The City of Man.

 

In the work " The two cities ", Saint Augustine of Hippo said that:

 

"Two loves founded two cities, namely: the earthly city the love of itself to the point of contempt for God, and the heavenly city the love of God to the point of self-contempt."

  Today we live immersed in the City of Man that has come to the point of contempt for God, and with pride has built those great cathedrals of iron and cement proudly named “skyscrapers”. Giant redwoods of angular shapes, covered with steel and glass, gray, cold, that inside contains thousands of people working like ants busily in the business of human ambition. This City of man, with almost superhuman effort, has wanted to cover up God's Creation. In all of it that ambition is breathed, in all of it the hand of man has been imprinted. All over it is printed, on its steel and on its granite, the imprint of the willful man, the  superman nitzcheano, and under that figure, the power of the manipulation of matter, with which he has mastered the technique.

 

The thunderous roar of the engines and the screeching of the horns, lead us to ignore the silence. The screams of disgruntled men, distorted by the worn harangue of the electric amplifiers that intermingle with the beating of drums, like a tribal and out-of-tune dance, of the constant dissatisfied protesters who are mobilized with the slow passage of cattle over a wide avenue.

 

And at night, the raucous music that repetitively resounds in the speakers of a throwaway culture, in the nightclubs, in the clubs and nightlife bars, emits those sounds that enchant the lower instincts, that hypnotic transformation of the minds young people who fall unawares into the most awkward attitudes while trying to homologate what their "heroes" of the subculture impose with theirs. Good does not make noise and noise does not do good, said a saint. And the noises take us away from the silence so needed for the man who today and has always sought the Truth.

 

This human city is no longer content with its loud sounds, it resorts to the thousands of lights and large screens showing all its offers. The colored lights and the increasingly colorful posters are those noises that distract us at sight. The big chains that are increasingly monopolized in cinema, with their films that are increasingly empty of content, but at the same time more colorful, filled to the brim with special effects, reminding me more and more of the cultural speculations in dystopian or utopian? Aldous Huxley novel "Brave New World" with "sensitive cinema". The concupiscent rapture that puts us in front of us to sell ourselves the way of life that we must accept, or its many manufactures of the big factories or, when we are in electoral times,it distracts us with the motley multicolored fan of political "marketing." Noise to the eye and to a real thought about what today's cops really need.

Even the sparse vegetation that we can find in the center of the city seems to submissively subjugate itself to a human boss who orders it in the city and arranges it like chess pieces, manipulating and cutting it like papyrus according to his approval. Everything has been handled, built, planted millimetrically by the hand of man, to such a degree that we cannot see another hand in what surrounds us, than that of man.

The City of Man, "the Earthly City" that Saint Augustine called, stands proud, omnipotent, omnipresent, omnifunctional, like an oiled machinery willing to continue growing indefinitely in front of the man who lives immersed in it, absorbed by it, preventing him from all the possible means to be able to contemplate beyond its concrete walls. The human hand has built it every brick by brick, the prostitute Babylon, the tower of Babel, whose prince is the Prince of this World, rises again to say to the contemplating man: "you will not be able to."

The Earthly City always seeks that men are immersed in their occupations, in their diversions, as much as possible, all their lives, and thus forget the profound, the important and the transcendental. His sensory steamroller seeks to flatten the perspectives of life, showing that there is only one horizon: the terrain, and thus hide with its various tricks, that there is also a vertical horizon, if the paradox may be permitted.

 

But still, to the beholder, to the man who loves and who seeks Love, who wishes to live in the Celestial City, the Celestial Homeland, when the combat against the Earthly City is presented to him, he can find the grace to take shelter in the candor of a simple interior Saint Irenaeus of Arnoise, it still has that vestige that the cement conglomerate still cannot remove. Although the city, with its dazzling lights has been able to cover a large part of the stars, there are still the heavens to be able to climb to the zenith and make out the vestige of God.

And after these reflections, in a rhetorical way, could you ask me a few questions, are these things for which large cities have been transformed into the legalistic and legislative accumulation of vices and disorders unimaginable in the past? Has the distancing of man from God led us to the construction of these great cities or were the great cities that also alienated man from the transcendent gaze?

 

Such is the confinement of man within the walls of the great city, that he has lavished a considerable number of lunatics, those lunatics that GK Chesterton described as the one who had locked himself between the four walls of the cardboard box of his little universe, painting the sky and the stars on the roof.

 

And I remember that, with certain hints of melancholy, Pope Leo XIII recalled in " Immortale Dei " that " there was a time when the philosophy of the Gospel governed the States. At that time the proper efficacy of Christian wisdom and its divine virtue had penetrated the laws, the institutions, the morals of the peoples, infiltrating all classes and relationships of society . "

 

Within the human defects, in those times, the harmony that produces the life of a deep Christian worldview reigned. The time where the truth was the Truth, where common sense and sanity reigned in the laws. The contrast between the two cities is stark. They cannot live together, they are irreconcilable and they will always be in constant conflict.

 

Mariano Gabriel Pérez-Tinnirello , taken from the National Congress News portal , Nov 7, 2018.