At the Interface Theology & Virtual Reality.

At the Interface Theology & Virtual Reality BY Mary Timothy Prokes, F.S.E. Published by Fenstra Press, 2004, ISBN: 1-58736-304-6 Softcover, pp. 181, $15.95 U.S.

The biological purpose of sexuality is the continuation of the species. Many other good things are involved in the relationship of men and women, but they are all based on the fundamental good of procreation. It follows that to identify pleasure as the ultimate good is to subvert the order of nature. This subversion can be made, as we know all too well, but so to go against nature is to invite catastrophe. There is no need to list for readers of Catholic Insight evidence for this statement; let one instance suffice. The New York Times recently commented on the depopulation of Europe. Not surprisingly there was no mention of birth control and abortion, the reasons for Germany's low birthrate of 1.3 children per couple, but the effect is everywhere apparent. Forty-three schools in Dresden closed last summer because of lack of children, and maternity wards in the hospitals are empty. "... commentators conjure up a sort o reverse Malthusian nightmare: Germany as a land of predominantly geriatric towns and cities set in a deserted, creeping countryside." (Mark Landler, "Empty hospital nurseries show Germany dwindling," reprinted in the Houston Chronicle, 26 November 2004, p. A34.)

But what is it to be against nature? Is a skyscraper unnatural, or a symphony orchestra, or genetically altered food? The advance of science and technology adds to the list. What about cyborgs (entities that are part human, part machine), cloning, the internet ...? In At the Interface: Theology and Virtual Reality Sister Mary T. Prokes, F.S.E., examines a range of such questions. She begins with the effect on society of virtual reality (VR)--"an event that is real in effect but not in fact"--and virtual environment (VE)--"representational spaces that propose particular spatial illusions" with the conviction that the absorption of the person into an enveloping electronic medium is in a different category from losing oneself in a book or at the theatre. After these, with a blink of the eyes, we return to the real world, enriched, perhaps, but not ensnared by our experience. The new media, however, can be so involving that their victim comes to prefer fantasy to the point of existing in an imaginary universe rather than the real one. She cites a film, The Matrix, in which an entire population, permanently inert, lives exclusively through images electronically transmitted to their brains. The point is that these human beings seem to experience a richer, more fulfilling life than their counterparts who are limited to what their senses provide.

Such considerations indicate that what is essentially unnatural is not this or that artifact but the denial that man, uniquely in creation, can know things as they are, in the real world, a point stressed in every Christian thinker from Saint Paul to John Paul II, from Pascal to G.K. Chesterton. Sister Prokes discusses the madness among some scientists who would redesign man and even contemplate substituting for the universe a computer-generated copy that would be indistinguishable from the real thing. The absurdity of such a scheme becomes apparent when we note that such a computer would itself become part of the universe, and so one can imagine an infinite series of such computers, the third containing two universes--the real and the ersatz--the fourth the preceding three, etc. The truth is that man, as God's special creation, can have no substitute, and the Promethean endeavour to create one can only wreak havoc. We have here the opposite extreme of certain naturalists who see man simply as one of the animals, and no better at being an animal than he is at being a machine.

Sister Prokes locates the cause of such assaults on man and nature in a dualistic contempt for the body which differs from the Gnostic heresies of the second century only by the technological skills of its practitioners. It is something like the difference between a spear and the atomic bomb as a weapon of war: the motive for using either one is the same, but how different are the effects! So too, contemporary man's strivings to control nature are not different from primitive man's first use of a plough; but no plough could have created the ecological, intellectual and spiritual wasteland we are preparing for ourselves.

The remedy is not to turn back the clock; that is impossible. What is required is a return to fundamentals of human existence that do not change because they are rooted in God and presented to man in revelation. Jesus Christ, therefore, is the centre of Prokes's book. The sacraments, for example, provide a striking parallel to virtual reality in that both of them are not what they seem, the sacrament because it is more and virtual reality because it is less. The desire to escape from the physical world, which is accomplished today by means of VR/VE, is the temptation of Eden: to become like gods. But divinity is available to man only through the real flesh and blood of Christ. At the Interface, therefore, is ultimately Eucharistic, with a striking passage concerning the meals--really eaten--that were central to the mission of Christ and which culminated in the Last Supper. The irony of modern man's desire to disembody himself is underlined by the fact that North Americans are pathologically overweight and obsessed with the mechanics of sex. It is no wonder they seek to escape into virtual reality even as their bodies become their prisons.

Among Sister Prokes's earlier writings are books on the theology of the body and the Trinity. These stand her in good stead as she recalls her readers to the meaning of marriage and its significance in Catholicism; for the technological dungeon in which the disembodied monad has been cast can be escaped only by knowing and loving another person. God himself, as one and triune, constitutes a community best approached by the concept of gift as the radical donation of all one is to another.

As made in God's image man must also exist in fellowship, in the created order, marriage is the supreme instance of this relationship, the analogue to the trinitarian mode of inter-relatedness presented by God to indicate his relationship to his people and Christ's to the Church. In line with this biblical teaching Sister Prokes counters the isolation produced inevitably by VR/VE with Pope Paul VI's crucially important encyclical Humanae vitae, which honours the complete self-donation of the partners in their task of creating and caring for a family, In this way, her book reminds us that something that is against nature cannot endure even as she recognizes the great harm that will be effected by false ideas and practices before they are finally put aside.