When I was a child, my mental portrait of God began at the feet, great, gnarly, besandaled feet, much like those of the giant at the top of Jack’s beanstalk. Vaguely, as if emerging from mist, the feet stretched out from under a white robe that disappeared into a fog of clouds. Though I assumed his countenance was surely grandfatherly, I respectfully obeyed the injunction to create no image for the face of God (even imaginatively). When I recited my nightly “Now I lay me down to sleep,” I fancied my prayers drifting upward from these feet, then slipping through a dense obstruction of cloud before falling vaguely onto an undefined ear.
This child’s notion of an anthropomorphic God was largely informed by cartoons, snatches of Sunday school lessons, and a dread fear of upsetting said deity by inadvertently breaking commandments. (Strangely, I assumed picturing God’s feet and ankles would not count as mental graven image-making, while imagining his face would.)
I found it exceedingly difficult to conceive of God without picturing some part of him. Praying to a vast oneness was beyond me. Even as my Sunday school teachers showed us storybook paintings of Jesus and my children’s Bible illustrated the (also sandal-wearing) sage, I was unnerved that there were no drawings of God. I needed something to visualize if I were going to hold down my part of the conversation. Interestingly, I did not feel similarly compelled to fill in the sound of God or the smell of God. He could be mute, odorless, even faceless, but at the very least, he had to have toes.
This observation has become particularly interesting to me as I work my way through Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. While Postman’s central task is uncovering the cultural epistemology created by the MTV era, he spends considerable time supporting the premise that a culture’s modes of communication create the framework for knowledge and define the forms of thought within that culture. The Second Commandment is particularly revelatory for Postman. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth. Sure, opting out of graven images would functionally distance the Hebrews from golden calf worshipping, Ba’al celebrants. But the Hebrews weren’t just commanded to step back from these image-driven cults, they were required to cease and desist in the creation of any images of their world, symbolic or otherwise.
Marked as chosen by an abstract, universal God, this sect was forbidden to make their faithful imaginings concrete. As Postman writes, “The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter culture.” Basically, living in a world that pictures God would have left people incapable of making the intellectual leap toward a God that cannot be pictured.
Whether this was the pragmatic function of the Commandment within early Jewish culture, Postman’s observation makes sense. Living in a visually dominated world teaches individuals to think in images. Existing in a textually dominated world instills abstract thinking. If that is the case, what sort of thinking precipitates from our current modes of communication? If I spend hours a day, rapidly flicking between computer windows, scrolling (not reading) text, skimming with the Control + F shortcut, and bouncing from link to link, what patterns of thought will I learn? If information floods my senses through TV, internet, cell phone and, less frequently, radio and print media, which structures will become my trusted methods for discerning truth?
Seeing is believing may have once been a measure of reliability. There seems to have been a time (roughly somewhere between Plato and the Enlightenment) during which reason could be trusted to drive a person toward truth. Now, when the usefulness of information is a measure of its hit rank on Google and the attractiveness of its layout, belief is the result of a popularity contest and truth is a function of mass appeal. More than becoming relative, truth and knowledge are becoming consumable goods—those assertions with the best ad-buy win.
If we accept that the bounds of human understanding are trained in cultural media, what forms of knowledge can flow from a blogreading, Facebooking, podcasting society? I wonder if my disenchantment with my childhood religion has been nurtured by the hit and miss nature of these structures. I am no longer patient picturing the cartoon feet of God, the paintings of Jesus, or clinging to the literalism my church tried to instill. There is far too much information out there to become cozy in a single worldview. But rather than being the product of healthy skepticism, is my theology merely colored by a glut of competing, unsatisfactory truths?
Does my conception of reality have proverbial hyperlinks?
For individuals seeking Truth (capital T intentional), the impact of culture on thought is troubling. Frankly, I am not lucky enough to have landed conveniently in a time and space with its thumb on the pulse of reality—and so I am left to sift through the way society has taught me to think and, alternatively, attempt to conceive of a reality that is beyond my untrained faculties.
Reality (whether consisting in God, some innocuous god, physicality only, or some other option) is only a word. Its referent, whether Word or an object, seems to be darting far too quickly for my flickering grasp.
