Architecture, sacred order and Benedict

ISI Books is without question one of the most important publishers in America. If there is ever to be a broad revival of dynamic traditionalism, ISI Books will be right at its center. I've been getting their new releases lately, and I almost wish they'd stop sending them, because each one makes me want to stop the world, sit down in my chair and read them from cover to cover. On Saturday, a copy of "Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred" by Philip Bess arrived at my doorstep. It's a collection of essays by the head of the graduate program in architecture at Notre Dame, which has become a center of renascent traditionalist urbanism.

Just so you know, in the first chapter, Bess, a Catholic who considers himself to be a New Urbanist, invokes Rieff, MacIntyre and St. Benedict. I thought I was going to levitate! That chapter sets out Bess's ideas about how traditional urban architecture proceeded from an Aristotelian understanding of human nature. Human beings reach their fullest potential living virtuously in community, and cities should be constructed in ways that encourage that goal. In so doing, the public spaces will reflect the sacred order (by which, if I'm reading Bess correctly, he doesn't necessarily mean a specific theological order, but a metaphysical understanding of how the unseen world is constructed). Our public spaces -- their architecture and their design -- should help us to become more civilized. We can say that being "civilized" means at least living virtuously in a stable community.

I don't have the time or the space to get into the specifics of Bess's discussion of Aristotle, the polis and architecture, but it is enough, perhaps, to state his view -- consonant with Rieff's and MacIntyre's -- that we are now living, and have for some time been living in, a highly individualistic "emotivist" society (emotivism being the philosophical stance that denies objective truth, saying rather that truth-claims are nothing more than statements about the feelings of the speaker), in which the feelings of individuals are considered the absolute telos, or goal, of society. Maximizing individual liberty and pleasure is considered the highest good. Bess writes that emotivists are "highly individualistic and assume an autonomous self whose good is achieved largely by its emancipation and inner detachement from what are perceived to be and experiences as the constrants ("fictions") of various communal roles and commitments. In contrast, communitarians contend that individual selves cannot achieve their good apart from the network of roles, privileges, and obligations attendant to various communal pursuits."

Bess calls both suburban landscapes and avant-garde architecture to be the fullest flowering of America's individualist potential: the individual, cut free from the past and communal constraints. The New Urbanists, with their ideas of returning to the ways civic spaces were designed in the past (e.g., human-scaled, pedestrian-oriented), hope to revive a civic and communal spirit among people, by creating public and private spaces that reflect a traditional understanding of how human communities flourish. The New Urbanist communities would thereby revive a dormant communalism suppressed by modernist planning. That's the optimistic scenario.

But here's the thing, says Bess: what if America is too far gone down the path of fragmentation and individualism to recover an older civic sense? Were that the case, the hopes and the work of the New Urbanists would not revive community in all its rich textures and facets, but would only mask the further break-up of community:

In this tragicomic scenario, emotivist culture and a global market economy conspire to creat a "market niche" for "traditional urbanism" that in reality they cannot succor. New Urbanist towns turn out to be merely one more aesthetic option for the private lives of a relatively wealthy and elite class of people, and tend to obscure further the historic relationship between traditional urban aesthetics and traditional urban culture. In perhaps the greatest irony of all, the New Urbanism would function culturally exactly like the art and architecture of its avant-garde critical theory antagonists, its success or failure a simple consequence of the individual tastes of that class of peple who can afford to buy art. For in an emotivist society, unliek a traditional city, de gustibus non disputandum est.

If the Tocqueville Scenario is naively optimistic, says Bess, that leaves us with the Benedict Scenario, based on that famous final paragraph of Macintyre's "After Virtue," which I often quote here:

"A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead . . . was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. . . . This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless quite different — St. Benedict."

If Macintyre is right, says Bess, then the only way for true community to be revived is for people who share the belief that the purpose of community life is for something other than maximizing individual pleasure and freedom to come together and share the same urban spaces. Membership in this community wouldn't be a matter of class, but of a shared moral sense, including a conviction that individuals and communities must share a common vision of sacred order. Bess says that it's understandable that middle class people would want to go to the burbs to escape underclass crime and bad public schools, but he strongly implies that such a movement is destroying the ideal of community and citizenship. Bess writes that, "Perhaps therefore the way to begin promoting development that is not so class exclusive is to encourage and promote physical development by institutions and individuals whose primary interests include objectives other than maximizing their return on real estate holdings."

Do such persons still exist? If so, where are they likely to be found? To put this another way, what kinds of communities and institutions, pursuing what kinds of practices, can we find in contemporary America where membership is, or at least could be, based upon factors other than class? Several communities and institutions come immediately to mind, all with numerous historical antecedents: religious communities, ethinc groups (particularly recently arrived immigrants); and college and university communities. Perhaps there are others: the commercial corporation, provided its primary objective is the stable, profitable, and long-term production of particular goods and service; the bugeoning medical community; perhaps the America military. Are there would-be town founder/developers from among such communities interested in the re-association of community and place, willing to make provisions in town and neighborhood master plans for both their affluent and less affluent members? If so, how do the New Urbanists find and identify them?

I was thinking last night after having read all this how great it would be to be able to buy an old building with two or three other families from church, or who shared our basic religious and moral stance, and renovate it into a multi-family dwelling, where we all lived separately in our apartments, but we could also live in close community. But who has the capital for doing something like that today? And with everybody's jobs so insecure, given globalization, the prospect of putting down roots and staying put it harder to commit to. On the other hand, if you read "Crunchy Cons," you know that Paul and Rachel Balducci's parents, as members of an intentional Catholic community, did just this very thing a generation ago, by buying up houses in a somewhat blighted part of their town, renovating them and living together.

One more thing. Later in the Bess book, he talks about the Benedictine monasteries as examples to us today of how to create community out of chaos. Bess is talking here about how the Benedictines, in the Dark Ages, converted Europe to Christianity out of those monasteries:

How they did so is instructive, for it was not by preaching alone, or perhaps even primarily; it was by embodying Christian faith and virtue in their lives -- and, not least, the physical organization of their communities. A monastery is after all almost a polis; and for several hundred years monasteries were as much of a polis as anything that Western Europe had to offer. This too is instructive. Joseph Ratzinger [later Pope Benedict XVI -- RD.] has remarked that

the only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the *saints* the Church has produced and the *art* which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church's human history. ...

Bess continues:

So what are some possible models for how Christians actually might engage and be engaged by the New Urbanist agenda? I will suggest three and describe one. The first is the most obvious; and though rare, the most common: the Christian citizen-developer who out of his or her own faith commitments conscientiously attempts to do traditional neighborhood developments. A second model is the Christian institution as a developer. This model is actually not uncommon. Its prototype is the church-based community development corporations that historically have focused on providing housing, but in principle could be both broader in their concerns and more sociologically and formally savvy by engaging in and promoting housing as part of a larger focus upon traditional neighborhood develompent. A third model is the Christian institution that partners with developers. This is the rarest model, and the one I'd like to describe in greater detail as a potential new strategy for American churches anywhere, but especially for new suburban parish church developments.

I'll stop here. Do buy this book -- it's full of exciting ideas, and written in a way that a layman can understand.