A Picture Held Us Captive

"A picture held us captive..." --Ludwig Wittgenstein.

We have labored far too long with St. Augustine's metaphor of a divided world: the city of God and the city of man. As a result, we have been unable, in the West, despite admirable prosperity and the accumulation of remarkable wealth, power, and influence over the rest of the world, to come to terms with our actual (existential) situation: we live in one city, a city closed in upon itself, a city infested with plague.

And such is our enthrallment to the Augustinian metaphor, that we continually turn away from the city in which we are suffering and imagine that we can escape the city of man and be received, as refugees, in that other city, the city of God.

But there is no escape from the city we inhabit, a city of plagues we call the human condition.

The great service that Albert Camus attempted to provide his fellow human beings was to offer us a new urban metaphor as a substitute for the one that had been obstructing our insight into our own, dire predicament: Oran.

In choosing Oran, an actual city in North Africa, a city plagued by French colonial occupation (a situation from which Camus personally benefited and suffered), Camus was calling attention to the actual (and existential) condition of modern human beings and, especially, of Europeans caught in a prison of their own devising.

But he did more than that, for he invented characters (some exemplary, others not), made them citizens of Oran, and then imagined for us how they would respond to their (our) actual life in a plague-infested world.

Placed among the exemplary citizens of Oran were Dr. Rieux and Jean Tarrou: two properly disillusioned individuals who rejected the Augustinian dualism they had inherited from their culture and chose, instead, a courageous reconciliation with the found world, the world of the plague. They dedicated their lives to ameliorating the effects of the contagion that, ultimately, they were helpless to eradicate completely.

Our inability to dislodge the Augustinian metaphor and replace it with Camus's gift is sad testimony to the inability of the human race to re-imagine its own existential predicament and, with that re-imagining, take concrete steps to re-invent the world. Thinking ourselves to be the freest people in the world we are, in fact, the most to be pitied: for we are slaves to the very poison that, day by day, is killing us.

The poison that is killing us (the plague) is, in part, the conviction that we have another city to which we can escape: the city of God. We are like Rambert, the character in The Plague who is so desperate to get out that he will take any risk and pay any amount to get his wish. The interesting thing about Rambert, however, is that he, too, becomes disillusioned (like Rieux and Tarrou) and joins the "resistance" to the plague. Perhaps Camus was something of an optimist after all...

Imagining a heavenly city is not necessarily a symptom of disease, if that imagined city is embraced as an ideal that then motivates one to work to see its attributes realized in the found world. In other words, if it serves as an inspiration to struggle with the status quo. Unfortunately, for far too many, the city of God is viewed as a kind of lifeboat or escape hatch. It is the object of wishful thinking that displaces positive action to better the world with resignation and the despair that expresses itself in conservatism and conformity.