The City of God
Easter 6, 20th May, 2001
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's, Eastern Hill
I saw no temple in the city; for its temple was the sovereign Lord God and the
Lamb. And the city had no need of sun and moon to shine upon it; for the glory
of God gave it light, and its lamp was the Lamb.
Revelation 21: 22-23.
In the Handfield chapel, the central panel of the reproduction of the Van
Eyck Ghent altarpiece shows the heavenly city of Revelation as the artist
imagined it: tidy groups of worshippers of the Lamb, hierarchically arranged
around the throne. In the background of the landscape appear towers and
battlements that look suspiciously like those of the Ghent of Van Eyck's day.
Cities, their layout and planning have provoked and continue to provoke a
wide range of responses. Visitors to Australia in the second half of the
nineteenth century had markedly different responses to the layouts of Melbourne
and Sydney. Sydney, with its streets and winding roads following the outlines
of the hillsides around the harbour, made them describe Sydney as being like
a traditional English or European centre. The tidy grid patterns and street
lighting that spoke of the harnessing of modern technology – gas, then
electricity – made visitors to Melbourne compare it with the most modern
cities in America, or newly designed centres in some parts of Europe. (We now
have very different responses to Sydney and Melbourne).
If the big city was in many ways a 19th century product, imaginative 19th
century minds could forsee some of the more nightmarish possibilities for city
design and order. In a posthumously published novel (L'Etonnante Aventure de
la Mission Barsac, 1920), Jules Verne pictured a city where design and
hierarchy were used to reinforce racially based abuse and oppression. In the
centre of the Sahara, the engineer Camaret creates Blackland. It is watered
with artificial rain; gliders fly in a labour supply of negroes kidnapped from
their villages; radar watches the walls to prevent escape. A river flows
through the centre of this city, which is far from a City of God. On its right
bank is the palace with its high cement tower, home of Harry Killer, his nine
counsellors and black guard of 50. It faces the factory, the centre of
technical and economic power. On the left bank are the quarters of the Merry
Fellows, criminals recruited from Europe, who live by looting, and whose number
is limited by statute. Another subordinate body of white criminals also
recruited from Europe, called (ironically) the Civil Body, provides new members to fill in vacancies as they occur among the superior one of Merry Fellows.
The suburbs in which the Merry Fellows and the Civil Body live pen in the
quarters of the black workers, who are controlled by terrorism. An intermediate
group exists, 'free workers', working on paid contracts in the factory for
agreed wages. What they do not know is that their freedom is illusory; when
their terms expire, they will be killed in the desert, and their incomes
returned to the common treasury.
Verne well understood the possibilities for perverting city structures and
hierarchies for perverse and sinister ends. As we hear this morning's epistle,
its central point is not that the life of the world to come is dominated by
structures that offer a perfect version of the kind of order that we fail to
attain in this world, even though painters like Van Eyck could make visually
attractive versions of hierarchically structured cities. The city centre is
not a location, somewhere more central and important than suburbs or areas of
production, but a person and a state of being – God worshipped and enjoyed
without distraction. Nor is it something that offers a version of technology
superior to any known to human beings (I say this because it is likely that
the writer of Revelation would have heard of one of the ancient world's great
technological marvels, a wonder of lighting, the lighthouse of Alexandria).
Again, the light of this so-called city is a person whose life irradiates His
worshippers. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews came to the core of the
image of the city in the spiritual life when he contrasted our present life
with that of the world to come: the cities of this world for him represented
impermanence and changeability: here we have no abiding city, but we seek that
which is to come, whose founder and builder is God. In the end, the city
spoken of in Revelation is not a heavenly validation of hierarchy as we
know it, but a metaphor for the permanence of a communion with God which we
know, as yet, only fleetingly. Positively, it is a promise that what we
experience fleetingly now and in the midst of impermanence, is no illusion or
projection of our fantasies, but a momentary glimpse of an ineffable reality.
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