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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
In the last 500 years our modern world has oscillated between the belief in “disenchanted” strategies of bureaucratic control and surveillance, and the celebration of iconoclastic ruptures that are supposed to preserve our sense of freedom and dignity. Yet, the equilibrium between these poles has fallen out of balance after the turn of the millennium. While the obsession with control has released concerted efforts to replace our supposedly irrational intelligence by the “artificial intelligence” of digital technologies, the implementation of ICT technologies in our everyday life has undermined the iconoclastic conviction that artefacts are merely tools. Our smartphones have a “magic life” of their own – be it that they afford a life that we appreciate, or that they nudge us into a life that we abhor. This challenge requires us to recover our ability to distinguish between idolatrous attachments and the prudent use of “magic objects” that is consistent with our natural desire to transform our life for the better. The following essay will discuss the question to what extent the basic assumptions of the confessionalized religions of the post‐Reformation era distract us from the task of engaging with this challenge. Moreover it will question the modern inclination to replace the engagement with sacramental objects with an engagement with pious “master signifiers”: authoritative substitutes for the “body of Christ”, like the Eucharistic host, the Bible or secular party books that reduce the attachment to religious traditions to a matter of formal belief and submission to an authoritative system of clerical, bureaucratic, or (today) robotic surveillance.
1 Up to a certain point this insight emerged already in the late writings of Jacques Derrida. See, for example: Derrida, Jacques, Passions (Paris: 1993)Google Scholar; and Honneth, Axel, “Das Andere der Gerechtigkeit. Habermas und die ethische Herausforderung der Postmoderne” in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 24 (1994), 195‐220Google Scholar. As for the premodern tradition see: Inigo, Bocken, “Aequitas: Gerechtigheit in actu von Thomas von Aquin bis Suarez” in Coincidentia 5/2 (2014), pp. 277‐298Google Scholar.
2 Hoff, Johannes, Das Paradox des Glaubens und der Holzweg moderner Entscheidungslogik. Kierkegaards Lektüre von Genesis 22 und ihre Wirkungsgeschichte von Heidegger bis Derrida und darüber hinaus, in Hoping, Helmut; Knop, Julia; Böhm, Thomas (Ed.), Die Bindung Isaaks. Stimme, Schrift, Bild (Paderborn: Schöningh 2009), pp. 238‐258. Bruno Latour has made a similar point with regard to the modern dualism between nature and society. See Bruno, Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Porter, Catherine (New York; London: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1993)Google Scholar.
3 This was the topic of Foucault's famous lectures on “gouvernmentality”, see for example: Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter (Ed.), The Foucault Effect. Studies in Gouvernmentality, with two Lectures by and and Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago 1991)Google Scholar.
4 Florensky, Pavel, Reverse Perspective, in Beyond Vision. Essays on the Perception of Art (London: Reaktion Books LTD 2002), pp. 197‐272, p.217Google Scholar; see also below Fn. 46.
5 See Eckhard, Nordhofen, “Idolatrie und Grapholatrie. Eine Medienkonkurrenz der monotheistischen Religionen und Konfessionen.” In: Merkur 11 (2015), pp. 18‐30Google Scholar.
6 See Bacon, Francis, Novum Organum. Annotated Edition (Altmünster: Jazzybee Verlag 2015), pp. 8‐12Google Scholar; and Simpson, James, Under the Hammer. Iconoclasm in the Anglo‐American Tradition (Oxford: Oxford UP 2010), pp. 16, p.124 fGoogle Scholar.
7 See Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Dover Publications 2006), particularly pp.48‐64Google Scholar.
8 See Simpson, Under the Hammer, pp. 116‐158.
9 Simpson, Under the Hammer, pp. 85‐115.
10 See the famous conclusion of the preface of Hegel's Philosophy of Law.
11 See Bruno, Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” in Critical Inquiry 30/2 (2004), pp. 225‐249Google Scholar.
12 For an exemplary analysis of this phenomenon see: Agamben, Giorgio, “From the State of Law to the Security State: Giorgio Agamben on the State of Emergency in France” in Autonomies (2015), pp. http://autonomies.org/pt/2015-12/from-the-state-of-law-to-the-security-state-giorgio-agamben-on-the-state-of-emergency-in-france/.
13 See Spiekermann, Sarah, Ess, Charles, Cockelberg, Mark, Hampson, Peter, and Hoff, Johannes, “Die gefährliche Utopie der Selbstoptimierung: Wider den Transhumanismus” in Neue Züricher Zeitung (2017), pp. https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/kommentare/die-gefaehrliche-utopie-der-selbstoptimierung-wider-den-transhumanismus-ld.1301315; for an extended English version of this text see: The Ghost of Transhumanism and the Sentience of Human Existence, http://privacysurgeon.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Human-manifesto_26_short-1.pdf.
14 See Sharon, Tamar, Human Nature in the Age of Biotechnology. The Case for Mediated Posthumanism (Dordrecht: Springer 2016), pp. 24‐28Google Scholar. Similar to the liberal tradition (see Fn. 46), the focus on the freedom of individual choice goes along with a totalising utopia of a collectivist future. As for the (mainly British‐imperialist and communist) origins of the transhumanist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth‐century see: Coenen, Christopher, “Transhumanism and its Genesis. The Shaping of Human Enhancement Discourse by Visions of the Future” in Humana Mente 26 (2014), pp. 35‐58Google Scholar.
15 Strictly speaking the phenomenon of digitization is inherent to every form of writing technology since the invention of clay tables. See Ong, Walter J, Language as Hermeneutics. A Primer on the Word and Digitization, ed. by Zlatic, Thomas D. (Ithaca: Cornell UP 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 For a thorough investigation of this phenomenon see: McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and his Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (New Haven: Yale University Press 2009), part IGoogle Scholar. The historically oriented, second part of this volume would need a thorough revision in the light of the philosophical, theological and historical research of the last 30 years.
17 See: OECD, “Understanding the Digital Divide” in OECD Digital Economy Papers 49 (2001), pp. https://doi.org/10.1787/236405667766.
18 Carr, Nicholas G., The Shallows. What the Internet is Doing to our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton 2011), p.149 ffGoogle Scholar. See also Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together. Why we expect more from technology and less from each other (New York: Basic Books 2013)Google Scholar; and Turkle, Sherry, Reclaiming Conversation. The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin Books 2016)Google Scholar.
19 This is the notorious core thesis of Kant's ground‐breaking attempt to provide a systematic account of the principles of modern aesthetics. See Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement. Transl. by Meredith, J.C. (Oxford: Clarendon 1988)Google Scholar.
20 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, Oration on the Dignity of Man. A New Translation and Commentary. Ed. by Borghesi, Francesco, Papio, Michael and Riva, Massimo (Oxford: Oxford UP 2012)Google Scholar.
21 Duffy, Eamon, The Stripping of the Altars. Traditional Religion in England, c.1400‐c.1580 (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press 2005)Google Scholar.
22 It is, of course, possible to discover a powerful symbolism in the functional simplicity of cup, as the high theology of the post‐Vatican II tradition demonstrated. Yet the globalized generalisation of this possibility tends to relate to its prototypes like the social house building of the 70s to the Bauhaus movement. I am grateful to Dr Frank Turner SJ. for drawing my attention to this difference.
23 “The Soldiers in their Passage to York turn into Reformers, Pull down Popish Pictures, Break Down Rayles, turn Altars into Tables.” See https://www.scholarsresource.com/browse/work/2144666754.
24 See Milbank, John, Beyond Secular Order. The Representation of Being and the Representation of the People (Hoboken: Wiley‐Blackwell 2014), pp. 158, 175, 184 passimGoogle Scholar. As the technic philosopher Bernard Stiegler has pointed out in his trilogy “Technics and Time”, we are by nature “prosthetic” creatures, see: Stiegler, Bernard, Technics and Time. 1. The Fault of Epimetheus, transl. by Barker, Stephen (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a mapping of the recent philosophical discussion on technology see: Sharon, Human Nature in the Age of Biotechnology.
25 For a thorough investigation of the failed modern battle against fetish‐objects see: Kohl, Karl‐Heinz, Die Macht der Dinge. Geschichte und Theorie sakraler Objekte (München: Beck 2003)Google Scholar.
26 See McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man (Cambridge (Mass.): The MIT Press 1994)Google Scholar.
27 “Every once in a while a revolution comes along that changes everything.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ, 46‐53′′.
28 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ. 14′57′′.
29 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ. 17′9′′.
30 For an illustration of this phenomenon see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINa46HeWg8.
31 I will engage with this complex topic more thoroughly in my forthcoming monograph on Magic Objects. Art, Technology and Sacramentality in a Post‐digital Age.
32 See Ward, Adrian F., Duke, Kristen, Ayelet, Gneezy, and Bos, Marten W., “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity” in Journal of the Association of Consumer Research 2/2 (2017), pp. 140‐154CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Weil, Simone, War and the Iliad. Transl. by McCarthy, Mary (New York: NYRB Classics 2005), p.7Google Scholar.
34 Nagel, Thomas, Mind and Cosmos. Why the Materialist Neo‐Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press 2012), p.118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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36 See Williams, Rowan, The Edge of Words. God and the Habits of Language (London ‐ New Delhi ‐ New York: Bloomsbury 2014), p.26 fGoogle Scholar.
37 See Foucault, Michel, Naissance de la clinique: une archéologie du regard médical (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France 1963)Google Scholar.
38 See Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica. Transl. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Notre Dame, Ind: Christian Classics 1981), Ia q. 78 a. 4 ad 1Google Scholar; and I q. 57 a. 2 resp. As for Cusa's theory of perception see: Hoff, Johannes, The Analogical Turn. Re‐thinking Modernity with Nicholas of Cusa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2013), pp. 75, and 168‐74Google Scholar.
39 For an introduction to the history of this concept see: Art. Sensus Communis in Ritter, J.; Gründer, K. (Ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, Bd. 9 2017, 622‐675.
40 Already Aristotle associated the sensus communis with the sense of touch. See Otabe, Tanehisa, “Das Problem des ‘sensus communis’. Die Wahrnehmung des Wahrnehmens (Aristoteles) und das ästhetische Bewusstsein (Kant)” in Journal of the Faculty of Letters, The University of Tokyo, Aesthetics 39 (2014), pp. 69‐82, p.74Google Scholar. For a phenomenological evaluation of Aquinas’ appropriation of Aristotle's theory see: Milbank, John and Pickstock, Catherine, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge 2001), pp. 72 ffGoogle Scholar.
41 The intersubjective dimensions of the sensus communis were already discussed by Aristotle, and had become prominent again in the late Kant: See Otabe, “Das Problem des ‘sensus communis’”, p.74 ff.; and Arendt, Hannah, Vita activa. Vom tätigen Leben (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer 1960), pp. 202 ffGoogle Scholar.
42 Jones, David, Art and Sacrament in Harman, Grisewood (Ed.), Epoch and Artist. Selected Writings (London: Faber and Faber 1959), pp. 143‐179Google Scholar; see also: The Utile. A note to ‘Art and Sacrament’ (1958), ibid. pp.180‐188.
43 Jobs father was a mechanic. See Isaacson, Walter, Steve Jobs. Die autorisierte Biografie des Apple‐Gründers (München: BTB 2012), pp. 19 ffGoogle Scholar; and ibid. pp.153‐163.
44 Williams, Rowan, Grace and Necessity. Reflections on Art and Love (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse 2005), p.13Google Scholar.
45 See Jones, The Utile, p.180 ff.
47 See Williams, Grace and Necessity, pp. 58‐69.
48 I have investigated this iconic feature of sacramental objects more thoroughly in a forthcoming essay, see: Hoff, Johannes, Iconicity and the Anamorphosis of Social Space. Retrieving Nicholas of Cusa's Political Pneumatology in Dürr, Walter; Negel, Joachim (Ed.), Komm Heiliger Geist! Reflexionen über das vielfältige und einheitstiftende Wirkung des heligen Geistes (Münster: Aschendorff 2018)Google Scholar.
49 See Cicero, , De natura deorum (Cambridge: Cambride University Press 1880), II, 72Google Scholar.
50 Lactantius, , Divinarum Institutionum Liber IV in Migne, J. P. (Ed.), Patrologia Cursus Completus. Series Latina, 6 (Paris: Garnier 1815), 28.2Google Scholar.
51 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, lib. 1 cap. 1.
52 Williams, Grace and Necessity, p.68.
53 Ward, Graham, “The Commodification of Religion or the Consummation of Capitalism” in The Hedgehog Review (2003), pp. 50‐65, p.61Google Scholar.
54 See Spiekermann, Sarah, Ethical IT Innovation. A Value‐based System Design Approach (New York: Taylor & Francis 2015), pp. 39 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
55 Bayer, Oswald, Martin Luther's Theology. A Contemporary Interpretation (Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans 2008)Google Scholar; and Bayer, Oswald, A Contemporary in Dissent: Johannes Georg Hamann as a Radical Enlightener, transl. by Harrisville, Roy A. and Mattes, Mark C. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 2013)Google Scholar.
56 See for example: Braaten, Carl E. and Jenson, Robert W., Union with Christ. The New Finish Interpretation of Luther (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans 1998)Google Scholar.
57 See also Simpson, James, Reform and Cultural Revolution. The Oxford Literary History Vol. 2 (Oxfrord: Oxford UP 2002)Google Scholar.
58 Fort the following see: Gregory, Bred S., The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard UP 2012), pp. 1‐128CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gillespie, Michael Allen, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2008), pp. 19‐43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Pfau, Thomas, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2013), pp. 160‐213Google Scholar.
59 Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2007), pp. 25‐220CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 See also Manent, Pierre, Metamorphoses of the City. On the Western Dynamic, transl. by Lepain, M. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP 2013), pp. 304‐328CrossRefGoogle Scholar
61 Milbank, John, “Reformation 500: Any Cause for Celebration?” in Unpublished Paper (2017), p.6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to John Milbank for sending me his manuscript.
62 As for the controversy about the last question cf. White, Graham, Luther as Nominalist. A Study of the Logical Method used in Luther's Disputations in the Light of Their Medieval Background (Helsinki: Luther‐Agricola Society 1994)Google Scholar; and Muller, Richard A., “Not Scotist: Understanding of Being, Univocity and Analogy in Early‐Modern Reformed Thought” in Reformation and Renaissance Review 14/2 (2012), pp. 127‐150CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
63 Milbank, John, “Reformation 500: Any Cause for Celebration?”, p.17.
64 Luther rejected the rationalistic logicism of the late‐scholastic tradition, the semi‐Pelagianism of the nominalist tradition, and the general tendency to downplay the significance of Christ, yet the classical points of conflict between Luther and Calvin – trinity, christology, real presence and double predestination (not to mention the problem of free will) – would have turned out to be pseudo‐problems for theologians who have a firm grounding in the participatory realism of the tradition of Albert, as Nicholas of Cusa still had in the fifteenth‐century. For a more thorough discussion of this issue see ibid. pp.11‐22.
65 Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Rendall, Steven (Berkeley: University of California Press 1984), p.137Google Scholar; and Certeau, Michel de, The Mystic Fable. Transl. by Smith, Michael B. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1992), pp. 90‐94Google Scholar.
66 For the following see: Candler, Peter M., Theology, Rhetoric, Manuduction, or Reading Scripture together on the Path to God (Grand Rapids, Mich: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co 2006)Google Scholar; and with regard to the twelfth‐century: Illich, Ivan, In the Vineyard of the Text. A commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993)Google Scholar.
67 See McLuhan, Marshall, The Gutenberg Galaxy. The Making of the Typographical Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2012), pp. 104‐109Google Scholar.
68 For the last example see: Brown, Michelle P., The World of the Luttrell Psalter (London: The British Library 2006)Google Scholar.
69 As for the last point see: Milbank, John, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Cambridge Mass.: Blackwell 1991), pp. 17‐20Google Scholar.
70 See Candler, Theology, Rhetoric, Manuduction, or Reading Scripture together on the Path to God, p.18 f.
72 Lubac, Henri de, Corpus Mysticum. The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, transl. by Simmonds, Gemma (London: SCM 2006)Google Scholar. For the following see: Certeau, The mystic fable, pp. 79‐90.
73 See Hoff, Johannes, Mystagogische Zugänge zur Kirche als Leib Christi. Certeaus taktische Re‐lektüre von Corpus Mysticum und das Vermächtnis Henri de Lubacs in Bauer, Christian; Sorace, Marco A. (Ed.), Gott, anderswo? Theologie im Gespräch mit Michel de Certeau (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald 2017) (forthcoming)Google Scholar. This text is a substantially revised version of: Hoff, Johannes, Mysticism, Ecclesiology and the Body of Christ. Certeau's (Mis‐)Reading of Corpus Mysticum and the Legacy of Henri de Lubac, in Bocken, Inigo (Ed.), Spaces. History and Mysticism in Michel de Certeau (Louvain/Paris: Peeters 2012), pp. 87‐109Google Scholar.
74 See Ward, Graham, The Church as the Erotic Community in Boeve, Lieven; Leijssen, Lambert (ed.), Sacramental Presence in a Postmodern Context (Leuven: Peters 2001), pp. 167‐205, pp. 179 ffGoogle Scholar.
75 McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy), p.126. McLuhan builds here on the ground breaking research of Walter J. Ong: see Ong, Walter J, Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, Mass, London: Havard UP 1983)Google Scholar.
76 See Edgerton, Samuel Y., The Heritage of Giotto's Geometry. Art and Science on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution (Ithaca ‐ London: Cornell UP 1991)Google Scholar; Edgerton, Samuel Y., The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope. How Renaissance Linear Perspective Changed our Vision of the Universe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2009)Google Scholar; and Hoff, The Analogical Turn, part II.
77 See Taylor, A Secular Age, pp. 25‐220.
78 McLuhan calls this the “power to act without reacting”. McLuhan, Understanding Media, p.4.
79 The Protestant retreat from the logic of papal indulgencies and socio‐economic practices of sacred donations did not drain the “fetish practices” of the past. Rather, it created the space in which the true religion of the modern age emerged: the religion of capitalism. See Leshem, Dotan, The Origins of Neoliberalism. Medelling the Economy from Jesus to Foucault (New York: Columbia UP 2016)Google Scholar; Goodchild, Philip, Theology of Money (Durham and London: Duke UP 2009)Google Scholar.) The commodification of the Bible marked the point at which the old religion overlapped with the new religion.
80 See Marin, Louis, Portrait of the King, transl. by Houle, M. M. (Minneapolis: Univ of Minnesota Pr 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hoff, Mystagogische Zugänge zur Kirche als Leib Christi (forthcoming).
81 Kurzweil, Ray, The Singularity is Near. When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Duckworth 2006)Google Scholar.
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83 Gregory, The Unintended Reformation.
84 “Literalism, as a cultural phenomenon, is always a child of mistrust, and literalism must always become the parent of mistrust. The words on the page inevitably produce division, but the literalist can only appeal to the words on the page or written in the heart.” Simpson, James, Burning to Read. English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP 2010), p.143Google Scholar.
85 Floridi, Luciano, “Semantic Conceptions of Information” in The Standford Encyclopedia (2017) [accessed 09/09/2017]. Floridi concludes his entry with an affirmative quotation of this declaration.
86 See, for example: Floridi, Luciano, The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality (Oxford: Oxford UP 2016)Google Scholar.
87 As for this prediction see also: Ong, Walter J, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London ‐ New York: Routledge 2001)Google Scholar.
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