By Casey Chalk

"Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own," declared Pericles in his famous funeral oration to honor the Athenian dead and the glorious city for which they died. Many paeans could also be sung of the great cities of Christian history - Jerusalem, Rome, Constantinople, Paris, Vienna, Kiev - for which men of faith in ages past willingly shed their blood.

Yet for many conservative Catholics today, the city has lost its luster. It is, its critics argue, a den of crime and iniquity, but also the place where all the worst of liberalism and modernity are on display: social atomism, materialism, technological utopianism, and the self-aggrandizement of the managerial class. In the city, you can't even see the stars.

Given these very obvious evils, it's easy to forget how central the city has been to Christianity. Moreover, as Mike Aquilina argues in his new book Rabbles, Riots, and Ruins: Twelve Ancient Cities and How They Were Evangelized, Heaven itself is described as a city:

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I heard a great voice from the throne saying, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men" (Revelation 21:1-3).

God could have made heaven a "big, happy farm, or an unspoiled forest," writes Aquilina, but he chose a city. Depending on our sentiments, we may be inclined to imagine Heaven as an unspoiled landscape with snow-capped mountains in the distance, akin to C.S. Lewis's description in The Great Divorce. But the metaphor Holy Scripture gives us is the city, a place that in its first-century context would have conjured up images both exciting and nauseating, given the overcrowded, unsanitary character of such places.

Christianity was, in the early centuries, a primarily urban development. The apostles and their counterparts took the Gospel first not to rural farms but to the great cities of the Roman Empire: Antioch, Ephesus, Smyrna, Corinth, and of course, Rome, where Sts. Peter and Paul were both martyred.

It made sense: Roman roads and uncontested control of the Mediterranean (Mare nostrum) made travel comparatively safe and easy, while Jewish synagogues, often the starting point for evangelism efforts, were common in municipal areas. And, of course, the cities were where the most people were, masses of gentiles who, as G.K. Chesterton opines in The Everlasting Man, were spiritually and intellectually exhausted by the false philosophies and mystery cults of the ancient world.

Apart from Judaism, that milieu of intellectual and religious thought - itself preeminently an urban phenomenon - served as Christianity's primary interlocutor in the first century, and, as Aquilina shows, even many Jews themselves, such as Philo of Alexandria, had been engaging with Greek thought for generations.

St. Paul quoted Greek writers and employed classical rhetoric; St. John's principal opponent was the heresy of Gnosticism, which was informed by pagan philosophy and mystery cults. If Christianity was going to wage spiritual war against the most powerful intellectual and spiritual forces of the ancient world and declare Jesus Christ as the true king, that battle would inevitably be an urban battle.

And so it was, as Aquilina ably relates, from Christianity's beginnings in Jerusalem, through its spread to Antioch, Ephesus, Rome, and Alexandria, to its establishment in the great cities of the later Roman Empire: Constantinople, Milan, Ravenna, and Carthage. Though Aquilina's story will be familiar to those with some knowledge of early Church history, there is much here even for experienced students.

For example, while we typically understand Christianity as a movement that shifted west in the centuries following the apostolic age, Edessa and Ejmiatsin (also known as Vagharshapat), remind us of the robust traditions of the East. The...