Christian Art, A Locus Theologicus, and Digital Media
By Franco Lever
[Rev. Franco Lever is a Salesian priest who holds degrees in Theology, Education and Catechetics, and Television studies. He is cofounder and past dean of the faculty of Sciences of Social Communication of the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome. This text was presented at the Theocom Conference, Santa Clara University in California, June 2012.]
When we are looking for a better insight into Theology, we usually turn to Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Karl Rahner… Why do we not pay the same attention to the artists of Christian tradition and to how they communicated and celebrated the Christian faith? The digital revolution gives us both the means and the instruments for this type of study, which no one had (or would have dreamt of) in the past. Doing research on the history of the signs of the Cross and Crucifix, I found a wonderful way to trace the experience of the Christian community is through the arts as they developed a theological understanding of our faith, in dialogue with culture.
My thoughts are organized around these points:
A new context of communication, an authentic revolution, is underway, bringing with it a new way of understanding reality, not just a change in the way we communicate.
There is an enhanced ability to communicate at our disposal. In observing this change, we usually stop at social networks, but it goes much further. There is another component: as never before in history, we can now use a plurality of languages directly, and simultaneously, along with multimedia databases that are progressively all-encompassing.
Communicating across multiple languages implies having a better possibility of exploring human experience, including religious experience. Each language is, in fact, an instrument for exploring reality, even before being an instrument of communication. It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that we are given the opportunity to have a better understanding of ourselves and of God.
To speak of God, the privileged language used today is the verbal and rational one. It is sufficient to observe the programs of seminaries and faculties of theology, or to browse through the catalog of their libraries; they propose, almost exclusively, studies based on the written language. There is neither space nor time for painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theater, cinema, poetry, or dance.
For centuries, art, in all its forms, was at the service of the expression and celebration of faith and, in certain periods, almost exclusively. I am convinced the mysterious presence of God is emptied when you enclose it in a rational formula; we need to change mindsets and acquire more integrated communication, where there is room, not only for rationality, but also for imagination, for feeling, wonder and contemplation. Thus, it turns out to be indispensable to look for the masters: we find them in the works left behind by those who knew how to evoke and unravel this Presence through the arts. Today more than ever we have the means and the opportunities.
A New Communication Context
We are facing a revolution in communication that involves the entire world community and, as with every genuine revolution, we contemporaries find It hard to see all the implications. Somehow, we feel that everything changes, but it is difficult to measure the boundaries of change and to be able to anticipate the results to guide the process. The most attentive among us, know any radical change, in terms of communication, brings with it a renewed way of understanding reality and a need to adjust the balance of power. In fact, it is communication that builds the reality we inhabit, which is why the "earthquakes of communication" not only destabilize the ways in which we exchange information (for example, the communicative relationship between generations), but this also disrupts the whole "social reality". If we do not perceive this, we run the risk of unnecessarily committing ourselves to rebuild what is falling apart rather than building new projects. For the scope of our interest - theology, pastoral care, religious education - those assuming that an update of our language is what is needed, deceive themselves; we are, rather, required to have new eyes capable of seeing and understanding the innovations, bearing the burden and concerns they carry with them, before claiming to interpret them.
The current revolution took off in the middle of the last century with the adoption of computers and a binary language. At first there was an electronic machine which, using sequences of "0" and "1", performed any calculation (precisely, because it was a calculator). It did this at a rate which became more and more elevated and used ever more complex programs. Thus, it was able to guarantee total error-free checking. Since all technology has progressively adopted the digital language, step by step, this "machine" has made its own all the inventions of the last two centuries by coordinating their action:
a) Electromagnetic radiation, which has the speed of over 300,000 km per second The earth has, therefore, lost its dimension and has become a village: radio, TV, satellites, fiber optics, networks, mobile phones ... our relationship with space and time has totally changed.
b) The ability to store data, with new forms of recording media that is increasingly powerful and fast: recording of visual information with photography, sound recording, video recording on tapes, hard disks, CD, DVD, solid state memory. This is an awesome and sensational innovation. A memory card SDXC is about to reach the capacity to hold two terabytes of data, which is a whole library of a million books or a film with thousands of movies.
c) Digital convergence determines a truly communicative Pentecost. The multiplicity of communication codes converges toward their digital version, thereby transforming the computer into an intelligent tool of integrated communication. And the computer, when working on a language, not only handles all its signs (say, the "dictionary"), but it knows and respects the logic that organizes them (the "grammar" and "syntax"). We see it with writing: The computer not only corrects the typing errors made but can also tell us about errors of grammar and syntax. It corrects text and images: it is, thanks to a minicomputer that cameras (and many phones!) today click high quality photos (from the technical point of view!), applying the "procedures" (grammar and syntax) which in the past were known only to professional photographers.
d) Interfaces make the dialogue transparent between man/machine (the various types of monitors, video and audio). The processed data are not just numbers. Or, rather, the computer continues to process numbers (it uses only "0" and "1"), but the sequences of digits now interpret the codes of human language.
The word, writing, all forms of images (photography, film and television), sound, music... the computer handles all of these languages: writes, stores, composes, assembles, and transmits, or receives, from any distance, according to the instructions of those who know how to use them.
It is becoming an indispensable instrument for humans, like a new part of their body.