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Marshall McLuhan and Eastern Christianity: Probing an Interfaith Interface
Christian Roy
Abstract
McLuhan’s references to Eastern Christianity in The Medium and the Light reveal an ambivalence
that raises challenging questions about both of them. If the Reformation was the product of the
technology of print that undermined manuscript-based medieval culture, such a communal culture
persisted in the Eastern Orthodox Church, while the Catholic Counter-Reformation’s print-based
centralized bureaucracy seems like dead weight in the neo-tribal electric environment. McLuhan
often lumped together Orthodoxy and the Orient in their appeal to post-literate Western man under
those conditions. To be sure, rare is now the Catholic or mainline Protestant church that does not
display at least one Eastern icon as a self-evident touchstone of authentic Christianity. But is that
new prestige of Eastern Christian forms to be viewed as the Trojan horse of an Oriental peril to
Western civilization as it dissolves into a global electronic environment? The Eastern Church is,
if anything, the more direct heir of Greco-Roman tradition, and yet did not treat it as the “hard
shell” of visual-literate immutability it became in the West. Has her Eastern way of handling that
heritage preserved Christian possibilities that are neither married to Western modernity, nor to
be subsumed under post-modern electronic Orientalism? McLuhan’s understanding of faith,
theology, Incarnation, the Logos, etc., often has an Orthodox ring to it: “the medium is the
message” could sum up the theology of the icon. With its acute sense of their inseparability, can
Orthodoxy contribute to a critical understanding of electric conditions that also challenge it as
their counter-environment? How would it stand up to McLuhan-inspired scrutiny as the Christian
interface between East and West, audile-tactile and visual culture, participation and personality?
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We now understand better than we used to do the extent to which Marshall McLuhan was
motivated to articulate his media theory largely as a Catholic humanist response to the cultural
dominance of assumptions and modes of thought having their root in the print-based conceptualism
and moralism of Protestantism as the Roman Church’s Other. But what of Catholicism’s other
Other: an Eastern Christianity that remains alien to the Western matrix of modernity, yet closer to
its ancient roots as an Orthodox Church that was spared reconstruction in visual terms? What did
McLuhan make of the challenge of a non-Western Christianity to his intended defence of Christian
qua Western civilization? McLuhan’s references to Eastern Christianity in The Medium and the
Light reveal an ambivalence that raises fruitful questions about his premises as a Western
Christian, as well as for Eastern Christians who may not share them, but have yet to formulate
anything resembling his sustained critical engagement with the ways different media shape man –
especially in electric conditions, even though their own tradition, as exemplified by icon-worship
and its theology, clearly shows extraordinary sensitivity to those issues. In this paper, I will be
probing this largely uncharted territory of inquiry, coming from an angle in some ways
symmetrical to McLuhan’s position, namely as a Western convert to Orthodox Christianity for
close to thirty years now —about as long as I have been fitfully grappling with McLuhan’s thought.
Marshall McLuhan embraced Roman Catholicism as he realized the Protestant
Reformation was the product of a particular technology, since “medieval culture based on
manuscript allowed for a style of communal life very different from the mass community which
appeared with print.”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 46) He thought subsequent history had been “an ignoble
retreat” from its “difficult and untried ideas”, by which he may have meant certain grammatical
aspects of Scholasticism, so that the promise of a Christian humanism was “distorted” and the
Renaissance’s “proud promise to us” was nullified.(McLuhan, 1999, p. 7) McLuhan includes the
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rather late medieval “scholastic method of discussion” in the same oral pattern as “the manuscript
tradition”, which was “much more acoustic than visual”, as “transmission mostly came about
orally”. This older communal culture persisted in the Eastern Church; but there, it has always been
understood to be thanks to an early instinctive and theological rejection of Scholasticism as a
dangerous temptation from a Western Church that was already straying into a conceptual—and
therefore visual—bias inimical to an inner understanding of the faith as orally transmitted, e.g.
through the liturgy. For Greek theologian Christos Yannaras, Western medieval thought “ruled out
cognition as the experience of communion and relation, it limited truth to individual
comprehension, to the correspondence of thought and the object of thought (veritas est adaequatio
rei et intellectus).”(Yannaras, 2003, p. 17)
It founded an individualist anthropology and a rationalist theory of knowledge that saw
their completed systematization in Scholasticism and later in Descartes. The theology of
the West wanted to establish itself as a positive science —to prove the existence of God
with rational arguments and to impose its ethics as functionality. It thus transformed God
into a dead concept (blosser Begriff —Kant) preparing the way for metaphysical nihilism.
(Yannaras, 2003, p. 18)
So the transformation of faith from a percept to a concept was, in the Eastern view,
underway long before the advent of print, as the very process that drove the Roman Church out of
communion with the other ancient patriarchates in the same orthodox faith, as its novel claim to
direct jurisdiction over them in a universal Papacy came to a head at the same time as the
emergence of Scholasticism, an infatuation with Roman law, the invention of Purgatory, celibate
clericalism, non-iconic art forms, and other dubious innovations. Beholden as he was to this postschism medieval synthesis that set apart Roman Catholicism from previous and further ecclesial
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developments, McLuhan recognized that “the Eastern Church, being iconic and audile-tactile,
could not tolerate the visual hierarchy of Rome with external, materialistic aspects,” later bolstered
by the Counter-Reformation’s emphasis on print-based centralized bureaucracy. The latter felt to
him as dead weight now that Catholicism is caught in the alternative to sink or swim in the neotribal electric environment “with its multi-locational boundlessness”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 137), so
that Eric McLuhan could even maintain that “something more like the Eastern Church may be in
the offing”, with doctrinal authority but no central high command.(McLuhan, 1999, p. xxviii).
That may be one way to interpret McLuhan’s quip: “It would be a good time to be Russian
Orthodox: they split off from Rome because it was too literate.”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 60) And to be
sure, the Eastern theological current of “eucharistic ecclesiology”, emphasizing the communal
sacramental embodiment of the Church at the local level of parish and diocese, has recently come
to gain a wide appeal even beyond the confines of Orthodoxy. Even more telling perhaps of a shift
in religious sensibilities concomitant with the flipping back of visual into acoustic conditions, rare
is now the Catholic or mainline Protestant church that does not display at least one Eastern icon as
a self-evident touchstone of authentic, ancient Christianity.
Is that new appeal of Eastern Christian forms of worship to be seen as the Trojan horse of
an Oriental peril to Western civilization as it dissolves into a global electronic environment, as
McLuhan sometimes seemed close to suggesting? Or is it, on the contrary, an indication that the
Eastern Church, far from being aligned with ethereal “electric information environments” that
McLuhan saw as “a “reasonable facsimile of the mystical body, a blatant manifestation of the AntiChrist”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 72), might instead offer the promise of a concrete antidote to it as the
original, locally embodied acoustic Church, of which the discarnate electric planetary
consciousness is but a Luciferian parody? For the Roman Church in particular remains saddled
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with old and new baggage of its own shift away from the common acoustic paradigm of
Christianity’s first millennium: both the inherited centralized universal jurisdiction of its defining
visual bias, symbolized by the Council of Trent, and its recent acoustic reversal in the contentless
ecumenism of the emerging noosphere of electronic media and new technologies, echoed by
Vatican II and embraced by the likes of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Both of these templates of
Catholicity have in common a definition of it in terms of continuous extension in space, in contrast
to Orthodoxy, whose very name entails a definition in comprehension as locally transmitted
through time.
These two ecclesiological models can be closely matched to the two imperial models
identified by Harold Innis: the militaristic empires concerned with the conquest of space and the
religious empires privileging transmission over time. It is clear that the Roman Church decided
around the turn of the last millennium to organize and image itself as a world-conquering
administrative State, whereas the Eastern Churches’ paramount concern has always been to remain
in communion beyond time with the ecumenical Church as it existed for a thousand years before
the Great Schism. The Western bias toward space initially coincided with a new visual emphasis,
whereas the Eastern bias toward time has remained a function of an acoustic emphasis. “It was
Innis’ conviction that stable societies were able to achieve a balance between time- and spacebiased communications media. In his writings, Innis is forthright in his own bias that the oral
tradition”, based as it is on taking time for personal transmission, “is inherently more flexible and
humanistic than the written tradition, which he found rigid and impersonal in contrast.”(Soules,
HAI) Harold Innis held up both classical Greece and Byzantium as unique examples of balance
between oral and written culture that pointed a way to the future.
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But while McLuhan started out as a booster of the acoustic paradigm of the late Middle
Ages against the visual turn of the Gutenberg Galaxy, when faced with the onslaught of electronic
medias’ tribal drums, he turned into more of an advocate of beleaguered Western literate
civilization, aligning its Greek emergence with its European print version over against all things
Eastern and pre-modern. That is why he sometimes lumped together Orthodoxy and the Orient in
their appeal to post-literate Western man’s longing “to be immersed in things and lose the
individual self” as “a by-product of the alphabet and the visual world that flows from it. The
Eastern Church, especially the Slavs, traditionally tends towards the inner trip: from that comes
the importance to young Westerners of Dostoevski” and similar Russian authors (McLuhan, 1999,
p. 95): the very ones who drew him to Christian faith when he was young and still a rebel against
the soulless mass individualism of print culture.(McLuhan, 1999, p. 17)
There was certainly a note of concern in McLuhan’s frequent musings in later life as to
“whether the Church has any inherent and inseparable bond with the Greco-Roman tradition of
civilization”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 129), since she brought salvation to “the private individual equal
before a code of written laws”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 128) born of the phonetic alphabet of the ancient
polis.
Christianity definitely supports the idea of a private, independent metaphysical substance
of the self. Where technologies supply no cultural basis for this individual, then Christianity
is in for trouble. When you have a new tribal culture confronting an individualist religion,
there is trouble.(McLuhan, 1999, p. 85)
For McLuhan, it was far from “accidental that Christianity began in the Greco-Roman
culture. … A sense of private substantial identity–a self– is to this day utterly unknown to tribal
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societies.”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 80) And yet, it is not in those terms nor on the premises they express
that, out of an Eastern Christian sensibility, Russian writers and artists such as Dostoevsky,
Solzhenitsyn and Tarkovsky have mounted their spirited defense of the integrity of the human
person as much against the mass individualism of the “civilized” West as against collectivistic
“Oriental” despotism. Though I know of at least one bold Orthodox attempt to show that the
Gospel message is not married to Greco-Roman culture and could just as well, or even more
appropriately, be couched in the language of Chinese humanism and Taoist wisdom (Damascene,
1999), the broader consensus of Orthodoxy is to assume a providential link between Christianity
and a Hellenism that managed to break the “acoustic” spell of archaic tribalism. But this shift is
understood in somewhat different terms than the typically Roman ones used by McLuhan.
Orthodox theology would quibble with or balk at almost every term of McLuhan’s “self-evident”
alignment of Christianity with “the idea of a private, independent metaphysical substance of the
self”.(McLuhan, 1999, p. 85)
On the one hand, Greek theology has always been suspicious of the kind of substance
ontology favoured in the West from Augustine on, applied to Godhead as somehow distinct from
the Persons of the Trinity. Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics as tied to onto-theology
and naturally leading to the nihilism of Technique is taken as independent confirmation of the
wrong turn taken by Western Christianity, and it may be noted in passing that another great
Christian thinker of Technique from Canada, George Grant, also came to this view under the
decisive impact of British Orthodox writer Philip Sherrard’s account of The Greek East and the
Latin West (1959). On the other hand, most Orthodox theologians take for granted the distinction
between “person” and “individual” made popular by Christian thinkers of various churches in the
first half of the last century, opposing to the humanist natural individual defined by privative
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separation the Christian person in and as free communion. At bottom, they reject the Western
definition of the personal self as rational substance, only accepting a relational subject, patterned
on the three Persons of God. Thus for John Zizioulas, Metropolitan of Pergamon, “the person,
viewed in the light of the Trinity, is not an ‘individual’, in the sense of an identity which is
conceivable apart from its relations”(Zizioulas, 2006, p. 177), for “the names Father, Son and Holy
Spirit indicate ‘a mode of existence, that is of relation’,”(Zizioulas, 2006, p. 175), to cite the
Cappadocian Father Amphilochius.
Personhood
as
a
situated
nexus
of
mutual
“relations
of
ontological
constitutiveness”(Zizioulas, 2006, p. 173) is clearly a function of resonance in acoustic space that
is at odds with the notion of fixed substances in uniform visual space. In McLuhan’s terms, “for
the auditory man, no two times or two spaces could be alike. Each is unique. Everything has its
own structure. This is what brings the stress on existentialism” that McLuhan rightly connects with
Russian authors and the appeal of the East, even as he is wary that such a relational
“internalization” has as its corollary that “the human condition is focused on the group, the tribe,
the family”, to the point that, “according to Zen Buddhism, you have to immerse yourself in things
and efface the self; you have to disappear.” “The same characteristics apply to the Eastern Church
as a whole”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 50), he maintains. But this is not quite how the Orthodox sense of
the person as a kenotic “selfless self” in ecclesial communion plays out. Zizioulas could thus
follow up his classic “Studies in Personhood and the Church” gathered under the title Being as
Communion (1997) with further studies of Communion and Otherness (2006), to spell out how,
“if Chalcedonian Christology were to be expressed philosophically, it would be absolutely
necessary to work out an ontology whereby distance is not an inevitable corollary of otherness,
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and unity does not destroy but —this is important— affirms and realizes otherness.”(Zizioulas,
2006, p. 293)
McLuhan appears to share that insight of “eucharistic ecclesiology” when he stresses, in a
letter to Allen Maruyama (New Year’s Eve 1971), how “characteristic of man’s humanity is his
freedom in community, which the Christian community provides … in the corporate freedom in
the mystical body of Christ, the Church.” Now that the electric age has subsumed individual
freedom into a corporate one “in a tribal context,” “the hope of man is that he can be changed
sacramentally so that he will eventually come to an awareness of himself in his community and
discover individual freedom in his community.”(McLuhan, 1999, p. xxvii) This hope is consonant
with the Eastern sense of the Church as a body singing in unison, which translates in a local setting
as the monodic, unaccompanied, partially notated chant of traditional Eastern liturgies; hence the
dismay of people raised with them when they come to encounter virtuosic, fully scripted
polyphony and even instruments in a church setting in the West, which both foregrounds
individuality and standardizes it by technical means.
This clash of an untechnological acoustic experience and a visual individualized experience
of what the Church and even a Christian is extends to the very understanding of the nature of
theology and (small o) orthodoxy. McLuhan once said that “orthodoxy, in the etymological sense
of the word, is to corner oneself into a single point of view”(interview with Pierre Babin, cited in
de Kerckhove, 1982). But in the Eastern “view” —which is really a form of hearing, the word
“orthodoxy” does not translate just as “right teaching”, but interchangeably as “right praise”, that
is to say, right singing, in unison, without the discordant voice of individual choice that is the
etymological meaning of heresy. Hence the ultimate theological authoritativeness of the sung texts
transmitted in the liturgy, as per the ancient adage lex orandi, lex credendi. McLuhan comes close
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to this kind of Orthodox understanding of the nature of theology when he says it “can become a
work, perhaps as part of the opus dei, part of the prayerful contemplation of God”, instead of a
mere game as a “theoretical or intellectual construct.”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 82) Due to the visual
bias of his own faith tradition, he may be one-sidedly exaggerating the extent to which the Church
“wrapped itself in a visual culture that placed static permanence above all other values”: the “hard
shell” of Greco-Roman culture, that brought in the “alphabetic age” of “visual man, logical man
—Plato and Aristotle”, read in the key of “Parmenides and the first logicians who wanted to
logically connect all beings.”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 49) This may actually be more of a belated
Roman key, whereby, according to Christos Yannaras, a more Heraclitean —and hence acoustic—
“Greek concept of logos”“was supplanted by the Latin ratio”(Yannaras, 2003, pp. 14-15) and its
fixed constants. He insists on the unbroken continuity of Hellenic civilization, as fulfilled by the
Eastern Church in substituting divine love for natural necessity in the definition of logos. For
Yannaras,
the decisive meaning of logos is relation; the reference and the reception of or the response
to the reference, which constitutes the event of communion. The entire universe, the whole
of reality, is for the Greeks a communion of logical relations. (It is a harmonic ordering of
“referrings” and referential responses to “referrings”.) This logical element renders the
universe into cosmos, a word meaning embellishment. The cosmos is embellishment of
harmony and order.(Yannaras, 2003, p. 15)
This is the world McLuhan identified as that of the pre-Socratics, especially Heraclitus, as
“acoustic people”. “They lived in a world abounding with voids, gaps, and intervals. For them,
things stirred, intersected, and reacted on each other.”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 48) The Eastern
Christian experience may be that the pre-Socratic acoustic world was if anything retrieved by the
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conversion of actually existing, continuous Greek civilization to the Christian mystery. The Greek
Church converted Hellenic concepts as the array of prayerful paradoxes that is Patristic “negative”
theology, whereas what happened in the Latin West was that the faith came to be recast within the
framework of the visually reconstructed Greco-Roman concepts of Scholastic rational theology.
Shedding that “hard shell” might not be tantamount to losing Christian civilization to global
neo-tribalism as McLuhan feared, but an opportunity to realize that neither Christianity nor
Hellenism are necessarily married to visual dominance as enshrined in print culture, as he thought
with concern about Christian prospects beyond the West, defined in both time and space. For there
are some indications that Greek Christianity can thrive in its wake by providing an authentic,
embodied alternative to electronic facsimiles of the mystical body, especially in cultures still close
to their acoustic tribal roots, as would seem confirmed by the exponential missionary growth of
Orthodoxy in Africa, after local seekers spontaneously sought out the ancient patriarchate of
Alexandria to join its timeless liturgies, with all the Greek accoutrements of the Eastern Roman
Empire! A harder missionary field might be the post-industrial West, so far gone from its roots
both alphabetic and acoustic, and there, McLuhan’s brand of media-savvy Catholic humanism and
the mystical theology of the Eastern Church may well gain from mutual engagement to make
intelligible to post-Christian cyberculture how, through the Incarnation, the human race “has been
assumed into the life of the Divine Logos, which is Christ”(McLuhan, 1999, p. 158), in whom
“there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message”.(McLuhan, 1999, p. 103)
References
Damascene, Hieromonk (1999). Christ the eternal Tao. Platina, CA: Valaam Books.
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de Kerckhove, Derrick (1982). Passion and Precision: The faith of Marshall McLuhan, for the
MICHAELMAS Conference, June 4th, 1982. Media Ecology Association. Retrieved from
http://www.media-ecology.org/mcluhan/mc_pass.txt (16/10/2015).
McLuhan, Marshall (1999). The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion. Eric McLuhan
and Jacek Szklarek (Eds.). Toronto: Stoddart.
Sherrard, Philip (1959). The Greek East and the Latin West. A Study in the Christian tradition.
Oxford University Press.
Soules, Marshall (n.d.). Harold Adams Innis: The Bias of Communications & Monopolies of
Power. Media Studies. Retrieved from http://www.media-studies.ca/articles/innis.htm
(16/10/2015).
Yannaras, Christos (2003). The Church in Post-Communist Europe. Patriarch Athenagoras
Orthodox Institute Distinguished Lectures 1998. Berkeley, CA: InterOrthodox Press.
Zizioulas, John D. (1997). Being as communion: Studies in personhood and the Church.
Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary Press.
Zizioulas, John D. (2006). Communion and otherness. Further studies in personhood and the
Church. London: T. & T. Clark.
Biography
Christian Roy is an independent scholar of intellectual and cultural history (PhD McGill 1993),
an art and cinema critic, and a translator from several European languages. A specialist of the
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French Personalist tradition (especially its technocritical “Bordeaux School” around Bernard
Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul —two authors he is currently translating into English), he has
published his thesis and many articles in that area, in addition to several texts on Paul Tillich,
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and George Grant (e.g. the entry on this Canadian critic of technology
in The Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Politics, Greenwood Press: 2006). He is also the author
of a two-volume reference work: Traditional Festivals. A Multicultural Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio:
2005). Roy is a member of the Board of the International Jacques Ellul Society (IJES).