ABSTRACT
Walter J. Ong, S.J. (b. 1912) is a Jesuit priest and Professor of English at St Louis University. His distinguished scholarly career was founded on a study of the Huguenot rhetorician and educationalist Peter Ramus, Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). In Ong's view, Ramus was a crucially important figure in the transformation of scholastic logic at the time of the Renaissance, from a method of inquiry and exposition based on oral disputation, to one based on the model of the visualized spatial diagram. Ong's specialized research seems to have influenced and been itself reinforced by the more speculative and global theorizing of his friend, colleague, and co-religionist, Marshall McLuhan (see below, pp. 610-20) who argued in The Giitenberg Galaxy (1962) that after the invention of the printing press western society increasingly neglected oral-aural methods of communication, with a consequent impoverishment of human perception and sympathies-a condition which may be alleviated by modern developments in communications technology. In numerous essays, some of which are collected in The Barbarian Within (New York, 1962) and In The Human Grain (1967), Fr. Ong has continued to explore the implications of these ideas for education, literary criticism, cultural history, and religion. Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit author of The Phenomenon of Man (Paris, 1955) was another friend whose mystical evolutionary thought has influenced Ong profoundly, and made him (rather rarely among modern literary intellectuals) a generally optimistic commentator.
