Escape Into Understanding: A Biography.

If "Media Studies" has a father or a godfather, it's surely H. Marshall McLuhan (1911-80). Not that he invented the field: Plato, I think, did that in his distinction between speech and writing in the Phaedrus. And in our century there were earlier and brilliant analyses, including Eric Barnouw's studies of broadcasting and Harold Innis's epochal work on the influence of print on the shaping of modern consciousness (work absolutely essential to McLuhan's own best writing, and oddly characteristically soft-pedaled in Gordon's book). But McLuhan made it all sexy, imbued it all with an aura of freedom and play.

He wrote, co-wrote, or edited over twenty books, plus hundreds of essays and speeches; the Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, his home school, was founded mainly as an adjunct to his personal and apparently inexhaustible, research; and from the midsixties to early seventies he was, if not as inescapable as the Beatles, considerably more so than the Kinks (who were as good as the Beatles).

It was the wimpy professor's dream (and McLuhan, whose work I venerate enormously, was, also, a wimpy professor) to have his erudite and/or vatic mutterings published and to find them celebrated in the Big World. McLuhan's mother had been a successful performance artist, and it rubbed off on her boy. He was a kind of genius, yes; but also a tireless self-promoter and a flamboyant showman (which does not mean "charlatan"). And without his flamboyance, it's doubtful that "Media Studies" would have the cachet it currently enjoys in the universities.

The irony is that "Media Studies," as practiced now, has little to do with, and cares little about, McLuhan's crucial insights. It is largely a dreary exercise in discovering the ways media "disenfranchize" or these guys' favorite word - "disempower" marginalized groups.

And that's not what McLuhan was about. Some of the best of Gordon's book explains how his man's obsession with media was tied to his deep, ferocious Catholicism (McLuhan converted in 1937).

Born in Edmonton, Alberta, to a devoutly Methodist woman, by his college years McLuhan was a voracious and intense reader his first great passion being, significantly, Chesterton. On a fellowship to Cambridge, his Catholic enthusiasms expanded to, among others, Aquinas (he always described himself as a Thomist), Gilson, Eliot, and the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. Now, the Summa Theologiae and the Wake may seem an odd pairing and McLuhan was to become famous for odd, outrageous pairings of ideas - but Gordon helps us see how it makes perfect sense in terms of the man's religious conviction and of the core brilliance of his work on media.

McLuhan's Catholicism was strongly pentecostal, in the sense that he sought, and found, in the church the Real Presence in the sense of the community of believers, rather than in the - to him, Protestant - idea of an individual, intensely private relationship with God. (I think that as a daily communicant, he would have loved the innovation of having the whole congregation stand during the Consecration: everyone, not just the priest, performs the act. And remember that "HCE," the name of the Wake's hero, means, among other things, "Here Comes Everybody!")

Furthermore, he came to believe, with Innis, Max Weber, and R.H. Tawney, that the invention of print (1450), with its attendant results of privativization of reading, standardization, and "flattening" of cultural differences, was a prime occasion, if not cause, of both the Reformation and of the rise of capitalism. So the Summa could be read as a "pre-Gutenberg" celebration of the faith of an immense and variegated community, and the Wake as a "post-Gutenberg" expectation of the return of that community at the end of the era of print-oriented, "protestant" individualism. Film, radio, and especially TV (first used in 1936, by the way, as Joyce was writing the Wake) were as world-making as the Gutenberg revolution just because they heralded the abolition of the privacy of the book and the reemergence of a communal, visual and aural and tactile space: a "global village," to invoke what is probably McLuhan's most famous phrase.

But if that were the whole story, McLuhan would be simply an interesting crank with a few good ideas. As Gordon, again, makes clear, there was more. McLuhan's two most influential teachers at Cambridge were F.R. Leavis and I.A. Richards, among the founders of what would be called the New Criticism. And the central tenet of New Criticism is that the critic's job is not to indulge in moral or philosophical generalities about the work examined (novel, poem, or medium), but to attempt to analyze it as it really is ("close reading," now largely scorned in lit departments, is the new critic's one thing needful). And that - never mind that Leavis and Richards were materialists - is a distinctly privatized, "protestant" approach to reading.

So McLuhan became a visionary Catholic pentecostal with a close, precise habit of attention to his subject, a prophet with scruples, and scrupulous prophets are rare, maddening - and of immense value.

Of all his books, the two that somehow are Marshall McLuhan appeared two years apart: The Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962 and Understanding Media in 1964. And the creative tension between his "catholic" and "protestant" imaginations, the visionary of renewed communitas (or commonweal?) and Methodist, private, close reader, is wonderfully present in these books. Electronic media may create for us a global village; but electronic man is "discarnate man," so what can the Incarnation possibly mean to him; the book is being replaced by the virtual reality of the Tube, but the Tube conveys, mostly, crap; "the medium is the message"; but what is the message?

McLuhan could probably not have been, and surely was not, a systematic thinker. His books are hardly books at all, but collections of aphorisms, insights - "probes," he liked to call them. His lyrical ambivalence about the new media is, I think, his great value. He looked unflinchingly at new modes of communication that increasingly define our sense of self, and tried to read them as what they are, and what they imply for our common, and spiritual, life.

My main quarrel with Terrence Gordon's very fine book is that he elides the contradictions implicit in McLuhan's work. Gordon is an unabashed admirer of his subject, so naturally wants McLuhan to appear in complete control of his insights. But it ain't so. And thank God. A self-assured McLuhan is not a McLuhan I can use; his edginess is almost the content of his work (the medium being, after all, the message). And, when Gordon discusses the frequent critics of McLuhan's work, he - more hagiographer than biographer now - always assumes that they just "didn't understand" what the man was saying. Well: sometimes they did; and often their criticisms were right. You don't set off as many conceptual firecrackers as McLuhan did without having a lot of misfires.

Frank McConnell, Commonweal's media critic, teaches English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.