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Barton T. Geger, S.J., and "Jesuitmania" (REVIEW ESSAY)

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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) August 10, 2024: My favorite scholar is my former teach at Saint Louis University, the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian and pioneering media ecology theorist Walter Jackson Ong, Jr. (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955).

As a member of the Society of Jesus (abbreviated S.J.), Father Ong occasionally wrote about the Spanish Renaissance mystic St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) and the Society of Jesus. Ignatius is the author of the famous Spiritual Exercises. He served as the first Superior General of the Society of Jesus, and, in addition to writing thousands of letters, he also wrote the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus.

The American Jesuit theologian Barton T. Geger (born in 1968; doctorate in sacred theology, Universidad Pontifica Comillas in Madrid, 2010) has edited the new 2024 book Constitutions of the Society of Jesus: A Critical Edition: With the Complementary Norms [Promulgated by the Society of Jesus] (Institute of Jesuit Sources).

The Institute of Jesuit Sources at Boston College has a website: https://jesuitsources.bc.edu

I will discuss Geger's new edition of the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus further below in the second part of the present essay.

Now, I would like to draw your attention to three of Ong's relevant publications about St. Ignatius Loyola and the Society of Jesus.

"'A.M.D.G.': Dedication or Directive?" in the now-defunct Jesuit-sponsored journal Review for Religious, volume 11, number 5 (September 15, 1952): pp. 257-264. The Latin expression Ad majorem Dei gloriam means "For the greater glory of God." Ong answers the question he posed in the title of his essay by pointing out that St. Ignatius Loyola used the expression "For the greater glory of God" as a way to guide and direct one's decision making, once one has identified the ethically permitted options available under the circumstances. Ong's essay is reprinted in volume three of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Scholars Press, 1995, pp. 1-8).

"St. Ignatius' Prison-Cage and the Existentialist Situation" in the Jesuit-sponsored journal Theological Studies, volume 15, number 1 (March 1954): pp. 34-51. Ong reprinted it in his 1962 book The Barbarian Within: And Other Fugitive Essays and Studies (Macmillan; pp. 242-259). It is also reprinted in volume two of Ong's Faith and Contexts, edited by Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Scholars Press, 1992b, pp. 52-67).

The existentialists generally emphasized the importance of decision making - the very same context that Ong refers to in his understanding of "For the greater glory of God" as a directive for ethical decision making.

In Ong's 1986 book Hopkins, the Self, and God (University of Toronto Press), the published version of Ong's 1981 Alexander Lectures at the University of Toronto, Ong reprises his understanding of the expression Ad majorem Dei gloriam (pp. 78-81 and 87). In addition, he discusses St. Ignatius Loyola and the Society of Jesus extensively (pp. 5, 25, 27, 36-37, 39, 44, 54-88, 60-61, 65-75, 113-122, 144, 155-156).

Now, we should note here that the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s. It helped propel an upsurge in literacy and formal education in our Western cultural history. Ong's pioneering study of the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s is also Ong's pioneering study of the aural-to-visual shift in cognitive processing in our Western cultural history, his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Harvard University Press; for specific page references to the aural-to-visual shift, see the "Index" [p. 396]). Peter Ramus (1515-1572) was a French Renaissance logician and educational reformer and Protestant martyr. He was a regius professor at the University of Paris. (In our Western cultural history from ancient times, the verbal arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic - also known as logic - constituted what is known as the trivium. The "Index" in Ong's massively researched 1958 book contains entries on grammar [p. 400], rhetoric [p. 405-406], and logic [p. 401-402].)

There is a certain overlap in the lives of Peter Ramus (1515-1572) and St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) - namely, the years 1515 to 1556. Moreover, Ignatius studied at the University of Paris, where Ramus was a regius professor.

In any event, I have discussed Ong's thought in his massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue in my OEN article "Walter J. Ong's Philosophical Thought" (dated September 20, 2020):

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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