The following is an excerpt from a paper (The Politics of Pilgrimage) that I’ll be presenting at Wheaton this Saturday. Most of the paper is literary criticism, but this one section sets the stage for the theme I tease out of the literature I engage—pilgrimage as an interpretive category for the Christian life.
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[...] For a moment, step back with me from specific texts, and consider in general the political and spiritual opposition I have just tried to draw out of Erasmus’s colloqy [A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake].
I said the earthly city has a political purpose of stability. It anchors the geography around it, such that everything outside of it is described in relation to it. Where locations were formerly designated in relation to various equal points of interest, the land is transformed by the presence of the city into a centric spread, connected by arterial roads to a central heart. The centrality of the city allows industries to lean upon each other, stabilizing the whole by augmenting the power of production and gathering raw material together from many sources. Talent is drawn to the city, which becomes a center of entertainment, of creativity, of the acquirement and dissemination of knowledge, a warehouse of ideas and experiences, rendering outlying places gray, tiresome, and uninspiring.
All of this ingathering and conglomerating serves the basic purpose of rendering human society in its fullness stable. Grand visions, as of a tower of Babel, no longer energize our brick-layers, but a fear of the danger of ungathered living drives us together to build walls against the wilderness. We weave our practices and institutions together until they become interdependent.
Our laws serve this political vision of stability. The laws keep us from destabilizing each other’s lives by disruptive self-assertion. Obedience to the laws, an obedience driven by the desire for stability, is the only condition for citizenship in the earthly city.
Because stability is the meaning of earthly city life, although initially political in scope it becomes spiritual by appealing to the heart, to the center of individual people. The desire for stability in the face of life in the fallen world overwhelms all other desires. The demands of individual relationships and moral convictions must give way before the demands of the city, of the desire for stability. It becomes more important to be a good citizen than a good son or daughter, sister or brother, husband or wife, mother or father. In this way, the political vision of stability can be said to become a spiritual possession, demonic in scope and power. Moreover, we are born into cities, presented with the spiritual vision of stability as a default stance toward life.
In contrast to the spiritual vision of stability, Christianity urges a spiritual vision of mobility. We have in the church the citizens of a city unbuilt. The church stands in opposition, politically, to the earthly city precisely to the degree that the earthly city stands in opposition, spiritually, to it. To allow the desire for stability to overpower all other desires—which is precisely the tendency inspired by the structure of the earthly city that I have described—is a kind of idolatry for the Christian. Consequently, although to be a Christian does not preclude living in an earthly city, still to be a Christian means resolutely resisting spiritual possession by the earthly city’s ideal of stability. Because this kind of spiritual vision possesses one as a result of the structural tendencies of the city, the Christian inevitably subverts the earthly city where she dwells simply by refusing to submit to its spiritual dominion.
The whole purpose of this extended exposition of the meaning of the earthly city and its political opposition to the church was by way of defining the context of pilgrimage as a category for interpreting specific Christian ideas and practices. When I speak of the ensuing texts as interpreting Christianity in terms of pilgrimage, I mean that they interpret life in terms of this opposition between the spiritual visions of the earthly city and the church. [...]
