As part of Ong's Jesuit training, he studied the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas in his philosophical studies (in Latin) and also again later in his theological studies (in Latin) - before he later went to Harvard University for his doctoral studies in English. However, later, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) in the Roman Catholic Church downgraded Aquinas a wee bit from his most favored status earlier in the twentieth century. But did Ong study all 52 of Aquinas' works from which Fox translates excerpts in his excellent 1992 550-page book Sheer Joy: [Four] Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality? In all honesty, I do not know.
For a bibliography of Ong's 400 or so publications, including information about reprintings and translations, see Thomas M. Walsh's "Walter J. Ong, S.J.: A Bibliography 1929-2006" in the 2011 book Language, Culture, and Identity: The Legacy of Walter J. Ong, S.J., edited by Sara van den Berg and Thomas M. Walsh (pages 185-245). (If a comparably comprehensive bibliography of Bloom's many publications has been published, I am not aware it.)
Now, in the "Preface" to his 1977 book Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (pages 9-13), he mentions Bloom, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and certain other noteworthy contemporary thinkers:
"At a few points I refer in passing to the work of French and other European structuralists - variously psychoanalytic, phenomenological, linguistic, or anthropological in cast - such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Tzvetan Todorov, not to mention Claude Levi-Strauss and certain cisatlantic critics such as Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Harold Bloom, who are more or less in dialogue with these Europeans. Many readers will doubtless note that the works of these scholars and the present volume share common themes and perhaps even a kind of common excitement" (page 10).
But Heys does not happen to advert explicitly to Ong's work.
Unfortunately for Ong, the longstanding anti-Catholic bias in the prestige culture in American culture has not entirely waned to this day, as the former Catholic religion historian Philip Jenkins argues in his 2003 book The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice and as the American Jesuit Mark S. Massa also argues in his 2003 book Anti-Catholicism in America: The Last Acceptable Prejudice.
As to Ong's sense of identity as an American Catholic in the midst of a sea of American Protestants, he uses the imagery of leaven (yeast) to suggest how American Catholics may interact with American culture in his first book Frontiers in American Catholicism: Essays on Ideology and Culture (1957, page 27). Years later, Ong once again invoked the modest imagery of leaven in his article "Yeast: A Parable for Catholic Higher Education" in the Jesuit-sponsored magazine America, volume 162 (April 7, 1990): pages 347-349 and 362-363, which is reprinted in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts (1999, pages 169-176).
In the United States in the twentieth century, most non-Protestant undergraduate English majors, including myself (class of 1966 at Saint Louis University, the Jesuit university in St. Louis, Missouri, where I first encountered Ong in the fall semester of 1964), also, like Bloom, had to come to terms somehow with their own personal identity as an American in respect to the predominantly WASP prestige culture in American culture historically. Under the circumstances, perhaps most non-Protestant undergraduate English majors in the United States in the twentieth century had to work out a hyphenated or hybrid sense of American identity - a byproduct of the famous American melting pot.
The American scholar Stephen Greenblatt published the 1980 book Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. I like the expression "self-fashioning." For me, my own personal self-fashioning started well before my undergraduate years, but my process of self-fashioning became far more deeply earnest for me during my undergraduate years, as it has continued to be for me ever since then. In writing the present essay, I am carrying forward my own personal self-fashioning.
By way of digression, I should point out here that I heard the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), a Baptist minister, speak at Saint Louis University on Monday, October 12, 1964. In addition, I joined the last leg of his march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and heard him speak at the rally in Montgomery on March 25, 1965. For me, all of my Ong-related publications have been part of my own personal Via Transformativa path in life (in Fox's terminology, discussed below).
The American alcoholic novelist William Faulkner (1897-1962) has memorably profiled the white anti-black male racist of the Old South in the character of the arrogant Thomas Sutpen in his 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! No doubt Dr. King's civil rights movement made irreversible inroads with regard to Jim Crow laws and customs in the Old South. Nevertheless, Mayor Richard J. Daley's white police in Chicago staged a televised police riot against demonstrators in Chicago at the time of the 1968 Democratic Convention -- and showed the world what we can expect from arrogant white police - a tradition that the certain police in Minneapolis continued on May 25, 2020, in the tragic death of George Floyd in police custody.
In any event, apart from the fact that both Ong and Bloom received their doctoral degrees in English from different prestigious universities in 1955 (Ong from Harvard; Bloom from Yale), and apart from the fact that both of them occasionally published books and articles about religion, do they have anything else in common? Yes, they do. Ong published his 1981 book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness, the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University. And Bloom published his 1982 book Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. So both of them were interested in contesting behavior (displayed, for example, by the arrogant Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner's 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!).
For further discussion of Faulkner and male agonism, see my essay "Faulkner and Male Agonism" in the 1998 book Time, Memory, and the Verbal Arts: Essays on the Thought of Walter Ong, edited by Dennis L. Weeks and Jane Hoogestraat (pages 203-221). For further discussion of the homework that Faulkner did for his portrait of Sutpen, see the 2010 book Ledgers of History: William Faulkner, an Almost Forgotten Friendship, and an Antebellum Plantation Diary.
No doubt the arrogant President Tweety is a cultural and psychological descendant of the fictional Thomas Sutpen, but he is not as smart as Sutpen is portrayed to be. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate Tweety's arrogance.
Now, like Ong and Bloom, Rene Girard (1923-2015) was interested in contesting behavior in the form of what he refers to as mimetic desire. In 1993, the journal Religion and Literature, published out of the University of Notre Dame, published "Violence, Difference, Sacrifice: A Conversation with Rene Girard" conducted by Rebecca Adams. One central point in their conversation is what they refer to as the "imitation" of Christ. In response, Ong published his short article "Mimesis and the Following of Christ" in Religion and Literature, volume 26, number 2 (1994): pages 73-77, which is reprinted in volume four of Ong's Faith and Contexts (1999, pages 177-181). Briefly, Ong argues that Christians are called upon to follow Christ, rather than imitate Christ. Imitating Christ invokes in the Christian a certain kind of contesting behavior with a model. But following Christ does not invoke any contesting. For self-described Christians of all sorts, following Christ resembles, in effect, following your bliss, as Joseph Campbell's advises.
In any event, Ong's persistent interest in contesting tendencies is also manifest in certain selections in An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry (2002).
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