Now, from 1937 to 1944, the young Canadian Marshall McLuhan taught English at Saint Louis University (SLU), the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri, during which time he continued to work on and eventually completed his 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation on Thomas Nashe. In 1939, Harvard's Perry Miller published his massively research book about Ramus, in part, titled The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Harvard University Press; for specific page references to Ramus, see the "Index" [page 528]).
At the time when McLuhan was teaching English at SLU, the young American Jesuit seminarian Walter J. Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) was pursuing graduate studies in philosophy and English at SLU as part of his lengthy Jesuit formation. From McLuhan, Ong learned about Ramus. Subsequently, Ong undertook his Ph.D. in English at Harvard, where Perry Miller served as the director of his massively researched doctoral dissertation on the history of the verbal arts in Western culture and Ramus. Ong's dissertation was published in two volumes by Harvard University Press in 1958: (1) Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason; and (2) Ramus and Talon Inventory, a briefly annotated bibliographic listing on more than 750 books (most in Latin) by Ramus and his allies and his critics that Ong had tracked down in more than 100 libraries in the British Isles and Continental Europe.
Ong's volume Ramus and Talon Inventory includes the dedication "For/ Herbert Marshall McLuhan/ who started all this" - meaning that McLuhan had started Ong's interest in Ramus.
Now, in paragraph (8), John Fraim says that McLuhan's completed doctoral dissertation "also served as a type of 'embarkation point' for McLuhan's study of media theory placing it in an overriding religious context."
In paragraph (11), John Fraim says, "In some ways, the materials in the book [The Medium and the Light] serve as background to McLuhan's eventual conversion to Catholicism [in 1937]. Yet, as interesting and important as McLuhan's conversion to Catholicism might be, The Medium and the Light is really about far more than one influential individual's conversion to the Catholic religion. Rather, its real subject is more about an awakening rather than a conversion. The awakening was to a faith in percepts over concepts [which are operationally defined and explained in philosophy and in Roman Catholic theology], and yes, and early discovery that 'truth' and 'light' is to be found in the acknowledgment of the surrounding 'medium' of life rather than in the analysis of the 'messages' and concepts inside this life. In effect, McLuhan never set out to understand the idea of religion but to admit particular feelings he had."
In paragraph (12), John Fraim says, "It was the admission of these feelings, not the attempt to understand them, that led to his conversion and his ultimately great discoveries in media."
In paragraph (13), John Fraim says, "For McLuhan, concepts stood in the way of knowledge. He once wrote his friend Jim Taylor, editor of The United Church Observer, 'I do not think of God as a concept, but as an immediate and ever-present fact - an occasion for continuous dialogue. . . . I don't think concepts have any relevance in religion. Analogy is not a concept. It is a resonance. It is inclusive. It is the cognitive process itself.' Faith is a mode of perception, a sense like sight or hearing or touch and as real and actual as these" (the ellipsis is in John Fraim's text).
I have discussed McLuhan's interest in analogy in my 5,400-word paper "Contextualizing Marshall McLuhan" that is available online through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy:
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/209151
In paragraph (17), John Fraim says, "Christianity arose during a linear, visual technology [i.e., phonetic alphabetic literacy in ancient Hebrew and Greek culture] which encouraged privacy. Yet the dominant medium today is the non-linear and auditory, one of electricity. As McLuhan often noted, the electronic medium makes the world into one great tribal village where privacy (that of early Christianity) is no longer possible."
In the long history of the Roman Catholic Church, the most pronounced emphasis on privacy involved monasticism - but at a time when privacy was hard to cultivate in a residual form of primary oral culture (in Ong's terminology).
No doubt the monastic practices of one-to-one spiritual direction and private confession contributed to the development of privacy in the Western Catholic Church, as the late French philosopher and self-described atheist Michel Foucault (1926-1984), in effect, notes in his posthumously published book Confessions of the Flesh: The History of Sexuality: Volume 4, translated by Robert Hurley; edited and with a "Foreword" by Frederic Gros (New York: Pantheon Books, 2021).
In paragraph (19), John Fraim says, "The crucial thing needed in this critical period is not the ability to see a new concept but rather to feel a particular 'frequency.'"
In paragraph (20), John Fraim says, "So, the ability to listen rather than look for the answers to life goes back to those early years in McLuhan's life when he listened to his heart at the beginning of his journey through life rather than looked with his mind."
Now, Ong borrows the French playwright and Christian existentialist Marcel Gabriel's distinction between belief "in" (a person) and belief "that" (a proposition is true) in his seminal 1958 essay "Voice as Summons for Belief: Literature, Faith, and the Divided Self" in the now-defunct Jesuit-sponsored journal Thought: A Review of Culture and Idea (Fordham University), volume 33, serial number 128 (Spring 1958): 43-61.
Ong's seminal 1958 essay is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002, pages 259-275).
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