Cyberneomonasticism–the concept of a monastery devoted to the development and transmission of cyberculture as ancient monasteries were preservers and transmitters of our cultural heritage in medieval times–has been proposed as a real possibility in our day. I am interested to find if the project to establish a monastery of cyberculture is developing. Some of my colleagues in religion are quite wary of an undiscerning enthusiasm for cyber-technology, seeing in such unsober zeal a tendency and temptation to a kind of idolatry and possibly worse. I share their concern, but as a scholar, I have also benefited greatly from the unprecedented access to material which the World Wide Web has provided, so I tend to want to utilise the medium without it becoming entirely my "message," so to speak. I was also intrigued to find that the great patristics scholar Cardinal Schoenborn is interested in this project. I know him only through his writings, in particular his study of St. Sophronios of Jerusalem who is the spiritual master of St. Maximos the Confessor, in whose writings I have concentrated my work. But let us look for a moment beyond the obvious benefits of virtuality to some of its more unsettling aspects, then come back to consider a monastery devoted to studying and transmitting cyberculture.

First

look at the almost shocking zeal and strange almost intolerant missionary spirit for cyberculture that has gripped the "knowledge elites" of the world. Why does hypertext make people so hyper? Paulo Soleri, the visionary arcologist of the Arizona desert, is a case in point. Besides a dense and almost impenetrable style and a strange fascination for all things silicon, his writings betray an intolerance of religion, in particular, a strong anti-Christian streak, and a tendency summarily to dismiss Christian theology as irrelevant at best and obscurantist at worst. Is he a typical example or an exception? Let us for the sake of argument assume the latter. Still, this zeal for virtual reality has a missionary fervour that makes one uneasy, despite all the wonderful advantages of hypertextual possibilities. The following are my real, not rhetorical, but genuinely existential questions: Can one–no, not the impersonal "one" but the personal I–can I become addicted to information? Am I already so addicted, since I am spending more and more time online? Is there a cult of the metamachine? Is this cult of the metamachine a form of gnosticism? Does cyberculture concentrate the energies of the soul in an integrative, healing fashion, leading to the realisation of the "one thing needful," or does it evacuate the spiritual energy of the intellect/mind/nous leading to the disintegration of the soul?

Secondly

what monastic tradition will be followed, if any, in starting this monastery? Will the founder be a monk himself? A genuine, living monastic tradition is a sine qua non for a monastery, it seems to me. Without that, no matter how wired and interactive and cyberculturally powerful you make it, it will not be a true monastery and may in fact be spiritually dangerous. I am sure that Cardinal Schoenborn, with his own background in the monastic spirituality of the 6th and 7th centuries, which produced some of the greatest spiritual masters in the history of Christianity, will agree with me. It is only fair to emphasise at this point that while I am questioning from a spiritual standpoint whether cyberculture is an unmitigated good, I must also admit from the same standpoint that religion is certainly not an unambiguous force for good either. There is a sickness of religion that is one of the most virulent forces on the planet; and it is a sickness that can break out in any religious or spiritual form or practice. What is of concern here in these reflections on the concept of a cyberneomonasticism is the possibility of linking the dangers of cyberculture with the sickness of religion. Humanity is, after all, not only "homo sapiens" or "homo faber" or "homo semioticus" but also "homo religiosus."

Thirdly

and by far the most important reservation regards the differing effects of cyberculture and monasticism, or the culture of ascesis. Cyberculture overwhelms and paralyses with its flood of information. Monastic asceticial culture seeks to transform the life of the individual and transfigure his consciousness by concentrating on the "one thing needful." Cybercultural overload creates loss of context and meaninglessness. The culture of hesychasm creates the apotheosis of meaning through deification: monastic "overload" when it occurs, is not a negative loss of meaning but is supremely positive--spiritual ecstatic union with God, participation in the total meaningfulness of the Uncreated Light. Cyberculturalists are desperately searching for effective "filters" to control the paralysing crush of information. Monastic asceticism is itself the supreme spiritual filter that, in matters of the body, soul and spirit, screens the inessential from the essential, the peccable from the impeccable, the destructive (deconstructive?) from the constructive, the disintegrative from the integrative, the disabling from the enabling. The ascetic life seeks to commune in the here and now with the Hyperessence, not dally till doomsday with hypertext. If the medium is indeed the message, and the Gospel teaching is true that we will on the day of judgement give an account for every idle word, thought or deed, then we need to ask the question, not in a neoLuddite spirit but in the spirit of sober discernment: what is the spiritual effect upon the soul of immersion in cyberculture?

 

II

"Wisdom, imagination and virtue are lost when messages double, information halves, knowledge quarters."

Heiner Benking, Futurist

" Whoever imagines mental barriers which actually do not exist and then thinks them away, has understood the world. As space is entrapped in geometry's network of lines, thought is caught in its (own) inherent laws. Maps make the world comprehensible to us; we are still waiting for the star-maps of the spirit. In the same way that ambling through fields we risk getting lost, the spirit negotiates its terrain

Friedrich Rueckert Wisdom of Brahmins

" We should look on man with wonder, conscious that his intellect [nous], being infinite, is the image of the invisible God; and that even if it is for a time limited by the body, as St. Basil says, it can embrace all form, just as God’s providence embraces the whole universe. For the intellect has the ability to transform itself into everything, and is dyed with the form of the object it apprehends. But when it is taken up into God, who is formless and imageless, it becomes formless and imageless itself "

St. Peter of Damaskos (1090?-1160?)

"If through sincere, continual prayer you stand aloof from desire for earthly things, if you repose not with sleep but through abandoning concern with everything except God, being steadfastly rooted solely in mindfulness of God, you will establish in yourself, like another helpmate, love for God. For the cry of the prayer that rises from within you releases divine love; and divine love awakens the intellect, revealing to it what is hidden. Then the intellect, united with love, gives birth to wisdom, and through wisdom proclaims the esoteric meaning of things. For the divine Logos, invoked in the cry of the prayer that rises from within you, lays hold of the noetic power of the intellect as though it were Adam’s rib and fills it with divine knowledge; and in its place, bringing to perfection your inner state, He confers the gift of virtue. Next He vivifies light-generating love and brings it to the enraptured intellect as it sleeps a sleep free from all desire for anything earthly. Love appears as another helpmate to the intellect liberated from mindless attachment to sensory things; it is because of this that it awakens the intellect, now in a state of purity that permits it to embrace the words of wisdom. Then the intellect, gazing on love and filled with delight, speaks at length to others, disclosing to them the hidden dimensions of virtue and the unseen operations of divine knowledge

St. Theoliptos of Philadelphia(1250-1322)

I have been visiting the various weblinks of conceptualist, holist, globalist and futurist, Heiner Benking, (ceptualinstitute.com/genre/benking/homepageHB.htm) and others, such as semioticist, Umberto Eco, through the bibliography of a friend’s PhD. thesis on the effects of WWW on literature. I have been somewhat encouraged by the direction I find that they are taking. I am glad to see that there is a recognition that loss of meaning and a frightening vacuation/abstraction of basic humanity are very real possibilities in a naive acceptance of an unhumanized cyber-future. The metaphor of a "second flood" to describe the destructive effects of the overwhelming flood of information created by cyberculture is significant. The question is, what kind of "ark" can be built to save human culture from drowning in the accelerating vortex of virtuality, loss of context and meaninglessness?

I am glad to see recognition that some metaphors and images are sterile, and even harmful, and that we need to link the past with the future . I am particularly happy to see Goethe's thought and vision recognised as a possible way forward. Goethean science is an alternative approach that we have neglected in our "Newtonian sleep." The idea of participatory science, knowledge related to consciousness, removing scales from our eyes, synthetic vision--these concepts which we find in Goethe, can also be found back in the past in the period of the great patristic and medieval mystics and spiritual masters, such as St. Maximos the Confessor and Meister Eckhart. These men were masters of contemplation of the living symbols of the real world. Benking’s use of this passage by Goethe is particularly apt:

"... the mere gaze of an object cannot engage us (completely). Each look flows into a careful examination, each examination into a meditation, and each meditation takes us into a connection. With each attentive look into the world we already begin to theorise about it. If the abstractions we fear are to be harmless and the experience we hope for is to be real and useful, we need to engage skilfully with consciousness, self-reflection, a sense of freedom, and - to use a daring word-a sense of irony."

Goethe is important for a grasp of cyberculture, not only for his alternative approach to a more participative view of the universe with its striking parallels to the latest quantum cosmologies, but also for his insights into the "Faustian bargain with the devil," which seems a perennial temptation of mankind. Is cyberculture such a Faustian bargain–offering intoxicating vistas of unlimited power of information and knowledge, but at what cost–perhaps the loss of our theomorphic soul? It is very unwise not to fear the dehumanised abstractions into which a lucipheric , gnostic, cybercultural cognitive universe will draw us. It is crucially necessary to learn to engage skillfully with consciousness enhanced by meditation and contemplation and self reflection the experiences of the present moment. Ultimately, the goal must be a fully human transfiguration of consciousness, which no machine or meta-machine can give us, but which may be drawn out of the individual human being in accordance with the natural and spiritual laws by which we are made.

The point is not merely that cyberculture is neither inherently evil, nor an unmitigated good. The point is to understand the essence of cyberculture. An even more crucial gap in understanding for our cyber-theorists and futurists lies in the nature of the compatibility between cyberculture and humanity. Above all, it is necessary to understand the essence of human nature. It is of the essence of humanity–humanity’s greatest gift and greatest curse--to be almost infinitely adaptable. But adaptability comes with a price. For, as St. Peter of Damaskos says, the intellect has the ability to transform itself into everything, and is dyed with the form of the object it apprehends. Bearing that infinite adaptability of the human soul in mind, it then becomes crucial to understand exactly what human nature is being called to adapt to, because the price of human adaptability is to become "dyed with the form of the object it apprehends." It all depends on who or what we worship (give worth to). If we worship materiality, we become materialised; if we worship animality, we become bestial; if we worship God rightly, we will become divinised. What will happen to human nature if it worships, not virtue, but virtuality?

III

 

The materialistic and wordy spirit of the wisdom of this world may lead us to speak about ever wider spheres of knowledge, but it renders our thoughts increasingly crude and uncouth. This combination of well-informed talk and crude thought falls far short of real wisdom and contemplation, as well as of undivided and unified knowledge. By knowledge of truth understand above all apprehension of truth through grace. Other kinds of knowledge should be regarded as images of intellections or the rational demonstration of facts."

St. Gregory of Sinai (1265-1346)

"Anyone who thinks himself intelligent because of his scholarly or scientific learning will never be granted insight into divine mysteries unless he first humbles himself and becomes a fool, discarding both his presumption and the knowledge that he has acquired. But if he does this and with unhesitating faith allows himself to be led by those wise in divine matters, he will enter with them into the city of the living God. Guided and illumined by the divine Spirit, he will see and learn what others cannot ever see or learn. He will then be taught by God. Those taught by God will be regarded as fools by the disciples of such as are wise in the wisdom of this world. But in fact it is the worldly-wise that are fools, spouting an inane secular wisdom, the stupidity of which God has demonstrated and which Scripture condemns as material, unspiritual, devilish, filled with strife and malice. Since these people are blind to the divine light, they cannot see the marvels it contains; they regard as deluded those who dwell in that light and see and teach others about what is within it. On the contrary, it is they themselves that are deluded, not having tasted the ineffable blessings of God

St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022)

As an Eastern Orthodox Christian theologian, I arrive at ’s "Integrity" website (ceptualinstitute.com) with a mind entirely and happily immersed in the writings and imbued with the holistic and integrative noetic vision of the Christian spiritual masters of the Patristic and Byzantine periods (4th C to 14th C). So either there is no hope for an unreconstructed traditionalist like me whatsoever, or I may be written off as just another neoLuddite, or--perhaps through the contrast of very different rhetorics, there comes a momentary flash of insight illuminating both sides of the stream (or so one hopes). What I seem to see in this search for a "metaparadigm" is an immense amount of effort being expended to express in contemporary " cyber-philosophy" concepts which have been well known to sages and saints for over two millennia. Is there not a touch of neolatry–worship of the new--in these writings which renders their enthusiasm for "complexity" less critical than it could be? There is at least some metaphysical truth in the old saying that "if it's new,it isn't true; if it's true, it isn't new." Just calling something a "new paradigm" does not necessarily make it so, does it? Attempting to express what are in fact perennial insights in contemporary cyber-speak can create the illusion that we have discovered something new, but have we really? writes:

"The Integrity Paradigm binds together all these things in a perspective that is unquestionably new and yet conceptually familiar and comfortable. It takes all that we currently know of the world which we are part of and re-assembles prior understandings in a substantially - and substantively -
new way; melding topics that were once thought to have no connection what so ever, and showing that they are all representatives of very simple principles, which, when formed as all the incredible mutually supportive assemblies of being and potential, blossom into the vast awe inspiring beauty that is the universe - complex and vibrant on every scale of existence."

Unquestionably new? The "integrity paradigm" that Mr. thinks is so breathtakingly new seems to me to be something that the Greek Fathers of the early Church of 1500 years ago, not to mention Plotinus even earlier and the Stoic philosophers earlier still, would find most congenial (though they may wonder why it takes the denizens of the future [cybernauts] so long to say it).

2000 years ago, the "integrity paradigm" was called the doctrine of the Logos:

"In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with Theos and the Logos was Theos. The same was in the beginning with Theos. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not" (Jn.1:1-5).

1400 years ago, St. Maximos the Confessor (580-662) brought the Logos paradigm to new heights, creating an unsurpassed synthesis that truly brought together all that was ever known in the past, all that was currently known of the world and all that could possibly be known in every age, "melding topics that were once thought to have no connection whatsoever," to use ’s words, and showing definitively that they are all representatives of one simple and supreme principle, the Logos Principle, which as the Archetype/image/likeness pattern that forms the deep structure of the cosmos, creates the "incredible mutually supportive assemblies of being and potential" which to the inner eye of those capable of theoria/vision, "blossom into the vast awe-inspiring beauty that is the universe"--a unity of simplicity, complexity and harmony of the Logos--the ultimate Principle of Being--and the logoi--the inner essences of all beings, a beauty which St. Maximos calls diakosmesis, or the ordered harmony of unity in complexity of truth-goodness-beauty in the microcosm-macrocosm-metacosm that is God’s creation.

For St. Maximos the Confessor, the

"house of horizons and perspectives" which was "a cognitive deep open-space for positioning, comparing, merging and morphing our metaphors, models, maps and views",

in the words of Heiner Benking, was self-evident. It was the Church as the cosmic Living Symbol and "memory palace" par excellence--the image and likeness at one and the same time of

1) God 2) the supra-sensible universe of universes 3) the sensible (aesthetic) universe of heaven and earth 4) the universe of imaginal and physical worlds 5) the human microcosmos as male and female.

 

For Orthodox Christians then, following St. Maximos, the Church is our house of all horizons and perspectives and the Logos is the ancient and ever-new paradigm which
understands, explains and encompasses all. The words that St. Paul used when he preached his sermon on the Unknown God to the sophisticated Greeks on Mars Hill are equally applicable to the sophisticated cybernauts of today:

"In him, we live and move and have our being"(Acts17:28).

The principle of diakosmesis (diakosesij) of the Greek Fathers of the Church reveals the perennial integrity paradigm–the Logos incarnate, yesterday, today and forever. The essence of diakosmesis is this: that what we know, all we do know, and all we can possibly know about humanity and what we know, all we do know and all we possibly can know about the universe are entirely correlative. Completely reciprocal. This means that how we see the world depends upon how we see ourselves; and, equally, how we see ourselves depends upon how we see the world. The model we have of the universe–our weltanschauung, our world-view or world-image depends upon our view, our anschauung, of ourselves, our self-image.

In philosophical terms, this is to say there is no physics without metaphysics, and ontology and epistemology are reciprocal. In science, it is to say that we live in a participatory universe where the observer and the observed are intertwined and interactive. In Biblical terms, this principle is enshrined in Genesis, chapter one, where we are taught that God made humanity in His own image and likeness. In patristic terms, the image is the perfection of all nature and our nature as God intended; the likeness is the actual state of our nature; the distance between the image of nature--the way God made it, and the likeness of nature--what we have done with it, is the source of all disorder and disharmony in the world. It means creation is iconic, (the image); all knowledge is mimetic (imitates and reflects the living symbols of nature); all disorder is diastemic, i.e., the distance (diastema) between image and likeness.

Diakosmesis, then, following the great patristic, ascetic and hesychastic writers, as the perennial integrity paradigm, is composed of three principal elements, all interrelated to the single cosmogonic-epistomological principle of mimesis:

1) humanity as image and likeness of God 2) humanity as microcosm and mediator, that is, the link that harmonizes or brings disorder to all levels of being 3) the universe is a liturgy, a mighty work/song of praise enacting in timeless unity at every possible level the creation, redemption and transfiguration of the world in the Logos.

If there is dissonance in this liturgy, or disharmony, it stems from any paradigm of thought or action which enshrines the unnatural disorder and distance between the way things really are and the end to which they are intended (teleology), and what we have made of them and the end to which we actually put them (economy/ecology. I see nothing in the principle of diakosmesis that is superseded by any technological development of the present, including computers, the internet and hypertextuality, that would necessitate an all-out effort to find or declare a new paradigm or metaparadigm.

 

IV

 

Certain dualisms have been persistent in Western Traditions; they have been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals--in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the service of the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many. From A Cyborg Manifesto, by Donna Haraway

The image of God is one thing, and that which is contemplated in the image is another. For the image of God is the noetic soul, the intellect and the consciousness, which form one indivisible nature. What is contemplated in the image is that which is sovereign, royal and self-determinative. Thus the glory of the intellect is one thing, its dignity is another, its being in the image of God is another, and its being in His likeness is another [Gen. 1: 26]. The glory of the intellect is its power of ascent, its constant movement upwards, its acuity, purity, understanding, wisdom and immortality. The dignity of the intellect lies in its intelligence, its royal and sovereign nature, and its power of self-determination. Its being in the image of God resides in the self-subsistence of soul, intellect and consciousness and in their coessentiality, indivisibility and inseparability. For intellect and consciousness belong to the incorporeal, immortal, divine and noetic soul; these three are coessential and coeternal, and can never be divided or separated from each other. The intellect’s being in the likeness of God resides in its justice, truthfulness, love, sympathy and compassion. When these qualities are energised and guarded in a person, that which is in the image and likeness of God is clearly manifest in him; he acts, that is to say, in accordance with nature and enjoys a higher dignity than others. On Spiritual Knowledge 8, St Nicetas Stethatos

Nature is, however, a topos, a place, in the sense of a rhetorician's place or topic for consideration of common themes; nature is, strictly, a commonplace. We turn to this topic to order our discourse, to compose our memory. As a topic in this sense, nature also reminds us that in seventeenth-century English the "topick gods" were the local gods, the gods specific to places and peoples. We need these spirits, rhetorically if we can't have them any other way. We need them in order to reinhabit, precisely, common places-locations that are widely shared, inescapably local, worldly, enspirited; i.e., topical. In this sense, nature is the place to rebuild public culture. Nature is also a tropos, a trope. It is figure, construction, artifact, movement, displacement. Nature cannot pre-exist its construction. This construction is based on a particular kind of move- a tropos or "turn." Faithful to the Greek, as tro'pos nature is about turning. Troping, we turn to nature as if to the earth, to the primal stuff-geotropic, physiotropic. Topically, we travel toward the earth, a commonplace. In discoursing on nature, we turn from Plato and his heliotropic son's blinding star to see something else, another kind of figure. I do not turn from vision, but I do seek something other than enlightenment in these sightings of science studies as cultural studies. Nature is a topic of public discourse on which much turns, even the earth. The Promises of Monsters: a Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others, Donna Haraway

So long as [a human being’s] will is stubborn and raw, [God] abandons him to the domination of evil; for he has chosen the shameful passions of which the devil is the sower, in preference to nature, of which God is the creator. God leaves him free to incline, if he so wishes, towards the passions of the flesh, and actually to satisfy that inclination. Valuing the insubstantial passions more highly than nature, in his concern for these passions he has become ignorant of the principle of nature. Had he followed that principle, he would have known what constitutes the law of nature and what constitutes the tyranny of the passions--a tyranny brought about, not by nature, but by deliberate choice. He would then have accepted the law of nature that is maintained through activities which are natural; and he would have expelled the tyranny of the passions completely from his will. He would have obeyed nature with his intelligence, for nature in itself is pure and undefiled, faultless, free from hatred and alienation, and he would have made his will once more a companion of nature, totally stripped of everything not bestowed by the principle of nature. In this way he would have eradicated all hatred for and all alienation from what is by nature akin to him. Commentary on the Lord’s Prayer of St. Maximos the Confessor (580-662)

In this essay's journey toward elsewhere, I have promised to trope nature through a relentless artifactualism, but what does artifactualism mean here? First, it means that nature for us is made, as both fiction and fact. If organisms are natural objects, it is crucial to remember that organisms are not born; they are made in world-changing technoscientific practices by particular collective actors in particular times and places. In the belly of the local/global monster in which I am gestating, often called the postmodern world, global technology appears to denature everything, to make everything a malleable matter of strategic decisions and mobile production and reproduction processes. Technological decontextualization is ordinary experience for hundreds of millions if not billions of human beings, as well as other organisms. I suggest that this is not a denaturing so much as a particular production of nature. The preoccupation with productionism that has characterized so much parochial Western discourse and practice seems to have hypertrophied into something quite marvelous: the whole world is remade in the image of commodity production.' The Promises of Monsters, Donna Haraway

Since nature exists in the world in a temporal mode, its movement is subject to change because of the world’s limited stability and its liability to alteration and corruption through the passing of time. When nature has come to exist in God through the essential unity of Him in whom it was created, it will possess an ever-moving stability and a stable and changeless form of movement generated eternally round that which is one, unique and always the same. It has been said that this state is a direct and permanent grounding in the first cause of created beings. The mystery of Pentecost…is the union of nature with its principle, the Logos under the guidance of providence; and in this union there is not the slightest trace of time or generation. Again the Logos is our trumpet [Lev. 23: 24], summoning us with divine and hidden knowledge. He is our propitiation [Lev. 225: 9], since He expiates our offences in His own person by becoming like us, and divinises our sinful nature by the gift of grace through the Spirit. He is our booth or tabernacle [Lev. 23: 42], since He is the realisation of that immutability with which our inner being, conformed to God, is concentrated on the divine, and also the securing bond of our transformation into an immortal state…Nature would not lead us purposelessly to what does not naturally exist. It is clear to everyone that whatever is a natural consequence of something demonstrates its own authenticity with the force of truth. Various Texts 5: 48,49,77, St. Maximos the Confessor.

How, in the face of this marvel, can I seriously insist that to see nature as artifactual is an oppositional, or better, a differential siting? Is the insistence that nature is artifactual not more evidence of the extremity of the violation of a nature outside and other to the arrogant ravages of our technophilic civilization, which, after all, we were taught began with the heliotropisms of enlightment projects to dominate nature with blinding light focused by optical technology?9 Haven't eco-feminists and other multicultural and intercultural radicals begun to convince us that nature is precisely not to be seen in the guise of the Eurocentric productionism and anthropocentrism that have threatened to reproduce, literally, all the world in the deadly image of the Same? The Promises of Monsters, Donna Haraway

God is Intellect and transcends the creatures that in His Wisdom He has created; yet he also changelessly begets the Logos as their dwelling-place, and, as Scripture says [John: 14: 26], sends the Holy Spirit to endow them with power. He is thus both outside everything and within everything. Similarly, man participates in the divine nature, and according to his spiritual self–that is to say, as a spiritual, incorporeal and immortal soul–is an image of God, and possesses an intellect which naturally begets consciousness from its essence; and by virtue of all this he maintains the power of the body. He is thus both outside matter and visible things and within them. And just as the Father who created man is inseparable from the other two hypostases–thatt is, from the Logos and the Spirit–so man’s soul is indivisible from his intellect and his consciousness, for they are of one nature and essence–an essence uncircumscribed by the body. On Spiritual Knowledge 6, St. Nicetas Stethatos

I think the answer to this serious political and analytical question lies in two related turns: 1) unblinding ourselves from the sun-worshiping stories about the history of science and technology as paradigms of rationalism; and 2) refiguring the actors in the construction of the ethno-specific categories of nature and culture. The actors are not all "us." If the world exists for us as "nature," this designates a kind of relationship, an achievement among many actors, not all of them human, not all of them organic, not all of them technological.10 In its scientific embodiments as well as in other forms nature is made, but not entirely by humans; it is a co-construction among humans and non-humans. This is a very different vision from the postmodernist observation that all the world is denatured and reproduced in images or replicated in copies. That specific kind of violent and reductive artifactualism, in the form of a hyper-productionism actually practiced widely throughout the planet, becomes contestable in theory and other kinds of praxis, without recourse to a resurgent transcendental naturalism. Hyper-productionism refuses the witty agency of all the actors but One; that is a dangerous strategy-for everybody. But transcendental naturalism also refuses a world full of cacophonous agencies and settles for a mirror image sameness that only pretends to difference. The commonplace nature I seek, a public culture, has many houses with many inhabitants which/who can refigure the earth. Perhaps those other actors/actants, the ones who are not human, are our topick gods, organic and inorganic. The Promises of Monsters, Donna Haraway

If God cannot be grasped by mind or sense-perception, if he is not a particular being, how do we know him? This is something we must inquire into. It might be more accurate to say that we cannot know God in his nature, since this is unknowable and beyond the reach of mind or of reason. But we know him from the arrangement of everything, because everything is, in a sense, projected out from him, and this order possesses certain images and semblances of his divine paradigms. We therefore approach that which is beyond all as far as our capacities allow us and we pass by way of the denial and the transcendence of all things and by way of the cause of all things. God is therefore known in all things and as distinct from all things. He is known through knowledge and through unknowing. Of him there is conception, reason, understanding, touch, perception, opinion, imagination, name, and many other things. On the other hand he cannot be understood, words cannot contain him, and no name can lay hold of him. He is not one of the things that are and he cannot be known in any of them. He is all things in all things and he is no thing among things. He is known to all from all things and he is known to no one from anything. This is the sort of language we must use about God, for he is praised from all things according to their proportion to him as their Cause. But again, the most divine knowledge of God, that which comes through unknowing, is achieved in a union far beyond mind, when mind turns away from all things, even from itself, and when it is made one with the dazzling rays, being then and there enlightened by the inscrutable depth of Wisdom. Still, as I have said already, we must learn about Wisdom from all things. As Scripture says, Wisdom has made and continues always to adapt everything. It is the cause of the unbreakable accommodation and order of all things and it is forever linking the goals of one set of things with the sources of another and in this fashion it makes a thing of beauty of the unity and the harmony of the whole. [Divine Names 7: 3], St. Dionysios the Areopagite (5^th c.?)

I began these "short meditations" with the intention simply to juxtapose some of the philosophical claims of cyberceptualists and futurists with some of the thoughts of the representatives of the Orthodox tradition of ascetic spirituality. My presupposition was–and is–that as the thought of the great spiritual masters of the Christian East is relevant to, and often sheds a fresh light upon, contemporary concerns in theology, spirituality, ethics and theological anthropology and cosmology. Would hesychasm also illuminate the potentialities and pitfalls of the cutting-edge concerns of cyberculture? My interest as pastor and theologian is the spiritual effect of immersion in cyberculture: how does spending more and more time in virtual reality affect the life of the soul–the substance and quality of one’s thoughts, feelings, desires, emotions, ability to pray, concentrate and center oneself, ability to experience compassion for others, to acquire the virtues, love of neighbor, concern for creation and love of God, and so on. The Orthodox ascetic spirituality is founded on the concept of synergy: the grace of God is all and everything, but it is inextricably linked to human action and effort. Not that human effort produces or determines grace or in any way controls salvation through good "works," yet there is a connection between the quality of our thoughts, feelings and actions and divine grace. The quality of our knowledge is related to the beauty of our soul which is related to the acquisition of virtue which is connected with a-patheia or detachment, in which agape or the love of God flourishes.

What I found is that the more I dialogued with cyberculturalists and futurists and the more hypertextual links I explored, the more I kept running into postmodernist philosophy and jargon, especially the work of the critical theorists from Derrida to Kristeva. The concerns of postmodernism seem to be the concerns of cyberculture; the language of critical theory seems to be the language of cybercultural philosophers; deconstruction in literature and hypertextuality on the Web are intimately related. This is undoubtedly not fresh news to anybody under 40 with a computer and a batchelor’s degree in the humanities, but there it is. I make no excuses for my abiding preference for the great Byzantine spiritual writers of the 5^th to the 15^th centuries over most contemporary writers.

However of all the postmodernist thinkers of my acquaintance, Donna Haraway seems unique in that she has got a grip on the central problem in any theorizing about metaparadigms and paradigm shifts. And that is the problem of the nature of nature. Her writing has all the usual preoccupations of deconstructionist, postmodernist critical theory but she seems to be facing much more honestly the full implications for humanity of the "merging and morphing of our metaphors, models maps and views," to use the words of Heiner Benking, that is going on in academia today. Haraway seems less likely than the Derridas and Kristevas of this world to dismiss the work of the past as mere "logocentrism."

"Logocentrism" is a derogatory term used by deconstructionist critical theorists to describe any text, discursive construction or cultural position that attributes a determinate meaning to words, or possesses a world-view in which words are considered things and not merely social relations. Can the principle of diakosmesis be dismissed as logocentric because it stems from the Christian Tradition, a religion of the Book? Am I logocentric and a representative of a cultural position resistant to cyberculture and hypertext because I am a Christian theologian who accepts the
Bible as authoritative, enjoys quoting John 1:1 and employs discursive constructions that signal an interest in the essential, the universal, the perennial, the principial, the metaphysical, the absolute? Depends on whose standards. Yes, by Derrida's and Kristeva's standards. But those standards are impossibly narrow and lifelessly abstract. Derrida, Kristeva and company reduce the meaning of "word" to its flattest, most dessicated, neurasthenic sense, and so I reject the charge of logocentrism by their lights as hopelessly inadequate. But if one understands logos with the height, depth and plenitude characteristic of Sts. Maximos the Confessor, Gregory Palamas, and Nicodemos the Hagiorite, then, yes, I am emphatically Logo(s)centric, Christocentric, Theocentric, and not to put too fine a point on it, Theoanthropocosmocentric. Hallelujah! (Forgive the highly unseemly, unprofessional yet curiously enjoyable expression of subjective religious emotion.)

If St. Maximos and St. Gregory Palamas, as representatives of the cognitive universe of the Byzantine hesychasts, were to encounter the writings of the postmodernists, how would they characterize such thinking? I think they would undoubtedly answer the charge of "logocentrism" with the countercharge of "logomachy." Modern critical theorists are contemporary incarnations of the temptation of logomachy, or those who embrace the heresy of fighting against the meaning of words. And logomachy to the ancients was indeed a heresy of the worst sort. For them all meaning is revelatory to some extent. Far from being purely arbitrary convention set up as a means of securing political and cultural power over others, all communication of meaning had something of the miraculous, something of the presence of God in it. For the Greek Fathers, people like Derrida and Kristeva would be considered representatives of some new species of logomachy.

Kristeva's definition of intertextuality may be correct as far as it goes, but it is drained of all life--her idea of horizontal and vertical dimensions of the word and "three dimensional textual space" seems conceptually correct on one level but actually lacks true dimensionality--it does not describe the real world of mediated and immediate experience of meaning. (Anyone who can theorize T.S. Eliot into meaning the opposite of what he actually says and intends to mean is someone who, in my view, should not be trusted.) The critical theorists–those of the tribe of logomachy, do not seem to comprehend--and so do not incorporate in their theories--the ultimate mystery and meaning of subjectivity: the I-ness and You-ness and We-ness of everything in the context of the unfathomable veil of pre-existing Itness, behind which is: What? Who? Where? Why? To face these questions in all their existential urgency is immediately to confront without escape into theory something of the mystery and meaning of subjectivity, the ontological and existential depths of which the tergiversations of most postmodernists do not begin to penetrate.

Africans say it takes a village to raise a child. Christian ethicists and preachers say that for a child to be raised up, some adult has to lay down her or his life. The Scriptures say it takes a god to raise humanity. What means this "raise"? Ultimately it means raise into full participation in meaning itself. How does the village or the adult or the god accomplish this? Primarily, face to face. We are created to learn, grow and understand face to face. Face to face, not face to monitor. I know this not from theory but from everything in my life, not least the home-birthing, home-schooling and home-raising my children. Meaning is personal, interpersonal, nonpersonal, transpersonal--and most effectively and genuinely transmitted face to face. "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1 Cor. 13: 12). If we move from Kristeva’s "desire in language, a semiotic approach to literature and art" to St. Maximos’ kardia-desire in life, a semiotic-somatic-noetic-pneumatic approach to human-beingness, in which literature and art are but modes of being (tropoi hyparxeos, in the Greek of St. Maximos), will we not see that the truest, deepest heart's desire of every human being, the force impelling all relationships, is to know even as we are known, face to face?

The human face is probably the greatest, most complete "sign" in the world. What a mystery the face is! What profundity, possibility and variability of meaning can be conveyed by–and through--an arrangement of features of flesh and blood. What theorist of meaning has adequately analysed the face? Face to face encounter is not only the most effective transmission of knowledge, it is also the surest means for the inculcation and preservation of ethical principles and moral behaviour. It has often been observed that phoniness and deception and fantisizing are rife in cyberculture. Why? Isn't the source of the tendency toward "bogus authorship," phoniness, deception and fantasizing (often with dangerous and real-life consequences) on the internet partly because of the absence of face to face encounter, which allows one the "freedom" to deceive or to fantasize just as wearing a mask at a costume ball often liberates one from usual inhibitions.

My actual where-the-rubber-meets-the road experience of cyberculture and hypertextuality tells me that, contrary to the theorists of logomachy, hypertextuality in its present stage of development does not overcome textual linearity at all. Since every link, every connection (precinding from multi-media for the moment) is equally linear, what it does is make linearity more immediate, more present, more intrusive and obtrusive. It fills up and hence destroys all the
healthy, fruitful non-linear space in the reader's (the solitary reader with book in lap and imagination and intellect engaged) soul with ever-increasing and insistent demands and enticements of linearity.