On Secularization, as Augustine Would Have It

Father Schall, in the course of a meditation on certain readings from the breviary, has this to contribute to the discussion on secularization:

"Make our work today benefit our brothers and sisters, that with them and for them we may build an earthly city, pleasing to you." We have to ponder that sentiment. We want our work to be beneficial to others. What are all of us doing in our work? We are building an earthly city that is pleasing to God. Such a statement has overtones of Augustine's two cities. This atmosphere should make us alert.

Just what is meant by this earthly city that we are supposedly building? Men have been on this earth for a long time. Many earthly cities have come and gone; we have here no lasting city. Can there be two -- an earthly city and a heavenly city -- both of which are related to our deeds: a temporal judgment and a final judgment?

Obviously, it is possible to work for an earthly city that is counter to the city of God. Good men in the worst regimes can also achieve their ultimate end, which is not an earthly city. And what is it that men who do not work to glorify God seek to achieve? It is precisely an earthly city that is opposed to what the city of God is about. Thus, we can work for a city that in no way glorifies God.

This intercession seems ambiguous. We can say, with Aristotle, that man is by nature a political animal. This would mean that the city and its proper building is a task we ought to achieve, but it is not the highest thing. That city ought to be built in such a way that, within its confines, we can practice human virtue in such a way that we control our vices. Scripture seems to present politics as a zone that, at its best, leaves us alone to achieve our final end, which is not political.

Whenever building the earthly city becomes our chief purpose, we are close to the neo-absolutism that elevates the earthly city to be itself the city of God. This temptation to reverse the priority of the city of God so that it becomes identical with the city of man is very contemporary. This reversal comes about most often when we want to find no intelligence in nature but our own. This leaves us free to construct our own "city" that has no reference to any transcendent end of each created person, no matter what regime or era in which he exists.

The final intercession reads: "Grant joy and peace to us and to all we meet this day." We can ask this in any earthly city, even the worst, because our end is not an earthly city.

It puts an interesting dilemma before Christians. On the one hand, we are to care for the least among us, which would seem to demand attempting to heal injustice and rectify corrupt or broken political structures. But on the other hand, the end of our efforts is the City of God, not the City of Man. We cannot build utopia on a battlefield, as Michael O'Brien points out in Father Elijah, and we are actually living in a battlefield.

So the Christian must live in the tension between these two positions, the two Cities, or rather in the City of God which is buried in the City of man like a mustard seed in a field, or leaven in dough--as Thomas More, for instance, or Thomas Becket both dwelt in the twin cities. They lived at the pinnacle of the City of Man, and, by their fidelity to their faith, eventually came to stand at the pinnacle of the City of God--beneath the altar.

We are called to bear witness in the streets of the temporal city that is passing, calling people to life again, to enter into the eternal city, where all that was good in the City of Man shall be preserved, and made whole and unstained.