The male agony: according to Walter J. Ong.

Walter J. Ong, S.J., is a genial polymath. Where others stay within their fields, Ong cuts across them, taking cues from anthropology, sociology, biology, psychology, literary and intellectual history, and Christian ecclesial and theological history. He refers to himself, not as a relativist, but as a "relationist" - as in E.M. Forster's injunction, "only connect." His students at Saint Louis University affectionately call him "The Great Walter Ong." Yet at age eighty, Ong doesn't have the name recognition that his late Jesuit compeers John Courtney Murray and Teilhard de Chardin enjoy. Ong's seminal thinking on the effect of writing and the printing press on human consciousness is just beginning to bear fruit in church history and biblical studies. Otherwise, he is probably better known outside Catholic circles - among intellectual historians, literary critics, linguists, and folklorists - than he is within his own household.

Ong invariably surprises his readers by making connections, and intimate ones at that, between seemingly unrelated phenomena. For instance, have you ever considered the parallels between the adversarial method of Aquinas's Summa Theologiae and the sparing rites of male fig wasps or oryx antelope? Probably not. Well, Walter Ong has.

One minute, Ong is describing how Western intellectual life, from Aristotelian logic to modern jurisprudence, grew out of reflection on verbal combat, and the next he is illustrating the point in terms of animal behavior, Clifford Geertz's descriptions of Balinese cockfights, or "land diving" from atop trees in the New Hebrides islands. And before you know it, you may get a disquisition on how such masculine rites of display relate to the stylized tongue-lashing of inner-city African-Americans and rap music, the sexual politics of the Catholic church, or the "us versus them" rhetoric of Patrick J. Buchanan, Fidel Castro, and Saddam Hussein.

Indeed, as a close student of the subterranean politics of the Renaissance humanist tradition, Ong has understood better than most the subtle links between social hierarchy, gender roles, and sexual identity. Pat Buchanan and Fidel Castro, he will typically note, were educated in the disputatious atmosphere of all-male Jesuit high schools when Latin was still the centerpiece. Why was Latin retained? Well, because Latin pedagogy was part of boot camp. "The Roman Catholic church," Ong writes, "clung longest of any group in the West to Learned Latin, the extrafamilial, sex-linked, distinctively male language that carried with it the old agonistic mind-set and thought forms" of an oral culture. Latin drill outlived its utilitarian medieval and Renaissance function of initiating young men into the elite language of the governing class in church, state, and academia precisely because, as a "toughener" complete with customary flogging, it possessed all the marks of a male puberty rite in so-called primitive societies. The object was to define the boy over-against the "soft" world of women in order to "make a man of him."

Poet Robert Bly has been reminding us lately of what men deprived of such ordeals of manhood lose. What Bly overlooks but Ong sees is that such strenuous initiation rites also function to fortify the gender hierarchy - and consequently, with the collapse of these tests, not only are the rules for establishing male identity eroded, but the legitimacy of the hierarchical order founded on gender discrimination also comes apart. It is no wonder, then, that pyramidal models of church organization totter. Further, inasmuch as church teaching is, as Ong says, "permanently structured in deep masculine-feminine polarities that shift dialectically through time," dogma itself becomes unsettled. Frightening?

Ong is not frightened; he is one of the most unnostalgic of men - because in his understanding, only the spirit, not the letter, gives life. For him, the Christian church "is not a body of doctrine or an |institution' but a community with a shared memory."

The question is, how did Ong move from studies of the contrast between oral cultures and literate ones to gender issues? From studies of a little-known sixteenth-century humanist to the issues of social hierarchies? And from these issues to a consideration of the biological substructure of the doctrines of the church, redemption, and God? The path is circuitous, but worth following - especially in an era of feminist criticism.

The Letter Kills

If there is a common theme running through Ong's scholarly work, it is the variety of ways consciousness has been reshaped at first by the invention of writing, then by the printing press, and finally by television, stereos, and computers. Ong's point is not just that the medium affects the content of the message, as his teacher Marshall McLuhan claimed, but that in framing and storing ideas in certain ways, technology restructures the whole mental universe of communicators and receivers. Electronic channels of expression and transmission, he maintains, are even now inducing a "secondary orality," - and restructuring our psyches and norms, creating the "global village" of instant telecommunication, undermining the artificial securities of typography, and making thinkable the kind of national "electronic town meeting" referenda proposed by Ross Perot to get around the gridlock between the White House and Congress. Long ago, the Greek alphabet shook up a hierarchical social system in a similar way.

With Perry Miller as his mentor at Harvard, Ong first made his academic reputation as a preeminent Renaissance scholar by driving home the limitations of being "lettered." His favorite aphorism, that "The letter kills, it is only the spirit that gives life" (2 Cor. 3:6) - which he glosses to mean that books are no substitute for the interaction of speakers who always say more than they mean, and mean more than they can say - takes its force from his study of its opposite in the person of Peter Ramus, a sixteenth-century logician and pedagogue. In 1958, Ong published two weighty volumes on this subject, and the title of one of these books, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Harvard University Press, 1958), nearly says it all (except for the words of advice cited on the frontispiece from a contemporary of Ramus's, to a disciple: "Young man, listen to me: You will never be a great man if you think that Ramus is a great man"). In brief, Ong's study of Ramus revealed the programmed contentiousness in the intellectual life of Renaissance and medieval academic circles that arose out of the high-stress ethos of the still largely oral and male-dominant culture. Like Plato's Socrates before them, these academics employed verbal duels to get at the truth, much as adversarial procedure in a modern courtroom is used to get at the "facts."

In contrast, Ramus wanted to eclipse oral discourse. He used the new print technology of the time to write the perfect textbook and thus eliminate the ambiguity and surplus of meaning that always elicits a "comeback" in oral exchange. As Ong puts it, the mentality of the printed book "encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in the text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion" (Orality and Literacy, see box). Once an untruth has been cast in lead type, it seemingly lasts forever. That's why, according to Ong, books are burned!

Subsequently imitated throughout the learned world (and notably in theology), Ramus's rationalistic mindset and pedagogy became normative throughout the West, contributing to the bad smell "dogma" has had ever since. As Ong points out, however, the psychological distance fostered by print technology would eventually itself undo such fixity, as demonstrated by the critical turn of the Enlightenment and the "hermeneutics of suspicion" that came with Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud. In the same vein, moreover, it is this psychological distance that would lead Ong to "see through" Ramus and other humanists of his era, perceiving them as contestants in a male game of one-upmanship or face-off. For as Ong explains in his later book, Fighting for Life (Cornell University Ness, 1981), in order for a man to define his own identity, he "must face the threat of masculinity within himself by facing it in others like himself" In short, a man cannot do without his proper adversary. Such adversativeness, Ong argues, has been hugely constructive in Westem intellectual life.

Orality vs. Literacy

Ong followed his Ramus enterprise with a trilogy of more popular works that provide a kind of cost-benefit analysis of the history of consciousness from the perspective of orality and literacy-the Presence of the Word; Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology; and Inter aces of the Word (see x).

I was first drawn to Ong's trilogy after spending a summer in India in 1975. It had been my first extended visit to a largely oral culture (read third world) - where, as Lucien Levy-Bruhl once noted, people "see with eyes like ours, but they do not perceive with the same minds." The shock had been immense, and I was trying to figure out why I had been both fascinated and repulsed. The atmosphere, particularly in the villages, had seemed overwhelmingly, mysteriously maternal, and devouring. (Indira Gandhi, standing in for the Great Mother, had declared martial law days after I arrived.) At the same time, male misogyny ran rampant. The most popular film that summer featured a Hindu Lizzie Borden slaughtering her abusive husband and tyrannical mother-in-law. I was seasick. Why did I feel like a visitor from another planet - with the soul of a Jew?

Reading Walter Ong afterwards provided some answers. Of course literacy and orality feed off of each other, and the distinct mentalities fostered by each interpenetrate. But Ong helped me understand both what it means to have the "dry" soul of a literate Westerner and what it meant to live with Homer's "winged words" before they were transferred to textual space. Oral cultures have no books or libraries for "backward scanning." Theirs is an utterly fugitive world, tenuously held together by the human voice, by hearing rather than, as with us, by seeing. For a taste of it, you might read the novels of Chinua Achebe, the Nigeria writer, or visit the "third world" in your own illiterate inner city. What India desperately needed, I finally concluded, was to cool down with a mass literacy campaign, though that would bring losses.

It made a huge difference, I began to realize, that I belonged to a "people of the Book" and was the heir to Gutenberg.

Before reading-Ong, it had never occurred to me that writing is a technology, depending on tools: styli, brushes, or pens, carefully prepared surfaces, inks or paints - and how much such apparently artificial, external aids had transformed our consciousness of the way the world is. We literates have so interiorized the medium of writing that we take the potentials it gave rise to for granted. But they can't be. The ability to lift myself above impulse, to reflect, to immobilize "things" out of their context in the rushing human life-world, and then analyze them in terms of causal sequence, is largely (though not exclusively) the product of the artifice of writing. For it is writing that removes one from that holistic life-world and "freezes" it, breaks it up, linearizes it on the surface of a page - and shapes our thought forms accordingly. "By separating the knower from the known," writes Ong, "writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity, opening the psyche as never before not only to the external objective world quite distinct from itself but also the interior self against whom the objective world is set. Writing makes possible the introspective religious traditions such as Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" (Orality and Literacy).

Fine. But we fail to advert to the fact that literacy also constitutes a major component of both first-world power and spiritual emptiness. For we forget literacy's distortions: how the textualization of existential reality renders the poetry of life prosaic, and turns the radical becoming of an oral world into static being, conveying a sense of false security. Yes, the transformation had advantages: Above all, it meant that I was inner-directed, an agent-subject, not an object of history. It meant deliverance from peasant fatalism, freedom (and corresponding guilt) such as the oral personality does not have. All this "lettered" detachment, however, also meant a proneness to what T.S. Eliot called a "dissociated sensibility," to tense inner conflicts, and a diminution of a sense of dwelling in sacred space - in short, secularization. For as Ong is fond of pointing out, the visual dominance heightened by a print-oriented culture focuses attention on visual surfaces - and it's a short jump from that to Immanuel Kant's Enlightenment dictum that we only know superficial "phenomena," not numinous depths and heights. The letter gives us leverage; it also kills. To say "I see your point" somehow does not strike as deep as to say "I hear you."

Peasant Hindus are in touch with numinous depths, and Ong helped me understand why I felt closer to the world of the Bible in India than if I had been in modern, literate Jerusalem. Oral people synthesize the world through the car, not by sight as we do. Consequently, they know nothing of our neutral, Newtonian space. Their space is acoustic, wrap-around, invariably somewhat animistic, filled with vocal presences. Hearing attunes them to mystery, to the sacred. Sound, furthermore, is fundamentally centering; it surrounds and enfolds, establishing the oral-audial person at the core of sensation and existence - and hence the seemingly innate religiosity of such cultures remarked upon by Mircea Eliade. As Ong puts it, the oral personality "finds himself in a kind of vast interiority" (The Presence of the Word). You can see it in faces and carriage - these people walk in holy space. Yet it's often a dreamlike space, as if they were still in the womb of the Great Mother, wrestling to be born in another kind of time zone.

Over centuries, the detached habits of literacy, Ong insists, have pacified our world. In contrast, and to an extent our cool, tolerant times can hardly imagine, oral identities (especially male identities) depend on intense interpersonal struggle. Or, as Ong phrases it, oral cultures are marked by the "agonistic" or "adversative" tone (think of tribal Israel or her cantankerous prophets). And the Hindu caste system, still vigorous though outlawed, is a product of such adversativeness and the games of male bonding and dominance that go with it. All legitimized by religion.

The catch is that oral peoples, as Heraclitus once said, are "wet" souls. Having little inwardly ordered imaginal life that goes with literacy, they are subject to diffuse excitement, and readily go berserk (except in cultures like China's where open antagonism is repressed). Precisely like figures out of the Iliad, they often go in pursuit of a scapegoat for some real or imagined slight to their "good face" or honor. India, like other largely oral cultures, is full of vengeful Hatfields and McCoys. For, unlike the literate person who may react to anxiety by withdrawal, the oral personality usually takes his anxieties into the marketplace. As Ong puts it, "the individual is psychologically faced outward, he is |tribal' man, and, under duress, he directs his anxieties and hostilities outward toward the material world around him and chiefly ... to his fellow man" (The Presence of the Word).

More likely in great mothering India, however, the "fellow woman" is the target. For in almost all oral cultures, as the constraints of a rigidly hierarchical and conserving society break down under the democratizing impact of literacy, one finds men reacting to adversity with either passive aggression or the violence of out-of-control machismo. The latter simply repeat the excesses of a whole train of classic Greek heroes gone berserk in their rage to separate from Mother-Right. Once again, Ariadne is abandoned, Cassandra ravaged, and the altar of Athena is reviled - but with different names and places. The Hindu Lizzie Bordens are justifiably angry.

Insecurity & Male Power Games

Walter Ong's most surprising book is undoubtedly Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (see above), which integrates the sociobiological work of Edward O. Wilson into Ong's own studies of the high-stress, agonistic tone of oral cultures and its endurance even in literate cultures like our own. Here, Ong aimed to understand the force with which male "contest" functions to shape our cognitive worlds in politics, sports, commerce, jurisprudence, academic knowledge, and ecclesiology. The book underscores how much, historically, the rise of human consciousness, up until the appearance of the modern novel, is mainly a masculine story - that is, of men fighting for a life of their own. It is a thesis that comes close to (but does not fully endorse) Camille Paglia's argument in Sexual Personae (Yale University Press, 1990) that males are the main creators of culture. At any rate, Ong might add - so far.

Drawn from the Old French legal term conteste, implying a fair witness to an altercation, Ong intends the term contest to refer "to action based on deliberation and reason, not to violent physical action." As Ong uses the term, then, contest is William James's "moral equivalent of war" - a sublimation of aggression that has been enormously constructive in history. It is a struggle, usually between males, that is "entered into to determine dominance." Ritual contest, argues Ong, affects human life "from its biological base to its intellectual heights," and so long as we remain sexually polarized beings, this will be so. The book sharpens the issues underlying our current gender wars, including the issues behind women's ordination in the Catholic church, better than any other I know.

The roots of contest, Ong argues, go deeper than consciousness, to the "asymmetrical opposition" between the sexes buried in our evolutionary past. (Feminists will be glad to note that for Ong the male-female relationship is one of contraries, not complementarity.) The feral names of sports teams and the "killer" argot of Wall Street are no accident. For whether it occurs in the "games" of athletics, business, the courts, space races, or politics, the face-offs of men bear striking resemblance to the kind of thing studied by Konrad Lorenz: the (usually) nonlethal territorial battles that conspecific males engage in throughout the animal kingdom. (Thus the analogy between Aquinas's combative style and the behavior of wasps and antelope bucks.)

The agonistic pattern, argues Ong, is rooted in the male's basic insecurity, an insecurity stemming from the fact that masculine identity is acutely problematic, a burden and a task in a way that a female's identity is not. From the outset in the embryo, a male fetus must secrete combative androgens to offset maternal hormones that do a female no harm. The male's contrary restlessness is thus built in. And the pattern of differentiation or resistance to the environment, a certain over-againstness, continues throughout life. For, after an initial stage of identification with the mother's body, the male secures his masculine identity by growing away from the feminine; he must separate, test himself against others like himself, prove himself a man by seeking out stress - without, of course, ever breaking the bond with the feminine sources of his confidence (his mother, lovers, muse) without whom he is lost. (Ong cites the case of Albert Camus's inert, passive-aggressive Meursault in The Stranger as a prime example of the weakness that results from severing the bond to the feminine.) It's fatal, says Ong, if there's not a bit of Don Quixote's impossible dream, or of a daredevil Evel Knievel, in every man. And also fatal if nature and women are seen as proper adversaries.

Above all, then, masculinity stands for differentiation and change-agency. The standard male symbol, the spear of Mars, , catches the drift of all the sociobiological evidence Ong marshals on this point, signifying outward movement: conflict, courting risk, dissection, division, altering the environment. Males break up the field; they have a proclivity to analyze, to be quixotic loners, to bond with other males against whom they can measure themselves as truly "not women." Male antifeminism, therefore, is rooted in the fear of being absorbed into the other sex. In contrast the woman's sexual identity crisis is brought on, Ong maintains, by the abiding crisis of the male whose identity is always being earned. Men seem to know, in their bones, that they are the "expendable sex" and that, as one of Ong's authorities phrases it, "Nature's first impulse is to create a woman." So - mistakenly - men go against nature, or against women, when the worthy adversary is another man.

The epithet, "weaker sex," Ong insists, illustrates nothing so much as male defensiveness. The opposite is true: das ewige Weib (the "eternal feminine") outweighs and outperforms the male in holding society together. As the Chinese proverb has it, "the female always overcomes because of her quietness." The woman's symbol of Venus's mirror, , suggests self-possession, gazing at oneself as projected into the outside world and reflected back from there. The sense of being at-one with Mother Nature, indeed, of somehow representing the domain of the unconscious, goes deep in women, Ong claims, and accordingly the present concern for holism and for preserving the environment are women's inputs. Unlike a man, a woman doesn't have to "fight it" as a man does; her program, as Ong puts it, is: "I want to be me, to realize what is in me," as opposed to the male's "I want an adversary to keep at bay so as to give me confidence in what I can do." Male insecurity, seeking the stress situation, and the quest for dominance, these three, Ong insists, are functions of one another.

The point is not that women cannot be aggressive, competitive, take on male roles, even cross-dress. On the contrary, Ong is at pains to assert that women, being able to generate a male child out of themselves, know men better than men know themselves, and thus can readily take on heroic male qualities without any threat to their feminine identity. The problem is that males have no corresponding ability to assimilate the feminine without the fear of being swamped by it.

The Big Question:

Women's Ordination

That the foregoing reflection is pertinent to current gender debates within the Catholic church is obvious. "The development of the Roman Catholic ethos, as of consciousness generally over the past three millennia," writes Ong, "has been that of a strongly masculinizing era, marked by agonistic patterns." The Bible, from its earliest books through Revelation, repeatedly depicts human life as a struggle, usually by male against male. God is primarily conceived of as "Father," Jesus as the male who makes the big difference, and the church is feminine. Catholicism, as Ong says, is "structured in deep masculine-feminine polarities." The question is whether the church can just slough off its masculine, adversative element as a relic of a by-gone era, adopt inclusive God-language, and ordain women.

Ong does not directly commit himself on this question, but his work clarifies what is at stake. The question in his mind is this: "How much masculinization can the gospel tolerate? How much feminization?" No one doubts that we are passing, or have already passed, into a more irenic era of feminine ascendancy and ecological concern, and Ong welcomes the change. The fact that Vatican II eschewed anathemas and polemics, says Ong, is sign enough that the church is adapting to the new spirit. A further sign is given by accenting the Eucharist as a nurturing sacred meal rather than an agonistic sacrifice. But the shift will not serve us well, he thinks, if it entails a collapse of the dialectic of the sexes in doctrine and church order. To lose that, I think he means, would be to lose a great deal of the church's dynamic and energy.

For instance, do we really understand what masculine images of God convey that feminine images may not, and vice versa? Feminists typically assume we do, but I doubt it. Ong is helpful here. If he is right, feminine imagery suggests notions fundamental to the Christian experience of God: our source, the one to whom we are all umbilically bonded, who takes in, harbors, and keeps - as well as one who inspires and lets sons and daughters go in freedom. The Bible provides a goodly handful of such metaphors for God ("Can a mother forget her infant? ... I will never forget you." [Isa. 49:15], and so forth). In contrast, as we have seen above, masculinity stands for differentiation and change. It follows that male images of God are entirely appropriate and indispensable to signal our own difference (or individuality) before the wholly other Holy One whose ways are not our ways, whose thoughts are not our thoughts - and who, accordingly, has a radical agenda for breaking idols and changing our world. In short, more is at stake in male images of God than the power of a clerical club. Also at issue is the iconoclastic God of the prophets.

The otherness of God, of course, is not the whole story. What is equally important (and perhaps neglected) is our participation in and union with God-Spirit - which feminine imagery may possibly convey more powerfully. Ong does not argue that point, but he does clarify why both women and men might want to retain a secure place for masculine religious metaphor - if only to secure a man's place in a church where, as I noted above, a woman can do virtually everything a man can do, including prophecy, without compromising her identity as woman. But the reverse is not true, and there's the rub. The danger of dis-enfranchising men is real, especially in machismo cultures where the terror of being swamped by the feminine is acute. In such a culture, men fear a leveraged buy-out by assertive first-world women of an institution that is already perceived as an exclusively feminine preserve.

The problem, as Ong puts it, is this: "To the psyche, the church is always feminine - Holy Mother church." In fact, so overwhelmingly feminine is the church that Ong sees the function of an all-male clergy as a "countervailing force," reassuring men in the person of a male priest that it is possible to overcome the fear of being absorbed by the feminine and still remain masculine. Mary's "yes, be it done unto me" is paradigmatic. For, just as it was through Mary's free consent to the divine initiative that the Incarnation occurred, so it is through feminine insight that Spirit enters the world at large. To this end, the rule is that all of us, both men and women, have to cultivate an inner life - a space for the Spirit to breathe in. In this respect, it has to be said that women, by reason of their anatomy and sense of interiority, have a distinct advantage over men - who, by reason of their need to separate from the feminine and prove themselves, are inclined to neglect inwardness. To become Christians, we have to overcome our fear of taking on feminine qualities, like the capacity to receive. "Macho insights," Ong charges, "reveal nothing of God."

In this regard, the sexually defined role of Jesus in redemption is illuminating. On the one hand, Ong affirms that Jesus' style is unmistakably masculine - differentiating, field-breaking, a lonely struggle to liberate in the truth. "I come into the world to divide it" (John 9:39). "My mission is to spread, not peace, but division. I have come to set a man at odds with his father, a daughter with her mother, a daughter-in-law with her mother-in-law" (Matt. 10:34-36). "I have come to cast fire upon the earth" (Luke 12:49). "He who is not with me is against me" (Matt. 10:30). And so forth. But that's only half of it, the other part being Jesus' nonviolence in going to meet, and enduring his passion. "Father, forgive them..." (Luke 23:34). "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit" (Luke 23:46). "The masculine in Jesus' redemptive action," says Ong, "is complemented by his feminine strength-in-quietness - which is not passivity at all but free and active choice. Such free choice, free response ... is what makes a woman in her |quietness' appealing to a man....For such quietness bespeaks power." In brief, Jesus himself did not flinch at breaking the male mold and taking on feminine qualities.

In Jesus, then, we have an example of a man who overcame the compulsion to distance from the feminine, and consequently the need for bravado or dominance vanished as well. This would seem to imply, though Ong does not say so, that an all-male leadership in the church is a function of male insecurity. On the basis of the gospel, however, Catholic identity and institutional structure need not hinge on the protocol of women's subordination. Other, variant structures are imaginable - which apparently do not jeopardize Walter Ong's sense of manhood. "You fight these issues," he remarks, "hoping you can crush them. But by the time the news gets out, they're dead all on their own."

The Presence of the Word (Yale University Press, 1967), Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Cornell University Press, 1971), and Interfaces of the Word (Cornell University Press, 1977) focus on the difference between oral cultures and literate ones, tracing the impact of writing, print, and electronic media on human character, ways of thinking, social structures, and behavior. A fourth book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen, 1982), synthesizes the trilogy and, in addition, develops the implications of the orality-literacy contrast for structuralism, deconstruction, speech-act and reader-response theory, social studies, biblical studies, philosophy, and cultural history generally. In between the above works, I count some eleven other books on such diverse topics as language, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Milton, Charles Darwin, popular culture, and religion.