The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet

Contemporary Review, Nov, 1999 by Tom Phillips

Margaret Wertheim. Virago. [pounds]14.99.320 pages. ISBN I-86049-527-3.

With its intriguing sub-title this is an unusually eclectic book. Not only does it contain a breezy summary of the development of Western science, it also puts forward the remarkable argument that the computer-generated realm of cyberspace is 'a repository for immense spiritual yearning.'

Few books can boast such wide-ranging subject matter. As well as a discussion of medieval art, it includes a history of early modern astronomy, an outline of Einstein's theories, an extraordinary chapter about hyperspace and a guide to the weird and wonderful cyber-phenomena of MUDs (multi-user domains) and the virtual 'city' of Alphaville. Specialists in these fields will probably groan at the breathlessness with which the ideas are treated but the verve of the writing and the audacity of the argument are undeniable. Whether that argument stands up or not is another matter.

Broadly speaking, what the author has to say is this: in medieval metaphysics, two distinct types of space were believed to exist - the physical and the spiritual. These corresponded to the body and the soul. They were, in effect, parallel but qualitatively different realities and people like Dante and Giotto 'saw themselves embedded in both'.

From the early fourteenth century onwards, however, this carefully poised dualism began to break down. The trend towards monism encouraged by a growth in the natural sciences accelerated. The author tracks this through the discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler to the twentieth-century physicist's quest for a universal Theory of Everything.

All this is orthodox enough. Science is often seen as a secular imperative creating a picture of reality in which there is, quite literally, no room for God. From here, however, the book departs for the arcane realm of cyberspace and we are introduced to some very unorthodox ideas indeed. Chief among these is the claim that the Internet and 'virtual reality' are generating a new kind of medieval 'soul-space' in which the limitations of the material world can be transcended.

When you hook up for an on-line chat or join a communal computer game, this argument runs, you can become whoever or whatever you want. Like a medieval Christian, you exist in two realms simultaneously. You are sitting in front of your computer but you are also in another place - a place whose geography is so complex it is unmappable and whose very existence is intangible - and while you're there you can change your gender, pass a camel through the eye of a needle and generally defy the laws of physics.

Take this a stage further and 'virtual reality' can become an ideal community in which all social and economic distinctions lose their meaning. Take it further still and you end up with the extreme beliefs described towards the end of this book, that cyberspace is the New Jerusalem and that through it we will all achieve a kind of immortality.

To be fair, these beliefs are not those of the author herself and she remains healthily sceptical about cyber-religions, cyber-Heavens and cyber-Utopias. However, she clearly does have a lot of time for those who regard the Internet and 'virtual reality' as more than simply a means of communication and a scientific tool. She repeatedly asserts that they are helping to revive a dualistic vision of being and space.

What she doesn't do is risk disturbing the symmetry of her arguments by adequately considering other, less idealistic, ways of regarding this technology's future and its limitations or the possibility that cyberspace may never detach itself from everyday reality as definitely as some of her sources insist.

Why, for example, should the Internet - which is already glutted with junk transform our world view any more significantly than the telephone, the television or the invention of print? Can people engaged in even the most engrossing fantasy world or cyber-community really forget that the 'digital self' they project is the product of their imagination and not the manifestation of their soul? And what truly spiritual meaning can you attach to a 'reality' which disappears the second you switch off your computer? This, perhaps, is the essential difference between Dante's beliefs and the Internet: Dante never logged off.

TOM PHILLIPS