Feature
Urban Prospects
The Cities of Man & the Dwelling Place of the Lord
by Anthony Esolen
I am not fond of cities. Cain, a tiller of the soil, was the first man in Scripture to have founded a city. Thus does the sacred author, with a laconic suggestion, associate the height and the strength of the city with the murder of a brother. Saint Augustine was not slow to miss the point, and after the vindictive Alaric and his Goths went on their spree and put Rome to the torch, he spread his carbolic acid on the open wound, noting that the eternal city, begun in time and to end in time, was founded by another brother-murderer, Romulus. Livy gives us the legend. Romulus and Remus were building separately, and Remus in contempt leaped over the walls of his brother's earthwork. So Romulus stabbed him to death. Sic semper, and all that.
The second builder of a city, after Cain, is Nimrod, that "mighty hunter before the Lord," whose name in English came to be synonymous with "idiot." For it was the same Nimrod, as the ancients interpreted it, who decided to build a Tower to reach unto heaven, that he and his people might make a name for themselves, suspicious of their neighbors and seeking to dominate them.
Milton saw it that way, too. His Nimrod hunts not beasts but men. He is the first to "arrogate Dominion undeserved / Over his brethren." God laughs the Nimrods to scorn, and scatters them abroad, each of them speaking a language unintelligible to the others: "Thus was the building left / Ridiculous, and the work Confusion named."
Such are the cities men build. The drover comes to Ecbatana and finds himself amid a gabble of tongues, amid the hustle, the sidelong glances, the nervous walking, and the locked doors of suspicion. Well may he suppose that every city is a Babel at heart. Cosmopolis: chaopolis.
The Colors of Chaopolis
So I have imagined a centurion in the time of Christ, bidding farewell to the Judean harlot he loves, wishing also to bid farewell to all of the cities he has seen, in quest of a land he has not seen:
. . . Sparta the pig-sty with a broken fence,
Athens the groveling teacher of the world,
Seven-gated Thebes upon her windy plain,
Renowned only for treachery and worse,
Aegina, Argos, Mycenae rich in gold,
All faded into names. Then westward still,
Past her who squats upon the waters like
A whore at her salt-bath, the general sink
Of all the gathering sewage of the world,
Rome, glorious stewing-pot of wealth and power,
Her slapdash tenements just one spark away
From fields of ruin, her temples marble-faced
But inward brick, and rafters termite-riddled;
My home, for all that; we will leave her too.
Rome would go up in flames, lighted by the hand of her own emperor, neither the wickedest among those who went by that title, nor the least intelligent; and that is saying much. When I walk along the streets of a chaopolis like Manhattan, or an anti-polis, like the gated and barred non-places where the rich wall themselves away from the masses who suffer their benefactions, I do not fear fire or sword, thief or highwayman. But the vast angular structures of the former, and the blank bolted silences of the latter, say to my soul, "You do not belong here. You are a human being, and we are not. Bow down to us. Submit,
if you wish to remain and prosper."
Not that the modern city lacks its color. Here are plots of green grass where children must not play, or the ground would be tracked and rutted with their games. Here are great garish signs declaring something to spend your money on. Here are greater signs declaring octopodal businesses that control what the money you would spend is worth. Here are well-dressed men and women hurrying somewhere, among the occasional badly dressed person not hurrying anywhere.
Here is a church, like a dowdy widow, sporting her crinoline and lace, with a cross to top her little spire, while buildings fifty stories high loom above her, and leave her in the valley of the shadow of something which, if it is not death, is not quite life; or if it is life, it is that of a weed sprouting in the cracks of a pavement, soon to be rooted out or withered with the surest of modern poisons. As I say, the city has color.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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