281 - The Presence Of the Word: Some Prolegomena For Cultural and Religious History

The Presence Of the Word:
Some Prolegomena For Cultural and Religious History
By Walter J. Ong, S.J.
360 pp. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1967. $6.95.

Quite simply stated, Fr. Ong's Terry Lectures are an attempt to construct a contemporary Christian apologetics, with a liberal but orthodox Catholic base, and employing for the most part the fashionable if uncritical language of Marshall McLuhan (although McLuhan has probably learned more from Ong than Ong from McLuhan). We should remember that Fr. Ong is at once a distinguished scholar of English literature and perhaps the first Catholic theologian to strongly embrace and affirm the social and cultural processes of modern technology and secularization. Fr. Ong, moreover, is incredibly optimistic, believing that ours is the most just and peaceful society in history, and that never before have men been more open both to the human presence of each other and to the divine presence of God. Yet lying at the very center of this forward-looking optimism (and here one is reminded of the "optimism" of Karl Barth) is a total commitment to the primordial form and presence of the Word, a spoken but invisible Word; for the mystery of sound, as Fr. Ong insists in his final sentence, is the most personally human, and in this sense closest to the divine.

Although Fr. Ong is much too responsible a thinker to be capable of the grosser absurdities of McLuhan's game, he seems to me to be even more reprehensible in that he presents his argument in the form of an historical and rational analysis, while nevertheless writing in such a way as to foreclose the possibility of critical or reflective judgment. For example, it is essential to his argument to maintain that the spoken word is the closest sensory equivalent to fully developed interior thought, and he even goes so far as to claim as an historical fact that the world of sound has proved in all cultures to be the most immediate sensory coefficient of thought; yet in the course of his argument the very meaning of what he postulates as thought disappears. Perhaps this is because, as Fr. Ong concedes, the history of mankind is the history of the greater and greater conceptualization and verbalization of truth, and for post-archaic or post-tribal man there is no possibility of non-conceptual or non-verbal truth, and hence no possibility of being open to a pre-verbal or primordial Word. Or is there? May we not rejoice in the decline and fall of "visualist man" and in the rebirth of "verbomotor man"? Are we not now entering an electronic age or a global village which is resurrecting the world of primordial sound, thereby freeing us from the depersonalized mode of existence of a literate and topographic culture, and making possible that immediate and interior presence which sound alone embodies and releases?

282 - The Presence Of the Word: Some Prolegomena For Cultural and Religious History

While refusing McLuhan's total negation of the "Gutenberg galaxy," Fr. Ong for the most part displays a negative attitude towards the world of "visualist man," and significantly enough he never attempts an analysis of a work of literature in the course of his argument or even casts a glance at the world of music (for after all, is not almost everything which we know as music and literature, to say nothing of the plastic arts, a product of a writing culture?). Again, unlike McLuhan, Fr. Ong is a personalist, and a personalist in the American grain, although he has been deeply influenced by Martin Buber. Believing in a personal God (albeit an invisible God and one who speaks only out of or within his silence), Fr. Ong also believes that all manifestations of the sacred make manifest a personal presence, and that the evolution of human society and the "hominization" of the world can be understood as a triumph of voice, and therefore we may surmise as a triumph of the Word, and more specifically of the Incarnate Word. Thus Fr. Ong's choice of voice and sound as the most real of the human and cosmic phenomena might be looked upon as a consequence of his choice of the Incarnate Word. But we must also note that this very choice here issues in what must finally be regarded as a negation of the world of civilization, of those human worlds created by writing cultures; for, from this point of view, the very development of the verbal media, and the shift of focus from the spoken word and the habits of auditory synthesis to the written word and visual synthesis, de-sacralized culture, devitalized the universe, weakened the sense of presence in man's life world, and rendered the world profane by making it an agglomeration of things.

We should admire Fr. Ong not only for the courage of his convictions but also for the compelling manner in which he teaches us once again the theological consequences of a contemporary choice of the primordial Word. For despite all the affirmation of technology and secularization, and the apparent refusal of a backward-looking stance of faith, we find that the new electronic orality celebrated by Fr. Ong becomes for him a way to the primordial voice and sound of the God who speaks. For God is neither "silent" nor "dead"; it is rather man who is relatively deaf, his sensorium adjusted to the post-Newtonian silent universe. If a new electronic orality can negate or transcend that universe (McLuhan: "The phrase 'God is dead' applies aptly, correctly, validly to the Newtonian universe which is dead"), then God will be more alive than he has ever been in anything which we can know or experience as history, and the presence of man to himself over the face of the globe will make manifest the presence of the primordial Word. Of course, a price must be paid for seeking such a presence. And that price is the negation of visual or civilized man, the refusal of conceptual or verbal thought, and a quest for the

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lost innocence of the first Adam. Fortunately, Fr. Ong himself does not go so far.

In this book, the reader will discover a series of fascinating historical investigations as well as the raising, if only indirectly, of a number of important problems. But he will discover no genuine theological thinking, nor conceptual thinking of any kind, and surely this is exactly what the Protestant theologian should now expect of any theologian who gives himself so totally to a quest for the presence of the primordial Word.

Thomas J. J. Altizer
State University of New York
Stony Brook, New York