Essential McLuhan 342 the Church has been so progressively dissolved and the God it preached so far decomposed that it is not possible to begin to see Jesus as the core of faith and as incarnate in humanity wherever there is life, and to see God as the opposite of humanity, life, progress—that is, as death.” (James Heisig, The Wake of God, Divine Seminary, 1967.) In a visual sense God is no longer “up there” and “out there” any more than twenty million books in a pinhead could be said to be “in there.” Visual orientation has simply become irrelevant. Some feel that Christianity’s existence must always stand in the tension between being in the world and standing outside it. Kierkegaard was keenly aware of this, as were St. Paul and, later, Martin Luther. But the tension between inner and outer is a merely visual guideline, and in the age of the X-ray inner and outer are simultaneous events. As the Western world goes Oriental on its inner trip with electric circuitry, it is not only the conventional image of God that is deposed; the whole nature of selfidentity enters a state of crisis. God the clockmaker and engineer of the universe is no more an essential visual image to the West than is the identity card or the visual classification as an image of private personal status. The problem of personal identity first arose in the West with King Oedipus, who went through the crisis of detribalization, the loss of corporate involvement in the tribal group. To an ancient Greek the discovery of private identity was a terrifying and horrible thing that came about with the discovery of visual space and fragmentary classification. Twentieth-century man is traveling the reverse course, from an extreme individual fragmentary state back into a condition of corporate involvement with all mankind. Paradoxically, this new involvement is experienced as alienation and loss of private selfhood. It began with Ibsen and the Russian writers like Dostoyevsky, for whom there remained a much larger degree of awareness of the old tribal and corporate life than anything available to other European writers in the nineteenth century. The novelists and dramatists who began the quest to discover “Who am I?” have been succeeded by the existentialist philosophers, who meditate upon the meaninglessness of private lives in the contemporary world: One can say, in sort, that meaninglessness is spreading before our eyes. A strange inner mutation is thereby produced which takes on the aspect of a genuine uprooting. Entirely new questions are being asked, they insist upon being asked, where one hitherto seemed to be in an order which contained its own justification; it is the very order to which the barracks man belonged in the days when he was still a living being, when he was in the present. He for whom reflection has become a need, a primordial necessity, becomes aware of the precarious and contingent character of the conditions which constitute the