Posted on: July 13th, 2022 Urban Culture & Newman’s “Daimonia”
Given that, quite soon, I’ll be relocating from one city (Tyler, TX) to another (Austin, TX), I’ve been thinking, pondering quite a bit about the difference between the two cities.
For example, you’d love Tyler if you like gated communities, country clubs, racial segregation, monster pick up trucks, Walmart, high school football games, guns, and hunting. Oh, and Trump.
… You’d love Tyler if you like gated communities, country clubs, racial segregation, monster pick up trucks, Walmart, high school football games, guns, and hunting. Oh, and Trump.
In Austin it could not be more different. Very few of my friends in Austin are members of country clubs, for example (even the ones who are worth many millions of dollars, or more). One friend of mine literally took a vow to avoid Walmart for the rest of his life. Have I ever heard of anyone attending a high school football game in Austin? Despite the fact that Friday Night Lights was filmed a couple of blocks away from our house in Austin, and admitting that my “station in life” might have something to do with this … no, no I have not.
All that to say, the ethos, the quality, the character, of the two cities are as different as can be. Which leads me to this quotation by John Henry Newman, suggesting that one explanation for such differences might be something in the spiritual realm:
... besides the host of evil spirits, I considered that there was a middle race, daimonia, neither in heaven, nor it hell; partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, as the case might be. These beings gave a sort of inspiration or intelligence to the races, nations, and classes of men. Hence the action of bodies politic and associations, which is often so different from that of individuals who compose them. hence the character and instincts of states and governments, of religions communities and communions. I thought these assemblages had their life in certain unseen Powers. My preference of the Personal to the Abstract would naturally lead my to this view. I thought it countenanced by the mention of "the Prince of Persia" in the Prophet Daniel; and I think I considered that it was of such intermediate beings that the Apocalypse spoke, in its notice of "The Angels of the Seven Churches."
John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (New York: Norton, 1968), 35–6.
