Building the City Amidst Ruins
T.S. Eliot turns to rebuilding the modern city in "Choruses from The Rock"
Thus far in our piecemeal examination of Eliot’s “Choruses from The Rock” (see parts one, two, three, and four), we have focused primarily on the problem of the modern city. But as I mentioned at the conclusion of last week’s post, this poem is fundamentally a poem about building, not about ruins, like The Waste Land. It’s about what it looks like to move forward in the modern world, not just how terrible the modern world is, although it certainly is terrible in certain ways.
We’ve already seen some hints at Eliot’s positive way forward. For example, in part two of our study, we discussed Eliot’s call to “expiate the sins of our fathers” by walking together in humble repentance. And in part three we discussed how community is foundationally a group of people who live in praise of God (a rather different definition than a secular sociologist would give!). Both of these are models of living life in a modern wasteland that makes space for God and our humanity. Today’s stanza continues that theme by explicitly addressing the idea of building:
We build in vain unless the LORD build with us.
Can you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you?
A thousand policemen directing the traffic
Cannot tell you why you come or where you go.
A colony of cavies or a horde of active marmots
Build better than they that build without the LORD .
Shall we lift up our feet among perpetual ruins?
I have loved the beauty of Thy House, the peace of Thy sanctuary
I have swept the floors and garnished the altars.
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes,
Though you have shelters and institutions,
Precarious lodgings while the rent is paid,
Subsiding basements where the rat breeds
Or sanitary dwellings with numbered doors
Or a house a little better than your neighbour's;
When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?
Eliot begins with a principle that lays the foundation for the rest of the poem: “We build in vain unless the LORD build with us,”—echoing Psalm 127:1. He expands on this idea in the next line with the rhetorical question, “Can you keep the City that the LORD keeps not with you?” Notice the capitalization of “city.” I believe that for Eliot, the City represents Western or even human civilization in general. Jacques Ellul makes a similar point in The Meaning of the City—that in the contemporary world everywhere is functionally a city. This is even more true today as we are nearly all connected through the internet. Also like Ellul, I believe Eliot’s point here is that the risk of a city is that it can lead us to think of ourselves as radically autonomous from God. A city, Ellul argues in The Meaning of the City, is a space where historically man has strived to stand apart from God, to not have to depend on God’s hand for provision, protection, or providence.
To understand this, I like to think about my own experience getting food compared to my great grandparents who grew their own food. I buy my food at Aldi. I don’t know who grew it. I don’t really know where it came from. It appears on the shelf like magic. And I, in my own purchasing power, buy it for myself. I feel myself to be utterly self sufficient in the city. And technology has only rapidly increased that sense of self sufficiency. But Eliot rejects this idea of the autonomy of humanity in the city. The true city must be built and kept with God. It must be a work of God’s.
The next lines might seem to come out of nowhere. What’s all this about policemen directing traffic? But the key to understanding these lines is the idea of teleology. The policemen can direct traffic, but they “cannot tell you why you come or where you go.” The administrative state can give you rules and guidelines and procedures to follow, but it cannot provide you ultimate ends to pursue. It’s silent on the question of meaning and purpose. While it’s good to have the policemen directing traffic and providing order in the city, it’s not enough to make a city flourish. The people need to know where they are going and why they are going somewhere. And for that they need God.
In an allusion to Psalm 74:3, Eliot asks, “Shall we lift up our feet among perpetual ruins?” In the Psalm the psalmist asks God to lift up His feet to see the ruin of His sanctuary, but in Eliot’s context, I believe he means for us to be the ones lifting up our feet. In other words, he is asking, “Shall we do the daily, longsuffering work of lifting up our feet and moving toward building something good even while we live among perpetual ruins?” Eliot encourages us to build and not just accept the wasteland of modernity, but he is cleareyed about the ruins. The ruins will probably remain. But what will we build among the ruins? What will we set our hands to?
The priority in building, for Eliot, is the “temple”: “Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.” And he goes on to describe how it’s possible that you may be able to build institutions, “shelters,” places where “rent is paid,” “sanitary dwellings,” and houses “a little better than your neighbor’s,” but not homes. To create homes requires a center to a city, and that center is the temple or the church. A place where the community (which as we know lives in praise of God!) worships God.
As we will see later, Eliot has an expansive understanding of what he means to build churches. He certainly means to physically build churches, but he also means spiritually. Cities will gravitate towards being spaces of autonomy from God, and churches are anchors that bring us back to our radical dependence upon God, particularly when they make demands of us, demands of our time on Sunday morning, demands of our money through tithes and offerings, demands of acts of service and charity, demands of our attention and social comforts, and so on. Churches teach us that we are not our own but belong to God.
Eliot starts to bring this stanza to a close with a hypothetical situation:
When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?
This is a piercing question for all cities to ask of themselves. What is the meaning of this city? Do we live close together because we love each other? Or do we dwell together to make money from each other? Or, a third option, “This is a community,” where we love each other and we profit from each other’s productivity so that we mutually flourish?
I think the relevance of this question for us living in secular spaces is to live in such a way that we love our neighbors and don’t reduce them to means of making a profit. It also means a deeper commitment to the local church as the center of our “building” efforts amidst the “perpetual ruins” of civilization. It also strikes me that Eliot’s concern about teleology is an important one, especially for our secular neighbors. As I have written about before, we are living through a meaning crisis. And part of this meaning crisis is that people don’t know where they are going or why. We have intricate systems of government to direct our behaviors, but we don’t have a clear direction. It seems to me that Christians have an opportunity to provide answers to gnawing questions that trouble anyone who slows down long enough to realize they don’t know where they are going or why.
The idea of the city being a place for us to shield us from needing God reminds me of Genesis 4,and Cain's punishment. God curses him to wander restlessly, but a few verses later he is building a great city. I've always felt that Cain may have found salvation had he accepted his curse to wander in the woods, rather than building his city. He ran to the city instead of running to God.
A Christian artist, I admire says, "bring you poetry and I'll bring mine," so here is something I wrote after a jam packed business trip while reflecting on Eliot:
What have we built doing this busy business
Something eternal or cluttering the mess
Always thinking about our why
Never once lifting our hands to the sky
The thing we provide is good while the goals are super pushy
What is the end, to live safe, "good," and cushy?
Where does it stop? How far do we go?
Are we just friendly people, watching cash grow?
Does this company have depth of fruit that can last?
Or is this a peopled mission till it's time has past?
Our assets our our people lot's of firms say
Depreciating slowly, unless He enters the fray
Who has built a good one outside of His church?
I could name a few, yet all are destined for a lurch
Can we dee Christ in the work and people in the city?
Or do we dread and recoil, yelling "man this is sh*tty"