Brendan Sanderson
Tony Tremblay
I came in on my knees.- McLuhan and Catholicism
The Medium and the light: Marshall McLuhan's Reflections on Religion. Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek, eds. Toronto: Stoddart, 1999. V-Vi, vii-xxviii, 219 pages. $22.95 Paper.
The Medium and the light is a curious collection of McLuhan's essays that at once satisfies and does not satisfy our interest in the religious attitudes and commitments of a man who was very much a prophet in his own right. Medium, sage, oracle, zealous convert, McLuhan has been labelled all of these things, and while one might expect to find concrete anchor points for his well-known Catholic affinities, those that we suspect informed some of his riskier imaginative and critical flights, one must search closely to locate those in this collection of essays. My observation, mind you, is not a criticism of the collection as much as it is a general statement on what McLuhan chose to say (and, more appropriately, not to say) about his own faith. The two lines that best describe McLuhan's religious writings in this collection, then, come from a letter to Fr. Clement McNaspy in 1946. McLuhan writes in that letter: "There is no need to mention Christianity. It is enough that it be known that the operator is a Christian" (202). There can be little doubt indeed that McLuhan is a Christian, as each of the collection's twenty-two essays, letters, interviews, and fragments in their own way attest. But if readers are looking for a very Catholic writer's full witness and testimony, either of the memoir or reflective formats of Muggeridge, Chesterton, or Maritain, they will be unsatisfied here, concluding, I suspect, that along with the excellent Marchand and Gordon biographies, The Medium and the Light is but a start at unravelling the complexities and self-confessed paradoxes of McLuhan's Catholicism.
While the collection hits its stated mark only peripherally, though, there are countless points of interest revealed, the first of which is revisiting McLuhan's uncharacteristically impassioned, adjective-laden first essay on the writer who brought him into the Church, G.K. Chesterton. Students of McLuhan will know already of the correspondence generated by the essay between Father Gerald Phelan at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies at St. Mike's and McLuhan, the correspondence that would ultimately result in McLuhan's conversion to Catholicism in 1937. What is of real interest in the essay, beyond the late-19th century rhetorical style that McLuhan would soon scrap for the sparer non-involvement of the punster, is McLuhan's stated admiration for Chesterton's risk in taking on a Dickensian-like humanism as the centre of his moral programme. Such risk, he would later write to his mother, buoyed his faith in a greater moral economy of nature, proving to be an antidote to the dark, despairing misanthropy of European-styled intellectualism (the mix of Leavisite New Criticism and German philology that he had encountered at Cambridge). In this seemingly naive early essay, then, we are given a clue to what attracted McLuhan to the Church - namely, the corrective of its moral humanism. That McLuhan would seek such a corrective at this time of his life is not entirely surprising, given that he had steeped himself in the fierce antiindustrialism of Wyndham Lewis, was intimately aware, by first-hand account in London, of the sterility of Eliot's modem wasteland, and was making early intellectual preparations to write The Mechanical Bride.
Of all the pieces in the collection, then, the first few constitute the most candid statements McLuhan would make about his feelings toward the Church. The already well-known pre- and post-Conversion letters to his mother detail a rare frankness toward his faith that, if Philip Marchand is to be believed (and this collection is good evidence that he should), he would not reveal again, preferring "the time-honored Catholic habit of leaving theology to the professionals" (Marchand 45). As a young convert, however, he could risk the following declarations:
Now the Catholic religion as you may be able to check in your own experience of it is alone in blessing and employing all those merely human faculties which produce games and philosophy, and poetry and music and mirth and fellowship with a very fleshy basis.... The Catholic Church does not despise or wantonly mortify those members and faculties which Christ deigned to assume.... Catholic culture produced Chaucer and his merry story-telling pilgrims... [It] produced Don Quixote and St. Francis and Rabelais. What I wish to emphasize about them is their various and rich-hearted humanity. (15)
Had McLuhan continued to be as frank about his beliefs as he was in these early pre- 1940 musings, he would have left us with a testimony that is Ellullike in the range of its convictions. Which is not to say that Ellul was a greater thinker than McLuhan, but that Ellul's full spectrum of human awareness more obviously (and necessarily) included the spirit as part of the sensorium. McLuhan's did too, of course, but one has to dig deeply to find it - too deeply, I would suggest, for a thinker who believed so completely in the Catholic doctrine that the only real potency ofthe material body of Christ is through action. What this insight reveals is that McLuhan must have been mightily tormented by the incongruity of his detached persona with the Living Presence in his life. Perhaps, in this regard, Chesterton and Joyce's role-playing fun backfired on him.
Less satisfying in the collection are Parts II and III, in which McLuhan writes about the Church's misunderstanding of media. I say less satisfying because these essays reveal something of the hubris of a mature thinker searching for circumstances that affirm his theories. McLuhan is not immune from this hubris in the essays the editors selected for these two sections. Locating the modem fixation for "good or bad" value judgement in the Protestant obsession with efficient causality (37), for instance, is, for me, too loose a piece of reasoning for a thinker so dexterous. Likewise, to come across global village, figure and ground, allat-onceness, mosaic and paradox, Symbolist "poetic process" and other favourite McLuhan ideas (and to come across them feeling that they've been served up as the template under which the history of Christianity is observed and dissected) is somewhat unsettling, a shoddy short-hand for one so insightful. I wanted more of McLuhan's freshness in these middle essays, the kind of daring that revisited the monastic scriptoria, that tied the illuminatedmanuscript and medieval iconography to pictorial, ideogrammic representation. But, while McLuhan in the middle essays of Parts II and III is less daring than he was in The Gutenberg Galaxy, some connections are not as cacophonous when yoked together. Here McLuhan writes about Roman schism using his theories of typography:
But Luther and the first Protestants were "schoolmen" who were trained in literacy. They transported the old methods of scholastic discussion into the new visual order: they thus used the new discovery of print to dig the trench that separated them from the Roman Church.... This slide toward the visual also explains the appearance of sects. The word sect evokes visual fragmentation... Recall the famous incident [in Hawthome's novel, The Scarlet Letter] of the woman who belonged to the Puritan sect in New England. She was convicted of adultery and branded with an "A." The idea of isolating her from the rest of the world with a scarlet mark characterizes those puritans who loved to classify people according to their opinions and attitudes. (47-48)
McLuhan's discussions of the coterminous rise of the Church with the early phonetic stages of Greco-Roman culture also make interesting reading, as does his condemnation of a content-obsessed Catechism that misses the real ground of its beseeching - i.e., "the word that [the pope] utters, not the encyclical" (147,206). In fact, this idea of an expanding, and ultimately stifling, phonetic literacy becomes McLuhan's central criticism ofthe Catholic Church. In "The De-Romanization ofthe American Catholic Church" (1970) and "Our Only Hope is Apocalypse" (1977), McLuhan launches a surprisingly uncensored attack on the smugness of Roman Catholic hierarchy, saying that, as a product of the alphabetic logic of classification, "Rome is going to have to liquidate its bureaucracy" if it has any chance of survival "under electric conditions" (55). Calling Rome's hold a "visual monopoly" and the Roman pontiff a CEO, he sees the only hope for the Church resting in a series of apocalyptic events that will seed a new liturgy, one that sees the Cardinals leave the dioceses to work in participatory contact with people in the marketplace:
I think that the "death of Christianity" or the "death of God" occurs the moment they become concept. As long as they remain percept, directly involving the perceiver, they are alive. (81)
McLuhan's only omission in this observation is a failure to identify that the real target of his criticism is the first-world Catholic Church, specifically the English-language North American Church. His call in this collection, and elsewhere, for greater materiality in practice, whether in the donning of vestment or in daily communion with Mary or the Sacred Heart, is very much a feature of third-world and Spanish-influenced Catholicism. And while McLuhan does cite eastern orthodox practice as being more in tuned with acoustic changes, his omission indicates that his real difficulty with North American-styled Romanism is the dehumanization of its bureaucratized authority.
In these and other observations in the collection, McLuhan identifies himself as a Thomist, whose noumenal world resonates with the divine Logos. I'll give McLuhan the benefit of the doubt here and suggest that beyond Marchand's suggestion for McLuhan's muteness on religion spelled out above, McLuhan truly believed that theology - that is, "theorizing" Christ - was anti-religious, certainly anti-Catholic. As he explained in a l972 interview: "using direct percept and direct involvement with the actuality of a revealed thing - there need be no theology in the ordinary sense ofthe word" (81). It is left to us, finally, and I hope to ffifther studies, to ruminate on the effects that "non-theorizing" had on a mind of such gigantic intellectual curiosity and accomlishment. Perhaps faith, reft of all its sectarian ornamentation and trifle, was the only puzzle McLuhan felt he didn't have to solve; perhaps faith alone was all that could bring him to his knees, which, he admitted, was how he entered the Church.
Works cited:
Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. Toronto: Random House, 1989.
Editorial Office:
The Antigonish Review
P.O. Box 5000
Antigonish
Nova Scotia B2G 2W5
Canada
Telephone: (902) 867-3962
Fax: (902) 867-5563
E-mail: tar@stfx.ca
