CYCLE FOUR

1. One hears much talk of Western godlessness from, not least, Eastern religious fanatics of one persuasion or another, but one has to be careful how one interprets the term 'God', and thus what one understands by religion. If one means 'God as Creator', in the sense of some cosmic First Mover credited by certain ancient texts, including the so-called Christian Bible, with the creation of the world and all or most of the creatures in it, then one is adhering to a very basic and, to my mind, primitive concept of God which, whether or not it has ceased to apply to the West, is only credible, it seems to me, in relation to a naturalistic and largely rural background.

2. It may be that the West is comparatively Godless in terms of adherence to such a primitive and basic notion of God as the term 'Creator' evokes, but if that were so - and there are conflicting opinions here - is that any great misfortune or shortcoming when considered not only in relation to Christian traditions of Christ-worship (wherein, even with distinctions between the Old Testament 'Creator', or Jehovah, and the New Testament 'Creator', or the Father, the Son is effectively a salvation from if not the eternal, then certainly a temporal manifestation of the Father and effective cynosure, in Christ, of worship), but, notwithstanding such traditions, to the sorts of environmental or climatic conditions in which such basic notions of God normally flourish.

3. When one lives closer to Nature in rural or mountainous lands it stands to reason that some acknowledgement of either Nature or that which is deemed responsible for Nature, like a variety of cosmic bodies, will be officially upheld and widely practised through conventional or traditional religious rites, even if less in terms of Nature-worship than of some sublimated extrapolation from Nature and/or the Cosmos which may or may not be given anthropomorphic associations.

4. But what of those countries or peoples which have moved beyond such primitive conditions and now command vast reserves of industrial, technological, scientific, and other know-how, having acquired a much more urban orientation in which man-made rather than nature-made things abound - can they be expected to relate to naturalistic concepts of God, and if not, what is wrong with their more humanistic and socialistic concerns?

5. For it seems that the more developed countries and peoples become, the more they abandon primitivistic religion in the interests of a sort of humanistic focus in which things made by man take precedence over whatever might have been fashioned by Nature or some outside force operating on Nature from the Cosmos. They are no longer surrounded by Nature to any appreciable extent, but have a uniquely humanized world to live in and develop. Small wonder if traditional concepts of God or religion fall by the roadside!

6. But humanism, even Christian humanism, is hardly the end of the road, nor is its secular counterpart, which takes a variety of socialistic forms. For urban civilization provides a bridge, it seems to me, from the Nature-bound past to a much more interiorized and even genuinely religious future, a future in which godliness is truly within, as one emerges from the 'black hole', as it were, of industrial development into a light which owes little or nothing to the Sun, still less to the Cosmos, but much if not everything to the soul and its capacity for inner light, as revealed through a variety of meditative devotions and chemical stimulants, not to mention intellectual and spiritual studies conducted via the use of personal computers and such like.

7. Of what relevance is the 'Garden without' to a person who has gone within and whose whole lifestyle is aided and abetted by environmental and technological transformations in society which, while rooted in sensuality, intimate of a sensible alternative and deeper resolution. For city life contrasts with Nature, nature-in-the-raw, as an environment in which more sensibility is possible by dint of the interior parallel to sensibility which living or being indoors much of the time inevitably provides.

8. Doubtless the West, and northern Europe in particular, owes not a little of its urban and technological sophistication to weather conditions which, in their various inclemencies, conduce towards an indoor lifestyle - something which could hardly be said of much of north Africa and the Middle East, to take but two regional examples. People do not ordinarily get as much chance to lounge around in the sunshine in northern Europe as they do in some places farther afield, and over the centuries a mentality has developed, in conjunction with Christianity, which places more emphasis on living indoors than outdoors, so that most indigenous Europeans more or less take their sedentary lifestyles under roofs and between walls for granted, only venturing out when they have to or as the leisurely exception to a general rule.

9. But how inextricably tied to sensibility this is, and how it contrasts with those countries and peoples which, for climatic as well as environmental reasons, were never given quite as much incentive to develop a civilized and urban alternative to Nature but, even with certain inclemencies, revelled in the outdoors and in the sensuality that hot climates entail. Even now the African or Arab or coloured person in general in Western cities is more likely to linger longer outdoors on a fine day than his European counterpart. And if he is not more sensible, he is certainly more sensual, and thus closer to nature, as they say, than those of us for whom city life and city lifestyles are the time-honoured norm.

10. Of course, the city is not only a vehicle for furthering sensibility in the extent to which indoor lifestyles proliferate; it can and does contain much sensuality, though arguably much less sensuality than rural areas or than those countries in which the sun is so much more prevalent. Sensuality is the basis of life for even the most sensible of persons, and few if any of us would be able to tolerate life without at least some daily contact with the scaled-down nature of, for instance, parks, gardens, indoor plants, pets, roadside trees, and so on. But this scaled-down and often transmuted nature is not to be confused with nature-in-the-raw, or Nature with a capital N, and no-one in his right, sensible mind would ever wish to return to a context closer to Nature in that rural or primitive sense. For he would ultimately risk returning to a primitive concept of God and mode of religion, a mode rooted in the notion of cosmic Creator and requiring worshipful subservience of a degree likely to evoke unpleasant political connotations with authoritarian monarchy!

11. No, the city at least prevents any such retrogressive step for those who are properly germane to it, and to that extent it is a guarantor of freedom from theocratic or other authoritarianisms and vehicle for enhanced sensibility, to the extent that people respond to the indoor summons on a positive note, scorning contact with the great outdoors on all but a tangential, or city-conditioned, basis.

12. But there is more than one kind of sensibility, and the city often tends to reflect this in the different types of architectural style which different usages and orientations dictate, ranging from the metachemically square to the metaphysically round via the chemically rectangular and the physically elliptical, as from noumenal objectivity to noumenal subjectivity via phenomenal objectivity and phenomenal subjectivity. Cities can be more one thing than another, and so they often tend to be, yet are also capable of being transmuted not only in terms of enhanced interiorization, but of one type of architectural parallel to sensibility at the expense of or in preference to another, depending on the nature of the city and even of the people who happen to inhabit it.

13. Cities are not fixed but infinitely transmutable in their development, and widespread disillusionment with one type of architectural bias does not invalidate the possibility of another but, rather, portends the likelihood of further change attendant upon a variety of ideological and functional preconditions. Ultimately, we get the city we deserve!

14. But whatever city we live in, the distinction between raw nature and urban civilization is indubitably one between sensuality and sensibility, the outer and the inner, and to that extent the development of any higher culture, be it Christian or post-Christian, is premised upon a civilized precondition, without which lifestyles will remain heathenistically given to the 'great outdoors'. And so, by a correlative token, will religion and thus the concept of God.