Digital Communion: Marshall McLuhan's Spiritual Vision for a Virtual Age

by Nick Ripatrazone

Marshall McLuhan was the greatest prophet of the digital age. In the 1960s, McLuhan, a Canadian literary theorist reared on Elizabethan satire and the labyrinthine novels of James Joyce, turned his attention toward the budding and befuddling electronic age. Like most prophets, McLuhan became one through a fascination with God. Prophets divine their wisdom from a source, and Digital Communion shows that McLuhan's was his own Catholic faith. In other words, the greatest prophet of the digital age was an ardent Christian. A reconsideration of his vision can change the way we view the online world. A Catholic convert, McLuhan foretold a digital age full of blessings and a world where information was a phone call or keystroke away, but where our new global village could also bring out the worst in us. For him, mass media was a form of Mass. McLuhan thought that while the print world was visual, the electric world--especially television--was a medium of touch. It enveloped us. For McLuhan, God was everywhere, including in the electric light. Digital Communion considers the religious history of mass communication, from the Gutenberg Bible to James Joyce's literary forerunners of hypertextual language to McLuhan's vision of the electronic world as a place of potential spiritual exchange, in order to reveal how we can cultivate a more spiritual vision of the internet--a vision we need now more than ever.

Genres: Nonfiction, Religion

145 pages, Hardcover

Published March 29, 2022

About the author

Nick Ripatrazone is the author of Longing for an Absent God: Faith and Doubt in Great American Fiction (Fortress Press 2020) and Wild Belief: Faith in the Wilderness (Fortress Press 2021).

He is the Culture Editor for Image Journal, a Contributing Editor at The Millions, and a columnist for Literary Hub.

He has written for Rolling Stone, GQ, The Atlantic, Esquire, America, Commonweal, Christianity Today, The Sewanee Review, The Christian Century, Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

Reviews

[Cali · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I have never been an optimist or a pessimist. I'm an apocalyptic only," Marshall McLuhan said during a 1977 interview. "Apocalypse is not gloom," he added. "It's salvation."

PhD dissertation on Elizabethan texts transitioned to the metaphysician of media presenting mosaic-style reflections on technology seeped in Catholicism... I wanna be Marshall McLuhan when I grow up. Postmodern Rankeanism, they said it couldn't be done!

This book genuinely floored me. Reading about McLuhan through electric impulses while reading Saint Augustine in print translation is SUBLIME; multimodal sensuality gives way revelations of Christ in artifice, simultaneously constructed and constructing a eucharistic feast for the senses. How do we reconcile the paradox of 'digital communion' without falling in manichaeistic simplifications? Can simulacra fulfil Platonic ideals? Does electric reification of acoustic space augment the abstract or bastardize the absurd? Is electric communication the new orality? Precisely how much danger, ontologically speaking, might we find ourselves in when we seek the saviour of man in his nervous extensions? In the 'global village' the discarnate nature of man echoes the katholikos of the Incarnation; yet, I cannot help but wonder if the continuous present will lead to an inversion of John 1:14, in which, perversely, the flesh becomes Word—salvation through subversive violence. Man is, at once, delivered and undone by the revelation of his lapsarian nature.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick read. I'm not sure the connection between the first 80% of the book dealing with McLuhan's life and philosophy of media had on the final chapter, speaking about the COVID pandemic, its effect on in-person worship experiences within catholocism, and the future of communal/community/communion experiences intermediated through digital technologies. It seems Ripatrazone wanted to write about McLuhan because he's done a ton of work there, but he also wanted a book about our current moment, so he tried to marry the two. Unfortunately, that final chapter was the simultaneously the most interesting part of the book, and the part that had very little by way of showing how the church is informed by or helped by McLuhan's spiritual vision for a virtual age. Or at least, I didn't discern the connection. If you're looking for insights about how to use digital tools to make God present in the lives of humans, this book is not a guide. Ripatrazone does point out that we can't be luddites: in the same way that the Church couldn't ignore the effects of Gutenberg's printing press invention, it can neither refuse to engage with humans in the digital spaces they occupy, nor to refuse to attempt to harness the power of the new technology to accomplish the mission(s) of the Church. Whether the Church can embrace novel ways or not is really important, especially in a time of rapidly declining religiosity in the broader culture.

[Bryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is a veritable study of the modern age from the birth of television through the social media age. As such, the book is essentially revelatory of the "water" to which we are the fish that ask "what's water?" It was a bit dense in one chapter and overall a lot to process, perhaps demonstrating that "the medium is the message" in a book about the medium. The book was very interesting and a quick read for that reason.

[Rod Naquin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes ya find a book—or a book finds you—at the perfect moment, or exceptionally appropriate for your eclectic interests and needs. This ride through McLuhan from a catholic perspective, through Joyce, the jesuits, and the counterculture, is so interesting to me—with practical, contemporary consequences

[AL Ohm · Rating 4 out of 5]

The idea that the internet has failed us, or we it? Really resonates for me. I read a book recently about one of my favourite thinkers: Marshal McLuhan. Digital Communion. It was an interesting exploration of what a great futurist got wrong about the internet: predicted it correctly but he thought it would bring us closer together, and to ourselves.

[Renée]

Review forthcoming