Interlude: The Ongoing Encounter between Faith and Communications Technology

With thoughts toward a theology of presence

Paul:

It is a commonplace that Catholicism is incarnational, founded in sacramentality, a religion of bread and wine and physical presence. The Incarnation itself is fully physical and biological; Christ is born of Mary, who is thus Theotokos, mother of God. Contra Docetism (and Islam), he really suffers and really dies; alongside the spiritual burden of the sins of the world, he bears the physical agony of the Cross. The risen Christ is eager to assure the disciples that he is not a ghost; he sits with them, eats bread and fish, invites Thomas to probe his wounds. His last words to the disciples at the Ascension are: Behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age – and the realization of his promise is, above all, the Eucharist. In all of this he is Emmanuel, God-with-us.

Yet are there new ways in which he is choosing to be with us now? Are there new ways for us to choose (or refuse) to be with him? This is particularly worth examining in this moment, as the Church is on the verge of canonizing Blessed Carlo Acutis as the first Internet saint. Indeed, a legacy site for his online ministries – catalogues of approved Eucharistic miracles and Marian apparitions – is still maintained by the Foundation, alongside the account of his holy life and his devotion to Christ. Whether thematically as an action of the Church or providentially in the circumstances of his life, Blessed Carlo’s canonization calls us to consider the present moment in the ongoing encounter between faith and technology.

From the first, the saints have used every means and every medium to proclaim Christ. The recounting of St. Paul’s work throughout the Middle East, Greece, and Asia Minor forms much of the New Testament. Early accounts attribute intrepid travels to many of the Apostles, most especially St. Thomas. All such travel involved putting the works of the world – at that time, seafaring trade routes and the passible roads of the Pax Romana – to the service of the Gospel.

The Church in all times has applied the technologies at hand to extend personal presence. In times past, church architecture was informed by a necessarily high level of attentiveness to acoustics; for us, it is obvious that a church should have an amplification system, although it means that the sound your ears hear is projecting not from the priest’s larynx, but from a speaker. Large outdoor Masses almost invariably show the celebration on the altar on giant screens. Yet all of this does no more than convey the accidents of sight and sound by which unproblematically present realities are recognized. But the times demand of us – with especial urgency, in these years of pandemic and post-pandemic – a deeper understanding of presence, specifically in terms of relationality.

In March 2020, Val and I were at weekday Mass on St. Patrick's Day, the first livestreamed closed Mass of the pandemic. A pastor friend had planned to keep us with him as unofficial weekday Mass music ministry; later that day, he let us know that the diocese had ordered attendance to be limited to the celebrant and an altar server.

So like most religious practitioners, we found ourselves suddenly alone… and we adapted. It certainly was not immediate; sitting in ironed dress clothes at an armoire lit with candles and laden with flowers trying to watch the Easter Vigil on a phone screen might well have been the most miserable liturgical experience ever, if it could properly be called liturgical at all – although, mysteriously, the random flowers that Instacart delivered for us matched the altar arrangements perfectly.

But, yes, we adapted. We found holy ground where we could – the local Catholic cemetery. We prayed liturgically as we could – daily recitation of the full Liturgy of the Hours. Our pastor friend gave us a venue for safe, private Eucharistic Adoration (forever grateful, Father, if you're reading). And as we adapted, we have discovered more goods, and found ourselves called to a fuller and deeper engagement with what we have been given – to which I will return.

But to understand any of this, I think we need to look back quite a bit further. In the same years as the only-begotten Son of God was being born into obscurity as a helpless infant, the image of a man claiming the same title was being propagated throughout the realm in which the Christ was born: Caesar Augustus, divi filius, with a representation of the Emperor’s image in profile. The Old Testament prohibition of graven images seems quite prudent, in context.

Yet that rather crude imperial portrait pales in comparison to the kinds of self-projection available to every human with a smartphone in our day... as at the same time the instruments of surveillance, data gathering, advertising, for-profit influence and social control run apace, compiling information for invisible and even impersonal forces. Indeed, these mechanisms feed into one another. The complexities our time presents to us seem almost insurmountable.

Val:

Clearly, there is a temptation – not a new one, although much facilitated by contemporary technology – towards resisting one’s native circumscriptive relation to space, towards expressing oneself as merely virtual, holographic, and thereby dominating and draining the attention of the global collective as a viral flash-in-the-pan... all to the detriment of organic human living, one’s own as much as that of others. At the risk of being eisegetical here, when St. Paul enjoins those who will not work to not eat either, I personally hear less a concern that freeloaders be taken to task than that busybodies – whose ego assertions, psychological manipulations and ideological disputes typically have an angelistic and even solipsistic tendency – be brought back to the plane of lived reality.

Pope Francis has been absolutely emphatic with regard to the spiritual mandate of relationality, defining its necessary role in the attainment of holiness:

The human person grows more, matures more and is sanctified more to the extent that he or she enters into relationships, going out from themselves to live in communion with God, with others and with all creatures. In this way, they make their own that trinitarian dynamism which God imprinted in them when they were created. Everything is interconnected, and this invites us to develop a spirituality of that global solidarity which flows from the mystery of the Trinity.

In parallel with the Holy Father’s insight, it is worth considering how Karl Rahner writes that, in death, the soul becomes not acosmic but “all-cosmic” (as the English edition of Ratzinger’s Eschatology translates the concept in a brief mention). Rahner educes from Thomistic theology itself that the soul is intrinsically oriented to the cosmos in a way which can be fully actualized only after having been released from the limitations of mortal existence. This liberation is often conflated with an imagined flight into a monadic immateriality, abstracted from and indifferent to all non-divine others (“God TV,” as Paul calls it); Rahner rebuts this:

This conception prevails because instinctively or, to speak more precisely, under the persistent influence of a Neoplatonic mentality, we tend to assume that the appearance of the soul before God, which, as faith teaches, takes place at death, is a contrary concept to the soul’s belonging to the world, as though a lack of relation to matter and nearness to God must increase in direct ratio.

To borrow from the todo y nada of St. John of the Cross, in the negation that is death, the sanctified soul truly has come to possess everything. The world belongs to it, as much as it belongs to the world; its orientation to the world is intensified. As Rahner asks, would not the separation of soul from body,

the termination of its relation to the body by which it maintains and forms the latter’s structure and delimits it from the whole of the world, rather imply that it enters into some deeper, more comprehensive openness in which this pancosmic relation to the world is more fully realized?

I think that this affords an approach, not only to the complexities related to physical presence that Paul was discussing above, but also to a whole range of problems unique to spatial extension, and to the ultimate overcoming of spatial extension with all its limitations. Pneumatization does not occur via a sloughing off of creation – one’s own body firstly and then everything else with it – but with an embracing of and an entering into creation vigorous, and humble, enough to include embracing even the contradiction of bodily corruption.

Just so, there is a fully legitimate impetus toward liberation from the constraints of space, towards a heightening of the global solidarity which flows from the Trinity itself. Yet it stands to reason by extrapolation that the call is to become not aspatial but all-spatial; this we can do only in the humility of concrete service according to human scale, and within the model of subsidiarity – by entering into locality (part and parcel of physicality) more deeply and with ever greater commitment. The patron of missions is none other than St. Thérèse of Lisieux, who never left her monastic enclosure.

And yet “pan-locationality” itself features as a mark of sacred space – a correlate, as I see it, of God’s omnipotence. It is undoubtedly a Christian innovation when the Samaritan woman at the well at Sychar is told of the worship which is to transcend the boundaries of the temples of Gerizim or even of Jerusalem.

A valuable prism for this understanding is Catholic eucharistic theology. Even for unbelievers, and certainly for Enlightenment thinkers like Leibniz and Descartes, who engaged with it thematically, this eucharistic theology has left its imprint on the human imagination, expanding our sense of the possible – particularly valuable in our time, in which technological change has been so rapid.

Consider that, for Thomas, “Christ’s body is not in this sacrament as in a place…” This is affirmed in the Roman Catechism, and reaffirmed in Mysterium Fidei explicitly by St. Paul VI. (Despite this, one can find Roman Catholic theologians online boasting their credentials, insisting in perfervid frenzies of all-caps that the Eucharistic presence of Christ is a local one.)

Thomas himself writes:

Christ's body is in this sacrament not after the proper manner of dimensive quantity, but rather after the manner of substance. But every body occupying a place is in the place according to the manner of dimensive quantity, namely, inasmuch as it is commensurate with the place according to its dimensive quantity.

In other words, Christ’s body does not fill the sacred host physically. The host is neither made out of Christ’s body, nor is he somehow physically inside it. The host of bread has, without alteration of its accidents, dimensions, or any of its physical properties, become the body of Christ, because it is a new and different substance – because Christ’s substance has appropriated what once was bread along with all its accidents. Hence, transubstantiation.

Thomas goes on:

Hence it remains that Christ's body is not in this sacrament as in a place, but after the manner of substance, that is to say, in that way in which substance is contained by dimensions; because the substance of Christ's body succeeds the substance of bread in this sacrament: hence as the substance of bread was not locally under its dimensions, but after the manner of substance, so neither is the substance of Christ's body.

The bread being bread was not dependent on the amount or location of space that it occupied, but on its substantial character as bread. Christ, for his part, does not physically displace the bread in space, but succeeds (one might even say supersedes) it on the level of substance.

He concludes:

Nevertheless the substance of Christ's body is not the subject of those dimensions, as was the substance of the bread: and therefore the substance of the bread was there locally by reason of its dimensions, because it was compared with that place through the medium of its own dimensions; but the substance of Christ's body is compared with that place through the medium of foreign dimensions, so that, on the contrary, the proper dimensions of Christ's body are compared with that place through the medium of substance; which is contrary to the notion of a located body.

In other words, the bread of the host, alongside its substantial character as bread, was exactly this much bread, in exactly this and only this place. The Eucharistic Christ is neither “this much Christ” (an absurdity) nor in any way in this place, much less only in this place.

So how is Christ present in the Eucharist? Let’s turn to Thomas once again, this time, as it happens, on the angels, where the metaphysics is a little more transparent:

For a body is in a place in so far as it is contained under the place, and is commensurate with the place… But an angel is not in a place as commensurate and contained, but rather as containing it.

How much more so is the King of the Universe neither contained under, nor commensurate with, place. Rather, he is the encompassing, pan-spatial Temple of the heavenly city which obviates the specificity of locale. This glory was effected in the historical/supra-historical moment of obedience to the will of the Father, prostrate on a very small and specific plot of dust.

Ratzinger encourages us to see that the overcoming of space, as of all other limitation, is not in itself hubristic, but a necessary part of the Christian mission: “The empirical conditions of life in this world are still in force, but they have been burst open, and must be more and more burst open, in preparation for the final fulfillment already inaugurated in Christ.” This expansion of the capacities of the “not yet” in which we find ourselves must happen with Christ and according to his way, that is, by and in sacrifice. Going back to the Rahner, technology enables not the pan-iteration of our selves, but the amplification of our relationality, which can and should include receptivity, not simply dominance – or, to put it another way, the strengthening of our bondedness to the world, and of the world to us.

For Ratzinger, Christ’s love in the Passion is in “no way just a spiritual occurrence. It is a spiritual act that takes up the bodily into itself, that embraces the whole man.” That spiritual act, if I may speculate, informs body such that (with Thomas) extension – the indispensable mark of corporeality itself – is modally verified precisely as substance. The Eucharistic body is related to cosmos as the individual soul is to the body – as possessive yet inextricable, and animative; that is, as substance, “whose nature is for the whole to be in the whole, and the whole in every part” (ST III, 76, 4): hence, the total overcoming of space – utterly unique to be sure, but also prophetic of an altogether new relationship to space for humanity. All things are called (according to St. John Paul II, as I have mentioned more than a few times on this Substack) to the realization of their own eucharistic potential.

Paul:

I want to conclude with a couple more brief anecdotes.

Of course, joining a livestream of the Mass is not Mass attendance, but that does not preclude significant graces, as we found during the pandemic. The full range of livestream times and our unimpeachable credentials as serious night owls led us to the 7 p.m. (10 p.m. for us) Mass celebrated daily by the Most Rev. Gary Gordon, ordinary of the Diocese of Victoria in British Columbia in Canada. Bishop Gary was (and doubtless is) wise, kind, quirky, and unabashedly himself, as we found daily online and in our one personal communication with him. I mention Bishop Gary specifically inasmuch as his exceptional openness and freedom from any affectation made the communion of the Body of Christ unusually transparent. It is a credit to his ministry.

After a full year of praying the complete Divine Office coenobitically, we conceived the idea of a liturgical YouTube, to share our prayer of the Hours and to support the prayer of others. Our initial attempts were thwarted; we felt called to pray with the Eucharist, and the space in which we prayed with the Eucharist was consistently too loud for recording. On the Memorial of St. Clare, patroness of media, we happened into an accidentally unlocked church into which we had never before set foot. That church has become not only our recording space, but our parish, a community into which we have become truly integrated. To any of you reading who have been part of this integration and welcome, we are most grateful.

I leave you with these anecdotes inasmuch as the overcoming of space is ultimately a spiritual, rather than technological quest, however much material conditions may influence its course. It is not in controversies and factions, but in the daily work of presence and service, committed to where we stand, yet reaching out to the ends of the earth – the work that Blessed Carlo exercised with such great perfection in his short life, that Bishop Gary brought to the Catholics of Victoria and was passed on to us – that the realization of the eucharistic potential which St. John Paul preached and which Val has cited so often, may draw ever nearer.

All of this remains work in progress. As we have found in our discussions developing this post, there is so much material and so much potential here. We will be returning to these ideas, once we complete the two remaining entries on True Belief, False Mysticism and Reading the Cosmos.