The CITY OF MAN

vs.

The CITY OF GOD

by Adrian Calderone | Remnant Columnist

This is a meditation on the city, that of man and that of God. I offer some reflections on the history, sociology and spiritual aspects of the city.

Civilization is defined by the existence of cities. Culture can exist apart from the city but civilization means a society with cities. The origin of cities is recorded in Genesis 4:17. Cain built the first city and named it after his son Enoch. Cain inaugurated a city dedicated to a new world apart from Eden. Adam and Eve remained in a pastoral world relying upon God. But Cain, having murdered his brother Abel, was now estranged from God. Where was he to find security apart from God except in the world of men?

God’s grace does not factor into the spirit of Cain. He wants to be self sufficient.

He wants to provide his own protection.

The city is a center of spiritual power and its inhabitants cannot help but be affected by it. In Plato’s Republic Socrates explains that the State arises out of the needs of mankind. No one person is completely self-sufficient. Many people are needed, with a division of labor to provide for the basic needs of food, clothing, housing and commerce.

What Socrates first describes is a city which provides just the basic needs: a subsistence state. His interlocutor, Glaucon, denigrates this primitive city as a city of pigs. He wants a city of luxuries and riches. But this complicates matters, for the desire to satisfy one’s desires beyond one’s needs requires expansion which brings the city into conflict with other cities. The city then requires an army. Warfare is conducted by cities, not pastoral people. The origin of wars, said Socrates, comes from the same desires that lead to the corruption of cities and their inhabitants. Warfare spurs technology. The great and terrible inventions of man are made by and for a society with cities.

One of the features of a city is the wall which surrounds it. The wall is meant to define an area with a boundary to control the entry of people. Since the city engages in warfare, the wall serves the function of defense. The walls of Troy were impassible to the Mycenaean Greeks who attacked Troy in the Trojan War. It was only by subterfuge that the Greeks could enter the front gate opened to them by the deceived Trojans.

According to Numa Denis Fustel De Coulanges, the ancient cities of Greece and Rome were founded on the cult of ancestor worship. A priesthood officiated at the household worship of the domestic hearth where the spirits of the family’s ancestors resided. The ancestral spirits were regarded as gods who protected the family. In addition to the gods of the family hearth the citizens of the city worshiped city gods. Religion was at the heart of society.

The priesthood of the Romans went back as far as Aeneas and Romulus.

The founding of a city was a religious act. Romulus and Remus, brothers and descendants of Aeneas had a conflict over where their city was to be founded. Romulus had traced a furrow to demarcate the location of the city wall which surrounded the sacred hearth, the dwelling place of the ancestral gods.

Thus, the furrow traced by Romulus was the mark of sacred space. No stranger had the right to cross over it. Remus, to spite his brother, leapt over the furrow. A fight ensued in which Remus was killed.

But the fight was not about a slight given to Romulus by the act of leaping over a ditch. The ditch marked sacred space and in the eyes of Romulus the act of Remus constituted a sacrilege. It was for this that Remus was killed.

Whatever piety we might think to ascribe to the ancient Romans for their devotion to their ancestors, it was not a matter of morality in our sense of the word. The Romans did not pray for those outside of their family. Outsiders were strangers to them. The Romans also had gods not taken from human souls of ancestors.

These were gods of physical nature and, unlike the traditional worship of ancestral spirits, religious worship of these city gods developed through the ages. Such gods as those, for example, taken from the Greeks, were not loved but feared for their alleged power and its amoral use.

The Psalmist tells us that the gods of the nations are demons. And St. Augustine provided ample evidence in The City of God that none of them were good or even capable of providing the protection for which they were worshiped.

The use of a wall to delimit sacred space, the sanctuary, is carried forth today in Catholic churches and is represented by an altar rail. It is kneeling at the altar rail that the Catholic faithful receive Holy Communion, a participation in a sacred act. The modern practice in the post-Vatican II Church of eliminating the altar rail and giving Holy Communion in the hand to people standing leads to desacralization of the Faith. The sacred should not be mixed with the profane.

There are two cities mentioned in the Old Testament which have special mythic significance. The first is Babylon, founded by Nimrod, who was renowned as a mighty warrior. Nimrod attempted to usurp the privileges of God by building a tower to heaven. We should note that Babylon was not founded by a priestking as the center for pious worship.

The people of the time spoke a common language. "Let us build a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens, they said, "so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the earth." So they built a tower to their pride and insolence. God would not allow them to succeed, so He confused their language. They could no longer communicate with each other and had no common interests which would enable them to act in concert. It was a punishment from God but also a mercy, for it prevented them from even greater evils. Because of their confused language their city was known as Babel, from which we later get Babylon.

Babylon factors in sacred history as the city to which the Israelites were exiled for 70 years. This was not an ordinary city. It was the city: Babylon the Great.

No city matched her in opulence and war. Her walls were impenetrable. The king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, who had captured the Israelites, had a dream which only the prophet Daniel could interpret.

Nebuchadnezzar had dreamt of a statue with a head of gold, arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze and legs of iron.

The statue represented Babylon and the kingdoms and peoples which would follow, all of them inferior to Babylon.

Babylon was the physical archetype of the city of man. It was where man

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wanted to dwell for its riches. But it was also the city of sin. It did not last. The Persians conquered it by slipping through openings in the wall.

The mythic significance of Babylon as an archetype and its fall is seen in the book of Revelation. "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great which made all the nations drink of the maddening wine of her adulteries." She is described as a haunt for demons and unclean spirits. A voice from heaven cries out, "Come out of her my people so that you do not partake of her sins." Those who live in Babylon share in her sins and punishments.

The other city of mythic significance is Jerusalem. Originally called Salem, which means "peace", and governed by the priest-king Melchizedek, which means "king of righteousness", Salem was later called Jerusalem, the "city of peace." Of all the cities on earth, this city is unmatched in its spiritual significance.

It is the city of God’s Chosen People.

Unlike Babylon, which asserted its independence from God, Jerusalem was the home of the Temple and the center of worship of God. The Israelites time and again abandoned true worship, but God did not abandon them. Chastised for a while, they returned to God only to fall into sin again. They were tempted, as we are tempted, by the allurements of the world. The true enemies of man – the world, the flesh and the devil – cannot be overcome by human strength, even that of those who truly wish to achieve goodness. Grace and the power of the Holy Spirit are what enable us to rise again after a spiritual fall. The Israelites looked to Jerusalem as their home. Their devotion to Jerusalem, the center of their worship, was with them even in their exile in Babylon: We no longer have to think of Jerusalem as the place where we worship God.

The sacrifice of the paschal lamb in the Temple at the Passover celebration has been replaced. Jesus Himself is the Paschal Lamb who is offered to the Father at the Catholic Mass in every Catholic Church throughout the world.

At the end of time, when after this world with all of its sin has passed away, a holy city, a New Jerusalem will come down from heaven. We will dwell with God. Christ, our Priest-King and the Lamb of God, will wipe away every tear.

There will be no death in the heavenly Jerusalem. Neither will there be a Temple, for God and the Lamb are its temple.

But we are not there yet. We live in the earthly city of man, which is man’s greatest achievement. But bound as it is to the exclusion of God, there is no existential hope in it. Of course, there are earthbound hopes. But that other hope, what Josef Pieper calls "fundamental hope", is not directed to anything in this world.

Man creates a city for security, hence the wall and war. He also creates a city for immortality. This is sought through one’s progeny and renown. One’s descendants are expected to continue the ancestor worship of the spirit of the deceased which inhabits the hearth.

Renown keeps the dead in the abiding memory of future generations. Achilles was given the choice to go to war against the Trojans in which he would die but be forever remembered for his heroic deeds, or stay at home and lead a peaceful and well-fulfilled life into old age and with many children and grandchildren. But after that he would be forgotten. Achilles chose fame and war. His exploits have been memorialized in Homer’s Iliad for the past three thousand years. In Virgil’s Aeneid we read that Rome was granted the privilege of lasting as long as the earth. We still dub Rome the "Eternal City."

St. Augustine wrote the following about the immortality achieved by fame:

But since these Romans were in an earthly city, and had before them, as the end of all the offices undertaken in its behalf, its safety and a kingdom, not in heaven, but in earth – not in the sphere of eternal life, but in the sphere of demise and succession, where the dead are succeeded by the dying – what else but glory should they love, by which they wished even after death to live in the mouths of their admirers.

St. Augustine reminds us that human honor should not be held at a great price, "for it is smoke which has no weight."

But the Romans who sought glory through noble and valorous deeds were long gone in the time of Augustine.

The great saint describes the society of the men of his age: prostitution, fornication, hedonism, lewd dancing and obscene theaters, gluttony, crookedness, excitement and injustice. The one who attempts to criticize the licentious behavior of the people is branded a public traitor and silenced, banished, or killed.

This is the type of happiness sought by those who denounce Christianity in the city of man. Is this not an accurate description of the current state of civilization? One can almost hear the voice of Augustine from across the centuries asking us today, "Have you learned anything at all from history?"

But what of that other city, the city of God? This is the city, Augustine says, which knows and worships one God.

Both cities are founded on love. The city of man is founded on the love of self and earthly things to the exclusion of God.

The city of God is founded on the love of God and heavenly things. St. Paul spoke to the Philippians about the people of the two cities. There were those who were the enemies of the cross of Christ, who mind only the things of earth, whose god is in their belly, and who glory in their shame.

Their end is ruin. But there are those whose citizenship is in heaven and who eagerly await a Savior, Jesus Christ, Who will refashion their body of lowliness into a body of glory.

The city of God is characterized by hope of eternal life, absent from the city of man. It is spiritual but in the present world. It is sustained by grace which comes to us through the Catholic Church.

The two cities both exist on earth and are commingled until the end of time. We, as Catholics, are in this world but not of it. Cain founded the earthly city. But Abel, who founded no city, nevertheless belonged to the city of God. As long as the two cities are commingled, the citizens of the city of God are to obey the just laws of the city of man insofar as the temporal goods common to both are necessary to sustain livelihoods. Thus, as St. Augustine observed, there can be a harmony between the two cities.

This commingling is absolutely necessary for the continued existence of the earthly city of man. By its exclusion of any consideration of God, whether through ignorance or willfulness, it cuts itself off from the rationale for its existence. For God is not only the first cause of His creation, but also the final cause. Which is to say that He is the reason for which the universe is created. "I am the alpha and the omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." But how is the worldling to attain to such knowledge and its acceptance? This requires supernatural faith brought by grace.

More specifically, what is required is actual grace, which is given in some degree to everyone, even those in mortal sin. Actual grace is a supernatural gift, internal to us and of a passing nature whereby God helps us to avoid sin and enables us to do those things which tend to salvation. Without it sanctifying grace once lost could never be recovered. For example, the sting of a guilty conscience is a result of actual grace and prompts us to repentance and confession. But actual grace can be resisted and its benefit lost.

On a purely human level we can use rational arguments to bring people to the preambles of faith. But true conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is a Catholic doctrine that supernatural faith is above the power of the natural intellect. Hence the necessity for some agency to channel supernatural grace into the city of man. That agency is the commingled city of God, the Catholic Church, which is the presence of the Mystical Body of Christ in the natural world. Without it the city of man would sink of its own iniquity to the level of Sodom and bring destruction upon itself. In Genesis, Abraham bargained with God to spare Sodom. Had there been even ten Godly persons in Sodom it would have been spared. The very few that were, Lot and his family, were urged by angels of God’s wrath to leave Sodom. Then Sodom along with Gomorrah were obliterated in a rain of fire and brimstone. Is this not a lesson for our time?

In the parable of the weeds, Jesus spoke of a man whose field of wheat was mingled with weeds sewn by an enemy.

He declined to have the weeds pulled up because the wheat would also be uprooted. Instead, both the wheat and the weeds were to be grown together until harvest, at which time the wheat was to be gathered and stored and the weeds were to be bundled and burned. This is what is to happen at the end of time as further explained in the parable of the sheep and the goats. The faithful of the city of God, the sheep of the parable, and those who sought not God in the present life, the goats, will be separated, the faithful to eternal life, and the faithless to their doom.

But the city of God will no longer be just a spiritual city. For there will be a new heaven and a new earth. And the Holy City of Jerusalem will come down from heaven and be inherited by the resurrected bodies of those who died in Christ and who will dwell with God forever. There will be no death or suffering. This, then, is the end of the city. ■

How could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?

If I forget you Jerusalem may my right hand be forgotten.

May my tongue cleave to my palate if I remember you not, If I place not Jerusalem ahead of my joy.