Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) December 26, 2014: No other literature professor in the twentieth century achieved the media notoriety that the Canadian Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) achieved in the 1960s and 1970s. McLuhan's most imaginative book, Understanding Media: Extensions of Man, was first published in 1964. It helped catapult him to extraordinary media attention. On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of its publication, I'd like to contextualize it and McLuhan's life.
My general theme centers around Marshall McLuhan's religious faith and his works. However, in my research on McLuhan's life, I have not come across any published statements in which he discusses the years in his life when he was a Protestant. As a result, I will of necessity center my attention on his interest in and conversion to Roman Catholicism. I will present the results of my research on his life in chronological order based on the chronology of his life. From time to time, I will flash-forward to mention a later development (or developments), but then I will return to the chronological timeline as indicated in the subheadings.
Perhaps I should explain that I undertook my research on McLuhan's life in connection with my research on the life and work of the American Jesuit cultural historian and theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003). I have discussed Ong and McLuhan in my book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Hampton Press, 2000; rev. ed. 2015) and in my lengthy introduction to An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pages 1-68).
Timeline: 1934
In a posthumously published letter dated May 6, 1969, to Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic Thomist, McLuhan reports that he first read Maritain's book Art and Scholasticism in 1934 when he (McLuhan) was in graduate studies in English at CambridgeUniversity. At the end of his letter, McLuhan says, "It was a revelation to me. I became a Catholic in 1937" (Letters of Marshall McLuhan, edited by Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye [Oxford University Press, 1987, page 371). The juxtaposition of these last two sentences suggests that Maritain's book may have contributed somehow to McLuhan becoming a Catholic in the spring semester of 1937, when he was teaching English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Before the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church (1962-1965), many college-educated Catholics in Europe and North America and elsewhere, not just priests but also lay people, studied Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy and theology in their undergraduate education at Roman Catholic institutions of higher education. As a result, they characteristically thought of themselves as Thomists. In North America, the two leading centers of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy were St. Mike's at the University of Toronto and St. LouisUniversity, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri.
As we will see momentarily, McLuhan devoted the better part of his adult life teaching English at those two leading centers of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy in North America. No doubt McLuhan considered himself to be a Thomist. However, he had no formal training in philosophy -- or in theology. In philosophy and theology, he was an autodidact. (By contrast, Ong as part of his Jesuit training was professionally trained in philosophy and theology.)
The overall spirit of pre-Vatican II Catholicism is nicely expressed in the main title of Philip Gleason's book Contending with Modernity: [American] Catholic Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1995). No doubt Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy was one of the ways in which pre-Vatican II were contending with modernity and its spirit of secularism. In terms of philosophy, Catholic Thomists were contending primarily with Kant and the Kantian philosophic tradition of thought. Because Kant had not studied Thomas Aquinas's metaphysical thought, Thomists rejected Kant's critique of metaphysical thought on the grounds that he had not done his homework and therefore did not know what he was talking about. But pre-Vatican II Catholics were not just contending with modernity in the realm of philosophic thought, but also in a wide range of supposedly secular matters, including movies and other aspects of popular culture and consumerism. In any event, when McLuhan converted to Catholicism in 1937, he was presumably signing on to the Roman Catholic spirit at the time of contending with modernity and secularism. McLuhan's book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (Vanguard, 1951) fits nicely within the Roman Catholic spirit of contending with modernity and consumerism.
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