The Matrix: Communion Reloaded - Gnostic Sacraments?

A man goes about his daily business on a pretty ordinary day. The sights and sounds are familiar. Everything smells, tastes, and feels just as it normally does. But he is in for a rude awakening. As it turns out, none of these experiences are real. In fact his body is attached to a machine and is being farmed for use as an energy source by hostile beings of great intelligence. Knowing that the human ‘batteries’ work best if they are kept psychologically comfortable, these malevolent entities feed a constant stream of sensory stimuli direct to the mind. A small resistance force has broken free of this unconscious captivity. They break the hero out of his happy delusion and offer him two pills. One will take him back into this purely mental experience, detached from physical reality. The other will bring him out of it into a world of real lived experience.

This is the basic plot of the popular film series, The Matrix. It is also a helpful illustration of what has been called the ‘brains in vats’ theory. Whilst you might never have heard of this theory there is a good chance that you believe it, or something very similar. It works something like this. The world out there bombards our bodies with a range of sensory stimuli. These stimuli trigger our various  sense organs, and these receptors turn information into electrical nerve impulses which transfer  information to the brain. What we call ‘mind’ is located somewhere in relation to the brain. Essentially, what the mind experiences is an internal perception of the external world. With the right technology you could keep a brain alive in a vat, and supply it with the right electrical stimuli, and the conscious mind would never know any different.

If you understand the relationship of mind and body this way (perhaps unconsciously), it is possible to take the following small step. It does not really matter whether photons of light bounce off an object directly into your eyes, or whether a computer screen emits an identical pattern of light particles. Your mental perception will be the same. It makes no real difference whether you are in close proximity to an object or whether you are in close proximity to a screen presenting an image of that object. It should be easy to see how this is not too far away from the Matrix fantasy. All we have to do is imagine that at some point technological advances will move us beyond screens and audio speakers which can merely reproduce representative sights and sounds, and create something capable of providing a holistic sensory experience with representative smells, tastes, and touch-sensations.

A Matrix-world might not be real (yet?!) but it is among the possible scenarios which we, in Western cultures at least, find imaginable. This is not quite the same as a ‘worldview’. You might not actually believe that you are a contentedly deluded human energy cell, a technological slave kept ignorant by a regular supply of happy pills. But you can envisage it as a possibility. It is believable enough that people will sit and watch the film and find it entertaining instead of dismissing it as a surreal Monty Pythonesque absurdity. The Matrix-world has become part of our intellectual currency. It is in our shared conceptual toolbox. It is part of what the philosopher and social commentator Charles Taylor has called our ‘social imaginary’.

Social imaginaries are frequently subconscious. They include all kinds of ‘unthought thoughts’ - things we think without ever stopping to really think about them. They are things - ‘facts’ - we take for granted because they seem so obvious to us that we are rarely challenged to ask why they are obvious. When you read intellectual history or really engage with a foreign culture you discover that other people do not necessarily share your ‘unthought thoughts’. The ‘facts’ which are so obvious to you are not obvious to them. To you they appear unassailable ‘facts’ but the others do not even recognise them as ‘facts’ at all! A film like the Matrix will only be comprehensible to people who carry the ‘external world - sense mediation - internal perception’ outline of human experience as part of their ‘social imaginary’ or ‘unthought thoughts’.

All this is relevant to the recent debates among Christians about the legitimacy of online communion. We are all in agreement that the sacrament of communion requires that Christians gather. 1 Corinthians 11:20 states clearly that the Lord’s Supper is something we do ‘when we come together’. The point of difference is whether internet-facilitated ‘meetings’ are in fact ‘meetings’. And I would suggest, following the line above, that most people who are arguing in favour of online communion are operating with the ‘external world - sense mediation - internal perception’ outline as an ‘unthought thought’ or, at best, a ‘semi-thought thought’. In keeping with this view Stephen Clarke has written that even when we are in close proximity to other people 

“we are not having immediate experience of the person but

mediate or intermediate experience through sense impressions”. 

Only if you think of ‘meeting’ in physical proximity primarily in terms of a sense-mediated internal subjective mental perception of an otherwise unreachable external world, will you be able to envisage communication without physical proximity as actually meeting.

There is a tragic irony in the fact that it seems impossible to make ‘online meeting’ an actual thing, without turning ‘physical meeting’ into nothing more than a subjective perception. In this case, ‘coming together’ is not essential to Holy Communion even in normal times because it is not really possible. Because you can never “have the person himself / herself in our head but only sense impressions” - the ‘persons’ never actually come together. Whilst your bodies might be in close proximity, you are only ever a loose gathering of independent minds each experiencing your own subjective mental perceptions. Others may be sharing similar subjective mental perceptions but, if they are, you will never know because you can never “have the person himself / herself in our head but only sense impressions” of that person. Gathering, coming together, is not an objective fact relating to the physical proximity of physical bodies. It is about the extent to which we can have another person, or an impression of that person, “in our head”.

The theological ramifications of this are not insignificant. Some of you want to view communion as a secondary issue. Why should those with a shared faith in Jesus argue over this? This is why: because at the incarnation Jesus took our humanity in its totality. If we are internal minds experiencing mediated ‘perceptions’ of an external world so is He. But I can’t think of anywhere where Scripture presents the body of Christ as a kind of mediating machine through which the detached mind of the God-man perceived an external world. On the contrary, Scripture consistently emphasises that the Word became FLESH and that this physical presence, this actual dwelling among us, is essential to our salvation which climaxes, not in a mystical, spiritual, mental perception of heaven, but an earthy physical resurrection and an eternal bodily experience of the immediate presence of God. Jesus did not take a human body as a vehicle to facilitate His mental perceptions of the sinful people He met. He did not take a human body in order that we could have a “sense impression” of the Messiah without having His person “in our head”. I may be wrong, but that sounds a lot like Gnosticism.

(Next post here).