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The Church Building as Sacramental Sign and Neighborhood Center A Lecture By: Philip Bess The City is a central metaphor and theme of historic Christianity. Christian scripture depicts the end of the human pilgrimage as a heavenly city, the New Jerusalem; and the relationship between this world and the next was articulated paradigmatically for subsequent Christian theology in the 5th century A.D. by St. Augustine in The City of God. Systematic philosophical thinking about urbanism antedates Christianity, however, going back to Aristotle, who wrote some four centuries before Christ that the best life for individual human beings is the life of moral and intellectual virtue lived in community with others, and most particularly in a polis. Aristotle’s argument really constitutes two claims about the good life for human beings: one about the centrality of moral and intellectual virtue, the other about the centrality of the polis; and these were the subject matters of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and Politics respectively. A consideration of the importance of moral and intellectual virtue to thinking about, making, and living in cities today is a subject well worth pursuing; but not here. My immediate purpose is to ask for your attention to the polis and its formal order. If Aristotle is the intellectual wellspring of western thinking about cities, it was Augustine who identified most clearly a peculiar and distinctive character of the individual and corporate Christian life and vocation, which is that Christians are members of two cities: an earthly city and a heavenly city, the City of Man and the City of God. In Augustine’s view of things, the Church is a sacramental mystery that seeks to make Her members over the course of a lifetime fit citizens for the City of God; and we become thus in part by learning to be good citizens in the City of Man, and by loving the City of Man with a properly ordered love, never forgetting that our first loyalty is to the heavenly city that is our origin and destiny. Aristotle wrote of the polis that it is a community of communities, “the highest of all, embracing all the rest…[aiming] at the highest good: the well-being of all its citizens.” Now at one level a Christian might say this is not quite right, inasmuch as the Church would be characterized as the highest of all communities, aiming at the highest good: the eternal well-being of all its citizens. But here again, Augustine offers the insightful hermeneutical key. In its life on earth, the Church is but a single member of and participant in that community of communities which is the earthly city. But with respect to Her divine vocation, the Church recognizes that here she has no lasting city, but seeks the City that is to come---and not only seeks but represents and to some extent even embodies it. And so more than even Aristotle himself knew, the highest of all communities---embracing all the rest, aiming at the highest good: the well-being of all its citizens---is indeed a City: it is the City of God [SLIDE #2], of which the Church is its earthly herald, symbol, and embodied anticipation. We get something of the flavor of Augustine’s and the Church’s inclusive urban vision, and of the interesting and complex relationship between the earthy and heavenly cities in the following passage from The City of God:
The life of the city as “a social life” is a reality and ideal that since the Enlightenment and the rise of the industrial city has become increasingly problematic. There is now a large volume of academic and popular literature devoted to the individualist and emotivist turns of modern society, and to modern society’s discovery and celebration of the “autonomous self.” What was noted by Tocqueville in the first half of the 19th century as an inherent tendency of democratic societies to foster a culture of individualism has moved from a tendency to a triumph, as Philip Rieff declared in the (ironic) title of his 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic. But what Rieff there prophetically identified as “an impossible culture” is becoming more obviously self-contradictory; and so it was that in July of 2001 I listened with great interest to a lecture at Calvin College by New York University psychologist Paul Vitz about “the self in post-modern therapeutic culture.” Professor Vitz spoke of the current trajectory of the modern self toward being defined by consumption; he spoke of the dis-integration of the modern self, and the celebration of that condition in the theory and literature of post-modernism; and then he spoke of an emerging theory of the “trans-modern” self emerging from the work of thinkers who are re-examining and re-appropriating certain pre-modern views of the self as being---note well---both embodied and relational. One of those thinkers, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, has reminded us in After Virtue that good histories are not just about ideas, and not just about actions in the world; but rather about how ideas are shaped in a social context of actions, and about how actions are the embodiment and expression of ideas. And if there is a reciprocity between actions and ideas, I would like to take this notion one step further and suggest that there is likewise a reciprocity between a society’s view of self-hood and the physical and spatial forms of the built environment---and that there is also a contemporary crisis of architecture and urbanism coincident with and no less profound than the contemporary crisis of the self. The name (and physical expression) of this intellectual and institutional crisis is post-WWII suburban sprawl [SLIDE #3]; and it has affected if not corrupted virtually every institution responsible for the creation of the built environment: from the profession of architecture, to the institutions of architectural education, to the institutional patrons of architecture, to the organization of the construction industry, to the rule-of-thumb manuals of transportation engineers, to the lending policies of banks, to the legal framework represented by zoning ordinances that regulate where and how buildings get built. The vision of both the City of Man and the City of God to which I have referred earlier stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the suburban ideal that has become our culture’s dominant paradigm for the good life. I don’t have time here to discuss either the distant origins or the immediate causes of post-war sprawl; nor do I wish to suggest that divine grace is wholly absent from post-war suburbia. The Apostle’s Creed, after all, professes that Christ “descended into Hell,” so we really have no reason to doubt that He makes himself present in suburbia… [This is a joke. Christians are bound to the demands of both justice and charity, which obviously calls for us to hate the suburbs, but love the suburbanites.] Anyway, I want to argue that sprawl is problematic because it renders embodied, cross-generational, mixed-class communities of place impossible. The automobile suburb---of its very nature, owing to its physical characteristics---effectively de-mobilizes and disenfranchises that significant percentage of the population at any given moment too young, too old, too poor, or too feeble to drive an automobile. The automobile suburb makes all parents chauffeurs and all children totally dependent until late adolescence, at which time---voila!---it grants them complete and free control over several tons of lethal machinery. In addition, Suburbia as a democratic cultural ideal is contradictory because it is impossible to realize in that it consumes the landscape that is the very substance of its promise. The automobile suburb cannot deliver on its promise of convenience, mobility, the beauty of the natural landscape, and individual freedom and well-being for all. Its dynamic is inherently expansive; and its contradictory nature is evidenced in that the persons who have most recently arrived in suburbia are often the people most vociferously opposed to its continuing extension, the political phenomenon that has come to be known as NIMBYism. But our suburban cultural habit is perhaps most insidious in the way it undermines the formal and cultural patterns—the urban patterns--by means of which human beings have traditionally sought to achieve the good life. The post-war American suburb is a cultural conspiracy catering to the illusion that unpleasantness in life can be avoided. But Catholic Christians above all must surely understand that unpleasantness in life can not be avoided; and I think it is not too much to say of the traditional city that it is a complex institution designed to address and transform the unpleasantries of human life by means of community, culture, and civil society.
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