City of the Good by Michael Bell, Princeton, 360pp, £25
I like it when a book opens with an epiphany. Michael Bell, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin, is in the Sistine Chapel, looking upwards. Like all those around him, he is wonderstruck by The Last Judgment. But then he starts to make an inventory of what isn’t there: “No animals. No forests. No gardens, aside from Adam and Eve being evicted from Eden . . . No farming. No eating. No laughing. No sex. No politicians. No people of colour. Almost no women.” Heaven seems “a starkly limited place”. What troubles Bell most is the implicit declaration that “this was all for the good”.
Next Bell and his wife begin to explore long Vatican corridors that they had previously missed, containing museums of ethnology, cartography and Egyptology, and a gallery of Greek and Roman busts. These rooms teem with representations of things missing from the Sistine ceiling and walls. Here was life “more nearly as it is really lived”, where “the good and the bad are not easily separated and where politics cannot be escaped”. Why, Bell wonders, have the world’s dominant religions “long relegated these experiences to the side passages”?
City of the Good is the densely argued outworking of this epiphany, and the questions it provokes in Bell’s mind about the partitioning of nature, the divine and the good. He thinks that this failure of religion, environmentalism and politics to remain in fruitful contact with one another has deep historical roots. It is an “old cultural habit” that first took hold when cities grew into states and empires. People were troubled by new and growing inequality, unsure whether to defend or confront it, and they sought solace in absolutes that have bedevilled mankind ever since.
Moreover, the major universal religions “have little to say about pagan interests of ecology and sustenance because they arose to speak to other worries, worries brought about by the rise of class and the decline of kin”. By this reading, Jewish monotheism emerged to bolster the development of a more urbanised, centralised Jewish state. Jesus championed a form of quasi-kinship through faith to address the growing disruption of the traditional ties between people.
In other ancient cultures, however, including some that still survive, nature, the supernatural and the human were more “entangled”. Nature was not perceived as a category, realm or power separate from humans and the “poly-divinities” that populated their imaginations – “nature before nature”, as it were. Here, Bell finds “striking realism” in the acceptance of “the materialism, desire, strife and imperfections of daily life”.
……
City of the Good is, in many respects, a feast for the mind, an extended, thought-provoking meditation on “the melody of human affairs”. The opening chapter places Henry David Thoreau and St Augustine side by side in their efforts to slice through error and confusion. A few pages later, we are reliving the imperilled childhood of Zeus in a cave on Mount Ida. Then it is on to the extraordinary Popul Vuh, an ancient text sometimes called the “Mayan Bible”. Next up is a synopsis of the Epic of Gilgamesh. We are not yet 40 pages in.
On Bell goes, a learned, agile, affable guide, a natural storyteller and phrasemaker, who continuously merges scenes from his own eclectic intellectual autobiography with the book’s great themes.
A note of caution, though. This is a thesis that sucks in all before it. The breadth of knowledge on display seems uncanny and readers may find reasons to doubt Bell’s omniscience when he strays into fields of knowledge they themselves know well. Catholics, for instance, will certainly wince at the repeated misapplication of the term “immaculate conception”.
More alarming still is the misrepresentation of Luke 19:27. Bell suggests that the instructions for bloodletting are given by Jesus to his followers, rather than by the speaker in the parable to the bystanders. This is done seemingly to create equivalence with instructions to commit violence in the Koran; and it is dispiriting generally to watch Bell sidestep other difficult aspects of Islam in order to arrive at his desired interpretation.
City of the Good builds up to a long, heartfelt plea for “perpetual openness”. In part, because he treats the claims of religions seriously and respectfully, and in part because he patently desires a world free from the “metallic ring” of authoritarianism, Bell is able to make an at times compelling case for sweeping, open-ended relativism.
Yet, in doing so, he never seems to entertain the alternative notion that the great religions might strive for forms of dialogue that would still allow for respectful disagreement when beliefs collide, as they must. Food for thought, therefore, albeit missing some vital ingredients.
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