Beyond Materialist Flattening: Theology in the Digital Age

The Angel of History and the Risk of a World Without Transcendence

In his ninth thesis on the philosophy of history, Walter Benjamin interprets Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus as a metaphor for history itself: an angel gazes upon the ruins of the past while an irresistible storm—what we call “progress”—drives it inexorably forward. It cannot stop to mend the wreckage or awaken the dead—it can only watch as disaster upon disaster accumulates, all while being propelled into the future. For Benjamin, history is not a chain of triumphs but a succession of catastrophes, and progress, far from being a redemptive force, is often a wind that erases and forgets rather than saving and remembering.

Today, this tension manifests in how modernity approaches the sacred. The erosion of grand religious narratives has led many to adopt a materialist view of reality, where the meaning of existence is often reduced to biological, economic, or technological processes. The danger is not only the loss of transcendence but the creation of new myths that, paradoxically, end up serving the same function as the old religious structures.

Feuerbach and the Human Projection of the Sacred

In the 19th century, Ludwig Feuerbach formulated a radical critique of religion: according to him, God is nothing more than a projection of human nature. People transfer their aspirations onto God, creating a perfect and transcendent entity that merely reflects their fears and desires—this was the so-called anthropological turn.

This interpretation profoundly influenced modern thought, leading to the view that religion was an illusion to be deconstructed. But while Feuerbach’s critique helped expose how power exploits the sacred, today we risk facing a new problem: the replacement of transcendence with new forms of materialist idolatry.

Concepts such as the market, technological progress, or artificial intelligence have taken on an almost metaphysical aura; backed by science, they become even more powerful dogmas. If religion once legitimized social hierarchies and power structures, today that role has shifted to economic and technological logic. The risk is that, while we critique ancient beliefs, we may find ourselves indoctrinated into new mythologies. I, too, have written many articles under the influence of the materialist hypothesis, seeking to explore just how far it can take us.

Benjamin and Adorno: Deconstruction as Liberation

Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno used deconstruction as a critical tool—not to destroy the sacred, but to free it from the ideological superstructures that suffocate it. Benjamin, with his concept of messianic time, suggests that history is not a linear progression but a constellation of possibilities that can be redeemed. His critique is not a rejection of the spiritual dimension but an attempt to restore its authenticity. He applies deconstruction, but not reduction.

Adorno, on the other hand, warns against the danger of a society that replaces religion with technology and consumerism. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, he shows how myth does not disappear but transforms into new forms of domination: reason, in its attempt to control the world, ends up becoming a new absolute, erasing any space for freedom and transcendence.

The Challenge of Spirituality in the Digital Age

Today, we face a new challenge: the digital realm is redefining our relationship with reality and the sacred. Algorithms do not merely process data—they shape our perceptions, influence our emotions, and, in some cases, even attempt to replicate spiritual experiences.

Artificial intelligence, for instance, can already generate pseudo-religious texts, sermons, and prayers, creating an illusion of transcendence without genuine inner experience. This phenomenon mirrors the mechanism described by Feuerbach: a sacredness created by human hands—this time, through the machine.

The issue is not just the loss of traditional faith but the emergence of an automated religion, where depth and reflection are outsourced to deep search technologies like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. If religion was once instrumentalized by political and economic powers, today algorithms have become the new priests of meaning, distributing pre-packaged truths according to market logic (nothing new, a critic of religious institutions might say).The irony is that, in using these deep search tools—present as of February 2025, when I am writing this article—I find myself engaged in a real intellectual, and therefore also spiritual, dialogue. Perhaps the question is no longer whether AI can replace faith, but whether it can provoke a deeper reflection on what faith itself means in a world increasingly shaped by digital forces.

Beyond Materialism: Toward a New Spiritual Humanism

The solution does not lie in rejecting technological progress but in reclaiming a space for transcendence. As Benjamin suggests, the past is not something to be left behind but a reservoir of meanings waiting to be redeemed.

The future of spirituality will depend on our ability to avoid two extremes: on one hand, reducing religion to a mere social construct; on the other, transforming it into a consumer product, governed by algorithmic logic.

Personally, I believe that all esoteric traditions—from Zen spirituality to Sufism, from Gnosticism to religious messages not bound to structures of power—will be rediscovered as pathways to an authentic spiritual experience.

The Angel of History continues to gaze upon the ruins of the past. But perhaps, even in the winds of technological advancement, we can rediscover the foundational meaning of spirituality.

References

1. Walter Benjamin

• Angelus Novus (1940), in Theses on the Philosophy of History, Italian translation, Einaudi, Turin, 1995.

• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Italian translation, Einaudi, Turin, 2011.

2. Theodor W. Adorno & Max Horkheimer

• Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Italian translation, Einaudi, Turin, 1997.

3. Ludwig Feuerbach

• The Essence of Christianity (1841), Italian translation, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 2012.

4. Critical Theory and Spirituality

• Habermas, Jürgen, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Italian translation, Laterza, Rome-Bari, 1987.

• Löwy, Michael, Redemption and Utopia: Libertarian Mysticism in Central Europe, Italian translation, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 1992.

• Agamben, Giorgio, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin, 2000.

5. Technology, Religion, and Posthumanism

• Benanti, Paolo, Homo Faber. The Techno-Human Condition, EDB, 2022.

• Han, Byung-Chul, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Techniques of Power, Nottetempo, Rome, 2016.

• Ferrando, Francesca, Philosophical Posthumanism and Its Metamorphoses, Edizioni ETS, Pisa, 2016.

6. Online Sources and Recent Studies

• Facoltà Teologica del Triveneto, Digital Humanism, 2023. Available at: https://www.fttr.it/

• Graf, Stephanie, Inverse Theology and Critical Theory, in Scielo México, 2024. Available at: https://www.scielo.org.mx/

• Peyron, Giovanni, Christianity and Artificial Intelligence: What is the Link Between Faith and Technology?, in Agenda Digitale, 2023. Available at: https://www.agendadigitale.eu/