Concerning medieval icon images, see Hans Belting's book Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art, translated by Edmund Jephcott (University of Chicago Press, 1994).
Concerning imagistic thinking, see Eric A. Havelock's book Preface to Plato (Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 1963), a book that Ong never tired of referring to. To be sure, Havelock is explicitly referring to the imagistic thinking involving in the Homeric epics, the Illiad and the Odyssey. Over against the Homeric epics, Havelock sees Plato's dialogues as representing a more abstract kind of thinking - the abstract kind of thinking characteristic of Aristotle and all subsequent Western philosophy.
Both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola in the sixteenth century are closer to the imagistic thinking of the Homeric epics than to the more abstract thinking of Plato's dialogues and of Aristotle and all subsequent Western philosophy.
However, after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in the mid-1450s, the subsequent print culture in Western culture tended to inculcate the dramatic spread of the more abstract thinking of Plato's dialogues and of Aristotle and all subsequent Western philosophy, even among people who learned to read and write but who did not formally study Western philosophy.
Yes, even the white non-college-educated Trump voters have been inculcated in the more abstract thinking of Plato's dialogues and of Aristotle and all subsequent Western philosophy, inculcated in Western print culture mostly through their formal education in learning how to read and write.
Ong sees the prolific French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and his followers as pivotal in that dramatic spread of the more abstract kind of thinking characteristic of Western philosophy. See Ong's massively researched book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press, 1958).
For further discussion of Ong's philosophical thought, see my lengthy OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):
Now, if Stanley is correct in suggesting that our contemporary cultural conditioning in print culture in the West is an impediment to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola having such powerful motivational impacts on contemporary Jesuits so as to produce such extraordinarily motivated Jesuits as the first Jesuits described by O'Malley, then we may wonder if any other spiritual exercises in our contemporary culture may have such powerful motivational impacts.
Even though it may still be too earlier to say what the motivational impacts are, Jordan Peterson's bestselling book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018) strikes me, in effect, as a contemporary book of spiritual exercises. Nevertheless, there is no institutional structure in which people who read it can be guided and supported, even if certain readers are individually powerfully motivated by reading it.
So let's look around elsewhere. If we were to be somewhat elastic in what we were going to consider, in effect, as books of spiritual exercises, could we consider the Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan's ambitious philosophical book Insight: A Study of Human Understanding as a contemporary book of spiritual exercises?
Yes, we could accurately characterize it as a contemporary book of spiritual exercises. In addition, for those persons who individually work through it, it may have a powerful motivational impact. However, not many persons are likely to work through it.
The edited fifth edition of Lonergan's philosophical masterpiece is published as volume three of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (University of Toronto Press, 1992).
Also see the related book The Dynamism of Desire: Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., on The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola by James L. Connor, S.J., and others (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2006).
Now, could we perhaps consider the various books of the late Michel Foucault (1926-1984) as books of spiritual exercises? Yes, his books that he himself characterizes as archaeologies and genealogies seem to be spiritual exercises for the readers who individually work through them.
This brings me to the four volumes of his that we now have of The History of Sexuality series. But the series is not complete. So it is a much tougher call to make as to whether or not the four published volumes collectively, or perhaps even individually, might work for readers as spiritual exercises. Then there are the now published lectures that Foucault delivered over the years in different contexts.
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