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Real Presence Amid the Shallows: Eucharist and Friendship in a Digital Age
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 December 2023
Abstract
This article contends that Christ’s eucharistic offer of friendship, and the habits of attentiveness such real presence demands, must shape the church’s mission in a digital milieu that tends to shallow attention and relationships. It makes this argument in dialogue principally with the theology of Bernard Lonergan and the pontificate of Pope Francis, while aided by the cultural commentary of Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle, and Marshall McLuhan. First, I consider how Lonergan’s focus on human knowing and choosing anticipates the recent turn in the Catholic magisterium under Pope Francis that considers the formative effects of digital communication technologies. Second, I show how Lonergan’s account of bias helps explain the shallowing effects of these technologies, for both cognition and community. Third, inspired by Lonergan and Pope Francis, I propose how practices of friendship—informed by Christ’s own friendship extended through Eucharistic presence—can foster habits of real presence able to counter the shallows of our digital age.
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References
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4 Pope Pius XII, Miranda Prorsus, (September 8, 1957), https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xii_enc_08091957_miranda-prorsus.html, introduction.
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13 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §107.
14 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §108–09.
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16 See Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §68, §122–23. This critique of the technocratic paradigm, as applied to digital technologies, has remained a consistent one; see, for instance, Pope Francis, “Address to the Faculty of Information Technology and Bionics of the Catholic University Péter Pázmány (Budapest),” (April 30, 2023), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2023/april/documents/20230430-ungheria-cultura.html.
17 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, §47.
18 Pope Francis, Christus Vivit, (March 25, 2019), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20190325_christus-vivit.html, §86, citing the Synod Preparatory Document (21).
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26 Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” The Atlantic, (July/August 2008), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/.
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33 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 302.
34 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, 145.
35 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, “The Subject,” in A Second Collection, 64.
36 Lonergan, Insight, 215.
37 Lonergan, Insight, 245.
38 Lonergan, Insight, 245–46.
39 Carr, Nicholas, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), .Google Scholar
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42 Lonergan, Insight, 197–98; and Bernard J. F. Lonergan, “The Future of Thomism,” in A Second Collection, 43–53.
43 Carr, The Shallows, 27. Lonergan too plumbs the psychic depths of cognition; see Lonergan, Insight, 210–31. See also Doran, Robert M., Psychic Conversion and Theological Foundations (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981)Google Scholar.
44 See Alter, Adam, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (New York: Penguin Press, 2017)Google Scholar. As Pope Benedict XVI suggests, this positive reinforcement feeds the eros of the human spirit: “Ultimately, this constant flow of questions [and information] demonstrates the restlessness of human beings, ceaselessly searching for truths, of greater or lesser import, that can offer meaning and hope to their lives” (“Message for the 46th World Communications Day,” (May 20, 2012), https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/messages/communications/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20120124_46th-world-communications-day.html).
45 See Carr, The Shallows, 142. Carr references numerous scientific and psychological studies in making these claims; for example, Small, G. W., Moody, T. D., Siddarth, P., and Bookheimer, S. Y., “Your Brain on Google: Patterns of Cerebral Activation during Internet Searching,” American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry 17, no. 2 (February 2009): CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Rockwell, Steven C. and Singleton, Loy A., “The Effect of the Modality of Streaming Multimedia on Information Acquisition,” Media Psychology 9 (2007): CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ophir, Eyal, Nass, Clifford, and Wagner, Anthony D., “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 37 (September 2009): CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
46 As Carr notes, “There’s nothing wrong with browsing and scanning, or even power-browsing and power-scanning…. What is different and troubling is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of reading. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for deeper study, scanning is becoming an end in itself—our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts” (138).
47 Carr, The Shallows, 118.
48 See Carr, The Shallows, 125. Lonergan views this extroverted notion of understanding—as “taking a good look at the ‘real’ that is ‘already out there now’”—as the fundamental mistake of modern epistemology (Insight, 437).
49 Lonergan, Insight, 232.
50 Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), 10; emphasis added.
51 Antón Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 182. As Barba-Kay writes elsewhere, “To the extent that I associate with others in the online mode, I am in a position from which I may retreat, refrain, abstract myself at any point. There are no (or few) strings attached, the setting puts little pressure on the shape of my own desires. This is just what convenience is, what endows our online experience with such a compelling sense of our own empowered individuality” (A Web of Our Own Making, 102).
52 Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 152–53.
53 Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 21, 170–71; see Konrath, Sara, O’Brien, Edward H., and Hsing, Courtney, “Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students over Time: A Meta-Analysis,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 15, no. 2 (May 2011): CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
54 Lonergan, Insight, 244–47.
55 Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 293.
56 Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 298; Turkle refers here to Malcom Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted,” New Yorker, (October 4, 2010), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-malcolm-gladwell. This is not to say that there is no friction online; the vitriol found on platforms like Twitter confirms as much. In contrast to the friction that characterizes in-person interactions, however, one can opt out of that friction by choice. Moreover, it is precisely because these online interactions are removed from corporal friction (and the empathy that such friction naturally generates) that that vitriol can become all the more strident. See Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making, 122–23.
57 See Aral, Sinan, The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health—and How We Must Adapt (New York: Currency, 2020)Google Scholar; and Sasse, Ben, Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How to Heal (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), Google Scholar.
58 Lonergan, Insight, 247–50.
59 Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 217–21; Turkle expresses skepticism at Katherine Hayles’s conviction that schools should primarily foster hyper attention at the expense of deep attention (see N. Katherine Hayles, “Hyper and Deep Attention,” Profession [2007]: 187–99). Turkle does not reject the importance of hyper attention per se; instead, she underscores the need for students to cultivate an “attentional pluralism” fluent in both hyper and deep attention. See also Hess, Mary E., “Learning with Digital Technologies: Privileging Persons over Machines,” Journal of Moral Theology 4, no. 1 (January 2015): Google Scholar.
60 Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation, 240–44.
61 See Berg, Maggie and Seeber, Barbara K., The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 1–15Google Scholar.
62 Lonergan, Insight, 250–51.
63 “Google,” Carr remarks, “is in the business of distraction” (The Shallows, 157). See Zuboff, Shoshana, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019)Google Scholar; and Tim, Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016)Google Scholar.
64 See Twenge, Jean M., iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us (New York: Atria Books, 2017), 49–118.Google Scholar
65 Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, (November 24, 2013), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html, §54.
66 Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exsultate, (April 9, 2018), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20180319_gaudete-et-exsultate.html, §108.
67 This same focus on attention (and the possibility of its shallowing) in the most recent magisterial treatment of digital technologies; see Dicastery for Communication, Towards Full Presence: A Pastoral Reflection on Engagement with Social Media, (May 28, 2023), https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/dpc/documents/20230528_dpc-verso-piena-presenza_en.html, §25–40.
68 See Lonergan, “The Future of Thomism,” 49–53.
69 Lonergan, Insight, 128–38.
70 See Bernard J. F. Lonergan, “The Transition from a Classicist Worldview to Historical Mindedness,” in A Second Collection, 9.
71 As introduced earlier, key to this assertion is Lonergan’s formulation of “emergent probability,” a worldview that highlights the dynamic, intelligible contingency of world process unfolding toward ever-increasing complexity. This metaphysic admits that reality is stratified: lower, simpler levels of being set the conditions for the potential emergence of higher, more complex levels of being irreducible to those lower levels. Applied to anthropology, the transcendent drive of the human spirit cannot be explained or determined exclusively by physics, chemistry, biology, or neurology. See Lonergan, Insight, 144–51, 644.
72 See Lonergan, Insight, 643–47; see also Komonchak, Joseph A., Foundations in Ecclesiology, Lonergan Workshop (Boston, MA: Boston College, 1995), Google Scholar.
73 Lonergan, Insight, 714.
74 Lonergan, Insight, 655–56, 715–18; and Lonergan, Bernard J. F., “Healing and Creating in History,” in A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., ed. Crowe, Frederick E. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1985), 100–109Google Scholar.
75 Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, (October 3, 2020), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html, §6. This theme of friendship also plays a focusing role in Christus Vivit, §150–57.
76 Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, §43.
77 Lonergan, Bernard J. F., “The Redemption: A Supplement,” in The Redemption, CWL 9, eds. Doran, Robert M., Monsour, H. Daniel, and Wilkins, Jeremy D., trans. Shields, Michael G. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 265–643Google Scholar. The unpublished, though circulated, text was meant to supplement Lonergan’s Christological manual, De Verbo Incarnato. On the background of this text, see Crowe, Frederick E., Christ and History: The Christology of Bernard Lonergan from 1935 to 1982 (Ottawa: Novalis Press, 2005), 99–125Google Scholar.
78 Lonergan, “The Redemption,” 631; italics original.
79 Lonergan, “The Redemption,” 631.
80 See Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, (November 18, 1965), https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html, §2: “Through this revelation, therefore, the invisible God (see Col. 1;15, 1 Tim. 1:17) out of the abundance of His love speaks to men as friends (see Ex. 33:11; John 15:14-15) and lives among them (see Bar. 3:38), so that He may invite and take them into fellowship with Himself.”
81 See Schneiders, Sandra M., Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1999), Google Scholar.
82 Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 8.
83 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 105–06. See also Ryliškytė, Ligita, “Conversion: Falling into Friendship Like No Other,” Theological Studies 81, no. 2 (2020): CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I concur with Ryliškytė’s judgment to read God’s offer of friendship as a “special theological category” that specifies religious conversion; on “special theological categories,” see Lonergan, Method in Theology, 285–91.
84 Lonergan, Bernard J. F., “Existenz and Aggiornamento,” Collection, CWL 4, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert, M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), Google Scholar. See also Lonergan, Bernard J. F., “The Mediation of Christ in Prayer,” in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964, CWL 6, eds. Croken, Robert C., Crowe, Frederick E., and Doran, Robert M. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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86 Lonergan, “The Redemption,” 635.
87 See, for example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II–I, q. 65, art. 5; and ST II–II, q. 23, art. 1.
88 Aquinas, ST III, q. 75, art. 1.
89 Lonergan, Bernard J. F., “The Notion of Sacrifice,” in Early Latin Theology, CWL 19, ed. Doran, Robert M. and Monsour, H. Daniel, trans. Shields, Michael G. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), .CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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91 Lonergan, “The Notion of Sacrifice,” 17. See also Mudd, Joseph C., Eucharist as Meaning: Critical Metaphysics and Contemporary Sacramental Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), Google Scholar.
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94 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, “The Response of the Jesuit Priest and Apostle in the Modern World,” in A Second Collection, 141.
95 For a project that tries to develop the ecclesial possibilities of the internet from the second half of this sentence, see Katherine G. Schmidt, Virtual Communion: Theology of the Internet and the Catholic Sacramental Imagination (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books).
96 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, “An Interview with Fr. Bernard Lonergan, S.J.,” in A Second Collection, 225. See also Lonergan, “The Notion of Sacrifice,” where he adds that symbols are founded on “our sentient and corporeal nature” (7).
97 Lonergan, Insight, 372–76; and Lonergan, “Christ as Subject,” 176–77.
98 Imbelli, Robert P., Rekindling the Christic Imagination: Theological Meditations for the New Evangelization (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2014), Google Scholar.
99 Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, (December 25, 2005), https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est.html, §18.
100 See Crawford, Jennifer, Spiritually-Engaged Knowledge: The Attentive Heart (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 97–98.Google Scholar
101 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 8, chap. 3. Again, this is not to disregard the possibilities that friendships can be sustained through virtual media; nevertheless, even these interactions typically are oriented toward the incarnational.
102 As Rowan Williams writes, “Generosity begins not in the overflow of warm feeling, but in a patient looking and listening. It’s why love needs contemplation; why the Buddhist, as well as the Christian, tradition lays such stress on compassion being the fruit of ‘dispassion’—which is absolutely not chilly detachment, but a freedom from your own feverish desires when you look at another” (in Zournazi, Mary and Williams, Rowan, Justice and Love: A Philosophical Dialogue [New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021], CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
103 Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, §63.
104 Pope Francis, “Audience with Teachers and Students of the Pontifical Liturgical Institute,” (May 7, 2022), https://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/en/bollettino/pubblico/2022/05/07/220507f.html.
105 Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, §88.
106 Pope Francis, “Video Conference on the Occasion of the TED Conference in Vancouver,” (April 26, 2017), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/messages/pont-messages/2017/documents/papa-francesco_20170426_videomessaggio-ted-2017.html.
107 Pope Francis, Desiderio Desideravi, (June 29, 2022), https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_letters/documents/20220629-lettera-ap-desiderio-desideravi.html, §19. See also §28, §42, §44. The Vatican Dicastery for Communication has expounded the implications of this claim for our digital environment: “One cannot share a meal through a screen. All our senses are engaged when we share a meal: taste and smell, glances that contemplate the faces of the diners, listening to the conversations at table. Sharing a meal at table is our first education in attention to others, a fostering of relationships among family members, neighbors, friends, and colleagues. Likewise, we participate with the whole person at the altar: mind, spirit, and body are involved. The liturgy is a sensory experience; we enter into the Eucharistic mystery through the doors of the senses that are awakened and fed in their need for beauty, meaning, harmony, vision, interaction and emotion. Above all, the Eucharist is not something that we can just ‘watch’; it is something that truly nourishes us” (Dicastery for Communication, Towards Full Presence, 61). Note the role of both presence and attention here.
108 Ivereigh, Austen, Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2019), .Google Scholar
109 For the articulation an exceptional, ecclesial experience of digital connection, see Deanna A. Thompson, The Virtual Body of Christ in a Suffering World (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2016). One might also think of the pastoral accommodation for shut-ins to watch televised Mass. Still, here the exception proves the norm. Pastoral accommodations represent what Lonergan might call a “statistical residue” of what is typically the norm.
110 of Loyola, Ignatius, The Spiritual Exercises, trans. Mottola, Anthony (New York: Image Books, 1964), Google Scholar.
111 Doran, Robert M., Theology and the Dialectics of History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Doran here is expanding upon Lonergan’s formulation of the “law of limitation and transcendence” in human development in Insight, 497–502.
112 See Borgmann, Power Failure, 117–28. See also Gaillardetz, Richard R., Transforming Our Days: Finding God Amid the Noise of Everyday Life (Liguori, MI: Liguori, 2007)Google Scholar. In the last chapter of his book, Gaillardetz develops the Eucharistic contours of this proposal.
113 The Catholic Bishops of Australia capture the eucharistic dimensions of this claim especially well: “God’s encounter with creation is incarnational; primarily in the person of Jesus. Jesus, the God who became man, gathered children in his arms, touched and healed the leper, the blind, the sick and the broken. This incarnational presence continues sacramentally in the Church as we gather to hear God’s Word and receive the Eucharist. We are anointed with oil, sprinkled with water and have ashes deposited on our foreheads. Even the best of digital encounters cannot replace the Real Presence of Christ, given and received sacramentally, or the real presence of human encounter” (Australian Catholic Bishops, Making It Real: Genuine Human Encounter in Our Digital World, Social Justice Statement 2019–20, 17).
114 Granados, José, “The Pandemic: A Sacramental Reading,” Communio 47, no. 3 (Fall 2020): Google Scholar, at 456.
115 Pope Francis, with Paolo Rodari, “Pope Francis on Coronavirus Crisis: ‘Don’t Waste These Difficult Days. While at Home Re-Discover the Importance of Hugging Kids and Relatives,’” La Repubblica, (March 18, 2020), https://www.repubblica.it/vaticano/2020/03/18/news/coronavirus_pope_francis-251572693/.
116 Francis, Pope, with Ivereigh, Austen, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), Google Scholar.
117 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, my wife Catherine Petrany, Tom Syphan, Nicole Buchek, and my many students in TH 282 for helping me write this article and improve it.