Virtual Communion. Katherine G. Schmidt
Language and text are some of the most fundamental that come to mind.
It is not enough, however, to acknowledge the necessary mediation of human encounter. We must also acknowledge that digitally mediated experiences are, in fact, embodied, although perhaps not in the way we mean as we describe it as “disembodied.” Pursuing this question of embodiment and online experiences tends to expose the assumptions we carry into discussions of the body. It requires a body to engage with technology. Furthermore, the various mediations of virtual space—photos, sound, text—require sense experiences.
According to Graham Ward, the changes wrought by telecommunications include changes to our conception of space itself. They also include changes in our perceptions of what society is, and, in turn, what the individual is. As predicated on relationships between individuals, society is built upon negotiating trust and doubt. He argues, “With advanced telecommunications, forms of trusting are not only divorced from face-to-face encounter but become founded upon texts, their composition, transmission, and interpretation.”69 Ward is reminiscent of Miller here, arguing that the imagined space has thus become “internationalized.” He writes, “The internationalism of space produces international persons who are more diffuse, less embodied, more experimental, and less identifiable.”70 He goes on to argue that this view of the individual, a view in which the disembodied nature of our age plays an integral part, “denigrates being local such that material ‘locatedness’ is not in vogue.”71
Thus we have the appearance of one of the theological antidotes to the disembodied realm of the internet: the primacy of the local church community (again). Ward describes the vanishing relevance of the local: “How can an act of local responsibility—being a member of a town council or a volunteer in a regional project for the homeless—escape the sense of being arbitrary or parochial?”72 One can easily add participation in a church community as “an act of local responsibility.” Indeed, he goes on to argue that it is now the church’s onus to reassert “the importance of local and particular embodiment and of local and particular relations” in light of the changing technological and social landscape.73
Ward also argues that the internet is specifically about the transmission of text. The internet, he argues, “aspires to the pure act of reading, in which the interface between reader and text dissolves.”74 This particular article was written in 2002, before the advent of many of the technologies to which this observation might apply. One need only think of GoogleGlass, a device that places the computer interface into eyeglasses so that as one looks outward to the offline world, one is also peering into the online world. We are moving closer and closer, then, to the disappearing interface of which Ward speaks here. For Ward, this movement is theological. He writes,
The dreams of fully realistic virtual realities—the kind advertised in Star Trek’s holodeck—signal a desire for new textual immediacies. The trajectory of this desire is eschatological. It is a contemporary refiguring, after the various Enlightenment refigurings, of the city of God: a techno-redemption. The euphoria of certain apologists for cyberspace is an expression of a yearning for infinite freedom conceived as infinite light.75
The transhumanist impulse to free oneself from the body—to whatever degree it is present in current iterations of online life—is problematic for theologians for several reasons. In addition to the first theological locus of the church, which necessitates a being-together in physical space, a second theological locus emerges here: the Incarnation. The central conviction of the Christian church is that God takes flesh in Jesus Christ, a conviction that influences the Christian perspective on materiality’s place in the economy of grace. Thirdly, following from the Incarnation, is the resurrection, both of Jesus Christ and of ourselves. As Graham Ward puts it, “After all, resurrection is resurrection of the body.”76 Theologians have long seen it significant that the risen Christ is risen not in some ethereal, nonphysical form, but in a body, able to be touched by his disciples.
In order to argue for the internet as one of the Powers and Principalities, Bennett argues against the prevailing idea that the internet is primarily a disembodied space. She writes, “It is a body that must use the computer, check the email, navigate the avatar, reflect on how to interact with these people online.”77 But she, and any other theologian, must admit the importance of the local embodied community, especially for the sacramental life of the church. She writes, “The internet is not likely to be a proper site for participating in the sacraments or other physical forms of materiality that signify God’s grace.”78 The centrality of the sacraments and the “other physical forms of materiality” which participate in the sacramental order give a rather unavoidable preference to the local church. The centrality of this physically bounded community is incarnational; God’s revelation in the person of Jesus Christ changes the way in which Christians see the entirety of the created order. Therefore, both the local church (in its administration of the sacraments) and the Incarnation function as the two main theological loci for theological discussion of disembodiment in virtual life.
Conclusion: A Way Forward
Different Christian traditions have negotiated the place of “other physical forms of materiality that signify God’s grace” differently. The focus of the next chapter will be the Catholic tradition’s insistence upon physical objects and places in the sacramental order by virtue of an incarnational approach to the world.
I have attempted to describe several aspects of the internet that have been of particular concern to theologians. These five aspects are intimately related and often overlapping, and they often appear in nontheological approaches to the internet as well. In short, theologians have relied both implicitly and explicitly on two doctrinal loci to address the concerns of virtual life: the church, specifically in its local form, and the Incarnation. For my part, I am convinced that these are indeed the two most relevant doctrinal loci for analyzing our current technological moment. What I propose, however, is an approach to the internet which attempts to understand its most basic logic, virtuality, as an expansive category that can actually help modern people understand some of the most important aspects of the Catholic imagination.
At the heart of the doctrines of the Incarnation and the church is a necessary dialectic between presence and absence, a dialectic upon which both interpersonal communication and mediation rely in virtual space. Although I will not return precisely to these five aspects of the internet, together they describe the “virtual” and in some cases are integrally important to religious modes of thought that sustain the life of the church and the Catholic imagination in particular.
The very category of “virtual” under which exists all of the activity and content theologians have found to be interesting and troubling is a constitutive part of the sacramental and ecclesial theology of the Catholic tradition. By focusing on what we mean by “virtual” in different contexts, I argue that we can come to see mediation as more than just a function of the internet. Mediation is, in a sense, the very practice that sustains the sacramental imagination. The church needs a “virtual logic” in order to understand both the sacraments and all of the physical-material entities which participate in the larger sacramentality of creation itself. In addition, in order for the church to be understood fully in both its universal and local iterations, one needs both presence and absence. This church has its own virtuality at the heart of its self-understanding as transcendent of both space and time.
Such virtuality necessarily entails attributes such as disembodiment and anonymity, and the necessity of these modes of social interaction and religiosity in the church should alert us to the fact that much of what is making theologians uncomfortable or worried about the internet is not about the form of mediation but in its referent. It is virtual space cultivated not for a community oriented toward God but often oriented toward themselves. While much attention has been given to mediation itself, I propose we instead focus on what or whom is being mediated and to what end. We have begun our theological discourse about the internet by focusing on its form and assuming that its mediating logic is necessarily antithetical to the sacramental and ecclesial convictions of the church. I contend, however, that we must expand our understanding of “virtual,” using it as a hermeneutic for the church’s long history of mediation.