Walking by Faith in a World of Sight

In an age of the image, we no longer have patience to listen to the word--or the Word.

Nov 14, 2024

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” By this token, it is no wonder that ours is an age of little faith. For we live in an age of compulsive, ubiquitous seeing and being seen. We talk often about how digital media has transformed ours into an image-based culture, but we rarely ponder the broader spiritual effects of this transformation. Seeing, we are often told, is believing (“pics or it didn’t happen!”). And since God and the things of his kingdom have always been unseen, they have therefore always been objects of faith.

But so, for most of human history, have most things. Before modern camera and communications technology, I had to take on faith, on testimony, the existence of pretty much everything outside my own tiny geographical experience. As Richard Hooker wrote to those who questioned the validity of human testimony, “That there is a city of Rome, that Pius V and Gregory XIII and others have been popes of Rome, I assume we are thoroughly persuaded of. The ground of our persuasion, having never seen the place nor these persons, must be human testimony.” Today, though, we can easily pull up pictorial proof of each of these on Wikipedia. To be sure, there is still an element of faith involved (especially and increasingly in the age of AI-generated art!) but there is something very different about the experience of visually inspecting, assimilating, and verifying evidence for something, versus taking it on testimony.

“Faith comes by hearing,” writes St. Paul. But why is this significant? What makes hearing more virtuous than sight? To hear is to rest on the authority of the spoken word, which, at least before the age of audio recording, meant to depend upon the personal presence of another. Even in the age of recorded audio, the hearing of the spoken word still binds us to another person in a relation of dependence—“I’ll take his word for it.” Not so vision. In vision, we are transformed (at least in our imagination) from passive to active, from dependence to mastery. And we no longer need the presence of another. Moreover, hearing depends upon waiting—speech can only unfold in time—whereas vision allows us to take everything in at once, to force the world into the present tense.

In his brilliant work, Intellectual Appetite, Paul Griffiths writes of the modern ideal of knowledge as one of what he calls mathesis, whose proponents

“imagine a world of discrete objects arrayed spatially on a grid…fully transparent to the appropriately catechized gaze and passive before that gaze, there to be gazed upon and addressed without itself returning or exceeding the gaze….Their gaze is directed neither toward the past of the discrete objects they seek to know, nor toward their future, but always toward their frozen present, the condition they have assumed at this moment, the moment when the aspiring knower’s gaze falls upon them” (145-46)

For most of human history, vision was not conceived in such domineering terms, but even those disposed to think in such terms could only exercise their gaze within extremely limited contours: their literal field of vision, or whatever they might add to it by walking or (perhaps) riding a horse. But today our vision can range from the furthest depths of space (thanks to the James Webb telescope) to the depths of the ocean (thanks to David Attenborough documentaries).

“We see in a glass, darkly,” writes St. Paul. Not anymore. The black mirrors we each carry in our pockets are if anything clearer and crisper than the world itself. In them, we can see anything and everything that our will desires to conjure into our presence: a clip of violence in the Middle East, a new collectible I’m thinking about buying, a parade of potential girlfriends on Tinder.

Barba-Kay argues that the digital, by fusing sight with touch, has brought to fruition vision’s quest for control:

“The power to act on sight through digital interface is therefore akin to the power to put theory into immediate practice. That is, whereas sight is usually the most passive sense, when activated it approaches omnipotence (as we say the camera ‘shoots’ and lover’s glances ‘slay’)—the basilisk ability to kill on sight). Interface is like that; within the context of the screen, it renders sight and therefore thought effective. ‘He seemed to become each thing he saw’ (a description of cyberspace in Gibson’s Neuromancer). Interface abbreviates the significance of the hand and body, investing sight with will and thought with the capacity to do. Before the screen, we command the view. It has never been so easy to do so much, to flatter the straightforward experience of our will, where sight and touch go hand in hand” (47).

Faith, however, because it must put its trust in the unseen, is intimately connected with the virtue of patience—of waiting and trusting that the unseen will reveal itself in due course, that faith shall be transformed into sight.

I have written before about how life in our digital age destroys the virtue of patience, constantly diminishing the need for waiting while rendering every remaining wait that much more unbearable. The phenomenon is not new to digital technology per se, but began at least with the steam engine: “The novelist Milan Kundera,” writes Christine Rosen in The Extinction of Experience, “once described speed ‘as the form of ecstasy that technology has bestowed upon modern man’.” However, the digital has helped accelerate the feedback loop, with no end in sight. Rosen describes studies showing that online shoppers will generally begin to ditch a website if pages take just two seconds to load; three years earlier the same studies had put the number at four seconds.

Waiting, Rosen observes, is harder to bear the less information we have about our wait, something I think we all know well from experience. There is nothing so frustrating as encountering a sudden logjam (at the entrance to an event venue, for instance) with no idea of what is causing the delay or how long it will be. This, of course, is why the Apostles made so much of the close union of the virtues of patience and faith. In the Christian life, we have the least information about the most important wait of all: “No man knows the day or hour”; “Be patient for the coming of the Lord.”

Today, however, we have tried to ease the suffering of impatience by quantifying the precise day or hour for all of our waitings. Rosen mentions Disney World’s use of an app that reports estimated wait times; I recently wrote of GPS navigation ETAs in this regard. We can also see the frenzied barrage of election polls (well over 100 were released in just the final two days before November 5^th) as an attempt to ease the burden of waiting by pretending to give us an answer now as to what results to expect.

Of course, none of these actually provide the certainty that they promise; in fact, they trigger a feedback loop which becomes ever more unable to bear waiting or uncertainty, ever more unable to exercise patience or faith, because of the expectation we’ve created that we should never have to wait anymore, and if we do, we should know exactly how long.

Such a mindset is crippling, obviously, not merely to basic human virtues (many of which require waiting uncertainly upon one another), but to Christian faith, in which we must content ourselves with waiting upon the Word of the Lord with no sight of him or of his kingdom, and no idea of when we might expect to be granted such sight.

Our response to this catechesis of the image must be a renewed catechesis of the word, and especially of the spoken word. For individuals, this means if you’re going to use a smartphone, use it to listen to audiobooks or podcasts, not for feverish scrolling. For families, this means more read alouds and less movie nights. For churches, this means think twice (or thrice) before putting the liturgy, hymns, or Scripture readings on a screen at the front of the church, and for heaven’s sake, if you do have a screen, don’t use it for anything more than that! And above all, it means we must dedicate ourselves to prayer, the most difficult discipline of all in the modern world, where we offer up our words to an unseen God and wait—sometimes for weeks, months, or years—for an answer. To pray for five minutes without picking up your phone for a comforting image or a glance at your calendar—even that is a challenge for most of us today.

This is a theme I hope to be reflecting and writing more on in the coming months, so if you have thoughts from your own experience, please share them in the comments!

Newly Published

Review of Oliver O’Donovan’s The Disappearance of Ethics (Cranmer Theological Journal): Oliver O’Donovan is widely acknowledged as the greatest living Protestant moral theologian, and his recent Gifford Lectures were a crowning achievement to a lifetime’s work at the forefront of the discipline. Although published under the pessimistic title The Disappearance of Ethics, O’Donovan’s work offers a word of good news, of euangelion. Indeed, the impoverished state of our ethical discourse, he argues, although the result of specific modern intellectual and spiritual maladies, is simply another manifestation of the Fall, a darkness which the gospel comes to illuminate. The Christian proclamation, then, offers itself to our darkened moral imaginations as the best and fullest answer to the triple crisis of ethics that O’Donovan diagnoses.
“Better Living Through AI?” (WORLD Opinions): My latest for WORLD focuses on the growing industry of AI customer-service assistants—not just the text chat bots, but ones that answer the phone and do a better job than the frankly rather robotic humans we usually find ourselves talking to. Is this an example of a good use of AI, or is it rather an example of how modern technology is often called in to solve a problem it has itself first created?

Coming down the Pipe

Amicus brief in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton: I mentioned this briefly back in October, but this effort is now coming close to fruition and will be submitted to the Supreme Court next Friday, Lord willing, part of a massive coalition effort to finally take Big Porn down a notch after nearly three decades of legal carte blanche. My colleague Clare Morell and I have written an amicus brief demonstrating that the governing precedent in this field of law, Ashcroft v. ACLU (2004) is factually obsolete, premised as it is on the now-discredited claim that parental control filters can sufficiently protect children from obscene content online. “For too long,” we conclude, “our legal regime surrounding pornography has left parents to fight a one-sided war against Big Tech and Big Porn on their own, refusing to recognize the exploitative behavior of many of these industries, aimed at the most vulnerable members of society.”
“Taking the Easy Way Out?” (WORLD Opinions): With the UK now seriously considering joining the ranks of developed nations that have legalized physician-assisted suicide, it’s time to take the growing support for euthanasia with deadly seriousness. As with most issues on which social conservatives keep losing, it cannot be treated in isolation from broader cultural and yes, technological (sorry to be a broken record!) trends. In a society in which technology has conditioned us to look for the easy way out of any uncomfortable situation, we simply no longer have the cultural resources that enable us to make sense of prolonged suffering, or to support others through it.

On the Bookshelf

What with the amicus effort consuming much of my bandwidth, I’m only actively reading two books right now:

Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World (W.W. Norton, 2024): I cited this a couple of times in the main column above; I’m almost done with the book and have found it a very helpful addition to the growing body of technology criticism literature. Rosen’s book is not nearly so profound or eloquent as Barba-Kay’s, but for that reason it is also much more widely accessible, and is a good one to recommend to a friend or colleague who wants to reflect on the tradeoffs of digitized existence. Rosen’s book is more exploratory than dogmatic, inviting us to think about the critical skills and joys of embodied experience that we have increasingly thoughtlessly traded away for the convenience digitally-mediated immediacy. I’ll be reviewing this book for FusionAIER early in the new year, so look for more thoughts from me soon.
John Keegan, The First World War (2000): As I’ve followed the narrative from the tragedy of 1914 into the doldrums of 1915, the question that keeps pressing itself is “Why? Why did they keep fighting?” Consider: nobody really wanted to go to war to begin with in 1914, and only did so to pre-empt what they feared would be a devastating first strike by their foes, and each hoped to gain a decisive quick victory that could end the conflict before it destroyed everyone. So, logically, once all such early schemes had failed, why not seek a negotiated peace? Why not return to a status quo ante? Why continue a war of mutual assured destruction? Of course, knowing human nature, it is not hard to see why this was never seriously considered—World War I was essentially one giant exhibition of the “sunk-cost fallacy.” As such, it is an instructive warning for all of us tempted to think in such terms, or tempted to rush headlong into conflicts that we think we will be able to easily exit if the going gets tough.

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