The Latest Decalogue

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipp'd, except the currency:
Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it's so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.

- Arthur Hugh Clough


The Latest Decalogue is a savage denunciation of the hypocrisy of this world and of the developing capitalist ethos (Clough wrote and lived at a time when revolutions in Europe, such as the 1848 Revolution in France were expanding the notions of freedom, developments from which Britain was largely insulated). It is written in quick-flowing iambic tetrameter with rhyming couplets, a good metre for humorous satire - Clough, as well as his philosophical individuality, was also a great experimenter with metre, often writing in styles hardly used in English, such as hexameter. This tetrameter forces streams of thought over two lines and the spread allows a sort of mid-rhyme to develop inside sentences, enhancing the comic effect.

There are slightly different versions of this poem: the one discussed here is the manuscript version held by Harvard University.

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would tax himself to worship two?
God's image nowhere shalt thou see,
Save haply in the currency:

The irony of the word "tax" reinforces the political satire of this opening, and emphasises, from the very start, both the demands of organised religion - and its lack of credibility - and the love of Victorian society for money. A common refrain at this time was that England was "God's own country" and it is possible Clough is playing with that idea as well as the importance the country places on finance. The use of "haply" in the fourth line is particularly savage. It does not mean "happily", but "perhaps".

It was archaic even in Clough's time, and therefore hints at ancient honour, while impugning the selfish, destructive mores of his own day.

Swear not at all; since for thy curse
Thine enemy is not the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will help to keep the world thy friend:

Here Clough notes the fact that religion in Britain is not spiritual, but has been deprived of whatever personal meaning it may have had, being replaced instead with societal approval and keeping up appearances. "At church on Sunday to attend" pointedly refers to a once a week attendance: sufficient to appear holy, without involving a genuine commitment. It has long been a view of the Church that it is against "the world": here it is shown to be an essential element of its fabric.

Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom promotion may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive:

Family relationships are shown to be cynical in nature and the structure of preferment and ambition class-based and exclusive. The second couplet here is brutal in its dissection of simultaneous outward sanctimony and lack of concern or care for the poor and sick. Mid-Victorian England was becoming a country of slum cities, as families flocked to the new towns and cities looking for factory work. The Ten Commandments are here quoted in their King James version - the direct quotation sharpens the comparison with the selfish world the narrator lives in.

Adultery it is not fit
Or safe, for women, to commit:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When 'tis so lucrative to cheat:

Clough here reveals his modernity, highlighting the hypocrisy of Victorian sexual morality, which often turned a blind eye to male infidelity, but was harsh on women suspected of the same. "Safe" most likely refers to the treatment a woman would receive from her family, rather than the physical consequences of extra-martial sex. Think of the treatment of Tess in Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Clough also posits two sins against each other: stealing and cheating - while noting in passing that cheating is not in the Ten Commandments as such, he gives his view powerfully that people can make a good living from cheating people.

False witness not to bear be strict;
And cautious, ere you contradict.
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Sanctions the keenest competition.

In this conclusion, the reader is advised to lie carefully, in case you are caught. One thinks of Mark Twain's dictum that telling the truth means never having to remember anything! The subtle final couplet suggests that it may well be seen as wrong to want other people's goods; however, it is perfectly acceptable to fight tooth and nail to secure more goods for yourself. Selfishness is the theme of this poem and selfishness concludes it.

It might be a worthwhile exercise to analyse the rhyme choices in more depth - "strive" and "alive" make an excellent, mutually reinforcing pairing, for example, as does "attend" and "friend", which emphasises the public nature of Victorian morality.

Remember that this poem is not some twenty-first century stereotypical rehashing of all the things we hate about the Victorians: it was written by a man who was there, and who was, in some ways, a victim of it. The powerful, angry voice that emerges from this poem calls for a return to real values, though by conflating Biblical and selfish morality so closely, it does not recommend a return to the traditional European Christian values. The ones the narrator approves of can be seen simply by inverting his criticisms.

- Lawrence George

On the Sublime

Long partial to deserts, drawn to photographs of the American West (bits of tumbleweed blowing across a wasteland) and the names of the great deserts (Mojave, Kalahari, Taklamakan, Gobi), I booked a charter flight to the Israeli resort of Eilat and went to wander in the Sinai. On the plane journey over, I talked to a young Australian woman beside me, who was taking up a job as a lifeguard at the Eilat Hilton, and I read Pascal:

When I consider...the small space I occupy which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me [l’infinie immensité des espaces que j’ignore et qui m’ignorent], I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here?

- Pascal, Pensées, 68

Wordsworth urged us to travel through landscapes in order to feel emotions that may benefit our souls. I set out for the desert so as to be made to feel small. It is usually unpleasant to be made to feel small, whether by doormen in hotels or by comparison with heroes of great achievement. But there may be another and more satisfying way for a person to feel diminished. Intimations of this may be felt by any viewer who stands in front of Rocky Mountains, Landers Peak (1863) by Albert Bierstadt, An Avalanche in the Alps (1803) by Philip James de Loutherbourg or Chalk Cliffs on Rugen by Caspar David Friedrich. What do such barren, overwhelming spaces do for us?

Two days into my Sinai trip, the group of twelve that I have joined reaches a valley empty of life, without trees, grass, water or animals. Only boulders lie strewn across its sandstone floor, as though the stamping of a petulant giant had caused them to roll off the sides of the surrounding mountains. These mountains look like naked Alps, their nudity revealing geological origins normally concealed beneath coats of earth and pine forest. There are gashes and fissures that speak of the pressures of millennia, offering up cross sections through disproportionate expanses of time. The Earth’s tectonic plates have rippled granite as though it were linen. The mountains spread out in seeming infinity over the horizon until eventually the high plateau of the southern Sinai gives way to a featureless, baking gravel pan to which the Bedouins have given the name El Tih, or ‘the Desert of the Wandering’.

There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist; we are forced instead to make awkward piles of words to convey what we feel as we watch the light fade on an early autumn evening, or when we encounter a pool of perfectly still water in a clearing. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a word came to prominence by means of which it became possible to indicate a specific response towards precipices and glaciers, night skies and deserts. In their presence one was likely to experience, and count on being understood if one reported that one had felt, a sense of the sublime.

The word itself had originated around 200 AD., in a treatise ‘On the Sublime’ ascribed to the Greek author Longinus, but it had languished until a retranslation of the essay into English in 1712 sparked a renewed, intense interest among critics. While these writers often differed in their specific analyses of the word, their shared assumptions were striking. They grouped into a single category, by virtue of their size, emptiness or danger, a variety of hitherto unconnected landscapes, and argued that such places provoked an identifiable feeling that was both pleasurable and morally good. The value of landscapes would henceforth be decided not solely on the basis of formal aesthetic criteria (the harmony of colours, for example, or the arrangement of lines) or even economic or practical concerns, but rather according to the power of places to arouse the mind to sublimity.

Joseph Addison, in his ‘Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination’, wrote of the ‘delightful stillness and amazement’ he felt before ‘the prospects of an open champian country, a vast uncultivated desert, huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices and a wide expanse of waters’. Hildebrand Jacob, in an essay entitled ‘How the Mind Is Raised by the Sublime’, offered a list of the places and things that were most likely to invoke this prized feeling: oceans, either in calm or storm, the setting sun, precipices, caverns and Swiss mountains.

Travellers set off to investigate. In 1739, the poet Thomas Gray undertook a walking tour of the Alps, the first of many such self-conscious pursuits of the sublime, and afterwards reported, ‘In our little journey up to the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining. Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry.’

The southern Sinai at dawn. What, then, is this feeling? It is generated by a valley created four hundred million years ago, by a granite mountain 2,300 meters high and by the erosion of millennia marked on the walls of a succession of steep canyons. Beside all these, man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter—pleasurable; intoxicating, even—with human weakness in the face of the strength, age and size of the universe.

In my backpack, I am carrying a torch, a sun hat and Edmund Burke. At the age of twenty-four, after giving up his legal studies in London, Burke composed A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He was categorical: sublimity had to do with a feeling of weakness. Many landscapes were beautiful—meadows in spring, soft valleys, oak trees, banks of flowers (daisies especially)—but they were not sublime. ‘The ideas of the sublime and beautiful are frequently confounded,’ he complained. ‘Both are indiscriminately applied to things greatly differing and sometimes of natures directly opposite’—a trace of irritation on the part of the young philosopher with those who might have gasped at the Thames from Kew and called that sublime. A landscape could arouse the sublime only when it suggested power—a power greater than that of humans, and threatening to them. Sublime places embodied a defiance to man’s will. Burke illustrated his argument with an analogy about oxen and bulls: ‘An ox is a creature of vast strength; but he is an innocent creature, extremely serviceable, and not at all dangerous for which reason the idea of an ox is by no means grand. A bull is strong too; but his strength is of another kind; often very destructive....The idea of a bull is therefore great, and it has frequently a place in sublime descriptions, and elevating comparisons.’

There were oxlike landscapes, innocent and ‘not all dangerous’, pliable to human will; Burke had spent his youth in one such, at a quaker boarding school in the village of Ballitore in County Kildare, thirty miles southwest of Dublin: a landscape of farms, orchards, hedges, rivers and gardens. Then there were bull-like landscapes. The essayist enumerated their qualities: they were vast, empty, often dark and apparently infinite because of the uniformity and succession of their elements. The Sinai was among them.

But why the pleasure? Why seek out this feeling of smallness—delight in it, even? Why leave the comforts of Eilat, join a group of desert devotees and walk for miles with a heavy pack along the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba, all to reach a place of rocks and silence where one must shelter from the sun like a fugitive in the scant shadow of giant boulders? Why contemplate with exhilaration rather than despair beds of granite and baking gravel pans and a frozen lava of mountains extending into the distance until the peaks dissolve at the edge of a hard blue sky?
One answer is that not everything that is more powerful than us must always be hateful to us. What defies our will can provoke anger and resentment, but it may also arouse awe and respect. It depends on whether the obstacle appears noble in its defiance or squalid and insolent. We begrudge the defiance of the cocky doorman even as we honour that of the mist-shrouded mountain. We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean but awed by what is powerful and noble. To return to and extend Burke’s animal analogy, a bull may arouse a feeling of the sublime, whereas a piranha cannot. It seems a matter of motives: we interpret the piranha’s power as being vicious and predatory, and the bull’s as guileless and impersonal.

Even when we are not in deserts, the behaviour of others and our own flaws are prone to leave us feeling small. Humiliation is a perpetual risk in the world of men. It is not unusual for our will to be defied and our wishes frustrated. Sublime landscapes do not therefore introduce us to our inadequacy; rather, to touch on the crux of their appeal, they allow us to conceive of a familiar inadequacy in a new and more helpful way. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.

This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles. So grandly is it written there that we may come away from such places not crushed but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities. The sense of awe may even shade into a desire to worship.

Because what is mightier than man has traditionally been called God, it does not seem unusual to start thinking of a deity in the Sinai. The mountains and valleys spontaneously suggest that the planet was built by something other than our own hands, by a force greater than we could gather, long before we were born, and set to continue long after our extinction (something we may forget when there are flowers and fast-food restaurants by the roadside).

God is said to have spent much time in the Sinai, most notably two years in the central region, looking after a group of irascible Israelites who complained about the lack of food and had a weakness for foreign gods. ‘The Lord came from Sinai,’ said Moses shortly before his death (Deuteronomy 33:2). ‘And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the LORD descended upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly,’ we are told by Exodus (19:18). ‘And all the people saw the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they removed and stood afar off. And Moses said unto the people, Fear not: for God is come to prove you...’ (Exodus 20:18—19).

But biblical history serves only to reinforce an impression that would have occurred anyway to a traveller encamped in the Sinai: an impression that some intentional being must have had a hand in this, something greater than man and with an intelligence that mere ‘nature’ does not possess—a ‘something’ for which the word God still seems, even to the secular mind, a far from unlikely appellation. The knowledge that natural rather than supernatural forces can also create beauty and an impression of power seems peculiarly ineffective when one stands before a sandstone valley rising towards what appears to be a giant altar, above which hangs a slender crescent moon.

Early writers on the sublime repeatedly connected sublime landscapes with religion:

• Joseph Addison, ‘On the Pleasures of the Imagination’ (1712): ‘A vast space naturally raises in my thoughts the idea of an Almighty Being.’

• Thomas Gray, Letters (1739): ‘There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief without the help of any other argument.’

• Thomas Cole, ‘Essay on American Scenery’ (1835): ‘Amid those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted, the associations are of God the creator-they are his undefiled works, and the mind is cast into the contemplation of eternal things.’

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’ (1836): ‘The noblest ministry of nature is to stand as the apparition of God.’

It is no coincidence that the Western attraction to sublime landscapes developed at precisely the moment when traditional beliefs in God began to wane. It is as if these landscapes allowed travellers to experience transcendent feelings that they no longer felt in cities and the cultivated countryside. The landscapes offered them an emotional connection to a greater power even as they freed them of the need to subscribe to the more specific and now less plausible claims of biblical texts and organized religions.

The link between God and sublime landscapes is made most explicit in one book of the Bible. The circumstances are peculiar: God is asked by a righteous but desperate man to explain why his life has become full of suffering. And God answers him by bidding him to contemplate the deserts and the mountains, rivers and ice caps, oceans and skies. Seldom have sublime places been asked to bear the burden of such a weighty, urgent question.

At the beginning of the Book of Job, described by Edmund Burke as the most sublime book of the Old Testament, we learn that Job was a wealthy, devout man from the land of Uz. He had seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys. His wishes were obeyed, and his virtue was rewarded. Then one day disaster struck. The Sabaeans stole Job’s oxen and asses, lightning killed his sheep and the Chaldeans raided his camels. A hurricane blew in from the desert and wrecked the house of his eldest son, killing him and his siblings. Painful sores developed from the soles of Job’s feet to the top of his head, and, as he sat in the ashes of his house, he scratched them with a piece of broken pottery and wept.

Why had Job been so afflicted? His friends had the answer: he had sinned. Bildad the Shuhite told Job that his children could not have been killed by God unless they and Job himself had done wrong. ‘God will not reject a righteous man,’ said Bildad. Zophar the Naamathite ventured that God must have been generous in his treatment of Job: ‘Know therefore that God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth.’

But Job could not accept these words. He called them ‘proverbs of ashes’ and ‘defenses of clay’. He had not been a bad man—so why had bad things happened to him?
It is one of the most acute questions asked of God in all the books of the Old Testament. And from a whirlwind in the desert, a furious God answers Job as follows:

Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?

Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou has understanding.

Who hath laid the measures thereof if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?...

By what way is the light parted, which scattereth the east wind upon the earth?

Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way for the lightning of thunder?...

Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?

Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof in the earth?

Canst thou lift up thy voice to the clouds, that abundance of waters may cover thee?...

Hast thou an arm like God? or canst thou thunder with a voice like him?

Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings towards the south?

Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?

Asked to explain why Job has been made to suffer even though he has been good, God draws Job’s attention to the mighty phenomena of nature. Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way, he declares: the universe is greater than you. Do not be surprised that you do not understand why they have not gone your way, for you cannot fathom the logic of the universe. See how small you are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger than you and what you do not understand. The world may appear illogical to you, but it does not follow that it is illogical per se. Our lives are not the measure of all things: consider sublime places for a reminder of human insignificance and frailty.

There is a strictly religious message here. God assures Job that he has a place in his heart, even if all events do not centre around him and may at times appear to run contrary to his interest. When divine wisdom eludes human understanding, the righteous, made aware of their limitations by the spectacle of sublime nature, must continue to trust in God’s plans for the universe.

But the religious answer to Job’s question does not invalidate the story for secular spirits. Sublime landscapes, through their grandeur and power, retain a symbolic role in bringing us to accept without bitterness or lamentation the obstacles that we cannot overcome and the events that we cannot make sense of. As the Old Testament God knew, it can be helpful to back up deflationary points about mankind with reference to the very elements in nature which physically surpass it—the mountains, the girdle of the earth, the deserts.

If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains. Sublime places gently move us to acknowledge limitations that we might otherwise encounter with anxiety or anger in the ordinary flow of events. It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming. But it is the vast spaces of nature that perhaps provide us with the finest, the most respectful reminder of all that exceeds us. If we spend time in them, they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

- Alain de Botton

Hell

The worst of the Eight Hells is called Continuous Hell,

It has the meaning of Continuous Suffering.

- Nirvana Sutra, Verse 19

Hell or “everlasting damnation” is not the everlastingness of time going on forever, but of the unbroken circle, the continuity and frustration of going round and round in pursuit of something which can never be attained. Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and self-possession. It is trying to see one’s own eyes, hear one’s own ears, and kiss one’s own lips.

religion - happiness

Christianity

According to one influential wing of modern secular society, there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being “like everyone else”—for “everyone else” is a category that embraces the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people, so this argument goes, should be to distinguish themselves from the crowd and “stand out” in whatever way their talents will allow.

But being like everyone else is not, if we follow Christian thought, any kind of calamity, for it was one of Jesus’ central claims that all human beings, including the slow-witted, the untalented and the obscure, were beloved creatures of God—and hence deserving of the honour owed to every example of his work. In the words of Saint Peter, each of us has the capacity to be a partaker “of the divine nature,” an idea that in and of itself audaciously challenges the assumption that some are born to mediocrity and others to glory. No one is outside the circle of God’s love, Christianity insists, attributing divine authority to the notion of mutual respect. What we have in common with others comprises what is most cherishable in ourselves.

Christianity bids us to look beyond our superficial differences in order to focus on what it considers to be a set of universal truths, on which a sense of community and kinship may be built. Whether we are cruel or impatient, dim or dull, we must recognise that we are all detained and bound together by shared vulnerabilities.

Beneath our flaws, there are always two driving forces: fear and the desire for love. To encourage fellow feeling, Jesus urged his followers to learn to look at other adults as they might at children. Few things can more quickly transform our sense of a person’s character than picturing him or her as a child; from this perspective we are better able to express the sympathy and generosity that we all but naturally display towards the young, whom we tend to describe as naughty rather than bad, cheeky rather than arrogant. This is the same sort of softening we may feel towards anyone whom we see sleeping: with eyes closed and features relaxed and defenseless, a sleeper invites a gentle regard that in itself is almost love—so much so, in fact, that it can be unsettling to gaze at length at a stranger asleep beside us on a train or plane. That unmasked face seems to prompt us towards an intimacy that calls into question the foundations of civilized indifference on which ordinary communal relations rest. But there is no such thing as a stranger a Christian would say; there is only the impression of strangeness born out of a failure to acknowledge that others share both our needs and our weaknesses. Nothing could be nobler, or more fully human, than to perceive that we are indeed fundamentally, in every way that really matters, just like everyone else.

The idea that other people might be at base neither incomprehensible nor distasteful carries weighty implications for our concern with status, given that the desire to achieve social distinction is to a great extent fuelled by a horror of being—or even being thought—”ordinary:’ The more humiliating, shallow, debased or ugly we take ordinariness to be, the stronger will be our desire to set ourselves apart. The more corrupt the community, the stronger the lure of individual achievement.

Since its beginnings, Christianity has attempted to enhance, both in practical and in theoretical terms, the value its adherents place on belonging to a community. One notable way it has achieved this is through the repetition of rituals, from the saying of the service to prayer to the singing of hymns—each an opportunity for a large number of unrelated celebrants to feel their suspicion of one another abate thanks to a transcendent intermediary.

Music in any form can be a great leveller. We might, for example, imagine joining an unfamiliar congregation within the walls of a cathedral to hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor (“the greatest work of music of all ages and of all peoples,” in the view of Hans-Georg Nageli, writing in 1817). Much may separate us: age, income, clothes and background. We may never before have spoken to one another and may be wary of letting anyone catch our gaze. But as the Mass begins, so, too, does a process of social alchemy. The music conveys feelings that had hitherto seemed inchoate and private, and our eyes may fill with tears of relief and gratitude for the gift given us by the composer and musicians in making audible, and hence available to us and to others, the movements of our collective soul. Violins, voices, flutes, double basses, oboes, bassoons and trumpets combine to create sounds that evoke the most secret, most elusive aspects of our psyches. Moreover, the public nature of the performance helps us to realize that if others around us are responding as we are to the music, then they cannot be the indecipherable enigmas we imagined them to be. Their emotions run along the same tracks as ours, they are stirred by the very same things and so, whatever the differences in our appearance and manner, we possess a common core, out of which a connection can be forged and extended far beyond this one occasion. A group of strangers who initially seemed so foreign may thus in time, through the power of choral music, acquire some of the genuine intimacy of friends, slipping out from behind their stony facades to share, if only briefly, in a beguiling vision of humankind.

But of course, our sense of who other people are is seldom so flattering outside the cathedral. The public arena is usually more decrepit and threatening, sending us scurrying in search of physical and psychological cover.

There are countries in which the communal provision of housing, transport, education and health care is so inferior that inhabitants will naturally seek to escape involvement with the masses by barricading themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where “ordinary” life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

Then there are communities—far fewer in number and typically imbued with a strong (often Protestant) Christian heritage—whose public realms exude respect in their principles and architecture, and whose citizens are therefore under less compulsion to retreat into a private domain. Indeed, we may find that some of our ambitions for personal glory fade when the public spaces and facilities to which we enjoy access are themselves glorious to behold; in such context, ordinary citizenship may come to seem an adequate goal. In Switzerland’s largest city, for instance, the need to own a car in order to avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it has in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich’s superlative tram network, which is clean, safe, warm and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel in an automotive cocoon when, for a fare of only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will provide transportation from point A to point B at a level of comfort an emperor might have envied.

One insight to be drawn from Christianity and applied to communal ethics is that, insofar as we can recover a sense of the preciousness of every human being and, even more important, legislate for spaces and manners that embody such a reverence in their makeup, then the notion of the ordinary will shed its darker associations, and, correspondingly the desires to triumph and to be insulated will weaken, to the psychological benefit of all.

In an ideal Christian community, the dread of “losers” having to live alongside the “winners” will be tempered and contained by basic equality of dignity and resources. And the dichotomy between succeeding/flourishing and failing/withering will lose some of its excruciating sharpness.

- Alain de Botton

Twin Cities

One of Christianity’s central themes may be traced back to Jesus’ choice of career. The carpenters of Galilee practiced a semiskilled but insecure and rarely lucrative trade, and yet Jesus was all the same, in Saint Peter’s phrase, “the right hand of Heaven:’ the son of God, the king of kings, sent to save us from our sins. That someone could combine within himself two such different identities, being at once an itinerant tradesman and the holiest of men, forms the basis upon which the Christian understanding of status is built. Every person possesses, in this framework, two wholly unrelated types of status: the earthly kind, determined by occupation, income and the opinions of others; and the spiritual sort, meted out according to the quality of the individual’s soul and his or her merit in the eyes of God after the Day of Judgment. One might therefore be powerful and revered in the earthly realm, yet barren and corrupt in the spiritual one. Or one might be like the beggar Lazarus in the Gospel of Saint Luke, who had only rags to his name while glorying in divine riches.

In The City of God (A.D. 427), Saint Augustine explained that all human actions could be interpreted from either a Christian or a Roman perspective, and that the very accomplishments that were esteemed most highly by the Romans—amassing money, building villas, winning wars and so on—counted for nothing in the Christian schema, in which a new set of concerns, including loving one’s neighbors, being humble and generous and recognizing one’s dependence on God, offered the keys to elevated status. Augustine’s figure for these two value systems was a pair of cities, the City of God and the earthly City, which he described as being, until the Day of Judgment, coexistent but separate. One might thus be a king in the Earthly City but a mere manservant in the heavenly one.

Nine centuries later, Dante would flesh out Augustine’s ideas by providing a detailed accounting of who would end up where in that ultimate twinned embodiment of the Christian hierarchy: Heaven and Hell.

Hieronymus Bosch - The Garden of Earthly Delights (1504)

In the Divine Comedy (1315), he enumerated no fewer than nine different circles of Hell (with seventeen distinct rings), each one reserved for a particular kind of sin; and set opposite those, ten spheres of Heaven, each the province of a specific virtue. The religious hierarchy resembled a distorted or inverted version of its secular counterpart. Dante’s Hell was home to a wide range of individuals who had enjoyed high status during their life on earth: generals, writers, poets, emperors, bishops, popes and merchants, all now stripped of their privileges and enduring extreme sufferings as punishment for having offended God’s laws. In the fourth ring of the ninth circle of Hell, Dante (touring the place with Virgil) hears the screams of those who were powerful but treacherous when alive, now being chewed in the mouths of the three-headed giant Lucifer. In the first ring of the seventh circle, the poet finds himself by a river of boiling blood in which Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun struggle to stay afloat while, from the riverbank, a group of centaurs fire arrows over their heads to force them back under the sickening froth. In the fifth circle, an array of angry, prominent leaders whose tempers once cost the lives of others languish in a swampy, fetid cesspool, choking on mud; and in the third circle, excrement rains down upon those who used to be gluttonous.

Gustave Dore - The Thieves Tortured by Serpents (1861)

The liturgical discrepancy between heavenly and earthly status promised believers a way out of an oppressive, one-dimensional vision of success. Christianity did not do away altogether with the concept of a hierarchy; its contribution was, rather, to redefine success and failure in ethical, nonmaterial terms, by insisting that poverty could coexist with goodness, and a humble occupation with a noble soul: “A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth,” according to Saint Luke, a follower of that impecunious carpenter from Galilee.

But far from merely asserting the superiority of spiritual over material success, Christianity also endowed the values it revered with a seductive seriousness and beauty, accomplishing this in part through the magisterial use of painting, literature, music and architecture. It employed works of art to make a case for virtues that had never before figured prominently—if at all—in the priorities of rulers or their subjects.

For hundreds of years, the talents of the finest stonemasons, poets, musicians and painters—whose predecessors had been called upon to celebrate the triumphs of emperors and the blood-curdling victories of legions over barbarian hordes—were directed towards praising such activities as giving alms and showing respect for the poor. The glorification of worldly values never entirely disappeared in the Christian era—there remained plenty of palaces to alert the world to the charms of mercantile or landed wealth and power—but for a time, in many communities, the most impressive buildings on the horizon were those that honored the nobility of poverty rather than the might of a royal family or corporation, and the most moving pieces of music sang not of personal fulfillment but of the torment of the Son of God, who had been, in the words of Isaiah 53:3, quoted in Handel’s Messiah (1741),

despised and rejected of men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

Through its command of aesthetic resources, of buildings, paintings and Masses, Christianity created a bulwark against the authority of earthly values and kept its spiritual concerns in the public eye and at the forefront of the public mind.

In the four centuries between approximately 1130 and 1530, in towns and cities all over Europe, more than a hundred cathedrals were erected, their spires coming to dominate the skyscraper, looming above grain stores, palaces, offices, factories and homes. Possessed of a grandeur that few other structures could rival, they offered a venue in which people from every walk of life could gather to ponder ideas that were, at least in the context of the history of architecture, highly unusual: ideas about the value of sadness and innocence, of meekness and pity. Whereas a city’s other buildings were designed to serve earthly needs—housing and feeding the body, allowing it to rest, manufacturing machines and implements to assist it—the cathedral had as its unique functions to empty the mind of egoistic projects and lead it towards God and his love. City dwellers engaged in worldly tasks could, during the course of a day, on seeing the outlines of these great massings of stone, be reminded of a vision of life that challenged the authority of ordinary ambitions. A cathedral such as Chartres, whose spires soar 107 meters into the sky (the height of a thirty-four-storey skyscraper), was understood to be the home of the dispossessed, a symbol of the rewards they would reap in the next life. However ramshackle their present physical dwellings, the cathedral was where they belonged in their heart. Its beauties reflected their inner worth, as its stained glass windows and coffered ceilings made vivid the glory of Jesus’ message to them.

Christianity did not, of course, ever succeed in abolishing the Earthly City or its values, and yet if we retain some distinction between wealth and virtue and still ask of people whether they are good rather than merely important, it is in large part due to the impression left upon Western consciousness by a religion that for centuries lent its resources and prestige to the defense of a handful of these of extraordinary ideas regarding the rightful distribution of status. It was the genius of the artists and craftsmen who worked in the service of Christianity to give enduring forms to its ideals and to make these real to us through their handling of stone, glass, sound, word and image.

In a world where secular buildings whisper to us relentlessly of the importance of earthly power, the cathedrals that punctuate the skylines of great towns and cities may continue to furnish an imaginative holding space for the priorities of the spirit.

- Alain de Botton