‘A theology for the bodiless’ : a prolegomenon to Catholic ‘sacramental’ presence in the age of AI

Abstract

A title as seemingly strange as the one I am suggesting for this contribution deserves some explanation. I am a moral theologian, psychotherapy trainee, and media ecologist with a keen interest in the thought of Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan, his son Eric McLuhan, and the Toronto School of Communications. If you know anything about the McLuhans, and especially their commitment to classical education and faith, you are likely aware that their understanding of the world is imbued with a “Catholic sacramental imagination.” This is evident from the very beginning of Marshall McLuhan’s scholarship, composed during WWII, and through which he converted to Catholicism. His doctoral dissertation, published as The Classical Trivium, studies how that fundamental analogical principle of the Greek mind, where logos – ‘word’ – implies ‘speech as intelligibility’, has shaped all Western history. Human words – for it is only the human endowed with reason, who, like God, speaks – are a medium (or metaphor), uttering the ‘nature of things’. In turn, it is not surprising that the incarnate Logos also communicates the very nature of God to humankind.