Poverty is not the real problem of the modern world. For we have the knowledge and resources which could enable us to overcome poverty. The real problem—the thing which creates misery, wars and hatred among men—is the division of mankind into rich and poor.

We can see this division at two levels. Within nation states there are a few individuals who have great wealth and whose wealth gives them great power; but the vast majority of people suffer from varying degrees of poverty and deprivation. Even in a country like the United States, this division can be seen. In countries like India, Portugal or Brazil, the contrast between the wealth of a few privileged individuals and the dire poverty of the masses is a crying scandal.

And looking at the world as a collection of nation states, we see the same pattern repeated. There are a few wealthy nations which dominate the whole world economically, and therefore politically; and a mass of smaller and poor nations whose destiny, it appears, is to be dominated.

The significance of this division between the rich and the poor is not simply that one man has more food than he can eat, more clothes than he can wear and more houses than he can live in, while others are hungry, unclad and homeless. The significant thing about the division between rich and poor nations is not simply that one has the resources to provide comfort for all its citizens, and the other cannot provide basic services. The reality and depth of the problem arises because the man who is rich has power over the lives of those who are poor, and the rich nation has power over the policies of those which are not rich. And even more important is that our social and economic system, nationally and internationally, supports these divisions and constantly increases them, so that the rich get ever richer and more powerful, while the poor get relatively poorer and less able to control their own future.

The renewal of sacramental theology in the past fifty years or so has depended considerably on a recovery and development of the primitive insight that the primary and primordial sacrament is Christ himself, whose sacramentality is the ground and the culmination of all human existence in the world in time. It is because we are as we are (and it is good, ‘very good’, that we are as we are), because basically if not most interestingly we are men in virtue of a shared flesh and blood, unable to communicate or be men except as such, even with and before God, that we enact our human and our Christian existence sacramentally. We interpret ourselves to ourselves, discover what it means to be who we are and so find how to become who we are, by projecting ourselves on and realizing ourselves in external nature. By our bodily creativity, in words and symbols and the extraordinary variety of human art-forms we are able to make sense of our life in the world, to make its flux and chaos precisely meaningful, to focus the whole in a perceptible sign which in contracting the immensities allows us to live amongst them as those who are at home there. And the Jewish-Christian tradition at its classical moments has maintained that a particular history has redeemed us more deeply into our bodies, into being more authentically at home in our flesh and blood and sexuality, in our passions and emotions and instinctual drives.

This paper asks some questions about man and nature from one point of view, that of an interest in the city. It puts forward a few current concepts of the city with emphasis on recent social studies. It asks to what extent the making of cities and living in them is ‘natural’ to man; to what extent they have always been a deliberate statement about man’s relationship to the world of nature (is there a conflict here ?); and it tries to show the direction in which cities are developing and the degree to which these developments may be said to enhance and enrich experience or to impoverish and destroy it. It is a personal statement and is not in any way an attempt to give a critical summary of current sociological, planning and artistic critiques of the city.

The City as Experience

After some weeks of reading in preparation for writing this paper I was preparing to make a concentrated start on it one evening. It happened that I had cause to visit a friend in a local hospital that same evening. The journey was short, through a decaying industrial/ housing part of the city. The hospital itself is entered through an arch over a narrow carriage way, unaltered since horse and carriage days as witnessed by the width of the opening and the stone cart tracks leading into a cobbled yard; the hospital building, an agglomeration of bits and pieces from the last 100 years or so. The pub next to the hospital, on a Friday night, is crowded and noisy and a refuge for both patients and staff.

Professor Markus seems to be concerned with the city as symbol and as organization. What does the city now mean, and how does it and might it function ? These two questions are very closely related; even a purely technical system will, if it functions, have various significant impacts on the aesthetic and ethical levels. And if a symbolic system really involves efficacious symbols these will at some point cut into the world of allocations and preferences. If his questions 3 and 4 were to be answered as he would seem to wish, we would be at the same time well on the way to answering 1 and 2. The really efficient city where rights and duties were clearly mapped would be therapeutic and liberating. I think again he doesn’t see this therapeutic role of the city as something static—rather as being more like a group psycho-therapy where recovery and discovery are both part of the programme.

I think though that we must start distinguishing; there is man’s activity carried out under the sign of the city, and that carried out as man the tool-maker, if you like man the world changer. The city expressed in the agora, a community of citizens functioning as a juridical and political unit, is essentially a Mediterranean institution; of course, there were cities elsewhere, among the Arabs, in India or China, and for that matter in pre-colonial black Africa. But these lacked the characteristic patterns of the city-state, centring round the concept of a body of citizens with specific rights and duties constituting the polis. Despite the claim of Massignon, the Arab cities had no real system of guilds; the Hindu cities had activity which may be called political within the various quarters, but there were no overall civic democracies, or oligarchies, nor did the Chinese city have any greater degree of civic personality.

The current spate of writings on the Christian attitude to divorce is remarkable for its almost complete unanimity in allowing for the possibility of dissolving the marriage bond. Moreover, there seems to be widespread belief that it is not only possible but highly desirable, if not desperately necessary, for the Catholic Church to change her discipline in this matter. Such a change would indeed be a drastic reversal of belief and practice, yet biblical and historical research indicates that the New Testament doctrine is not without its difficulties and that there was in fact toleration of divorce in the early Church both in the writings of certain Fathers and in the practical discipline of particular Churches. Many have concluded that these facts make it evident that the Church has more power in dissolving marriages than it exercises at present.

Whilst there is this frequent conclusion, authors nevertheless arrive at it by different routes. Some argue that our Lord’s teaching was meant as an ideal rather than a law; some hold that the Church, in exercising the power of the keys in this matter, is not a mere human authority, but that she is using divine power, hence it is not man who ‘puts asunder’ the marriage bond, but God acting through his Church; others, again, seem to base their case on the spirit of compassion for human imperfection which was such a marked aspect of Christ’s dealings with sinful man. These opinions may or may not assist the authorities concerned in their task of reviewing marriage legislation in Canon Law. They will wish to adhere with the utmost loyalty to the evangelical value proposed by Christ in his teaching on marriage and they will look for a clear biblical precedent before departing from the present position. For whatever else may be said about the Church’s marriage laws, they have enabled her to bear witness to the world that marriage is a union forged between man and woman by God himself, and man may not sunder it.