The Challenge of a Post‐Digital Age

For more than 500 years our modern world has been driven by an uncritical admiration of machines. In the case of doubt, we do not treat machines as servants, but subordinate our intellectual intuition to the clear cut, digital rationality of algorithms, calculators, and robots. Even in our ethical judgement, or in academic assessment procedures, we trust uncritically in the mechanical application of anonymised schemata and rules. We consider the allegedly “unbiased” selection of decontextualised, identically repeatable decision‐making procedures as “objective” and “fair”, and comply with the rules, although every civilised person knows intuitively that it is not only impolite, but also unjust to subject everyone to the same schemata, laws, or proceedings.Footnote ¹

The idolatrous attachment to measurable or probabilistic procedures that are supposed to be “objective” is a general feature of liberal societies, no matter whether we look at right or left‐wing representatives of this tradition. However, in classical modernity the inauthentic and contemptuous character of this attachment was paradoxically counterbalanced by an iconoclastic attitude that aimed at subverting the fetishising of totalising rationalisations.Footnote ² Revolutionaries and artists were supposed to preserve our sense of dignity. Hence, our thinking oscillated between the “avant‐garde” celebration of political revolutions, artistic subversions, philosophical demystifications, and “disruptive” economical innovations on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the conviction that the social spaces that we inhabit need to be subjected to scientific strategies of bureaucratic control, surveillance, quality assessment, academic rankings, risk assurance, etc.Footnote ³ As “enlightened autonomous subjects” we are supposed to believe in iconoclastic ruptures, yet in our everyday life we are “preoccupied with a struggle against life, its goal being to completely stifle it with a system of schemas.”Footnote ⁴

The genealogy of our iconoclastic mind‐set leads us back to the Age of Reform, although the position of the reformers was not univocal from the outset. Luther, for example, did not support the iconoclastic attitude of Calvin and Zwingli, although he shared the “grapholatic”Footnote ⁵ inclination to focus on the written word at the cost of spiritual engagement with icons and other non‐linguistic media. However, already two generations later Francis Bacon extended the suspicion of idolatry to every common‐sense‐based attachment of the human mind.Footnote ⁶

This was the starting‐point of an unprecedented series of iconoclastic revolutions. As noticed by Edmund Burke in discussing the French revolution, the suspicion of idolatry exposed everything to the “hammer” of enlightened reasoning.Footnote ⁷ Ultimately, only the emerging, modern concept of liberty and subjective autonomy remained untouched. Yet, this is not surprising, given that the modern concept of liberty is only defined ex negativo as the absence of attachments, whatever they might be.Footnote ⁸

The modern “subject” is a sublime mystery, since it is ultimately meaningless and pointless. However, this does not mean that it is immune from idolatry. In hindsight we might rather follow James Simpson's historical conclusion, that it represents a paradoxical type of idolatry: the obsessive attachment to the desire to be free from any attachment, which has found its most condensed expression in the veneration of “statues of liberty” that disguise their status as mesmerising idols, for example, by offering explanatory inscriptions.Footnote ⁹

It is easier to see through this paradox today, since we have already entered the stage of the “owl of Minerva” that (to paraphrase Hegel)Footnote ¹⁰ spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk. The sublime mystery of negative freedom has lost its power to unite people under the banner of an irreversible history of freedom and progress. As the sociologist Bruno Latour noticed already in 2004, the “critical spirit” of the Enlightenment tradition has “run out of steam”:Footnote ¹¹ While the obsession with revolutionary breaks and deconstructive acts of subversion has been appropriated by Islamist and populist movements, the democratic traditions of liberalism have taken refuge in governmental strategies of surveillance and control. The vision of a democratic state of law, that celebrates the dignity of man, has become replaced by the commitment to creating a security state.Footnote ¹²

This new development becomes particularly evident in the increasingly powerful transhumanist movements of our present time: in the project, deadly serious in political, economic and technological terms, to replace the supposedly fallible and irrational intelligence of human minds by the allegedly more optimal, “artificial intelligence” of robot‐driven technologies, artificial agents, machine‐learning algorithms, etc.Footnote ¹³ We might consider this techno‐fascist movement as an illegitimate offshoot of the modern history of progress. However, the ideology of transhumanism is not only completely consistent with the liberal commitment to defend the achievements of “negative freedom”.Footnote ¹⁴ It also confirms the century‐long western prioritisation of “digital”Footnote ¹⁵, “left‐hemisphere based”Footnote ¹⁶ types of intelligence. Despite romantic attempts to move against the grain, the Enlightenment tradition always failed to cultivate “analogical” types of cognition, such as emotional intelligence and practical wisdom (phronesis).

This is the first challenge that we have to face when we try to read the signs of our time: we have to develop a “post‐digital” rationality. In the “digital age” we had to cope with the emergence of social and economic inequalities caused by unequal access to (or unequal familiarity with) electronic information and communication technologies.Footnote ¹⁷ In our present time, a new divide is about to emerge, one caused by a lack of the practical, ethical, emotional, and spiritual skills to implement digital technologies in our analogical life‐world. Poorly designed technologies encourage the economic exploitation of our attention, undermine our cognitive self‐confidence and creativity, and pollute our gift to be attuned to our never fully penetrable social and natural environment. Hence, a new divide emerges between those who are able to focus and direct their attention, and those who leave this task to the invisible hand of the market, globalised rankings, soft‐ware agents, or the algorithms of the “church of google.”Footnote ¹⁸

In my view this challenge requires us to overcome the post‐Reformation fetishising of “negative freedom”, based on a retrieval of the premodern tradition of analogical reasoning that was governed by the concerted striving to live a “eudemonic” life. However, a related, second challenge requires us to retrieve the premodern tradition: we need to rethink the modern assumption that artefacts are merely tools, or beautiful objects of the purposeless free play of our cognitive faculties.Footnote ¹⁹ In genealogical terms this conviction is the rationalistic flipside of the modern war against magic or fetishist attachments: we have lost the capacity to distinguish between “good” and “bad” magic, because we think there is no magic.

In his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man of 1486, Pico della Mirandola was still able to proclaim that magic can provide the best proof of the Christian belief in the divinity of Christ. Pico was still convinced that it is possible to distinguish between things that are benign (“white magic”) and things that have malicious influence (“black magic”) on our attempts to transform our life for the better.Footnote ²⁰ This earlier assessment of the power of things was no longer compatible with the mainstream thinking of the post‐reformation tradition. After all, the “stripping of the altars”Footnote ²¹ and the demolition of sacred objects had the pious purpose of demonstrating that all power must be reserved to God alone. If no finite thing has the legitimate power to effect pious actions, then every “chalice” has to be turned into a “cup” and every “altar” into a “table”Footnote ²² – as the heading of a famous engraving of the 17^th century expressed it.Footnote ²³

Subsequently the vanguard of western culture has made every effort to convince its followers that physical objects have no power over educated, autonomous subjects. Yet, seen from the viewpoint of contemporary philosophies of technology, this doctrine was bound to fail from the beginning. We are “trans‐organic social animals”Footnote ²⁴ who are by nature inclined to transform our lives based on the intelligent use of artistic fictions and social conventions. This means that our social and intellectual lives are always already shaped by artifices, fictions and tools that have a “magic life” of their own: be it that this “magic life” affords a life that we appreciate, or that it nudges us into a life that we abhor.

Already in the late nineteenth‐century thinkers such as Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud realised that we have never been autonomous subjects; and the neo‐Marxist tradition of the twentieth‐century followed this path.Footnote ²⁵ Yet, the “critical” thinkers of this time were nevertheless committed to defend the utopic vision of a “counterfactual” realm of negative freedom. Only maverick Catholics like Marshall McLuhan developed a more realistic assessment of the modern “history of progress”.Footnote ²⁶

This situation has changed in the twenty‐first‐century, as becomes evident if we recall an event that caused perhaps the most rapid shift in our everyday habits since the invention of the printing‐machine. In 2007 Apple founder Steve Jobs introduced a telephone that “changed everything”.Footnote ²⁷ Jobs’ iPhone started to push competing mobile phone companies like Nokia out of the market, not because it was better designed to meet the demand for new devices, or because it was superior in terms of efficiency. In fact, the first iPhone was fragile, its battery life was poor, and its technical qualities modest. Yet it disrupted the mobile phone market because it appealed to our synesthetic intuitions – using for the first time multi‐touch technology in a mainstream device.

Jobs presented this device as a quasi‐sacramental object that can be simultaneously seen, touched and heard (“You can just touch your music! It's so cool!”).Footnote ²⁸ When he introduced its music function, which had previously been included in a separate device (the iPod), he staged the synesthetic features of his new device by touching with his fingers (projected on a screen by an additional camera) the song With A Little Help From My Friends from the Beatles Album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Hence, it might be no accident that the era of smiling multi‐touch devices that appeal to our synesthetic ability to hear what we can see and touch started on the 9 January 2007 with the touching voice of the young Ringo Starr: “Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song….”Footnote ²⁹

This moment gave rise to an era in which almost every digitally alphabetised western person who had forgotten her mobile phone felt like a nineteenth‐century man who had forgotten his trousers.Footnote ³⁰ What has happened? Have we suddenly turned into superstitious idolaters?

Sacramentality, Technology and Idolatry

At this point I will end my attempt to read the signs of our time, in order to provide in the second part of this essay a short summary of my research on the distinction between icons, and idols or simulacra.Footnote ³¹

In phenomenological terms, the example of Steve Jobs’ iPhone is illuminating, because it exemplifies a basic feature of sacramental objects: sacramental objects are not reducible to mere tools that are “ready to hand”. As with a human body, they have a unique mode of presence that affects our perceptive and cognitive attitudes, as well as our desires and aims. Empirical research on how we handle proximate and distal objects moves along similar lines when it indicates that the mere presence of my smartphone can produce decrements in high level cognitive functions, even if my phone is hidden in my pocket and my attention successfully focused on something else.Footnote ³²

As indicated, the most striking example of such modes of invisible presence is a human body. Simone Weil draws our attention to this phenomenon when she points out that we move differently, if we step aside for a passer‐by on the road than if we step aside to avoid a billboard – for the same reason that “we get up, walk about, sit down again quite differently” when we are alone in our rooms.Footnote ³³

This phenomenon is not only a characteristic feature of our attitude toward human bodies. It also characterizes, albeit to a lesser extent, our attitude towards non‐human bodies, such as animals and trees. To use an example of Thomas Nagel: “it would be callous and objectionable to cut down a great old tree just for the fun of trying out one's new chain saw.”Footnote ³⁴ Why would it? Because my attitude towards a tree differs from my attitude towards a chunk of timber: a tree has the character of a symbolically charged entity that shapes my perceptions and cognitions, and makes me interact in a responsive way. Symbolically charged entities have the power to “evoke” responsive actions and cognitions, because they affect our synesthetic sensibilities. I am able to “hear” and “touch” what I see, for example when I am “touched” by a face that “speaks”, even if I look into a speechless face from the distance.

This gift can be the foundation of unique skills. Experiments with blindfolded people show, for example, that we are able to “see” invisible trees, or to play catch in an invisible forest, using sound, smell and touch as a mode of vision.Footnote ³⁵ However, our capacity to cultivate this skill has to rely on pre‐reflexive intuitions. Blindfolded people who tend to adopt a detached, self‐conscious or hyper‐reflexive attitude when they feel insecure are incapable of playing catch under invisible trees. What is the ontological status of this “synesthetic sense”?

As modern Kantian or Utilitarian subjects, we are inclined to argue that our ability to see invisible trees or speaking faces is of no more than aesthetic significance. But this is an analytic fallacy. Rowan Williams recalls an observation of Ludwig Wittgenstein that clarifies this point: everyone who is able to look sincerely into a human face knows that the expressive dimensions of perceptible entities are not accidental to their existence.Footnote ³⁶ A smile or a frown that speaks to us is not an accidental feature of a face; it is only intelligible as the shape of a real face. If I am looking into the face of a beloved person, I really see what it is expressing. I do not look metaphorically into the eyes of my wife – its expressive dimensions are “really present.”

It is, of course, possible to reduce the perception of a human face or body to the perception of an inanimate object in the “outer world”: The ophthalmologist who investigates the eye of his patient perceives nothing but the “empirical” features of a dead eye; the objectifying gaze of a gynaecologist sees nothing but the genitals of a corpse – after all modern physicians are trained to perceive human bodies as corpses.Footnote ³⁷ But this perceptive attitude, useful in delimited circumstances, is the result of an artificial training programme; it is not consistent with our natural disposition as intelligent, rational animals.

In contrast to modern societies, pre‐modern civilizations did not consider unresponsive habits as desirable or virtuous. The modern fetishising of “fairness” and “objectivity” had not yet distorted their minds. For this reason, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Nicholas of Cusa took it for granted that our synesthetic sensibility plays an indispensable role in our scientific and everyday perception.Footnote ³⁸ Following Aristotle, they called it sensus communis Footnote ³⁹ and interpreted it as an interior dimension of touch: if we want to keep in touch with the real world we inhabit, we have to pay attention to the sensus communis as a quasi‐tactile “sixth sense” that represents the foundation of our five specialized senses, and governs their pre‐conceptual harmonisation.Footnote ⁴⁰

In phenomenological terms, we might interpret this synesthetic “sense of touch” as a musical sense of self‐attunement: The sensus communis mediates between our five specialized senses, and discloses similarities between their characteristic features. Yet it needs to be accompanied by a sense of trust with regard to our environment. My ability to be “touched” by “speaking” faces is, for example, always intertwined with my ability to share my perceptions with other people. The cultivation of our intra‐sensual self‐attunement presupposes a kind of “musical attunement” with our social environment – there is no sensus communis without a healthy measure of common sense. It is no accident that the English expression common sense derives from the Latin sensus communis. The two meanings of this technical term have been intertwined since Aristotle.Footnote ⁴¹

Steve Jobs’ iPhone exemplifies the significance of this common‐sensical dimension of human perception for our engagement with technological devices. However, as David Jones has pointed out in his ground‐breaking essay Art and Sacramentality,Footnote ⁴² it was already possible to analyse this phenomenon in 1959. Jones anticipated the genius of Steve Jobs when he discovered the paradigm case of a sacramental object (as Jobs did two generations later)Footnote ⁴³ on the inner side of a motor‐car – in the well‐proportioned integrity and splendour of a diesel engine.

As children of the industrial age, we are inclined to consider a diesel engine as a neutral means to an external end. However, despite its character as a tool, an engine cannot but display simultaneously the qualities of an entity that has a unique integrity. As Jones argues, it displays the three basic features of the Thomist concept of beauty, integritas, proportio et splendor, and “gives itself to the observer in an ‘overflow’ of presence”Footnote ⁴⁴ – at least as long as it is well and honestly made, and not the upshot of industrialised mediocrity.Footnote ⁴⁵ We might encounter technical or artificial creations that display only the ‘appearance’ of beauty in the sense of Kant and Nietzsche. But in this case our assessment indicates that they are actually ‘nothing’ – the work of botched dilettantes.

This consideration leads us to the critical point of my short introduction to the phenomenology of sacramental objects: how do we distinguish between sacramental objects on the one hand, and idols or simulacra on the other?

David Jones's painting Vexilla Regis Footnote ⁴⁶ might provide us with an illustration of this difference.Footnote ⁴⁷ The most characteristic feature of this painting is that it cannot be captured by an autonomous viewer in a single glance. Like in a Byzantine icon, we have to read this painted world‐tree if we want to succeed in discovering its sacramental dimensions.Footnote ⁴⁸

This scriptural feature of Jones's painting is reminiscent of one of the etymological roots of the Latin word religio, re‐legere, which can be traced back to Cicero: religious people are people who “choose” and “select caringly” (relegere, diligere), “bring together” and “elect” (eligere), in order to “gather” and “understand” something (intellegere).Footnote ⁴⁹

In accordance with this principle, sacramental objects are always embedded in an open network of narratives and social interactions. This distinguishes them from simulacra such as Dr Ford's robots in the science fiction thriller Westworld. The stories that charge sacramental objects with meaning are never enclosed in the tidied‐up narratives of artificially created fantasy worlds; they are always part of the real world that we inhabit, a world in which people gather together in order to celebrate and share the unpredictable sorrows and joys of their life. In contrast to the made‐up narratives of entertainers, which are designed as means to extrinsic ends, it is never possible to determine the beginning and the end of the stories that contextualise sacramental objects.

We might call this the de‐centring feature of sacramental objects. According to Jones, this feature must be counterbalanced by a re‐centering feature that binds the multidimensionality of sacramental objects back to a unique centre. This holistic feature of sacramental objects is consistent with Lactantius's (AD 250–325) second etymology of the word religion as re‐ligare: religious practices recall the bond of piety through which God binds (ligare) man to himself.Footnote ⁵⁰

The task of binding complex structures back to a principle of wholeness and simplicity cannot be achieved by trial‐and‐error experiments, or rational calculations alone. It requires wise and prudent persons, who have an intuition of goals and ends. This is the reason why we cannot leave the task of finding order in our world to software agents or the (per definition selective) algorithms of self‐learning machines. Sapientis est ordinare:Footnote ⁵¹ The wise person is like an artist who is able to see a meaningful order where ignorant people perceive nothing but chaos, and computers nothing but more or less randomly selected patterns (however stable they might be in probabilistic terms). This difference has a very simple reason: the actions of wise persons are governed by acts of ‘re‐ligare’ – the intellectual desire for harmony that has the power to make an infinite potential of simplicity and beauty concrete and visible. We have to “read” the world‐tree of Jones's painting while it is “being “re‐lit” by the non‐local but utterly concrete presence of the coming of the Word of God.”Footnote ⁵²

The third and last characteristic feature of sacramental objects sheds light on the concept of God: sacramental objects are transforming – they can take us by surprise and teach us to see the world with new eyes. This distinguishes sacramental objects like an icon from a simulacrum “that reflects back only what is projected onto it — like the dazzling fetish of money”.Footnote ⁵³ Sacramental objects have the power to challenge the schemata that govern our understanding of the world. For this reason, Moses's encounter with the non‐consuming fire of the thorn bush at the “mountain of God” (Exodus 3:1) was a decisive turning point in the history of practices of relegere and religare: It introduced the “meaning of meaning” into the religions of the past and directed our attention to a sacramental reality that has the power to transform because its being is not exhausted by the spatio‐temporal dimensions of the universe that shapes our everyday thought and behavioural patterns. According to Jones, this sacramental reality has assumed its ultimate sacramental shape in the Lord's Supper: The “real presence” of the body of Christ in the Eucharist marks the point where the order of “signs” (signum) coincides, under the species of a “real thing” (res), with the inexhaustible fullness of being itself (Exodus 3:14).

Since it is not my intention here to discuss the Eucharistic theology of Thomas Aquinas, I will end my introduction to the phenomenology of sacramental objects at this point in order to recapitulate its significance for the technological revolutions of our present era.

Jobs’ iPhone triggered, what economists call the “value revolution” of ICT‐technology, because it introduced tools that incorporate values:Footnote ⁵⁴ A smart phone has the character of a symbolically charged reality that motivates and inspires responsive actions, and controls our everyday habits, for better or worse. The challenge of this revolution is that it requires us to discern the spirits. We have to learn to distinguish idolatrous objects that keep us trapped in artificially created fantasy worlds and confound our attunement with the analogical world that we inhabit from symbolically charged objects that are consistent with our natural desire to transform our life for the better.

The pre‐modern tradition had good reasons to consider our engagement with symbolically saturated objects as an essential feature of our everyday life. For this reason sacramental practices played such an important role in pre‐modern cultures. The engagement with sacramental objects and actions strengthened their ability to discern things that help us to actualise our potentials to be truly human from things that weaken this ability. By contrast, our modern, left‐brain‐dominated, analytic mind‐set supports a Kantian style of reasoning, which dissipates the sacramental character of the world that we inhabit.

Martin Luther and the Genealogy of our Modern Mindset

In the last part of my essay, I want to focus on the genealogy of this anti‐realistic, modern mind‐set; and this leads me back to Luther and the Age of Reform. I have referred to Immanuel Kant above, because the post‐Kantian tradition plays a major role in German narratives about the significance of the revolution of October 1517. According to this narrative, the name “Luther” marks the turning point of an historical development that culminates in such thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and the dialectical theology of the twentieth‐century.

Leading German Luther‐scholars, such as Oswald Bayer, have rejected this reading, arguing that Luther was much more consonant with Immanuel Kant's critic Johann Georg Hamann.Footnote ⁵⁵ This objection did not change the mainstream interpretation in Germany. However, Bayer's counter‐movement has more recently received indirect support from new readings of Luther that question the dominance of German scholarship and share Bayer's criticism of Kantian readings.Footnote ⁵⁶

In Lutheran terms this new development is somewhat ironic: it seems to be possible to rescue Luther out of the stream of naïve Enlightenment narratives about the history of progress. Yet, if such attempts turn out to be successful, he will lose his reputation as the original ground‐breaker of our modern world‐view. Against this background, the central question of the last part of my essay might be put as follows: where else should we locate the origins of our modern world‐view, if it did not originate in Luther's legendary posting of the 95 theses?

The most recent research on long term developments confirms the suspicion that our modern world‐view is not the upshot of some unique historical upheaval, but of a long series of reforms that can be traced back up to the Gregorian Reform of the eleventh‐century. As I know from my own research on Nicholas of Cusa, the movements that led to the Reformation were anything but unique; the entire Middle Ages were a constant effort to seek reform.Footnote ⁵⁷

This does not mean that late medieval reformers agreed about the path to the future. Cusa, for example, built on Dionysius the Areopagite and the tradition of Albert the Great, which deviated significantly form the voluntarist scholastic mainstream of his time. In contrast to Cusa, the later tradition weakened the participatory relationship between God and his creation, and undermined the unity of the philosophical desire for wisdom and the religious desire for salvation.Footnote ⁵⁸ Religio was no longer concerned with the wise ordering of things to their principle of wholeness and simplicity. Rather, it was turned into a matter of good will: our relationship with God is no longer mediated by the theophanic relationship between God and his creation and the desire for a harmoniously ordered life, but by the inscrutable power of a divine lawgiver.

This voluntarist concept of mediation encouraged a transactional approach to salvation: if you stick sincerely to the rules, the divine lawgiver will reward you in return. Luther's famous attacks against the trade in indulgences deconstructed this transactional logic. More significant in the long term, however, is the fact that the focus on divine commands encouraged, however unintentionally, a secular attitude towards ethical and political affairs. Charles Taylor has drawn our attention to this phenomenon, when he points out that the pre‐sixteenth‐century reformers tended to focus exclusively on matters of discipline and morals at the cost of the cultivation of sacramental practices, rituals, and the festive dimensions of popular piety.Footnote ⁵⁹

The reforms of Luther and Calvin can be interpreted as a counter‐reaction against this moralistic reductionism. Yet their counter‐reaction went along with a pious anti‐sacramental attitude that had a fatal long‐term effect.Footnote ⁶⁰ Salvation was no longer a matter of re‐forming or reshaping our life, but “a matter of faith in the mercy of God who is alone righteous”.Footnote ⁶¹ Hence, instead of reversing the unintended trend towards secularisation, the reformers replaced the century‐long effort for reform by a quietist attitude. This was fatal, not only because it accelerated the trend to reduce “common‐sensebased” everyday practices to a matter of “disenchanted” pragmatic convenience; the focus on “faith alone” also reinforced the authoritarian attitude that underpinned the voluntarist obsession with an inscrutable lawgiver.

To be sure, reformers like Luther were neither indifferent quietists, nor uncritical followers of the Scotist or nominalist schools of the late Middle Ages.Footnote ⁶² Yet, in genealogical terms it is hard to deny that Luther's “metaphysical undernourishment”Footnote ⁶³ encouraged fideist tendencies that were, advertently or not, conveniently allied with the nominalist and authoritarian mindset of his time.Footnote ⁶⁴

This thesis becomes particularly evident in terms of the late‐medieval trend to replace the engagement with sacramental practices by the engagement with authoritative “master signifiers” like the Bible or the eucharistic host. As far as I can see, Michel de Certeau was the first thinker to investigate this long‐term trend systematically – particularly in his magnum opus La Fable Mystique. De Certeau builds in this monograph on de Lubac's research on the spiritual exegesis of the Middle Ages and summarizes the outcome of this research as follows: “Before the ‘modern’ period, that is, until the sixteenth or seventeenth century, this writing [Holy Scripture] speaks. The sacred text is a voice, it teaches…it is the advent of a “meaning” (un “vouloir‐dire”) on the part of God who expects the reader (in reality the listener) to have a ‘desire to hear and understand’ (un ‘vouloir‐entendre’) on which access to truth depends.’”Footnote ⁶⁵

The critical point of this quotation is related to de Lubac's observation that the practice of “reading” the Holy Scriptures had increasingly lost its embedding in common‐sense‐based oral traditions, in the wake of a process that started in the twelfth‐century and culminated in the Reformation.Footnote ⁶⁶ Media theorists like Marshall McLuhan have made a similar observation, when they drew attention to the fact that the reading of scripture became increasingly decontextualized.Footnote ⁶⁷ How, therefore, was scripture read before?

The pre‐modern reading practice might be exemplified by illuminated manuscripts such as the Book of Kells (800) or the Luttrell Psalter (1325‐35).Footnote ⁶⁸ Nowadays we may perceive the subtle design of illuminated manuscripts as pure decoration. However, the painstaking labour devoted to illustrating and glossing books was part of a sublime collective mnemotechnics. Even the great scholastic Summae of the high Middle Ages were not perceived as systematised deposits of knowledge. Rather the content of these books was perceived as a manuductio, to be learned by heart as a guide that enables us to read the signs of a world that is inherently charged with meaning.

This being the case, it was impossible to isolate the usage of scripture from shared oral reading practices. The Bible had to be illuminated, glossed, and liturgically performed in accordance with the yearly cycles, and the vagaries of history, and be remembered again and again through the common exercise of a liturgical imagination that was informed by the great masters of the spiritual and allegorical reading of scripture. Imaginative, textual and performative practices charged them with significance and made them speak anew.

When the reformed, iconoclastic tradition rejected the imaginative, multi‐sensual contextualisation of medieval reading practices in favour of the sola scriptura principle, it claimed to fulfil the biblical ban on images. But in reality it only enforced the privatisation of our spiritual imagination. This explains why scripture became mute after the early modern break: it no longer spoke because it no longer affected our sensus communis. The collective re‐narration of the Holy Scriptures in varying multi‐sensual contexts was no longer perceived as a matter of necessity. Instead, the faithful exercise of our spiritual imagination turned more and more into a private matter.

At the same time, the subjectification of common sense‐based reading practices was accompanied by a fetishising of its textual counterpart. Thanks to Gutenberg's “amazing printing press”, “the Bible” began to appear as a commodity – a clearly definable signifier of authoritative significance that could be reproduced on a large scale, but one that no longer spoke or provoked unpredictable spiritual movements on the level of our common‐sense‐based, collective imagination.Footnote ⁶⁹

To cut a long story short, “the Bible” turned in to a prototypical simulacrum. That is, the Holy Scriptures of the past were no longer passed down as part of an ongoing, orally recollected story that needed to be performed and re‐narrated in the suspended time of a public liturgy. Bound together in discrete book editions, “the Bible” appeared as a reproducible and locatable entity while its hitherto shared mystery became disseminated into subjective private imaginations that neutralized each other.

The leading exponents of this fetishising of “the Bible” were the progeny of reformed traditions, yet the more reactive post‐Tridentine Catholic tradition did not resist this epochal shift. Certainly, the Counter‐Reformation insisted on reading the Bible in the context of a broader tradition. But it viewed this tradition as a depositum fidei, a collection of propositions that was comparable to a modern book or storage device, and tended to turn images and symbols into pedagogical or propagandistic tools.Footnote ⁷⁰ Hence, although the duo of scripture and tradition extended the scope of the sacred text, the “revealed truth” of the Catholic tradition had as little impact on the common‐sense‐based collective imagination of modern societies as the privatized imaginative free‐play of the reformed milieu.

In the second chapter of La fable mystique, de Certeau investigates the beginnings of this epochal break starting with a pictorial example: Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Delights (1500).Footnote ⁷¹ Ambitious both in form and content, Bosch's masterpiece thwarts every effort to uncover a stable relation between imaginations and their meaning. By provoking endless possible interpretations, it exemplifies the early modern subjectification of our perceptual and imaginative skills. Overwhelmed by a radically decentred, unlimited range of possibilities, the viewer's ability to respond to what he sees becomes muted.

This disturbing experience did not befall the Age of Reform unprepared. The modern inflation of the imago can be traced back to the nominalist tradition in which every meaning was conceived as an arbitrary abstraction that is no longer rooted in the contemplation of the sacramental qualities of real things, or in the liturgical commemoration of the history of salvation. Bosch's triptych marks a turning point only in so far as it indicates that this destabilisation is no longer perceived as a fate, but turned into something that we can deliberately bring about.

Against this background it is hardly deniable that the reforms of the sixteenth‐century were at least partly infected by the nominalist trends of the late Middle Ages. If we want to assess the impact of the authoritarian flipside of this trend, we have to recall a second aspect of de Certeau's genealogical account of our modern mindset that is of equal significance. De Certeau builds at this point on another ground‐breaking work of de Lubac, his monograph on the Eucharist in the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁷²

According to De Certeau's (not completely unproblematic)Footnote ⁷³ reading of de Lubac's monograph, the most fundamental shift in the medieval understanding of the Eucharist can be traced back (again) to the middle of the twelfth‐century. This shift was related to an inversion of the semantic relation between two expressions: “mystical body” and “true body”. From a certain point onwards corpus Christi mysticum (mystical body) no longer designated the Eucharist but the church as “body of Christ”; and inversely corpus verum (true body) no longer designated the church but the sacramental body of the host.

After this shift, the grammar of Christian learning became increasingly focused on the authoritative presence of a visible, positively objectifiable “master signifier”. This is most evident in the post‐Tridentine, scholastic language‐use of the Catholic tradition, which focused on the doctrine of “real presence” at the cost of the apophatic roots of Aquinas’ concept of “transubstantiation”. Aquinas did not use the expression “real presence”. But even if he had, he would have used it in a way that is closer to the linguistic usage of David Jones than to that of the sixteenth‐century, which is consonant with the Franciscan tradition. In that tradition, the technical term “real” was increasingly interpreted as the signifier of a discrete entity (res) – as if the transubstantiated body of the host was a container for Christ's “real body”, and not the radiating focus of a non‐localisable theophanic mode of presence.Footnote ⁷⁴

Hence, it might be argued that the post‐Tridentine tradition turned the Eucharist into a simulacrum – in accordance with the Protestant polemic of this time. However, as de Certeau points out, the obsession with objectifiable fetishes was not confined to the Catholic construct of the “real presence” of Christ. After all, “the Bible” was increasingly perceived as a simulacrum as well: Luther's sola scriptura principle was equivalent to the semiotic substitution of the physical body of Christ by the authoritative body of the Bible (no matter how he interpreted this substitution in theological terms). If someone felt offended by the sacramental fetishism of the papalist party, he was now faced with the alternative of the Protestant party, which focused on the philologically controlled reproduction, interpretation, and distribution of an alternative, authoritative fetish.

Marshall McLuhan's research on the “making of the typographical man” confirms this observation from the viewpoint of early modern media history: a new “separative and compartmentalizing or specialist outlook”Footnote ⁷⁵ emerged that supported the illusion that everything can be dissected into discrete, identically reproducible, objectifiable units. The movable‐type characters of the printing machine represented the prototypical instantiations of such units. However, the analytic delusion, that everything can be dissected into discrete, mathematically objectifiable units was also supported by new imaging methods that transformed our perception of images and visual spaces.Footnote ⁷⁶ In combination, both innovations encouraged the modern inclination to act as detached spectators, who hide behind a window or a surveillance camera in order to observe analytically objectifiable “neutral facts” or more elementary “information units”.

The modern, Cartesian spectator no longer interacts with his environment in a responsive way. Rather he has turned into a “buffered self”.Footnote ⁷⁷ Similar to a Kantian “subject” or a modern physician, who dissects corpses, he is able to dissect everything he perceives into discrete, identically reproducible information units, types, or codes, in order to “synthesize” them again in a controlled way.Footnote ⁷⁸ He is trapped in the narcissistic illusion that he can adopt an “objective” view from nowhere on his world, and this enables him to turn everything into an identically reproducible, exchangeable commodity – including “the Bible” which represents, as it were, the archetype of our modern commodity economies.Footnote ⁷⁹

Against this background, it might be argued that the theological innovations of the reformers of the sixteenth‐century were only the tip of an iceberg that had emerged out of the “galactic” interaction between multiple technological, cultural, political, economic, philosophical, and theological developments. Yet, the semiotic substitution of the host by an almost incorporeal, exchangeable commodity marked the dubious core of these innovations: It created a confessional world in which identity‐establishing institutions competed about the power to control the authoritative centre of a homogenised social space.

To be sure, from the seventeenth‐century onwards secular powers intervened in this battle in order to replace the body of Christ with secular substitutes, such as the portrait of King Louis XIV.Footnote ⁸⁰ Yet, secular interventions did not change the basic rules of this competitive game: a confessional age emerged, forcing everyone to choose between competing candidates for the authoritative slot of the “true body” – from Louis XIV, Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, and liberal idols of liberty, up to the “singularity”Footnote ⁸¹ of post‐modern transhumanism.

This authoritarian turn was equivalent to the breakdown of the symbolic realist universe of the past. The pre‐modern focus on multiple theophanic, sacramental, and liturgical modes of mediation between the creator and his creation became replaced by the totalising focus on authoritarian “master signifiers”. We can chose between competing confessions, ideologies, and party books, but the new confessions are no longer a matter of sacramental fellowships that engage in the common‐sense‐based enactment of religious mysteries.Footnote ⁸² Rather the attachment to a religious, philosophical, political, or scientific tradition becomes reducible to a matter of formal belief, prescribed rule, and private beneficence that coincides with the submission to an authoritative system of clerical, bureaucratic, or (today) robotic surveillance.

Against this background, we might conclude (following Brad GregoryFootnote ⁸³) that the Reformation marked a turning‐point in the genealogy of our modern world‐view, not because of its theological intentions, but because of its unintended side‐effects. It encouraged the cultivation of a disenchanted, unresponsive attitude towards the world that we inhabit, and facilitated the conceptualisation of our natural and social environment as a dead and meaningless machine. It is no accident that the upheavals of this era were accompanied on both sides by an unprecedented rise of literalist readings of scripture that caused competition, division and mistrust.Footnote ⁸⁴ Since the divine Word no longer spoke through its creation, the latter had to be subjected to positivistic strategies of decontextualized, controlled objectification – as if the world were a book that displays the same underlying structures as the print editions of Gutenberg's Bible. God appeared as a giant printer, who has created a giant commodity out of a discrete set of movable, identically repeatable codes. Yet, the meaning of this giant print‐copy turned out to be a riddle that provoked a competition about exploitation rights.

Seen in this perspective, the German tradition of interpreting Luther as a predecessor of Kant is not completely beside the point. However rich his theological thoughts might have been, his legendary posting of the 95 Theses encouraged the emergence of a subject‐object split that reduced the mystery of the world to a synthetic configuration of well‐formed “information units”. Luther's “revolution” marked the breaking point at which the world‐view we have cultivated and promoted in the last 500 years started to take shape: a mechanistic metaphysics of commodifiable codes. And the transhumanist religion of our present time might be marked as the last product of this metaphysics. It represents, as it were, the theologically thinned‐out icing on the obscene business‐world of Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street (1987), in which the millionaire Gordon Gekko declares without any hint of embarrassment or self‐deprecation: “The most valuable commodity I know is information.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The mercantile logic of this metaphysics holds even philosophically educated thinkers captive, as the proto‐transhumanist “information philosophies” of Oxford scholars like Luciano Floridi demonstrate.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, even if we agree with secularisation narratives that describe the Reformation as a decisive step in a globalised process of disenchantment, this does not mean that this process was a matter of irreversible necessity.

Already in the 1962 McLuhan predicted the emergence of new, second type of “orality” that leaves the logic of the Gutenberg galaxy behind.Footnote ⁸⁷ And, despite exaggerations, he was not wrong in this prediction. As pointed out in the first part of this essay, we have already entered a new world that is shaped by highly responsive and synesthetic “oral” modes of communication. Yet, as McLuhan emphasised when he warned against an unprecedented retribalisation of our political, social and cultural interactions, this is a dangerous and potentially destructive transformation process that requires us to pause in order to re‐orientate our thinking: