4.
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 a basic equality of dignity and resources. And the dichotomy between succeeding/flourishing and failing/withering will lose some of its excruciating sharpness.
Twin Cities
1.
One of Christianity’s central themes may be traced back to Jesus’ choice of career. The carpenters of Galilee practised 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 Judgement. 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 neighbours, being humble and generous and recognising 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 Judgement, 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. 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.
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 souclass="underline" “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.
Gustave Doré, The Violent Tortured in the Rain of Fire, 1861
Gustave Doré, The Thieves Tortured by Serpents, 1861
2.
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 honoured 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 fulfilment 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),