Place and space are two distinct concepts but concepts that have been used inter-changeably far too often in dialogue surrounding the church’s place in the world and its space within secular society. In both cases, place and space has been, at least since the enlightenment, a move within the discourse to speak of both space and place as a physical limited space that has barriers, edges and a perimeter and within these specific boundaries the church must claim either its space or a place in civil society.
The concept of spatiality has been used in a very Baconian sense; it is limited and quantifiable. It can be measured and defined and as such there is a limited amount of space that exist that the church must share with the rest of civil society. And in this sense the church’s place in the world has been slowly eroded as secular society has slowly taken root over the last few hundred years and begun to occupy more space within civil society. The space that the church occupies as a result has continually contracted.
The advent of the social contract and the necessary negotiated pluralism of western democracies have slowly forced the church from a place of prominence in civil society to a separate sphere altogether. The church ended up being regulated to the “private” sphere of influence of citizens’ lives while the “public” sphere has been reserved for reason and pluralistic debate of the kind that reaches for the common good. This separation of private/public space has in a sense created a separation in citizens’ lives from the public realm and has encouraged the thinking that there is indeed a limited amount of space. The agreement as to how this is done is through the social contract of a given nation state. In the case of the United States of America there is a sharp distinction between these two spheres, while in Canada this separation is not as clear, but tends toward the relegation of religion to the private sphere.
A consequence to this is that the nation state becomes the one polis that all people in a pluralistic society become subject to above all others. Pluralism in this sense of dividing space is that it requires a tempering of an individual citizen’s particular religious commitment to his/her commitment to the nation state. To keep peace among a large population with a variety of religious views, the nation state is therefor held up to be the means by which the common good is reach and particular religious convictions must either come in line with the nation state or become antithesis to the social contract.
The basic assumption therefore is that the nation state is one polis, or one city and within which there is a division of goods and labour which follow certain binaries or dichotomies: civil society and the state, sacred and secular, eternal and temporal, religion and politics, church and state. This modernist thinking has for too long though occupied our thinking about the church’s place in society and where our space is in civil society.
Instead of seeing civil society made up of finite goods and labour, writers such as William Cavanaugh have reached back to the writings of Augustine for inspiration on how to re-imagine modern society, the one polis or one city and map a place for the church in the world and space in secular society; from one city to two.
Augustine concepts are not new; they have merely ceased to be applied in modern political thought. For Augustine there is not one city, but two cities that use the same amount of finite goods and labour, but use them for different purposes. This is not to say there is a competition for the goods, but that the two cities exist simultaneously and use the same goods but for different ends. The nation state uses these goods and labours for the common good, but the church would use these goods and labours to help transform the earthly city or the nation state.
Underlying Augustine’s proposition of two cities is that while they use the same goods and labours and occupy the same space, they also exist temporally, that is through time. The earthly city is on a trajectory towards the heavenly city and the role of the church is to help guide that transformation. Augustine basis his thought upon the realized kingdom of God through the sacrifice of Christ upon the cross that was inaugurated and the not yet that is the fallen and broken world in which we live as we await the return of Christ.
For Augustine the already is not some principle or transcendental reality, but is a reality to which the church bears witness too in history. Christ has been triumphant and the powers and principalities of the world are passing away. The kingdom of God has been realized. But it is also not yet, not because God is holding back from fully enacting the kingdom, but because humans are holding back, trapped in sin due to the fall. As such, coercive government, of the kind that enacts a Hobbesian social contract where the threat of violence against individuals is held by the state, is not natural but a result of the fall. The earthly city of which is the nation state uses the threat of violence and has dominion over and against other rational human beings is seen by Augustine as necessary for the common good, but is antithesis to scripture and the will of God.
The role of the church therefore becomes one that bears witness to the heavenly kingdom. It does so, as Cavanaugh has demonstrated, by enacting a comedy during a tragedy. To illustrate this metaphor Cavanaugh compares the two-city model of Augustine to Richard Strauss’ opera Ariadne auf Naxos. In the opera the host has two performances to be played, a tragedy and a comedy. The composer not wanting his masterwork of the tragedy to be followed by the frivolous offering of the comedy is outraged. The situation becomes worse when the announcement comes from the prima donna that they have to leave early, so both offerings must occur simultaneously.
The tragedy, the earthly city and the comedy, the heavenly city, therefore occur at the same time, in the same place and make use of the same resources; the stage, the audience, the space and time. In Christian theo-political imagination then the comedy is meant to save us from the tragedy of violence that we impose on ourselves through the nation state and the social contract. The church interrupts the tragedy of the earthly city by enacting the comedy of the redemption of Christ. The church does not allow the earthly city to define one public space, but constantly redefines what is truly public.
The church therefore is not a separate institution relegated to the private sphere in citizens’ lives. It is not enacting a wholly separate drama either. The church seeks to work with other actors and players to try to divert the tragedy into the drama of redemption. As such, when we envision space and place we must always remain aware that the church is not separate or competing for limited space, but is in fact part of the tragedy told and the comedy meant to transform. In a very real sense there are two cities that exist simultaneously and that space and place are not limited in a Baconian sense. Space and place exist both physically and temporally across time. Space and place are also not limited by human reason but are open to the abundance of God and they occur both here in the earthly city and also simultaneously in the heavenly city at the end of time.