The City of Man

The City of Man

by Mariano Gabriel Pérez-Tinnirello.

Taken from the National Congress News portal, November 7, 2018

Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope

In his City of God, Saint Augustine says:

"...two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self"

Today we live immersed in the City of Man which has progressed to the contempt of God, and with arrogance has built those huge iron and cement cathedrals proudly called skyscrapers, giant sequoias with angular forms, covered with steel and glass; gray, cold, holding thousands of people inside busily working as ants for the enterprises of human ambition. This City of Man, with almost superhuman effort, has attempted to hide God's creation. In all of it, such ambition is breathed, in all of it the hand of man has been imprinted. On its steel and on its granite, the mark of the headstrong man, of the Nietzschean superman is stamped all over, and under this figure, the power to manipulate matter, with which it has achieved the domination of technology.

The thunderous roar of the engines, the screech of the horns, keeps us away from silence. The cries of discontented men, distorted by the worn-out harangue of the electrical loudspeakers which are intermingled with the strikes on the drums, as a tribal, discordant dance of the constantly unsatisfied protesters moving at the slow pace of cattle on a wide street. 

And at night, the stertorous music which resounds repeatedly in the speakers of a disposable culture. in the discothèques, nightclubs, and bars of the after-dark life, emit those sounds which produce a spell on the lower instincts, that hypnotical transformation of the young minds that fall unawares in the dumbest attitudes, who at the same time try to imitate those of their 'heroes' in the subculture. 'Good makes no noise, and noise does no good' said a saint. And noises get us away from that silence so needed by the men who today and always have searched for the truth.

No longer satisfied with its strident sound, this human city resorts to thousands of lights and great screens exhibiting all of its offerings, The gaudy colored lights and lighted billboards, ever more spectacular, are the noises which distract our sight. The ever more monopolized movie theater chains with their films ever more vacuous but at the same time more spectacular, replete ad nauseam with special effects, which remind me every time of the dystopic (or utopic?) Brave New World novel by Aldous Huxley, with its 'feelies'. The concupiscent fascination which is put in front of us to sell us a way of life we must accept, or the multiple products of its great factories or, when we are in the midst of electoral campaigns, to distract us with the multicolored variety of political 'marketing'. Noise for the eyesight and for true thinking of what today's polis really needs.

Even the scant vegetation which we can find in the city center seems to subjugate submissively to a human pattern that arranges it in the town and sets it out as chess pieces, manipulating it like origami, and trimming it at pleasure. Everything has been managed, built, and planted millimetrically by man's hand, to the point that we cannot see any other hand but that of man in everything that surrounds us. 

The City of Man, the "Terrestrial City" as called by Saint Augustine rises proudly, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnifunctional, like an oiled machine ready to keep growing indefinitely before the men who live immersed in it, absorbed by it, preventing them by all possible means from contemplating beyond its cement walls. Human hands have built everything, brick by brick, the Babylonian whore, whose prince is the Prince of the World, who appears again to say to the contemplative man "you cannot!"

The Terrestrial City always seeks for men to be immersed all their life in their occupations, in their amusements, in what is possible, and in this way neglect the profound, the important, the transcendent. Its sensorial steam roller seeks to flatten the perspectives of life, showing only one horizon, the terrestrial one and in this way, with its varied tricks, block out the fact that there is also a vertical one if the paradox is allowed to me.

But the contemplative man who loves and seeks Love, who wishes to live in the City of God, in the Heavenly Homeland, can find the grace to cover himself in the candor of an interior Saint Ireneous of Arnoise, still keeps that vestige which the cement conglomeration cannot take away from him. Even when the city, with its fulgurant lights, has been able to hide most of the stars, the skies still remain to be able to climb to the zenith and see a vestige of God.

And after these reflections, in a rhetorical manner, I could ask myself some questions. Could these be the things for which the great cities have been transformed in the legalist and legislative accumulation of vices and disorders, unimaginable in olden times. Is man's distancing from God what has led us to build these gigantic cities or have these gigantic cities also made men distance themselves from the transcendent outlook?

Such is man's imprisonment between the walls of the great city that it has spawned a considerable number of lunatics, those lunatics like that which G.K. Chesterton described, who had confined himself inside a cardboard box in his small universe, painting the sky and the stars on the top. 

And I remember, with a certain melancholy aftertaste, that Pope Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei, reminded us that 

"There was a time when the philosophy of the Gospel ruled the States. At that time, the efficacy proper of Christian wisdom and its divine virtue had penetrated the laws, the institutions, the morals of the peoples, infiltrating itself in all classes and relationships in society."

Even within the human defects of those times, harmony reigned, produced by the living of a profound Christian worldview. The time when truth was the Truth, when common sense and sanity reigned in the laws. The contrast between the two cities is overwhelming. They cannot live together, they are irreconcilable, they will always be in constant rivalry.