Thingness: Some Notes on McLuhan's Dialogue With the Church

McLuhan’s dialogue with the Church was not restricted to a top-down engagement with the hierarchy. During his tenure as hallucinated idiot McLuhan also tried to save his fellow Christians from ruination by “conventional theology” [1] on the grounds that: “…all those having trouble with their faith today tend to be victims of post-renaissance conceptualized theology and catechism.”[2] His efforts in this regard bring us, in many respects, to the single most “personal object” he sought to address throughout his entire career.[3]

The crux of McLuhan’s praxis here was to try and provide some propaedeutic for an “encounter”[4] with the uncharted and un-chartable “thingness” and what he considered the “ever present fact”:[5]

Isn't the real message of the Church in the secondary or side-effects of the Incarnation, that is to say, in Christ's penetration into all of human existence? Then the question is, where are you in relation to this reality? Most people prefer to avoid the question by side-stepping it. The message is there but they want no part of it. So they eliminate it by plugging into another channel. They hypnotize themselves with the figure so as to better ignore the ground. They prefer to study the words rather than the questions that Christ asks everywhere, and of every human being. [6]

Central to his procedure was his bid to recast what “theology” means. Here McLuhan’s conversation with Hubert Hoskins brings us to the heart of McLuhan’s way, and works to further illuminate the relationship of his work to the “negative way” of T. S. Eliot with which we began this chapter:

McLuhan: The revelation is of thing, not theory. And where revelation reveals actual thing-ness you are not dealing with concept. The thing-ness revealed in Christianity has always been a scandal to the conceptualist: it has always been incredible. This issue is raised in the Book of Job, where faith and understanding were put at totally opposite poles. Job was not working on a theory but on a direct percept. All understanding was against him; all concept was against him. He was directly perceiving a reality, one revealed to him.

Hoskins: If what you are saying is right, I still don't see how such an activity as theology is possible even in theory.

McLuhan: I should think that it is very much a pastime, in the sense of a rehearsal of past times. It is not personal and direct confrontation. Theology is one of the “games people play,” in the sense of its theorizing. But using direct percept and direct involvement with the actuality of a revealed thing — there need be no theology in the ordinary sense of the word....

Hoskins: You regard this as a game?

McLuhan: Pure game.

Hoskins: A useless game?

McLuhan: Not necessarily more useless than any other game. Most games are a tremendous katharsis for pent-up emotions and frustrations. There has always been a great clash between works and concepts in religion. I think that theology can become a work, perhaps a part of the opus dei, part of the prayerful contemplation of God. Insofar as theology is contemplation and prayer it is part of the contemplation of the thingness and the mysteries.

Hoskins: This is using the term “theology” in a rather unusual way.

McLuhan: Theology should ideally be a study of the thingness, the nature of God, since it is a form of contemplation. But insofar as it is a theoretical or intellectual construct, it is purely a game, though perhaps a very attractive game. It can be played equally with any oriental theology: it has no more relevance to Christian theology than to Hindu theology.[7]

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[1] See McLuhan, “Milton, Montaigne, and the Philosophi Christi,” MS., 5.

[2] McLuhan to William Kuhns, 5 January 1970.

[3] McLuhan says to Wakin, only 1 in 6 of his kids raised in the Church stayed in the Church. “There is a great disparity between what the kids learned in Church and what they experienced and what their needs are,” (McLuhan, “Our Only Hope is Apocalypse,” in The Medium and the Light, 63).

[4] “It is clear to me that a study of the effects sought by any writer or artist or scientist whatever would naturally stress the experience of encountering this person. The word "encounter" is universally employed today, just as the words "perception" and "involvement" are. I think that the series I have in mind would be very much on the side of "encounter" and direct experience,” (McLuhan to Judith Greissman, 14 July 1971).

[5] “… I can say that I do not think of God as a concept, but as an immediate and ever present fact, an occasion for continuous dialogue,” (McLuhan to James Taylor, 15 January 1969).

[6] McLuhan, “Religion and Youth: Second Conversation with Pierre Babin,” in The Medium and the Light, 102–03.

[7] McLuhan, “Electric Consciousness and the Church,” in The Medium and the Light, 81–82.