Testament did not separate spiritual life and worldly experience. Like the Greeks, their everyday existence seemed to them filled with divine plagues, the miraculous parting of seas, voices speaking from burning bushes. God was always present. But unlike the Greeks, the people of the Old
Testament thought of themselves as uprooted wanderers. The Yahweh of the Old Testament was himself a wandering god, his Ark of the Covenant portable and, in the theologian Harvey Cox’s words, “When the Ark was finally captured by the Philistines, the Hebrews began to realize
that Yahweh was not localized even in it…. He traveled with his people and elsewhere.”1 Yahweh was a god of time rather than of place, a god who promised to his followers a divine meaning for their unhappy travels.
Wandering and exposure were as strongly felt to be the
consequences of faith among early Christians as among Old Testament Jews. The author of the “Epistle to Diognatus” at the height of the Roman Empire’s glory declared that
Christians are not distinguished
from the rest of humanity either in
locality or in speech or in customs. For they do not dwell off in cities of their own … nor do they practice an extraordinary
style of life … they dwell in their own countries, but
only as
Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is a foreign country.2
This image of the wanderer came to be one of the ways in which Saint Augustine defined the two cities in The City
Now it is recorded of Cain that he built a city, while Abel, as though he were merely a pilgrim on earth, built none. For the true City of the saints is in heaven, though here on earth it produces citizens
in which it wanders as on a pilgrimage
through time looking for the
Kingdom of
eternity.3
This “pilgrimage through time” rather than settling in place draws its authority from Jesus’ refusal to allow His
disciples to build monuments to him, and His promise to destroy the Temple of Jerusalem.
Judeo-Christian
culture is, at its very roots, about experiences of spiritual dislocation and homelessness. The terrors of exposure are at the heart of our religious imagination. Our faith
began at odds with place, because our gods themselves were disposed to wander. And yet in Augustine’s time this spiritual resistance to settling down modulated. Augustine’s City of God was occasioned by Alaric’s sack of Rome in August 410. Augustine was deeply awed, as were
contemporaries, that the Christian churches were largely unharmed by the barbarians. In response to charges by Volusianus and other pagans that Christianity had sapped the will of the Romans to fight, he was at pains to defend his fellow believers; his defense was that one could be both a good soldier and a good
Christian, so separated was the life of battle from the world of inner experience. And to the charge that Christianity would flourish in the ruins of the Roman Empire, Augustine responded that though God, through the instrument of the barbarian hordes, had
struck down unbelievers, t he Christian had no call to install himself now as master and rebuilder of Rome; his duty lay within his soul, not in his hands. Augustine’s two cities are therefore “two groups of human beings, which we can call two ‘cities,’ according to the special usage of our Scriptures.”4
That usage of city was to describe two forms of authority, “two pyramids of loyalty,”5 rather than places.
For the Christians of Augustine’s day more generally, the conflict between spiritual life and worldly experience was felt as a conflict that occurs within every
human being; the Christian engaged in this spiritual battle whether or not he or she lived in houses where pagans had raised their children, bathed where they had bathed, indeed used their temples to Minerva or to Apollo for prayer to Jesus. Yet Augustine’s book would lay the theological foundation for
a city whose architecture and urban forms would give the restless spirit a home. This was because Augustine believed in “religious vision” as a concrete, perceptual act, not simply as a verbal metaphor. “Religious vision” would lead, eventually, to an inner life that took shape in glass and stone. Our
civilization from his time on has sought to cope
with spiritual
uprootedness as much through the eye as through words.
The nature of vision Augustine takes up immediately after he announces his two cities. “A shadow, as it were, of this eternal City has been
cast on earth, a prophetic representation of something to come rather than a real presentation in time.” In this passage vision is first given a distinctively Christian cast. To Augustine the “shadow” of the eternal, which is an impalpable intimation of faith, casts in turn another shadow, one of darkness and light
apparent to any naked eye, whether the eye of a believer or not: “In the world community, then, we find two forms, one being the visible appearance of the earthly city and another whose presence serves as a shadow of the heavenly City.”6 His sense of religious “vision”
supposes something like the perception, in slow motion, of an image bouncing along a corridor of mirrors. This image has a peculiar property; the farther away the image travels from its spiritual source, closer to everyday life, the easier it becomes to see. The shadow is more defined than the light that creates
it. This simple proposition suggested to Augustine the process by which unbelievers can become believers. Those most in need of God, the unbelievers, can find him by using their eyes. They should look for where the image is coming from, seek out the light that casts the clearly etched shadow. The source of
light is defined as the end point of a long passage.
Augustine’s modern biographer, Peter Brown, has characterized this “stereoscopic effect” as one principle of organizing the arguments throughout The City of
God.7 Augustine begins with something pagan and familiar, then adds to it
other more difficult but still pagan ideas or images, until suddenly, as though one had looked down that tunnel of vision, one came to the end and a whole new, Christian, image was revealed. The Christian who follows his or her eyes will find God.
For Augustine the eye was an organ of
conscience, as it was for Plato; indeed, the Greek work for “theory” is
theoria, which means “look at,” “seeing,” or— in the modern usage that combines physical experience of light with understanding
—“illumination.”
However, this religious vision was not a sudden illumination, like
switching on a light in a darkened room. One had to engage in a lifelong search to find the source of light.
Among Augustine’s pagan contemporaries life as a quest was understood in terms of acting in the world, as it was first understood by Homer. For instance, men would
seek to exonerate the honor of their families, to avenge an ancient injury, through the lifelong pursuit of an enemy. The Christian quest, rather than a saga of action, sent a man or a woman in search of faith, a quest altogether more inward.
In Augustine’s
Confessions, when the
moment of illumination, he feels that something has happened to him that he has sought for all his life, without, when young, knowing at all what he wanted. Later, he argued himself intellectually into religious adherence while still lacking the full, sensate illumination of religious belief. One sees clearly only at the end.
The very notion of “finding” faith, as though God were hiding, creates a profound uncertainty. The pagan, like the ancient Hebrew, had no doubt of divine presences. These presences were to be felt in the speech of the winds whistling through trees, in the descent of plague upon a
city. For Augustine, finding faith instead involved a reforming of the human being’s powers of perception; one had to relearn how to see. Yet there was no formula a Christian could be taught in school, in prayer, or by Socratic example that would teach him or her how to have religious visions. Each Christian
would have to find his or her own way to the place from where light was shining.
The Greeks had
conceived of
“centeredness,” as I noted, in what they called
sophrosyne, which translates as gracefulness o r balance. This Greek ideal is expressed in modern terms when a
dancer is said to be well- centered in his or her body; the Greeks imagined a spiritual gyroscope to compliment the physical sense of balance. Augustine’s spiritual center was not a point of balance; his was no quest for sophrosyne. The Christian searching for his or her spiritual
center indeed would lose in the process any
guidance from
established things; the shadows were not to be trusted.
This Christian theology has had a profound and disturbing effect on the way our culture both believes in and suspects the reality of the senses. On the one
hand, the eyes offer evidence of God. On the other hand, up to the moment of illumination most of this evidence is false. Unlike Plato, Augustine believed in the permanent necessity of physical searching and sifting of evidence; his own story is one in which illumination had to be prepared for by sensual
indulgence, by the thirst
for power, by
innumerable (in his own mind) wrong turns. This is the Christian’s tragedy: experience is necessary for faith, but the sensations of experience do not correspond to the truths of religion.
It was out of this disjunction that “inner”
and “outer” came to be incommensurate
dimensions. Nothing is more cursed in our culture than the continuing power of this separation. It makes connecting motives and actions difficult, since they seem to belong to different realms. Experiences like love become disturbed because
feelings are kept inside, invisible—the realm where Truth is kept. And the places people live in become puzzling. The street is a scene of outside life, and what is to be seen on the street are beggars, tourists, merchants, students, children playing, old people resting—a scene of human differences.
What is the relation of these differences to inner life? What is the spiritual value of diversity? Augustine recognized that t he Christian would have trouble assaying the value of human diversity. The very act of believing would deprive a person of the ability to make sense of the scenes of life
outside.
Like Plato
considering in The
Republic those who were
released from a cave of shadowy illusions, Augustine took seriously the fact that staring at the sun blinds the beholder. Once the Christian believes, he or she cannot look at the halftones and varied shapes of those
worldly differences anymore, those shadows that are the forms of everyday experience; the Christian has been blinded by truth. It is in this truth-stricken condition that the Christian is in need of God’s protection. He or she has ceased to be a secular adult and reverted to a simpler condition—
that of a child of God.
Augustine thought God would make a promise to men and women in this condition, a promise that was not felt by even the most devout Jews in the Old Testament. It was the promise of security through faith. Through the very act of believing,
God will protect you, even if his redemption of your martyr’s soul is divorced from protection of your suffering body. To resolve the endless process of wandering among shadows by finding where the light comes from requires an act of surrender, however, as one follows these images with one’s eyes—
ever greater surrender of one’s will, ever greater understanding of what one sees. Augustine’s religious vision thus had a concrete political denouement. You are promised that you will be taken care of, if only you submit, if you do your duty to bishop or king or parent. Vision, then, leads the wanderer to a house
of submission, in which the pains of exposure come to an end. The eye is an organ of both faith and domination.