Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) April 23, 2022: My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and media ecology theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). Over the years, I took five courses from him at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri. For one course I took from Ong, I wrote a paper on the English Renaissance writer John Lyly's Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578). In it, John Lyly (1553-1606) characterizes the character Euphues (whose name means good sounds) as having more wit than wisdom. In other words, clever-sounding wordplay does not always bespeak wisdom, even though it shows cleverness.
For a modern-spelling edition, see John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit [1578] and Euphues and His England [1579], edited by Leah Scragg (Manchester University Press, 2003).
Lyly was one writer in the group of English Renaissance writers known in literary studies as University Wits. The others were George Peele (1556-1596), Robert Greene (1558-1592), Thomas Lodge (1558-1625), Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), and Thomas Nashe (1567-1601).
Now, as a young Jesuit seminarian, Ong himself had studied at Saint Louis University much earlier in his life, receiving three graduate degrees there (a Master's in English, a licentiate degree in philosophy; and a licentiate degree in theology).
In any event, from Ong, I first heard of the Canadian Renaissance specialist and media ecology theorist and Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980; Ph.D. in English, Cambridge University, 1943).
Young McLuhan had converted to Catholicism in the spring of 1937, when he was teaching English at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. Next, he taught English at Saint Louis University from 1937 to 1944, during which time he continued to work on his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation on the history of the verbal arts (of grammar, rhetoric, and logic [also known as dialectic]) and the English Renaissance witty writer Thomas Nashe (1567-1601). McLuhan also kept himself busy writing the witty commentaries about popular culture, a selection of which he eventually published in his 1951 illustrated book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Vanguard).
According to McLuhan, the witty public intellectual and prolific writer G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), himself a convert to Catholicism, was a significant influence on his own decision to convert to Catholicism. Like his role model Chesterton, McLuhan in the 1960s would emerge as a kind of public intellectual and commentator.
In any event, the young Canadian literary critic Hugh Kenner studies Chesterton's wit in the short book Paradox in Chesterton, with an "Introduction" (pp. xi-xxii) by Herbert Marshall McLuhan (Sheed & Ward, 1947). Subsequently, Kenner went on to distinguish himself as a Joyce scholar. For a much broader discussion of paradox, see Rosalie L. Colie's book Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton University Press, 1966).
In addition to the convert Chesterton, McLuhan credited the French Catholic convert and Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain's book Art and Scholasticism as another significant influence on his decision to convert. See McLuhan's 1969 letter to Maritain in the Letters of Marshall McLuhan, selected and edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye (Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 369-371). In any event, along with his conversion, McLuhan became a self-described Thomist.
The worldwide Roman Catholic Thomist revival was launched by Pope Leo XIII's 1879 encyclical letter Aeterni Patris, which is available in English translation at the Vatican's website for those who are interested in seeing it. However, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), during McLuhan's rise to extraordinary fame in the 1960s, downsized Thomism a wee bit, to the chagrin of many Thomists such as Maritain and McLuhan.
At least in part, Ong's 1947 article "Wit and Mystery: A Revaluation in Medieval Latin Hymnody" in the prestigious journal of the Medieval Academy of America, Speculum, 22(8 (July 1947): pp. 310-341, is about St. Thomas Aquinas' wit in his Latin poetry. Ong reprinted his 1947 essay in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (Macmillan, pp. 88-130).
Now, McLuhan's extensively researched 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation was published posthumously, unrevised, as the book The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, edited by W. Terrence Gordon (Gingko Press, 2006). For the "Bibliography" (pp. 255-265) that the editor worked up, based on references in McLuhan's text, we find eight works by Aristotle. In the "Index" (pp. 267-276), we can consult the entries on Aquinas and Aristotle (p. 267) to track down specific page references to each of them.
In it, the young McLuhan also refers (pp. 69-70n32) to young Ong's article "The Province of Rhetoric and Poetic" in the journal the Modern Schoolman (Saint Louis University), 19 (1942): pp. 24-27. Ong's 1942 essay is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (Hampton Press, 2002, pp. 175-183).
At first blush, it may sound a bit odd, but young McLuhan also became a dedicated fan of the witty Irish Jesuit-educated literary artist and singer James Joyce (1882-1941), whose witty wordplay resounds spectacularly in his 1939 experimental novel Finnegans Wake enormously captivated McLuhan.
Two of McLuhan's articles on Joyce, "Joyce, Mallarme, and the Press" (1953) and "James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial" (1953), are reprinted in the 1969 book The Interior Landscape: The [Selected] Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan: 1943-1962, selected and edited by Eugene McNamara (McGraw-Hill, pp. 5-21 and 23-47). McLuhan also published the article "Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process" in the journal Renascence (Marquette University), 4(1), (Autumn 1951): pp. 3-11. It is reprinted in the book Joyce's "Portrait": Criticisms and Techniques, edited by Thomas E. Connolly (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962, pp. 249-265).
Incidentally, Ong's somewhat lengthy 1970 review of The Interior Landscape: The [Selected] Literary Criticism of Marshall McLuhan: 1943-1962 is also reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (pp. 69-77), mentioned above.
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