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ABSTRACT
For over a millennium, Catholic and Protestant traditions have deployed technologies to address the central paradox of the Christian faith: God’s absence after Easter. The following essay brings together scholarship on religious technics in the Christian Latin West during the medieval and early modern periods with a focus on the performance of presence. Medieval actors utilized an array of techniques, instruments, and contraptions to manifest the divine power present in holy matter. The movement of artifacts and people across medieval and early modern horizons mobilized and multiplied the effects of sacred proximity. The Society of Jesus’ emphasis on sensuality in worship and spectacle linked older forms of ritual piety with routinized religion. The shift from a predominantly Christian to modern culture in the West did not terminate organized religion’s close association with technology, but extended the experience of spiritual presence in the West through industrial and post-industrial, digital means.
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Notes
1. Sharp, “Steel Axes.”
2. Stoneman, “Global Radio Broadcasting.”
3. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, 362.
4. Engelke, Problem of Presence.
5. Synonyms for presence include simultaneity, immediacy, present-ness, now-ness, and nearness.
6. de Vries and Weber, Religion and Media and Meyer and Houtman, Things. Religion is a highly contentious concept among scholars. Skeptics reject the analytical value of the concept of religion, while nominalists defend its use as a necessary academic construct. Confusion over the concept of religion is further reflected in deep-seated methodological and disciplinary differences over how it should be applied; religious scholars and theologians favor substantive definitions that focus on the sense of religion for practitioners, while sociologists and anthropologists favor functional definitions, which privilege description of ritual practices and communal behavior. See the work of Russell McCutcheon and Nathan Rusticcia. For nominalists, see Nongbri, Before Religion and the work of the late historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith. For a substantive approach, see especially Riesenbrodt, Promise of Salvation. Despite scholarly disagreement, it is nonetheless possible to formulate a working conception of religion. According to Nongbri, ‘.. there is nothing inherently wrong with using religion as a redescriptive way of arranging the data for our own comparative purpose, as long as we strive to make it clear that the resulting arrangement is our own and not somehow intrinsic to, or embedded in, our evidence.’ Nongbri, ‘“Embedded” Religion,’ 455. This essay considers religions as shared, organized sets of beliefs and practices of the sacred as manifested in the normative lives of believers.
7. Technical artifacts differ from material artifacts in that they embody future human purpose. Technical artifacts inscribe future human purpose through the processes of design, production, use, and maintenance. Rather than conceiving material culture as pure ‘things,’ historians of technology thus view artifacts themselves as the outcomes of prior technical actions – ie, as products. See Meijers, ed., Philosophy of Technology; Kroes and Meijers, “The Dual Nature,” 1–4; and Kroes, “Engineering and the Dual Nature.”
8. As a result, it is worth pointing out that the power of the material realm to mediate the divine exists as a capacity that religious groups and individuals must realize through technical actions.
9. See Meyer and Houtman, Things, Introduction.
10. See Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History, Introduction.
11. See Gillin, “Prophets of Progress”; and Munday “Mining Cultures.”
12. On communication media and presence, see Sconce, Haunted Media and Milne, Letters, postcards, email. On photography and divine presence, see Christian, Divine Presence.
13. Derrida, “Above All, No Journalists!”
14. Smith, Sensuous Worship.
15. Thiesset, “Entretien avec Pierre Musso,” 2. I use technics here, as elsewhere in the essay, as an umbrella term to encompass both traditional techniques and modern industrial technology. The word is thus intended as roughly synonymous with contemporary usage of the term technology.
16. The choice of subject is necessarily selective and not meant to exclude the Christian streams of Orthodoxy or denominational Protestantism, each of which merits equal consideration.
17. For an exploration of religion as an historical category, see Harrison, Territories. For discussion of religion as an historical discourse, see Asad, Genealogies of Religion. On modernity as a set of anthropological distinctions, see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
18. On the transformation of early Latin Christianity, see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo and Ransom of the Soul.
19. Harrison, Territories.
20. During its time, Thomas à Kempis’ work was the second most popular book after the Bible and was printed 750 times before 1650, while over 2000 editions of the book exist today. The volume played a major role in Catholic Christianity and strongly influenced Ignatius of Loyola, among others, in composing his Spiritual Exercises.
21. Vermeir, “Techniques, Rites, Religion.”
22. Bynum, “Notes from the Field.”
23. Larkin, Very Nature of God.
24. Schatzberg, ““Technik” Comes to America.”
25. At least until recently when usage of the English term technology became more widespread, all continental European languages distinguished between technique and technology: la technique (Fr.), die Technik (Ger.), de techniek (Dutch), la técnica (Sp.). Schatzberg, Technology: Critical History, 7–8.
26. Nye, Technology Matters, Chapter 1.
27. Techniques involve the rational organization of various practices for a goal or purpose. Vermeir, ‘Techniques, Rites, Religion,’ 410. By technical practices, the current essay intends both purposeful material activities (see note7 above) and personal skills or methods, as opposed to industrial technology.
28. Vermeir, “Techniques et Religion,” 491 and Stolow, xxv.
29. Landes, Revolution in Time, 61.
30. I am indebted to Lee Vinsel for the basic insight concerning the role of techniques.
31. Lagrée, Prométhée and Religion et Modernité.
32. Archambeau, “Miracle Mediators.”
33. Vermeir, “Techniques et Religion.”
34. Ibid.
35. Kopania, “Animated Sculptures.”
36. Christian, Divine Presence, Chapter 2.
37. Kopania, “Animated Sculptures.”
38. Bynum, Christian Materiality, 216.
39. Kopania, “Animated Sculptures.” For a trenchant historical framing of the acts of erasure upon which automata depended, see Jones-Imhotep “Ghost Factories.”
40. Powell, “Machine for Souls.”
41. Peters, “Calendar, Clock, Tower.”
42. Ibid.
43. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, Chapters 3–4.
44. Truitt, Medieval Robots, 145.
45. Ibid., 148.
46. Ibid., Chapter 6.
47. See note 21 above.
48. Gospel of John 1.
49. Bynum, Christian Materiality.
50. Smith, “Portable Christianity.”
51. Davids, “Shadow of the Jesuits,” 189–206.
52. Davids, “Colonial, Religious, and Commercial Machines,” 212–219.
53. Schilling, “Confessional Migration.”
54. Scoville, “Spread of Techniques,” 347–360 and “The Huguenots”, 294–311; and Misa, Leonardo to the Internet, 33–58, 74.
55. Davids, “Colonial, Religious, and Commercial Machines.”
56. Davids, “On Machines.”
57. Smith, Sensuous Worship, 54–5.
58. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (1435), quoted in Christian, 97, 103.
59. See note 14 above.
60. Ibid.
61. The practice of Baroque exposition graves was widespread through most of the eighteenth century, until Enlightenment disdain brought it to an end. Munich alone had 27 exposition graves in 1728.
62. See note 40 above.
63. Vermeir, “Techniques et Religion,” 493.
64. See note 36 above.
65. See note 23 above.
66. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, Chapter 9.
67. On the close association between the mechanical and supernatural during the early industrial age in France, see Tresch, “The Machine Awakens.” On the intersection between the mechanical and the Romantic movement in France, see Tresch, The Romantic Machine.
68. On the spiritual telegraph, see Sconce, Haunted Media and Stolow, “Salvation by Electricity.” On the psychic telegraph, see Noakes, “Thoughts and Spirits.”
69. Schmidt, Hearing Things, 237–245.
70. On electricity as a performative and speculative medium in late nineteenth-century Britain, see Morus, “No Mere Dream.”
71. For a discussion of spirit photography in Victorian England, see Tucker, Nature Exposed, 65–125.
72. Morgan, Protestants and Pictures.
73. Christian, Divine Presence, Chapter 3.
74. Schatzberg, “From Art to Applied Science.”
75. On religious radio speech as a distinctly Christian form of embodiment, see Mitchell, Visually Speaking. For an overview of religion and new media practices, see Campbell, ed., Digital Religion.
76. Sconce, Haunted Media, 19.
77. See Groys, “Digital Reproduction”; and Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.
78. Green, “Soul Survivor.”