Walter Ong's thought as framework and orientation for cultural studies in the humanities

WALTER J. Ong, S.J., turned ninety on November 30, 2002. Perhaps we can use this occasion to take stock of his scholarly achievement. Ong has achieved extraordinary scholarly status. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and he has a well-deserved reputation for thoroughness and formidable knowledge. The French government has dubbed him a knight, Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Academiques. he has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. he has been elected president of the Modern Language Association of America. he has delivered the Terry Lectures at Yale University, the Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, and the Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto. he was selected to be one of the Lincoln Lecturers instituted on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Fulbright Act. The Conference on Christianity and Literature has conferred its Lifetime Achievement Award on him.

Even though few of Ong's works are widely known, his deeply original thought can still serve as a seedbed for further exploration by other scholars. From approximately the 1950s onward, Ong has been ahead of his times, and most of us are still playing catch up. Because of the incisiveness of his thought and because of the economy of expression and nuance of his thought, his work repays careful consideration. In my lengthy introduction to An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (1-68), I have called attention to ways in which his thought can be related to a variety of scholarly studies in the humanities. In the present essay, I will also suggest ways in which his thought could be developed. To assist readers who may not already be familiar with his wide-ranging work, I will here provide certain background information about his scholarly work and contextualize his thought - all in the service of suggesting that more people should examine his thought and develop his more fruitful insights further.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, on November 30, 1912, and raised there, Walter Jackson Ong, Jr., entered the Society of Jesus in the fall of 1935 and was subsequently ordained a priest on June 16, 1946 (for a sketch of Ong's life and scholarly career, see Farrell, Ong's Contributions 33-53). When Ong was working on his Master's degree in English at Saint Louis University, which he finished in the spring of 1941, he had the good fortune of studying under a young Canadian fresh from Cambridge University, Marshall McLuhan.

At that time McLuhan himself was working on his own doctoral dissertation, which centered on the sixteenth-century writer Thomas Nashe. McLuhan set out to situate Nashe in the larger context of the competing emphases in the verbal arts down to Nashe's time, and so McLuhan worked up a century-by-century account of the verbal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (or logic) from about the time of Cicero to the time of Nashe. In developing this account, McLuhan became familiar with the work of the sixteenth-century French logician and educational reformer Peter Ramus, whose works were widely known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mostly in Protestant circles and especially in Puritan circles. John Milton, for example, was familiar with Ramus's work, and Milton himself even wrote a textbook in logic based on one by Ramus.1

Ong credits McLuhan with calling his attention to Perry Miller's extensive discussion of Ramus and Ramism in Miller's 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. After delineating the features of Ramus's work as well as he could, Miller called for somebody to undertake a fuller study of Ramus's thought. Approximately a decade after Miller's book was published, Walter Ong would undertake such a study as his doctoral dissertation in English under the direction of Miller at Harvard, with Myron P. Gilmore of Harvard also serving on his committee. By the time Ong proceeded to doctoral studies in English at Harvard, he had not only completed a Master's degree in English but also two other degrees roughly equivalent to Master's degrees as part of his training in the Jesuit order: one in philosophy and the other in theology. For both of those degrees, Ong had taken courses and exams in Latin, the language in which Ramus and his followers wrote most of their works. With the assistance of Guggenheim fellowships in 1949-1950 and 1951-1952, Ong was able to live in England for approximately a year and in Paris for three years. Over those years Ong worked in over one hundred libraries in the British Isles and continental Europe tracking down more than seven hundred fifty editions of books by Ramus and his followers, which Ong lists and briefly describes in his 1958 book Ramus and Talon Inventory.2

While Ong was living in Paris, he traveled to various European libraries. It was also in Paris that Ong first read Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's work in manuscript, while he and Chardin lived in the same Jesuit residence in Paris. Even though Ong is primarily a literary scholar, he is preoccupied with evolutionary thought. he often contrasts evolutionary thought with cyclical patterns of thought, or cyclicism for short.3 The theme of the evolution of thought and expression is implicit in many of the essays reprinted in his collection entitled Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (1971), and it is explicitly adverted to in the sub-title of his other collection, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (1977).