How St. Thomas Aquinas Invented the Web 2.0
By Ersin Akinci
Thomas Aquinas -- Patron Saint of the Internet?
The World Wide Web, the Cloud, Web 2.0, the Information Superhighway. Each day it seems that there’s a new word to describe the Internet. Beyond the marketing buzz of Silicon Valley, however, there lies an important medieval lesson to this profusion of monikers: the nameless have power beyond words.
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What’s in a name?
The World Wide Web, the Cloud, Web 2.0, the Information Superhighway. Each day it seems that there’s a new word to describe the Internet, leaving many bloggers and news reporters wondering what’s the difference between them and why these new labels keep on coming.
The real differences between them are very few. Technically speaking, for instance, the Internet is the physical network that connects all computers while the Web is simply a way in which they communicate, one separate from e-mail, instant messaging, and other Internet uses. However, at this point the two have nearly merged in common usage, having cooperatively fended off venerable challengers from the 1990‘s like “cyberspace” and “information superhighway” to describe the same thing. Newer buzzwords have also risen to the challenge, but their staying power has yet to be determined. Consider “the Cloud”, literally the most nebulous term to date and sure to disperse on a windy day, or “Web 2.0“, which is already being superseded by rapidly escalating versions.
The search for God and the Internet
The seemingly spontaneous generation of all of these terms is, in fact, an exposition of the complicated way in which language adapts to the evolution of an idea. At the very core of the issue is that each word can be associated with many different meanings and kinds of things, and vice versa.
Aristotle was among the first in Western philosophy to understand this linguistic difficulty, which he treats in his Categories. We can call a man, a diet, and a urine sample “healthy”, but the word “healthy” doesn’t mean the same thing in each case, nor is each thing being described similar to the other. Nevertheless, he explains, we use the same word to describe each, and thus “healthy” is said to have an equivocal meaning.
The proliferation of terms for the Internet suffers from the opposite phenomenon, that too many names describe one thing, yet fundamentally the question is the same: what do we mean when we say that a thing is something? For medieval theologians in the Catholic church, this posed a serious conundrum in trying to understand the nature of God, whom scripture praises as “great”, “all-knowing”, and with a variety of other adjectives. Could God be known, they asked, through language; and if so, how?
Ultimately their efforts failed, though the reasons why are muddled. There is the historical factor, that as time passes intellectual trends change, and many medieval innovations found themselves at odds with a Renaissance that emphasized rediscovering ancient texts. More telling is the fate of the greatest medieval theologian of all, St. Thomas Aquinas, who gave up lecturing at the end of his life, famously stating that all he had written seemed like straw. Common wisdom has it that he underwent a spiritual experience before he died where he realized that words would bring him no closer to God, who transcends all words.
The Idea of the Internet: the more names, the better
The fact is that any one Idea is in the end independent and not beholden to any descriptions, whether it be God or the Internet, although we will go on labeling it. That Idea is generative and powerful; often it has other ideas contained within. It will inspire and create new things in the minds of others, but most of all it will defy definition, because as in art or matters of the spirit the true meaning of the idea is in the deed, not just the word. We might call the Internet by many names, and if we examine what we’re talking about closely we will see that really there’s no one thing there, but rather a collection of networks, protocols, applications, users, and data. Yet in our minds it is rightfully one, because it forms a unified experience, a unified action of “Internetting” that cannot be described but only done. To do otherwise wouldn’t do justice.
Historians one hundred years from now will be confounded by this arrangement, because they will look for a definition of the Internet but see that “a vast computer network linking smaller computer networks worldwide” doesn’t begin to explain it. Nor does Dictionary.com’s definition of the World Wide Web as “a system of extensively interlinked hypertext documents” come anywhere close.
Their loss is our gain, for once an Idea like God or the Internet can be defined, it becomes inert and dies. Our inability to find one good name and stick with it isn’t a fault, it’s a sign that the Internet is still healthy, inspiring us with new visions for its future and our place within it.
The How St. Thomas Aquinas Invented the Web 2.0 by Ersin Akinci, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Great meditation. I never thought it’d be as hopeless to try to “define” Internet as to define God. That’s a delightful comparison. I think Bill Clinton would also agree with this analysis since he went on public record by saying that certain hard-to-define things in life depend on our interpretation of “what ‘is’ IS.” But now, I’m thinking… what did then Gertrude Stein really mean when she said “a rose is a rose is a rose”?
Brilliant. FYI, the patron saint of the internet is actually St. Isadore of Seville.
[...] How St. Thomas Aquinas Invented the Web 2.0 [...]
Very fascinating read.
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Late to the party here, but just wanted to add that Rick Altman makes a similar observation when discussing his methodology of “crisis historiography” and the idea that new technologies, when they first emerge, pass through an identity crisis. One his basic premises is that all new technologies are “born nameless” precisely for the reasons you indicate above — because they could be “assimilated to multiple possible models, new technologies always begin life with multiple monikers rather than a stable single name.” (This is from his book Silent Film Sound.)
Great post — so glad I found the blog!
Hi, Rachel! Thanks for visiting and for your great comment. I’ll have to look up Silent Film Sound once I get back to campus in August.
It’s interesting that Altman can assign a reason for what seems like a great mystery to me, one which I had originally explored through tracing the ancient/medieval climatic concept of the “torrid zone”, commonly referred to as the “theory of the torrid zone” today by most historians (Nicolás Wey Gómez has a fantastic book on the topic, The Tropics of Empire, MIT Press 2008). Most secondary literature since the seventeenth-century essentially holds that this was an “opinion” or “belief” (later on, a “theory”) shared among most ancient and medieval writers that the Earth’s equatorial region was so hot that it was literally uninhabitable (the degree varies…Seneca in the Naturales Quaestiones talks about how silver in Ethiopia, on the edge of the torrid zone, melts during the day…the word “Ethiopia” itself is generally believed to come from aithein + ops, or “burn face” in Greek). This “theory” was then shattered when Europeans began sailing to the tropics in the fifteenth century, which they found populated and verdant.
At least, that’s the established narrative. Looking carefully at the original untranslated ancient texts, I found that there was never one set phrase like “the torrid zone” used by all authors, let alone a single definition, let alone a theory. Yet the torrid zone was still palpably there, there was no denying it, and it plays different roles under different names across all the texts I read. For instance, sometimes it would serve as the phenomenon being described (e.g., Seneca’s description in the NQ), at other times as the explanation of phenomena (e.g., the ocean’s salinity in Aristotle’s Meteorology), and still at other times as evidence for an explanation of a phenomenon (frequently found in various gemological treatises). Things change after Ptolemy (at least, his is our earliest extant record), who gives the torrid zone a name and a set definition. This suits later scholastic methods well, and so it becomes propagated, which brings about the torrid zone’s death as a critical component of Greco-Roman science, but also gives it a new lease on life: for a definition, even when contradicted, is hard to put down. So even fifty years after the Portuguese entered West Africa, we still have Genoese authors writing on the impenetrability of the torrid zone though a certain professor in Cracow (!) was simultaneously publishing treatises with the latest data and accepting the torrid zone’s falseness; two hundred years later, some British writers still spoke of the torrid zone’s impenetrability. (Just a few months ago as I was explaining this to a friend, I gave the analogy of how some people are still unaware that smallpox has been eliminated for the past thirty years, to which she was surprised since she “knew” that her aunt had just contracted the disease.)
Historians since have dismissed such exceptions with a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with counter-reform Catholicism and defending Biblical authority, since certain passages in the Bible had become tied up with the debate (specifically, that the gospel had reached all ends of the Earth, since the discovery of heathens unexposed to the Gospel could only have made sense with the torrid zone in place; teaching the existence of “Antipodeans” living on the other side of the torrid zone belt was accordingly prohibited in the Condemnations of 1277). And so it’s become a whipping boy, an example of the errors in unscientific thinking, when in fact today’s understanding of the torrid zone has nothing to do with how it was originally conceived. This was the observation that informed this post, and I see the “Internet” as a modern day torrid zone, critical to so many questions and problems yet without even having a set name or scope.
BTW, I took a quick look at your blog, and I should add that although I don’t recall the torrid zone in Blake (where one might expect it), it does show up in Milton’s Paradise Lost once or twice, not to mention a few English Renaissance travel plays. To use your/Altman’s words, it is an idea that can and has fit into innumerable contexts.
I hope you keep reading!
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