‘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.” If we embrace the religious import of McLuhan as electronic prophet, then his cataclysmic tone feels not only appropriate but necessary. Prophets see, they beckon, they disrupt. For McLuhan, prophecy existed in a tradition that led to the end of all things through the parousia – a world made utterly, divinely new.
McLuhan, the pop culture sage of the electronic world, was a Catholic convert. The entertainment, media and academic worlds of his heyday had good reason to miss the Christian foundations of his theories, for McLuhan made subtle his overtly religious sense. McLuhan’s Christian belief and worldview were no mere biographical footnote; they offer him pliable metaphors for the intersection of the material and the spiritual, they engendered him with the confidence and determination of a religious adherent, and they compelled him to react to the rapidly changing electronic world around him. Any honest and thorough analysis of McLuhan’s paradigm-changing views must not merely begin with these religious considerations but must also examine how his belief sustained the development and dissemination of these theories. McLuhan’s vocation was to understand how the environments created by media shape our perception of the world.
Raised in “a loose sort of Protestantism”, according to his son, McLuhan likely drifted toward agnosticism at the University of Manitoba, where he enrolled in 1928. While studying toward his doctorate at Cambridge, McLuhan read Jacques Maritain, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and two writers who remained essential for his entire life: Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce. On 6 August 1935, he noted that he was ‘reading Joyce very slowly’.
Along with Hopkins and Joyce, there was another Catholic influence: G. K. Chesterton. The prolific Catholic convert was a fixture of BBC radio, and McLuhan was ripe for such inspiration. McLuhan wrote a letter to his family praising Eliot’s poetry– mentioning several times the poet’s Anglo-Catholic identity – but lamented how there were not many critics who have the religious background and sense to truly understand him. It was a strangely prescient observation that foretold the inability of secular and even religious commentators to understand McLuhan’s own project.
McLuhan was especially drawn to the Catholic view of the bodily and communal elements of the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. For Catholics, God is with us in form and spirit, demonstrated through the devotional practices of our faith, including the invocation of the saints and relics, and the Eucharist. In contrast, McLuhan claimed that his mother’s version of faith implied “that the map of the universe was not radically altered” by the incarnation and the resurrection. He concluded, “Let me tell you that religion is not a nice comfortable thing that can be scouted by cultivated lectures. It is veritably something which, if it could be presented in an image, would make your hair stand on end.” His letter should be read not as from a son merely disrespecting his mother, but rather as from a seeker on the precipice of conversion teeming with curiosity and sincerity, feeling more than a little defensive.
The faith of his youth now seemed provincial and, perhaps worse for McLuhan, anti-intellectual: “I could never have respected a ‘religion’ that held reason and learning in contempt – witness the ‘education’ of our preachers. I have a taste for the intense cultivation of the Jesuit rather than the emotional orgies of an evangelist.”
Later that year, he wrote a letter to a priest friend of his mother, stating his interest in being received into the Church. During Christmas, when McLuhan came home to Canada, he met and spoke with the priest. In January 1937, McLuhan started going to Sunday Mass and met with Father Alvin Kutchera, who had just become pastor at the University of Wisconsin’s Saint Paul’s Catholic Center; McLuhan had a temporary teaching position at the university. He converted to Catholicism on 24 March, 1937.
Now when McLuhan spoke of Catholicism, he did so as a participant rather than as one with a mere intellectual curiosity. He lauded Mass and the reception of Holy Communion as “spiritual acts” in a 1939 letter to his wife. He found in Catholicism a certain equality of imperfection, that “one man is quite as great a sinner as the next”. As a convert, he was certainly inclined to draw comparisons and thought one distinction was that Catholics were drawn to God through love, not fear. He also placed himself within a lineage by writing that “most [Catholic] converts tend to be intellectuals”. Becoming a Catholic meant entering spiritual drama, for “there is a great heightening of every moment of experience, since every moment is played against a supernatural backdrop”.
After his conversion, McLuhan had a spiritual world view that felt sustained by an intellectual foundation and tradition. “I am conscious of a job to be done,” he wrote in a letter dated 1946, “one that I can do, and, truly, I do not wish to take any step in it that is not consonant with the will of God.” “My increasing awareness,” he noted, “has been of the ease with which Catholics can penetrate and dominate secular concerns thanks to an emotional and spiritual economy denied to the confused secular mind.” For McLuhan, faith resulted in clarity and confidence. Rather than an intellectual vice, belief charged the Catholic thinker.
Clarity and confidence were both necessary for a form of cultural battle. McLuhan wrote of the need to “confront the secular in its most confident manifestations, and, with its own terms and postulates, to shock it into awareness of its confusion, its illiteracy, and the terrifying drift of its logic”. He thought there was “no need to mention Christianity” during the criticisms, for it “is enough that it be known that the operator is a Christian”. McLuhan thought the battle “must be conducted on every front – every phase of the press, book-rackets, music, cinema, education, economics”. The ultimate goal was to help “both Catholic and non-Catholic, to resist the swift obliteration of the person which is going on”. McLuhan did not desire to convert religiously but wished to convert perceptively. He publicly refrained from overt Christian references, “lest perception be diverted from structural processes by doctrinal sectarian passions”.
The Eucharist – which McLuhan believed was both symbol and substance, metaphor and material – offered a vessel for his media theories. “Analogy is not concept,” he wrote. “It is community. It is resonance. It is inclusive. It is the cognitive process itself. That is the analogy of the divine Logos.” He was strident on this point: “I do not think of God as a concept, but as an immediate and ever-present fact – an occasion for continuous dialogue.” Additionally, “faith is not a matter of concepts; it’s percepts, a matter of immediate reality”.
Such a point of view would compel McLuhan to focus on the elements of life that were most replicated: the media that surround us and the God that permeates them all. Jesus is the synthesis, for in him “there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.” In a similar vein, McLuhan stressed that “the church is a thing, and not a theory” – a community and belief so masterfully simple and true that “the poor and the children of the world can grasp it, whereas the wise and the learned have serious conceptual problems blocking their perceptual lives”. He cautioned that while theology “should ideally be study of the thingness, the nature of God, since it is a form of contemplation”, if God is imagined as “a theoretical or intellectual construct, it is purely a game”.
Years later, reflecting on his conversion, McLuhan explained that the Church “has a very basic requirement or set of terms, namely that you get down on your knees and ask for the truth”. He said that he came into the Church on his knees, and that “is the only way in”. It was inevitable that McLuhan’s religious beliefs would be both foundation and structure for his media theories, because both God and the electronic world were omnipresent in their own ways. “When I study media effects,” McLuhan explained, “I am really studying the subliminal life of a whole population, since they go to great pains to hide these effects from themselves.” McLuhan thought that reading the Bible needed to be a regular activity, so that it might “pass into your daily life”, for only then “do you get the message, that is, the effect. Only in that moment do medium and message unite.”
Perhaps, then, the inevitable electronic world required a prophet, a person of faith who might observe, document, describe, and gently offer suggestions. “The Church is the only institution capable of coping with this situation and is not very keen on it,” McLuhan observed. “A new doctrine is needed that should have been promulgated one hundred years ago: at the instant of Incarnation, the structure of the universe was changed. All of creation was remade. There was a new physics, a new matter, a new world. The doctrine would enable modern man to take the Church much more seriously.” This new arrival, portending a second coming of sorts, would happen without our assent. “The new matrix is acoustic, simultaneous, electric, which in one way is very friendly to the Church. That is, the togetherness of humanity is now total,” he noted. “As long as there is the means of communion, social and divine,” McLuhan assured, “there is an indefinite number of forms in which it can be achieved.”
McLuhan believed that “it is especially the job of the Catholic humanist to build bridges between the arts and society today”. This needed to be an active pursuit, not merely a mode of contemplation; otherwise, McLuhan explained, “our secular contemporaries” would master the world of electronic interaction and “use it for power over the minds of men”. A sceptical point of view, but a realistic one. What was needed was a person of faith who was willing to make grand pronouncements in the most public of venues, who was willing to be wrong and criticised. What was needed was a deft rhetorician with a love for language and a firm footing in intellectual and literary traditions. What was needed was a person who was serious in his self-effacements, who was in the world but never truly of the world. What was needed, essentially, was Marshall McLuhan.
Nick Ripatrazone’s book Digital Communion: Marshall McLuhan’s Spiritual Vision for a Virtual Age is published by Fortress Press later this month
This article first appeared in the March 2022 issue of the Catholic Herald. Subscribe today.
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