Matt ZepelinModern U.S. History – Research Seminar5/7/14

COMPUTERS AND THE CATHOLIC MIND: RELIGION, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIAL CRITICISM IN THE POSTWAR

UNITED STATES

Introduction

Every three years, the Alliance of Digital Humanities

Organizations gives its Roberto Busa Prize for “lifetime

achievements in the application of information and

communications technologies to humanities research.” The

prize was named after Father Roberto Busa, whose Index

Thomisticus, a complete concordance and lemmatization of the

works of Thomas Aquinas and several related authors, was the

pioneering project in the field of digital humanities.1

Father Busa himself received the first prize in 1998,

at the age of 85. Busa was then in his seventh decade as a

Jesuit. At his acceptance speech, in addition to offering

thoughts about the past and future of digital humanities, he

1 A “concordance” is an alphabetical listing of key words or all of the words in a text. To “lemmatize” is to sort words into groups based on inflected or variant forms of the same word, which can require giving the sentence context of the word.

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posited a familial tie between God and computers: “God is

the father of man; man is the father of the computer; ergo

computers are the grandchildren of God.”2

A linguist by training, Busa’s words were highly

intentional; he did not say that computers are like the

grandchildren of God, he said they are the grandchildren of

God. In the land of informatics, Busa’s theology is a rare

bird. Even in the realm of “humanities” computing, where

scholars sometimes wonder about the epistemological

implications of digital methods, one does not usually

encounter bedrock religious opinions. But Busa did not

fundamentally approach the Index Thomisticus as a problem in

computing. Computers were a necessary and convenient way for

him to fulfill his scholarship on Thomas Aquinas—a project

which was part of the larger Catholic reaction to modernity,

dating back to the latter half of the nineteenth century.

From Pope Pius X’s 1864 encyclical A Syllabus of Errors

until the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s, the

2 Busa, R. “Picture a man . . . Busa Award Lecture, Debrecen, Hungary, 6July 1998.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 14, no. 1 (April 1, 1999): 5–9. doi:10.1093/llc/14.1.5. Pg. 9.

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Vatican repeatedly condemned secular modernity for being

atheistic, individualistic, and materialistic. But the

Church’s response to modernity was not only negative in

form. Pope Leo XIII, wanting to add a proactive component to

the Vatican’s stance, encouraged a revival of Thomist

scholasticism. In his 1879 Aeterni Patris, he urged “Catholic

teachers and philosophers to draw deeply from the riches of

the Angelic Doctor, Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose doctrine and

method were thought to be the surest path both to finding

philosophic truth and to engaging the modern world with

forthrightness and vigor.”3

Leo XIII surely would not have imagined that someone

would take his suggestion to the extent of turning every

word ever written by Aquinas—more than 10,000,000—into a

piece of digital information, available for sorting and

comparison like any other “bit” of computer data. But when

push came to shove, Busa saw that he could do more

exhaustive linguistic analysis on the work of Aquinas with

3 Woods, Thomas E. The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Pg. 3.

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computers than without them, and IBM responded to his call

for help.4

If it seems ironic that the founder of digital

humanities had, as a motive for his work, the revival of

medieval Catholic philosophy, Busa was not alone. Surveying

the social interpretation of computers and other technology

in the postwar U.S., one finds that a number of the most

prominent and influential figures were Catholic. And many of

them also had one eye on modern technology and one on its

pre-modern antecedents. Busa may have done the most in

working directly with the technology, but he was certainly

not the only Catholic—layman or priest—to spend his career

thinking about computers.

If the initial impulse was conservative, the

conclusions drawn by twentieth-century Catholic thinkers

were often surprising. Like Busa, the Jesuit scholar Walter

Ong believed modern technology to be part of God’s plan for

4 The fact that computers made this work possible did not, however, makeit easy. Busa noted that the ratio of human work hours to computer hoursended up being more than 100:1. “Computer hours were less than 10 000,” he wrote, “while man hours were much more than one million.” Busa, R. “The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus” Computers and the Humanities 14, (1980): 83-90. Pg. 87.

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the world. As he produced a large body of innovative

scholarship on the history of communications technologies—

from orality and literacy to print and computers—Ong

operated on the belief that his historical research was a

way to curate God’s work through man.

One of Ong’s early teachers, a Canadian Catholic

convert and professor of English named Marshall McLuhan,

took this view to sensational extremes in his cultural

criticism of the 1960s and ‘70s. Although he rarely

disclosed the Catholic theology behind his thought,

McLuhan’s exuberant celebration of modern technology in

books like The Gutenberg Galaxy (1961) and Understanding Media: The

Extensions of Man (1964) propelled him to stardom as a public

intellectual and earned him a founding place in the field of

media studies.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the renegade

Catholic priest Ivan Illich became a leading figure in

certain segments of the 1970s counterculture with his

extreme criticism of modern technologies and institutions.

Against McLuhan’s technologically-unified “global village,”

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Illich painted a picture of technological modernity that

looked a lot like the prelude to the apocalypse.

The work of these three men—Ong, McLuhan, and Illich—

leads to questions about the connections between

Catholicism, the history of communications technology, and

the bearing of that history on contemporary social

criticism. What was it about the computer and its

predecessor technologies that so piqued the interest of mid

twentieth-century Catholic thinkers, and how did Catholic

worldviews come to bear on their analysis of computers?

While the widest frame for understanding the work of

these men is the Catholic Church’s reaction to modernity,

there are also more specific questions to be asked about the

milieu of postwar North American Catholicism. Why was it in

Canada and the U.S., rather than Europe, that Catholics

began this line of scholarship? And is it significant that

Ivan Illich, the only European of the trio, was also the one

to come to negative conclusions about technology in modern

society?

6

But before attempting to answer these questions about

the role of Catholicism in the work of Ong, McLuhan, and

Illich, it will be necessary to examine the content of their

scholarship.

Part One – Orality, Literacy, Technology, and Media

Marshall McLuhan was a literary scholar from Western

Canada whose academic career from the mid-1930s till 1960

gave no indication of the kind of fame and acclaim he would

gain thereafter. In a 1971 interview, Ong said he was

“pretty certain that only two people in the world” reviewed

McLuhan’s first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man

(1952). He knew because he had been one of them.5

Although the book was not a hit, its title gives

indication of the very successful direction that McLuhan

wanted to take his work, which had been more standard

literary criticism prior to that point. By “the folklore of

industrial man,” the material he sought to interpret in the

book, he meant the vast and growing body of cultural

5 Ong, Walter J. An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Cresskill, N.J: Hampton Press, 2002. Pg. 80.

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ephemera he saw around him, “so much of which stems from the

laboratory, the studio, and the advertising agencies.”6

McLuhan compared the situation of the modern American

to that of a shipwrecked sailor caught in a whirlpool in

Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story, “A Descent Into the

Maelstrom.” Caught in the overwhelming pull of the

whirlpool, the sailor seeks a moment of amusement before his

death by gauging the relative trajectories of other objects

floating on the water’s surface. Seeing patterns of movement

emerge in what he had first taken as chaos, he is able to

escape the maelstrom by navigating currents within it,

rather than trying to struggle against its awesome power.

McLuhan wrote The Mechanical Bride—an analytical pastiche using

ads, movies, books, and other bits of pop culture—in a

similar spirit of “amusement born of rational detachment.”7

By the mid-1960s, McLuhan’s stature had skyrocketed. He

traveled the U.S. giving speeches and was featured on the

cover of Newsweek in 1967 and in a Playboy interview in 1969.

6 Preface to The Mechanical Bride in: McLuhan, Marshall. Essential McLuhan. NewYork, NY: BasicBooks, 1995. Pg. 22.7 McLuhan, 1995, pg. 21.

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Not one but two edited volumes on McLuhan’s work and its

themes were published in the 1960s, featuring academic stars

like Kenneth Burke and Raymond Williams as well as popular

writers such as Anthony Burgess, Tom Wolfe, and Susan

Sontag.8

There were two main reasons for the difference in

reception of McLuhan’s work between the early 1950s and the

1960s.

The first was an increased appetite for social

interpretation of media. In the technologically-saturated

twenty-first century, it is important to remember that most

adults in the 1960s U.S. could remember the era before

anyone had heard of a machine called a “computer,” before

the television had been invented, before most homes had a

refrigerator or a clothes dryer. For those who had lived

through the Great Depression, the postwar era was one of

abundant materiality with an unfamiliar, technological edge.

8 Stearn, Gerald Emanuel. McLuhan, Hot & Cool. New York: Dial Press, 1967. Rosenthal, Raymond B. McLuhan: Pro & Con. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.

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In 1961, for instance, sixty-year-old Americans—born

before airplanes and before the notion of a “world war,”

much less a “cold war”—watched as reporters around the

country and the world made live television broadcasts about

a Soviet man orbiting the earth, with a subtext of the space

flight’s implications for nuclear warfare. The time was ripe

for questions about technology and media, and their bearing

on people’s daily lives. McLuhan’s intellectual

assertiveness, and his status as a university professor,

made him an obvious candidate to become a public

intellectual in that nascent field of inquiry.

But there is something else to be seen in the

difference between the 1950s and the 1960s, and we can pick

up on it in McLuhan’s tone. If his work in The Mechanical Bride

was confident, his writing in the 1960s was nothing short of

oracular. Though the 1960s was the decade when the presumed

eminence of white men came under attack, white men also

participated in that attack, particularly in the early part

of the decade, in ways that now seem antiquated. Like

Timothy Leary or Norman Mailer, McLuhan claimed the

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triumphalist mantle of 1960s counterculture despite, in many

ways, representing the demographic—white, male, middle-

class, Christian, institutionally-supported—toward which the

counterculture would later direct much of its antagonism.

As we shall see, McLuhan’s efforts as a culture critic

had a personal, Catholic motivation, but that did not stop

him from adopting the tone and feel of the 1960s zeitgeist.

Indeed, he gave it some of its terms.

***

“The medium is the message,” proclaimed McLuhan in

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.9 While the saying has

taken on a life of its own, for McLuhan in the early sixties

the primary referent of “medium” was television, and the

message was good. McLuhan theorized that television was

helping to bring about a higher unification of human

societies across the globe. He argued that print tended to

emphasize the visual sense above all others, and that this

was responsible for many of the problems of modernity:

excess rationalism, isolation, individualism, and

9 McLuhan, 1995, pg. 151.

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nationalism. Print, in McLuhan’s lingo, was a “cool” medium

in which finished forms of rational information got conveyed

linearly (linear both in terms of logic and in terms of the

direction of the type). Television, by contrast, typified a

“hot” medium—a medium whose messages contained gaps

requiring acts of participatory inference from the

receiver.10

Part of McLuhan’s intellectual appeal was his

confidence in assigning unexpected examples of media content

to his categories. Newspaper cartoons, jazz music, James

Joyce, and television advertisements were all “hot,” while

even Chaucer or Shakespeare could be made “cool” by editors

who focused on typographical regularity at the expense of

aural experience.11

McLuhan’s unabashed celebration of television, and his

view of advertising as something akin to modernist poetry,

drew attention from a wide range of academics and

businesspeople interested in interpreting modern media.

10 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pgs. 70-71.11 McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. New York: New American Library, 1969. Pg. 166.

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While McLuhan may have continued to have Poe’s sailor-in-a-

maelstrom as his image of himself in relation to modern

technology, that survivalist stance was increasingly hard to

make out in his work. “We must maximize rather than minimize

the various features of our new media,” he wrote.12 To draw

social and ethical implications from such a statement is

possible, and it is what McLuhan intended. But in

retrospect, it is surely easier to see this kind of position

as a sort of amoral cheerleading for the internet and the

iPhone.13

There is an irony to McLuhan’s popularity, however,

since his views on technology were highly idiosyncratic. As

against either a celebratory history of human technology as

a progressive trajectory from past to future, or an anti-

technological narrative ascribing the problems of modernity

to technology, McLuhan went in for a bit of both. He argued

that where “machine technology” had been a turn for the

worse, “automation technology” would be a turn for the

12 McLuhan, 1995, pg. 273.13 Not surprisingly, there are several websites dedicated to McLuhan quotes, and they mostly give the impression that he was unambivalently in favor of new media.

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better.14 McLuhan touted the radio, TV, and computers as

technologies that would make things more like he thought

they had been in the historical period he most admired, the

Middle Ages.

“Man’s orientation to space before writing is non-

specialist,” he told an audience at a cybernetics symposium

in 1964, intending “non-specialist” in a positive sense.

“His caves are scooped-out space. His wig-wams are

wraparound, or proprioceptive, space, not too distant from

the Volkswagen and the space capsule! The igloo and the

pueblo are not enclosed space; they are plastically modeled

forms of space, very close to sculpture.”15

From the vantage of the twenty-first century, this kind

of statement, which McLuhan said or printed constantly, is

pabulum. In the sixties, however, the idea that human

cultures, past and present, fit clear, identifiable types

based on their technologies; that such technologies affected

everything from aesthetics to politics to raw sensory

experience; and that societies both past and future were

14 McLuhan, 1995, pg. 151.15 McLuhan, 2003, pg. 46.

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better than that of the present made for a compelling set of

messages.

Looking back at the field of media studies, the

Cambridge Handbook of Literacy notes that The Gutenberg Galaxy “put

the entire study of the media and technologies of

communication into an explicitly global and historical

perspective and added to it what we today would call the

global media hype.”16

Even Jonathan Miller, McLuhan’s most ruthless and

thorough critic, acknowledged that he had done a service in

convening a debate on the effects of media as form, rather

than as content. “I can still recall the intense excitement

with which I first read McLuhan in 1960,” wrote Miller in

his Modern Masters series book on him. “Not that I remember a

single observation that I now hold to be true, nor indeed a

16 Olson, David R., and Nancy Torrance, eds. The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy. Cambridge, N.Y: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pg. 11. In terms of McLuhan’s impact in academia, the literary scholar Eric Havelock has written that The Gutenberg Galaxy was one of four books that constituted a kind of cultural moment in the early 1960s—the birth of the study of orality as an interdisciplinary field. In addition to McLuhan’s work, Havelock cited, in classical literary studies, the publication of his Preface to Plato, and in anthropology, the publications of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind and Jack Goody and Ian Watt’s “The Consequences of Literacy.” All four of these works came out in 1962-’63.

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single theory that even begins to hold water. And yet, as a

result of reading him, I first began to look at print as a

thing in itself; I became aware of the peculiar idioms

associated with using the telephone; I began to see

photographs not just as pictures of the world around but as

peculiar objects existing in their own right.”17

Although, given the plausibility of thinking of the

internet as the technologically-mediated “global village”

that McLuhan was predicting in the sixties, Miller’s

wholesale dismissal of McLuhan’s ideas and theories may have

been premature, Miller’s take is basically correct: it is

hard to find much that seems rigorous and verifiable in

McLuhan’s oeuvre.18 This charge was leveled at McLuhan

during his lifetime, and he discounted it without much in

the way of logical rebuttal. He claimed that he was

misunderstood because he thought with the right hemisphere

of his brain, while others thought with the left. More 17 Miller, Jonathan. Marshall McLuhan. New York: Viking Press, 1971. Pg. 123. Rarely is a living intellectual given the honor, and punishment, ofas thoughtful and complete a dissection as Miller gives McLuhan in this book.18 On the “global village” idea, see: McLuhan, Marshall. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

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curtly, he was known to simply say, “You know nothing of my

work.”19

Looking at his comfort with inference, contradiction,

and ambiguity, it makes sense to think of McLuhan as he

clearly thought of himself, at least in the post-Gutenberg

Galaxy phase of his career—not as an academic but as an

artist with an interest in mysticism. “Anything becomes a

work of art as soon as it is surrounded by a new

environment,” said McLuhan in 1966.20 And his publications

following Understanding Media increasingly put this motto to

the test. Books like The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects

(1967) and War and Peace in the Global Village (1968) are essentially

long sequences of McLuhan’s aphorisms arranged as graphic

design: various fonts and sizes, the words sometimes

superimposed on images, printed backward, and so forth.

These books bear more comparison with Andy Warhol than

with the work of McLuhan’s academic peers. Like Warhol, Jack19 McLuhan, 2003, pg. 248. McLuhan says the line in a cameo as himself in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. It is also the title of Douglas Coupland’s biography of McLuhan.20 McLuhan, 2003, Pg. 81. This is another example of McLuhan’s heightened confidence in the 1960s. In the preface to The Mechanical Bride, he identified his work as a type of art criticism, while he aspired for his work in the 1960s to be art in its own right. McLuhan, 1995, pg. 23.

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Kerouac, or McLuhan’s friend Timothy Leary (comparisons to

which I shall return, since all of these men were also

Catholics), McLuhan used a flashy, charismatic style to draw

incredible amounts of attention to what he deemed important

sites of cultural interaction.21 His impact in spreading the

concepts of orality, literacy, and technological literacy

far surpassed most of his academic peers, even as his ideas

often lacked substance.

“A kind of alchemical foreknowledge of all the future

effects of any new medium is possible,” McLuhan told a group

of Chicago editors in 1959.22 It remained to others to think

through orality, literacy, and electronic media with more

rigorous evidence and a degree of nuance.

***

One of McLuhan’s earliest students (and a man only one

year his junior) was Walter Ong. Ong, a Jesuit, enrolled in

one of McLuhan’s courses at Saint Louis University in the

mid 1930s. He credited McLuhan with directing him toward the

21 Leary credited McLuhan with coining “turn on, tune in, and drop out,”though it was Leary who made it famous.22 McLuhan, 2003, pg. 8.

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subject of Peter Ramus, a sixteenth-century French

Protestant educational reformer. Ong’s exploration of

Ramism, an influential educational style in early modern

Europe and the colonial United States, pointed him toward

the topics he would develop through the rest of his long and

prolific career.

Ong had learned from Perry Miller’s work on the

intellectual world of colonial New England that Ramism had a

major effect in terms of structuring education (which at the

time, of course, meant Christian education) in more

systematic, analytic ways. Ramus had used what Ong called

the “dichotomized outline” to guide pedagogy—breaking

subjects into component parts, and then more component

parts, and so forth. “Ramus didn’t know it but he was

working out a crude computer flow chart,” said Ong in a 1971

interview. “He dropped memory as a part of rhetoric because

his diagrams and outlines are an elaborate memory system.”

Ong believed that Ramism formed “some kind of bridge

between the early Middle Ages and the modern world.”23 He

23 Ong, Walter. An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry. Cresskill, N.J: Hampton Press, 2002. Pg. 82.

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found a way to think about the issue by reflecting on the

contrast between ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew ways of

knowing the world.24

In his landmark 1967 book, The Presence of the Word, Ong

argued that “the primacy of the Hebrew feeling for the word

suggests a highly auditory sensorium, for word here means

primarily the spoken word.”25 He believed that the Hebraic

stress on face-to-face, oral/aural (and, at its high points,

prophetic) religion carried on into Christianity in ways

that strongly shaped people’s experience at least through

the Renaissance. Working off of Havelock’s Preface to Plato, Ong

posited that ancient Greece had undergone a sort of

cognitive alphabetization, a change that, over the course of

generations, radically altered people’s sense of reality.

24 In this regard Ong, like McLuhan, Havelock, and many others, was indebted to the godfather of orality studies, Milman Parry. In his work in the late 1920s and 1930s, Parry, a scholar of ancient Greek, proved that the Homeric epics had developed in a pre-literate tradition of Greek, oral poetry. The distinction between traditions of oral, epic poetry—which were found in cultures across the pre-modern world—and written poetry was the seed for a wide range of research and theory on social and cognitive differences between oral and literate societies. Havelock’s Preface to Plato concerned the timing and nature of the transition from orality to literacy in Ancient Greece. He argued that itoccurred contemporaneously with Plato and is evidenced by his work.25 Ong, Walter J. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Pg. 12.

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“The alphabet irrupts into sound itself, where the one-

directional flow of time asserts its full power, and it

neutralizes this flow by substituting for sound immobile

letters,” he wrote. “The sense of order and control which

the alphabet thus imposes is overwhelming.”26

In The Presence of the Word, Interfaces of the Word (1977), Orality

and Literacy (1982), and numerous other books and articles,

Ong probed deeply into the cultural and phenomenological

implications of the differences, tensions, and overlaps

between orality and literacy, especially as evident in

historical texts. As with McLuhan, Ong believed that

literacy (and especially alphabetic, as opposed to

pictographic or ideographic, literacy), tended to emphasize

the visual sense over the aural sense. In pieces like “‘I

See What You Say’: Sense Analogues for Intellect,” he

examined the ways in which different societies emphasize

different channels of the human sensorium in their common-

sense epistemologies. The historical trajectory he saw in

Western culture was away from the early Judeo-Christian

26 Ong, 1967, pg. 45.

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aurality more and more toward Greek visuality, such that

contemporary Western culture favors “visual synthesis in its

way of organizing both physical actuality and knowledge as

such.”27

Unlike McLuhan, Ong did not ascribe to these

differences a simple, binary quality. Indeed, he pointed out

“the complexities within the sensorium itself” and called

for more research on the phenomenology of perception.28 That

said, (or, as Ong would note, “that written,”) he did draw

plausible connections between the shift to literacy and

changes in the personality structures and institutional

styles common to modern, Western societies.

“If I ask any reader of this article to think of the

word necessary,” wrote Ong in his 1985 essay, “Writing and

the Evolution of Consciousness,” “he or she will have

present in imagination the letters of the words—vaguely

perhaps, in handwriting or print.”

If I ask you to think of the word necessary for two minutes, 120 seconds, without ever allowing any letters to enter your imagination, you cannot do it. A person from a

27 Ong, Walter J. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1977. Pg. 126.28 Ong, 1977, pg. 130, and Ong, 2002, pg. 108.

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completely oral background, however, will think only of the real word, a sequence of sounds: ne-ces-sa-ry. For the real word “necessary,” the sounded word, cannot ever be present all at once, as written words deceptively seem to be. By thetime I get to the sa-ry, the ne-ces is gone. Recalling soundedwords is like recalling a bar of music, a melody, a sequencein time. Words are events, happenings, not things, as letters make them appear to be. We find it hard to recognizethis obvious truth, so deeply has writing taken possession of our consciousness.29

Ong contended that the aural quality of language in

“pristine” oral cultures tended to produce magical thinking,

to limit what is considered “knowledge” to that which a

person can recall in the present moment, to make language

“additive rather than subordinative” in its grammar, to make

language “aggregative rather than analytic” in its style, to

make people conservative in their disposition, and to keep

language “close to the human lifeworld,” that is, concrete

and actionable.30 Most basically, Ong believed that people

in oral cultures experienced words as having power or

aliveness in ways that are simply incomprehensible to

chirographic and typographic persons, and that such

29 Ong, Walter J. Faith and Contexts. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. Vol. 3, pg. 203.30 Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New Accents. London ; New York: Methuen, 1982. Pgs. 31-42.

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aliveness had ramifications we can be confident existed but

can only strain to comprehend.

One of Ong’s best examples in trying to explain how

profound the differences must be in oral cultures came in an

imaginative exercise, trying to think how one would describe

a horse to someone who only had experience with mechanized

forms of transportation. “Imagine writing a treatise on

horses . . . which starts with the concept not of “horse”

but of “automobile,” built on the readers’ direct experience

of automobiles,” he wrote. “It proceeds to discourse on

horses by always referring to them as ‘wheelless

automobiles,’ explaining to highly automobilized readers all

the points of difference.” Ong concluded that such a

description would ultimately produce an image of horses in

the negative—“horses are only what they are not.”31 Such, he

believed, was the case with our attempts to understand life

in “pristine” oral cultures. There was a cultural-historical

opacity only partly penetrable by scholarly analysis.

31 Ong, 1982, pg. 12. Quoted in Gleick, James. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Vintage Books, 2012. Pg. 29.

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How does an institution maintain continuity without

written records? How does a society frame its history

through memory alone? How does a person constitute his or

her “self” in the absence of any visual, typographic

reflection of that self? These were the kinds of questions

which Ong asked and which scholars of orality and literacy

have built on in his wake.

Ong’s decades-long effort to understand the

oral/literate dynamic put him in a position to comment on

the new technologies that emerged during his lifetime, and

he did so. Looking at the effects of computers and other

electronic media, for instance, Ong saw the need to

differentiate between the commonly synonymous terms

“information age” and “communication age.”32 He was at pains

to rescue meaning, a necessary quality of communication,

from the increasingly vast seas of inert data generated by

computers. Such data could be organized by people into

meaningful, relational form, and hence become communication,

but Ong did not want to lose the sense of interaction which

32 Ong, 2002, pg. 505.

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he saw as fundamental to real communication. “Human verbal

communication is sometimes carelessly conceived of according

to an information model, as simply the movement of an item

from one point to another,” he wrote in a 1996 article. “But

human communication involves much more than simple diffusion

of units of information.”33

Ong had been deeply influenced by Martin Buber’s

concept of the I-Thou interaction—interaction between

persons, and between individuals and God. Having seen that

powerful changes were effected in the transition from

orality to literacy, he was wary of the possibility that

computers could efface the sacred quality of interaction.

This was also a concern of profound importance to Ong’s

contemporary and fellow priest, Ivan Illich.

***

In the era of moral outrage that was the 1970s, perhaps

no one managed to be more outraged by more subjects than

Ivan Illich. Beginning with his publication of Deschooling

Society in 1970, Illich in the seventies published one book

33 Ong, 2002, pg. 507.

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after another attacking the status quos of major

institutional, professional, and social aspects of Western

culture. In Deschooling Society, he argued that universal,

compulsory education had the effect of conflating learning

with schooling, thereby disempowering millions of people

around the world who, he believed, would never have access

to the eighteen or more years of school prescribed in the

First World. In his other best-known work, Medical Nemesis

(1975), he expounded on the concept of “iatrogenesis,” which

means illness or damage caused by medical examination or

treatment. Transportation, energy use, labor, gender—Illich

took up one issue after another, finding major flaws in the

way that modern Western (and, increasingly, non-Western)

societies handled each.

In the 1980s, however, he was given pause by a dawning

realization that he was living through an epochal change:

the replacement of books by computers as society’s dominant

media, and of “bookishness” by informatics as the dominant

means of organizing knowledge and making social metaphors.

“Adverse as the side effects of compulsory literacy have

27

been for most of our contemporaries,” wrote Illich in ABC:

The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (1988), “literacy is still

the only bulwark against the dissolution of language into

‘information systems.’”34

Like Ong, who had a major influence on his work, Illich

tried to face the problem of technological change by

learning from historical precedent. And as Ong had done with

Peter Ramus, Illich found a particular representative from

the Christian literary tradition, Hugh of St. Victor, on

whom to focus his study. But where Ramus had exploited the

capacity of the printing press to expand the role of logic

in Christian pedagogy, Illich argued that Hugh, a twelfth-

century monk, gave evidence of important changes in literacy

well before the European invention of the printing press.

In In the Vineyard of the Text (1993), Illich attempted to

trace the characteristics of the “bookish” culture he

believed to be passing away—thinking of a text as an

abstract entity reproduceable in identical form, placing

spaces between words, reading silently and individually,

34 Illich, Ivan, and Barry Sanders. A B C: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind. San Francisco: North Point press, 1988. Pg. ix.

28

etc.—as historical changes from a preceding kind of

literacy. That previous literacy had been characterized by

the public, religious, out-loud reading practiced by Hugh

and other Christian monastics.35

Illich tended to view historical change as devolution,

and so he saw drawbacks in the emergence of bookishness, and

then further drawbacks in what might come after bookishness.

Since Illich, in Deschooling Society and elsewhere, had called

for the decentralization of education, he is today sometimes

cited as a forerunner of the internet. This claim, while

logical, is dubious, since Illich made it well-known that he

did not like what interactions with screens did to people.

He feared the possible consequences of a computerization of

society even more than he disliked some of the side effects

of compulsory “bookish” literacy.

In 1987, Illich delivered an address entitled “Computer

Literacy and the Cybernetic Dream” to a conference on

technological literacy at Pennsylvania State University. “I

35 Illich, Ivan. In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pgs. 86-92.

29

am concerned about how to keep awake in the computer age,”

said Illich, illustrating his concern through an anecdote he

had read.

Susan teaches high school in Northern Florida. Many ofher students have home computers. When Susan assigns a paperto these students, they run off to their machines. They feedit Susan’s key words, have it retrieve materials from data banks, string these together and present them to the teacheras their homework. One afternoon, Frank, one of these students, stayed on with Susan after class. The paper that week had been on drought and hunger south of the Sahara. Frank wanted to show her more of his printouts, and at one point Susan interrupted him. She said, ‘Frank, tell me, whatdo you feel about this?’ Frank stared at her for a moment and then replied: ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ At this moment the abyss between Susan and Frank comes into view. . . . For Susan, a statement is an utterance; behind each utterance there is somebody who means what she says. And further, Susan cannot mean anything without feeling how this meaning is embodied. . . . For Frank, words are units of information that he strings together into a message. Their objective consistency and denotational precision, not their subjective connotates, count.

Illich went on to take issue with the verb “to

face” as a description of how a person interacts with a

computer screen. In an example suggesting how utterly

different was his view toward technology than was

McLuhan’s, he disparagingly noted McLuhan’s coinage of

the term “interface” to describe technologically

mediated interactions. “I hope that Susan is a friend

who is seeking Frank’s face,” concluded Illich.

30

“Perhaps Susan sees her vocation in seeking Frank’s

face.”36

Illich, fluent in Latin, chose “vocation” in the

sense of “to be called,” and he intended its spiritual

meaning. Likewise, his use of the term “abyss” to

describe the space opening up between Susan and Frank

was meant to have apocalyptic overtones. These choices

are because Illich had a deeply religious motivation

for his work understanding literacy and computer

literacy. So too had Ong and McLuhan.

Part Two – Understanding McLuhan, Ong, and Illich as

Catholic Scholars

There was a peculiar optimism, a particularly American

Catholic optimism, in McLuhan and Ong’s work on orality,

literacy, technology, and media. Both men saw in these

topics evidence of God’s work through humanity. They saw in

the tools of human communication, from clay-block ideographs

to the internet, mysterious patterns of development that

36 Illich, Ivan. In the Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses 1978-1990. New York:Marion Boyars, 1991. Pgs. 205, 207.

31

seemed to indicate an unfolding of God’s incarnation and His

plan for the Earth. “Seen in larger historical, and

prehistorical, perspectives,” wrote Ong, “the age of

technology is part of the great and mysterious evolution of

the universe devised by God.”37

Conversely, there was a pronounced and, again,

particularly Catholic pessimism in Illich’s work on those same

subjects. Illich also saw deep patterns in the history of

media and technology, but to him the trends pointed toward

the deterioration of the sacred in human communication.

Reflecting on the proliferation of graphs, charts, and other

forms of computer-generated, abstract representations of

life (he called them “visiotypes”), Illich said, “Each time

you look at a visiotype, you contaminate yourself with the

virtuality it carries within it.”38

These forms of optimism and pessimism were flip-sides

of the same coin: the survival of the Catholic Church as a

pre-modern institution, set of beliefs, and lineage of 37 Ong, Walter J. Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture. New York: Macmillan, 1957. Pg. 88.38Illich, Ivan, and David Cayley. The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich. New York: House of Anansi Press, 2005. Pg. 160.

32

religious practice in the modern and postmodern milieu of

twentieth-century America. Put simply—all three scholars

were able to tackle the realities of modern media, and their

postmodern implications, because they were working from

sophisticated, nuanced, but in essential ways, pre-modern

Catholic worldviews. To the extent and for the duration that

the unity of pre-modern Catholicism survived into the

twentieth century, so it was possible for Catholic

intellectuals to argue that modern media and technology

could be harnessed to that unity, or that they should be

censured from within it.

To understand, however, why the two North Americans

tackled the subject with optimism verging on millenarianism

while Illich, the European, was pessimistic to the point of

eschatology, we need to look more closely at the history of

American Catholic intellectual life. McLuhan and Ong were

riding an unprecedented wave of post-World War Two American

Catholic self-belief at the very moment that its basis, the

Church of Rome, was beginning to crack under the pressure of

modernity. The North Americans looked at modern technology

33

from the postwar height American power and American Catholic

self-assurance, while Illich looked at it from the vantage

of a chastened, European, postwar Catholicism.

***

The historiography on Catholic intellectualism in the

U.S. repeatedly points to the fact that there were few

respected, Catholic intellectuals in the U.S. prior to the

mid-twentieth century. In order to understand McLuhan and

Ong’s optimism and confidence as Catholic scholars,

therefore, we first have to ask how there came to be North

American Catholic scholars in the first place.

“Nearly all the major Catholic intellectuals writing in

English between 1840 and 1960 were converts to Catholicism,”

writes historian Patrick Allitt.39

The paucity of native-born, Catholic intellectuals in

the U.S. had to do with Catholicism’s status as a

persecuted, minority religion with a predominantly immigrant

population. Allitt writes that American Catholics from the

sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries “faced recurrent

39 Allitt, Patrick. Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Pg. ix.

34

persecution and accusations of treason, along with a torrent

of religious invective, charging them with idolatry and

blasphemy, alleging vicious habits among priests, monks, and

nuns, and depicting the papacy as a bastion of arbitrary,

tyrannical power.”40

Prior to the First World War, this virulent anti-

Catholicism, typified by groups like the American Protective

Association, continued to hold sway. The vast majority of

American Catholics were poor immigrants from Eastern and

Southern Europe, often living in shabby urban ghettoes, and

they spent most of their energy just trying to make a living

and get by in a new, hostile country.

Although the intensity of American anti-Catholicism

abated across the course of the twentieth-century, American

Catholics’ sense of themselves as a minority continued to

play a prominent role in shaping their identity at least

through the 1950s. John F. Kennedy’s victory in the

presidential election of 1960 marked a watershed for

American Catholics, but right prior to that, in the 1950s,

40 Allitt, 1997, pg. 24.

35

Protestant writers like Paul Blanshard and magazines such as

The Nation and Christian Century “saw Catholicism as the antithesis

of American freedom, faulting it for foreign loyalties,

domestic intransigence, censoriousness, and opposition to a

free and vigorous intellectual life.”41

A limitation for non-convert Catholic intellectuals,

then, was the necessity of positioning themselves in

relation to the mainstream Protestantism. One historian has

written that twentieth-century American Catholic culture

“can best be described in terms of ‘the ambiguity of

success.’”42 In question form: has Catholic success in

America ever been the spiritual success of a pure

Christianity, or has it merely been the relative success of

gaining space from or credibility in relation to

Protestantism?

American Catholic intellectuals were also at a

disadvantage in producing innovative work due to their

obedience to the official stances put forth by the Vatican.

41 Allitt, 1997, pg. 310.42 Fisher, James Terence. The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933-1962. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Pg. xiv.

36

Turn-of-the-century Catholic intellectuals who tried to

advance an “Americanist” Catholicism, arguing that political

liberalism and Catholic orthodoxy could co-exist, were

repeatedly rebuked by Rome. Pope Leo XIII made that opinion

explicit in the first papal encylical addressed to the

American Church, Longinqua Oceani (1895). In it he denied

“that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State

and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.”43

His successor, Pope Pius X, set a tone of intellectual

orthodoxy by pressuring John F. Farley, the Archbishop of

New York, to shut down The New York Review, a Catholic

periodical that had published articles on scientific and

political topics the Vatican found suspect.44

In sum, the combination of longstanding anti-Catholic

prejudice; a largely immigrant, poor, and uneducated

population base; and the intellectual conservatism of the

Vatican made for a situation in which there were very few

43 Reher, Margaret Mary. Catholic Intellectual Life in America: A Historical Study of Persons and Movements. New York: MacMillan, 1989. Pg. 73.44 Reher, 1989, pg. 96.

37

American Catholic intellectuals, and those that did exist

had strong limits placed on their independence.

This situation began to change in the period between

the First and Second World Wars. The First World War brought

about a degree of nationalization in American Catholic

institutions, such as the National Catholic Welfare

Conference, that started to bring American Catholic

consciousness out of its “Catholic ghetto” mentality.

Moreover, the stemming of the flow of Catholic immigrants

from Eastern and Southern Europe due to a 1924 federal

immigration restriction bill, combined with the Church’s

focus on neo-Thomism as its intellectual program to combat

modernity, allowed American Catholicism to begin to

stabilize during the first half of the twentieth century.45

At the institutional level, this led to the maturing of

the Catholic higher education system. Dozens of Catholic

colleges had come into being in the U.S. during the

nineteenth century, but few of them were respected

institutions. As late as 1955, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, a

45 Reher, 1989, pg. 114.

38

Catholic priest and Church historian, argued that most

Catholic colleges and universities “were more concerned with

apologetics than with liberal learning.”46 But a few select

institutions—the Catholic University in Washington, D.C. and

the Jesuits’ Saint Louis University, for instance—had by

that time become centers of creative Catholic scholarship.

In a review of The Interior Landscape (1970), a compilation

of McLuhan’s literary criticism, Ong wrote that “a certain

first-hand knowledge of classical, medieval, and Renaissance

texts was taken for granted in this University milieu, being

made possible in great part through the massive, communal

command of Latin possessed by the hundreds of Jesuit

students and several score of Jesuit faculty members who

formed a small but distinctive part of the Saint Louis

University world.”47

Ong attributed part of McLuhan’s success to his time

teaching in this context, but since Catholic converts like

McLuhan (for instance, in the nineteenth century, Orestes

Brownson and Isaack Hecker, both of whom converted from

46 Reher, 1989, pg. xix.47 Ong, 2002a, pg. 76.

39

Unitarianism) had managed to become prominent intellectuals

without such institutional support, the information reflects

even more strongly on Ong himself. Indeed, Ong is a prime

example of the kind of Catholic-born, native intellectual

American Catholicism had largely failed to produce prior to

the mid twentieth-century. The work of postwar American

Catholic intellectuals like Ong at times takes on a

victorious quality; it was not just a high point, but a high

point that stood in relief against an historically low

status quo.

In addition to the institutional maturation of American

Catholicism, the era between World War I and the Second

Vatican Council saw an ironic development in the religion’s

history. Put succinctly, Catholicism’s perceived nature in

the U.S. as a minority religion with pre-modern moorings

went from being a liability to being an asset.

As James Fisher argues in his The Catholic Counterculture in

America: 1933-1962, “the Protestant stress on autonomous

selfhood and a productive vocation in this world produced a

significant crisis in middle-class culture in the late

40

nineteenth century,” a crisis to which American Catholics,

in their relatively isolated sociocultural settings, were

largely immune. “. . . After 1900 the idea of Catholicism as

a potential antitode to bourgeois sterility and

“weightlessness” became suddenly attractive.”48

The cultural attraction of Catholicism’s social and

ethical conservatism was strongly reinforced by the American

experience in the First World War. For the many Americans

for whom the war’s insensate carnage was a confirmation of

the misdirectedness of modernity, Catholicism suddenly

seemed, in comparison to Protestantism, relatively free from

association with the progressive, materialistic attitude

with which the country had approached the war. “World War I

acted as a midwife to American Catholic identity,” concludes

one historian. “From it Catholics emerged with enthusiasm

for ideals and a confidence in their own beliefs.”49

This post-World War I wave of Catholic confidence

attracted a generation of intelligent, proactive American

converts to the Church, most prominently Dorothy Day and

48 Fisher, 1989, xiv.49 Reher, 1989, pg. 112.

41

Thomas Merton. Though renewed anti-Catholic sentiment in the

1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s put a damper on

the development of assertive forms of American Catholic

identity, in the post-World War II era, a set of conditions

supportive of such assertion finally came into place.

American Catholic institutions had stabilized and were

maturing; the religion faced less persecution as the country

turned its attention to the Cold War and the Civil Rights

Movement; Catholics, like many (though certainly not all)

other groups of Americans, enjoyed the high-tide of material

prosperity and national confidence of the postwar era; and,

perhaps most importantly, the Church’s belief that it could

maintain coherent, comprehensive, orthodox religious views

in the modern world remained intact. It was a moment ripe

for the seizing by American Catholic intellectuals.

***

Of my three main subjects, the tie between McLuhan’s

Catholicism and his work is the least obvious. It is

possible to trace an intellectual lineage for McLuhan that

has very little to do with Catholicism. He did much of his

42

graduate work at Cambridge, where he was heavily influenced

by the “New Criticism,” a school of literary theory which

saw pieces of literature as self-contained aesthetic

artifacts, and which was influential in canonizing modernist

poets like William Butler Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

McLuhan’s work through the mid 1940s is clearly in this

vein.50 Furthermore, McLuhan cited his colleague at the

University of Toronto, Harold Innis, as a primary influence.

Inspired by Milman Parry, Innis had published two books—

Empire and Communication (1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951)

—exploring how the forms of media had affected the course of

cultures and empires.

With these non-Catholic influences, and given McLuhan’s

infrequent mention of his Catholic religiosity in public, it

has been possible for some writers to analyze McLuhan

without much reference to his Catholicism.51 Looked at from

another angle, however, Catholicism was at the heart of his

scholarship, and it was there all along.

50 Miller, 1971, pgs. 58-59.51 See, for instance: Willmott, Glenn. McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.

43

While studying in England in the mid 1930s, McLuhan

encountered the work of G.K. Chesterton, perhaps the most

influential (and certainly the most prolific) English-

speaking Catholic convert of the twentieth century. After

meeting Chesterton in person, McLuhan converted to

Catholicism in 1936, and he attended mass almost every day

for the rest of his life.52

As Miller pointed out in his work on McLuhan, the

“Fugitive Group of Southern Writers” with whom McLuhan

associated himself during his time in St. Louis in the 1940s

bore close resemblance to Chesterton’s “pious

agrarianism.”53 Miller argues that McLuhan’s style fit

rather well into the sort of cranky conservatism practiced

by Chesterton or Southern American writers like Allen Tate.

But then, sometime in the 1950s, it took a surprising turn

from “high patrician anguish” to something more like

“euphoric acceptance.”54

52 “Nothing would be allowed to interfere with his daily attendance at mass and communion,” wrote one of McLuhan’s students, David Staines, in a remembrance of his teacher. McLuhan, 2003, pg. 303.53 Miller, 1971, pg. 37.54 Miller, 1971, pgs. 58-59.

44

“While men like Chesterton retreated into the dubious

consolations of nostalgia,” wrote Miller, “McLuhan mounted a

much more adventurous crusade on behalf of the lost

consensus, seeking aids to its recovery in the very culture

that usurped it. This paradoxical enterprise relies upon the

optimistic identification of certain unexpectedly hopeful

features in the structure of an otherwise corrupt

regime. . . . The devil defeated by his own ingenuity!”55

Allitt goes even further in arguing that McLuhan, at

the deepest level, disapproved of much modern technology. He

writes that McLuhan was “bitingly critical” in most of his

analysis of new media and for him, “modern visual media,

film and television, stood squarely in the center of

contemporary consciousness, seeming to personify the

challenge and threat of the modern world to traditional

religious life.”56

While this description may fit McLuhan’s views of the

1940s, if Allitt intends it also for McLuhan’s more well-

55 Miller, 1971, pg. 120.56 Allitt, 1997, pgs. 316, 329.

45

known work of the 1960s, I believe he is attributing more

complexity to McLuhan’s position than was actually there.

By the mid-1960s, McLuhan had become a self-appointed

mystic. Not without precedent in Christian history, he

believed that the good news of the Gospel was such good news

it could redeem anything and everything.

“It would be a comic irony if men proved unable to cope

with abundance and riches in both the economic and psychic

order,” stated McLuhan. “It is not likely to happen. The

most persistent habits of penury are bound to yield before

the onslaught of largesse and abundant life.”57

It seems to me that almost anyone who could take a

position of such profound optimism within 20 years of the

atom bomb and the Holocaust would have to be a committed

antinomian. I see no other explanation for his comment, made

in the same speech as that above, during the height of the

Cold War, that “the Bomb, as pure information, consists of

higher learning.”58

57 McLuhan, 2003, pg. 55.58 McLuhan, 2003, pg. 47.

46

Returning to my earlier comparison of McLuhan with Andy

Warhol and Jack Kerouac, McLuhan was able to combine a

personal sense of Catholic mysticism with the explosive,

increasingly globalized cultural energy of the 1960s to

create a quasi-religious vision of humanity and reality. The

qualification and concern evident in some of McLuhan’s

letters from the 1940s gave way in the sixties and seventies

to something closer to sheer exuberance.59 While Warhol’s

province was visual art, Kerouac’s was fiction and poetry,

and McLuhan’s was a sort of free-form literary-historical-

cultural criticism, all three men had the confidence and

charisma to make their vision enormously appealing to their

contemporaries.

McLuhan’s view was not so different from that expressed

by Busa at the start of this paper. If God created man and

man created technology, how bad could technology be? Might

59 McLuhan, Marshall. Letters of Marshall McLuhan. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1987. See for instance his letter to Clement McNaspy, S.J., from 1946: “It seems obvious that we must confront the secular in its most confident manifestations, and, with its own terms and postulates, to shock it into awareness of its confusion, its illiteracy, and the terrifying drift of its logic.” Pg. 180.

47

it not even part of God’s plan for the unfolding of the

human redemption?

In his writings to other Catholics in the late 1950s,

this was the viewpoint explicitly adopted by Walter Ong.

***

In Frontiers in American Catholicism and American Catholic

Crossroads, Ong’s central argument is that a Christian view

of reality must be historical, in the sense of a

unidirectional, unfolding history standing in contrast to

the pagan or prehistorical view of time as circular.60 This

view was based on the notion that Christ’s incarnation,

death, and resurrection had been real events in history, and

that they marked an unprecedented expansion of possibilities

for human beings.

The viewpoint adopted by Ong and McLuhan owed much to

the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit and

scientist whose books had an enormous influence on

twentieth-century Catholic mysticism. The crucial element of60 See: Ong, 1957, pg. 54. Also: Ong, Walter J. American Catholic Crossroads: Religious-secular Encounters in the Modern World. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1959. Pgs. 1-4.

48

Chardin’s work was not just his global-historical view of

Catholicism—after all, the Vatican had always upheld the

universality of its doctrine—but rather the willingness to

marry such Catholic universalism to the findings of modern

science. A working geologist and paleontologist, Chardin

found it impossible to agree with the Church’s ongoing

denial of Darwinian evolution and of the deep, geological

history of the earth. He came up with new terminology such

as “geosphere,” “biosphere,” and “noosphere” to analyze

world history in a way that would still allow for Christian

teleology.61

Although it put him well outside the mainstream of

1950s Catholic intellectual life, Ong was indeed writing as

a Catholic, in the tradition of Chardin, in his effort to

think of modern technology as evidence of divine evolution.

Ong wrote of the age of technology “as an epoch in what we

may call the “hominization” of the world, that is, the

taking over of our planet by mankind.”62

61 Ong, 1957, pg. 92.62 Ong, 1957, pg. 88.

49

Like Chardin, Ong was a man of formidable intellect,

and he did not think any scientific discovery lay outside

the purview of a Catholic understanding. He stated that the

work of Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and many others

could and should be read and integrated by Catholics—“not a

new understanding of faith and of God in the light of the

new discoveries, but a new understanding of the new

discoveries in the light of faith in relationship to God.”63

A difference between Chardin and Ong lay in the

former’s specialization in geological/paleontological

evidence and the latter’s in textual evidence. Additionally,

Ong attempted to enfold postwar American optimism into his

evolutionary view of Catholicism. He asserted that American

Catholicism, having so many roots outside of the country and

being in the country at the forefront of modern technology,

had become the “proving ground” for modern Catholic

worldviews. “The need for a Christian humanism of this

technological era to which the evolution of the cosmos has

currently brought mankind is a particularly urgent need in

63 Ong, 1959, pg. 10.

50

the United States,” he wrote. “Here the world frontier is

peculiarly an American frontier.”64

Ong was not the first American Catholic to address

modern science from a Catholic viewpoint and to advocate for

an American contribution to Catholicism. In 1896, John Zahm,

Professor of Physics at Notre Dame, had published Evolution and

Dogma, one of several books in which American Catholics

attempted to integrate Darwinism into a Catholic worldview.

Zahm argued that evolution was fundamentally in agreement

with scripture and with Catholic theology. He wrote that the

leading evolutionary theorists of the nineteenth century—men

like Darwin, Lamarck, and St. George Mivart—were “the kings

and prophets of the most active and prolific period of

research that the world has yet witnessed.”65

The argument is very similar to Ong’s position 60 years

later, but the Church’s responses to the two men were very

different and indicate its weakened ability to defend its

anti-modern orthodoxy and its Eurocentrism in the postwar

era. Evolution and Dogma was proscribed by the Sacred

64 Ong, 1957, pg. viii.65 Quoted in Reher, 1989, pg. 79.

51

Congregation of the Index, the Vatican’s list of works

unacceptable to the faith, and Zahm had it withdrawn from

further publication. But no such proscription was issued

against Ong’s radically open-minded and pro-American

writings of the 1950s, nor did the postwar Vatican issue

encyclicals, like Longinqua Oceani or the 1900 Testem

Benevolentiae, censuring American Catholics for their

political liberalism.66

Even before the end of the Second World War, Pope Pius

XII could see that militant Fascism had made it untenable

for the Church to continue to oppose democratic

governance.67 And intellectually, the twentieth century more

and more showed neo-Thomism to be inadequate as a defense

against modern science and scholarship. Compromised by its

wartime politics, lacking viable responses to the problems

posed by modern science, and situated in the ruins of

66 Reher, 1989, pgs. 82-83. Reher writes that it was no coincidence Testem was issued six months after the end of the Spanish American War, in which the “young, Protestant, Republican” United States used its industrial strength to defeat “old, Catholic, monarchical Spain.” Pg. 80.67 Bromley, David G., and Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh, eds. Vatican II and U. S. Catholicism. Greenwich, Conn: JAI Press, 1991. Pg. 24.

52

postwar Europe, the Vatican was in no position to take

assertive leadership in the postwar era.

It is in this context that we can better understand

Ong’s ability and willingness to take the position, in the

1950s, that “American Catholicism is essentially

adaptability, an adaptability keeping alive the spiritual,

interior message of the Gospel in the present-day industrial

world of mass culture, and possible only where the Church is

face to face with this world in its concentrated American

form.”68

If, as historian Mary Reher writes, “It was the

American Catholic community that kept alive the illusion of

American innocence for a half-century after the nation had

abandoned it” (she refers to the half-century after World

War I), we can also say that American Catholics extended the

illusion of the Church’s integrity for a quarter century

after the European Church began to lose hold of it.69

McLuhan, for one, kept up his technological-religious

optimism all the way till his death in 1979. Although he did

68 Ong, 1957, pg.9.69 Reher, 1989, pg. 115.

53

appear somewhat chastened by Vietnam, and perhaps a bit

embarrassed by the heights of his technological utopianism

in the 1960s, still, in the year of his death he was saying

things like, “Electricity creates the angelic or discarnate

being of electronic man, who has no body,” and “Man’s

technology is the most human thing about him.”70 But

McLuhan’s Catholic scholarship was so eccentric even prior

to the Second Vatican Council, his views of human history

and progress emerging from such an obscure, personal

mysticism, that he should not be taken as a typical case.

The unalloyed optimism of Ong’s books of the late

1950s, by contrast, is unique in his oeuvre. His writing

became increasingly focused on scholarly topics, as opposed

to pure theology, after that point, and one suspects the

change has to do with the deflated optimism of American

Catholicism as a whole following the Second Vatican Council.

70 McLuhan, 2003, pgs. 288-289. His power of technological foresight continued to the end as well. In the same lecture, he very accurately predicted the emergence of crowd-sourcing: “Out in the mass audience, every single possible mode of perception exists unawares. But how do we tap that resource? I suggest that one possibility would be to take thesehighly specialist problems to this mass of untutored, non-specialist people. There is always one man in a million for whom any problem is nota problem at all.” Pg. 292

54

This deflation is ironic, for at the same time that Vatican

II affirmed the American political stance on religious

pluralism (Dignitatis Humanae Personae, the council’s

declaration on religious freedom, was principally drafted by

Americans and “had behind it two centuries of American

experience in a religiously pluralistic society”), it also

dealt a blow to the sense of the Church’s unique

infallibility—the foundation on which American Catholic

intellectuals like Ong and McLuhan had stood in confronting

modern media and technology.71

American Catholics of the 1950s who had “persuaded

themselves that their highbrow evangelizing effort was

gaining ever more ground and that a demoralized secularist

enemy was on the verge of capitulation” had to face the

reality, after 1962, that “the long Catholic rear guard

against modernity began to collapse from within.”72

If Ong tamped down his Catholic, utopian vision in a

way that McLuhan did not, there is nonetheless evidence of

Ong’s belief in the divine hand in human history and

71 Reher, 1989, pg. 133.72 Allitt, 1997, pg. 13.

55

technology even in his late publications. As I noted above,

Ong was concerned that data not be confused with

communication, but he was also open to the possibility that

computers would bear out some significance as part of God’s

plan for humanity.

In “Digitization Ancient and Modern,” Ong’s last

publication, written five years before his death, he

attempted to draw linkages between early, pre-alphabetic

forms of writing and the way that digital computers process

information. “Originally,” he argued, “writing was not so

much a “communication” device (involving interchange between

two conscious persons)—although it was this to some extent—

as it was a simple “information” system (a coding system),

although it was not entirely this either. The way into

writing remains, psychologically and sociologically,

somewhat mysterious. At the heart of the mystery is the role

that digitization, now matured in the computer, played in

the ways human beings stumbled into writing in the first

place.”73

73 Ong, 2002a, pg. 548.

56

One senses that Ong was yet taking comfort in the

presence of this felt mystery.

***

Like Ong, Ivan Illich had religiously-informed views of

technology that matured, without losing their basic

orientation, from the start of his career until his death in

2002. Where McLuhan’s was an unqualified optimism and Ong’s,

after the 1950s, a qualified optimism, Illich was always on

the pessimistic end of the spectrum.

Illich’s condemnation of universal, compulsory

education in Deschooling Society came out of his experience

working at Catholic schools in Puerto Rico in the 1950s. He

detected in the Church’s missionary efforts there and

throughout South America a troubling marriage of

ecclesiology and modern development. As against his vision

of the early Church as a group of people freely associating

in their devotion to Christ, he began to suspect that the

modern Church had become institutionalized to the point

where it was merely carrying out its own self-perpetuation.

57

“We want to build community, relying on our techniques,

and are blind to the latent desire for unity that is

striving to express itself among men,” he wrote in 1966. “In

fear, we plan OUR Church with statistics, rather than

trustingly searching for it.”74

Illich’s deeply distrusted technological or scientific

management of human beings. In contrast to McLuhan, Illich

believed that the work of the Devil should be seen as the

work of the Devil, not as signs of a new age of

antinomianism. Without going so far as to attribute

causation, it is certainly a meaningful correlation that

McLuhan was born to a Baptist mother in Alberta, Canada,

while Illich was born to a Sephardic Jewish mother in

Austria, Vienna. Although he spent the war years studying at

the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, the destruction

of the war in Europe, and the Church’s inability to make

meaningful interventions in it must have affected him.

74 Illich, Ivan. The Church, Change, and Development. Chicago: Urban Training Center Press, 1970. Pg. 32.

58

In The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich, David

Cayley interviewed Illich in an attempt to clarify a theme

he saw throughout his work—the idea that the history of the

Catholic Church had been one of increasing corruption, and

that the history of Western modernity was that of

institutions, initially modeled on the Church, following

parallel tendencies toward corruption.

Although one need not see this Catholic background to

understand Illich’s criticism of modern school systems,

hospitals, energy departments, and so forth, it is clear

that he saw his body of work in this light. His early

writings were critiques of the “epoch of instrumentality,”

while the later ones were attempts to interpret an epochal

shift, from instrumentality to information systems, such

that those who chose to could opt out of both.75

Illich wanted people to opt out of instrumentality,

institutions, and information systems so they would have a

chance to discover sacred presence. He studied the history

of literacy because he felt it to be a window onto the

75 Illich and Cayley, 2005, pgs. 156, 228.

59

religious orality and silence from which he thought literacy

emerged. He studied the history of technology in search of

the religious embodiment and interpersonal connection from

which he believed technology emerged. “Silence, according to

Western and Eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the

emergence of persons,” said Illich in “Silence is a

Commons,” a 1982 speech he gave in Japan. “It is taken from

us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made

increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for

thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for

moving.”76

Illich was a critic and a contrarian—to a fault, but

not to the core. At the core was a desire for people to have

sociocultural circumstances in which they would have at

least a chance to find freedom from sociocultural

circumstances. This freedom he spoke of as “gratuity,” the

sense of life as a divine gift. “Gratuity in its most

beautiful flowering, is praise, mutual enjoyment . . . ” he

76 Illich, 1992, pg. 53.

60

wrote. “The message of Christianity is that we live

together.”77

Illich’s history, his “mirror of the past,” was his

effort to show how technology and systems can alienate us

from the simple, holy, human togetherness he saw modeled in

the life of Jesus and the early Church. McLuhan, by

contrast, believed that new media and technology could

enhance this togetherness. Somewhere in between McLuhan’s

celebration of technology and Illich’s condemnation of it

lay Ong’s scholarship. Less certain of conclusions than

either of these men, he was also more careful in his

cataloguing of what he took to be God’s good creation.

Conclusion

To conclude, I would like to reflect on a distinction I

have been making throughout this paper, that between pre-

modern, modern, and postmodern. I will write first about Ong

and McLuhan, and then treat Illich as a related but separate

case.

77 Illich and Cayley, 2005, pg. 229.

61

In arguing that McLuhan and Ong brought pre-modern

Catholic views to bear on a postmodern technology like the

computer, I do not want to make the suggestion that there is

something necessarily pre-modern about Catholic religious

belief. People have been and continue to be modern and

postmodern religionists of all stripes in both modern and

postmodern societies.

What I mean by “pre-modern” is the way in which McLuhan

and Ong were able to think of the Catholic Church in

externalized, universal terms. In the mid-twentieth-century

arena of competition between secular ideologies—communism,

capitalism, Freudianism, Darwinism, science—they conceived

of the Church as a similarly bounded, coherent force, and

one that was divinely sanctioned. “If a community of

interests is manifested in a general way for all human

beings of the present day,” wrote Ong in 1957, “it is doubly

manifest for present-day Catholics, who live in a tradition

capable of penetrating indifferently all cultures, and,

indeed, designed by God to do precisely this.”78

78 Ong, 1957, pg. 2.

62

The Church was an historical actor on the stage of a

coherent human history. Perhaps alone among the Christian

sects (or so it seemed, at least, in America), it could

contend with the ideologies and technologies of secular

modernity. It could, perhaps, even yoke them to its divine

purposes. But as historians of religion have written, for a

religion to accept alternative worldviews as competitors is

already a relinquishment of its claim to universality.79 To

argue that something is universal implies the possibility of

non-universality in a way that the absence of a debate would

never suggest.

For a brief window in postwar America, Catholic

intellectuals could believe in the pre-modern Church because

they believed that it could win. But to the extent that the

Church acknowledged cultural and religious pluralism in the

Second Vatican Council—acknowledged the terms of a debate it

had already in fact joined—it became harder and harder for 79 See, for instance: Turner, James. Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. And Chadwick, Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century: The Gifford Lectures in the University of Edinburgh for 1973-4. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

63

Catholics to retain the purity of their univeralism. Even

today, it would be going too far to say that the Church has

become postmodern. There is still a coherence to Catholic

theology and doctrine, but it is a fractured coherence. The

Church since Vatican II has looked more like a Picasso than

a Michelangelo.

It was thus that Catholic intellectuals like Ong had to

transfer their Catholic universalism from public and

institutional terms to communal or private terms. Because

McLuhan’s convert Catholicism had been more idiosyncratic to

begin with, and because he was not a priest, less of a

change is evident in his post-Vatican II work. He had not

needed the Church to approve his religious-technological

utopianism before Vatican II, and he did not need afterward,

either.

Illich turned the movement from universal Catholicism

to personal/interpersonal Catholicism into a crusade—

condemning the Church for having made of itself a universal

institution in the first place, and criticizing the

continuation of its institutionalization.

64

Illich’s Catholicism was, in this sense, older than the

pre-modern Church. He aligned himself with the pre-

Constantinian Church, the Church of elective believers. Even

so, it makes sense to include Illich with Ong and McLuhan

due to the vehemence and repetition of his anti-institutional

stance. For a while in the 1960s and ‘70s, Illich’s

iconoclasm became its own kind of school. Like other leaders

of the counterculture, he brought a universalizing

confidence to his attack on forms of universalism.

But he pulled himself out of this catch-22. In 1976,

Illich shut down his own, highly successful institution, the

Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernevaca,

Mexico, before it could be compromised by the inertia of

institutionalization. He moved from outright polemics to

polemical history, and he encouraged people not to think of

his work as definitive, or even fixed. He questioned the

wisdom of his own decision to allow people to record him,

when he did allow it.

“When Illich was assigned to Puerto Rico in 1956,”

recalled Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, a fellow priest, “he began a

65

practice of visiting a small community of Puerto Ricans in a

barrio called Playita Cortada, not far from Ponce. He would

construct a temporary altar on the porch of a small family

house and gather the people for mass.” Illich’s friend,

Professor of Sociology at Fordham University, Dorothy Dohen,

would tell him he “would do so much more for the people of

God and for himself if he would go back to Playita

Cortada.”80

It was a possibility of which Illich wanted to be

reminded.

80 Hoinacki, Lee, and Carl Mitcham. The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Pg. 38.

66

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