Alan Jacobs

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. 

Emily Wilson: “In Epictetus’ version of Stoicism, the self is always the focus, even for the most enlightened philosopher. The wise Stoic never gives up his desire for power and possessions, goals that can be achieved through control over the will. It isn’t a coincidence that Stoicism, in a watered-down form, is currently so popular with wealthy white men in Silicon Valley or Wall Street; Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman’s The Daily Stoic (2016), for example, has been a bestseller in the Business Motivation, Success Self-Help and Greek and Roman Philosophy categories.”

Caught in mid-zoom.

That first half from Dortmund was shocking, not because they were bad but because they didn’t try. Didn’t even run back to defend. Embarrassing. ⚽️

Ross Douthat: “But for all its influence, social media is still downstream of other institutions — universities, newspapers, television channels, movie studios, other internet platforms. Twitter is real life, but only through its relationship to other realities; it doesn’t have the capacity to be a hub of discourse, news gathering or entertainment on its own. And many of Musk’s difficulties as the Twitter C.E.O. have reflected a simple overestimation of social media’s inherent authority and influence.”

I’m starting to write about Augustine’s City of God, with help from (of all people) China Miéville.

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.

About fifteen years ago I started moving away from the standard research essay assignment. In my Literary Theory classes I assigned dialogues; in Christianity and Fantasy I asked students to make critical editions of texts; since I got to Baylor I’ve used dialogues in some classes and in others have given take-home exams asking people to do close-reading explications of passages I’ve chosen for them. The LLMs do not yet know how to do any of these things, so I am not having to think too much about their effects on my classes; my chief challenge is to avoid smug self-satisfaction. But I remind myself that the day of reckoning is surely coming for me also.

(And yes, I know this courts that smugness, but: I stopped assigning research essays because what my students gave me was so maddeningly predictable — predictable because formulaic — that I just couldn’t bear to grade them any more, not after thirty-plus years of doing it. Now I think: the predictability was in some crucial pedagogical respects the whole point, and so of course LLMs can do those assignments!)

Of all the tributes to Tim Keller I’ve seen, the one that resonates most strongly for me is this from Russell Moore.

My friend Richard Gibson:

Emerging adults need to see, as one of my colleagues put it, “the benefits of the struggle” in their own lives as well as their instructors’. The work before us — to preserve old practices and to implement new ones — provides the ideal occasion to talk to our students about not only the intellectual goods offered by our fields that we want them to experience. It is also a chance to share how we have been shaped for the better by the slow, often arduous work of joining a discipline. Our students need more than technology, and the answer cannot simply come in the form of another list of dos-and-don’ts in the already crowded space of a syllabus. They need models for how to navigate these new realities — paradigms for their practice, life models. AI’s foremost challenge for higher education is to think afresh about forming humans.

My heart says Yes, but my head says I think it’s impossible. That is, I suspect the owl of Minerva really does fly only at night, and one cannot learn the value of “the slow, often arduous work of joining a discipline” in advance. That value can only be discerned in retrospect. 

Imagine that Mr. Miyagi teaches Daniel the wax-on/wax-off technique and leaves him to get to work. Then, as Daniel is straining and sweating, a guy comes up to him with a little machine labeled WaxGPT. “Hey kid! Wow, you’re working hard there. But I have good news: this machine will do the waxing for you. And it’s free! All you have to do is give me your phone number.”

You think Daniel will hesitate? You think his reverence for Mr. Miyagi will keep him in line? Unlikely; but just possible, I guess, since Daniel has seen Mr. Miyagi’s prowess and has asked to be taught by him. That’s not how it is for many of us who teach university students. My students are not free agents making free choices. I haven’t saved any of them from vicious thugs. A few of them may admire me in certain respects, but almost all of them think of my assignments as mere impediments, and I don’t think I can change that view in advance of their maturation. Later they may thank me — a good many have, over the years — but they don’t thank me in the moment. Even Daniel is likely to think that WaxGPT can do the dirty work for him so that, in his own good time, Mr. Miyagi will teach him something useful. 

So while I don’t disagree with Rick’s overall emphasis on personal formation, I believe we should reassess — radically reassess — the relationship between such formation and our assignments, assessment, and testing. I think that’s where we have to begin learning to live in the Bot Age. My guess is that those schools that are already disconnected from the standard assessment metrics — places like Reed College and the two St. John’s colleges — will be best placed to deal with the challenges of this era. 

Phil Christman: “A certain man went down from Athens to Atlanta, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain conservative megachurch head pastor that way….”

Michael Luo in the New Yorker: 

In June, 2020, Keller announced that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. One of his final projects, completed earlier this year, was an eighty-three-page white paper he called “The Decline and Renewal of the American Church.” It offers a wide-ranging set of prescriptions for what he viewed as the profound afflictions of the evangelical movement, including its anti-intellectualism, its problems with race, and the politicization of the church that has “turned off half the country.” The document is an exhaustive blueprint, but the question now is who will carry it out. 

That is precisely the question. 

(Also, maybe I should annotate that white paper the way I annotated the terrific new essay on postrationalism by Tara Isabella Burton.) 

Clive Thompson: “The problem is that while we moderns desperately need exposure to nature, it sure doesn’t need exposure to us.”