The words, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city and a tower whose head shall be unto heaven,” suggest such thoughts as these. The lawgiver thinks that besides those cities which are built by men’s hands upon the earth, of which the materials are stones and timber, there are others, even those which men carry about established in their souls. Naturally these last are models or archetypes, for the workmanship bestowed upon them is of a more divine kind, while the former are copies composed of perishing material. Of the soul-city there are two kinds, one better, the other worse. The better adopts as its constitution democracy, which honours equality and has law and justice for its rulers—such a one is as a melody which sings God’s praises. The worse, which corrupts and adulterates the better, as the false counterfeit coin corrupts the currency, is mob-rule, which takes inequality for its ideal, and in it injustice and lawlessness are paramount. The good have their names entered on the burgess-roll of the former type of state, but the multitude of the wicked are embraced under the second and baser type, for they love disorder rather than order, confusion rather than fixedness and stability. The fool not content with using himself alone thinks fit to use fellow-workers in sin. He calls upon the sight and the hearing and invokes every sense to range itself beside him without delay, each bringing all the instruments that are needed for the service. And further he spurs and incites that other company, the company of the passions, to put their untutored nature under training and practice and thus render themselves resistless. These allies, then, the mind summons, saying, “Let us build ourselves a city,” which means, “Let us fortify our resources and fence them in with strength, that we may not fall easy victims to the onset of the foe. Let us mete out and distribute the several powers of the soul as by wards and tithings, allotting some to the reasoning and some to the unreasoning portion. Let us choose for our magistrates such as are able to provide wealth, reputation, honours, pleasures, from every source available to them. Let us enact laws which shall eject from our community the justice whose product is poverty and disrepute—laws which shall assure the emoluments of the stronger to the succession of those whose powers of acquisition are greater than others. And let a tower be built as a citadel, as a royal and impregnable castle for the despot vice. Let its feet walk upon the earth and its head reach to heaven, carried by our vaulting ambition to that vast height.” For in fact that tower not only has human misdeeds for its base, but it seeks to rise to the region of celestial things, with the arguments of impiety and godlessness in its van. Such are its pronouncements, either that the Deity does not exist, or that it exists but does not exert providence, or that the world had no beginning in which it was created, or that though created its course is under the sway of varying and random causation, sometimes leading it amiss, though sometimes no fault can be found. For this last an analogy is often seen in ships and chariots. For the course of the one on the water and of the other on land often goes straight without helmsman or charioteer. But providence demands, they say, more than a rare and occasional success. Human providence frequently achieves its purpose, the divine should do so always and without exception, since error is admitted to be inconsistent with divine power. Further, when these victims of delusion build up under the symbol of a tower their argument of vice, what is their object but to leave a record of their ill-savoured name?
On the Confusion of Tongues 23
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.