Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [33]
Accountability and Accommodation: The Pragmatics of Original Sin
In this chapter I want to explore the implications of this extraordinary dominance of the church-at once revered and hated, saintly and sinning-for what is happening in the city today. This will necessitate an exploratory foray into questions of doctrine. At times in tandem, at others in discordant rupture, theological and political moralities have guided the management of the city-as well as the lives of its inhabitants-for many centuries.
Most prominent, although rarely invoked in name, has been the doctrine of original sin. As a taken-for-granted etiology of ordinary human imperfection, it provides a framework for blame and accountability. Because the world is full of evil, moreover, idioms of respect, courtesy, and mutual regard provide ways of compensating for the imperfections of the social order and managing relations from day to day. These express the pragmatic face of another doctrine, that of mutualism, whereby an apparent reciprocity of gifts and courtesies disguises, but does not suppress, a hierarchical reality that has often-as in Spain, for example-allowed church and state to reinforce each other's power structures over long stretches of time.' Poorer Romans know full well how things work: the rich, "they're in charge ... they have the money, they have the power, they have the lot." In this context, civility-here the antithesis of civic engagement-is a means of maintaining inequalities in the name of stability and mutual dependence under the banner of the church, and even its charitable works take on a more instrumental and oppressive hue.2
Commentators on the recent vagaries of Roman civic life often express great astonishment that a relatively left-leaning administration should accommodate itself so easily to both the demands of the religious Vatican state and the demands of neoliberal ideology. To understand how this came about is to perceive the enduring presence of certain assumptions about human imperfection-the necessity of political compromise, the ineradicability of corruption, the improbability of altruism-that persistently appear in the practices of the all-too-human representatives of both church and state. Attempts to explain these phenomena away as forms of backwardness or underdevelopment are a sad reproduction of condescending foreign critiques; they explain nothing, but they illustrate a great deal about the global politics of value.3
A generic model of original sin, by contrast, informs the long Roman conjuncture of corruption and civility. It helps us understand how remarkable architectural glories and a robust politics could emerge from, and indeed exemplify, centuries of illegal construction and underhand governance. The aesthetics of both personal interaction and artistic creativity spring from an urbanity (civilta) in which elegant appearance always trumps a too-literal adherence to the rule of law.
Original sin is a theodicy, grounded in that originating eviction of Adam and Eve from Paradise, through which both Orthodox and Catholic traditions explain how, in a world divinely ordained, human life is still subject to deep and ineradicable imperfection. Rome defines itself as a city of Christians (although many other religions are represented there); and Christians are, by their own definition, sinners. This is not merely a theological conceit, but has social resonance; to call others "Christian" is to recognize them as decent folks who, like the speaker, are forced by the wicked world around them to lie, steal, cheat, quarrel, and fornicate, often at the expense of the rich and powerful and thus also in solidarity with close kin and neighbors. Since J. K. Campell's remarkable account of the Sarakatsan