The Incarnationals

On Christine Rosen, Charles Taylor, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Rembrandt, Abraham Serving the Three Angels, 1646, Oil on panel

“If you have heard God calling you in the depths of your heart, in spite of the tumult of the world, then you are indeed most blessed.” A nun named Irene wrote this sentence to me in a letter two summers ago. I had written to her asking for advice, expressing my deep disturbance at a sense of being called to religious life. “You should have no reason at all to be frightened of the possibility that God might be calling you to serve Him,” she continued. “It is the plan of Satan today to keep people well and truly busy and distracted by spending hours on social media at work and home. So few today spend time in prayer and due to the noise in their heads, they are incapable of hearing the gentle whisper.”

It is said of monasteries that if one does not belong there, they “spit you out” — and indeed, this was my experience. I left unceremoniously after one sleepless night in my guest cell. It was clear that God was not calling me to be a nun. Walking in the woods that morning without my belongings, however, I received communication from God — about what He wanted me to do, and how He wanted me to do it. What else had I been missing in the preceding months, because of my inability to put down my phone? As soon as I managed to abstain for an hour, a day, or a weekend, I began to receive messages and directives with unmistakable clarity.

One of my favorite writers, the early 20th-century French novelist Colette, addressed her friend Germaine in a letter: “You know how much I persist in believing in chance, in unexpected meetings, in the man who may at this very moment be about to turn the corner to meet us. You will meet him . . . . He may be the man you will love more than any other.” But what if Germaine existed today, and never met the man of her dreams, because her face was in her phone? What if he appeared on the same city bus, sitting across from her, and she couldn’t sense his energy because she was scrolling?

The March issue of Washingtonian magazine featured a dating guide that brought up the same problem. “Opportunities to meet someone special can be found virtually everywhere, but many people remain absorbed in their own world, wearing earbuds and rushing from place to place.” It quoted a dating coach who stated: “The pandemic made us even more introverted, and people are really longing for that personal connection, which is ironic because they’re looking down at their phones. Talk to people and look up, and don’t bring your phone — turn it off.”

Whether one is called to religious life or the devotion of a romantic relationship, the sense of vocation can be easily missed through distraction. The subtle messages of the body, like a heightened heartbeat or a feeling of calm, can be obliterated by ongoing attention to a device.

Two new books, Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World, and Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, address the theme of loss. Rosen’s focus is on the ways that physical life is waning because of tech use. Taylor writes about the efforts of Romantic and post-Romantic poets to recover a sense of connection with the cosmos, often through nature, after the philosophical shifts of the Enlightenment toppled the perceived legitimacy of orthodox religious systems.

While Rosen’s book is about the internet, Taylor’s is about something called the “interspace.” As the Catholic philosopher explains it, the interspace is “the space of interaction between us and our world.” It is a “third, irreducible domain” in which “the relationship of human agent to world” is “at stake.” The Romantics needed the interspace in order to sense and describe felt experiences of God, or ultimate human reality. Whereas “earlier writers and thinkers asserted their notions of cosmic orders as fundamental truths,” Taylor says, the Romantics were forced to go into “epistemic retreat” — a withdrawal from asserting any definite notions of what lies beyond. The poetry of William Wordsworth or Novalis communicates sensations of a God who still exists, and is trying to reach us through nature. The reception of this presence, in the Romantic imaginary, is available to certain individuals (like poets) through specific portals.

Observe these lines from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”:

. . . And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Or this fragment of Novalis: “The site of the soul is there, where inner- and outer-world touch each other. Where they interfuse, this site is in every point of this fusion.”

Is the internet itself an interspace, a portal through which we can connect more deeply to some subliminal, shared truth? Or is it a false interspace that keeps us from communion with something higher and more substantial?

Is surfing the internet a legitimate self-soothing practice? Or does it simply numb us without providing deeper solace? Is the internet a genuine companion? Or does it stop us from having close contact with other incarnated beings?

In a sense, deep engagement with the internet offers the opportunity for dissociation that is an inversion of the noble, often religious impulse toward separatist life. The choice of the Amish, for example, or of Catholic and Orthodox monastic orders to hold the world at arm’s length is mirrored by the cloistering effect of a device. To look at the world through a smartphone is to look at it through a protective layer of glass.

Contact with the created world is a chance to engage with the interspace that Taylor mentions, and one of the best ways to do this is through nature immersion. Orthodox writer Paul Kingsnorth characterized his spiritual experience in the woods to Rod Dreher in a recent book, Living in Wonder: “If you go for a walk in the forest, and you bear in mind that the forest is sentient, that it can sense your presence there . . . you go in with the sense that you’re seeing and being seen . . . you’re having a living relationship with it.” The same could be said of an iPhone. But while the woods sense one’s being, the internet is a voyeur. Forests keep secrets. Devices do not.

In The Extinction of Experience, Rosen writes that although “the human condition is embodied,” the surge in technological innovation of our era has brought about a “rejection of the direct experience of our own bodies.” She quotes virtual reality specialists who claim that the internet can “easily satisfy” our “social needs and drives,” and who don’t seem concerned that this will cause people to “withdraw physically from society.” This is unconscionable, she says. “We need to defend the sensory world and remind ourselves of the crucial importance of the physical body.”

Taylor, for his part, talks about the consequences of the post-industrial age, in which “the modern urban landscape frequently contains neglected and run-down neighborhoods . . . it contains non-places (non-lieux), like vacant lots which are the site of a disordered collection of cast-off objects.” It could be said that after the introduction of the internet, and especially for people who spend hours a day online, the body has become a non-place or “non-lieu.” Our physical frames are the vacant lots, our organs the cast-off objects.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Photograph, Léon Herschtritt via BnF

All this would be anathema to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a 20th-century French existentialist philosopher who developed a concept of “flesh” in his final works and emphasized the importance of the body. He is mentioned by both Rosen and Taylor, and my hope is that his work will come to the prominence it deserves as a result of the physical deficit of our time. Taylor shows how Merleau-Ponty provides us with a pathway to “the recovery of our identities as incarnate.” Raised Roman Catholic, Merleau-Ponty’s thought was deeply influenced by the Church’s insights into existence. In works such as Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, he sought to overcome the mind-body dualism that had been established by earlier thinkers like René Descartes. Far from being something that can be separated from our brains or our souls, he writes, the body is “a natural self, a given current of existence, such that we never know if the forces that carry us belong to us or belong to our body — or rather, such that they are never entirely our body’s or entirely ours.” The important thing is not Cartesian certainty, but “entering body and soul into an enigmatic life.”

This is the opposite of how many modern people have begun to talk about their emotions. “I was really dysregulated,” a friend said the other day, instead of simply saying that she was upset. We now “process” feelings, an industrial word, rather than “ruminate” on them — an agricultural word, referring to farm animals chewing cud. Taylor notices this too. “Now the mind is seen in mechanistic terms,” he laments, “very often identified with the brain, and frequently understood as operating like a computer.” This makes “no place for the kind of living, experiencing beings that we are.” It is a “deep source of dissatisfaction.” He is indignant: “Are we just minds, or computing mechanisms, taking in information? Are we not also incarnate beings, beings of ‘flesh’ in Merleau-Ponty’s sense? ‘Immersed’ in our world, ‘dwelling’ in it?”

Merleau-Ponty said that “sensation is, literally, a communion.” Novalis, the earlier Romantic poet, wrote: “Everything that we experience is a communication. Hence the world in fact is a communication.” It is likely that after the loss of a sense of cosmic order in the 18th century and the upheaval of the first stages of the Industrial Revolution, God was trying to speak to certain Romantic poets through specific portals in the natural world, showing them that He still existed. Religious experience became accessible through emotion and affect, which were provoked by intense interactions with nature. As modernity advances, however, and technology grows with it, the body becomes the locus of these glimpses of eternity.

The poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, writing in 1902, describes a momentary state of being in which:

everything seems to mean something, everything that exists, everything I can remember . . . . I feel a blissful and utterly eternal interplay in me and around me, and amid the to-and-fro there is nothing into which I cannot merge. Then it is as if my body consisted entirely of coded messages revealing everything to me. Or as if we could enter into a new, momentous relationship with all of existence if we began to think with our hearts.

After some time, the “strange bewitchment stops.” The mystical experience is hard to put into words: “I can no more express in rational language . . . how it made itself perceptible to me, than I can describe with any precision the inner movements of my intestines or the engorgement of my veins.”

If the predicament of moderns is that God speaks to us through the body, it makes sense in a Christian worldview that acknowledges the reality of both good and evil that Satan is using the internet to block us from our bodies. It is too facile to say that “the internet is the devil.” Rather, the internet is something the devil uses to separate us from the source of the felt presence of God.

The practice of a sacramental religion can be an aid in recovering this crucial contact with the body. The fragrances, sounds, living music, icons, and gestures of the Church, as well as the physical presence of others, are a much-needed antidote to the scentless, sanitized sight of a screen. Sacraments like baptism are visible signs of invisible spiritual truths. The Latin word sacramentum comes from a Greek word meaning “mystery,” or “to conceal,” as theologian Orion Edgar writes in his book Things Seen and Unseen. It carries “the sense of showing something in its hiddenness.” We of the digital era especially need the sacraments, because the body has become hidden to us.

The mass hypochondria of the Covid era could be seen as the symptom of a disembodied populace coming into uneasy awareness of the body. In the midst of a technological upsurge that rendered physical interaction and presence ever less “necessary,” people were confronted with the likelihood of illness and the ancient reality of mortal flesh. In Jungian psychology, the vague fantasies that come with the hypochondriac state are paradoxically a “road to salvation.” Their purpose is to reconnect the patient with his or her physical existence. Jung once wrote of an American entrepreneur he had treated, who “had lived entirely for his business and concentrated all his energies on it with incredible intensity and one-sidedness.” After retiring early, the man descended into an unbearable state of hypochondria. Jung perceived the psyche’s purpose for this episode: “the ultimate goal was to drive him back, as it were, into his own body, after he had lived since his youth only in his head.”

The experience of the body incorporates pain as well as pleasure. This is acknowledged by a character in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a woman at an intellectual gathering who quips, “So long as you can forget your body you are happy. And the moment you begin to be aware of your body, you are wretched. So, if civilization is any good, it has to help us forget our bodies, and then time passes happily without our knowing it.”

This is what the internet does.

Like Jung’s patient, when a person scrolls for hours in bed, or immediately focuses his attention on his phone when on public transportation or waiting in line, he is active on “one side of his being; the other side remain[s] in an inert physical state.” Rosen, a historian at the American Enterprise Institute, documents with surgical clarity the many ways the internet pulls us away from physical engagement. She is also correct to assert that moderate, temperate calls for “a more balanced relationship with our devices” are “no longer enough.” That kind of attitude is like taking aspirin for a terminal illness. Any responsible refutation of the internet needs to acknowledge its profound seductive power.

Blithely recommending that people make different choices with their smartphones is ignoring the obvious reality that for many people, smartphone use is an addiction. It is no longer a matter of choice. No longer a society of addicted individuals, we now have a culture of addiction. I see people, especially young people, who quite literally cannot wrest themselves away from their devices. They bump into me on the street as they walk without looking up. When I am stopped at a red light, I look to the side and see the driver next to me staring at her phone. On a recent Metro ride, 12 out of 13 people I counted in my car were online. Even at the gym, I see young, healthy men sitting on the equipment — not lifting weights, but scrolling.

The Satanic allure of the internet must be recognized. What is this desire for dissociation, this need to dissolve ourselves in its ether? Why is the soporific glow of the blue and white screen so beautiful in the middle of the night? Taylor speaks of the Romantic desire for “an almost Dionysian loss of self,” a “yearning beyond life.” There is “something approaching joy at oblivion.” The internet-zombie state, induced by long binges, is the synthetic version of this impulse.

Baudelaire wrote of acedia, or “spleen” — a vague state of listlessness and dissatisfaction, or unending monotony. “The essence of spleen lies in the meaningless repetition of immediate surface experiences,” Taylor explains. Is there any better description of the way we feel compelled to check email and notifications as though in an assembly line, although no one constrains us to be in a factory? Are we unable to put down our phones because of genuine “impotence of the will,” or is it instead “that there is some fascination here still with evil?” Is it a coincidence that the symbol on the back of a computer is a bitten apple, the ancient Christian symbol of temptation and the Fall of Man? Taylor writes of Baudelaire’s “double-mindedness,” his acknowledgment that we “know from birth that all voluptuous pleasure comes from evil.” We long for salvation, but settle for the fascination of addiction. “In every human being,” Baudelaire says, there is “the desire to rise to a higher level,” but Taylor fleshes out the idea that “this is not the whole story. There is also the postulation toward Satan. And this too draws on the energy of longing, but gives it a deviant direction. The love of evil is the longing for God which has been hijacked.” He continues: the “human being will at moments long for release, then at other moments be excited by Satanism, and long to give himself to the devil utterly.”

In laying bare the desires of his heart, both for poison and for paradise, Baudelaire restores to us a full sense of spirituality. To deny the existence of evil and our attraction to it, to diminish its power to pull us into its embrace, is simultaneously to deny the possibility of real escape. Through Baudelaire’s work, “this entire range of experience is transfigured and made to speak. The spiritual depths or truth underlying it all is made to emerge into light.” Taylor writes that “we suffer from the distance, the absence from our lives of the spiritual.” Thinking of ourselves as inherently good and in full control of our choices precludes us from full release; “all hope of returning to the real paradise . . . is lost if evil itself is denied and lost sight of.” In contrast, the “recovery of a sharp sense” of our own fallibility “is a relief, a liberation, a spiritual awakening and enlivening.”

Baudelaire gains distance from the misery of ennui by setting it into poetic form. This is the opposite of the kind of distancing that is achieved through clinical language, the lexicon of the therapeutic. A psychiatrist today might say that Baudelaire was suffering from “monotony depression syndrome,” Taylor quips. But look at the beauty that emerges from Baudelaire’s verse, the healing that occurs when the full range of his longing is exposed:

O ends of autumn, winters, springtimes deep in mud,
Seasons of drowsiness, — my love and gratitude
I give you, that have wrapped with mist my heart and brain
As with a shroud, and shut them in a tomb of rain.

The elegiac quality of this verse brings me to a resounding sense that any anti-internet movement of quality will necessitate beginning with grief. Something has been lost. That much is clear. We are not going to go backwards, much as the factories that replaced pastoral fields in the early 19th century — which William Blake called “Satanic mills” — were not going to disappear overnight. We have to mourn what we have lost. Those who are uncomfortable with grief will oppose this.

The digital has encroached on the body, in the same way that industrialization began to encroach upon nature in the age of the Romantics. Taylor describes how people in early 19th-century England felt “troubled at the loss of a traditional way of life” and sensed “a new alienation from nature.” However, it was also against this “background of loss” that the “reconnective vision” of the Romantics took off. The intuitions of this group of poet-seers, who “reacted to the fading of solidly accepted metaphysico-moral orders with a sense of loss,” presage ours. We are reacting to the fading of the commonly-lived interrelational physical order. Commenting on the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, and apropos of our problem, Taylor says the point is not in “trying to re-create what was there before. This cannot be our model, the pole of our longing.” What we can do is create new forms that evoke the reality of physical experience.

This is the current frontier in the “battle against our separation from Nature.” A new movement begins “paradoxically,” Taylor states, in devastation. The desire to reconnect is enough — even when the loss seems “irremediable,” even when a new reality “seems beyond our grasp.” Our movement is futuristic — not reactionary. It will be enabled by the schism that has happened — it won’t try to undo it.

What is the correct posture toward the encroachment of the internet? Is it to try and make it un-happen? Is it to embrace it uncritically, with naive optimism? Is it to make well-mannered, utterly ineffectual calls for “balance” and bourgeois “moderation?” Or is it to ask, instead, what God’s purpose for this particular Fall is? What is the divine purpose it is pulling us toward?

In Christianity, there is the idea of the felix culpa — the “happy fault” which appears in the sung liturgy of the Easter Vigil, and characterizes original sin as the catalyst for ultimate redemption. If Adam, the original man, had not succumbed to temptation in the Garden of Eden, it would not have been necessary for God to incarnate as Jesus Christ and infuse the world with His warmth and salvation. Saint Augustine wrote in the 5th century that “God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” A similar sentiment arises in the book of Genesis: Even though you meant harm to me, God meant it for good, to achieve this present end.

If The Extinction of Experience is the delineation of the problem wrought by the internet, Cosmic Connections is the answer. The latter book asserts that the desire for cosmic connection does not disappear over time, but mutates. When one mode of enchantment loses its power or efficacy, another arises. This is how culture moves forward. It is a process of recovery in which what is rediscovered takes on a more transcendent form, and is in fact greater than that which was lost. It is a continual revolving of “occlusion” and “renewal,” a breathing in and out of that which recedes and that which is restored. It is what the early Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin described as the spiral path: a “movement away from an original unreflected unity,” Taylor writes, then through “division,” and finally to a “higher harmonious synthesis.”

For Merleau-Ponty, as Orion Edgar tells it, this consists in the idea of flesh as icon, or the “union of opposites” of “consciousness and nature,” and in fact “announces their originary indivision.” “Although Merleau-Ponty’s work here is concerned with the problem of the body, and not with nature, the point is the same. The body is not simply an analog of nature; it is nature as the human being.”

If the ravaging of nature in the early industrial age brought about the eventual emergence of Romantic poetry, the internet’s fracturing of physical connection could result in artistic and religious movements that especially honor incarnation. The interspace is no longer only between us and the forest, as it was in Goethe’s time — it is between us and our bodies. This is the portal through which messages will arrive. God is still speaking to us through nature — we are the nature. “One must think with one’s whole body,” Mallarmé once said.

We need a new physical imaginary. Our era perceives the body as a machine, so we must find the ways in which it rebels against such a vision and read them like a sacred text. Throughout my life, I have developed obsessions with writers and artists who understood the originary indivision of physical and spiritual — and I’ve sought communion with them in my mind. I consider them ancestors, patron saints, though they were not orthodox and certainly not canonizable. They are William Blake, Colette, and D. H. Lawrence. Maurice Merleau-Ponty has recently joined my pantheon, although I am just beginning to discover his work. These writers showed me a pathway toward a life I wanted to discover — a way through my deepest questions and the solution to my life’s conundrum. I, hoping to join them, will call our collective the Incarnationals — it’s certainly better than “millennial.”

Blake’s aphorisms from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, extracted here, are the flame that begins to illumine the passageway.

Man has no body distinct from his soul.

Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.

He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.

First the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do . . . melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.

Colette was a rural soul and writer of the senses. Her biographer Geneviève Dormann characterized her preoccupations as “a fine head of lettuce, the supple back of a cat or a well-built man.” Her novels described things like “black figs that bleed white juice when you pluck them.”

D. H. Lawrence, the beloved sage whom I will immediately embrace once I find him in Heaven, perhaps foretold the coming movement of artistic creation when he made his famous character Constance Chatterley say:

Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind: when the body is really awakened to life. But so many people . . . have only got minds tacked on to their physical corpses . . . . The human body is only just coming to real life . . . it is really rising from the tomb. And it will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely universe, the life of the human body.

Also Lawrence: “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says is always true.”

And Edgar on Merleau-Ponty: “For [him], flesh is not an obstacle at all. Indeed, as his earlier thought made clear, embodiment is not the obstacle of freedom, but its very condition. The flesh does not, for Merleau-Ponty, oppose the spirit, but is its incarnate ground. The flesh is the site of generativity.”

The exoneration of desire is very important. Monk Sebastian Moore, in Jesus the Liberator of Desire, wrote about desire as the opposite of egoism, since it results in communion: “It is because we do not understand desire but equate it with egoism, that we see the cross of Jesus as opposed to it. Real desire is what the cross empowers.”

Charles Taylor also writes of “real, self-transforming desire,” echoing the Catechism in its description of sexual love as “mutual self-giving.”

This embrace of desire is related to the sacramentality of the flesh, as Edgar sees it: “What all these transformations share is that they lead us into a deeper engagement with the lived world and not to a detached ascent from the world to a different, higher realm.” Some Merleau-Ponty scholarship refers to this as a “liberating ‘horizontal transcendence.’”

The choice is therefore not between the isolation of the internet and the continuous solitude of a remote sanctity. It is to enter more deeply into the world, to engage with flesh, both my own and others’, and to see God in all things.

My personal and artistic project could be said to be anti-Romantic, or it could be said to represent a Romantic completion. I am not involved in any sort of epistemic retreat, but am interested instead in epistemic reaffirmation. My affinity for the Romantics led me to nature, then to the body, and through the body to an embrace of Catholicism, with its all-important gifts of Body and Blood. Romantic ineffability pointed me, improbably, to a modern experience of sacramental religion. It is a full circle.

And yet the preoccupations of the Romantics and post-Romantics, as Taylor characterizes them — “how the features of the traditional view could be recaptured in the new context,” the idea of “tradition as an ever-changing simultaneous order,” and how to give this order “new expression in contemporary terms” — are also my preoccupations.

When I am on my deathbed, will I regret the thousands of hours I have spent online? Will I think of the time I could have spent with family, whose lives are finite? The thunderstorms I could have watched from my window, instead of scrolling the news? The evenings I could have spent reading Proust instead of Twitter? The time I lost holding my phone, instead of a lover? The nights I spent streaming instead of praying, when one prayer could have changed my life?

The messages are all around me, if I am willing to listen. If I enter into silence, I will hear them.

Emma Collins is the author of A New Heaven on Substack. She has written for the Washington Examiner and RealClear Books & Culture. Originally from upstate New York, she now lives in Washington, D.C.