The Pilgrim Church, the Space Between
I had an encounter on social media where someone had picked up my first book Justice, Unity & the Hidden Christ. The reader had given very kind feedback, and made reference to a passage that jolted a memory of a paragraph that occupied a small portion of that book, but one that had proven formative in how i think about how we live as members of the Church.
In his City of God, Augustine spoke about how each of us, Christian and non-Christian alike, are citizens of two cities. On the one hand, there is the city of God, marked by the love of God over the self; on the other, there stands the city of man, marked by a self-love in which one “curves in upon oneself” and acts upon a “lust to dominate”.
For Augustine, at any given moment on this side of the end of history, each and every of us may walk the streets of either one of these cities. There would be days when we can show glimmers of the communion of saints dancing through the streets of the new Jerusalem. There might be other days when we might slide into manifesting our concupiscence and cavort among the inhabitants of Babylon.
On an individual level, this image of exposing our citizenship of the two cities might be easy to spot within ourselves (this of course assumes that we do not have an excessively high opinion of our own righteousness). Augustine tells us, however, that there is another, very much subtler, social level in which the two cities might manifest themselves. To understand how this works, we need to pay attention to the fact that in talking about loves, Augustine also talks about love manifest in a city.
This says something about our love. Love is not just a flutter of emotion taking place internally. It is an outworking of desire, or what the Greek philosophers would call the pull of eros. Desire does not stay within us, but draws us out of ourselves, into time and space. The link between desires and cities is that cities are where our desires become assembled and institutionalised in time and space (Graham Ward has more on this in a chapter of his Cities of God). The upshot of this is that, whether we intend to or not, our desires cannot help but work themselves out in such a way as to occupy a place in the world.
Whether leads our desire to either the City of God or the City of Man, depends on the way in which we intend to have our desires occupy that place in the world. In other words, do we intend to move through our world or take control of it? This is where that little passage of my book becomes relevant.
Towards the end of Justice, Unity and the Hidden Christ, I engaged the Jesuit and social theorist, Michel de Certeau, who is noted for writing The Practice of Everyday Life. In that book, de Certeau wrote about two modes of occupying the world.
The first mode was known as a strategic mode, in which space was occupied with a desire “to own that space, keep it under constant surveillance and exclude other forms of social embodiment” (66, my paraphrasing of de Certeau). There is a link between de Certeau’s strategic mode and Augustine’s city of man, for if a person is marked by love of self, that love would manifest itself in time and space as a lust to dominate and subject everything in that space to his or her whim and control. To quote de Certeau, a social space occupied in a strategic mode will be occupied by those who wish to “distinguish its ‘own’ place … of its own power and will”.
It does not stop there, however. de Certeau goes onto say that if the desire is to control space, that desire also shapes a disposition towards the world. A person driven by the lust to dominate will treat the world as a “base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats … can be managed”. What this means is that the love of self does not merely have the person collapse upon itself. It fans out to pull everything and everyone into that collapse. Driven by the love of self, all relations become seen through the lens of advantage and threat.
de Certeau contrasted this strategic form of living with what he called the “tactical”. Whilst the strategist sought to occupy the world by controlling it, the tactician understands that there is “an absence of a proper locus”. As I laid out in the book, tacticians understand that the space is not theirs to own. They understand a place has been given to them and may eventually be replaced by another, equally gifted place. As such, a tactician understands that attempts to manipulate and control the world in order to prolong its institutional presence will end up betraying its own nature.
As I argued in the book, Christians occupy an unusual space in history. The Church is, as the Second Vatican Council’s Lumen Gentium has it, a pilgrim passing through this earth. Being in a strange land, the Church has institutional forms that should take up space in this world, for doing so helps it fulfil its rightful pastoral function to faithful and foreigner alike. Be that as it may, the Church itself is a foreigner, and it should not attempt to own that space, because it was not the Church’s to own in the first place.
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