Soul Space

A summary of:
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press: London.
Chapter 1 - Soul Space

In this chapter, Wertheim shows how different the Middle Age's conception of space is from our own, using Dante's The Divine Comedy as evidence of this. In this work, Dante formalized a new space to allow for the religious idea of accounting of sins: Purgatory. This makes this "a rare instance in which we can see clearly the emergence of a new space of being" (67), and therefore a great parallel with and insight into our own creation of cyberspace. In some respects, she argues, Dante was engaged in the task of creating a virtual world, mapping heaven and hell and in between. But this is Wertheim's point: "The 'virtual worlds' being constructed on computers today usually bear little or no relationship to the world of our daily experience. For most VR pundits, escape from daily reality is preciselythe point. Dante, however, was not trying to escape daily life; on the contrary he grounded his 'virtual world' in real people, real events, and real history" (50).

This, I feel, is the difference between escapism and sublimation. And what worries me is that the technology we create now caters to escapism, when it has the potential to facilitate wonderful sublimation, creation, a greater experience of our actual world.

Another thing that is evident beneath the surface of Dante's work, foreign as it may be to us now, is the orientation characteristic of the Middle Ages whereby people are guided "by a spiritual compass rather than a physical one." In other words, Dante's map was in a way spiritually correct, i.e. it resonated with a spiritual truth; regardless of the fact that we know that physically it makes no sense. (We have been to the moon, and we have not passed God on the way.) Other examples from the time, like the mappae mundi, represent completely warped landmasses with Jerusalem at the center. This makes a different kind of sense. And it is quite amazing to realize how foreign this type of thinking is to us now. Much has changed in our worldview; and yet we can never seem to imaging any other kind of thinking being possible than the worldview we currently hold. Thus is the nature of a paradigm. As Wertheim writes,

A major problem, I suggest, is that the very questions raised here are quintessentially modern. They are framed within the context of our purely physicalist paradigm, which was quite alien to the medieval mind-set. When we ask if Dante 'really' believed in a set of heavenly spheres or a hellish chasm inside the earth, we are asking questions about physical space. In our minds we start wondering how far above the earth the lunar sphere would be. How far below the surface would the second circle of Hell be found? At what longitude might Purgatory be? We do this because we cannot help it. Our minds have been so trained - so brainwashed - to think of space in purely physical terms, it is almost impossible for us to think in any other way. It is not just that we have been to the moon and found no crystal spheres, or that we have circumnavigated the globe and found no terraced mountain; we simply cannot imagine a place being 'real' unless it has a mathematically precise location in physical space (69).

In Dante's time, it was possible to perform what we might think of today as amazing feats of intellectual acrobatics. Dante used somewhat familar means - geometry - but to bizarre ends, coupled with poetic language. "Passing through 'the skin of the universe' the virtual Dante looks out to see a Blazing Point of light around which circle nine rings of fire: God and the angelic orders symbolically rendered in light. Here, all directions and all dimensions fuse: 'the Burning Point is not only the center, the innermost, but also the highest, the outermost' reference. In this single point of infinite love is contained the whole of time and space" (72-3).

The key to this creative interpretation of religious experience is that "Body-space and soul-space have been melded into one-space. The mystery is beyond intellection" (73).

How foreign! How wonderful!

I get frustrated when people are so resigned to the state of things, poo-pooing alternative visions for our world with a simple, defeatist, "It's just the way things are." But as this example highlights, everything is a product of its time yet - or indeed, therefore - subject to change! This is why it is so important to be cognizant of the ways our technology is changing our very humanness! I am reminded of Marx's assertion that there is no such thing as 'human nature' per se, and that what we think of as being innate to our humanness is in fact historically situated. "Life," he argues, "is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life."

The question I am left wondering, however, is whether a spiritual conception of our world is actually possible when we live amongst technologies that so aggressively assert a scientific paradigm. How can we reconcile technologies with spirituality when the two embody entirely separate ways of thinking? I suppose the answer lies in the realization that what we really need is a paradigm shift, and entirely new way of thinking that allows for both, or for something new and more harmonious with our mental health and wellbeing.