“Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.” — Edith Stein

Growing up in the Southwest exposes one to a copious dose of mariachi music. Due in no small part, I’m sure, to the often involuntary nature of this exposure, and furthermore the fact that until I was a teenager I rarely actively sought to listen to music at all, I carried through my formative years a subtle yet nonetheless present distaste for mariachi. Never, however, was this distaste’s existence clearer than when it was obliterated. Mariachi had always essentially either pumped gratuitously from the subwoofers of passing vehicles or otherwise innocuously wafted amidst the bustle of a public setting, but it was in my first experience of a live performance that it became an art to me.

I was not by any means transformed into an aficionado of the style, but the shift from ambivalence or even annoyance to appreciation can be best explained by the dramatic novelty of an encounter which was markedly embodied. I likewise recall fondly, though orchestral music had early in life become one of the only kinds I sought to hear, the transformative enchantment of witnessing a symphony in person for the first time, so distinct was it from a mere recording. Any given fan of any given kind of music will no doubt sympathize. Further, it seems everything from music to sports to socialization is better when it is likewise embodied. It is undeniable in the face of experience that the virtual is simply no replacement for the actual.

The digital aether has made a pseudo-gnostic attitude toward the material much more palatable. The Covid Pandemic, as it did with so many things, induced this disposition to absurd and destructive extremes. The digital became for millions not only adequate, but preferable. Bodies are subject to disease, discomfort, risk. Through the mediation of the digital realm, everything from entertainment to work to education to friendship can be enjoyed without sacrifice of safety, whether mental or physical. But if anyone thinks that the most meaningful aspects of education, friendship and the like can survive the distillation into data and transmission from screen to screen, then such a person has woefully misunderstood the essence of these goods.

I’ve always been irked by the use of the term “space” in non-literal contexts, not least because it reeks of corporate gobbledygook, but most especially with reference to so-called digital or virtual “spaces.” While the term may have some utility as a metaphor, it seems to have overflowed the strictures of such and become for many as valid a description of online interaction as it is of real, tangible, habitable, actual physical space. But this is a problem precisely because the very nature of space is essentially pertinent to bodies. Where it is sensible to literally “make space” in a room upon some newcomer’s arrival by shuffling chairs, scooting bodies about in order to designate an actual spatial locale for the person in question, the prevalence of the more metaphorical space-making implies that people are not primarily (or even secondarily) their bodies. “Space” is now a thing to be made emotionally, psychically, or otherwise virtually.

But, as the pandemic grimly demonstrated, this relegation of bodies to their quarantined cloisters, only maintaining minimal contact with the embodied world, in practice puts an immense strain on the invisible, intangible human being. Statistics on depression and anxiety from the time demonstrate that, though conducted in the spirit of mitigation or even hubristic eradication of risk, madness is an invariable risk posed by such chronic sequestering. If all the burden of being is placed on the mind and the soul, they may start to crack.

Explain as this may a common preference for the printed page over digital or audio alternatives, it is nonetheless also true that an excess of reading is, as the wise teacher says, “a vexation of the spirit.” Reading can no doubt serve as a singular enrichment of life, but it is also capable of precluding actual living. A manual of birds is no good to one who never steps outdoors. A book of world history is little use to one who has never seen any of the real world. A novel of romance is worthless to one who is too afraid of the gamut of human feeling to even speak to others, one who does not even know by experience what the course of human society entails, what a human being is.

I have, more than once, fallen prey to this disembodiment, especially epistemically. Tempted as we are, perhaps by nature as humans, but certainly by nature as moderns, to drift disembodied through the landscape of facts, selecting information like unaffected, dispassionate ghosts, this is far from the reality of human existence. Even the mind is not strictly rational, or rather even capable of strict rationality or “pure reason” in some detached, abstractly idealized sense, as Iain McGilchrist has so helpfully elucidated. No person can live strictly by propositional truths, he can only convince himself that he does, which itself is the self-defeating acceptance of a false proposition, for if he knew himself, he’d know that the propositions he believes are first assessed as valuable, meaningful, or real, which process is far beneath and long before lethargic reason arrives at the action of the mind. As I’ve found personally, such excessive propositionalism, so to speak, is also a kind of madness. Not only is the mind not sufficient to bear this weight in terms of embodiment, but it cannot even bear it on its own terms. There is not enough reason in the human mind and there is far too much knowledge in the external world for the capacity of the former to meet the task.

Daniel of O.G. Rose usefully distills this epistemic dimension of embodiment into the metaphor of a map, emphasizing the essential distinction between the territory and the map, the thing and its corresponding concept. Drawing on this image, the attempt at purely disembodied reason, absolute “propositionalism,” is the same mistake as assuming one can live and move in a map instead of the place it charts. As Daniel observes, to the chagrin of modernists, this error necessarily reveals via absurdity that maps are distinct from that to which they correspond by degrees of detail or resolution. Naturally, it follows that maps are encoded, that is, prior to and underneath the map itself is a principle or set of principles that separates the informational wheat from the chaff. The cartographer must be selective in what details are of use on a map and which ones are not. The question that remains is how, if at all, those principles can themselves be mapped.

In my own experience, this question manifests itself peculiarly and perniciously in the assessment of religious propositional truth claims. John Vervaeke identifies religion as fundamentally prior to attention, that is, religion is in his view the set of principles that guides the cartographer’s eyes and hands. Its dictates bubble up from the unconscious mind to silently and powerfully guide the conscious mind in its prejudgements of worth and meaning. In practice, this phenomenon is apparent, for example, in that Roman Catholic propositional claims about the authority of the magisterium depend on some previous self-identification, even self-validation of said magisterium. Consider, on the other hand, Westminster’s exemplification of the Protestant equivalent, that the “infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself.” Similar might be said of Eastern Orthodoxy’s dependence on the “living tradition” in order to interpret itself. What critiques of each of these views from their respective opponents often miss is that these are not merely propositions as to the truth of the matter, but propositions as to the manner in which truth is known at all — arguments about details on the map when the real distinction is in the cartography itself.

Frankly, I do not think anyone could be blamed — could rather be commended — for reaching this point in thought and, whether for inability to do otherwise or from some more enlightened motive, muster only a shrug of the shoulders in resignation. It’s sort of just the way things are, really. In the embodied, actual world, the religious layer of real human beings doesn’t even consist in propositions, though it may be expressed through them. As Paul Vanderklay sagely noted, converts to a new faith or tradition tend to fall in love first, and the rationalization follows. There is a noble epistemological humility invited by this line of reasoning, into the fray it strides to suggest meekly that perhaps human beings are not as in control of this religious layer, this unconscious dictator of attention, not as able to see their own sight or change anything under the map as they’d quite like to be. Christians of all stripes and traditions should be able to agree, in view of this whispered concession, that such change ultimately rests alone with the Almighty. Of course, humility by its nature grates against ours, and so there is a great deal of risk involved in granting such a concession, for it automatically vitiates the potential for total victory, for utter propositional correctness. If the invisible God is the master of such things, then the ability to falsify the epistemologies of fellow-spirits confessing Christ is severely mitigated. And how indeed we love to build certainty of truth upon certainty of falsehoods.

But yet again, if the squabbling parties lobbing their religious propositions across the arena can find it in themselves to hear the messenger of humility, they must also concede that some highest portion of highest truth eludes a particular mental certainty, else there would be no place for faith. And faith is, in its way, embodied, pouring out into a life lived in goodness and good deeds. This should always be remembered lest the squabbling turn to violence, with bodies disregarded as mere fuel for the war of ideas, and charity thus sacrificed to truth, which can thereby be no truth at all. The digital realm, in its disembodied contests of minds, is for this reason so often a graveyard of human kindness and happiness — and as often a tomb for the truth and reason that were in that realm supposedly more pure.

Such madness can only be avoided, and such charity only be enjoyed, if love is embodied, if it is lived. Love unlived is neither life nor love. The map won’t matter in the final summation if the territory is never actually navigated. A wise man once told me that theology is meant to be done together. A perfect, pristine, bulletproof systematic explanation of everything in heaven and earth is worthless to the one who won’t go to church, have fellowship, enjoy friendship, see the image of God in his fellow man and the invisible attributes of God in the world outside of his own mind. If his reason doesn’t describe a world that is real to him, perhaps he had better be more unreasonable and more alive.

But to be alive entails embodiment, and bodies are frail things. To love risks pain and heartbreak, to eat or drink risks ill health, to imbibe the warm life of the sun risks burning. To live risks dying, but to replace the sun with LEDs and their sickly blue light, to replace the sustenance from the earth with clinically formulated pills and packets and lab-grown imitations, to replace love with consumable, disposable relationships whose substance is pixels rather than persons is, in sum, hardly to live at all. Anything we would not be pained to lose is probably not worth having, much less worth sacrificing. Yet, in the Kierkegaardian sense, nothing sacrificed can be worth more than that which is returned. To wall oneself off from the absurdity of existence is to be insulated from properly existing at all. Belief is not the fortress of propositional certitude we can construct for ourselves, it’s a Way meant to be walked. To believe is to act. If we categorically reject the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, never love that which is fatally greater and stronger than us, then we can never love the One who made us.

Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already approved what you do. Let your garments be always white; let not oil be lacking on your head. — Ecclesiastes 9:7-8 (RSV)

Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it. — Luke 17:33 (RSV)