Spirituality for the Cathedral and Bazaar Mind

Nicholas Carr's essay "Is the Google Making Us Stupid?" in The Atlantic Monthly has generated vigorous debates on the Internet.¹ After all, Google was once the most visited website in the United States, surpassed only recently by Facebook. With the availability of so much information by clicking the mouse or tapping on the touchpad, one would expect that Google would make us smarter.

Carr argues that our constant surfing on the web, skimming through headlines, watching videos and pod casts, and jumping from link to link to link change our mental habits and thought processes. He notes that his own attention span has become shorter than before and his mind easily wanders, so much so that "the deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."² His friend laments that he can't read War and Peace anymore.

In the past, people use the metaphor of a cathedral to describe the mind of a learned person; today our individual minds and the overall culture are more like a bazaar.³ The cathedral is spacious, with towers and high vaults, transepts, stained glass windows, and side chapels and altars. The voluminous space holds the prayers, plainsongs, and anthems sung throughout the centuries. The playwright Richard Foreman describes the forming of the cathedral personality:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire version of the entire heritage of the West.⁴

In the Christian tradition, the multilayered architecture of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae has often been compared to that of a cathedral. The cultivation of a cathedral-like mind requires many years of training, the acquisition of a broad spectrum of knowledge, the mastery of sense and proportion of a given subject, and the fluidity of the mind to make connections that others might have missed. In Thomas' day, the forming of the cathedral mind was for the glory of God. It concerned not only a habit of thinking, but also a habit of living, and the two are integrally related.

In Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Erwin Panofsky compares the intellectual practice of Thomas' Summa with the modus operandi of Gothic architecture: the organizing and subdividing themes, the reconciliation between faith and reason, and the accommodation of contrasting tenets.⁵ As Bruce Holsinger notes, the term habitus, popularized by Pierre Bourdieu, was used by Aquinas hundreds of times and appeared ubiquitously in medieval theology "as a term denoting the disposition of a human subject within a field of moral, intellectual, or social practice."⁶ Habitus at the time included habitual knowledge, bodily practices, spiritual disciplines, and disposition within public life. All these formed a unified whole in thirteenth-century Western civilization.

But in our postmodern culture, our life is so fragmented and torn between many things demanding our attention. We can only give any piece of information a few seconds—if the headline or its first two or three sentences seem appealing. Otherwise, we click to another Web page. On my recent trip taking a bus from Boston to New York, I hardly saw any teenage passenger reading a book. Since the bus had wi-fi, most were surfing on their netbooks or laptops. Those without a computer were wired through their smart phones, accessing emails and checking messages. Very soon, we might become a species working with a silvery tablet with a sleek design—the iPad.

One might harbor nostalgia for the medieval cathedrals, with incense and Gregorian chants circulating in the solemn spaces. Thomas might still be invoked by the Roman Catholic Church in its encyclicals and church teachings. But for the majority of us, the sixty bilingual volumes of the Summa are simply too daunting. It is like the old Underwood typewriter: we know it existed and was quite intricate and looked like a fine piece of art. But thank you, we're glad to have the Mac.

If we can...