Now, Ong's seminal 1967 book The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (Yale University Press), the expanded version of his 1964 Terry Lectures at Yale University, inspired me to think about both the non-religious and the religious experience of presence (also known as the experience of the sacred in Mircea Eliade's terminology) over the years and over the years, to compile a reading list of books related to both the non-religious and the religious experience of presence.
At the end of this article, I am supplying a list of related books as recommended reading, along with some brief annotations to call attention to certain connections with other listed works.
Historically, the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence in Holy Communion emerged in a strongly oral world. In Ong's sweeping account of our Western cultural history, the strongly oral world persisted for centuries after the emergency of phonetic alphabetic literacy in the Hebrew Bible and in Greek philosophical thought as exemplified by Plato and Aristotle. However, after the emergence of the Gutenberg printing press in the mid-1450s, the strongly oral world began to wane considerably. No doubt many practicing Catholics in the United States today have deeply interiorized the visualist worldview that modern print culture fostered. Consequently, many practicing Catholics in the United States today may have serious reservations about the doctrine of Real Presence in Holy Communion.
This analysis/interpretation here of the doctrine of the Real Presence strikes me as somewhat analogous, at least up to a certain point, to Ong's own analysis/interpretation of Nietzsche's famous proclamation that God is dead in Ong's chapter "Post-Christian or Not?" in his other 1967 book In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (New York: Macmillan, pages 147-164).
As I say, "at least up to a certain point." So what exactly is that "certain point"? In Ong's chapter "Post-Christian or Not?" he refers in passing (page 154) Martin Buber's book The Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952). However, we have to look elsewhere in Ong's book In the Human Grain: Further Explorations of Contemporary Culture (1967a) for his more detailed discussion of Buber's book The Eclipse of God (1952).
On pages 180-181, where Ong uses generic masculines terms that were still commonly used in 1967, he says, "Whatever its manifold causes, the recent 'distancing of God is an era, not an interlude. Martib Buber suggests that this is an age when God is 'silent.' It might be more accurate to say that it is an age in which man is silent about God, in great part because man has not assimilated to his knowledge of God the new knowledge of the physical universe which has recently been given him. God speaks to men today as always there really is no evidence that he does not, and a great deal that he does. But God's manner of speaking to man varies somewhat as man moves through history. God spoke to man in the Scriptures in the days of Jeremaih, and he still speaks through them in our day. But God's voice in the Scriptures echoes today through a dense and carefully explored history which has penetrated and formed even our subconsconscious and which was unknown to Jeremaih, reaching back, as it does, not only to Jeremaih but also hundreds of thousands of years before his time."
Then on pages 182-183, Ong says, "Something has taken place here [in the mass communications media] comparable to what we have called the 'distancing' of God. The properly human human has been 'distanced,' and with it morality itself. . . . In mass communication, the result [of 'neglect(ing) the interior of the individual'] is inevitable. Father William F. Lynch has protested in The Image Industries [New York: Sheed and Ward, 1959] that films and television chronically tend to confuse fantasy with reality, weaken the sensibility, enslave the imagination, and project spectacular dreams which wipe out the true lines of human actuality. But more than this, since the 'thing,' the structure itself, demands so much attention, the human, the moral, tends to lose definition and to be minimized."
But I digress about my qualifying remark "at least up to a certain point." It is now time for me to return to my main points.
Now, if practicing Catholics in the United States today believe this orthodox Roman Catholic doctrine, their belief in its propositional truth is cognitive as are all beliefs in all propositional orthodox doctrines (such as the orthodox doctrine about the supposed divine trinity; of course, unitarians reject the orthodox doctrine about the supposed divine trinity, and so the Roman Catholic Church rejects unitarians as heterodox, not as orthodox Christians; for a time, Ralph Waldo Emerson served as an ordained Unitarian minister in Boston).
However, if practicing Catholics were to sense that they were experiencing the Real Presence of Jesus the Messiah through their participation in Holy Communion at Mass, then their personal subjective affective mystic experience would register on them as primarily affective and, upon reflection, perhaps also as cognitive.
But do practicing Catholics have to hold the cognitive belief that the doctrine of the Real Presence is true in order to have the personal subjective affective mystic experience of the Real Presence? No, not necessarily.
Conversely, might practicing Catholics who do not hold the doctrine of the Real Presence to be true possibly have the personal subjective affective mystic experience? Yes, in theory, this might happen.
Now, just as experiences of what is known as nature mysticism are usually brief, so too the personal subjective affective mystic experience of the Real Presence in Holy Communion at Mass could be brief compared to the longer duration of mystic experiences that Bernard McGinn examines in his multi-volume work The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1991, 1994, 1998, 2005, 2012, 2017a, and 2017b).
RECOMMENDED READING
Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Bloom, Harold. Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine. New York: Riverhead Books/ Penguin Group, 2005. Includes extended discussion of presence.
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