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

Thomas J. Farrell
Professor Emeritus in Writing Studies
University of Minnesota Duluth
Web: www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell
Email: tfarrell@d.umn.edu


In The Anatomy of Bloom: Harold Bloom and the Study of Influence and Anxiety (2014), the Bulgarian literary scholar Alistair Heys argues that Yale’s literary critic and provocateur Harold Bloom’s work “is best understood as an expression of reprobate American Protestantism and yet haunted by a Jewish fascination with the Holocaust” (I am here quoting from the publisher’s description of his book at their website).
Heys’ book includes a “Preface” (pages ix-xiv), followed by chapters on “Bloom’s Gnosis” (pages 1-33), “The Scene of Instruction” (pages 35-51), “Bloom and Derrida” (pages 53-68), “Bloom and De Man” (pages 69-81), “Bloom and New Historicism” (pages 83-95), “Bloom and Judaism” (pages 97-144), and “Bloom and Protestantism” (pages 145-218). The book also includes notes (pages 219-255) and an index (pages 257-261).
For a sketch of Bloom’s life and career, see the Wikipedia entry about him. For a more detailed discussion of his Jewishness, see Heys’ chapter “Bloom and Judaism” (pages 97-144). For Heys’ account of Bloom’s view of Protestantism, see Heys’ chapter “Bloom and Protestantism” (pages 145-218). However, I am seriously disappointed in the brevity of Heys’ discussion of Bloom’s 1992 book The American Religion (pages 2, 4, 8, 31, 145, 148, and 194-202), which will be my central focus in the present essay.
To be sure, Harold Bloom (1930-2019) was born into a relatively poor working-class Jewish family and raised in the United States, which meant that sooner or later he would have to come to terms somehow with how his own personal identity as an American would relate to prestige culture in American culture from colonial times onward that was dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), and former Protestants – down to, say, the election of the Irish American Roman Catholic, but Harvard educated Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts to be president in 1960. WASPs tended to be anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic and anti-black and anti-certain other groups as well.
For a detailed discussion of the gradual demise of the WASP prestige culture in American culture, see Robert C. Christopher’s 1989 book Crashing the Gates: The De-WASPing of America’s Power Elite.
As an undergraduate at Cornell University (class of 1951), Bloom came of age when anti-Jewish bias was still prevalent in American academic circles. He received his Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 1955. He was a member of Yale’s English Department from 1955 to 2019. However, Bloom also lived through the waning of anti-Jewish bias in American academic circles and the concomitant rise of noteworthy Jewish scholars such as himself.
As to Bloom’s own personal religion, he is not a theist, but a non-theistic idolater. His idol is William Shakespeare. For Bloom’s religion, Shakespeare’s writings are his religious scriptures. Bloom has declared his extravagant bardolatry is his surprise bestseller Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998).
Evidently independently of Bloom’s surprise 1998 bestseller, Phillip Cary published the book Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (2000) – in effect, contesting Bloom’s claim about Shakespeare’s invention of the human by more than a few centuries. Apart from contesting Bloom’s subtitle, I recognize that I tend to favor Aquinas’ critique of Plato and Platonists, including implicitly St. Augustine of Hippo. For a recent cogent critique of Augustine, see the non-Catholic Stephen Greenblatt’s 2017 book The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. For a positive elaboration of the relevant thought of the medieval Italian Dominican theologian St. Thomas Aquinas (c.1225-1274), see the Reverend Dr. Matthew Fox’s 2016 revised edition of his 1999 book Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society.
Now, as Heys notes, Bloom does indeed come from a Jewish background, and he was understandably haunted by the Holocaust – as are many other people including not only Jews but also Christians. For example, haunted by the Holocaust, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church passed its landmark declaration about the Jews known by its Latin tag-name as Nostra Aetate (also known as the Declaration on the Church’s Relation to Non-Christian Religions).
But Bloom’s view of American Protestantism needs to be intelligently challenged and firmly rejected, as I will argue below.

WALTER J. ONG’S WORK

My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). For a survey of Ong’s life and work, see the 2015 revised and expanded second edition of my book Walter Ong’s Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (1st ed., 2000).
As part of Ong’s Jesuit training, he studied the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas in his philosophical studies (in Latin) and also again later in his theological studies (in Latin) – before he later went to Harvard University for his doctoral studies in English. However, later, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church downgraded Aquinas a wee bit from his most favored status earlier in the twentieth century. But did Ong study all 52 of Aquinas’ works from which Fox translates excerpts in his excellent 1992 550-page book Sheer Joy: [Four] Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality? In all honesty, I do not know.
For a bibliography of Ong’s 400 or so publications, including information about reprintings and translations, see Thomas M. Walsh’s “Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006” in the 2011 book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (pages 185-245). (If a comparably comprehensive bibliography of Bloom’s many publications has been published, I am not aware it.)
Now, in the “Preface” to his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (pages 9-13), he mentions Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and certain other noteworthy contemporary thinkers:
“At a few points I refer in passing to the work of French and other European structuralists – variously psychoanalytic, phenomenological, linguistic, or anthropological in cast – such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Tzvetan Todorov, not to mention Claude Levi-Strauss and certain cisatlantic critics such as Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Harold Bloom, who are more or less in dialogue with these Europeans. Many readers will doubtless note that the works of these scholars and the present volume share common themes and perhaps even a kind of common excitement” (page 10).
But Heys does not happen to advert explicitly to Ong’s work.
Unfortunately for Ong, the longstanding anti-Catholic bias in the prestige culture in American culture has not entirely waned to this day, as the former Catholic religion historian Philip Jenkins argues in his 2003 book The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice and as the American Jesuit Mark S. Massa also argues in his 2003 book Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice. 
As to Ong’s sense of identity as an American Catholic in the midst of a sea of American Protestants, he uses the imagery of leaven (yeast) to suggest how American Catholics may interact with American culture in his first book Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture (1957, page 27). Years later, Ong once again invoked the modest imagery of leaven in his article “Yeast: A Parable for Catholic Higher Education” in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America, volume 162 (April 7, 1990): pages 347-349 and 362-363, which is reprinted in volume four of Ong’s Faith and Contexts (1999, pages 169-176).
In the United States in the twentieth century, most non-Protestant undergraduate English majors, including myself (class of 1966 at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri, where I first encountered Ong in the fall semester of 1964), also, like Bloom, had to come to terms somehow with their own personal identity as an American in respect to the predominantly WASP prestige culture in American culture historically. Under the circumstances, perhaps most non-Protestant undergraduate English majors in the United States in the twentieth century had to work out a hyphenated or hybrid sense of American identity – a byproduct of the famous American melting pot.
The American scholar Stephen Greenblatt published the 1980 book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. I like the expression “self-fashioning.” For me, my own personal self-fashioning started well before my undergraduate years, but my process of self-fashioning became far more deeply earnest for me during my undergraduate years, as it has continued to be for me ever since then. In writing the present essay, I am carrying forward my own personal self-fashioning.
By way of digression, I should point out here that I heard the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), a Baptist minister, speak at Saint Louis University on Monday, October 12, 1964. In addition, I joined the last leg of his march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and heard him speak at the rally in Montgomery on March 25, 1965. For me, all of my Ong-related publications have been part of my own personal Via Transformativa path in life (in Fox’s terminology, discussed below).
The American alcoholic novelist William Faulkner (1897-1962) has memorably profiled the white anti-black male racist of the Old South in the character of the arrogant Thomas Sutpen in his 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! No doubt Dr. King’s civil rights movement made irreversible inroads with regard to Jim Crow laws and customs in the Old South. Nevertheless, Mayor Richard J. Daley’s white police in Chicago staged a televised police riot against demonstrators in Chicago at the time of the 1968 Democratic Convention -- and showed the world what we can expect from arrogant white police – a tradition that the certain police in Minneapolis continued on May 25, 2020, in the tragic death of George Floyd in police custody. 
In any event, apart from the fact that both Ong and Bloom received their doctoral degrees in English from different prestigious universities in 1955 (Ong from Harvard; Bloom from Yale), and apart from the fact that both of them occasionally published books and articles about religion, do they have anything else in common? Yes, they do. Ong published his 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness, the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University. And Bloom published his 1982 book Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. So both of them were interested in contesting behavior (displayed, for example, by the arrogant Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner’s 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!).
For further discussion of Faulkner and male agonism, see my essay “Faulkner and Male Agonism” in the 1998 book Time, Memory, and the Verbal Arts: Essays on the Thought of Walter Ong, edited by Dennis L. Weeks and Jane Hoogestraat (pages 203-221). For further discussion of the homework that Faulkner did for his portrait of Sutpen, see the 2010 book Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Plantation Diary.
No doubt the arrogant President Tweety is a cultural and psychological descendant of the fictional Thomas Sutpen, but he is not as smart as Sutpen is portrayed to be. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate Tweety’s arrogance.
Now, like Ong and Bloom, Rene Girard (1923-2015) was interested in contesting behavior in the form of what he refers to as mimetic desire. In 1993, the journal Religion and Literature, published out of the University of Notre Dame, published “Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: A Conversation with Rene Girard” conducted by Rebecca Adams. One central point in their conversation is what they refer to as the “imitation” of Christ. In response, Ong published his short article “Mimesis and the Following of Christ” in Religion and Literature, volume 26, number 2 (1994): pages 73-77, which is reprinted in volume four of Ong’s Faith and Contexts (1999, pages 177-181). Briefly, Ong argues that Christians are called upon to follow Christ, rather than imitate Christ. Imitating Christ invokes in the Christian a certain kind of contesting behavior with a model. But following Christ does not invoke any contesting. For self-described Christians of all sorts, following Christ resembles, in effect, following your bliss, as Joseph Campbell’s advises.
In any event, Ong’s persistent interest in contesting tendencies is also manifest in certain selections in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (2002).
It may be the case that all forms of human imitation of human exemplars trigger the spirit of contesting and rivalry. Consequently, because humans are made in the image and likeness of God, perhaps humans should aim the imitation spirit to imitating the divine attributes of goodness and compassion and justice and peace and beauty, as Aquinas’ thought suggests. Of course, by definition, there would be no contest. But I am just saying that this strikes me as the best way for humans to direct their imitation spirit. Of course, this is just Aquinas’ view of the divine attributes, and some people might disagree with him about those divine attributes.
In any event, Aquinas says, “‘From frequent meditation the fire of charity is enkindled in the heart. And from this a spiritual joy is born within the heart’” (quoted in Fox’s 1992 book Sheer Joy, pages 267-268; Fox’s source: Aquinas’ Commentary on the Letter to the Ephesians [1259-1265; 1272-1273]). I suspect that Aquinas is drawing on his own personal experience of frequent meditation in making these two claims.
Now, Aquinas also says, “‘Sacred writings are bound in two volumes – that of creation and that of Holy Scripture’” (quoted in Fox’s Sheer Joy, page 59; Fox’s source: Aquinas’ Sermons on the Two Precepts of Charity and the Ten Precepts of the Law [1273]).
Consequently, for Aquinas, frequent meditation could include not only frequent meditation of Holy Scripture, but also frequent meditation on creation – or a combination of both. For one example of a guided meditation on creation, see the “Contemplation to Attain Love” in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the found of the Jesuit order (standardized numbered sections 230-237).
In the spirit of the two precepts of charity, the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984), who wrote two book-length studies of Aquinas’ thought, summed up his (Lonergan’s) guidance for people in five so-called transcendental precepts: (1) Be Attentive, (2) Be Intelligent, (3) Be Reasonable, (4) Be Responsible, and (5) Be in Love.
Nevertheless, Aquinas makes another point regarding our imitation spirit that is worth quoting here to round off this discussion: “‘[W]e ought to think much of the goods of others, [but] in such a way as not to disparage those [goods] we have received ourselves, because if we did disparage them, that would give us sorrow’” – which in turn could trigger despair (quoted in Fox’s Sheer Joy, page 281; Fox’s source: Aquinas’ Summa theologiae [1266-1273]). People need to have a measure of hope in their lives about themselves and their capacities for making a contribution to society to go on living.
Incidentally, I have discussed both Ong and Bloom in my article “Walter Ong and Harold Bloom can help us understand the Hebrew Bible” in the journal Explorations in Media Ecology, volume 11, numbers 3&4 (2012): pages 255-272. 


AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM

Now, the massive classic study of colonial prestige culture among the college-educated is the American alcoholic scholar Perry Miller’s 1939 book The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Among other things, Miller found only one self-described Aristotelian in seventeenth-century New England. All other college-educated seventeenth-century New Englanders were self-described Ramists – that is, followers of the French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572).
Now, the massive classic study of Peter Ramus, his antecedents, and his allies is Ong’s 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. For Ong, the Art of Reason refers to the truncated Art of Reason that emerged in the Age of Reason (also known as the Enlightenment) in Locke, Descartes, Kant, and others. But Bloom never mentions Ong’s 1958 classic study in his idiosyncratic 1992 book.
As to what Ong refers to as the earlier Art of Discourse, Aquinas would be one exemplar, among many, of the Art of Discourse. Moreover, the Art of Discourse did not just disappear with the emergence of the Art of Reason as exemplified in Locke, Descartes, Kant, and others, as Thomas O. Sloane shows in his 1997 book On the Contrary: The Protocol of Traditional Rhetoric. 
Unfortunately, the American Jesuit theologian Donald L. Gelpi does not happen to advert explicitly to Miller’s 1939 book or to Ong’s 1958 book about Ramus and Ramist logic. Nevertheless, Gelpi traces the American Protestant dialectical imagination, as he styles it, in his 2000 book Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism (pages 82, 132, 164, 172, 174, 192, 193, 206, 223, 224, 280, 281, and 282) – well into the post-Revolutionary period in which Bloom claims the so-called American Religion emerged. Briefly, Gelpi contrast the American Protestant dialectical imagination with the traditional Roman Catholic analogical imagination – of which Aquinas is a leading exemplar.
Ong, for example, reviewed that American Jesuit George P. Klubertanz’s 1960 book St. Thomas Aquinas on Analogy: A Textual Analysis and Systematic Synthesis in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America, volume 104 (January 28, 1961): pages 574-575.
In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, I give the American Jesuit Joseph G. Knapp credit for adverting to both Miller’s 1939 book and Ong’s 1958 book in his (Knapp’s) 1971 book Tortured Synthesis: The Meaning of Melville’s Clarel (pages 118 and 119, respectively). Regardless of how limited Knapp’s understanding of those two books may be, I give him credit for referring to both of them because I cannot find any other Melville scholars who mention those two books in their discussions of Melville’s lengthy poem Clarel.
Now, the non-Catholics Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer J. Adler included Aquinas’ uncompleted Summa theologiae in the 1952 edition of the Great Books of the Western World. For an excellent 500-page sampler of Aquinas’ thought from 52 of his works in Latin, see Fox’s excellent 1992 book Sheer Joy: [Four] Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, which Dover Publications has just reissued in 2020. Fox creatively constructs his four conversations with Aquinas around the four spiritual paths that Fox had formulated in his earlier work: (1) the Via Positiva, (2) the Via Negativa, (3) the Via Creativa, and (4) the Via Transformativa. But Bloom appears to know nothing about Aquinas’ thought.
For further discussion of Fox’s excellent book, see my 3,600-word online essay “Matthew Fox’s 2020 Reissued Book on Thomas Aquinas, and Walter J. Ong’s Thought” that is available through the University of Minnesota’s digital conservancy:
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/213541

For a much fuller discussion of Fox’s excellent book and optimal human development, see my 23,000-word online essay “Scott Newstok’s 2020 Book about Renaissance Education, and Walter J. Ong’s Thought” that is also available through the University of Minnesota’s digital conservancy:
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/213034
Now, according to the Wikipedia entry about the Jesuit-educated Irish novelist James Joyce (1882-1941), the author of the semi-autobiographical character Stephen Daedalus in the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and in the novel Ulysses (1922; see Stephen’s musings about the “ineluctable modality of the visible”), he was deeply influenced by Aquinas’ philosophy (which is referenced in the Wikipedia entry to Richard Ellman’s 1982 biography of Joyce, pages 60, 190, 340, and 342).
Ong reviewed the American Jesuit William T. Noon’s 1957 book Joyce and Aquinas in the American Catholic philosophical journal The New Scholasticism, volume 31, number 4 (October 1957): pages 553-555.
In any event, in my estimate, I still consider Sacvan Bercovitch’s 1975 book The Puritan Origins of the American Self (2nd ed., with a lengthy new preface by the author, 2011) more convincing than Bloom’s idiosyncratic 1992 book The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation -- with its wishful thinking about an alleged post-Christian American nation. For further discussion of this kind of wishful thinking, see Ong’s essay “Post-Christian or Not?” in his 1967 book In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (pages 147-164).
Now, because we noted above that Bloom proclaims himself to be a non-theistic idolater in his 1998 book about Shakespeare, we should note here that in Bloom’s idiosyncratic 1992 book about the so-called American Religion, he says, “I myself am an unbelieving Jew of strong Gnostic tendencies, and a literary critic by profession” (page 13). So what is prompting our literary critic by profession to write a book in which he styles himself as a religion critic?
In the “Invocation: The Evening Land” (pages xi-xiii), Bloom says, “The essence of the American is the belief that God loves her or him, a conviction shared by nearly nine out of ten of us, according to a Gallup poll. To live in a country where a vast majority so enjoys God’s affection is deeply moving, and perhaps an entire society can sustain being the object of so sublime a regard, which after all was granted only to King David in the whole of the Hebrew Bible” (page xiii).
As far as I know, Ong does not happen to advert to King David in the Hebrew Bible as an exemplar of anything. However, Ong does discuss what he, at times, refers to as the inward turn of consciousness – and, at other times, as inner-directedness (David Riesman’s terminology). What Bloom here refers to as “The essence of the American belief that God loves her or him” is, in effect, what Ong refers to alternatively as inner-directedness or the inward turn of consciousness.
Subsequently in Bloom’s chapter two (pages 31-46), he says, “An American now is convinced that God loves her or him (88 percent affirm this) or perhaps has that affection (9 percent) and only a few (3 percent) believe that they are not beloved of eternity. If one reflects that two out of three Evangelicals (31 percent of Americans) believe that God speaks to them directly , then one has the sense that American awareness of God, and of the relation between God and self, is very different from that of European Christianity, and perhaps from that of any Christianity the world has yet seen” (page 41).
However, the idea of God’s immanence in the soul (or psyche) is not exactly unknown in the earlier history of Christianity – indeed, God immanence is an integral part of the early Christian and medieval Christian tradition of thought about what is referred to as deification. See the following four scholarly studies:
(1) Norman Russell’s 2004 book The Doctrine of Deification in Greek Patristic Tradition;
(2) A. N. Williams’ 1999 book The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas;
(3) Bernhard Blankenhorn’s 2015 book The Mystery of Union with God: Dionysian Mysticism in Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas;
(4) Daria Spezzano’s 2015 book The Glory of God’s Grace: Deification According to St. Thomas Aquinas. 
But for a more accessible presentation of Aquinas’ thought, see Fox’s 1992 550-page book Sheer Joy.
Briefly, Bloom’s thesis in his idiosyncratic 1992 book is that the combined impact in WASP prestige culture of the Declaration of Independence, the American revolution, and the adoption, after considerable civic debate, of the U.S. Constitution produced around 1800 the emergence of what he refers to as the American Religion – which in his view somehow includes not only certain home-grown American religious movements but also certain home-grown WASP literary figures such as Whitman, Emerson, Melville, and others.
Of course, the conventional wisdom is that the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the adoption of the U.S. Constitution ushered in our American political liberalism and our economic liberalism. In light of the emergence of our political liberalism and economic liberalism, perhaps the blooming of major American literary figures in the nineteenth century is not surprising. 
Of course, before, say, 1800, Jews, Catholics, black, and certain other groups were not part of the WASP prestige culture in American culture, and after 1800, they were still not part of the WASP prestige culture in American culture. Despite Bloom’s blathering about the so-called American Religion, he has nothing significant to say in his idiosyncratic 1992 book about white anti-black racism and the history of slavery and white supremacy in American culture. However, Bloom may discuss our tragic heritage of slavery in another publication that I am unaware of.
Slavery is often described as our original sin, the tragic results of which are still with us, as the tragic death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, in police custody in Minneapolis shows. For the record, I think that peaceful protests of his death are warranted. However, I am sad to see the further loss of lives and the destruction of property and the looting of stores. I am also sad to see the arrogant Tweety inflaming the situation in an effort to advance his re-election in 2020.
Unfortunately, in Ong’s 400 or so publications, he does not discuss our tragic heritage of slavery in detail. Of the four paths of spirituality that Fox discusses with Aquinas (the Via Positiva, the Via Negativa, the Via Creativa, and the Via Transformativa), the Via Transformativa was the not often explicitly expressed in Ong’s work – that is, unless you see the entire body of Ong’s mature work aimed at engendering a broad Via Transformativa in Western culture. I have no doubt that Ong himself saw his mature work as at least a significant contribution to helping to transform Western culture and thereby bring about a measure of greater justice in the Western world and elsewhere. Let me explain my reasoning about this.
In Ong’s all-important 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason, he (Ong) explicitly acknowledges that he borrowed his thesis about the aural-to-visual shift in Western philosophical thought from the French lay Catholic philosopher Louis Lavelle (page 338, note 54). In turn, Ong’s former teacher and friend the Canadian Catholic convert and Renaissance specialist Marshall McLuhan borrowed Ong’s thesis about the aural-to-visual shift in Western culture and amplifies it with his own parallels and analogies, some of which are flawed, in his widely read 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man.
To understand just how deeply aural in orientation McLuhan was, see Paula McDowell’s perceptive short article “Elsie McLuhan’s Vocal Science” in the March 2020 PMLA (pages 378-386).
Like Bloom, McLuhan was a provocateur. But Ong characteristically was not a provocateur. In his mature work from the early 1950s onward, he is usually irenic in tone. He also tends to be contemplative in his attitude toward the works of other scholars. This contemplative quality characterizes most of the shorter selections that I have listed in the Appendix at the end of the present essay.
Just as Ong reviewed McLuhan’s 1951 book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man in a Catholic-sponsored journal, so too Ong reviewed McLuhan’s 1962 book in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America, volume 107 (September 15, 1962): pages 743 and 747, which is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (2002, pages 307-308).
In his review, Ong says, “The present work, like much of McLuhan’s utterance, is prophetic in the classical sense of the term. It is the result of a live realization of a truth that at least partially transcends immediate powers of utterance and that, as uttered, will affect hearers diversely. Those whose antennae are as sensitive as McLuhan’s will be overjoyed at this degree of articulateness about a vast range of mysteriously linked cultural phenomena” (page 308).
Granted, McLuhan was future-oriented, as prophets usually are. However, I think that Ong’s claim about McLuhan being prophetic is an overstatement, to say the least. In my estimate, it would be more accurate to characterize McLuhan as a provocateur who was deeply influenced by the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas – who excelled in seeing parallels and analogies, as Fox shows in his excellent accessible 1992 book Sheer Joy.
But it would not suit Ong’s sense of modesty to say that his own mature work is “prophetic in the classical sense of the term.” However, I think that this is exactly how he saw his own mature work – and it certainly is how I see his mature work from the early 1950s onward.
As to how Ong himself sees “a vast range of linked cultural phenomena,” he explicitly formulated his own relationist thesis in the “Preface” to his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (pages 9-13), mentioned above. He says the following in the first sentence: “The present volume carries forward work in two earlier volume by the same author, The Presence of the Word (1967) and Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (1971).” He then discusses these two earlier volumes briefly. Then he says: “The thesis of these two earlier works is sweeping, but it is not reductionist, as reviewers and commentators, so far as I know, have all generously recognized: the works do not maintain that the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality, causes or explain everything in human culture and consciousness. Rather, the thesis is relationist: major developments, and very likely even all major developments, in culture and consciousness are related, often in unexpected intimacy, to the evolution of the word from primary orality to its present state. But the relationships are varied and complex, with cause and effect often difficult to distinguish” (pages 9-10).
Major cultural developments include the rise of modern science, the rise of modern capitalism, the rise of representative democracy, the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of the Romantic Movement in philosophy, literature, and the arts. 
In effect, Ong implicitly works with this relationist thesis in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason – his major exploration of the influence of the Gutenberg printing press that emerged in the mid-1450s. Put differently, Ong, in effect, transformed the aural-to-visual-shift thesis that he works with in his 1958 book into the more expansive relationist thesis that he explicitly owns as his own in his 1967, 1971, and 1977 books (and subsequently in his 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, his most widely translated book).
Taking a hint from Ong’s own movement from his 1958 thesis to his 1977 relationist thesis, we might take a further step to a more generalized relationist approach in relating the works of other scholars to Ong’s multi-dimensional thought in developing his 1958 thesis and in developing the relationist thesis he claims informs his 1967, 1971, and 1977 books (and subsequently his 1982 book). For examples of how this relationist approach to relating the works of other scholars to Ong’s multi-dimensional thought, see my resource document “A Concise Guide to Five Themes in Walter J. Ong’s Thought and Selected Related Works” that is available online through the University of Minnesota’s digital conservancy:

http://hdl.handle.net/11299/189129
In the spirit of giving Bloom credit where credit is due, I give him credit for the many irenic appreciations of literary figures and literary works and literary critics that he has written in his many sole-authored books and in the many collections of critical essays that he has written. Within the constraints of his personality, he has attempted to the best of his ability to write fair appreciations – or at least as fair as he can manage to write – and within the constraints of my personality, I am attempting in the present essay to write as fair an appreciation of Bloom’s work as I can manage to write. Each reader will have to judge for herself or himself how well I have succeeded.
Now, in Bloom’s idiosyncratic 1992 book, he says, “Perry Miller, in his studies of the New England mind, had identified American Puritan religion with its theology. [But Philip] Greven’s emphasis [in his 1977 book The Protestant Temperament] is upon religious experience, which is a question of temperament rather than of intellectual acceptance. Temperament, and not theology, determines the self’s stance in religion” (page 17).
However, in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), the semi-autobiographical character Stephen Daedalus muses about the “ineluctable modality of the visible” – which I take to be based on Aquinas’ thought, in which whatever is in the intellect was first in the senses (in this case, in the sense of sight). Consequently, Stephen Daedalus’ self’s stance in religion strikes me as patently Roman Catholic – and because this character is semi-autobiographical, it is arguable that James Joyce’s self’ stance in religion is patently Roman Catholic.
In sum, according to Bloom, the self’s stance in religion is not determined by one’s theology or intellectual acceptance or one’s “thoughts, desires, and inclinations” (page 8) – which are integral parts of one’s distinctively human reason and will in Aquinas’ thought. However, for Aquinas, intellectual acceptance is an integral part of reason and will. For Aquinas, whatever is in the intellect was first in the senses (i.e., sensory experience). 
But Bloom never mentions Aquinas in his idiosyncratic 1992 book – evidently, because, according to Bloom, “Traditional Christianity suits the United States about as well as European culture does, which means scarcely at all” (page 130). Consequently, orthodox Roman Catholicism, including presumably Aquinas’ orthodox thought as represented in Fox’s 1992 book Sheer Joy, scarcely suits the United States at all – according to Bloom’s estimate.
But Bloom to the contrary notwithstanding, in terms of American Protestant culture from colonial times onward, I would call attention here to what David Riesman refers to as inner-directedness in his widely read 1950 book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. Riesman contrasts inner-directed Americans from colonial times onward – such as Ong’s paternal ancestors who left East Anglia on the same ship that brought Roger Williams to Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1631, the college-educated seventeenth-century New Englanders studied by Perry Miller, and the Puritans remembered by Sacvan Bercovitch as representing the archetypal American self – with the Americans he (Riesman) profiles as outer-directed (or tradition-directed) Americans from colonial times onward (perhaps including my paternal and maternal ancestors). However, Riesman worries about what he sees as the waning of inner-directedness and emerging of what he refers to as other-directedness.
However, in Ong’s 1957 book Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture, he commends Riesman’s characterizations of outer-directed (or tradition-directed) Americans and of inner-directed Americans, but he (Ong) sees the emergence of what Riesman characterizes as other-directed Americans as a positive development (pages vii and 39).
As to Bloom, he does not happen to advert explicitly to Riesman, but Bloom himself is an example of an inner-directed American – as is Ong.
As to Aquinas, he did not explicitly anticipate Riesman’s characterizations of Americans. Nevertheless, his detailed account of the role of conscience and careful deliberation in making choices may contain at least the kernel form of inner-directedness as Riesman describes it.
However, as I have already hinted, I do not think that Bloom is qualified to make pronouncements about what suits the United States today in religion. Of course, he is free to express his opinions about this matter, as he does in no uncertain terms.
However, after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church downgraded Thomism a wee bit from its most favored status earlier in the twentieth century, and after Vatican II passed its landmark documents, lay American Catholics subsequently took an unprecedented interest in spirituality.
For example, Beatrice Bruteau (1930-2014) published the following books, among others: Worthy is the World: The Hindu Philosophy of Sri [Ghose] Aurobindo (1972), Evolution Toward Divinity: [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin and the Hindu Traditions (1974), and The Psychic Grid: How We Create the World We Know (1979, in which she discusses McLuhan’s thought on pages 78-80, 108, 122, and 192).
In Ong’s 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness, mentioned above, he briefly discusses (on page 208) Bruteau’s article “Neo-Feminism and the Next Revolution of Consciousness” in the journal Cross Currents, volume 27 (1977): pages 170-182. For further discussion of the next revolution of consciousness, see Edward C. Whitmont’s 1982 book Return of the Goddess. But also see my essay “Whitmont Identifies the New Evolutionary Step for Western Culture” that is available online through the University of Minnesota’s digital conservancy:
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/185771
But Americans from all kinds of backgrounds were engaged in discovering American Indian spirituality, as the former Catholic religious scholar Phillip Jenkins shows in his 2004 book Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality. For a secularist materialist account of spirituality, see Danish New Testament scholar Troels Engberg-Pedersen’s 2010 book Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit.
For a discussion of the materialist spirituality of indigenous peoples in the amazon region of South America, see Pope Francis’ 2020 apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia (Beloved Amazon). But also see my essay “Pope Francis’ 2020 Apostolic Exhortation and Walter J. Ong’s Thought” that is available online through the University of Minnesota’s digital conservancy:
http://hdl.handle.net/11299/211640
Even certain American Jesuits embraced the emerging interest in spirituality. For example, see David Toolan’s 1987 book Facing West from California’s Shores: A Jesuit’s Journey into New Age Consciousness (in which he discusses Ong’s thought on pages 102, 108, 118, and 134), and James Martin’s 2010 book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life. Ong’s most sustained discussion of spirituality can be found in his 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God, the published version of his 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.
Disclosure: With the American Jesuit Paul A. Soukup in communication studies at Santa Clara University, the Jesuit university in California, I co-edited the wide-ranging 1993 scholarly anthology Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age. The generalized empirical method Lonergan works out in his philosophical masterpiece Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, originally published in 1957, is future-oriented.
Now, this background contextualization brings me to Bloom’s chapter titled “The New Age: California Orphism” in his idiosyncratic 1992 book (pages 193-202). He says, “Though the New Age cults have no more than about thirty thousand members, their fellow traveler are an untold multitude. Virtually all our bookstores feature a New Age section” (page 193). He says, “Its most enthusiastic (and uncritical) chronicler remains Marilyn Ferguson, who celebrated its promise in The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980” (page 195). However, Bloom also says, “New Age prose is its own genre” (page 196) – a genre of prose that he clearly does not like, or even find readable. He singles out Fox’s 1988 book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance.
Bloom says, “Matthew Fox, ostensibly a Catholic priest [which he was up to 1993, when he became an Episcopal priest], has formulated a curious doctrine of ‘panentheism’ to avoid this collapse into pantheism, but Fox is one of my defeats. Several attempts on my part to read through The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (1988) have failed, as no prose I have ever encountered can match Fox’s in blissful vacuity, where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea” (page 199).
After singling out one particular sentence by Fox for his satirical scorn, Blooms says, “To render justice to Fox and most followers of New Age [movements], he and they hedge the obsessive immanence of God with a touch of transcendence” (page 200).
However, in Fox’s 1992 book Sheer Joy, there is far more than “a touch of transcendence [of God]” – indeed, God’s transcendence is celebrated. I know, I know, Bloom’s idiosyncratic 1992 book was published in the same year as Fox’s 1992 book, which is why Bloom understandably does not discuss it.
In conclusion, in my estimate, Ong is a scholar’s scholar, as the 104 short selections that I have listed in the Appendix show. His mature work from the early 1950s onward deserves to be far better known than it is today. Of the articles and books by Bloom that I have read, I have usually found them thought-provoking, even when I do not find them entirely convincing. Of the books by Bloom that I have read, I find his 1992 book The American Religion the least convincing – and I am disappointed that Heys was not more critical of it than he was.

APPENDIX: A Portrait of Ong as a Literary Scholar, Based on Shorter Pieces Not Reprinted in His Books 

(1) Article: “Spenser’s View and the Tradition of the ‘Wild’ Irish” (1942).
(2) Article: “The Meaning of the ‘New Criticism’” (1943).
(3) Two-part article: “Literature and Cultural Initiative” (Parts 1 and 2, both 1945).
(4) Article: “Kafka’s Castle in the West” (1947).
(5) Review article: “Finitude and Frustration: Considerations of Brod’s Kafka” (1948).
(6) Review of Max Brod’s Franz Kafka: A Biography” (1948).
(7) Review of Franz Kafka’s The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces (1949).
(8) Review of Max Brod’s The Diaries of Franz Kafka (1949).
(9) Review of Kenneth B. Murdock’s Literature and Theology in Colonial New England (1950).
(10) Article: “The Green Knight’s Harts and Bucks” (1950). 
(11) Article: “Fouquelin’s French Rhetoric and the Ramist Vernacular Tradition” (1954).
(12) Review of Irvin G. Wylie’s The Self-Made Man in America (1955).
(13) Article: “Pere Cossart, Du Monstier, and Ramus’ Protestantism in the Light of a New Manuscript” (1955).
(14) Review of Niccolo Perotti’s Version of the Enchiridion of Epictetus: With an Introduction and List of Perotti’s Writings, edited by Revilo Pendleton Oliver (1955).
(15) Review of Hans Meyerhoff’s Time in Literature (1955-1956).
(16) Review of Joseph T. Shipley’s Dictionary of Early English (1956).
(17) Review of B. L. Ullman’s Studies in the Italian Renaissance (1956).
(18) Review of W. B. Stanford’s The Ulysses Theme: A Study in the Adaptability of a Traditional Hero (1956).
(19) Review of Hans Baron’s The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (1956).
(20) Review of Eleanor Rosenberg’s Leicester, Patron of Letters (1956).
(21) Review of Jean Elizabeth Gagen’s The New Woman: Her Emergence in English Drama, 1600-1730 (1956).
(22) Review of Henri Guillmen’s Claudel et son art d’ecrire (1956).
(23) Review of Wilbur Samuel Howell’s Logic and rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (1956).
(24) Titled review: “Moral Scene through New England Glasses”: review of Roger Burlingame’s The American Conscience (1957).
(25) Review of William T. Noon’s Joyce and Aquinas (1957), mentioned above.
(26) Review of Mario Nizolio’s De Veris Principiis et Vera Ratione Philosophandi contra Pseudophilosophos Libri IV (1957).
(27) Review of Iris Origo’s The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335-1410 (1958).
(28) Review of Michael Macklem’s The Anatomy of the World: Relations Between Natural and Moral Law from Donne to Pope (1959).
(29) Review of Kathleen Williams’ Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (1959).
(30) Review of Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Humphry House (1960).
(31) Review of The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Christopher Devlin, S.J. ((1960).
(32) Review of Alan Heuser’s The Shaping Vision of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1960).
(33) Review of Rollo May’s Symbolism in Religion and Literature (1961).
(34) Review of Louis Bouyer’s Erasmus and His Times (1961).
(35) Review of Don Cameron Allen’s Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (1961).
(36) Review of Neal W. Gilbert’s Renaissance Concepts of Method (1961).
(37) Short article: “Hopkins: Not for Burning” (1961).
(38) Short article: “‘Burnt Norton’ [by T. S. Eliot] in St. Louis” (1962).
(39) Short article: “New Definitions in the Humanities: The Humanities in a Technological Culture” (1962).
(40) Review of “A Library for Young Schollers” Compiled by an English Scholar-Priest About 1655, edited by Alma DeJordy and Harris Francis Fletcher (1962).
(41) Short article: “Modern Literature and American Universities” (1962).
(42) Titled review: “British Literary History”: review of The College and Adult Reading List of Books in Literature and the Fine Arts (1962).
(43) Review of O. B. Hardison’s The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (1963).
(44) Poetry dictionary entry “Classic and Romantic” (1963).
(45) Poetry dictionary entry “Johnson, Samuel” (1963).
(46) Short article: “English as English: The New Criticism and the Study of the Vernacular” (1964).
(47) Short article: “A Ramist Translation of Euripides” (1964).
(48) Review of Humanistic Education and Western Civilization: Essays for Robert M. Hutchins, edited by Arthur A. Cohen (1964).
(49) Transcript of a radio interview conducted by Sheila Hough with Ong and William K. Wimsatt, Jr.: “The Critic and the Arts” (1964).
(50) Review of Leo Spitzer’s Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung” (1964).
(51) Review of Margaret Mann Phillips’ The “Adages” of Erasmus: A Study with Translations (1964).
(52) Review of Petrus Ramus’ Dialecticae Institutiones: Aristotelicae Animadversiones, edited, with an introduction by Wilhelm Risse (1965).
(53) Short article: “Literature, Threat, and Conquest” (1966).
(54) Review of Pierre de la Ramee’s Dialectique (1555): edition critique (1966).
(55) Review of Rene Wellek’s volumes three and four of A History of Modern Criticism (1966).
(56) Titled review-article “Only Through Time”: review of T. S. Eliot’s To Criticize the Critic: Eight Essays on Literature and Education (1966).
(57) Review of Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm: Essays by Morris W. Croll, edited by J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans (1966).
(58) Review of Fei-Pai Lu’s T. S. Eliot: The Dialectical Structure of His Theory of Poetry (1967).
(59) Review of Rosalie L. Colie’s Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (1967).
(60) Short article: “The Expanding Humanities and the Individual Scholar” (1967).
(61) Short article: “Literature, Religion, and Faith” (1967).
(62) Short article” “Implications of the Humanities Institute for School Programs” (1967).
(63) Short report: “Report of the Working Committee on English, Literature, and Arts” (1967).
(64) Titled review-article: “The Human and the Humanist”: review of Martin Green’s Yeats’s Blessing on von Hugel: Essays on Literature and Religion (1968).
(65) Short article: Commentary on Richard J. Schoeck’s “The Scholar in the World: A Humanistic View” (1968).
(66) Unpublished MLA paper: “The Sounds of Literacy: Post-Literate Orality and the Media” (1968).
(67) Review of Renato Poggioli’s The Theory of the Avant-Garde (1969).
(68) Introduction to the facsimile edition of the 1599 Marburg edition of Peter Ramus and Audomarus Talaeus’ Collectaneae, praefationes, epistolae, orationes, edited by Walter J. Ong, S. J. (1969).
(69) Introduction to the facsimile edition of the 1569 Basel edition of Petrus Ramus’ Scholae in liberales artes, edited by Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1970).
(70) Review of Jerrold E. Seigel’s Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (1971).
(71) Review of Roland MacIlmaine’s 1574 translation of Peter Ramus’ The Logicke of the Most Excellent Philosopher P. Ramus Martyr (1971).
(72) Review of Brian G. Armstrong’s Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century France (1971).
(73) Short article: “English, 2000 A.D.” (1971).
(74) Short article: “Psychiatry and Literature: A Report with Reflections” (1972).
(75) Review of Keith L. Sprunger’s The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism (1974).
(76) Short article: “Printer’s Legerdemain in Milton’s Artis logicae plenior institution” (1974).
(77) Review of Nancy G. Siraisi’s Arts and Sciences at Padua: The Stadium Before 1350 (1975).
(78) Review of E. M. Barth’s The Logic of the Articles in Traditional Philosophy: A Contribution to the Study of Conceptual Structures (1977).
(79) Short article: “Oral Culture and the Literate Mind” (1977).
(80) Review of Mary Louise Pratt’s Toward a Speech-Act Theory of Literary Discourse (1978).
(81) Milton encyclopedia entry: “Artis Logicae” (1978).
(82) Short article: “Presidential Address 1978: The Human Nature of Professionalism” (1979).
(83) Unpublished MLA paper: “Writing is Always Secret” (1979).
(84) Unpublished MLA paper: “Orality and the Teaching of Writing” (1979).
(85) Milton encyclopedia entry: “Logic and Rhetoric” (1979).
(86) Milton encyclopedia entry” “Ramus, Peter” (1979).
(87) Short article: “Oral Remembering and Narrative Structures” (1980; but considerably revised in 1982 version).
(88) Short article: “Reading, Technology, and the Nature of Man: An Interpretation” (1980), but reprinted as “Reading, Technology, and Human Consciousness” (1982).
(89) Review of Peter M. Daly’s Literature in the Light of the Emblem: Structural Parallels Between the Emblem and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1981).
(90) Review of Geoffrey H. Hartman’s Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (1982).
(91) Short article: “Introduction: On Saying ‘We’ and ‘Us’ to Literature” (1982).
(92) Short article: “The Psychodynamics of Oral Memory and Narrative: Some Implications for Biblical Studies” (1982).
(93) Short article: “Writing is a Humanizing Technology” (1983).
(94) Short article: “Foreword to Werner H. Kelber’s The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q” (1983).
(95) Short article: “Foreword to The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric, edited by Winifred Bryan Horner” (1983).
(96) Review of Brian Stock’s The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (1984).
(97) Short article: “Foreword to Paul Zumthor’s Oral Poetry: An Introduction, translated from the 1984 French by Kathy Murphy-Judy” (1984, but English translation, 1990).Short article: “Orality-Literacy Contrasts and the Current Critical Milieu” (1985).
(98) Review of Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian: Translation and Text of Peter Ramus’s Rhetoricae distinctions in Quintilianum (1549), translated by Carole Newlands (1987).
(99) Review of Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine’s From Humanism to Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (1987).
(100) Short article: “Some Psychodynamics of Orality: Sounded Word as Power and Action” (1988).
(101) Review of William A. Graham’s Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (1989).
(102) Review of William R. Paulson’s The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of Information (1989).
(103) Review of Mary J. Carruthers’ The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1992).
(104) Short article: “Foreword to Kathleen E. Welch’s Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy” (1999).
For complete bibliographic information for each of these publications, see Walsh’s bibliography of Ong’s publications, mentioned above.


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