Harold Bloom (Ph.D. in English, Yale, 1955) v. Walter J. Ong (Ph.D. in English, Harvard, 1955)

Abstract

In my 8,400-word review essay "Harold Bloom (Ph.D. in English, Yale, 1955) v. Walter J. Ong (Ph.D. in English, Harvard, 1955)," I briefly review the life and work of Harold Bloom and Walter J. Ong. As part of Ong's lengthy Jesuit training, he studied the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274) in his graduate studies in philosophy (in Latin) and later in his graduate studies in theology (in Latin). But Bloom appears to be unfamiliar with Aquinas' thought, even though the non-Catholics Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler of the University of Chicago included Aquinas' uncompleted Summa theologiae in the 1952 edition of the Great Books of the Western World. In any event, I quote Aquinas' thought occasionally in my review essay from Matthew Fox's accessible 1992 550-page book Sheer Joy: [Four] Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, in which Fox includes passages from 52 works in Latin by Aquinas that he has translated for us. When I discuss Bloom's 1992 book The American Religion, I focus on his chapter on New Age movements and his pointed critique of one of Fox's earlier books. However, overall, I argue that Ong's work offers Americans better guidance for their self-fashioning than Bloom's 1992 book does.