WALTER J. ONG AND THOMAS AQUINAS
My favorite scholar is the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). As part of his Jesuit training, he completed three graduate degrees in philosophy (1941), English (1941) and theology (1948), all from Saint Louis University, before he started his doctoral studies in English at Harvard University.
For his Master's degree in English, Ong wrote his thesis, under the direction of the young Canadian Catholic convert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), on the sprung rhythm in the posthumously published poetry of the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889). Ong's thesis was published, slightly revised, in 1949 as "Hopkins' Sprung Rhythm and the Life of English Poetry." It is reprinted in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Hampton Press, 2002, pages 111-174).
James I. Wimsatt of the University of Texas at Austin accepted Ong's challenge to study Hopkins' sprung rhythm further in his book Hopkins' Poetics of Speech Sound: Sprung Rhythm, Lettering, Inscape (University of Toronto Press, 2006).
Ong himself continued to study Hopkins life and poetry through book reviews and articles. The culmination of Ong's study of Hopkins is his 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press), the published version of his 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto.
As part of Ong's graduate studies in philosophy and theology (with classes and exams in Latin), he studied the Thomistic philosophy and theology, which the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church downgraded a wee bit from its most favored status previously in the twentieth century. But this tiny downgrading of Thomism was a blessing in disguise because it subsequently opened the way for various scholars to study Aquinas' spirituality in far greater depth than it had been studied previously.
For an accessible presentation of Aquinas' thought about spirituality, see the American Episcopal priest Matthew Fox's 2020 560-page book Sheer Joy: [Four] Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality (Ixia Press/ Dover Publications; orig. ed., 1992). Fox creatively structures Aquinas' thought in the four constructed conversations in the book into his four-fold account of creation spirituality:
(1) the Via Positiva (pages 57-187);
(2) the Via Negativa (pages 189-243);
(3) the Via Creativa (pages 245-382);
(4) the Via Transformativa (pages 383-515).
In my estimate, the best way we can attune ourselves to the creative universe is by following what Fox refers to as creation spirituality as Aquinas operationally defines and explains each of the four paths of creation spirituality in this book.
But for a more succinct presentation of Aquinas' thought, see Fox's short 2020 book The Tao of Thomas Aquinas: Fierce Wisdom for Hard Times (iUniverse).
Of course, Aquinas' thought about creation spirituality includes the two accounts of creation in the book of Genesis. For Aquinas, creation is ongoing - even though God is portrayed in one account in Genesis as resting on the seventh day of creation. For Aquinas, God may be resting, comparatively speaking, but God's creation has not stopped. Moreover, as Fox notes (pages 125-132), Aquinas' thought is compatible, broadly speaking, with evolutionary theory.
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