Walter J. Ong Society

Walter Jackson Ong (2012-2003) was a prolific and wide-ranging scholar whose publishing career spanned nearly 70 years. His published writings number well over 400, and a comparable number of works remained in unpublished manuscripts at the time of his death.

 

Ong and his brother Richard were born in Kansas City, Missouri, into a family with English and German roots. Ong is an English name. Walter’s earliest American ancestors, Francis Onge and his wife, came to Boston in 1631 on the ship Lyon, among whose passengers on that trip were Roger Williams, the English Protestant theologian who began the colony of Providence Plantation as a refuge for religious minorities. The Ongs spread West and South. Walter Ong, Sr., was born in New Orleans. He married Tennessean Scotch-Irish Mary Virginia Jackson. Ong’s mother, Blanche Eugenia Mense, was born to German immigrants active in journalism, printing and publication in northern Missouri. His religious heritage was Episcopalian and Roman Catholic. He was reared in the latter.

 

Ong attended Rockhurst Jesuit High School and Rockhurst College (now University) in Kansas City. Here he was exposed to a capacious liberal arts learning environment, and he acquired a deep and enduring interest in language, literature, writing and print media, especially journalism. Just out of high school, at the age of sixteen, he wrote a series of articles on his trip to Europe for the 1929 Boy Scout Jamboree, and these were published in the Kansas City Journal-Post. (It is worth noting that Walter became one of the first Catholic Eagle Scouts in the United States, reflecting a time when Scouting was just beginning to openly recruit Catholic, Jewish and other non-Protestant boys.)

 

After graduating from college in 1933, Ong worked at several jobs related to printing and publishing. In 1935 he entered the Society of Jesus at Florissant, Missouri. As part of his training, he received a master’s in philosophy in 1940, followed by a master’s in English from Saint Louis University in 1941. His master’s thesis on the poetry of Gerard Manley was directed by Marshall McLuhan who was teaching there at the time. After two years teaching at Regis College in Denver, he began four years of theology at St. Mary’s College in Kansas, the Jesuit Missouri Province’s theologate. He was ordained to the priesthood there in June 1946.

 

Ong entered Harvard for doctoral studies in English in 1948. After completing coursework and comprehensives, he left for Europe and two years of dissertation research. The sojourn was funded by two sequential Guggenheim fellowships. The final product, the two-volume, 1700 page dissertation, was published in 1958  by Harvard University Press as Ramus, Method and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason and Ramus and Talon Inventory. The first volume has remained in print until today.

 

Although Ong remained a professor of English at Saint Louis University from 1959, and professor of Psychiatry in the Humanities from 1970 until his retirement, he enjoyed a long list of fellowships, visiting professorships, and distinguished lectureships in the United States, Europe and Africa. His activities included major roles in many professional organizations, foundations, and in both public and private consulting and advisory bodies. Notably, he served as president of the Modern Language Association and as a fellow of the American Academy of Science.

 

If Walter Ong’s professional resume qualifies him abundantly as a consummate member of the academic establishment, his scholarship also qualifies him as a consummate maverick and outsider. While his work never fails to witness to masterful disciplinary scholarship, it nevertheless refuses to be reducible to narrow disciplinary boundaries or to what he called “closed system” thinking. While this sort of polymathic thinking is certainly not unique to Ong,  the scope and creativity of his work is certainly unusual, provocative, radical, rare. How can we account for this?

 

First all, Walter Ong was a Mid-Westerner, from Harry Truman country to boot. This may account in part for a certain unabashed straightforwardness in his professional work. There is a certain pragmatic spirit, a curiosity about what makes things work, and inquisitiveness about deeper or larger currents in the flow of things, currents that escape the attention of other observers.  Seen over its span, Ong’s work exhibits a characteristic confidence for charging into matters that others might find obscure or less than politically correct, drawing attention without embarrassment to the Emperor’s new clothes or to establishment orthodoxy in academe or elsewhere.

 

On the one hand, taken seriously, Ong’s work is both consummately professional and radically subversive. His subversiveness is not based on ideology or mere contrariness. He exhibits a persistent curiosity, an unrestricted urge to follow up on what he has observed and for working to make sense of its causes. It is no surprise that Ong found a co-naturality with a senior Jesuit with whom he lived in community during his dissertation research, Pere Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.

 

The sources of Ong’s subversiveness are at least twofold. One, as the man said, “You gotta know the territory!” Ong did. Perusal of any bibliography in his publications discloses both the ever present breadth and depth of his base of operations. This differentiates him decisively from dabblers like Meredith Wilson’s huckster Howard Hill.

 

But not only did Walter Ong characteristically tackle subjects of potential interest and significance to broad academic audiences. He invited his readers and his students, by his circumspect and circumstantial way of proceeding, to discover and question the biases inherent in any exposition, to challenge the assumptions made and the implications imbedded in any study. Ong was concerned with the state of knowledge but also with the conditions under which knowledge occurs. This paradoxical interplay is captured in two aphorisms he liked to recite: “Few people realize how much you have to know in order to realize how little you know.” And, “Whenever a thing is a true as true can be and certain beyond all doubt, it is still incomplete.”