Note - This review was originally written in 2018. This is a redraft. Also forgive the poorly formatted image, I will fix it, when I am not so lazy.
To write a masterful monograph which applies a single disciplinary methodology flawlessly, that is a challenge. But to write a book steeped in elegant multidisciplinarity, rich in erudition, and spiced with some dry wit, that is a feat of its own.
As a student of the premier media ecologist Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong roots the sometime offputting frenetic energy of his mentor in a grounded, accessible style by crafting an analysis of that nebulous bridge period between the "medieval" and the "modern". Ong takes one individual as a particularly revelatory nexus of parallel historical developments, the educator Petrus Ramus (1515-1575). Across the chapters of this book, Ong he deftly navigates the development and the implications of Ramus' revolutionary approach to pedagogy, printing, humanism, and beyond. I will only briefly introduce some of these dimensions as a teaser of what a reader can find inside Ong's study.
The birth of methodology
One should not forget that in this time Aristotle was king. Ramus was decidedly anti-Aristotelian, as his polemics make no secret of. This rendered him a particularly controversial figure in his own day. The Western university curricula had been thoroughly rooted in Aristotle for several centuries by now, so Ramus' attempt to dethrone "The Philosopher" were not met with cheerful acceptance by the scholastic university system, as one might expect.
The Scholastics (a term Ong finds problematic though useful) decried Ramus for jettisoning Aristotle because it left him with a weak methodus, which can be defined as the way one proceeds through their subject matter.
Method had not been problematized in such a way before. What is a method and how does one arrive at it? This is the quintessential Cartesian or Bacon question (or whichever Enlightenment figure floats your boat). Ong contends that through his disruption of Aristotelian teaching, Ramus unintentionally prompted this modern question of method not just between humanists and scholastics but also within these two camps as well. A question that has haunted the natural and human sciences to this day.
Print and pedagogy
Print technology was still relatively new at this point in time. It had been used for Bibles and then weaponized for the Reformation, but the technological developments surrounding the book had not yet percolated into the realm of pedagogy, until Ramus. Ong argues that Ramus was the first to employ print diagrams and charts as he implemented them in his textbooks on rhetoric and dialectic. What medieval philosophy and logicians had taken page upon page, subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, to detail in a way that could only make sense to a reader with a remarkable scrutiny of effort, all this verboseness was easily displaced by the visual diagram. Abstruse concatenations of text gave way to clear, simple, visual diagrams which could make the meaning of a thousand words clear in one picture. A revolutionary achievement in the dissemination of knowledge and the circulation of teaching.
Furthermore, while before many writers perished under the suffocating weight of critics' rebuttals (if not snuffed out by the church), Ramus was remarkably proactive in utilizing print technology to respond to his adversaries. He rapidly and repeatedly printed new editions of his books with corrigienda, supplemental arguments, or refutations of counter-arguments. He incorporated his critics' points into his own work, thus strengthening his own presentation despite others' attempts to negate it.
The printing press also mobilized Ramus' ability to spread his ideas. Rather than being constrained to a network of universities as manuscript culture had been constrained to do, Ramus was an early figure in the transnational republic of letters, becoming a central figure for the Anglophone Puritan movement in England.
And this is not because Ramus possessed a prodigious degree of foresight, at least in Ong's view, but it is because he had particular reformist goals contra scholasticism and was placed at a rare intersection of historical circumstances which allowed him to utilize new scholarly tools in his endeavour.
Debunking Thomist Nostalgia
Ramus was a Huguenot. Ong was a Jesuit. And Ong makes no effort to conceal his preference for Catholicism throughout his work. That is fine for me though, for he also has absolutely zero sympathy for the neo-Thomist nostalgia movement which had pervaded twentieth century Catholicism. At the time for him this was Jacques Maritain, but it continues under various auspices via Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, Charles Taylor, and most prominently for me personally in my undergraduate experience.
The basic premise of this Catholic metanarrative is that Thomas Aquinas came along and more or less solved philosophy with the perfect blending of Aristotle and Christianity. This was the ultimate fulfillment of the Western philosophical tradition. However, the innovations of John Duns Scotus corrupted this intellectual utopia and brought us an intellectual Fall called modernity. A simplistic retelling, yes, but that's the basic gist.
Ong has several remarks on this subject (I have several more but will refrain from interjecting here).
First, the idea that Thomism reigned as some supreme vogue tradition until it was displaced by Scotus or the Reformation, that has zero historical grounding. When Aquinas died, the University of Paris only felt it necessary to preserve a few of his commentaries and his treatise on aqueduct construction. More than that, teachings espoused by Aquinas were explicitly condemned as heretical in 1277, until this decision was somewhat discreetly reversed when he was canonized in 1322. Not many realize that Aquinas has a much more controversial reception history than his nostalgists often acknowledge.
Second, scholasticism was not institutionally built on faculties of theology. If one considers the hard numbers of what represented scholasticism, the vast majority of those at scholastic institutions were logicians, and Thomas was not a strong logician either. Theologians constituted a significantly smaller number of scholars than their counterparts in logic, and their voice in pedagogy was often unheard. Thomism was at best a marginal doctrine, even among the literate and educated, it was not a universally promulgated doctrine.
Another laudable observation from Ong is the problematic nature of using terms such as realism or nominalism to distinguish medieval thinkers. Such an anachronistic label is often used to bifurcate the Western philosophical tradition, but in Ong's view, this method of teaching the history of philosophy introduces more misconceptions than it does impress accurate ones. They ultimately misframe the conversations of medieval and Renaissance thought.
Media Ecology: Spatial Cognition
Ong is foremost remembered as a media ecologist, as his predecessor Marshall McLuhan was. And this frame of observations is also prevalent in this work as well. One of the key arguments of this book is that the technology of the print book was part of a larger ongoing development of constructing and defining knowledge almost exclusively in visual and spatial terms.
Charts and diagrams are visual ways we construct, relate, delineate, and compartmentalize knowledge. For Ong, the wake of print technology ushers in semantic evolution as well. With more people reading instead of listening, philosophical vocabulary became increasingly visualistic as well (e.g. the word definition means the physical delimitation of space).
For Ramus, the true nature of things was not conveyed through oral dialogue or lectures but through the written word and its containment in visual spaces. Scholastic pedagogy featured the oral monologue of the professor while humanist pedagogy showcased the text as the primary instrument for truth and understanding. The humanists engaged in oral dialogue for the sake of discerning the more real truth contained (this, also being a spatial term) within the written/printed text.
Literary and Philosophical Impacts of Ramist Pedagogy
Ong also draws attention to a variety of ways that Ramism gave birth to the greatest minds of the Renaissance. He argues that it was only because education shifted from listening-only to dialogue and exercises that required the students to think and imagine more, that great thinkers and writers of the later Renaissance like Shakespeare were possible. This pedagogy made the minds of the next generation more synthestic, imaginative, and thus creative. He argues that the visualist typology of Ramus' works were an important precursor to the highly visual style of writers such as the English metaphysical poets.
There are a wide variety of other historical, etymological, pedagogical, and philosophical arguments that Ong convincingly weaves into his narrative, and it is truly remarkable that he could cover so much ground in his studies (especially since he personally traveled around the world to track down thousands of various copies and editions of Ramus' works). This is truly a landmark study, a classic which is essential for anyone interested in intellectual history, methodology, media ecology, or the history of the book.