Cities of God

Graham Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134632411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Cities of God traces urban culture of north America and Western Europe during the 1970s, to ask how theology can respond to the postmodern city. Since Harvey Cox published his famous theological response to urban living during the mid-1960s very little has been written to address this fundamental subject. Through analyses of contemporary film, architecture, literature, and traditional theological resources in Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa, Graham Ward lays out a systematic theology which has the preparation and building of cities as its focus. This is vital reading for all those interested in theology and urban living.

Part I
CULTURAL ATOMISM

1
CITIES OF ETERNAL ASPIRATION

If you see a philosopher determining all things by means of right reason, him you shall reverence: he is a heavenly being and not of this world. If you see a pure contemplator, he unaware of the body and confined to the inner reaches of the mind, he is neither an earthly nor a heavenly being: he is more a reverend divinity vested with human flesh....we can become what we will.

(Pico della Mirandola [1487]: 1948, 226–7)

Introduction

Faith in the City, the report of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas, was first published in 1985. The report, without going into many theological details, announced a Christian commitment to the city. In this it was following the footsteps of Christian socialists of the previous century like F.D. Maurice, and R.H. Tawney. In the nineteenth century the famous Scottish preacher, Henry Drummond, spelt out the nature of that Christian commitment. ‘Christianity’, he said, ‘is the religion of cities. It moves among real things. Its sphere is the street, the marketplace, the working life of the world … Take away people, houses, streets, character and it ceases to be.’ He concluded: ‘the perfect saint is the perfect citizen’ (Drummond: 1988, 11–12). The Archbishop’s report concurred (Church of England: 1985, 70), outlining the need for a theology in a picture of a disintegrating cityscape. But it did not provide the theology it called for – and its critics made this plain.¹ Anthony Harvey sought to clarify and redress the omission with a collection of essays which theologically reflected upon the findings of the Archbishop’s Commission, entitled Theology in the City. One of those essays by Professor, now Lord, Plant commented incisively that the Commission was simply misreading the signs of the times – in particular the nature of conservative capitalism and, we are in the eighties here, New Right Thinking. For all its detailed awareness of the poverty and destitution of UPAs (Urban Priority Areas), for all its compassion and sense of outraged shock, and for all its recognition that there is a serious situation in major cities of this country – Faith in the City, and its call to affirm the belief that our cities are still flourishing centres of social, economic and political life, misunderstood that cities as they believed in them were rapidly changing. While understanding that ‘the modern consumer economy, depending as it does on the continual stimulation of all attainable desires … come[s] perilously close to encouraging the sin of covetousness’ (Church of England: 1985, 55), the Commission still wished to employ the language of ‘collaboration’, ‘liberation’, ‘community’, ‘development’, ‘locality’, ‘fellow citizens’, ‘contribution’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘participation’. It never asked whether the social atomism of city-life had moved beyond being able to collaborate; it never asked who contributed and why, and who couldn’t or wouldn’t contribute; it never asked about the growing numbers who have already opted out – who have already opted for a virtual reality (in drugs, in drink, in interactive computer games, in play-station fantasies, in film, in televiewing). It appealed for state intervention when the state was in the process of dismantling its welfare concerns. It referred continually to the concept of nation (and implicitly to a nationalism) that flew in the face of increasing globalisation. It expressed its belief in its own unique position to be ‘responsible for, the whole of the society, and proclaim [s] its care for the weak, its solidarity with all’ (Church of England: 1985, 59), with little regard to the fact that the Church of England no longer had the resources nor the social standing to carry out such paternalism. The Church, albeit in a different way, is as marginal as so many of the poor it portrayed, and all the indications are that cities are turning into something else: radically eclectic places where each pursues his or her own consumer interests under the ever-watchful eye of surveillance cameras ready to pinpoint when radical difference flares up into riot. How then do we begin to think about today’s city theologically?

Metropolis: Berlin 1927

On a freezing January evening in 1927, the city of Berlin buzzed with an excitement that had been building for almost two years. On this night would be premiered the longest, most expensive and most technically sophisticated silent film made to date. The film was called Metropolis. It opened at Berlin’s largest movie theatre, Ufa Palast, the front of which had been mounted with billboards portraying monumental skyscrapers. The film’s director was Fritz Lang – a man obsessed in his early years by architecture – and its subject was social life in a futuristic city. It was being premiered in a Western European city second only to London in size. A city which the pioneering German city developer, Werner Hegemann, depicted at the forefront of an international battle in urban development ‘in the struggle for the beneficial arrangement of [a] completely new world in which we have been living since modern techniques in industry and transport first came into effect’ (Sutcliffe: 1981, 45). Berlin had already established itself as a prototype city, for Germany; staging, in 1910, the first town-planning exhibition to promote the regional planning that had gone on in the city since the publication in 1862 of James Hobrecht’s huge Bebauungsplan (Sutcliffe: 1981, 35). According to Lang – who already had an eye on American film-production, whose studios he would later grace – it was inspired by viewing the New York skyline from an ocean liner.² But the film had been financially made possible by the newly stabilised Mark, and produced by Berlin’s Ufa (Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft), in a Germany widely recognised, at the time, as a world leader in urban planning (McGilligan: 1997, 8). The film’s production reflected a growing interest in the discipline that would come to be known as urban studies. It illustrated the ‘very real contemporary fears and ambiguous attitudes about cities’ (Neumann: 1996, 35) and their design – particularly the debates between the conservative and younger architects about cities composed of skyscrapers rather than cities centred around one huge building that might act as a modern version of the mediaeval Cathedral. Luis Buñuel, who saw the film when it opened in Madrid wrote: ‘Now and forever the architect is going to replace the set designer. The movies will be the faithful translator of the architect’s boldest dreams’ (quoted in Neumann: 1996, 9). We will return to this observation in the next chapter. A number of earlier German films had also reflected the debates among the architects and urban planners – Hans Werckmeister’s Algol (1920) and Murnau’s Der letzte Mann (1925) – but it was Metropolis, and the set designs of Erich Kettelhut, in particular, which presented the symbiotic relationship between cinema and the city: the glamour and scintillations of the former reflecting the energetic buzz of the latter.

Urban studies, theorising about the city and cinematography all emerge around the same period. It was the early 1900s when Stadtebau, Stadtbaurat and Stadtebauer were organising town planning as a distinct profession in Germany (Sutcliffe: 1981, 34); it was 1904 when Ebenezer Howard’s dreams for the new garden city became a fully-fledged plan for Letchworth and the president of the Manchester and Salford Citizen’s Association, Thomas Horsfall, published his groundbreaking book The Improvement of the Dwellings and Surroundings of the People: The Example of Germany; and it was 1907 when the United States set up its first commission for city planning. In France, urban planning came much later; the first town-planning law not being passed until it was deemed necessary, in 1919, following the devastation of the First World War. Urban studies emerges as, by 1900, thirteen cities around the world were estimated to be occupied by over one million inhabitants (Chandler and Fox: 1974, 19).³

We begin then with Metropolis, a film set in the modern city, at a time when the city was being seen as a field requiring separate study and analysis; with a film about the conflicting desire, politics and psychology of civic living. We begin also with a film, not a novel or a theological account of the city because of the relationship we have acknowledged between them, and the commitment of this study to working from a Christian analysis of cultural metaphors towards a theology of the times. Film owes its appeal and possibility to city life. As Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker who is frequently invited to take part in discussions on the urban landscape, observes: ‘there are links between the cities, the urban landscapes and the cinema. Film is a city art. It has come into existence and it has blossomed together with the great cities of the world.... The cinema is the mirror of the twentieth century city and twentieth century art’ (Wenders: 1997, 93).⁴ The content – what the film is about – and the form – cinematography – correlate in Metropolis. Just as the city is preoccupied with the structure and control of what can be seen – Joh Fredersen (the Master) watches the city from a glass-fronted tower – so the silent film, as a medium, communicates through the organised textures of what is screened. Both the city and the film organise what and how people will see. Each are metaphors of modern life – metaphors which express a profound ambivalence. As Buñuel noted, they express dreams and aspirations and so reflect a certain utopianism, while at the same time, their imposing visibilities threaten to overwhelm, to dominate. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis creatively plays with this ambivalence – the futuristic city rehearsing feudal power in an epic film.

The plot of the film and the way the camera frames its shots, both play with the hidden and the visible. And what is outside the frame (and concealed) frequently dictates the activity in the frame (and revealed). As one film critic writes: ‘This is the atmosphere of Lang’s world, with an intangible threat existing nowhere but felt everywhere’ (Jensen: 1989, 13). The camerawork plays with the hidden and the visible, evoking the presence of a power that is unlocatable. This expresses itself in terms of the plot: beneath the visible city, for example, the citizens go about their work in labyrinthine underground caverns and corridors. The camera’s silent and panoramic eye has access both to this hidden city as well as to the visible city of towers above it. Joh Fredersen’s surveillance is itself surveyed.

The film is set in the year 2000. Under the surveillance of Fredersen, the workers toil, oppressed and exploited. They are encouraged, inspirited, and consoled by a female prophet called Maria who speaks to them of their future salvation. One day a mediator will come from the world above to deliver them. Freder, the only son of Fredersen, becomes that saviour (by self-appointment).⁵ He has crept down from the city and listens, unseen, to Maria. Fired by what he hears he accepts the mission as his. Only elsewhere … his father, who has heard about Maria’s political activism, has had a mad scientist create a robotic simulacrum of Maria. This ‘Maria’ is seductive and sexually aggressive and evil; whereas the real Maria is virginal and pure. Fredersen sends down the robotic Maria to stir the workers into anarchy, so they will destroy their world. In the unleashed anarchy the workers turn on the robot itself and burn it before the doors of the Cathedral. In the meantime the real Maria escapes from her imprisonment. In a final effacement of the feminine, it is then Freder who affects a reconciliation between his father and the workers, once more before the Cathedral doors.

The topological planning of the film reflects a powerful Germanic folk-myth of dwarves and trolls inhabiting underground caverns, working invisibly to perform the labours that make daily life in the world above pleasurable, leisured; the myth that Wagner dramatises in Das Reingeld, where the Niebelungen work away hidden from the world and ruled over by the tyrannical dwarf, Alberich.⁶ Lang's previous two films were adaptations of these Germanic myths – Siegfried and Kriemheld’s Revenge (both 1924). Utopian civic structures are crossed by a medieval politics of oppression, the future technopolis by the nationalism and imperialism of the past. The twenty-hour day is divided into two working shifts of ten hours; the clock and the great rotating cogs of industrialism dictate production. Power, paranoia, hysteria, madness – are viewed as the other, repressed side of the sharp-edged city with its geometric surfaces and its ‘rationalisation and commodification of space and time’ (Kasinitz: 1995, 1).

But the plot and characterisation of the film rehearse several theological concerns and resonate with Christian and biblical allusion. ‘Maria … acts as a Christian priest to the workers’, one critic observes. Certainly the scenes in which Maria teaches the workers about the one who is to come and save them take place in a catacomb-like chapel – replete with cross and altar. Another critic writes about Maria that ‘She is Christ the Redeemer and Madonna the Virgin rolled into one’ (McGilligan: 1997, 110). This is blind to the gender roles being played out here. Maria is the virgin prophet in John the Baptist mode, Joh is the father God Jehovah, but the Christic the mediating role is male and the father’s only son.

The biblical allusions are self-consciously present. Thea von Harbou, who was Lang’s second wife and with whom he worked on the screenplay, said the structure in the metropolis was known as ‘The New Tower of Babel’. The city’s hierarchical socio-political power structure is mirrored in a vertical mapping, with the pleasure gardens of Eden at the highest point and, at the lowest, the underground city ruled over by fire and built upon vast reservoirs of water.

When Erich Kettelhut first drew up plans for downtown Metropolis and made the Cathedral (a very Köln-like Cathedral) the focal point of the city, Lang carefully crossed out the Cathedral twice adding ‘Away with the church: Tower of Babel itself’. Nevertheless, in a film in which the city is seen as both potential champion of a new social order and potential exploitative monster (again reflecting the two views of city-living current at the time), it is the Cathedral which is the final locus for reconciliation.

The question I wish to ask is what does this film tell us about the modern city and Christian theology’s relationship to it? This will involve (1) saying something about the biblical view of the city and (2) the history of civic development with respect to theological concerns. Examinations of both of these will enable us to provide some answer to that question which then must be related to prominent aspects of the film itself. I suggest there are four such aspects.

First, the film is structured around dualisms: the human versus the machine;⁷ the darkly erotic and self-interested versus the saintly and altruistic; the male opposed to, and fearful of, the female; the conscious world of control and organisation against the unconscious, silenced but volatile world of the emotions; the city above ground and workplace underground; the individual opposed to the masses; good against evil; and several others – all filmed in black and white.

Secondly, what characterises this city is industrial labour, on behalf of a few technocrats, by strongly bonded, quasi-religious fraternities – what, in Germany, after the pioneering sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies, would be termed Gemeinschaft as distinct from communities based upon location and impersonal, self-interested relationships, Gesellschaft.⁸ Gemeinschaft social bonds are natural, organic and intellectual and function unconsciously (beneath the civic surface). Gesellschaft social bonds are rational, mechanistic, means-to-ends and function consciously.⁹ The film visually spatialises Tönnies’ conceptual schema. When they rebel, the workers’ anger irrupts impulsively, breaking through the rational, geometric planes which compose the film sets which frame them. Nevertheless, the workers move forward as one, in a disciplined if mute co-operation mirroring the way they had lived together in their destitution and oppression. They march towards the Tower in a great triangular wedge. They are the producers and their working alongside each other fosters a sense of community – a corporate identity.

Thirdly, it is a city of towers and high density residence, rather akin to the Gotham city of Batman fame. It is a city made possible by advanced technology, migration of the populace towards places of high employment and wages, the production/consumption rhythms of developing capitalism. It is attractive because it suggests wealth – as potential if not possessed – and it is electric with the excitement of the new, the latest, the most efficient, the most antiseptic. The skyscraper is the symbol of human aspiration and potential; the proud phallus of masculine-led power.

Fourthly, the city’s problems are believed to be resolvable with the establishment of reciprocal responsibilities. The final scene of the film establishes a social contract between patrician-capitalist and worker-citizen allowing for a new consensus politics to arise. Modernity’s metaphysical aspiration to synthesis is evident here: the move beyond Cartesian splits between the mind and the body, the intellectual and the physical, and Marx’s dialectics between labour and capital.¹⁰ The liberal dream of respectful tolerance and co-operation, founded in the common denominator of the human condition, makes city life possible. Urbanism fosters, in fact requires, liberalism or, when the tide turns and we all become more sceptical about humanism, pragmatism. The class divisions in Metropolis can be extended towards gender divisions and racial divisions – all these distinctive sections of the urban populace can only co-exist within such a concentrated space if a liberal laissez faire mentality (which may take an implicit or an explicit social contractual form) operates.

Cities and secularity

The Bible is ambivalent towards cities. The first cities were built by men of demonstrable power and ambition. Cain, having murdered his brother Abel and, being informed by God that he would be a vagabond all his life, ‘built a city, and called the name of the city after the name of his son, Enoch’ (Genesis 4.17). The origins of the city, for the Bible, seem to lie in masculine expressions of defiance, insecurity, the need to find substitutions and consolations for the loss of God, and the desire perhaps to take the place of that God, to become a dynasty. In the second wave of city-building, following the flood, it was Nimrod, son of Cush, a warrior, who established Babel and Nineveh (Genesis 10. 9–11).

If Abraham represents the righteous Jew, the ideal is a wanderer, a nomad, not a city-dweller – city-dwelling, like the need for a king, was later sanctioned by God, but ambivalently so. Cities like Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis are places one abides in at risk. Jerusalem, following the amalgamation of Israel, Judah and Caanan under David and Solomon, begins to take on a mythic, utopian quality as Zion, the seat of God, but nevertheless it is counterpoised by the city of Babylon, the pagan, hostile, city of destruction, exile and subjugation. It has been argued recently that the myth-making of the great Jerusalem was part of a political move to ‘write up’ what was, in fact, a small provincial centre (Zvi: 1997, 194– 209). In the New Testament, these two cities meet again in an apocalyptic battle – Bab...