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The Real Patron Saint of the Internet Who gets your vote? Do you remember back in February, 2001 when the media broke the news that Pope John Paul II was expected to soon name a Patron Saint of the Internet? The selection for that post has not yet been made, but the leading contender is St. Isidore of Seville, who is attributed with writing the world's first encyclopedia more than 1,400 years ago. The nomination was made by Spanish religious groups who already had designated their countryman as a "protector" of the World Wide Web in 1999. Other contenders for Patron Saint of the Internet include St. Paul, the Archangel Gabriel, St. Anthony of Padua and San Pedro Regalado, a 15th-century global navigator. Cybertheologists--folks who think about the relationships between God, spirituality and cyberspace--and many other Internet users, however, are not waiting for the Vatican to appoint a patron saint. If the amount of thought and the number of web pages are any indication, the true Patron Saint of the Internet is Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) who wrote the following in his book, The Formation of the Noosphere: "No one can deny that a network (a world network) of economic and psychic affiliations is being woven at ever increasing speed, which envelops and constantly penetrates more deeply within each of us. With every day that passes it becomes a little more impossible for us to act of think otherwise than collectively." Those words were written in 1947, but resonate strongly with cybertheologists today. Teilhard's scientific and theological constructions of the noosphere are central to much cybertheological thought. Many believe that the Internet is a manifestation of the culminations of the predictions Teilhard made so many years ago about the expansion of what he called the noosphere to encompass the earth as a thinking and webbed layer of thought. For Teilhard, the stages of evolution flowed from geogenesis (the geological formation of the earth) to biogenesis (the formation and evolution of life forms) to psychogenesis (the evolution of the brain) to noogenesis (evolution of collective thought). Teilhard describes the process: "Psychogensis has led to man. Now it effaces itself, relieved or absorbed by another and a highter function--the engendering and subsequent development of the mind, in one word noogenesis. When for the first time in a living creature instinct perceived itself in its own mirror, the whole world took a pace forward." For Teilhard, the noosphere started to be created when noogenesis began: "...it is really a new layer, the "thinking layer," which, since its germination at the end of the Tertiary period, has spread over and above the world of plants and animals. In other words, outside and above the biosphere there is the noosphere." The amazing thing is that, although Teilhard's work was not published until after his death in 1955 (the Catholic Church refused to let him publish), he actually coined the term noosphere in 1925 when he wrote most of his now classic, The Phenomenon of Man. The parallels between what Teilhard was proposing and today's Internet, cyberspace, and the World Wide Web are so obvious that they have served as a springboard for much current cybertheological thought. For example, the following is from the introduction by Sir Julian Huxley to the first English edition of The Phenomenon of Man published in 1959: "Thus in 1925 he coined the term noosphere to denote the sphere of mind, as opposed to, or rather superposed on, the biosphere or sphere of life... He saw with his mind's eye that 'the banal fact of the earth's roundness'--the sphericity of man's environment--was bound to cause this intensification of psychosocial activity. In an unlimited environment, man's thought and his resultant psychosocial activity would simply diffuse outwards: it would extend over a greater area, but would remain thinly spread. But when it is confined to spreading out over the surface of a sphere, idea will encounter idea, and the result will be an organized web of thought, a noetic system operating under high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy." All this may be sounding extra-scholarly to you. That's because I've just given you a glimpse of a fraction of the 86-page work I recently turned in for an independent study project at Chicago Theological Seminary. The project is called "Spirituality and the Internet: Theological and Ethical Implications." The project contains a lot of interesting information including some worthwhile Web sites. I'll be sharing some of this with you over the next few columns. In the meantime, here are some interesting Web sites you might want to check out: abcNEWS.com, "Patron Saint of the Internet: coming Soon to a Computer Near You," http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/britain010209_cybersaint.html. In case you missed the stories about the Vatican's plan to select a Patron Saint of the Internet, this is the story. A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain, Cyberspace and the Changing Landscape of the Self, http://www.eff.org//Net_culture/Consciousness/geography_of_consciousness.article: Michael Strangelove explores the geography of the Noosphere and the impact on global communication. Noosphere, "Home page," http://www.technoetic.com/noosphere/: This site contains a lot of links to other sites that have information about Teilhard de Chardin. It also has a cool graphic that illustrates Teilhard's noosphere idea. The Nerd in the Noosphere, http://www.ibiblio.org/cmc/mag/1995/jan/heim.html: Michael Heim discusses issues related to virtual communities and the metaphysics of virtual reality. The presentation has a cynical flavor, but the essay makes some interesting points. Teilhard de Chardin and the Noosphere, http://www.december.com/cmc/mag/1997/mar/cunning.html: Michael Heim discusses issues related to virtual communities and the metaphysics of virtual reality. The presentation has a cynical flavor, but the essay makes some interesting points. The Noosphere, http://www.nettuno.it/fiera/electric.italy/noosphere.html: The Noosphere is the part of the world of life that is created by man's thought and culture.Pierre Teillhard De Chardin, Vladimir Ivanovich Verdansky and Edouard Le Roy distinguish the noosphere from the geosphere, the non living world, and from the biosphere, the living world. Mary Montgomery-Clifford is a certified web author and developer. Her company, Montgomery Media Enterprises ("Freelancing with Finesse!"), specializes in public relations, events, promotions, writing project and web authoring, development and publicity. Ms. Montgomery-Clifford is currently studying for a Master's Degree with an emphasis on inter-religious studies at the Chicago Theological Seminary and is in the process of completing the Morris Pratt Institute Course on Modern Spiritualism. Contact her via e-mail at Monty764@aol.com, by phone at 773-235-8821 or at her web site at www.montymedia.com Next Article |
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