The Sacred and the Christ
Any Return to the Sacred Without Christ is Just Profane
Do not conform to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind so that you may judge what is God’s will, good, pleasing and perfect. (Romans 12:2)
Dear friend, please forgive the rambling of this piece. My goal is to advance contemplative prayer, to encourage people to be vulnerable to God in the silence of their hearts. One of the many obstacles to this, however, is the overuse of technology and the self-occupation that this causes. I want to advance the practice of contemplative prayer because the human person needs the sacred. Without it, he is adrift in the profane - and God did not create us float through life. We are meant to have purpose, identity and to belong, but an alienated heart drifts without these anchors. To be adrift means to have one’s sense of identity become completely subject to the exigencies of the moment, the driving forces of the work-a-day world. A survey of the history of religions thought illustrates the consequences of being adrift.
This idea comes from Mircea Eliade, a thinker who influenced Fr. Owen Carroll and through Owen Carroll, a great deal of other serious contemplatives and scholars. No culture or society that abandons the sacred survives even a century. The ancients with some premonition of this reality feared being adrift and, consequentially, carefully passed on religious practices to the next generation as if the survival of their people depended on it. Western Moderns believed otherwise.
In the 19th Century various efforts at kulturkampf sought to replace the Christian faith with secularism. During this time, technocracy was imagined to be the supreme form of human culture - one in which technological achievement, not God, would become man’s salvation. The presumption was that a better material existence would make for a better humanity. The Cultural and Sexual Revolutions of the 1960’s marked the success of this project at least in the media and the popular imagination. In the aftermath, the last vestiges of Christian civilization sink below storms of materialistic secularism even as the world drifts toward an ever more violent nihilism.
All social rage, gender dysphoria and confusion in social roles that mark our oversexed and zoned in population, contemporary nihilism flows in currents of what Angela Franks calls liquid narcism. Once the ancient stonewalls of moral absolutes have been sucked under technocracy, the heart is still driven to seek identity, purpose and belonging. This is where Franks explains the contemporary’s sense of identity is liquid. It flows with the mores of the moment.
For the moment, technocracy promises unlimited power to define oneself. This pre-occupation with autonomous self-definition is nothing more than post-modern culture grasping around for a new a bearing, a new line of reference, or at least something to grasp to keep afloat. Yet what it has grasped is nothing more than a whim. Technological power proposes the realization of enchanting whims, an actual fantasia that rises above the frustrating limits of human frailty. The more it is mixed with criminality, hedonism and magical thinking, the more limitless the possibilities. At the same time, this new power to define one’s identity, purpose and community comes at great cost.
Specifically, power costs personal agency, the surrender of one’s own freedom to see and experience reality. One submits to a world filtered by technology. The real power of technology exists only within the limits (prison) of a technologized imagination. Such an imagination is limited to the preset parameters of an anonymous engineer’s world view, his moral code, his own unquestioned hopes and fears, ambitions and resentments, spiritual maturity and immaturity, his sense of the sacred and the sacredness of life.
This is not to say that there are not socially responsible engineers. we owe such men and women honor for their invention, their solicitude for advancing the common good. Nonetheless, it would be naive to suppose, however, that engineers were morally superior to anyone else simply because they were engineers. It would be even more naive to suppose that technology and science is amoral or morally neutral - every human act is always endowed with moral value, positive and negative, and this includes science and technology. Above all, we cannot presume the moral innocence of technologies aimed at reducing human agency.
When machines are designed to limit human freedom, to render it more predictable so that it might be exploited for commercial interests or ideological purposes, buyer beware. Matthew Crawford spells out the extinction that results from technology designed to nudge us into the zone. Within the limits imposed by whoever develops a technology, the whims of imagination may indeed gain total lordship over every power of reason and protect against every intrusion into one’s self-occupied world, but only at the expense of becoming a cog in the wheel of social progress or else extinguish from real life.
The un-named engineer has a quasi-sacerdotal status even if he too has allowed himself to be a cog in the wheel. I have in mind those who control the technologies we consume. We have been conditioned to believe that the motives of such priests must not be questioned any more than the ideology or commercial interests that drive them. But if they really see themselves as essentially cogs in the wheel, anonymous contributors to a process over which they have no personal responsibility, then the wheels they produce can only make people into the same kind of cogs that they are — and more often than we might think, engineers, like the rest of us, are isolated individuals cut-off from real relationships and real contact with the world God has made for them to live in.
Make no mistake: the power that the priests of technology offer is real. If there is a sword of the spirit, swords of the flesh also exist. One is able to severe from the way things are and then to manipulate them to conform to one’s own technologized whims. This power disconnects to manipulate relationships of soul and body, the individual and community, the self and the world. The more disconnected, the more fragmented, alienated and out of place a man becomes. Yet the euphoria of being in control against the relentless currents of the profane at least temporarily provides enough relief or escape that it feels worth it, and so, despite the cost, we disconnect from the world beyond our minds until we extinguish ourselves in distracting manipulations.
Thus, when the engineer through some commercial technological interface offers a bite of the apple, one needs to swallow, without question, a whole new morality. The unspoken principle is that no one is accountable for anything (as long as they too bite the apple and go with the flow) and everyone implicitly (if not unconsciously) agrees to close their eyes to the suffering that their technocracy causes even as they claim the moral high ground. Such is the new twist on the parable about the philosopher, deep in thought, falling into a hole. Indeed, by such an idolization of technology, a whole generation has fallen into an empty cistern of biblical proportions - prostituting daughters, slaughtering children and taken into captivity.
The only sense of the sacred that is strong enough to bear the weight of human existence is that which has been revealed in Christ, the Lord. He is the Word of the Father and He has come to bring us life to the full. Neither the imagination nor the power of reason to make technology suffice when it comes to giving real access to the sacred. Salvation comes when both powers bend the knee and humbly accept what Christ reveals by faith. Under the shadow of the Cross, His precious blood baths body and soul, all the psychological powers, and even the deepest substance of man. Only with this new life can one find the sacred, can one find what is most meaningful in the gaze of the Father, can one find the Fire of Love for which we were made.
Pride rebels against this love. The rebellion is revealed in resentment and anxiety with its corollaries: social violence and self-hatred. Technocracy orders this pride toward a self-conscious idolatry. It is material and not spiritual in its religious observances - but whatever the cause (political, environmental, social), it is held with fanatical religious conviction. Such conviction is both a reaction against as well as an effort to replace the love revealed by the Man Crucified for love. Yet, as Margaret Turek works out this love is atoning because it can bear the hostility of this conviction, and in fact, has already done so to the end. There is a love that is more powerful than pride.
When we consider the Son of the Father, it is difficult not to see that the deepest questions need better answers than technocracy can provide. The hostility of the liquified ego spills itself out in vain against the longing of the heart, the disharmony it suffers and the futility of death. The sacrifice of moral agency made to the work of our hands only ends up making us into the image of the technologies we worship. But the Cross shows us that we are invited to something so much more.
Consider artificial intelligence. AI has eyes but it does not see what Christ opens the eyes of the heart to behold. AI has ears but cannot hear what the Word of the Father makes known when He listens to our afflictions. The mouth of AI does not speak the thanksgiving that the Christian has learned to offer at the hour of death. Those who live by technology can only know profound restlessness, aggression and disconnection while those who live by faith know a peace not of this world even as the world falls apart around them.
St. Paul opens a way forward when he proposes that Christians should live, not conformed to this age, but a transformed life through the renewal of their minds. Rather than defining oneself through the power granted by an engineer, one discovers the truth about himself by offering his body as a living sacrifice, a life given to love of God and to others. Rather than a life where one is withdrawn into self-occupation, disconnected from one’s own body, the world and everyone in it; the renewed mind sees with eyes that have conquered death, that have overcome the enmity that divides, that see pain in the hearts of others with a readiness to provide a world of hope, no matter the cost. One lives no longer one’s own life, but the life of Christ, even in his own body and in the frailties of nature.
The transformed life is very different than this over-technologized life. The renewed mind is very different than the mind driven by materialism. One blindly grasps for any form of temporary relief from psychic pain while the other knows what is God’s will, good, pleasing and perfect.