The memory palace argument is the one that stops me cold — because what you are describing is not merely a loss of technique but a loss of a whole mode of being in relation to knowledge. The premodern scholar did not store information; he inhabited it. The mnemonic image was not a filing system but a form of encounter, and the stripping of that imagistic, colored interior world by the twin forces of print abundance and iconoclasm left behind something that looked like clarity but was in fact a kind of sensory deprivation. What we are now watching, in the re-emergence of the meme as shared symbolic lexicon, is the return of that imagistic consciousness — but without the interior architecture to receive it wisely. The images are back. The nous that knew how to dwell in them is not.
Where I think your argument opens something that deserves further pressure: the revival you are describing is real, but it is arriving into people whose capacity for the kind of sustained, receptive attention that genuine formation requires has itself been damaged by the very medium driving the re-enchantment. The hunger for mystery is genuine. The ability to be slowly shaped by it — to sit with an icon, to pray a prayer ten thousand times, to let a text do its work across years rather than seconds — that is precisely what the architecture of the feed has been quietly dismantling. The monasteries you call for are needed not only as social forms but as schools of attention. Without the recovery of that interior stillness, re-enchantment will remain a sensation rather than becoming a formation.
I listened to your address at Oxford, two days ago Mary. It was absolutely brilliant, an address I’ll always remember. I don’t even want to summarize your whole talk to explain why- because I’m still digesting. But when you spoke about those Christians, likely blue collar, that would lay down their lives for Christ (forgive my paraphrasing), that moved me like I can’t describe. There’s a reason that there were so many rough fishermen among the disciples. Since your talk, my head and my heart have been resounding with the pained beauty of cruciformity. Thank you for your address.
I was also deeply moved by Rod Dreher’s description of how, at Chartres Cathedral, he truly encountered God. Rod has such a beautiful way of calling the West back to the high arts- be that architecture, or icons, or what have you. As a classical, atelier trained artist, I deeply appreciate his insistence on the importance of beauty, and at the same time rewilding Christianity, reimbuing Christianity with wonder, with awe.
And Dr. McGilchrist, the next day, also gave one of the most important addresses I’ve listened to in my life. We need to regain our humanity, and rescue it from the clutches of the Machine. I was struck by the necessity of building our house upon Christianity, first as individuals, then the larger West, because the storms are indeed coming- whether that be AI, Islam.
The next time you lecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I dearly hope you pay a visit to St. Benedict Abbey in Harvard, Mass., about an hour inland from the Boston area.
I belong to the abbey’s community, and am working towards being a novice oblate to the abbey. The abbey has changed my life, after 40+ years away from the Church. In your talk at Pusey House in Oxford, you suggested that in a post-digital, post-print world, monasteries need to be rebuilt as places that deliberately cultivate disciplined study, prayer, and interior formation so that human minds are shaped by tradition rather than by algorithms and platforms.
As I like to say to people reeling from our unmoored modern existence: "Get thee to an abbey!"
You can spend as many nights there as you might like, since the abbey lodges and feeds people on retreat. The monks there are happy to chat. And they're happy to leave people alone who go on silent retreats.
I've wondered about planned housing communities or neighborhoods with single family homes that could function as a "breeder's monastery". It would have to be a place dedicated to raising children and intellectual development.
This was an excellent talk, one in which my son (who was in attendance) also enjoyed. Being able to speak to a college-aged young American male who is trying to find his way in our culture is very difficult. I appreciate you bringing these ideas to the dock and discussing them...
Yes, a tremendous amount to process here. My sense is that the general thesis is undoubtedly true. The huge shifts Mary convincingly describes are being driven by technological change. Neil Postman has spoken of the Faustian bargain every new technology presents: the benefits of the new are often obvious (indeed, are the selling points); the costs become obvious only later. I am also convinced that Christianity is the only place to stand as all other foundations dissolve around us. And, as some other commentators note, it is because in Christ we encounter the cruciform pattern of true resistance. The Holy Spirit is indeed for everyone, of every nation. But nota bene, Pentecost did not come until after Christ's death, resurrection and ascension. I suspect that what was true ontogenetically for the Saviour will need to be experienced phylogenetically by those who will share the Holy Spirit in the new world. Some form of death, I suspect, will therefore be necessary before we experience any kind of global Pentecost.
I enjoyed watching your speech on YouTube (a simultaneously Classical Greek experience of the Agora and a 21st century experience here amidst the woods and fields of Pennsylvania) and now, winding back to Gutenberg’s time, I’ll post my favourite excerpt from your very insightful and persuasive analysis:
“Upon This Rock
Against this, though, I also view Christian faith as perhaps the only place left to stand. And it’s perhaps the one worldview that has both the fluidity and universality to help us navigate the new tribalism: not to homogenise us, but to welcome people in their nations, without dividing those nations necessarily from one another. After all, the Book of Genesis tells us that God created the peoples of this earth “in their nations”. And the Gospels tell us in no uncertain terms that the Holy Spirit is for everyone. The new covenant isn’t just for one nation; it’s for all the peoples on earth. That’s the message of Pentecost.”
Yes- this was exactly the message we needed to hear, in the moment we are in. Chris, thank you for writing Mary’s quote down- I’m going to copy and paste it, to remember.
The loss is spatial. Not just memory to writing but now also to drawing. I was trained as an architect just prior the inception of digital drafting and modeling tools. In grad school we complexity-mavens hid from the digital modeling software pioneers because they slowed us down, and we crashed them in short order. I escaped grad school Happily un-digitized.
My first professional project post-grad involved at least a half dozen physical models, composite three-point perspectives and ultimately 90 sheets of pin registered ink on Mylar construction drawings. “Deconstructivist” we were told we were (I left Derrida’s lecture fearing i might off myself if I bought into the meaningless interplay of signifier crap) but in any case our work was probably unnecessarily complex. And yet to this day 30 some years later my imagination could fly into any corner of this built space to describe some intersection of the syncopated systems, details and materials, as could many of those on our design team, so crisp was our resulting 3d mental map.
But Within a few years of transferring that spatial complexity to mouse clicks and keyboard commands, the spatial incising no longer occurred. No more were the designs etched first in memory, then on drawings, then on ground and sky. The hand to memory link was severed. Our architects on job sites now had to refer back to what they had once “drawn” to repossess the form they had ostensibly created- Their memory map was simply not with them. With the advent of parametric software things further degraded, and it became fair to ask who was the actual designer of a building -architect or software designer. Who actually remembered the story of the artifact? Neither, and I now feel that this actually matters. Our places should be storied.
Oh, and I would like to volunteer to assist with the placemaking and architecture of your first monastery. Revivification, re-story-ing is at this point the primary driver of my vocation. I have a site or two in mind, on at least two continents. If you know, you know.
This was wonderful, and an excellent summary of your topics here lately. While I am usually all for heaping blame on my generation, especially my elders, I do want to defend them a bit. Not all Boomers are liberal church ladies who make felt banners, jump up when they call for Eucharistic ministers in a congregation of less than 30, or can’t wait to get their hands in the tabernacle. The generation before ours (I’m 64) has kept a Latin Mass going for 50 years in our diocese, despite Vatican II, multiple attempts at cancellations, and the difficulty of finding qualified priests. 25 years ago we were one of only two young families and our founders have all died off one by one. They would’ve been delighted to see two Latin Masses on Sundays, both full of large, young, families.
I do know exactly what you meant and certainly the bulk of baby boomers, including the pope, seem determined to keep the church as undemanding, progressive, and uninteresting as possible but some have kept the faith, with a liturgy that deserves to be called worship.
And one more remark: It's so easy for those of you in the great Western majority who were raised Christian to proclaim that only Christianity can save us. It feels a bit smug and dangerous to us minorities. It reminds me of the pro-AI people who are also saying "Adapt or die" (one of them actually said that to me). I am ethnically Jewish but finished with the religion since so many of my co-religionists were OK with butchering children. (Easy enough for me as I was raised nearly secular.) I think of myself as a "recovering Abrahamic." I sense there's a trustable Great Spirit/Holy Spirit but want to keep it generic and agnostic. A Pentecostal friend actually brought the presence of Jesus near to me (no way I could ever have imagined such a vast, wild love) and I resisted assenting to it because I knew she expected me to fall into a fit and get up proclaiming my gay friends hell-bound if they find love. I fear it is our own systems of ideas we worship (sola scriptura), interpret as suits us, and invest with authority.
"...trailed comet-tails of vivid associative imagery,"--that's poetry right there. You're such a damn-good fashioner of language Mary, it really does lift the penetrating insight of the content into new realms...
Brilliant analysis yet lacking. The Cross is promised to faithful Christians. Moreover, the re-enchantment speaks to the universal mysteries that are still out there, and acknowledges the supernatural as existing even if we are unable to measure them yet with current telemetry.
This essay made me think of a Wendell Berry poem, and specifically a line about "staying away from anything that obscures the place it is in". McLuhan's medium-is-the-message can be seen from a different vantage in this line from Berry. The electronic medium changes your relationship to your surroundings and sort of snuffs out the possibility of surprise and attention, and otherwise obscures them. Even as I stop typing this and look out the window at the thin dancing limbs of a cherry tree, I'm still in this uncanny relationship with this lodestone of facility that makes me believe I can communicate my eldritch sentiments to a larger audience that might care, and now the cherry tree has been subsumed in the medium as well. Here is the full stanza from the poem in question:
absolutely wonderful. It hits at so many of the problems with many of the right and left wing substitutes for the only proven way forward. Only Christianity can hold all of the nations that are going to be forced together as the old order crumbles away.
Lovely lecture Mary,
The memory palace argument is the one that stops me cold — because what you are describing is not merely a loss of technique but a loss of a whole mode of being in relation to knowledge. The premodern scholar did not store information; he inhabited it. The mnemonic image was not a filing system but a form of encounter, and the stripping of that imagistic, colored interior world by the twin forces of print abundance and iconoclasm left behind something that looked like clarity but was in fact a kind of sensory deprivation. What we are now watching, in the re-emergence of the meme as shared symbolic lexicon, is the return of that imagistic consciousness — but without the interior architecture to receive it wisely. The images are back. The nous that knew how to dwell in them is not.
Where I think your argument opens something that deserves further pressure: the revival you are describing is real, but it is arriving into people whose capacity for the kind of sustained, receptive attention that genuine formation requires has itself been damaged by the very medium driving the re-enchantment. The hunger for mystery is genuine. The ability to be slowly shaped by it — to sit with an icon, to pray a prayer ten thousand times, to let a text do its work across years rather than seconds — that is precisely what the architecture of the feed has been quietly dismantling. The monasteries you call for are needed not only as social forms but as schools of attention. Without the recovery of that interior stillness, re-enchantment will remain a sensation rather than becoming a formation.
Yes yes yes to all that
Thanks for not pay walling this.
I listened to your address at Oxford, two days ago Mary. It was absolutely brilliant, an address I’ll always remember. I don’t even want to summarize your whole talk to explain why- because I’m still digesting. But when you spoke about those Christians, likely blue collar, that would lay down their lives for Christ (forgive my paraphrasing), that moved me like I can’t describe. There’s a reason that there were so many rough fishermen among the disciples. Since your talk, my head and my heart have been resounding with the pained beauty of cruciformity. Thank you for your address.
I was also deeply moved by Rod Dreher’s description of how, at Chartres Cathedral, he truly encountered God. Rod has such a beautiful way of calling the West back to the high arts- be that architecture, or icons, or what have you. As a classical, atelier trained artist, I deeply appreciate his insistence on the importance of beauty, and at the same time rewilding Christianity, reimbuing Christianity with wonder, with awe.
And Dr. McGilchrist, the next day, also gave one of the most important addresses I’ve listened to in my life. We need to regain our humanity, and rescue it from the clutches of the Machine. I was struck by the necessity of building our house upon Christianity, first as individuals, then the larger West, because the storms are indeed coming- whether that be AI, Islam.
I only wish Paul Kingsnorth were there!
Hello Mary,
The next time you lecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I dearly hope you pay a visit to St. Benedict Abbey in Harvard, Mass., about an hour inland from the Boston area.
https://abbey.org/
I belong to the abbey’s community, and am working towards being a novice oblate to the abbey. The abbey has changed my life, after 40+ years away from the Church. In your talk at Pusey House in Oxford, you suggested that in a post-digital, post-print world, monasteries need to be rebuilt as places that deliberately cultivate disciplined study, prayer, and interior formation so that human minds are shaped by tradition rather than by algorithms and platforms.
As I like to say to people reeling from our unmoored modern existence: "Get thee to an abbey!"
You can spend as many nights there as you might like, since the abbey lodges and feeds people on retreat. The monks there are happy to chat. And they're happy to leave people alone who go on silent retreats.
Brilliant speech as always, Mary.
Rebuild the monasteries. That is to me the #1 takeaway.
I've wondered about planned housing communities or neighborhoods with single family homes that could function as a "breeder's monastery". It would have to be a place dedicated to raising children and intellectual development.
This was an excellent talk, one in which my son (who was in attendance) also enjoyed. Being able to speak to a college-aged young American male who is trying to find his way in our culture is very difficult. I appreciate you bringing these ideas to the dock and discussing them...
Yes, a tremendous amount to process here. My sense is that the general thesis is undoubtedly true. The huge shifts Mary convincingly describes are being driven by technological change. Neil Postman has spoken of the Faustian bargain every new technology presents: the benefits of the new are often obvious (indeed, are the selling points); the costs become obvious only later. I am also convinced that Christianity is the only place to stand as all other foundations dissolve around us. And, as some other commentators note, it is because in Christ we encounter the cruciform pattern of true resistance. The Holy Spirit is indeed for everyone, of every nation. But nota bene, Pentecost did not come until after Christ's death, resurrection and ascension. I suspect that what was true ontogenetically for the Saviour will need to be experienced phylogenetically by those who will share the Holy Spirit in the new world. Some form of death, I suspect, will therefore be necessary before we experience any kind of global Pentecost.
I enjoyed watching your speech on YouTube (a simultaneously Classical Greek experience of the Agora and a 21st century experience here amidst the woods and fields of Pennsylvania) and now, winding back to Gutenberg’s time, I’ll post my favourite excerpt from your very insightful and persuasive analysis:
“Upon This Rock
Against this, though, I also view Christian faith as perhaps the only place left to stand. And it’s perhaps the one worldview that has both the fluidity and universality to help us navigate the new tribalism: not to homogenise us, but to welcome people in their nations, without dividing those nations necessarily from one another. After all, the Book of Genesis tells us that God created the peoples of this earth “in their nations”. And the Gospels tell us in no uncertain terms that the Holy Spirit is for everyone. The new covenant isn’t just for one nation; it’s for all the peoples on earth. That’s the message of Pentecost.”
Yes- this was exactly the message we needed to hear, in the moment we are in. Chris, thank you for writing Mary’s quote down- I’m going to copy and paste it, to remember.
The loss is spatial. Not just memory to writing but now also to drawing. I was trained as an architect just prior the inception of digital drafting and modeling tools. In grad school we complexity-mavens hid from the digital modeling software pioneers because they slowed us down, and we crashed them in short order. I escaped grad school Happily un-digitized.
My first professional project post-grad involved at least a half dozen physical models, composite three-point perspectives and ultimately 90 sheets of pin registered ink on Mylar construction drawings. “Deconstructivist” we were told we were (I left Derrida’s lecture fearing i might off myself if I bought into the meaningless interplay of signifier crap) but in any case our work was probably unnecessarily complex. And yet to this day 30 some years later my imagination could fly into any corner of this built space to describe some intersection of the syncopated systems, details and materials, as could many of those on our design team, so crisp was our resulting 3d mental map.
But Within a few years of transferring that spatial complexity to mouse clicks and keyboard commands, the spatial incising no longer occurred. No more were the designs etched first in memory, then on drawings, then on ground and sky. The hand to memory link was severed. Our architects on job sites now had to refer back to what they had once “drawn” to repossess the form they had ostensibly created- Their memory map was simply not with them. With the advent of parametric software things further degraded, and it became fair to ask who was the actual designer of a building -architect or software designer. Who actually remembered the story of the artifact? Neither, and I now feel that this actually matters. Our places should be storied.
Oh, and I would like to volunteer to assist with the placemaking and architecture of your first monastery. Revivification, re-story-ing is at this point the primary driver of my vocation. I have a site or two in mind, on at least two continents. If you know, you know.
"who was the actual designer of a building - architect or software designer"
I've read someone saying they can go inside a relatively modern building and tell which version of AutoCAD was used to prepare the plans.
This was wonderful, and an excellent summary of your topics here lately. While I am usually all for heaping blame on my generation, especially my elders, I do want to defend them a bit. Not all Boomers are liberal church ladies who make felt banners, jump up when they call for Eucharistic ministers in a congregation of less than 30, or can’t wait to get their hands in the tabernacle. The generation before ours (I’m 64) has kept a Latin Mass going for 50 years in our diocese, despite Vatican II, multiple attempts at cancellations, and the difficulty of finding qualified priests. 25 years ago we were one of only two young families and our founders have all died off one by one. They would’ve been delighted to see two Latin Masses on Sundays, both full of large, young, families.
I do know exactly what you meant and certainly the bulk of baby boomers, including the pope, seem determined to keep the church as undemanding, progressive, and uninteresting as possible but some have kept the faith, with a liturgy that deserves to be called worship.
Weren't the monks—and nuns—of the Middle Ages the guardians of literacy? Is that a role they could return to in a new barbarian age?
And one more remark: It's so easy for those of you in the great Western majority who were raised Christian to proclaim that only Christianity can save us. It feels a bit smug and dangerous to us minorities. It reminds me of the pro-AI people who are also saying "Adapt or die" (one of them actually said that to me). I am ethnically Jewish but finished with the religion since so many of my co-religionists were OK with butchering children. (Easy enough for me as I was raised nearly secular.) I think of myself as a "recovering Abrahamic." I sense there's a trustable Great Spirit/Holy Spirit but want to keep it generic and agnostic. A Pentecostal friend actually brought the presence of Jesus near to me (no way I could ever have imagined such a vast, wild love) and I resisted assenting to it because I knew she expected me to fall into a fit and get up proclaiming my gay friends hell-bound if they find love. I fear it is our own systems of ideas we worship (sola scriptura), interpret as suits us, and invest with authority.
"...trailed comet-tails of vivid associative imagery,"--that's poetry right there. You're such a damn-good fashioner of language Mary, it really does lift the penetrating insight of the content into new realms...
Brilliant analysis yet lacking. The Cross is promised to faithful Christians. Moreover, the re-enchantment speaks to the universal mysteries that are still out there, and acknowledges the supernatural as existing even if we are unable to measure them yet with current telemetry.
"The Cross is promised to faithful Christians." Yes, indeed. Perhaps this is the most difficult thing, most likely overlooked, in our consumerist age
This essay made me think of a Wendell Berry poem, and specifically a line about "staying away from anything that obscures the place it is in". McLuhan's medium-is-the-message can be seen from a different vantage in this line from Berry. The electronic medium changes your relationship to your surroundings and sort of snuffs out the possibility of surprise and attention, and otherwise obscures them. Even as I stop typing this and look out the window at the thin dancing limbs of a cherry tree, I'm still in this uncanny relationship with this lodestone of facility that makes me believe I can communicate my eldritch sentiments to a larger audience that might care, and now the cherry tree has been subsumed in the medium as well. Here is the full stanza from the poem in question:
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
absolutely wonderful. It hits at so many of the problems with many of the right and left wing substitutes for the only proven way forward. Only Christianity can hold all of the nations that are going to be forced together as the old order crumbles away.