Status Anxiety

IV

RELIGION

Death

1.

The hero of Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886) has long since fallen out of love with his wife. His children are a mystery to him, and he has no friends besides those who can advance his career or whose elevated positions will lend him some reflected glory. Ivan Ilyich is a man overwhelmingly concerned with status. He lives in Saint Petersburg, in a large apartment decorated according to the fashionable taste of the day, and gives frequent soulless dinner parties at which nothing warm or sincere is ever said. He works as a high court judge, a post he enjoys chiefly for the respect it brings him. Sometimes, late at night, Ivan Ilyich reads a book that is the “talk of the town,” but only after he has discerned from magazines what line to take on it. Tolstoy sums up the judge’s life in a single sentence: “The pleasures Ivan Ilyich derived from his work were those of pride; the pleasures he derived from society were those of vanity; but it was genuine pleasure that he derived from playing whist.”

Then, at the age of forty-five, Ivan experiences a pain in his side that gradually spreads over his entire body. His doctors are at a loss to diagnose it: they talk vaguely and pretentiously of floating livers and inharmonious salt levels, and prescribe him a range of ever more expensive and ineffective medicines. Soon he is too tired to go to work; his intestines feel as if they were on fire; and he loses his appetite for food and, more significantly, for whist. It slowly dawns upon Ivan and all those around him that he will shortly be dead.

This is not, as it turns out, a wholly unwelcome prospect for many of Ivan’s colleagues in the judiciary. Fyodor Vasilyevich predicts that with Ivan gone, he himself will probably get Shtabel’s post, or Vinnikov’s—a promotion worth an extra eight hundred rubles plus an allowance for office expenses. Another jurist, Pyotr Ivanovich, imagines that he will now be able to get his brother-in-law transferred from Kaluga, a move that will please his wife and ease tensions at home. The news is a little harder on the Ilyich family. Ivan’s wife, while not directly regretting his imminent death, nevertheless worries about the size of her pension, while their socialite daughter fears that her father’s funeral may play havoc with her wedding plans.

For his part, Ivan, with only a few weeks left to him, recognises that he has wasted his time on earth by leading an outwardly respectable but inwardly barren life. He scrolls back through his upbringing, education and career and finds that everything he has ever done has been motivated by the desire to appear important in the eyes of others, with his own interests and sensitivities always being sacrificed for the sake of impressing people who, he only now sees, do not care a jot for him. One night, as he lies awake in the early hours, racked by pain, “it occurred to him that those scarcely perceptible impulses of his to protest at what people of high status considered good, vague impulses which he had always suppressed, might have been precisely what mattered, and all the rest had not been the real thing. His official duties, his manner of life, his family, the values adhered to by people in society and in his profession—all these might not have been the real thing.”

Ivan’s regret at having squandered his brief life is compounded by the realisation that it is merely his status that those around him love, not his true, vulnerable self. He has won respect by being a judge, a wealthy father and a head of household, but with all of these assets about to be lost, in agony and afraid, he can no longer count on anyone’s love: “What tormented Ivan Ilyich most was that no one gave him the kind of compassion he craved. There were moments after long suffering when what he wanted most of all (shameful as it might be for him to admit) was to be pitied like a sick child. He wanted to be caressed, kissed, cried over, as sick children are caressed and comforted. He knew that he was an important functionary with a greying beard, and so this was impossible; yet all the same he longed for it.”

Once Ivan has breathed his last, his so-called friends come to pay their respects, though grumbling all the while at the disruption this obligation has caused in their card-playing schedule. The sight of his colleague’s waxy, hollow face in the coffin is enough to make Pyotr Ivanovich consider that death may one day claim him, too—a fate that could have stern implications, especially for the logic that at present allows him to spend most of his time on whist: “ ‘Why, the same thing could happen to me at any time now,’ thought Pyotr Ivanovich and for a moment he felt panic-stricken. But at once, he himself did not know how, he was rescued by the customary reflection that all this had happened to Ivan Ilyich, not to him, that it could not and should not happen to him; and that if he were to grant such a possibility, he would succumb to depression.”

2.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is, in the best tradition of the Christian memento mori, a study in how the idea of death may reorient our priorities away from the worldly and towards the spiritual, away from whist and dinner parties and towards truth and love.

Tolstoy’s keen understanding of this phenomenon had its origins in personal experience: only a few years before writing Ivan Ilyich, he had questioned his own deepest concerns in the context of a newfound awareness of his mortality. In A Confession (1882), a record of that self-interrogation, he explained how at the age of fifty-one, with the publication of War and Peace and Anna Karenina behind him, world-famous and rich, he came to realise that he had long been living his life not by his own values, or even by God’s, but by those of “society,” which had inspired in him a restless desire to be stronger than others, more renowned, more important and richer. In his social circle, he noted, “ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride, anger and revenge were all respected.” But now, confronting the notion of death, he doubted the validity of his previous goals: “ ‘Well, you will have six thousand desyatinas of land in Samara Government and three hundred horses, and what then? … Very well; you will be more famous than Gogol or Pushkin or Shakespeare or Molière, or than all the writers in the world—and what of it?’ I could find no reply at all.”

The one answer that eventually silenced his questions was God: he resolved to spend the remainder of his days observing the teachings of Jesus Christ. Whatever we may make of the particularly Christian solution that Tolstoy adopted to his crisis of meaning, his sceptical journey follows a familiar trajectory. It is an example of how the thought of death may serve as a guide to a more genuine and more significant way of life. It is a solemn call, to follow Bach’s Cantata BWV 106 (Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit), to determine our true priorities:

Set thy house in order,

This is the ancient law:

For thou shalt die,

Man, thou must die.

And not remain alive.

Yea, come, Lord Jesus, come.

Bestelle dein Haus,

Es ist der alte Bund:

Denn du wirst Sterben,

Mensch, du musst sterben.

Und nicht lebendig bleiben.

Ja, komm, Herr Jesus, Komm.

3.

But how, specifically, might mortal illness help to orient us away

from an excessive concern with status?

Principally, it may do so by relieving us of our capacity for many of the activities for which society honours its members, including throwing dinner parties, working effectively and dispensing patronage. Death thereby reveals the fragility, and so perhaps the worthless-ness, of the attentions we stand to gain through status. In good health and at the height of our powers, we are spared any need to wonder whether those who pay us compliments are doing so out of sincere affection or in some evanescent quest for advantage. We seldom have the courage or the cynicism to ask, Is it me they’re fond of, or my position in society? Illness, by felling the conditions of worldly love, renders the distinction quickly and all too cruelly evident. With death looming, clad in our hospital pyjamas, we are liable to turn in rage against our status-conditional lovers, as angry with ourselves for being vain enough to be seduced by them as we are with them for orchestrating their heartless seductions in the first place. The idea of death brings an authenticity to social life: there may be no better way to clear our calendar of engagements than to speculate as to who among our acquaintances would make the trip to our hospital bed.

As conditional love begins to lose its interest for us, so, too, may a number of the things we pursue in order to secure that love. If wealth, esteem and power buy us a kind of regard that will last only so long as our status holds, but conversely we are destined to end our lives defenceless and dishevelled, longing to be comforted like small children, then we have an unusually clear reason to concentrate our energies on those relationships which will best survive the erosion of our standing.

4.

Herodotus reported that it was the custom, towards the end of Egyptian feasts, when the revellers were at their most exuberant, for servants to march through the banqueting hall and among the tables carrying skeletons on stretchers. Regrettably, he did not go on to explain what effect this reminder of death was intended to have on the guests: would it make them keener to carry on with their merrymaking, or send them home in a newfound mood of sobriety?

Typically, the thought of death may be expected, first, to usher us towards whatever happens to matter most to us (be it drinking beside the banks of the Nile, writing a book or making a fortune), and second, to encourage us to pay less attention to the verdicts of others—who will not, after all, be doing the dying for us. The prospect of our own extinction may draw us towards that way of life on which our hearts place the greatest value.

This theme animates “To His Coy Mistress” (1681), Andrew Marvell’s famous poetic attempt to lure a hesitant young woman into bed, through lines that stress not only her beauty and his fidelity but also the less obviously romantic notion that both she and he will soon enough be stone dead. Addressing a subject who is apparently reluctant to express her desire due to anxiety over her reputation, Marvell uses the spectre of death to shift her attention away from her status within the community and towards her own wishes. He would not object to her coyness, he assures her, were it not for the fact that

… at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity… .

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Shakespeare, too, seemed eager to exploit death’s amorous possibilities. One of his sonnets urges his beloved to anticipate the moment when

forty winters shall besiege thy brow

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field

even as another sonnet looks towards time’s transformation of

your day of youth to sullied night

While the thought of death may occasionally be abused (to alarm individuals or groups into doing things they might never do otherwise), more often, and more hopefully, it may help us to correct our tendency to live as if we could afford to defer forever, for the sake of propriety, our underlying commitments to ourselves. Contemplating our mortality may give us the courage to unhook our lives from the more gratuitous of society’s expectations. In the presence of a skeleton, the repressive aspects of others’ opinions have a habit of shedding their power to intimidate.

5.

Whatever other differences there may be between them, Christian and secular concepts overlap substantially on the subject of what is meaningful in life when viewed from the perspective of death. There is a strikingly similar positive emphasis on love, authentic social relations and charity, and a common condemnation of the pursuit of power, military strength, wealth and glory. These and certain other ends and activities seem almost universally inconsequential beside the thought of death.

Elsewhere in his Histories, Herodotus tells us an apposite anecdote about Xerxes, the mighty king of Persia, who in 480 B.C. invaded Greece with an army of nearly two million men. Seeing the whole Hellespont filled with the vessels of his fleet, and the plains covered with his regiments, Xerxes at first congratulated himself on his good fortune and abilities. But then, a few moments later, he began to weep. His stunned uncle Artabanus, standing beside him, asked what a man in his position could possibly have to cry about. The king replied that he had just realised that in a hundred years’ time, all these men arrayed before him, every one of the soldiers and sailors with whose help he had terrified the known world, would be dead.

We might feel no less sad, and no less sceptical about the value of fleeting achievements and impermanent notions of meaning, if we were to study a picture of the participants at a Heinz Company convention held in Chicago in the spring of 1902. The image of all these earnest men, each with his excited plan for increasing sales of ketchup and pickles in stores across the United States, should be enough to make us weep with the bitterness of King Xerxes of Persia.

Heinz salesmen, closing banquet, sales convention, Chicago, 1902

Of course, the inevitable erasure of our earthly efforts at the hands of death is foreshadowed in other tasks besides conquering nations and building brands. We may observe a mother teaching her dimple-cheeked child to tie his shoelaces, and find ourselves haunted by an image of both of their eventual funerals. Nevertheless, we may conclude that bringing up a child is a more effective way of cheating death than selling condiments, or that helping a friend enjoys an advantage over leading an army.

“Vanity of Vanity, all is vanity,” lamented the author of Ecclesiastes (1:2). “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever (1:4).” And yet it may be that, as Christian moralists would argue, not all things are equally vain. In some parts of Christendom, beginning in the sixteenth century, a new and very specific artistic genre emerged that would capture the imagination of the art-buying classes for the next two hundred years. Examples of “vanitas art,” so named in tribute to Ecclesiastes, were hung in domestic environments, most often studies and bedrooms. Each still-life featured a table or sideboard on which was arranged a contrasting muddle of objects. There might be flowers, coins, a guitar or a mandolin, chess pieces, a book of verse, a laurel wreath or a wine bottle: symbols of frivolity and temporal glory. And somewhere among these would be set the two great symbols of death and the brevity of life: a skull and an hourglass.

The purpose of such works was not to send their viewers into a depression over the vanity of all things; rather, it was to embolden them to find fault with particular aspects of their own experience, while at the same time attending more closely to the virtues of love, goodness, sincerity, humility and kindness.

above: Philippe de Champaigne, Vanitas, circa 1671 opposite: Simon Renard de Saint-André, Vanitas, circa 1662

6.

If reflecting on our own mortality is instructive, we may also find some relief from status anxiety in dwelling on the deaths of other people—particularly those whose accomplishments in life have made us feel the most inadequate and envious. However forgotten and ignored we are, however powerful and revered others may be, we can take comfort in the thought that the lot of us will ultimately end up as that most democratic of substances: dust.

Outside the village of Walsingham, in Norfolk, in 1658, a farmer tilling his field felt his plough strike something odd. It turned out to be one in a row of fifty urns in which a group of aristocrats had been ceremoniously buried in either Roman or Saxon times. The discovery created a minor sensation in East Anglia, which soon enough came to the attention of a doctor living in Norwich. By the end of the year, Sir Thomas Browne, taking the long-buried urns as his starting point, had produced a digressive meditation on the futility of striving for worldly greatness, on human imperfectibility and on the related need to recognise our dependence on God for salvation. He entitled his essay “Urne-Buriall; or, A Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes Lately Found in Norfolk.”

“In a field of old Walsingham, not many moneths past, were digged up between fourty and fifty Urnes,” reported Browne in his characteristic cadenced, lumpy English, “deposited in a dry and sandy soile, not a yard deep, nor farre from one another … some containing two pounds of bones, distinguishable in skulls, ribs, jawes, thigh-bones and teeth.” What interested Browne was how the identities of the dead, in their day the wealthiest and most important people in the area, had been entirely lost to history. Some had theorised that the remains were those of Romans, for the burial site was not far from an old Roman garrison; Browne, however, conjectured that they were more likely to be “our Brittish, Saxon or Danish Forefathers. ” In any case, no one would ever know their names, let alone in what century they had lived and died. From this, Browne moved on to reflect on the power of time to make a mockery of all human claims to earthly achievement and distinction: “Who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried?” he asked, challenging the dead aristocrats, who must once have felt confident of their place in the world, and hosted receptions and played the lyre and looked proudly at themselves in the mirror in the morning. “There is no antidote against the opium of time,” Browne admonished. “Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks.” Rather than try to achieve fame on earth, the duty of the honest Christian was to make an impression “not in the record of man” but instead “in the Register of God.”

The message may seem a melancholy one, but it is arguably much more so for those who anchor their lives on the pleasures of a highstatus position than it is for those whom society ignores and who are therefore already well acquainted with the oblivion in which their privileged counterparts will someday join them. It is the rich, the beautiful, the famous and the powerful for whom death has in store the cruellest lessons—the very categories of people, that is, whose worldly goods take them, in the Christian understanding, furthest from God.

In England, in the middle of the eighteenth century, this Christian-inspired moral was given repeated expression by a group of poets known as the Graveyard School. The name referred to their specialty: poems in which the narrator finds himself in a churchyard on a starry, moonlit night and, beside some semidefaced graves, begins musing on the power of death to wipe away success and glory (a phenomenon that clearly did not distress the poets overmuch but seemed indeed to be a source of barely suppressed joy). In Edward Young’s poem “Night Thoughts” (1742), for instance, the speaker, sitting on a moss-covered gravestone, lets his mind turn to the shared fate of all the great men of the past:

The sage, peer, potentate, king, conqueror

Death humbles these.

Why all this toil for triumphs of an hour?

What though we wade in wealth, or soar in fame,

Earth’s highest station ends in “Here he lies”:

And “Dust to dust” concludes her noblest song.

Young’s contemporary, Robert Blair, in “The Grave” (1743), set in another churchyard, picked up on the same theme:

When self-esteem, or others’ adulation,

Would cunningly persuade us we are something

Above the common level of our kind

The grave gainsays the smooth-complexioned flattery

And with blunt truth acquaints us with what we are.

The message was reiterated by the most distinguished poet of the Graveyard School, Thomas Gray, in his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751):

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,

And all that beauty, all that wealth ever gave,

Awaits alike the inevitable hour.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

For those treated roughly by society, there is some sweet, preemptive revenge to be had in anticipating the eventual demise of certain of its members.

A number of artists have similarly delighted in depicting their own civilisation in a tattered future form, as a warning to, and reprisal against, the pompous guardians of the age. So fond was one such, the eighteenth-century painter Hubert Robert, of painting the great buildings of modern France in ruins that he earned himself the sobriquet Robert des Ruines. Across the Channel, meanwhile, Robert’s contemporary Joseph Gandy would make a name for himself by portraying the Bank of England with its ceiling caved in.

Hubert Robert, Imaginary View of the Grande Gallerie of the Louvre in Ruins, 1796

Joseph Gandy, View of the Rotunda of the Bank of England in Ruins, 1798

Some seventy years later, Gustave Doré was to illustrate London as he fancied it would look in the twenty-first century. His latter-day version of ancient Rome is complete with a caped figure—identified in the work’s title as a New Zealander, an inhabitant of the country that in Doré’s day symbolised the future—sketching the ruins of the then-brand-new Cannon Street Station, much as Grand Touring Englishmen had once gone to Athens or Rome to sketch the Parthenon or the Colosseum.

From the eighteenth century onwards, inspired by like sentiments, European travellers set out on journeys to contemplate ruins of the past: Troy, Corinth, Paestum, Thebes, Mycenae, Knossos, Palmyra, Baalbec, Petra and Pompeii. The Germans, masters that they were at formulating compound names for fugitive and rare states of the soul (We ltschmerz, Schadenfreude, Wanderlust, to cite just a few), coined terms to describe the new feeling for old stones: Ruinenempfindsamkeit, Ruinensehnsucht, Ruinenlust. In March 1787, Goethe twice visited Pompeii.“Many a calamity has happened in the world,” he wrote from Naples, “but never one that has caused so much entertainment to posterity as this one.” “What wonderful mornings I have spent in the Colosseum, lost in some corner of those vast ruins!” remembered Stendhal in his Promenades dans Rome (1829). After recommending ruin-gazing as “the most intense

Gustave Doré, The New Zealander, 1871

Above: David Roberts, General View of Baalbec, 1842 Left: David Roberts, Doorway at Baalbec, 1842

pleasure that memory can procure,” he went so far as to declare that the Colosseum was more attractive in its present, crumbling state than it ever could have been when newly built.

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” reads an inscription on the pedestal of a statue of Ramses II of Egypt, according to Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818). But there is no need for the mighty, or even the humble, to obey the second command, for the Pharaoh himself lies in pieces on the ground, and “round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ruins reprove us for our folly in sacrificing peace of mind for the unstable rewards of earthly power. Beholding old stones, we may feel our anxieties over our achievements—and the lack of them— slacken. What does it matter, really, if we have not succeeded in the eyes of others, if there are no monuments and processions in our honour or if no one smiled at us at a recent gathering? Everything is, in any event, fated to disappear, leaving only New Zealanders to sketch the ruins of our boulevards and offices. Judged against eternity, how little of what agitates us makes any difference.

Ruins bid us to surrender our strivings and our fantasies of perfection and fulfilment. They remind us that we cannot defy time and that we are merely the playthings of forces of destruction which can at best be kept at bay but never vanquished. We may enjoy local victories, perhaps claim a few years in which we are able to impose a degree of order upon the chaos, but ultimately all will slop back into a primeval soup. If this prospect has the power to console us, it is perhaps because the greater part of our anxieties stems from an exaggerated sense of the importance of our own projects and concerns. We are tortured by our ideals and by a punishingly high-minded sense of the gravity of what we are doing.

Christian moralists have long understood that to the end of reassuring the anxious, they will do well to emphasise that contrary to the first principle of optimism, everything will in fact turn out for the worst: the ceiling will collapse, the statue will topple, we will die, everyone we love will vanish and all our achievements and even our names will be trod underfoot. We may derive some comfort from this, however, if a part of us is able instinctively to recognise how closely our miseries are bound up with the grandiosity of our ambitions. To consider our petty status worries from the perspective of a thousand years hence is to be granted a rare, tranquillising glimpse of our own insignificance.

7.

Vast landscapes can have much the same anxiety-reducing effect on us as ruins, for they are the representatives of infinite space, as ruins are the representatives of infinite time. Against them, or within them, our weak, short-lived bodies must seem of no greater consequence than those of moths or spiders.

Then, too, whatever differences exist among people, they are as nothing next to the differences between the most powerful humans and the great deserts, high mountains, glaciers and oceans of the world. There are natural phenomena so enormous as to make the variations between any two people seem mockingly tiny. By seeking these out, and experiencing a consoling sense of the insignificance of all humans within the cosmos, we may mitigate whatever discomfort we feel over our inferior position in the social hierarchy.

In sum, we may best overcome a feeling of unimportance not by making ourselves more important but by recognising the relative lack of importance of everyone on earth. Our concern with who is a few millimetres taller than us (above right) may thus give way to an awe for things a thousand million times larger than any human being (right), a force that we may be moved to call infinity, eternity—or simply, and perhaps most usefully, God.

8.

A fine remedy for our anxieties over our low status in society may be to travel—whether literally or figuratively, by viewing works of art—through the gigantic spaces of the world.

Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara, 1857

Thomas Moran, Nearing Camp, Evening on the Upper Colorado River, Wyoming, 1882

Albert Bierstadt, Western Landscape, 1869

Community

1.

According to one influential wing of modern secular society, there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being “like everyone else”—for “everyone else” is a category that embraces the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban. The goal of all right-thinking people, so this argument goes, should be to distinguish themselves from the crowd and “stand out” in whatever way their talents will allow.

2.

But being like everyone else is not, if we follow Christian thought, any kind of calamity, for it was one of Jesus’ central claims that all human beings, including the slow-witted, the untalented and the obscure, were beloved creatures of God—and hence deserving of the honour owed to every example of his work. In the words of Saint Peter, each of us has the capacity to be a partaker “of the divine nature,” an idea that in and of itself audaciously challenges the assumption that some are born to mediocrity and others to glory. No one is outside the circle of God’s love, Christianity insists, attributing divine authority to the notion of mutual respect. What we have in common with others comprises what is most cherishable in ourselves.

Christianity bids us to look beyond our superficial differences in order to focus on what it considers to be a set of universal truths, on which a sense of community and kinship may be built. Whether we are cruel or impatient, dim or dull, we must recognise that we are all of us detained and bound together by shared vulnerabilities. Beneath our flaws, there are always two driving forces: fear and the desire for love.

To encourage fellow feeling, Jesus urged his followers to learn to look at other adults as they might at children. Few things can more quickly transform our sense of a person’s character than picturing him or her as a child; from this perspective, we are better able to express the sympathy and generosity that we all but naturally display towards the young, whom we tend to describe as naughty rather than bad, cheeky rather than arrogant. This is the same sort of softening we may feel towards anyone whom we see sleeping: with eyes closed and features relaxed and defenceless, a sleeper invites a gentle regard that in itself is almost love—so much so, in fact, that it can be unsettling to gaze at length at a stranger asleep beside us on a train or plane. That unmasked face seems to prompt us towards an intimacy that calls into question the foundations of civilised indifference on which ordinary communal relations rest. But there is no such thing as a stranger, a Christian would say; there is only the impression of strangeness, born out of a failure to acknowledge that others share both our needs and our weaknesses. Nothing could be nobler, or more fully human, than to perceive that we are indeed fundamentally, in every way that really matters, just like everyone else.

3.

The idea that other people might be at base neither incomprehensible nor distasteful carries weighty implications for our concern with status, given that the desire to achieve social distinction is to a great extent fuelled by a horror of being—or even being thought—”ordinary.” The more humiliating, shallow, debased or ugly we take ordinariness to be, the stronger will be our desire to set ourselves apart. The more corrupt the community, the stronger the lure of individual achievement.

Since its beginnings, Christianity has attempted to enhance, both in practical and in theoretical terms, the value its adherents place on belonging to a community. One notable way it has achieved this is through the repetition of rituals, from the saying of the service to prayer to the singing of hymns—each an opportunity for a large number of unrelated celebrants to feel their suspicion of one another abate thanks to a transcendent intermediary.

Music in any form can be a great leveller. We might, for example, imagine joining an unfamiliar congregation within the walls of a cathedral to hear Bach’s Mass in B Minor (“the greatest work of music of all ages and of all peoples,” in the view of Hans-Georg Nägeli, writing in 1817). Much may separate us: age, income, clothes and background. We may never before have spoken to one another and may be wary of letting anyone catch our gaze. But as the Mass begins, so, too, does a process of social alchemy. The music conveys feelings that had hitherto seemed inchoate and private, and our eyes may fill with tears of relief and gratitude for the gift given us by the composer and musicians in making audible, and hence available to us and to others, the movements of our collective soul. Violins, voices, flutes, double basses, oboes, bassoons and trumpets combine to create sounds that evoke the most secret, most elusive aspects of our psyches. Moreover, the public nature of the performance helps us to realise that if others around us are responding as we are to the music, then they cannot be the indecipherable enigmas we imagined them to be. Their emotions run along the same tracks as ours, they are stirred by the very same things and so, whatever the differences in our appearance and manner, we possess a common core, out of which a connection can be forged and extended far beyond this one occasion. A group of strangers who initially seemed so foreign may thus in time, through the power of choral music, acquire some of the genuine intimacy of friends, slipping out from behind their stony facades to share, if only briefly, in a beguiling vision of humankind.

4.

But of course, our sense of who other people are is seldom so flattering outside the cathedral. The public arena is usually more decrepit and threatening, sending us scurrying in search of physical and psychological cover.

There are countries in which the communal provision of housing, transport, education and health care is so inferior that inhabitants will naturally seek to escape involvement with the masses by barricading themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where “ordinary” life fails to answer a median need for dignity and comfort.

Then there are communities—far fewer in number and typically imbued with a strong (often Protestant) Christian heritage—whose public realms exude respect in their principles and architecture, and whose citizens are therefore under less compulsion to retreat into a private domain. Indeed, we may find that some of our ambitions for personal glory fade when the public spaces and facilities to which we enjoy access are themselves glorious to behold; in such context, ordinary citizenship may come to seem an adequate goal. In Switzerland’s largest city, for instance, the need to own a car in order to avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it has in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich’s superlative tram network, which is clean, safe, warm and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel in an automotive cocoon when, for a fare of only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will provide transportation from point A to point B at a level of comfort an emperor might have envied.

One insight to be drawn from Christianity and applied to communal ethics is that, insofar as we can recover a sense of the preciousness of every human being and, even more important, legislate for spaces and manners that embody such a reverence in their makeup, then the notion of the ordinary will shed its darker associations, and, correspondingly, the desires to triumph and to be insulated will weaken, to the psychological benefit of all.

In an ideal Christian community, the dread of “losers” having to live alongside the “winners” will be tempered and contained by a basic equality of dignity and resources. And the dichotomy between succeeding/flourishing and failing/withering will lose some of its excruciating sharpness.

Twin Cities

1.

One of Christianity’s central themes may be traced back to Jesus’ choice of career. The carpenters of Galilee practised a semiskilled but insecure and rarely lucrative trade, and yet Jesus was all the same, in Saint Peter’s phrase, “the right hand of Heaven,” the son of God, the king of kings, sent to save us from our sins. That someone could combine within himself two such different identities, being at once an itinerant tradesman and the holiest of men, forms the basis upon which the Christian understanding of status is built. Every person possesses, in this framework, two wholly unrelated types of status: the earthly kind, determined by occupation, income and the opinions of others; and the spiritual sort, meted out according to the quality of the individual’s soul and his or her merit in the eyes of God after the Day of Judgement. One might therefore be powerful and revered in the earthly realm, yet barren and corrupt in the spiritual one. Or one might be like the beggar Lazarus in the Gospel of Saint Luke, who had only rags to his name while glorying in divine riches.

In The City of God (A.D. 427), Saint Augustine explained that all human actions could be interpreted from either a Christian or a Roman perspective, and that the very accomplishments that were esteemed most highly by the Romans—amassing money, building villas, winning wars and so on—counted for nothing in the Christian schema, in which a new set of concerns, including loving one’s neighbours, being humble and generous and recognising one’s dependence on God, offered the keys to elevated status. Augustine’s figure for these two value systems was a pair of cities, the City of God and the Earthly City, which he described as being, until the Day of Judgement, coexistent but separate. One might thus be a king in the Earthly City but a mere manservant in the heavenly one.

Nine centuries later, Dante would flesh out Augustine’s ideas by providing a detailed accounting of who would end up where in that ultimate twinned embodiment of the Christian hierarchy: Heaven and Hell. In the Divine Comedy (1315), he enumerated no fewer than nine different circles of Hell (with seventeen distinct rings), each one reserved for a particular kind of sin; and set opposite those, ten spheres of Heaven, each the province of a specific virtue. The religious hierarchy resembled a distorted or inverted version of its secular counterpart. Dante’s Hell was home to a wide range of individuals who had enjoyed high status during their life on earth: generals, writers, poets, emperors, bishops, popes and merchants, all now stripped of their privileges and enduring extreme sufferings as punishment for having offended God’s laws. In the fourth ring of the ninth circle of Hell, Dante (touring the place with Virgil) hears the screams of those who were powerful but treacherous when alive, now being chewed in the mouths of the three-headed giant Lucifer. In the first ring of the seventh circle, the poet finds himself by a river of boiling blood in which Alexander the Great and Attila the Hun struggle to stay afloat while, from the riverbank, a group of centaurs fire arrows over their heads to force them back under the sickening froth. In the fifth circle, an array of angry, prominent leaders whose tempers once cost the lives of others languish in a swampy, fetid cesspool, choking on mud; and in the third circle, excrement rains down upon those who used to be gluttonous.

The liturgical discrepancy between heavenly and earthly status promised believers a way out of an oppressive, one-dimensional vision of success. Christianity did not do away altogether with the concept of a hierarchy; its contribution was, rather, to redefine success and failure in ethical, nonmaterial terms, by insisting that poverty could coexist with goodness, and a humble occupation with a noble soul: “A man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth,” according to Saint Luke, a follower of that impecunious carpenter from Galilee.

Gustave Doré, The Violent Tortured in the Rain of Fire, 1861

Gustave Doré, The Thieves Tortured by Serpents, 1861

2.

But far from merely asserting the superiority of spiritual over material success, Christianity also endowed the values it revered with a seductive seriousness and beauty, accomplishing this in part through the magisterial use of painting, literature, music and architecture. It employed works of art to make a case for virtues that had never before figured prominently—if at all—in the priorities of rulers or their subjects.

For hundreds of years, the talents of the finest stonemasons, poets, musicians and painters—whose predecessors had been called upon to celebrate the triumphs of emperors and the blood-curdling victories of legions over barbarian hordes—were directed towards praising such activities as giving alms and showing respect for the poor. The glorification of worldly values never entirely disappeared in the Christian era—there remained plenty of palaces to alert the world to the charms of mercantile or landed wealth and power—but for a time, in many communities, the most impressive buildings on the horizon were those that honoured the nobility of poverty rather than the might of a royal family or corporation, and the most moving pieces of music sang not of personal fulfilment but of the torment of the Son of God, who had been, in the words of Isaiah 53:3, quoted in Handel’s Messiah (1741),

despised and rejected of men;

a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief

Through its command of aesthetic resources, of buildings, paintings and Masses, Christianity created a bulwark against the authority of earthly values and kept its spiritual concerns in the public eye and at the forefront of the public mind.

In the four centuries between approximately 1130 and 1530, in towns and cities all over Europe, more than a hundred cathedrals were erected, their spires coming to dominate the skyscape, looming above grain stores, palaces, offices, factories and homes. Possessed of a grandeur that few other structures could rival, they offered a venue in which people from every walk of life could gather to ponder ideas that were, at least in the context of the history of architecture, highly unusual: ideas about the value of sadness and innocence, of meekness and pity. Whereas a city’s other buildings were designed to serve earthly needs—housing and feeding the body, allowing it to rest, manufacturing machines and implements to assist it—the cathedral had as its unique functions to empty the mind of egoistic projects and lead it towards God and his love. City dwellers engaged in worldly tasks could, during the course of a day, on seeing the outlines of these great massings of stone, be reminded of a vision of life that challenged the authority of ordinary ambitions. A cathedral such as Chartres, whose spires soar 107 metres into the sky (the height of a thirty-four-storey skyscraper), was understood to be the home of the dispossessed, a symbol of the rewards they would reap in the next life. However ramshackle their present physical dwellings, the cathedral was where they belonged in their heart. Its beauties reflected their inner worth, as its stained glass windows and coffered ceilings made vivid the glory of Jesus’ message to them.

3.

Christianity did not, of course, ever succeed in abolishing the Earthly City or its values, and yet if we retain some distinction between wealth and virtue and still ask of people whether they are good rather than merely important, it is in large part due to the impression left upon Western consciousness by a religion that for centuries lent its resources and prestige to the defence of a handful of extraordinary ideas regarding the rightful distribution of status. It was the genius of the artists and craftsmen who worked in the service of Christianity to give enduring form to its ideals and to make these real to us through their handling of stone, glass, sound, word and image.

In a world where secular buildings whisper to us relentlessly of the importance of earthly power, the cathedrals that punctuate the skylines of great towns and cities may continue to furnish an imaginative holding space for the priorities of the spirit.