DECEMBER 2007 » book review

Natural Laws

Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred
by Philip Bess
ISI Books, Wilmington, DE; 2006
309 pp.; paperback; 22 color and 76 b&w illustrations; $18
ISBN 978-1-932-23697-2

Reviewed by Nicole V. Gagné

Since the beginnings of 19th-century industrialism, as Philip Bess points out in his 2006 book Till We Have Built Jerusalem, "there has never been a shortage of 'Big Theme' books and essays explicating and purporting to explicate the state of and threats to Western civilization. Inevitably, this book is an addition to that genre. [...] Its distinction resides in its focus upon the built environment as a marker of a more general cultural condition. [...] Moreover, this book is rare in contemporary architectural discourse for its considerations of the physical, symbolic, and sacramental roles of good architecture and urbanism as these both reflect and promote human happiness."

Bess is quite right to claim the distinctiveness of his focus; his accomplishment, seen from either the philosophical or architectural vantage point, is original and impressive. Bess' arguments may be unusually passionate and extreme, but his voice is reasoned and thoughtful, surprisingly non-academic (especially in light of his career as professor and director of graduate studies at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture), and frequently good humored too.

Although the book is culled from a variety of essays and lectures produced by Bess since the 1980s, it enjoys a coherence and lucidity that can be absent from the more concentrated tracts of other philosophers of architecture. (Only in "Part Four: Critical Essays" does he let it become something of a grab bag, with Bess surveying various books and essays of architectural thought.) But be forewarned: Till We Have Built Jerusalem, with its few and miniscule illustrations, is not for the casual admirer of architecture. Philip Bess has a mission. "I have fallen into the part-time role of explaining biblical religion and natural law to traditional urbanists, and traditional urbanism to adherents of biblical religion and/or natural law," he acknowledges. With this book he explains it all, examining both sides of this conceptual divide and decrying the Modernist assumptions he sees undermining their efforts.

Bess begins by examining urban design as an effort toward promoting human well-being in "Part One: Cities and Human Flourishing." As he ponders different architect-designed communities, from the planned town of Seaside in Florida to Thomas Jefferson's "academical village" at the University of Virginia, the values of Aristotle loom large in his considerations. Bess uses the ancient Greek philosopher to provide an underpinning for his conflation of religious and architectural principles: "'Virtue' is a key concept for any Aristotelian understanding of the polis [city]; and I want to suggest that this is true not only for the latter's moral order, but also for its formal order."

In "Part Two: The Sacred and The City," Bess looks at architecture, urbanism and human well-being "through the specific lens of biblical religion." Here he discusses six traditional design characteristics that evoke the sacred: verticality; the role of light and shadow; craftsmanship and durability; mathematic and geometric systems; compositional and artistic unity; and hierarchical organization. The devil in this belfry, not surprisingly, is "modern architecture – abstract, figural, pure, a-contextual, machine-like," and Bess is left to conclude, "The more architects and planners have turned their attention to building up the City of Man apart from some vision of the City of God, the meaner and uglier the City of Man has become."

This conclusion informs his comments on the city-building New Urbanists in "Part Three: New Urbanism." Bess frankly describes himself as "a willing if somewhat suspect member" of the New Urbanist movement, acknowledging the controversy generated by both his anti-Modernism and his religious emphasis. More than a few New Urbanists would have to feel uneasy reading this section of the book, where Bess elevates one of their design fundamentals – "Human beings should make mixed-use, walkable settlements" – into what he calls "a natural-law precept."

And they won't be the only ones feeling leery either, because by this distance into Till We Have Built Jerusalem, all sorts of readers will have started to wonder what exactly is the need to have a perfectly sensible and attractive approach to urban design swathed in such archaic moralizing and anointed as an eleventh commandment. Isn't it enough that it's a positive thing to do? Do we also have to have God demanding of us that we do it? Alas, Bess is devoted to such an approach, and in part three he highlights the recurring theme of his book: the primacy of so-called "natural law," which he defines as "principles of morality that are not only right for all persons but knowable to all persons by reason alone."

Even if one is willing to set aside the basic awareness that human conceptualizations of ethics are not and cannot be the laws of nature, it's still hard not to cringe at the spectacle of Bess parading his sugary dicta as absolutes of "natural law," including: "Good should be pursued and evil avoided"; "Harm no one gratuitously"; "Do not take innocent human life"; and "Don't steal." Is it natural law that harming someone is okay as long at you don't do it "gratuitously;" ditto killing, as long as you believe that the life you take is not "innocent?"

Where and how does "natural law" define gratuitousness and innocence? Are we to believe that stealing is always wrong, even if you take an item no one wants and do something beneficial with it? (Architects steal every day – they just call it traditional design.) And good luck to anyone who thinks they can define "good" and "evil" in terms of natural law – not even Bess tries to do that. Al-though he does come close in his chapter entitled "After Heroes: Nietzsche or Chesterton?" In this essay, an outburst of the Manichean thinking that dominates the book, Bess contrasts two writers: the German atheist Friedrich Nietzsche with the British Christian G.K. Chesterton (three guesses who represents evil and who good!).

Here Bess takes up a notion from one of his heroes, the Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre: "Nietzsche represents one of the only two intellectually coherent traditions of moral philosophy currently available to us, the other being the Aristotelian/Thomist tradition [represented by Chesterton]."

Of course, there are galaxies of meaningful thought and spiritual meaning that exist outside the boundaries of both Nietzsche and Chesterton. The Taoist sage Lao-tzu, for one, says that the universe produces both good and evil continuously, and treats them impartially.

Bess' readers are advised to proceed with caution as they go through this book. As the author does point out, "obeying natural-law prohibitions is obligatory." For those who believe in them that is. TB

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