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McLuhan Sacramental View

Hypothesis on a McLuhan Sacramental View of Life

Dennis D. Cali
University of Texas at Tyler
Talk Presented at University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
Monday, October 19, 2015
The views of Marshall McLuhan about the media and mediated reality
continue to intrigue scholars across the continents and across the decades. The
fascination leads McLuhan scholars to seek to understand the Weltanschauung of
the media ecology pioneer: its origins, its underpinnings, its unifying principle. And
in the search to see what he saw, some scholars probe McLuhans religious
convictions to try to crack the code on the remarkable insights he has left a legion
of disciples. Oddly, some scholars reject the idea that McLuhans faith convictions
had anything to do with McLuhans media views. These deniers, apparently
discounting McLuhans daily attendance at mass, contend that he was all secular
Monday through Saturday and Catholic only on Sunday. A growing chorus of others,
however, as this very conference attests, suspect that McLuhans Catholic creed
reverberates in his media scholarship. My impression about even these believers,
though, is that they miss something fundamental about McLuhans worldview. In
searching for explicit references to Church canons or concepts in his writing, they
obscure the possibility that McLuhan may have been formed more (or at least as
much by) percept than concept in his embrace of the faith and in his expression of
that faith in his intellectual reflections on social reality.
My first intuition about McLuhans perceptual expression of faith came in
listening to his appearance on the "Today Show" in 1976 in which he attributes
equipment malfunction of the amplifier in the Carter-Ford presidential debates to a
kind of supernatural pushback against the perversion of the dialog form. To ascribe
second order or transcendent motives to an inanimate object, I maintain, expresses
a kind of faith that the Divine, the inchoate, the Supernatural communicates on the
secular, the physical, the natural level and that all of life is infused with the divine,
is charged with the supernatural, is sacramental. Such a view can be found, to be
sure, in the theology and philosophy of Aquinas and Maritain, whose teachings
McLuhan has acknowledged to have been formative, but McLuhans pronouncement
of such a view, like that of other Catholic literary scholars, came largely disrobed of
Catholic dogma: he showed us more than he told us. Stated differently, he mediated
his catechesis. My hypothesis is that McLuhan's entire modus operandi, most
notably in his writings about media, manifests a Catholic imagination, a
sacramental view, and, as such, overcomes the contention either that faith had no
bearing on his scholarship or that it performed a role only like that of his
appearance on Annie Hall: cryptic and cameo. My intuition found confirmation in
reading McLuhans words to Edward Wakin: I never came into the church as a
person who was being taught Catholic doctrines.You dont come into the Church
through ideas and concepts.The Church is not an intellectual institution. It is a
superhuman institution (Wakin 11, as cited by de Kerckhove, 1982: 10). Similarly,
he wrote to Father John about the importance he gives to percept in matters of
faith: I am a Thomist for whom the sensory order resonates with the divine Logos. I
dont think concepts have any relevance in religion (April 1969: 69). Author and
journalist Tom Wolfe, who penned an essay entitled What if He is Right? lends
further legitimacy to my hypothesis in the Foreword to the book Understanding Me
(2003). He writes of McLuhans conversion to Catholicism and his study of popular

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culture that the twin passions coalesced: Although almost nothing in McLuhans
writing was to be overtly religious, these two passions eventually dovetailed to
create McLuhanism (xiii). If my supposition has meritand McLuhans own words
suggest that it doesit should be possible to map out the markers of McLuhans
sacramental view of life.
In that pursuit, Id like first to define what a sacramental view of life is. To do
so, I should like to enumerate five features of a sacramental view of life that I have
distilled from a few Catholic novelists and essayists. These literary figures have the
twofold benefit of both actually having spoken about a sacramental view and turned
out literary works that demonstrate its major features. Those novelists include
Flannery OConnor, G.K. Chesterton, Walker Percy, and J.R.R. Tolkien. A sacramental
view, as will be shown, is an orientation toward reality that is anagogical,
incarnational, anti-environmental, disruptive and revelatory as artistically expressed
or mediated through signs and symbols.
A Sacramental View is Anagogical
A first attribute of a sacramental view is its anagogical sense. One oriented
by a sacramental view of life applies a hermeneutic that finds in all reality an
intrinsic goodness straining beyond itself. The sacramental view, adducing the
upward leading way, recognizes in the material reality in and of itself something
numinous, existentially satisfying, and divinely beautiful (Schloeder: 146). In
explaining the sacramental strength of Flannery OConnors novels, John R.
Murphy (2000) applauds her ability to discover ultimate reality in the natural world
and present it through observable detailsthe mystery of our position on earth
(p. 6). Similarly, Tolkien (1964) speaks of seeing things as they were meant to be
seen (53). The character of Will Barrett in Walker Percys The Second Coming
(1985), when freed from his reliance on abstractions about reality instead of reality
itself, catches sight of the yellow sunlightbetween the spokes of the pines (403).
Interestingly, such heightened awareness of the natural world signals in the
character a new consciousness of the goodness of reality and parallels his new
experience of love for Allie. Explaining his anagogical view, Percy avows: things in
the worldmirror in themselves, however dimly, something beyond themselves.
(1993: 129) McLuhan, too, recognizes the anagogical, sacramental sense in G.K.
Chesterton. Of the British writer, McLuhan says that he rejoices at the green hair
on the hills, or the smell of Sunday morning and the daily miracles of sense and
consciousness (McLuhan 1999: 4).
Such anagogical effects are found linguistically as well. This was my
experience as well when I encountered the writing of a woman I consider my
spiritual mother, Chiara Lubich. Besides finding enchanting what she had written in
that first book of hers that I picked up, I was taken as well by how she said them.
She wrote on the charism of Unity with such luminosity and beauty, that her words
lit up to me; they glistened like a kind of poetry that I had never encountered
before. I found myself highlighting with my Sharpie ink highlighter virtually every
sentence. More than 25 years after reading these words, I can still recite some of
them almost verbatim:
Ah! Unity, unity! What divine beauty!...Who would risk speaking about
it? It is as indescribable as God himself! You feel it, you see it, you
enjoy it, butit is indescribable. All enjoy it when it is present, all suffer
when it is absent. It is peace, joy, love, ardor, the climate of heroism
and the greatest generosity. It is Jesus in our midst! (Lubich 1985: 28).

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The words themselves were my yellow sunlight and worked their own conversion
in me.
McLuhan demonstrates his anagogical orientation often through his wordplay.
To Jacques Maritain, for example, he contemplates the French philosophers
pronunciation of the term longing:
Let me speak to you of an occasion when you talked at the Royal
Ontario Museum in Toronto on The Longing for God. Throughout your
address, you pronounced longing lungeing. It had a very
mysterious resonance. On consulting the big Oxford Dictionary I
discovered that lunge means a length of rope on which a horse is
exercised in a circle. Lunge is the root and origin of longing. Is not
this a nice example of the reverberations of the Logos reaching across
language barriers? (1969: 70)
We see anagogical properties in Percys demonstration of strain toward
intersubjectivity in the dialog between his characters. McLuhans brother Morris
speculates that Marshall may, in fact, have been more influenced by poets and by
the style of Belloc and Chestertons writing than by any doctrinal point (de
Kerckhove: 8).
A Sacramental View is Incarnational
But what accords the prosaic realities of a Holiday Inn (Pridgen Winter 97/78:
6) or pine trees and green hills their divine character? Those who assume a
sacramental view find within the created world the presence of the Incarnate. A
second quality of a sacramental view, therefore, is that it is incarnational. Writers
who speak of a sacramental view characterize it along vertical and horizontal
trajectories. Vertically, the divine either moves downward from the divine onto the
physical world, or the movement stretches upward from below. The dual dimension
of reality passes from the visible to the invisible, or the invisible animates the
visible. A thing is enlightened from above or emanates upwardly from surface
reality. Horizontally, God is seen to dwell within and found everywhere. Human
beings, for example, embody the divine through Christs acquisition of human form.
The incarnational dimension is expressed as well in terms of primary and secondary
worlds. However located, OConnor writes that in a sacramental vision, different
levels of reality in one image or situation (1969: 159) dwell together in what
Thomas Merton (1979) called a living and sacred synthesis (60). And in
comments regarding how readers should approach one of her stories, she advises,
You should be on the lookout for such things as the action of graceand not for
dead bodies (1969: 113) and for the good under construction (226). In
OConnors work, the writer attends closely to the visible so as to reveal the
invisible. Tolkien (1947) speaks of the good catastrophe (or eucastrophe) of the
Birth of Christ with its insertion of grace into the created world (71 72).
I offer a recent personal experience in which I responded sacramentally to a
small incident. I had been wanting to return to a practice of setting aside a little
time each week to spend in silent contemplation before the Holy Sacrament. On this
one particular occasion, I had about an extra hour to kill before driving to the
chapel, so I thought I would catch up on the news and turned on the TV. When I
pressed the remote control, I got a message saying that the television was
searching for a channel. And then the screen went blank I tried a different remote
control and got the same message and blank screen. I moved to a different
television and saw the same message. In just a couple of minutes, I came to a sense
a sacramental sense, I would saythat I should quiet myself before approaching

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the Blessed Sacrament to place myself in the right disposition. This was what the
Inner Voice spoke to me through the static and blank screen of the television.
Where I find McLuhans most focused attention to the incarnational aspect of
the sacramental view is in his consideration of discarnation. In a letter to Sheila
Watson, he writes about the move away from incarnate being:
The other point I had in mind is the characters of The Human Age as
angels. Electrically, it is the sender who is sent, whether on the
telephone, or on radio. We are transported electrically and bodily. Thus
the people of the Magnetic City are angels, literally. Good or bad,
disembodied intelligences. (McLuhan 1971: 424. Italics his)
He repeats his concern in a letter to Clare Booth Luce. Registering his concern about
the effects of electronic communication on the sacramental state of being. He tells
her that electronic man tends toward the disembodied or discarnate condition of
angel and then suggests that the incarnational Church has need to confront this
new discarnate state of the laity under electronic conditions (1973: 478). Even
more forcefully, he links violence to the state of discarnation:
At the speed of light, everybody is a nobody. There is a further
dimension at the speed of lighteverybody is discarnate, a nervous
system without a body. Anger and frustration resulting from such
sudden inexplicable situations and loss may well account for the
extremities of violence and obscenities manifests in the new floods of
pornography. (1975: 515)
Eight years later, McLuhan sounds the same alarm, ramping up his distress in
another letter to Luce. If there were ever any ambiguity about how McLuhan looked
upon incarnational being. Here he is sacramental by decrying its demise:
On the telephone, or on the air, man is in every sense
discarnate, existing as an abstract image, a figure without a body. The
Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland is a kind of parallel to our state.
When discarnate, man has no identity, and is not subject to natural
law. In fact he has no basis for morals of any sort. As electric
information moved at the speed of light, man is a nobody. When
deprived of his identity, man becomes violent in divers ways. Violence
is the quest for identity. In Canada there is pending a large body of
nihilistic legislation dedicated to the ideal of freedom. No-fault divorce
is being succeeded by no-fault murder!
Discarnate man is not compatible with an incarnate
Church.T.S. Eliot has a line which seems to indicate awareness of the
discarnate state of electronic man: We all go into the silent funeral;
nobodys funeral, for there is nobody to bury. (1979: 543)
These sentiments recall comments made to Father John Mole in 1969. There, he
called the new electronic environment this strictly Luciferan product and a mockup of the mystical body (April 18, 1969: 69).
A Sacramental View is Anti-Environmental
One experiencing what he perceives as an eclipse of the divine life steps
away from the obstructed view. The person does this motivated by a desire to reify
the human experience that s/he feels to be in need of repair. An example of this
occurred in the life of a friend. He was already an ordained Catholic priest, but at a
certain point, he felt a call to withdraw from the rough and tumble of parish life and
entered a primitive hermitage. He renounced the parish for the hermits cell. It was
his way of waging a life-long protest against a perverse environmenthis hunger

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strike, his Occupy Earth, his silent cryto restore the sacred he deemed lost in the
environment. Artists wage their anti-environmental protest via their art.
Sacramental artists retreat to the hermits cell of their craft. For Tolkien, the
fantasy genre provided an alternative frame to the modern novel and its mentality,
which verged on overthrowing centuries-old tradition. Percy adopted semiotics as
his instrument, which we narrated and enacted in novel form. Language, for him,
provides a bridge between the empirical and metaphysical (Gretlund 113).
OConnor, too, used the novel and short story, but her signature item was the
grotesqueness of some of her characters. Chesterton deployed phrase twisting.
McLuhan draws our attention to the function of art of the sort that Tolkien,
Percy, OConnor, and Chesterton fashion as anti-environment or counterpunch to
the views of the world out of sync with the divine design, incarnated reality. He
makes clear that the artists critique is indispensable to the process of checking the
deleterious effects of technology. The task of art, he writes, is to correct the bias
of technological media (1960: 22, as cited in Anti-Environment). In The
Emperors New Clothes (1995b), he explains how art and the artist awaken human
sensibilities dulled by technological environments:
Since technologies are extensions of our own physiology, they result in
new programs of an environmental kind. Such pervasive experiences
as those deriving from the encounter with environments almost
inevitably escape perception. When two or more environments
encounter one another by direct interface, they tend to manifest their
distinctive qualities. Comparison and contrast have always been a
means of sharpening perception in the arts as well as in general
experience. Indeed, it is upon this pattern all the structures of art have
been reared. Any artistic endeavor includes the preparing of an
environment for human attention. A poem or a painting is in every
sense a teaching machine for the training of perception and judgment.
The artist is a person aware of the challenge and dangers of new
environments presented to human sensibility. Whereas the ordinary
person seeks security by numbing his perceptions against the impact
of new experience, the artist delights in this novelty and instinctively
creates situations that both reveal it and compensate for it. The artist
studies the distortion of sensory life by new environmental
programming and tends to create artistic situations that correct the
sensory bias and derangement brought about by the new form. (339
Art constructs an anti-environment that would, in turn, restore sacramental life.
A Sacramental View is Disruptive
What should be emphasized is that sacramental art possesses a moral
dimension. Sacramental artists do not display merely a benign and vapid but
creative alternative to environments altered by technology. They deploy severe
artistic tactics as social interventions to what they intuit as assaults on the moral
ecology. Sacramental views expressed in literary and other art forms may thus be
regarded as disruptive, distortive, and extremeupsetting of the pestilent
conditions wrought by technology. Art challenges first order appearances, writes
Smith (2006: 93). Though disturbing, the artist, like the prophet, makes grace
visible. The practice makes sense. If one has an understanding or experience of
incarnation, one is more keenly attuned to discarnation, disorder, and perversion
and feels a moral imperative to repair it and turns to the artists scalpel.

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Chesterton, for example, through paradox and pun, challenged all

complacent acceptance of conventional wisdom (Lamberti 2012: 75). OConnor
sought new and shocking ways to depict concrete reality to communicate
ineffable realities (Bieber and May 2011: 292). Percys wayfaring characters suffer
stifling effects of scientism, technological deification, and consequent abstractions:
a grave predicament of dislocation, disorientation, and alienation (1975: 134).
Pridgen (1996) profiles Will, for example, in Percys Last Gentleman (1966): He
limps through his life on a bad knee, half deaf and aphasic, lost in the confusions of
his private constructions and solely dependent on his thinking to direct him in his
quest (298). Tolkiens (1937/1982) Gollum was presented as a small slimy
creature with a horrible swallowing sound (71-72), to say nothing of Lord
Saurons Orcs, trolls, and other creatures of Mordor. Tolkiens characters inhabit a
reality alternative, a fantasy subterranean world, to the surface terrain that the
novelist wants to jolt into a new consciousness. Such creative machinations seek to
function sacramentally like Spirits of Ammonia or an Anointing of the Sick to jar
readers or listeners back to their senses or to bring spiritual and even physical
strength during an illness, especially near the time of death (Anointing of the
Sick).
Though not invoking the language of sacramentality, McLuhan (1967)
explains the sacramental role of the artist:
The poet, the artist, the sleuthwhoever sharpens our perception
tends to be antisocial; rarely, self-adjusted, he cannot go along with
currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social
types in their power to see environments as they really are. This need
to interface, to confront environments with a certain anti-social
poweris manifest in the famous story The Emperors New Clothes
(88).
In fact, McLuhan sub-titles his War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) an
inventory of some of the current spastic situations that could be eliminated by more
feedforward. McLuhans style is itself spastic at times, a jolt to the ordered
disorder of the information age. We see his indictment of media in his roughhousing
linguistic move from the medieval to the evil media (Cooper 2006: 167). Wolfe
(2004) writes of The Mechanical Bride (1951) (McLuhans first book) that it had the
conventional antibusiness bias of the literary man, aimed, as it was, at liberating
the public from the manipulations of the advertising agency (21). He defied the
constraining force of closed linear reasoning imposed by print in issuing probes
rather than propositional argument. He spoke in aphorisms to probe rather than
prove. He operated from percept, not concept. He deployed paradox, the artistic
tool he found so attractive in Chesterton, to subvert conventional wisdom so as to
get people to awake from their slumber. His medium is the message dictum
reflects his most typical device. His holistic thinking displayed predilection for
percept over concept, synthesis over analysis, experience over theory, and
recognition over mental vivisection (Cooper 168). Through it all, I submit, he
sought to afflict the comfortable, as he divulged to Edward Wakin:
Christ said: I do not bring you peace but the sword. The church
as the custodian of civilized values and so on that church is all
over, Id say. We are on a life raft. That sort of survival
operation.Our only hope is apocalypse. (as quoted in de
Kerckhove 1982: 25)
A Sacramental View is Revelatory

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Taken together, all of these features presented above work in service of

retrieving what has been lost. As Murphy (2000) observes of OConnor, her purpose
in using grotesque characters, the freak, in shocking and distorting surfaces, was
to reveal truth. In a quotation perhaps attributed to Hawthorne, he writes of
OConnors motive to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you
draw large and startling figures (np). Murphy describes the artistic aim as the
revelation of the mystery of life. Gretlund (2009) speaks of the writings of John D.
Sykes, OConnor, and Percy as instantiating an aesthetic of revelation (113).
Percys characters suffer their alienation and disorientations because they fail to
read the signs of the Incarnated Being in the phenomenal world, signs that Percy
would want to encourage the contemporary wayfarer to never tire of pursuing.
Tolkien offered a means of reclaiming aspects of Tradition being overturned: an
imaginative reconception of tradition through fantasy and recovery from
disillusionment and disenchantment (Smith 2006: 81). Such artists seek to counsel
readers to transcend parochialism, to accept mystery within vulnerability, to seek
embrace intersubjectivity. Through narration, characterization, puns, and paradoxes,
they offer creative images in an effort to re-enchant.
As McLuhan (1999) writes of Chesterton, he used paradox to cause a clash
between appearances in order to attract attention to a real truth transcending such
a conflict (5). His essay on Chesterton discloses the Eucharistic passion which he
finds in the heart of life, (4) to point to timeless principleswhich have been
foolishly forgotten (7) and to showcase the desperate need for direction and unity
in an age that has smothered man in men (10). As I draw to a close, I turn to a
line in McLuhans 1995 Playboy interview that summarizes his quest. Drawing as my
extraction from Playboy as it does, it is a fitting example of espying the incarnate in
the profane (though I heard recently that the salacious magazine plans to cover its
models, a testament to McLuhans reversal law of media):
The better part of my work on media is actually somewhat like a safecrackers. I dont know whats inside; maybe its nothing. I just sit
down and start to work. I grope, I listen, I test, I accept and discard; I
try out different sequencesuntil the tumblers fall and the doors spring
open. (1995a: 236)
Like other practical mystics, his meaning exceeded his message. Wolfe (1982)
captures the meaning beyond the man, of which he was surely its medium,
observed at a fashionable New York restaurant:
McLuhan walked straight to our table absolutely unperturbed by the
famous faces around us. I immediately sensed an aura of spirituality
surrounding him, something that I couldnt exactly define; later, during
our conversation, it appeared clearly: this was a man with a quest. A
man with a quest is the title I gave to the radio program because I
had personally experienced time and again in my encounters with
McLuhan, the presence of certitudeas to what really mattered in life
(2).
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