The Heart's City
Sometimes, during the morning prayer of the Liturgy of the Hours, we are prompted to recite Psalm 83 (84). In that psalm was a line that I found striking:
They are happy, whose strength is in you, in whose hearts are the roads to Zion (Ps 83:5)
I found myself needing to do a double-take to make sure I was not supposed to read it as “whose hearts are set on the roads” to the holy city. But no, the psalm quite clearly said that the roads to the holy city were in the heart.
This struck me immensely, because this was the first time I have seen a biblical reference that locates the infrastructure of the city within the human person, where the interior movements of the human person are equated to what takes place in a city. A city can be built, overtaken, interpolated or extended depending on how a person is predisposed.
This thread corresponds with a number of other similar observations from ancient, medieval and postmodern writings (some of which I had just covered in Political Philosophy here in the seminary)
At a philosophical level, there is an observation from Plato’s Republic, which extended Socrates’ analogy between a person’s soul and a city. For Plato, the city is not merely infrastructure that is arbitrarily laid out, but is a reflection of the state of a person’s soul. The ordering (or disordering) of a city, Plato suggested, corresponds with the ordering (or disordering) of the soul. Thus, the infrastructure of the city does not stand separate from a person’s interior infrastructure. Rather, the latter is the outworking of the former.
Similarly, at a theological level, Augustine’s City of God blurred the distinction between cities and persons. When talking about the tension between the heavenly and earthly cities, Augustine framed it in terms of the tensions that took place within one’s heart, at the level of desire. The divisions that occur in the human heart (the division that Origen calls the fruit of sin), work themselves out in the human person becoming embroiled in a battle of loyalties between the two cities.
These philosophical and theological observations help shed some light on the sociological observations of Cornelius Castoriadis concerning the distinctions between individuals and societies, which he made in “Radical Imagination * the Social Instituting Imaginary”. In that essay, Castoriadis argued that the distinctions made between societies and members is an artificial one. Because of the formative affects of social institutions on individual desires and actions, Castoriadis said that we are “walking and talking fragments of a given society…embody[ing]…the essential core of the institutions and significations of their society”.
Given the above, it seems that at a very visceral level, cities do not exist separately from us. To paraphrase the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we and the city are within one another. As cities are outward projections of the soul and desire, there is also what the Icelandic hymn Heyr Himna Smidur called hjartaborg, a city of the heart, wherein the crossroads of the city find their way into our interior life as well.
This convergence between city, soul and desire ought to give us pause, not only on where we walk in our cities, but also how the persons we encounter in our exterior cities can find their way into our own interior ones. More importantly, we ought to look to the Lord of the heavenly city, and pray for him to extend his roads into the hjartaborg, so that we might, as was at the time of Eden, find him walking down its footpaths in the cool of the evening.
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