern Senators profoundly committed to segregation recognized LBJ as one of them that he was able to bring them around to supporting, or at least accepting, massive changes in the segregationist system.)

Both Moses and LBJ were nasty men who did terrible things — but also did great things. And there was no way to get the great things without the terrible things coming along for the ride. Do you accept the deal? That’s the question Caro presses on all his readers, and that’s the key to his greatness as a biographer and historian.

P.S. Denunciation of Robert Moses has often been accompanied by reverence for Jane Jacobs (no relation), but in this outstanding essay Philip Lopate shows why those paired assessments need to be complicated.

August 15, 2024

after the Re-Learning

Tom Wolfe in 1987:

The twenty-first century, I predict, will confound the twentieth-century notion of the Future as something exciting, novel, unexpected, or radiant; as Progress, to use an old word. It is already clear that the large cities, thanks to the Relearning, will not even look new. Quite the opposite; the cities of 2007 will look more like the cities of 1927 than the cities of 1987. The twenty-first century will have a retrograde look and a retrograde mental atmosphere. People of the next century, snug in their Neo-Georgian apartment complexes, will gaze back with a ghastly awe upon our time. They will regard the twentieth as the century in which wars became so enormous they were known as World Wars, the century in which technology leapt forward so rapidly man developed the capacity to destroy the planet itself — but also the capacity to escape to the stars on space ships if it blew. But above all they will look back upon the twentieth as the century in which their forebears had the amazing confidence, the Promethean hubris, to defy the gods and try to push man’s power and freedom to limitless, god-like extremes. They will look back in awe … without the slightest temptation to emulate the daring of those who swept aside all rules and tried to start from zero. Instead, they will sink ever deeper into their neo-Louis bergeres, content to live in what will be known as the Somnolent Century or the Twentieth Century’s Hangover.

Was Wolfe correct? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

June 13, 2024

the wanderers and the city

My earlier posts in this series (which began by reading Genesis but has since expanded) are:

The Pentateuch concludes with the death of Moses and the arrival of the children of Israel at the doorstep of the Promised Land. As in the next books (Joshua and Judges) they consolidate their position, we’re moving, as I noted in an earlier post, from a world of nomadic pastoralists to a world of city dwellers — or, anyway, a world in which the embodiment of the Israelite identity is a city, Jerusalem, conceived first as the residence of the King and only later as the center of the cult of Yahweh.

This change raises certain questions about the theology and ethics of building, especially building a city, and as it happens I wrote a series of posts about that some years ago on my old Text Patterns blog:

The invocation of the Diaspora leads to a reflection on the city that in Scripture opposes Jerusalem: Babylon. Here are the entries in my Encyclopedia Babylonica:

I stopped writing then because I was confused about a number of things. But I am now seeing certain connections. The series on building (which focused on the Davidic era) and the series on Babylon (which focused on the era that ended the Davidic line) are, properly speaking, elements in a larger theology of the city, which I explored by writing about Augustine’s City of God:

(There’s some overlap to these series because they were written independently of one another and sometimes in forgetfulness.) And I have many other posts and essays that seem to be on unrelated subjects but may not be. For instance, Ruskin — my admiration for whom I recently reaffirmed — begins The Stones of Venice by claiming that three cities associated with the mastery of the sea stand above all others: Tyre, Venice, and London. His theology of art and architecture is also a theology of the city, meant for Londoners, as the successors to the Venetians, to heed. There’s even a strange passage early in Stones in which Ruskin claims that all three of Noah’s sons founded cultures that contributed to the rise of architecture, thereby reconnecting the theme of the City to the book of Genesis.

Related: there is a long and powerful tradition of writing about London as the city, the paradigmatic or exemplary city, the city as a “condensed symbol,” to return to a theme from my last post: this is what Blake does repeatedly, and Dickens, and H. G. Wells, especially in Tono-Bungay. There are some powerful connections between Tono-Bungay and Little Dorrit that I want to explore in a future post.

It’s strange that I have written a book’s worth of reflections on all this stuff. But what does this non-book say? Heck, what do I even mean by “all this stuff”?

I think these concerns arose in my mind because (a) I was, and still am, frustrated by the ongoing dominance of H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, a book that still establishes the categories for thinking about how Christians live in “the world”; and (b) I felt that a richer, deeper picture is offered, however obliquely, in the poetry and prose of W. H. Auden in the decade following the end of the Second World War. (It’s noteworthy, I think, that Auden’s work is contemporaneous with Niebuhr’s: that WW2 prompted full-scale reconsiderations of the ideal character of culture and society is what my book The Year of Our Lord 1943 is all about.) Auden, instead of writing about “culture,” writes about “the city,” and that reformulation strikes me as especially resonant and full of promise, especially given the prominence of the Jerusalem/Babylon opposition in the Bible.

Now, Auden writes about these matters in The Shield of Achilles, which I have edited — but he writes about them more extensively in his previous book Nones, which I may also edit. Even if I don’t get the chance to make a critical edition of that collection, I’m going to be re-reading it, and maybe after I do I’ll have a better idea of how to put all these thoughts, which have obviously been occupying my mind for quite some time, into better order.

But whether I should try to turn all this into an actual book? I have my doubts about that. For one thing, few if any publishers would be interested in publishing something that is largely available online for free. For another — and this actually may be more important — do all these thoughts really belong in a book, between covers, with a beginning an ending? Some projects ought not to be closed and completed; some projects ought to be ramifying and exploratory. I suspect this is one such project. I may have more to say about that in future posts.

June 24, 2023

Cities 10: last things

Book XXI of the City of God is about Hell, and as a result isn’t very interesting. Now, you might reply that Dante certainly made Hell interesting — but, see, Dante didn’t write a poem about Hell. The Divine Comedy is an allegory, and the subjects of the three canticles are sin (Inferno), sanctification (Purgatorio), and blessedness (Paradiso). In the Inferno Dante isn’t trying to tell us what he thinks Hell is actually like, he’s trying to tell us what he thinks sin is actually like, how it works, its weird twisted logic. Hell itself isn’t interesting, for reasons noted by C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain:

You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all [Matthew 25:34–41]. To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’.… We know much more about heaven than hell, for heaven is the home of humanity, and therefore contains all that is implied in a glorified human life: but hell was not made for men. It is in no sense parallel to heaven: it is the “the darkness outside,” the outer rim, where being fades away into nonentity.

So, enough about Hell.

Now, the condition of the blessed is infinitely more interesting, but perhaps not totally relevant to the inquiry I have been pursuing. My self-appointed task has been to try to understand the relationship between the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, as it obtains here and now, as they are mixed together, like Besźel and Ul Qoma.

As I noted in the first post of this series, Augustine says at the outset of his great work,

I have taken upon myself the task of defending the glorious City of God against those who prefer their own gods to the Founder of that City. I treat of it both as it exists in this world of time, a stranger among the ungodly, living by faith, and as it stands in the security of its everlasting seat.

In his final book, Augustine tries to describe the condition of the blessed, and his thoughts there are, or ought to be, fascinating for all Christians. Central to his concluding reflections is his claim that the blessed in heaven will possess true freedom, not because they can do anything they want, but because they cannot sin. They are free because they have been delivered from bondage to sin; their wills fully assent to the will of God; they are no longer divided selves. Dante expresses this very point at the end of Purgatorio XXVII, when Virgil, having guided Dante-the-pilgrim through his sanctification and deposited him back in the Garden of Eden (which stands at the top of the Mount of Purgatory), utters his final words:

libero, dritto e sano è tuo arbitrio
e fallo fora non fare a suo senno:
per ch’io te sovra te corono e mitrio.

That is: “Your will now is free, upright, and sound, and not to heed it would be wrong: Lord of yourself I crown and mitre you.” Dante-the-pilgrim is his own king, his own bishop; purged of sin, he is able to follow his own inclinations because those inclinations are perfectly sound. So Dante-the-poet here, and Augustine in Book XXII of the City of God, both depict the citizens of the City of God as they “stand in the security of [their City’s] everlasting seat.” Their wayfaring is over; they’re home to stay.

But that’s not where we are. We’re in the midst of our pilgrimage, living among — and often being friends with, often loving — neighbors whose citizenship is elsewhere and whose great city (figured in Scripture as Babylon) will, we believe, someday fall. They of course think that our City is imaginary, an illusion that will eventually dissipate. But in the meantime, here we are, all mixed up together, working in the same businesses, attending the same sporting events, voting in the same elections — for all the world looking like we’re citizens of a single city, which we are not.

In China Miéville’s fictional world, the citizens of Besźel and Ul Soma alike deal with the mysterious Cleavage in the same way: by ignoring one another, and when ignoring is impossible, unseeing. By and large, we in our world do not; instead, we practice a series of variable and ad hoc negotiations, often speaking of one another in ways that contradict our actions, often worrying — all of us — about the problem of divided loyalties. A hundred years ago many Americans found it axiomatic that a Roman Catholic could not be a true American because he owed loyalty to the Pope; today many fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals declare that America is a Christian Nation down to its bones — thereby declaring the Cleavage null and void, and perceiving non-Christians as, in effect, stateless vagrants. It’s a mess.

I began this series with a suspicion: that what many Christian thinkers call the “theology of culture” is misnamed and therefore misconceived, and that we need instead a theology of the Two Cities. I now feel more strongly even than I did then that “What is the proper relationship between Christ and culture?” is a fruitless question, one doomed to lead nowhere (not least because, as I have noted, I can’t figure out what theologians mean when they talk about “culture”). I am convinced that the much more fruitful questions, and ones more grounded in the biblical story and the Christian account of the world, are: How do we live charitably and justly with our neighbors whose citizenship is other than ours? What is the common good that we share with them? What are the instruments — the tactics, the tools, the arts, the practices, the dispositions — by which we might pursue that common good? And, finally, when and how must we make it clear that, while we are all neighbors and owe one another love, we do not belong to the same city?

As I’m continuing to think about these matters, I will certainly draw on Augustine, but I will also — no surprise here for those who know my work — draw on the poetry of W. H. Auden. Perhaps it is no accident that I am reflecting on these themes just as I am concluding my work on a critical edition of Auden’s The Shield of Achilles, which contains his poetic sequence “Horae Canonicae” — one of the most profound exercises in political theology I know. So I will draw this series to a close for now, but continue to meditate on these matters, and when The Shield of Achilles comes out — sometime next year — that might be a very good opportunity to revisit these themes.

It’s possible, of course, that I will issue occasional interim reports; but for the time being, this is a wrap. Ciao!

June 22, 2023

Cities 9a: the City of God coming down

One brief comment about Book XX: in XX.17 Augustine comments on Revelation 21:2-5:

And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”

And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”

Augustine makes the provocative point that throughout history, as the City of God has made its way along its pilgrim path, drawing others to join it, it has always been coming down out of heaven. What happens at the end is mere the completion of that ongoing descent.

June 21, 2023

Cities 9: ends and means

One of the most distinctive elements of Augustine’s method in the City of God looks like this: Now I wish to explore Z, but I cannot explore Z until I first explore X and Y. Thus in Book V he wants to ask why Rome ruled so widely and for so long, but he knows that many Romans — including his nemesis Virgil — believe that it was simply Rome’s destiny (fatum) to rule the world, and he has to refute that; but then he also knows that the belief in fate is buttressed by the belief in astrology, so he has to refute that. Only after all that preparatory work can he then explain why he thinks Rome became so dominant. As we saw in an earlier post, he thinks it was because of the virtues of the greatest Romans. It takes him a long time to get there, though.

(By the way, T. S. Eliot’s essay “Virgil and the Christian World” is still really useful on Virgil’s understanding of fatum and how it relates to the Christian understanding of God’s Providence.)

So here we are at the beginning of Book XIX, where we see that same methodological strategy at work. I’ll add in brackets some of the relevant Latin terms:

It is clear to me that my next task is to discuss the appointed ends of these two cities, the earthly and the heavenly. Hence I must first explain, as far as is allowed by the limits I have designed for this work, the arguments advanced by mortal men in their endeavour to create happiness [beatitudinem] for themselves amidst the unhappiness [infelicitate] of this life. My purpose is to make clear the great difference between their hollow realities and our hope, the hope given us by God, together with the realization — that is, the true bliss [beatitudo] — which he will give us; and to do this not merely by appealing to divine authority but also by employing such powers of reason as we can apply for the benefit of unbelievers [infideles]. Now the philosophers have engaged in a great deal of complicated debate about the supreme ends of good and evil; and by concentrating their attention on this question they have tried to discover what it is that makes a man happy [qui efficiat hominem beatum]. For our Final Good [finis boni] is that for which other things are to be desired, while it is itself to be desired for its own sake. The Final Evil [finis mali] is that for which other things are to be shunned, while it is itself to be shunned on its own account. Thus when we now speak of the Final Good we do not mean the end of good whereby good is finished so that it does not exist, but the end whereby it is brought to final perfection and fulfilment. And by the Final Evil we do not mean the finish of evil whereby it ceases to be, but the final end to which its harmful effects eventually lead. These two ends, then, are the Supreme Good [summum bonum] and the Supreme Evil [summum malum]. The search to discover these, and the quest for the attainment of the Supreme Good in this life and the avoidance of the Supreme Evil has been the object of the labours of those who have made the pursuit of wisdom their profession….

So: What is the end, the telos, of the City of Man? Well, naturally, it wants to achieve happiness — by which, as you can see above, Augustine means something far more than what we usually mean by happiness, and maybe even something stronger than the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia: he means a condition of blessedness, absolute bliss. Such happiness is our Final Good, the thing most desired, and to experience that is to attain or possess the Supreme Good. So what, exactly, for citizens of the City of Man, is the nature of the Supreme Good that they want to attain and the Supreme Evil that they want to avoid? That’s where Augustine has to begin.

Spoiler alert: Augustine doesn’t think any of the philosophers are correct. But the one that he seems to have the most respect for, in these matters anyway, is Varro. Varro, Augustine claims, says that the supreme good for human beings “consists in the combination of goods of both his elements, of soul, that is, and body” (CD XIX.3). But one also must possess virtue, because it is virtue that enables you to enjoy the goods of soul and body properly and not to dissipate or destroy them. Philosophers like Varro also agree that the happy life for human beings is social.

Augustine devotes some considerable time to demonstrating that a mortal being in this world can never be secure in either goods of the body or goods of the soul, that misfortune can come to people at any time, and that virtue itself is no guarantee of happiness because virtue is constantly warring with, and often losing to, vice. Because of the inevitable vagaries of this life — because of the unexpected and the unpredictable, including our own internal unpredictability — we can never rest secure in our possession of any this-worldly goods. By contrast, Christianity perceives that “eternal life is the Supreme Good and eternal death the Supreme Evil, and that to achieve the one and escape the other, we must live rightly. That is why the scripture says ‘the just man lives on the basis of faith’” (CD XIX.4). This, Augustine says is a secure inheritance that we can count on even when the goods of this life, whether of the body or the soul, fail us – even when virtue fails us. (Remember here that Augustine says in the previous book that the citizens of the two cities have many of the same experiences — they are differentiated merely in how they respond to them, and in what they hope for. The sun shines on Besźel and Ul Qoma alike. The instability of human fortune is a topic he returns to in XX.3, where he invokes the wise words of Solomon, primarily in the book of Ecclesiastes, in support of this view.)

But all of this is, effectively, boilerplate. What Augustine is really interested in is this matter of the social character of happiness. That’s relevant to everyone, since we are all involved in a shared existence, a common life. Augustine writes that the better and more reputable philosophies “hold the view that the life of the wise man should be social [socialem]; and in this we support them much more heartily. For here we are, with the nineteenth book in hand, on the subject of the City of God; and how could that city have made its first start, how could it have advanced along its course, how could it attain its appointed goal, if the life of the saints were not social?” (CD XIX.5) So the identity and character of the City of God is bound up with this conviction that the good life is inevitably social.

Augustine then spends a lot of time considering the afflictions that beset our social life. It is being attacked at all times by a wide range of forces — even “the friendship of the holy angels” is troubled by the deceits of demons (CD XIX.9). So under what circumstances is it possible for social life to be what it supposed to be, to bring the blessings it is meant to bring? This happens, Augustine says, only when we experience peace. And Augustine insists – this is one of his most essential ideas, it seems to me – that all rational beings seek peace. We should never forget that those whom we think of as our enemies desire peace just as much as we do. What Augustine would say then about the citizens of the City of Man is not that they don’t seek peace — even war, he says, is engaged in for the purpose of achieving peace – but rather that they misunderstand what peace actually is and the means by which it can be achieved (CD XIX.12).

This is where Augustine gets into some of his deepest questions about what a commonwealth is, that is: Under what circumstances may we live in a society in which there is a genuine common good? Augustine thinks that the City of Man can never experience peace, and it can’t experience piece because it cannot achieve a common good, a common weal, because it doesn’t understand what the Supreme Good actually is. Therefore he wants to argue that according to Scipio’s definition of a commonwealth – “he defined a ‘people’ as a multitude ‘united in association by a common sense of right, and a community of interest’” (CD XIX.21) — no earthly city can ever actually be a commonwealth. Because it worships false gods and because it doesn’t understand what our Supreme Good really is, it will always be mistaken in its “sense of right” and its “interest” will always be in the wrong things, on things that do not in fact lead to peace. (No genuine peace can ever be achieved through the unloosing of the libido dominandi.)

So Augustine says that a better definition of commonwealth is “the association of a multitude of rational beings, united by a common agreement on the objects of their love” (CD XIX.24) – but if you love something other than God, then your city will not have true justice, and if it does not have true justice, it will not have true peace, and if it does not have true peace, it will not make possible a social life conducive to the Supreme Good. To return to a theme from earlier posts in this series: the City of Man will get what it asks for, but it will not ask for the right things. It does not possess the orientation required in order to ask for the right things; it is not walking along the street of love, but rather motoring down the superhighway constructed by the libido dominandi. And so, in the end, the Great Divorce will be effected.

This is the subject of Book XX: the Last Judgment and what the Bible tells us about it. Reading that book is quite a bit like reading Hal Lindsey or Tim LaHaye. Not my primary interest. As I keep saying, we live in-the-midst and must decide how to dwell charitably and wisely with these citizens of another city — and that is what I’m trying to figure out.

June 19, 2023

Cities 8: parallels

In Book XVIII of The City of God, Augustine writes a kind of parallel history of the two cities, drawing on the best sources available to him at the time to show simultaneous developments in the City of Man (Assyria, Babylon) and the City of God (Israel, Judah). It’s a fascinating exercise in comparative ethnography.

Here’s a passage (XVIII.27) that shows what the exercise looks like:

Michah also records this period, after the reign of Uzziah, as the time of his prophecy. For he names the three following kings, named also by Hosea: Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. These men are found by their own statements to have prophesied simultaneously at this period. To them are added Jonah, also in Uzziah’s reign, and Joel, when Jotham, Uzziah’s successor, had by now ascended the throne. The dates of those two prophets can be found in the Chronicle, not in their own books, since they say nothing about their times. Those times extend from Procas, king of Latium, or his predecessor Aventinus, to Romulus, now a king of Rome, or even to the opening of the reign of Numa Pompilius, his successor, seeing that Hezekiah, king of Judah, reigned up to that time. So we see that those men, two springs, as it were, of prophecy, gushed out together, at the time when the Assyrian Empire failed, and the Roman Empire started. It was obviously designed that, just as in the first period of the Assyrian Empire, Abraham made his appearance and to him were given the most explicit promises of the blessings of all nations in his descendants, so in the initial stages of the Western Babylon, during whose dominion Christ was destined to come, in whom those promises were to be fulfilled, the lips of the prophets should be opened, those prophets who in their writings as well as by their spoken words gave testimony to this great event in the future. For although there was scarcely any time from the beginning of the monarchy when the people of Israel had been deprived of prophets, those prophets had been solely for the benefit of the Israelites, with no message for the Gentiles. However, when a beginning was made of writings with a more openly prophetic import, prophecies that would be of value to the Gentile nations at some later date, the appropriate time for that beginning was when this city of Rome was being founded, which was to have dominion over the nations.

The key point here is that, while the City of Man is hostile to the City of God, is devoted to its own ambitions and the false gods it worships, nevertheless the true God providentially oversees the course of the City of Man in such a way as to bring blessings to His people. The development of prophecy in Israel and Judah is synchronized with the decline of Assyria and the rise of Rome. When a great city arises that will “have dominion over the nations” and will therefore have the power to disseminate knowledge to those nations, then at that moment God inspires the prophets to speak words that will show that he cares for and seeks to save all the nations, not just Israel. And this synchronization of the development of the two cities can be seen as early as the simultaneous rise of Assyria and appearance of Abraham.

Here’s how Augustine concludes Book XVIII:

But now at last we must bring this book to its close. In it we have brought our discussion to this point, and we have shown sufficiently, as it seemed to me, what is the development in this mortal condition of the two cities, the earthly and the Heavenly, which are mingled together from the beginning to the end of their history. One of them, the earthly city, has created for herself such false gods as she wanted, from any source she chose — even creating them out of men — in order to worship them with sacrifices. The other city, the Heavenly City on pilgrimage in this world, does not create false gods. She herself is the creation of the true God, and she herself is to be his true sacrifice. Nevertheless, both cities alike enjoy the good things, or are afflicted with the adversities of this temporal state, but with a different faith, a different expectation, a different love, until they are separated by the final judgement, and each receives her own end, of which there is no end. And those different ends of the two cities must be the next subject for our discussion.

As I’ve previously noted, each city in the end gets what it wants — just as individual human beings do. Augustine’s teleological imagination applies at every level, from the personal to the imperial: a person, or a city, may be oriented to caritas — which Augustine defines as “the motion of the soul towards God” — or cupiditas, which is self-love, self-gratification. The person moved by cupiditas becomes, Augustine says, incurvatus in se, curved in on himself, growing ever more crabbed, ever smaller. Think of the Tragedian in Lewis’s The Great Divorce.

But this happens on a cultural level too, the level of the City or Empire: any given society may be growing towards God or seeking its own gratification. The latter kind of society inevitably becomes both sclerotic and isolated — it is always playing a zero-sum game with other societies. (It is not enough that Rome should succeed, Carthage also must fail. Carthago delenda est.) But the City motivated by caritas, like the person motivated by caritas, will grow more expansive — will find and welcome companions along the way, along what Augustine in De Trinitate wonderfully calls “the street of love.” (Cf. the companions — Faithful, Hopeful — that archetypal wayfarer Christian finds in Pilgrim’s Progress.)

I also find myself thinking here of the opposite of Christian’s finding of companions, the breaking of fellowship — which is the theme of one of Cavafy’s finest poems, “Myres: Alexandria, A.D. 340.” The poem is narrated by an Alexandrian pagan, whose dear friend (and perhaps lover) Myres has just died. The speaker goes to Myres’ house to see his friend for the last time, but “the dead boy’s relatives kept staring at me / in strange astonishment and displeasure” — so he remains in the vestibule, he dare not enter. The relatives do not wish to have a pagan interrupt their Christian mourning.

Some old women near me spoke in low voices
of the last day of his life —
that the name of Christ was constantly on his lips,
that he held a cross in his hands. —
Then into the room entered
four Christian priests fervently saying
prayers and supplications to Jesus,
or to Mary! (I do not know their religion well.)

Myres’ friend reflects that he had always known that Myres was a Christian, though he had not thought about it much; now various reminders of that difference between them, events little noticed when they had occurred, return to his memory. He watches and listens to the prayers, then:

And suddenly a queer impression
seized me. I had the vague feeling
that Myres was leaving my side;
I felt that he was united, a Christian,
with his own people, and I was becoming
a stranger, a total stranger; I also sensed
a doubt approaching me; perhaps I had been deluded
by my own passion, and I had always been a stranger to him. —
I flew out of their horrible house,
I left quickly before the memory of Myres should be
snatched away, should be altered by their Christianity.

Obviously we are meant to feel for this man who loved Myres; obviously we should, we should grieve with him. But — this is why Cavafy is great — we are also forced to consider the possibility that this doubt that assails him marks something real, substantial: that Myres is indeed separated from this pagan man who loved him and united instead “with his own people” — the people with whom he shares a citizenship in the City of God. “Myres was leaving my side.”

I have often wondered whether this poem was inspired by the great story in the fourth book of Augustine’s Confessions about the illness of the young Augustine’s dearest friend, a friend he had managed to turn aside from the Christian faith:

When he was sick with fever, for a long time he lay unconscious in a mortal sweat, and when his life was despaired of, he was baptized without his knowing it. To me this was a matter of no interest. I assumed that his soul would retain what it had received from me, not what had happened to his body while he was unconscious. But it turned out quite differently. For he recovered and was restored to health, and at once, as soon as I could speak with him (and I was able to do so as soon as he could speak, since I never left his side, and we were deeply dependent on one another), I attempted to joke with him, imagining that he too would laugh with me about the baptism which he had received when far away in mind and sense. But he had already learnt that he had received the sacrament. He was horrified at me as if I were an enemy, and with amazing and immediate frankness advised me that, if I wished to be his friend, I must stop saying this kind of thing to him. I was dumbfounded and perturbed; but I deferred telling him of all my feelings until he should get better and recover his health and strength. Then I would be able to do what I wished with him. But he was snatched away from my lunacy, so that he might be preserved with you for my consolation. After a few days, while I was absent, the fever returned, and he died.

And so they too were separated … though, Augustine came to believe, only for a time.

There must be a great divorce between the two cities, then, because they are driven by “a different faith, a different expectation, a different love.” Thus they must be “separated by the final judgement, and each receives her own end, of which there is no end.” Each receives, that is, the end which it has chosen.

But that final judgment of the two cities, that great divorce, is yet to come, and in the meantime — for the time being — “both cities alike enjoy the good things, or are afflicted with the adversities of this temporal state.” To return to a comparison from my first post in this series: the rain falls on Besźel and Ul Qoma alike. We are eschatologically two opposing cities, but topologically linked and paired. If we must be separated one day, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have common cause to make today. Temporary alliances are not as meaningful as eternal fellowship, but they are not meaningless either. We live within this tension and cannot, except through illusion, escape it.

June 6, 2023

Cities 7: a digression on reading

I’ve heard from a number of people, via email, about this series, and almost all of the responses have been negative. This has surprised me.

Most of the criticism is based on a misunderstanding of the project. My critics seem to think that I am seeking to describe “the Augustinian view of X” or “the Augustinian position on Y,” and so they want me to talk about something that Augustine writes in one of his other books or in a sermon. But I’m just trying to read a book, you know? Just read one book, a big complicated book.

There may be another misunderstanding at work in these critiques. The assumption seems to be that for any X there’s one “Augustinian view,” on any Y there’s one “Augustinian position.” But maybe he changed his mind about some things, or framed some complicated issue differently in one book than he had in another. Maybe also — I’m speaking from experience here — when you write millions of words over several decades you kinda forget some of what you’ve said. There’s a funny moment in CD XVIII.41 where Augustine contrasts the disagreements of the philosophers with the unity of the authors of Scripture, and when I came to that I made a little marginal note that this reminded me of his earlier statement that Babel/Babylon mean “confusion” (XVI.4). But then a couple of pages later he writes, “For ‘Babylon’ means ‘confusion’, as we remember having said already.” Oh right, I said that already. (It me.)

Maybe people are always this way, but I think in our own moment — I wrote about this in How to Think — the stream of information and misinformation so overwhelms our sensorium that we crave fixity, we like being done with something. Encountering a writer as prolific and various as Augustine, we perhaps look to manage the torrent of words by finding “the Augustinian position on Y” and putting it in our pocket for later use.

However valuable that might be, it’s not what I’m doing here. I’m just trying to read a book, and I think the reading of books — especially big complicated books — is pretty much a lost art. You read and you think, and then you read more and you decide that you thought wrong, you reflect and revise your interpretations — and you do so over a fairly lengthy period of time. (I may be adding second and third thoughts to this project a decade from now.) It’s a good intellectual exercise, I commend it to you.

Also: that’s why I’m organizing these posts in a Zettelkasten style: Every time I introduce a new topic I use a new number, but when I go back to revisit an earlier topic I create an appendage. So I might have topic 3 and then follow-ups I designate as 3a and 3b. Later I might add 3a1 and 3a2. Eventually I’ll create a page that lists all the posts in the proper reading order.

I’m traveling this week; posting will resume soon.

June 5, 2023

Cities 6: causes

In a previous post I wrote, “The Pax Romana is not a telos, it’s merely an event among other events, subject to varying interpretations and to the power of change.” But it’s it at least curious that Rome grew so powerful. What led to that power?

Here we have to invoke the idea of multiple causes. For Augustine, of course, God is the Final Cause of everything. In CD IV.33 he writes,

It is therefore this God, the author and giver of felicity, who, being the one true God, gives earthly dominion, both to good men and to evil. And he does this not at random or, as one may say, fortuitously, because he is God, not Fortune. Rather, he gives in accordance with the order of events in history, an order completely hidden from us, but perfectly known to God himself. Yet God is not bound in subjection to this order of events; he is himself in control, as the master of events, and arranges the order of things as a governor.

Though he says here that “the order of events in history” is “completely hidden from us,” a little later he wonders whether at least some of these divine purposes, and the order of events emerging therefrom, might be readable by humans. In the Preface to Book V he writes, “Let us therefore proceed to inquire why God was willing that the Roman Empire should extend so widely and so long.” And then he lays (at least some of) his cards on the table:

The cause of the greatness of the Roman Empire was neither chance nor destiny, in the sense in which those words are, somewhat arbitrarily, employed, when ‘chance’ is used of events which have no cause, or at least no cause which depends on any rational principle, and ‘destiny’ of events which happen in an inevitable sequence, independent of the will of God or man. Without the slightest doubt, the kingdoms of men are established by divine providence.

But then Augustine has to do things like discredit astrology — which is often used to show that human affairs are predestined — and it’s not until V.12 that he returns to the question: “Let us go on to examine for what moral qualities and for what reason the true God deigned to help the Romans in the extension of their empire; for in his control all the kingdoms of the earth.“ At this point we should remember that Augustine is replying to pagans who say that Rome flourished because of its devotion to its gods, and when Rome ceased to worship its gods, those gods withdrew their patronage. And Augustine has already demonstrated (to his satisfaction anyway) that those gods were either sheer fictions or weak and ineffectual demons, in either case unworthy of any devotion and incapable of assisting humans in their endeavors.

No, Augustine says, the real explanation for Rome’s success lies altogether elsewhere, and you can see where he’s headed if you note the phrase “moral qualities” (mores). Briefly, Augustine makes this remarkable argument: Rome flourished because, and insofar as, its citizens loved it. When Romans loved their city and sacrificed their personal interests to its needs, then it flourished. Yes, many Romans did this in order to gain the praise of their neighbors, which is not ideal — only the praise of God should really matter to us, and even pagan poets like Horace understood the dangers inherent in the love of praise (V.13) — but it is better to want to be praised for virtuous acts than to pursue vice.

Augustine has several points he wants to make about all this.

Those who sacrificed their own personal interests out of love for their city “received their reward” (V.15). They got the earthly happiness they wanted.
But they did not get, because they did not seek, eternal life and true happiness (beatus). This is a constant theme of Augustine’s writings: In the end, we pretty much get what we want.
And the Romans succumbed to the libido domanandi — you can see in the Aeneid, as I noted in an earlier post, this gradual shift from (a) wanting one’s city to flourish to (b) wanting one’s city to rule.
And this lust for political domination leads to a lust for personal domination. The infection spreads. In the days of the Republic, before the mania for imperial conquest set in, it wasn’t unusual to find virtuous Roman leaders, virtuous by the world’s standards anyway; now, at the fag-end of Empire, vice rules all. There could be no fifth-century Cato.

At IV.28 Augustine writes of the Romans, “though they could not have exercised dominion without the consent of the true God, still, if they had ignored, or despised, that multitude of false gods, and had recognized the one God, and given him the worship of sincere faith and pure lives, they would have had a better dominion – whatever its size – here on earth, and would have received hereafter an eternal kingdom, whether they had enjoyed dominion in this world or no.“ But instead they got what they asked for; they have their reward. So it is always with the City of Man.

June 2, 2023

Cities 5: a digression on longtermism

Not closely related to my main argument, but just a brief note:

Longtermism is the version of effective altruism that wants us to think about our ethical imperatives on a much vaster historical scale; it warns us against discounting the value of the lives of future people. (In his retelling of the Good Samaritan story, Phil Christman could have added a longtermist who would have scorned the Effective Samaritan for thinking only of the local and immediate. A longtermist, seeing a wounded man by the side of the road, would surely have “passed by on the other side.”)

Augustine is a kind of longtermist, in the sense that he thinks we should focus not on our immediate desires and concerns but on our eternal destiny. Thus his indifference to politics as we usually conceive of it: “As for this mortal life, which ends after a few days’ course, what does it matter under whose rule a man lives, being so soon to die, provided that the rulers do not force him to impious and wicked acts?” (CD V.17)

C. S. Lewis is writing very much under the sign of Augustine when, in his great sermon “The Weight of Glory,” he says this:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

It is a view that, if does not consign politics to the realm of adiaphora, quite radically decenters it.

We often hear that evangelicalism — and, often, other forms of orthodox Christianity — has been “too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good.” It has been so focused on “pie in the sky by and by” that it has neglected the prophets’ call to seek shalom — justice and peace in the City. And that critique is absolutely valid. But maybe we could use a little more longtermist decentering of politics these days.

June 1, 2023

Cities 3b: City and Church

My friend Brad East wrote with a partial dissent to something I say in this post:

When you say the City of God precedes the church, it seems to me you’re making a semantic decision that determines your conceptual interpretation. Such a claim makes sense only if you have predetermined that “church” means something like “the visible institution begun at Pentecost and continued in the public apostolic succession of episcopal administration” (or whatever). But all kinds of Christian writers have used the term “church” to mean something different and larger than that. In which case it’s not that the City of God isn’t the church; it’s that the church means something different than we often suppose in our colloquial speech.

Suppose “church” is coextensive with “the people of God,” which in turn is coextensive with “Abraham’s children,” which in turn is coextensive with “God’s children.” (You could add other convertible terms: “all the elect” and/or “all the saved” and/or “all who shall see God face to face.”) If that’s true, then you no longer have to distinguish between “City of God” and “church,” arguing that in Augustine’s or our usage the latter doesn’t mean the former. Rather, the conceptual range of “city” clarifies and expands our ordinary, or at least theological, usage and definition of “church.” So that “the City of God is the church and vice versa” redraws the boundaries of the rather [crabbed] definition some of us presuppose when we use the word “church.” So that, further, Augustine is narrating the course of God’s church from Adam/Abel to the Parousia and beyond into the new creation, it’s just that Augustine is helping us to understand what “church” means, or should mean, in our concepts and speech.

To which I responded:

Let’s make a distinction between what we — seeking to speak rightly about God’s Church — might want to say and what Augustine says. I’m just trying to understand Augustine, not make any claims myself. So what does he say about the relationship between City and Church?

Well, he’s not perfectly consistent. At one point he speaks of “the City of God, that is to say, God’s Church” (XIII.16), but I think that’s a moment of carelessness. Much more often he speaks of the Church as the part of the City that hasn’t yet come into its heavenly inheritance, that is still wayfaring. He often says that the angels are the larger part of the City of God, and “with us they make one City of God…. Part of this City, the part which consists of us, is on pilgrimage; part of it, the part which consists of the angels, helps us on our way” (X.7). And the angels are not the children of Abraham, nor are they the “elect.”

So I think on the Augustinian reading the City of God does precede the Church, because the angels (“all the company of Heaven”) precede the Fall, and it is with the Fall (exitus) that our pilgrimage (reditus) begins. Augustine believed, with virtually the whole Christian tradition, that (a) the serpent in the garden is to be identified with Satan and (b) Satan is a fallen angel. Q.E.D.

He also speaks fairly often of those who are part of the visible Church, who share the sacraments with the rest of us, but who will not inherit eternal life (I.35).

So for all those reasons I think Augustine does tend to make a fairly clear distinction between the Church — which we might define as “the faithful among the visible ekklesia, those who are genuinely on pilgrimage towards God” — and the City of God, which is a larger and older entity of which the Church (as just defined) is a part.

Reader, make your own decision!

May 31, 2023

Cities 3a: political theology

I got an email from a friend regarding this post: “What do you mean ‘Augustine isn’t interested in political theology or ecclesiology’???”

Hey, that’s not me (I say, evasively), that’s the great David Knowles. But Knowles makes a powerful point. His introduction to the 1972 Pelican edition of the City of God is by some distance the best brief commentary on the book I’ve ever read. Unfortunately, though that translation (by Henry Bettenson) is still in print, the move from Pelican to Penguin Classics was accompanied by the commissioning of a new introduction, and then, some years later, still another one. Neither is as insightful and useful as the Knowles original. (By the way, the chapter on Augustine in Knowles’s best-known book, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, remains, I think, an outstanding survey of Augustine’s mind.)

Anyway, in his introduction to the City of God Knowles writes this:

To our eyes it is remarkable that Augustine very rarely identities the City of God with the Catholic Church. He does so at least once: ‘The City of God, that is, God’s Church’ (Bk xIll, 16). He identifies the other city with the course of Gentile kingdoms before Christ, and the City of God with the ‘People of God’ from Adam to the birth of Christ. After the resurrection those who believe in Christ, the City of God, are in fact the Church, just as those that disbelieve are in fact the Roman authorities and the pagans of the Empire, but there is no confrontation of Church and State. We can see the reason for this. The constituent qualities of the two cities are their two objects of love, the love of God leading to contempt of self, and the love of self leading to contempt of God (Bk XIV, 28). The two cities are therefore two loves, and these are an inward and spiritual, not an outward and political distinction.

Augustine repeatedly says that Abel is a citizen of the City of God, so that City not only precedes the Church, it precedes … well, almost everything in human history.

Later — this regarding political theology — Knowles notes Augustine’s comment (CD V.17) that because life is so short is really doesn’t matter much what kind of political order you live in. And he continues,

Certainly there is an entire absence of any doctrine of Church-State relationship in the City of God. No doubt it would anachronisic to expect anything of the kind. Yet to most historians who consider the beginnings of that age-old confrontation, the conversion and subsequent patronage, not to say tutelage, of the Church by Constantine marks an epoch, a point of no return, when the Church was first faced with a secular master, benevolent though he might be. Augustine says not a word on this matter, though it had occupied the mind of his father in God, Ambrose.

That is, for the argument of the City of God, the conversion of Constantine is not significant. Augustine has some things to say about Constantine – for instance, that he was happy (beatus) in a way that no pagan emperor would ever be happy, and was granted the privilege of founding a new city, Constantinople, that contained no temples to demons. But he gives no indication that the existence of Christian emperors changes anything about the characters and conditions of the two cities. Therefore, says Knowles, to think that Augustine is concerned with the nature of the Church or with the proper relationship between the sacred and secular powers is to impose our categories on a book that works in a different manner than we are accustomed to.

Thus for my current project the challenge for me as a reader — and I am just a reader, not a scholar or a theologian — is to try to read him in ways that don’t cram him into the Procrustean bed of my expectations and familiar categories.

May 31, 2023

Cities 4: Secondary Epic

My previous post discussed the way Augustine sets up his City of God as antithetical to the Aeneid. Auden’s witty poem “Secondary Epic” may be seen as a kind of pendant to Augustine’s critique. It focuses not on the prophetic narration of Anchises in Book VI, but rather on a complementary moment, the description in Book VIII of the Shield of Aeneas. About this description Auden has some questions:

How was your shield-making god to explain
Why his masterpiece, his grand panorama
Of scenes from the coming historical drama
Of an unborn nation, war after war,
All the birthdays needed to pre-ordain
The Octavius the world was waiting for,
Should so abruptly, mysteriously stop,
What cause could he show why he didn’t foresee
The future beyond 31 B.C.,
Why a curtain of darkness should finally drop
On Carians, Morini, Gelonians with quivers,
Converging Romeward in abject file,
Euphrates, Araxes and similar rivers
Learning to flow in a latinate style,
And Caesar be left where prophecy ends,
Inspecting troops and gifts for ever?
Wouldn’t Aeneas have asked: — ‘What next?
After this triumph, what portends?’

And then the poem concludes, returning to Anchises:

No, Virgil, no:
Behind your verse so masterfully made
We hear the weeping of a Muse betrayed.
Your Anchises isn’t convincing at all:
It’s asking too much of us to be told
A shade so long-sighted, a father who knows
That Romulus will build a wall,
Augustus found an Age of Gold,
And is trying to teach a dutiful son
The love of what will be in the long run,
Would mention them both but not disclose
(Surely no prophet could afford to miss,
No man of destiny fail to enjoy
So clear a proof of Providence as this)
The names predestined for the Catholic boy
Whom Arian Odovacer will depose.

The names of that “Catholic boy”? Romulus Augustulus. What poet could resist the irony?

Auden borrows the title of his poem from A Preface to Paradise Lost, in which C. S. Lewis distinguishes primary epic — poems like the Iliad and Beowulf that show no obvious awareness that what they’re doing is, you know, epic — from secondary epic, which is always aware of its tradition its inheritance. Poems like the Aeneid and Paradise Lost are always gesturing towards their predecessors to make sure you know they are indeed epics. Secondary epics tend therefore to be at least somewhat polemical, in tension with their predecessors, because after all if those predecessors has said everything and said it perfectly there would be no need for later poems. Virgil has therefore set himself up to make an argument through his narrative, an argument about the destiny of Rome and the nature of heroism, and Auden joins Augustine in pointing out that the argument doesn’t work: No poet writing in the midst of history can plausibly convince us that a historical city is eternal and that heroic service to it can therefore have eternal consequences. The Pax Romana is not a telos, it’s merely an event among other events, subject to varying interpretations and to the power of change. “No, Virgil, no.”

May 29, 2023

Cities 3: hypothesis

Here’s the hypothesis I’m working with now: The problem with every theology of culture is that “culture” isn’t a biblical concept — isn’t clearly rooted in salvation history. And that is why I’m turning to Augustine. The idea of the two cities is deeply rooted in the biblical story and may be generative of certain important ideas that we can’t get through the use of a term like “culture.”

I think this is especially true because, as David Knowles points out, Augustine really isn’t interested in political theology, or for that matter in ecclesiology. In Book XV he says, “I classify the human race into two branches [generis]: the one consists of those who live by human standards, the other of those who live according to God’s will. I also call these two classes the two cities, speaking allegorically [mystice]. By two cities I mean two societies of human beings [duas societates hominum].” Two societies — this is what we might call a sociological or an ethnographic inquiry, and that’s much of what we’re after, or anyway I’m after, in a theology of culture. But, as James Davison Hunter says, with an emphasis on the symbols by which a given society is constituted and sustained. This is also where — see my previous post — Augustine’s application of rhetorical strategies to salvation history is especially imaginative and potent. I find remarkable and stimulating the idea that God’s providential shaping of history is a rhetorical act. For one thing, it implies that cities are in a sense rhetorical acts, saturated with symbolic and even archetypal meaning.

Also: it’s somehow typical of Augustine that when he’s trying to think sociologically he looks first at the city that Cain founded and then at the City of God in Revelation 21, and hangs his whole inquiry on a line suspended between the two. What a peculiar and fascinating mind, and that’s why, I suppose, we keep returning to him.

P.S. I wrote a bit about why I’m pursuing this project here over at my Buy Me a Coffee page.

May 29, 2023

Cities 2: archetype and antithesis

The City of God, which, as we saw in a previous post, claims to be an account of the two cities, the City of God and the City of Man, is a work in twenty-two books. It begins to discuss the two cities at the end of Book XIV. Why does Augustine take so long to get to the point?

Because his pagan interlocutors — who have argued that Rome declined when it abandoned its ancient gods for Christianity — misunderstand the entire subject, and therefore he has to get them properly oriented. To do this he must explain

That the historical record shows that the ancient gods never actually protected Rome;
That those gods were powerless to protect Rome, because they were weak and inferior demons;
That even if they could aid us in our earthly life, which as it happens they can’t, they could do nothing to help us gain eternal life;
That the wisest and best pagan philosophers understood all this;
That, however, those philosophers, not having been granted God’s revelation, could see the falsity of popular religion without having a clear sense of what true religion is;
That true religion was entrusted to the Jews, whose story and message culminated in Jesus Christ;
That once this salvation history is properly understood one will understand that Rome isn’t All That, and insofar as it had successes those resulted from the blessings of the One True God, which are granted and withheld for reasons typically unknown to mere mortals;
That all of history is in a sense salvation history, with the rise and fall of kingdoms contributing to God’s gracious desire to bring us all, through the mediation of His Son, into His everlasting City.

Only when this (necessarily detailed!) ground-clearing work is done can Augustine take up the story of the Two Cities, because only within this framework can one understand the actual place of Rome, and of all other human social organizations, in the economy of salvation.

•

In Miéville’s The City and the City, the Cleavage that created two cites where there had been one is shrouded in mystery. But our the Cleavage that creates the City of Man can be precisely identified, Augustine thinks. It happens not (as one might expect) with the Fall; it does not even happen when Cain murders his brother Abel. It stems, rather, from one of the consequences of that murder:

Now Cain was the first son born to those two parents of mankind, and he belonged to the city of man; the later son, Abel, belonged to the City of God…. When those two cities started on their course through the succession of birth and death, the first to be born was a citizen of this world, and later appeared one who was a pilgrim and stranger in the world, belonging as he did to the City of God. He was predestined by grace, and chosen by grace, by grace a pilgrim below, and by grace a citizen above. […]

Scripture tells us that Cain founded a city, whereas Abel, as a pilgrim, did not found one. For the City of the saints is up above, although it produces citizens here below, and in their persons the City is on pilgrimage until the time of its kingdom comes. At that time it will assemble all those citizens as they rise again in their bodies; and then they will be given the promised kingdom, where with their Prince, ‘the king of ages’, they will reign, world without end. [CD XV.1]

The founding of the City of Man thus arises from a moment of familial violence, and this, Augustine says, is “what the Greeks call an archetype” [CD XV.5]: later world-historical events would be “reflections” of it, most notably the founding of Rome itself, which is intimately connected to Romulus’s murder of his brother Remus. The City of Man is something like the eternal return of the aboriginal fratricide.

And thus the City of Man is therefore always and necessarily a product of what Augustine famously calls the libido dominandi, the lust for domination. And it is this lust, he repeatedly says, that drives and had always driven Rome.

One of the key elements of Augustine’s narrative structure, indeed of his theology of history, is antithesis, because, he thinks, antithesis is how God as the author of history shapes and figures that history:

The opposition of such contraries gives an added beauty to speech; and in the same way there is beauty in the composition of the world’s history arising from the antithesis of contraries — a kind of eloquence in events, instead of in words. This point is made very clearly in the book Ecclesiasticus [33.14], ‘Good confronts evil, life confronts death: so the sinner confronts the devout. And in this way you should observe all the works of the Most High; two by two; one confronting the other.’ [CD XI.18]

“A kind of eloquence in events” (rerum eloquentia) — what a remarkable phrase.

Thus the City of God finds its antithesis in the City of Man, but also, right from the beginning Augustine makes it clear that his narrative finds its own antithesis in another narrative: the Aeneid. In the opening pages of the City of God he repeatedly quotes Vergil’s poem, and there’s one passage in particular that he zeroes in on. It comes from Book VI, when Aeneas is visiting the underworld and meets his father Anchises, who tells him the story of the great Roman future. That story culminates in this great and famous passage:

Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera
(credo equidem), vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
orabunt causus melius, caelique meatus
describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:
to regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.

Here’s David Ferry’s version:

“There are those, I know it, who by their shaping art
Will call forth, from the bronze that breathes, the living
Features of the face; and those who by
Their art of eloquence argue and prevail
In courts of law; or those who by their art
Describe with their pointing wands the radiant wheeling
Of all the stars in all the nighttime sky,
And can foretell the moment of their rising.
And Romans, never forget that this will be
Your appointed task: to use your arts to be
The governor of the world, to bring to it peace,
Serenely maintained with order and with justice,
To spare the defeated and to bring an end
To war by vanquishing the proud.”

And, more compactly and (I think) more accurately, Allen Mandelbaum:

“For other peoples will, I do not doubt,
still cast their bronze to breathe with softer features,
or draw out of the marble living lines,
plead causes better, trace the ways of heaven
with wands and tell the rising constellations;
but yours will be the rulership of nations,
remember, Roman, these will be your arts:
to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer,
to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud.”

I’ve always liked Mandelbaum’s translation a lot. It’s a neglected one.

The key point here, for Augustine, is that everything in Anchises’ prophecy is about Roman domination: Rome is to rule, to teach, to conquer, to tame. And it did — for a while. But now it is falling, as all human endeavors will, in time. The City of Man is no lasting city. And so Augustine from the beginning of his work sets himself up the antithesis of Vergil, offering a counter-plot, a counter-myth to that of the Aeneid. But it is only in Book XV that he begins that myth-against-myth in earnest.

May 26, 2023

The City and the City

Should you happen to want to think about Augustine’s City of God (hereafter CD for Civitate Dei) in sociological terms – which is certainly not the only and perhaps not the best way of thinking about it – but should you want to consider it sociologically, then I would suggest that you first read China Miéville’s novel The City and the City.

Like Augustine’s masterwork, Miéville’s novel is concerned with two cities that have a complex, fraught, and not-always-comprehensible relation to one another. And like the City of God and City of Man, Besźel and Ul Qoma occupy the same physical space. Well, sort of. I’ll try to explain.

The protagonist of the novel is a police inspector named Tyador Borlú, who lives and works in a city called Besźel, which appears to be somewhere in the Balkans. (More on that in a later post.) We first get a sense that there’s something a little odd about this situation early in the book, when Borlú sees an old woman on the street:

With a hard start, I realised that she was not on GunterStrász at all, and that I should not have seen her. Immediately and flustered I looked away, and she did the same, with the same speed. I raised my head, towards an aircraft on its final descent. When after some seconds I looked back up, unnoticing the old woman stepping heavily away, I looked carefully instead of at her in her foreign street at the facades of the nearby and local GunterStrász, that depressed zone.

Her “foreign street,” we eventually learn, is in the city of Ul Qoma, which is the topological double, the “topolganger,” of Besźel. What does that mean? Much is never explained directly in the book, so any answer will necessarily involve interpretation, but …: If you were a resident of neither Besźel nor Ul Qoma and were dropped into their physical space, you would see one city. But the people who live there are trained almost from birth to notice the differences – in language, in food, in dress, even in basic bodily movement (“physical vernacular”) – and to somehow suppress their sensory awareness of the other city. Should that suppression fail, as it fails Borlú when he sees the old Ul Qoman woman, one must “unsee” – or “unhear” if you notice a foreign voice or the siren of a foreign ambulance, or even “unsmell” should the aromas of an alien bakery find their way to your nose. The separate identities of the two cities are sustained by an obsessively inculcated mutual incomprehension – or, more precisely, imperception.

As a citizen of Besźel or Ul Qoma navigates this topology, he or she is always aware that most areas are total – they are only in Besźel or only in Ul Qoma, and in such places the topolganger is alter – while others are crosshatched, that is, belonging somehow to both cities. (Navigating these can be difficult: one must take pains to avoid touching citizens of the other city, and must constantly unsee, unhear, unsmell. It’s stressful.) A few places are dissensi, disputed – each city claims them. Such disputes, and many others that inevitably arise, are adjudicated in the great administrative center called Copula Hall – the only building with the same name, and the same function, in both cities, and the only place where one can legally pass from one city to another:

If someone needed to go to a house physically next door to their own but in the neighbouring city, it was in a different road in an unfriendly power. That is what foreigners rarely understand. A Besź dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach. But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Besźel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home.

(Miéville gets his pronouns confused there. It happens even to professionals.) Some people believe – and this is important to the book but will not be stressed in this post – that there is a third city in the same place, one comprised of territories that Besźel thinks belong to Ul Qoma and Ul Qoma thinks belong to Besźel. This possibly imaginary city is called Orcinny, Miéville’s tip of the hat to Ursula K. Le Guin’s imaginary Central European country Orsinia.

To violate the categorical imperative, this Prime Directive of imperception, is to “breach,” and when you breach you become subject to the fierce power known as … Breach. When the boundaries are in any way violated, the “avatars” of Breach suddenly and mysteriously appear to deal with the violation, and in some cases the breacher is never seen again. Residents of both cities live in absolute terror of Breach, which they believe to be omniscient. After all, if Breach were not omniscient, how could you get in trouble just for seeing someone, or smelling a pastry baking? No ordinary mortal could know what’s going on in your head.

It’s only late in the book that we begin to question whether Breach really is that powerful. What if the people of the two cities are not policed in the way they fear, but instead are merely self-policing? We are told in the book that there was at some point in the distant past a Cleavage that separated the two cities, which suggests that until then the place was a single city; but no one seems to understand precisely when the Cleavage happened or why. Archeologists visit the two cities (primarily Ul Qoma) to study the artifacts of the Precursor culture, the culture that existed before the Cleavage, but those artifacts are confusing, featuring in the same strata what seem to be remains of widely varying civilizations. Rumors suggest that these artifacts manifest “questionable physics,” but we’re not told what that means, perhaps because no one knows. If for much of the book we are encouraged to think of the Cleavage and its resulting urban parallelism as a paranormal event, in the novel’s latter stages we begin to wonder whether there’s anything going on here other than group psychosis, the “madness of crowds” – maybe only plain old propaganda. None of these questions is answered.

•

At the outset of his massive work – simultaneously historical, sociological, ethnographic, and theological – Augustine writes,

I have taken upon myself the task of defending the glorious City of God against those who prefer their own gods to the Founder of that City. I treat of it both as it exists in this world of time, a stranger among the ungodly, living by faith, and as it stands in the security of its everlasting seat. This security it now awaits in steadfast patience, until ‘justice returns to judgement’; but it is to attain it hereafter in virtue of its ascendancy over its enemies, when the final victory is won and peace established. (CD I.1)

Already, here at the outset, we have a situation potentially more complicated than that of Miéville’s novel. For while we see the beginnings here of a contrast to the City of Man – the city built and sustained by the “ungodly,” those who reject the God who has founded His own city – we also see the eternal City ontologically doubled: at once (a) on a seemingly uncertain pilgrimage and (b) already and eternally victorious. And there is another complication: the City of God is not quite coterminous with the Church. For one thing, the former contains angels and the latter doesn’t. (CD XI.9: “The holy angels … form the greater part of that City, and the more blessed part, in that they have never been on pilgrimage in a strange land.”) Moreover, Augustine occasionally acknowledges that there may be some who do not belong to the Church who nevertheless belong to the City of God. So whatever else we say about the City of God, it’s bigger than the Church. And anyway, as David Knowles points out in his magisterial introduction to the edition I’m reading, Augustine in this work is not interested in the Church.

But Christians today are certainly more likely to think of the Church than of the City of God. At most what we tend to see is the Church as a kind of outpost, as it were, of the City of God; often it seems to be surrounded by its enemies. This is not wholly wrong but not wholly correct either. Near the beginning of The Screwtape Letters the demon Screwtape says to the junior demon Wormwood,

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate.

“Invisible”? — or perhaps, as Miéville suggests, unvisible, deliberately or half-deliberately unseen? One way to think about that sham-Gothic building is as belonging fully to the City of God – it is, as it were, total, and in relation to it the City of Man is alter. To see it that way would be to perceive “a serious house on serious earth” indeed. In the doubled city of Miéville’s novel, strangers who breach, who wander from one city to another heedlessly, are treated with compassion; they don’t know, they can’t be expected to know. Still more is this true when a citizen of the City of Man – Philip Larkin, say, whom I have just quoted – wanders into a church, because if Besźel and Ul Qoma are constituted by separation, and most of their citizens seem to wish only to make that separation more perfect, both of Augustine’s cities proselytize: though some of the individual proselytizers are more charitable and generous than others, each wants, ultimately, the end of the other.

In Miéville’s imagined world, separation is questioned only by unificationists (unifs, for short), who want to undo the Cleavage and make the city again one; here, almost everyone seems to know that that’s not possible. Ultimately, we all seem to believe, one of the cities will be triumphant and the other will end. (CD XV.4: “The earthly city will not be everlasting; for when it is condemned to the final punishment it will no longer be a city.” Voltaire: “Écrasez l’infâme!”) Unification achieved only through elimination or absorption. As a result, every inch of earthly territory is dissensi: such disputes are usually mute and implicit, but they become explicit whenever a state legislature mandates the posting of the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms, or when courts demand that Christian bakers or florists or web designers make obeisance to the newest imperatives of the City of Man.

And even when there are no open disputes, the citizens of both cities must regularly confront rival beliefs, rival values, rival ideals. In a few places one particular city may be nearly total, but the internet and the TV bring news from the other city. Such news most unsee, with a shrug or with a muttered imprecation, but tension always threatens; and almost all of us are aware that crosshatching is not rare but nearly ubiquitous. We may then treasure those moments, those places, where the other city can be felt to be wholly alter.

At the end of The City and the City, the future of Besźel and Ul Qoma remains in question. But here, in this world, few doubt the ultimate outcome. Each city believes it will be, in the end, victorious. But what to do in the meantime? This is one of Augustine’s key questions, though it takes him several hundred pages to get to it, and even then his approach is often indirect. More about all that in another post.

June 16, 2022

Tono-Bungay

My friend Adam Roberts has written extensively about this book, but because I knew I wanted to read it, I have avoided reading Adam’s account. I’ll now go back to see what he says, which may make me repent of everything I say here. But there’s value in just getting your thoughts down without too much editing. Also: many spoilers ahead.

H. G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay is a powerful but oddly constructed novel. It’s a bit difficult to describe that structure but here are what I believe to be the key elements:

1) It is most famously a story about commerce, and especially commerce based in advertising. Tono-Bungay is a patent medicine that does no one any good and might do them a little bit of harm – though its inventor, Edward Ponderevo, thinks that it might have positive psychological benefits that would justify his selling it. (Placebo effect, etc.) So the part of the novel most often commented on, what many critics would describe as the story, is about how Tono-Bungay is manufactured, advertised, and distributed throughout the United Kingdom. The business is, of course, a house of cards that is bound to collapse and eventually does.

2) But this is also a story about a man who is repeatedly thwarted in love. George Ponderevo, the narrator and protagonist, has a failed marriage, some casual affairs, and an unrequited or at least unfulfilled love for a woman – named, ironically enough, Beatrice – whom he meets when they are children and whom he definitively loses when they are middle-aged. One of the first important scenes in the book concerns his initial infatuation with Beatrice and – except for a coda which I will describe later – the book concludes with his final sight of her. (Because they are mismatched socially, the whole situation is quite like that of like Pip and Estella, with the unhappy rather than the happy ending.) Because his love for Beatrice is so prominent at the beginning and at the end of the novel, and because the middle of the novel is so occupied by his failed marriage to a woman named Marion, if I had to say whether this book is a story about commerce in advertising or a story about failed love, I would choose the latter.

3) The third element of the story is a contrast between the fixed character of social life in the world of English countryside and its small towns — a world controlled by a declining and ossifying aristocracy — and the immense energy and mobility of life in London. After early chapters establishing the rigidity of life on a country estate where George’s mother is the housekeeper, and in a sleepy small town dominated by another aristocratic family, the scene moves to London. We’re then treated to an extended panoramic celebration of the city narrated by the awestruck young George. “I got London at last with an exceptional freshness of effect, as the sudden revelation of a whole unsuspected other side to life.” More:

I came to it on a dull and smoky day by the South Eastern Railway, and our train was half an hour late, stopping and going on and stopping again. I marked beyond Chiselhurst the growing multitude of villas, and so came stage by stage through multiplying houses and diminishing interspaces of market garden and dingy grass to regions of interlacing railway lines, big factories, gasometers and wide reeking swamps of dingy little homes, more of them and more and more. The number of these and their dinginess and poverty increased, and here rose a great public house and here a Board School and there a gaunt factory; and away to the east there loomed for a time a queer, incongruous forest of masts and spars. The congestion of houses intensified and piled up presently into tenements; I marveled more and more at this boundless world of dingy people; whiffs of industrial smell, of leather, of brewing, drifted into the carriage; the sky darkened, I rumbled thunderously over bridges, van-crowded streets, peered down on and crossed the Thames with an abrupt eclat of sound. I got an effect of tall warehouses, of grey water, barge crowded, of broad banks of indescribable mud, and then I was in Cannon Street Station — a monstrous dirty cavern with trains packed across its vast floor and more porters standing along the platform than I had ever been in my life before. I alighted with my portmanteau and struggled along, realising for the first time just how small and weak I could still upon occasion feel. In this world, I felt, an Honours medal in Electricity and magnetism counted for nothing at all.

Afterwards I drove in a cab down a canyon of rushing street between high warehouses, and peeped up astonished at the blackened greys of Saint Paul’s. The traffic of Cheapside — it was mostly in horse omnibuses in those days — seemed stupendous, its roar was stupendous; I wondered where the money came from to employ so many cabs, what industry could support the endless jostling stream of silk-hatted, frock-coated, hurrying men.

This contrast between country and city is really key to everything else: surely Tono-Bungay is one of the great London novels. When Edward Ponderevo, George’s uncle, lives in a small town, trying to eke out a living as a chemist, he continually complains about the impossibility of making anything happen in such a catatonic place, and only when he is forced by bankruptcy to move to London and take up a menial job does he actually have the opportunity to create Tono-Bungay – and more important, to create a market for Tono-Bungay. It is the concentration of people in London that enables his creation to go viral. London, the viral city, in multiple ways.

London also puts people in touch with one another who in the countryside or in small towns would either not meet at all or meet only in constrained circumstances. George marries Marion, whom he has little in common with – something he comes to understand even before their marriage – but it’s only because they both live in London that they ever encounter one another. They have certain trivial habits or quasi-interests in common; everything between them arose from a chance encounter of strangers, the kind that almost never happens in the countryside but happens a dozen times a day in London. Their marriage ends because George has an affair with a young woman who works as a typist for his company – again, a connection that only the energy, congestion, and economic drive of the city makes possible.

It is noteworthy that George’s failed relationship with Beatrice happens almost wholly in the countryside, while his failed marriage to Marion happens in the city. His love for Beatrice is doomed by a world that’s too inflexible; his attachment to Marion – which he sees as a “hunger,” not as genuine romantic love – is produced by a world that’s too unbounded.

So one of the things that Wells wants to talk about here is London as a kind of universal solvent, a force powerful enough to disintegrate the long-established social structures of British life, and while we know where Wells’s sympathies lie – he despises the old division of social classes – nevertheless he is quite aware that a universal solvent will occasionally end up dissolving things that shouldn’t be dissolved.

At the end of the book, we get an epilogue in which we’re treated to another vista of London, this time as it appears from the Thames:

To run down the Thames so is to run one’s hand over the pages in the book of England from end to end. One begins in Craven Reach and it is as if one were in the heart of old England. Behind us are Kew and Hampton Court with their memories of Kings and Cardinals, and one runs at first between Fulham’s episcopal garden parties and Hurlingham’s playground for the sporting instinct of our race. The whole effect is English. There is space, there are old trees and all the best qualities of the home-land in that upper reach. Putney, too, looks Anglican on a dwindling scale. And then for a stretch the newer developments slop over, one misses Bladesover [the country house in which the book begins] and there come first squalid stretches of mean homes right and left and then the dingy industrialism of the south side, and on the north bank the polite long front of nice houses, artistic, literary, administrative people’s residences, that stretches from Cheyne Walk nearly to Westminster and hides a wilderness of slums. What a long slow crescendo that is, mile after mile, with the houses crowding closelier, the multiplying succession of church towers, the architectural moments, the successive bridges, until you come out into the second movement of the piece with Lambeth’s old palace under your quarter and the houses of Parliament on your bow! Westminster Bridge is ahead of you then, and through it you flash, and in a moment the round-faced clock tower cranes up to peer at you again and New Scotland Yard squares at you, a fat beef-eater of a policeman disguised miraculously as a Bastille.

We are moving through time: from the ancient English countryside to the city whose function was, for a long time, to consolidate the power of the rural elite, and now into modernity:

And then the traditional and ostensible England falls from you altogether. The third movement begins, the last great movement in the London symphony, in which the trim scheme of the old order is altogether dwarfed and swallowed up. Comes London Bridge, and the great warehouses tower up about you, waving stupendous cranes, the gulls circle and scream in your ears, large ships lie among their lighters, and one is in the port of the world. Again and again in this book I have written of England as a feudal scheme overtaken by fatty degeneration and stupendous accidents of hypertrophy.

Somehow we have moved, in the course of one novel and about forty years, from social sclerosis to “fatty degeneration.” Varieties of poor health: one world in which, as Edward Ponderevo always said, “nothing happens,” and another in which too much is happening; atrophy and hypertrophy. “Amidst it all no plan appears, no intention, no comprehensive desire. That is the very key of it all. Each day one feels that the pressure of commerce and traffic grew, grew insensibly monstrous, and first this man made a wharf and that erected a crane, and then this company set to work and then that, and so they jostled together to make this unassimilable enormity of traffic.”

And from there out into the Sea – the strongest possible contrast. “The river passes — London passes, England passes…”

Wells tries at the end of the story to make an accounting of What It All Means, but I will set that aside. I think what he narrates tells a rather different story than what he means to tell, though in a way he knows that there is a key “symbol,” as he calls it, here. George Ponderevo is making this final passage through London on a warship, a “destroyer” that he has built. It’s worth noting that he had begun his career as an engineer in the immediate aftermath of his divorce from Marion; and has returned to it after his final goodbye to Beatrice. A classic case of sublimation: “Eros, builder of cities” – but in this case Eros, builder of warships. At this point George has seen the loss of some he loves and the deaths of others; indeed, he himself is a murderer; and after the failure of all his loves he motors down the Thames and through the great city of London as an avatar of Thanatos. And that, I think, is what this powerful and sad book is all about: not the manic energies of Commerce but rather the end of Eros and the triumph of Thanatos.

May 8, 2022

Edward Heathcote, with a piece that provides an interesting counterpoint to my recent post on a 1950s skyscraper:

Sennett refers to the difference between Billionaires’ Row and the Rockefeller Center, a place of constant public and civic activity. In Rem Koolhaas’s 1978 book Delirious New York, written as the city was mired in bankruptcy but while its cultural scene was, arguably, at its apex, the Dutch architect argued that the skyscraper contained all the potential of a self-contained city. A “social condenser” is what he called it: “A machine to generate and intensify desirable forms of human intercourse.”

The slender profile of 111 W 57th represents the proud nail in the coffin of that potential. It transforms an archetype which was, since its birth at the end of the 19th century, a container built to accommodate the complex needs of the contemporary metropolis.

The skyscrapers of the golden era, the 1920s and 1930s, aspired to the condition of the vertical city, connecting the street to the sky via a labyrinth of corridors and arcades, shops, hotels, restaurants, subways, studios, theatres and, of course, offices with their own set of stratifications from secretaries to executives. This skinny tower aspires to something very different, the exclusion of the 99.99 per cent.

Ultimately, this is a skyscraper that has been built because it was possible, physically, economically and politically, to build it. Finance and engineering collide in the refinement of a new, very contemporary type of tower. It is, in its way, just as emblematic of its time as the buildings of the 1920s were of theirs. The economies of global cities are built on real estate, that is how they maintain growth. These towers may look insubstantial, but this is not a glitch. It is the new reality in which unimaginable wealth towers over the city uncontained, not by accident but by design.

April 29, 2022

Skyscraper

Skyscraper (1959) is a 20-minute documentary film — mainly in black-and-white, though color enters in an interesting way near the end — about the construction of a building in Manhattan called the Tishman Building, then carrying the address 666 Fifth Avenue. The number was recently changed to 660, which it could have been all along, since the building occupies several lots, including both 660 and 666. Perhaps its current owner, one of Jared Kushner’s companies, thought the association of a Trump family member with the Mark of the Beast was subject to unfortunate interpretation. But when it was completed in 1957 the three big sixes were quite prominently displayed on the façade.

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You can see the film here, though that’s a bad print — if you happen to subscribe to the Criterion Channel you can see a much better version. It’s fascinating in a number of ways.

Some of the filming takes place high above the streets, and certain shots look down on St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The narrator comments that St. Paddy’s had seen three buildings go up at 666, but the real story is more complicated. The first buildings on that stretch of Fifth Avenue were a series of mansions — one of which was designed by the famous architect and infamous human being Stanford White — built for the Vanderbilt family.

William Henry Vanderbilt Triple Palace Fifth Avenue

This one came earlier and was designed by Richard Morris Hunt:

William Kissam Vanderbilt House 660 Fifth Avenue Demolished NYC copy

They called it Le Petit Château, isn’t that cute. A château with no green thing in sight is no château at all, in my book.

Gradually these were torn down; by the time the Tishman Building started construction, the area had been reduced, as far as I can tell, to a 12-story office building and a parking lot. (The various histories are a little vague on these points.)

In any case, in 1957 construction was preceded by demolition, and when the dump trucks carried away load after load of rubble they took it to New Jersey, where it was used to reclaim marshland. So there are who knows how many buildings in New Jersey built on ex-Manhattan rocks.

When the building opened, among its most notable features was its lobby, which featured two artworks by the great Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, a flowing ceiling and a differently flowing waterfall-wall.

MG 7890 800x533

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These were removed in 2020. Thanks a lot, Jared.

For a while, plans were ongoing to demolish the 41-story building — stripping it down to its steel frame and then rebuilding it twice as high, to a design by Zaha Hadid. These proved too ambitious. But surely it won’t be long before St. Patrick’s Cathedral watches yet another building on those lots come down and yet another rise up.

Anyway: the documentary is cool, you should watch it.

November 9, 2021

Wendell Berry (1991):

I. Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people. National thinkers tend to be dangerous also; we now have national thinkers in the northeastern United States who look upon Kentucky as a garbage dump.

II. Global thinking can only be statistical. Its shallowness is exposed by the least intention to do something. Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place. Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it: reduce it, make a bauble of it. Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. If you want to see where you are, you will have to get out of your space vehicle, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot you will find that the earth is still satisfyingly large, and full of beguiling nooks and crannies.

March 22, 2021

Isolatos

In his brief 1949 book The Enchaféd Flood, Auden writes of what happens when communities — gatherings of persons bound together (Auden does not quote Augustine here but is silently citing him) by a common love — deteriorate into societies — collections of human organisms defined by their social and economic function. One of his touchstone texts in writing about these matters is Moby Dick.

If a community so dissolves, the societies, which remain so long as human beings wish to remain alive, must, left to themselves, grow more and more mechanical. And such real individuals as are left must become Ishmael’s “isolatos, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each isolato living in a separate continent of his own.”

(I’ve adjusted the spelling from “isolatoe” to avoid annoyance.) Auden goes on to make an unexpected and profoundly illuminating connection: “The grand explanatory image of this condition is of course Dürer’s Melancholia.”

608px Melencolia I Durero

Auden:

She sits unable to sleep and yet unable to work, surrounded by unfinished works and unused tools, the potential fragments of the city which she has the knowledge but not the will to build…

What is the cause of her suffering? That, surrounded by every possibility, she cannot find within herself or without the necessity to realise one rather than another. Urban society is, like the desert, a place without limits. The city walls of tradition, mythos and cultus have crumbled. There is no direction in which Ishmael is forbidden or forcibly prevented from moving. The only outside “necessities” are the random whims of fashion or the lifeless chains of a meaningless job, which, so long as he remains an individual, he can and will reject. At the same time, however, he fails to find a necessity within himself to take their place.

Earlier in his exposition Auden had drawn on Kierkegaard to describe those more common figures whose response to a lack of community is not to descend into melancholy but rather to accept their roles in a featureless “public” — Kierkegaard in The Present Age: “a public is a kind of gigantic something, an abstract and deserted void which is everything and nothing” — or to join some crowd, a crowd which might descend into a mob. These people are saved from melancholy by passively accepting the anonymity of the public or by attaching their anomie to the will of the crowd. As Auden wrote in an essay, “A mob is active; it smashes, kills and sacrifices itself. The public is passive or, at most, curious. It neither murders nor sacrifices itself; it looks on, or looks away, while the mob beats up a Negro or the police round up Jews for the gas ovens.”

On Good Friday, Auden wrote elsewhere, the crowd cried “Crucify him!” But that crucifixion was also enabled by those who shouted nothing but merely averted their eyes from the disagreeable spectacle.

The person deprived of a community who cannot, for whatever temperamental reasons, join the crowd or disappear into the public will inevitably become a melancholic “isolato.” Isolation, anonymous absorption of the self into some abstract social function, the madness of crowds — those are the three chief options for people who are deprived of genuine community.

The question then becomes: By what means might we achieve the restoration of community that will protect us from these dark fates?

It is important that Auden links both Ishmael’s condition and Dürer’s image of Melancholia with the failure of the city: For him what matters most about the unused tools scattered at the melancholiac’s feet, and perhaps also the geometric and mathematical images elsewhere in the print, are what they say about a built environment that has not been built, which indicates not only a loss of imagination and creativity but a failure to construct, which is, among other things, a failure to protect one’s community from natural and social enemies.

Hovering behind these expressed thoughts, I believe, is an ongoing meditation on the Aeneid. When Aeneas and his crew are shipwrecked on the Libyan coast and make their way to Carthage, Aeneas’s first words on seeing that city are “O fortunati, quorum iam moenia surgunt!” — Fortunate are those whose walls already rise — because he is impatient to raise the walls of the city he is pledged to found as a second Troy. But soon enough that impatience, coupled with love for Dido and grief for his lost city and wife, has him directing Carthaginian construction crews, something which Mercury, sent down by Jupiter, fiercely denounces: “tu nunc Karthaginis altae / fundamenta locas pulchramque uxorius urbem / exstruis?” So for love of this new wife of yours you’re building this pleasant city of Carthage? Instead of the one you’ve been commanded by the gods to build?

It looks like work that Aeneas is doing, but it’s not: Mercury says he’s wasting time, idling away the hours. The god thinks it’s love that keeps him in Carthage, but that’s not it, or not chiefly: it’s primarily a kind of structured procrastination born of melancholy.

Just three years before writing the lectures that became The Enchaféd Flood, Auden had held a temporary commission in the U. S. Army (rank: Major) and had participated in the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany — note the initials in the background of this photo:

Think of the ruination Auden saw, and think of the great task of Aeneas, and you will grasp the import of this passage from the conclusion of those lectures:

We live in a new age … in which the heroic image is not the nomad wanderer through the desert or over the ocean, but the less exciting figure of the builder, who renews the ruined walls of the city. Our temptations are not theirs. We are less likely to be tempted by solitude into Promethean pride: we are far more likely to become cowards in the face of the tyrant who would compel us to lie in the service of the False City. It is not madness we need to flee but prostitution.

Aeneas’s melancholy — his anomie, his ennui — has led him to prostitute himself to a city other than his own: literally Carthage, but metaphorically and spiritually what Auden calls “the False City.” A city built on comforting but deadly lies; a city which might, at its very best, offer some kind of society but never genuine community. Aeneas has escaped from the dark fate of the “isolato”; but he has done so by being absorbed into a public that is not his own.

What are the virtues, what is the disposition, of the builder of the True City? How might someone be formed to possess the proper disposition? I think we know what the impediments are — That’s surely an iPad in the lap of the putto in Melancholia: he’s obviously pissed off by some jerk’s tweet — but what are the affordances?

That’s Auden in his USSBS days, in late 1945, visiting the ruins of Nuremberg (photo scanned from this book). I’ve highlighted something curious at the center-right of the image. It’s a statue that by some miracle survived the bombing which, as you can see, completely devastated the rest of the city center. The statue depicts Albrecht Dürer.

November 6, 2020

back to the urbs

Many years ago I wrote a post about living in a suburb — Wheaton, Illinois — but having a life that in many ways felt more like what city life is supposed to be:

For people like me Wheaton doesn’t feel like a suburb at all, and many aspects of my life sound kinda urban. My family and I live in a small house – with one bathroom, for heaven’s sake – and have a single four-cylinder car. I walk to work most days, frequently taking a detour to Starbucks on the way. From work I often walk to Wheaton’s downtown to meet people for lunch, or, at the end of the day, to meet my wife and son for dinner. Drug stores and a small grocery store are equally close; I even walk to my dentist. I also like being just a short stroll from the Metra line that takes me into Chicago, just as Chicago residents like living just a short stroll from the El. And I know many other people who live in much the same way.

The point of my post is that the common opposition between “city life” and “suburban life” obscures many vital distinctions and gradations.

I don’t live in a suburb any more, I live in a city. But because the city I live in — Waco, Texas — has 125,000 people rather than millions, it’s not the kind of place that people refer to as urban when they talk about “America’s urban-rural divide.” For example, here is a piece by Eric Levitz that uses the binary opposition in the conventional way, or what seems to me to be the conventional way. I can’t be certain, but I strongly suspect that Levitz thinks that people who live in cities the size of the one I live in — especially if those cities are south of the Mason-Dixon Line — are “rural.” But they aren’t. Even if we don’t think or vote like New Yorkers.

When people talk about “the urban-rural divide in America,” I think what they usually mean is “the divide between people who live in megacities and people who live everywhere else.”

September 1, 2016

crooked neighbors

Onward we went, asking people everywhere we stopped about the Flushing Remonstrance. None of them knew anything about it. We ended up at the Macedonia AME Church, the third-oldest religious organization in Flushing, a block west of Bowne House, on Union Street, another ‘God’s Row.’ Partway through the service, we managed to wrest ourselves from the centripetal pull of the funky organ. On our way out we encountered a deacon who not only knew about the Remonstrance, but regaled us with reminiscences about growing up in Flushing with close friends whose surnames included Lum, Vargas, O’Neal, and DiVecchio. He saw in himself—part African American, part Native American—the story of the place. He told us that John Bowne had been an abolitionist, as were many of his descendants. For the deacon, the significance of the Remonstrance wasn’t whether it had bequeathed the diversity he celebrated. It was in providing a model for how that diversity could be preserved: A group of men stood up to defend the religious freedom of people with whom they disagreed, refusing to demonize them. They stood up for unity as well as diversity, just like the Chinese and Italian friends who’d come to his defense as a kid, when they would travel together to parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island where his skin color wasn’t welcome.

Catapult | Love Your Crooked Neighbour / With Your Crooked Heart | Garnette Cadogan. Another wonderful essay by Garnette, and more fruit of his ceaseless walking of New York City — despite the dangers of walking while black. The essay is, among other things, a reminder of just how prodigiously religious a city New York is: that’s the great hidden truth of the metropolis.

Garnette elegantly links the story of the Flushing Remonstrance to recent controversies in the city, for instance the whoile “Ground Zero mosque” kerfuffle of a few years back. When that was fresh I wrote a post about tolerance — and why George Washington didn’t like that word. I think it’s still relevant.