Urban/e Distances: Christians’ Guidelines to Secrecy and Discretion

The COVID-19 pandemic has been familiarising all of us with the formal measures and the informal techniques of social distancing. Yet, historically, city dwellers did not need plagues and sanitary crises to learn how to manage the intensity and intrusiveness of contacts of all types. In ancient Mediterranean urban societies functioning without privacy policies and PIN numbers, surveillance cameras and copyright lawyers, the capacity to allow, restrict, or deny informational access to other urbanites depended on the activation of a variety of distance-enhancing mechanisms and filtering devices of a physical, sensorial, semiotic, and institutional type, most of which are still in use today (Milgram 1970: 1472). Drawing on classics of sociological literature, the paper deals with a salient trait of past and present urbanities: the competence to refuse interactions involving reciprocal knowledge in personal matters as well as the ability to establish ‘secondary’ contacts and craft impersonal types of social relations that prevent and discourage people from ‘coming too close.’ More specifically, on the one hand, it focuses on the ways in which the urban – whether as physical layout, media infrastructures, or styles of social relations – enables, invites, and even compels the urbanites to employ specific sociological techniques and rely on aesthetical-moral attitudes for managing, monitoring, and limiting the access to personal information. On the other, it assumes that such processes of boundary formation prompts the fabrication of, and the exposure to, disparaging gossips, rumours, slanders, and other forms of unconfirmed reports. Re-interpreting an anonymous early Christian text (To Diognetus) as a document providing guidelines to these specific facets of urbanity, the article will show how social life in cities supposes and enhances attitudes and capacities to navigate the blurry line between mutual knowledge and ignorance, discretion and intrusion, secrecy and publicity, suspicion and trust.