“[I]n his Face that is so disfigured, there appears the genuine, extreme beauty: the beauty of love that goes ‘to the very end’”
-Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty
At intervals on our YouTube channel, one or another of our virtual praying community will add to the comment box a swipe at the architecture of the church in which we pray. While Paul and I
a.) are grateful beyond words for the privilege we have been accorded;
b.) ourselves esteem the space monastic and beautiful;
c.) recognize, in the contour, dimensions, materials and austerity of the building, the source of its magnificent acoustics;
d.) have been met with an uncommon openness, inclusion and respect within the parish;
e.) bear absolutely no responsibility for, nor authority regarding, the architecture or supposed liturgical aesthetics being criticized
(among many other caveats which, if listed in full, would exhaust the alphabet), we have espoused an unconditional policy of gentle welcome and affirmation toward all who write. The most recent of these comments included a request for an image of a Catholic church, to which charity obliges me to impute the best of motives.
Has it occurred to people that we could upload any image of our choosing? Has it entered anyone’s mind that we could claim to record faithfully at L’Abbaye du Mont-Saint-Michel or the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls? Or that we could set up a microphone in a garage and reengineer the acoustics to give the suggestion of a Gothic cathedral? Perhaps the less savvy don’t know, or fail to recall, that in Japan a popular influencer presumed to be a beautiful young woman highly adept in motorcycle maintenance was in reality a fifty-year-old man filmed with editing apps. We have made sacrifice after sacrifice to practice the authenticity of recording in a sacred space before the Blessed Sacrament, and His Presence was outright denied for lack of the visual shibboleth, as it were, of some imagined stylistic norm.
Our current and rapidly evolving state of technology demands an epistemology with a heft sufficient to deal with this tremendously novel human situation. While Scholasticism’s basic epistemological schema has much to offer, its particulars – here, specifically, in the work of the Angelic Doctor – need significant updating. For one thing, the mapping of cognitive processes to particular ventricles of the brain does not inspire confidence in the neuroscience of the medieval world, inherited from the ancients; without devolving into physicalism, we must duly respect the data set offered by contemporary science. Indeed, even Thomas himself appears already to have been vexed by epistemological conundra which inevitably arise; the scholar Jörg Alejandro Tellkamp, in an article published in The Thomist, does a fine job sketching Aquinas’s shift on certain relevant questions, moving, as it happens, from an Avicennian view to an Averroëan one over the course of a single work – that work, to be fair, being his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the equivalent of a dissertation aimed at gaining teaching faculties. Nonetheless, the discipline posed complexities which proved difficult – if not nearly irresolvable – even for one of humanity’s highest geniuses; since then, modern philosophy has struggled with the very possibility of knowledge of things, and contemporary philosophy is occupied with the “hard problem of consciousness.” We may do well to hope in a revived and revised Scholasticism, brought into discourse with the contributions – and more, the incredibly urgent needs – of our day.
In the document “Towards Full Presence – A Pastoral Reflection on Engagement with Social Media,” which the Vatican Dicastery for Communication saw fit, with apparent aforethought, to issue on 28 May 2023 (that is, Pentecost), we are told that social media is no longer a tool, but an “ecosystem” unto itself. This holy and necessary document is indeed pastoral and sociological, but it does not fully address the questions, truly philosophical in nature, which it raises. That media be named “an ecosystem,” a primary life world organic to humanity, should cause us to stop in our tracks. If virtuality is now a milieu connatural to contemporary man, the epistemological ramifications are seismic.
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Aquinas posits four interior senses to complement the five external senses with which we are all familiar. Three of these interior senses are the sensus communis, an integrating power to coordinate the disparate data of the five senses, getting all on the same track to form a fuller composite; imagination, and memory. The fourth is a bit more elusive: data gleaned from the external senses once processed according to the internal senses is designated “intentions,” intentiones. Exclusive to rational man, according to this system, is the vis cogitativa, having the vis aestimativa as a counterpart in the animal kingdom. The lower faculty of the vis aestimativa, or the estimative sense, renders intentions pertaining only to the brute interests of its particular animal subject. (How estimation and reason interact is exceptionally complicated and leads into great difficulties, and is therefore beyond the scope of this current post.)
The modern science of behavioral zoology demonstrates that animals have far greater existential seriousness than the postulation of a mere tangle of “individuo-centric” or “species-centric” instincts would support, but let’s take as a given that an estimative faculty hones into data under the aspect that life be preserved and fostered. According to this view Callista, my Siamese, via the vis aestimativa, generates intentions: the data indicating the neighbor’s French bulldog = nuisance; data indicating the fleecy throw blanket on the sofa = nap-time; data indicating my ankles = random offloading of the pent-up frustrations of the irascible appetite. For humans, the intentional content of the vis cogitativa is variable. I can render mocha Belgian chocolate fudge ice cream as delicious; as an apt recipe to craft in honor of my mentor and bring to our next Being seminar; as contraindicated by temperance; as devotionally inappropriate on a penitential Friday.
Though framed as a religious document, the “Pastoral Reflection on Engagement with Social Media” identifies well a problem plaguing moderns of any, every and no faith tradition: “Content overload is solved by artificial intelligence algorithms that constantly determine what to show us based on factors that we hardly perceive or realize: not only our previous choices, likes, reactions or preferences, but also our absences and distractions, pauses, and attention spans. The digital environment that each person sees – and even the results of an online search – is never the same as that of someone else. By searching for information on browsers, or receiving it in our feed for different platforms and applications, we are usually not aware of the filters that condition the results.” Or, as Benedict XVI once wrote in a totally different context, “We are all very much captive to powers that anonymously manipulate us.”
Examining the excerpt above in the light of the few basic Thomist principles I have cited, it immediately becomes evident that rationality-endowed intelligence is being fed intentions well beyond neutral perceptual data, and at lightning speed. Where predetermined intentional content invariably caters to a set of instinctual appetitive interests, a properly human cogitative function has been effectively ceded to an estimative one. Given the speed of microprocessors, targeting and the increasing habituation to impulsivity which these conditions were designed to cultivate, a netizen may no longer be free to choose among responses to calculated content, any more than a lamb could be self-determining to experience awe at the majesty of a lupine guest in its vicinity; it is hardwired to know only threat. Electronic media bypasses higher intellective deliberation, firing straight at amygdala and appetition. Moreover, as the Vatican document itself notes, each individual bears a unique signature to which this surrogate intellection is tailored. An algorithmically bespoke knowledge process, taking into its arsenal “not only our previous choices, likes, reactions or preferences, but also our absences and distractions, pauses, and attention spans,” reads vulnerabilities from within, as it were. Nay, more: this intimate daemon, this knock-off Doppelgänger, is at your right hand, at once assessing and approximating you with its algorithmic eye, tone-matching you as you mouse-click and, more alarmingly, shaping you in its image through the contents of your feed until, inverting the dynamic of The Picture of Dorian Grey, image and reality converge.
Furthermore, the “ecosystem” cited by the document is doubly unique; it is unlike any other, and is further unique to each individual in its particulars – essentially not an ecosystem, but billions of linked ecosystems, one per head. Heraclitus was associated with the condition of panta rhei; unable to step in the same river twice for its inherent flux, he knew reality as all becoming and no being. Online data collection, as I have already suggested, graces us with non-transferable “cyberbiomes,” each unstable in its own personalized flow of change. Not only does this elevate the potential for alienation, but personal memoria becomes displaced, co-opted by the algorithmic ledger of kosmos houtos. It is little wonder that the document we have been considering continues: “The consequence of this increasingly sophisticated personalization of results is a forced exposure to partial information, which corroborates our own ideas, reinforces our beliefs, and thus leads us into an isolation of ‘filter bubbles’.”
What is at stake is the loss of a transobjective connection with being. This said, let us consider the imaginative faculty as per the Schoolmen. Sensation, a bodily event, has its immaterial correlate in the phantasma, an intellective cataloging of real, vital and vibrant interactions with the physical cosmos – for example, the pleasingly bitter kick of really good mocha Belgian chocolate fudge ice cream, or the smarting of the skin under the influence of a mischievous Meezer nip, or, for thar matter, that precious and inimitable euphony of the breed – precisely as I, the knowing subject, experienced them. These interactions yield together the species expressa, comprised of what the internal senses have gleaned, and the species impressa, or the impression effected by the object known, meaning that the knower is always, at least in part, in a relation of passivity. The imagination, the storehouse of these species expressa, was said by Albertus Magnus to, in a certain sense, encompass all of the internal senses within its own activity. Such is its potential dominance.
Imagination is also a unique gateway to deception. Throughout his collected works, St. John of the Cross spends no little ink on warning of the dangers this faculty occasions in spiritual persons. Greatly formed in Thomism at Salamanca, he writes in The Ascent of Mount Carmel of a particular limitation of imagination: “At the most it can compose resemblances of these objects that are seen, heard, or felt. But such imitations do not reach a greater being or even as much being as that of the objects of the external senses. Even though individuals may imagine palaces of pearls and mountains of gold – for they have seen gold and pearls – all that is imagined will indeed be less than the essence of a little gold or a pearl.” (This would seem to cast doubt on the Ontological Argument – with no disrespect to St. Anselm, whose homily on the Blessed Mother we read each year on Immaculate Conception with ever-renewed devotion and inspiration.)
These matters are important for several reasons. For one, the angelic intellect knows material things certainly, but the medium of that knowledge is wholly immaterial, knowing them either within itself or in the divine Being. The human intellect knows within the soul – which, as we have established, amounts to an immaterial drive to be as matter. Since the first kinetograph and increasingly with technologically sharpened realism over the century and a third since, phantasms are being built up sans any tactile component, with no immediacy to ground them, giving more play to the imagination to supply for these experiential lacunae – and with online algorithmic formulae based on data collection, the quality of that absent content is thrust upon one as pre-given and pre-selected intentiones. For Aquinas, “the sensitive powers are nearer to the soul than the body is,” and these are being, at least to some extent, forfeited and determined from without. And more: the reality being conveyed is intercepted at the source, in a way that warps truth and carries maximum emotional force, even presuming that the viewer “knows better.”
Of course, the foregoing issues did not by any means emerge with media. What is new is that the medium of knowledge, i.e., the human soul, is now quasi-externalized; algorithms can track, store and capitalize on cues not observable otherwise, offering a window to its functioning. In addition, individuals can now experience movement with an agility close to that proper to the risen body in glory, just as cyberspace affords its own category of seeming liberation from the constraints of time and finitude. John of the Cross, again in The Ascent, teaches of high prayer: “While occupying a person’s soul it renders that soul simple, pure, and clear of all the apprehensions and forms through which the senses and memory were acting when conscious of time. And thus it leaves the soul in oblivion and unaware of time... When these persons return to themselves they observe the effects of this knowledge produced in them without their having been aware of it.” Such media can perniciously mimic contemplation, natural or supernatural, for absorption according to its hypnogenic atemporality.
With all this, we have but barely scratched the surface of issues that need to be dealt with and worked out in the coming time. This post is by no means a neo-Luddite apologia; technology merely amplifies the potentials, for bad or for good, of the human person and the human community; for me, the potential opened up for intellectual community by technology is effective motivation for the arduous labor of writing.
I do want to suggest that we – as consumers and as commodities – are at risk of exchanging away a Christocentric estimation of the beautiful for the deficient Apollonian which Nietzsche defined. Given our technologization, we will end up with a cult not just of appearances, but of illusions, wrought via willful complicity in our own deception. Nietzsche talks of dreams, and this elicits comparison to cyberspace, both being atemporal, a-corporeal realms of phantasms run amok. Given the flux of media, we risk losing touch with the anamnesis Ratzinger posits as grounding conscience, and therefore goodness and truth.
The Vatican document on social media offers this hope: “A contemplative approach is countercultural, prophetic even, and may be formative not only for persons but for culture as a whole.” Christianity calls, not for indiscriminate appetition and the accumulation of data points, but for loving knowledge and discernment. A truly sacramental attitude toward being – i.e. one capable of reading signs pointing beyond themselves – demands an ever greater purification according to truth, by which knowledge progresses only insofar as one enters into the mystery. A Christian Apollonianism cherishes the vulnerability capable of being “struck by the arrow of his paradoxical beauty.”
And once again from Ratzinger, in “The Feeling of Things, the Contemplation of Beauty”: “The icon of the crucified Christ sets us free from this deception that is so widespread today. However it imposes a condition: that we let ourselves be wounded by him, and that we believe in the Love who can risk setting aside his external beauty to proclaim, in this way, the truth of the beautiful.”
Stay tuned.