The Medium and the Light

This book brings together two of my recent interests, Catholicism and Marshall McLuhan. I've perhaps noted that McLuhan was very worried about the effects of new technologies on existing instituions. Well, this concern went double for that most durable of western institutions, the Catholic Church. McLuhan was a very devout Catholic, he called himself "the worst kind, a convert" having found the Church in his university days. Collected here is the introduction to his PhD thesis on Thomas Nasche, which led McLuhan to the Church and convinced him that one of the central conflicts of the medieval world was between the rhetoriticians, dialecticians and the grammarians. Most Catholics tended to follow the grammarian route set down by Augustine. Remeber that Guibert was taught by a master of rhetoric.

At any rate, McLuhan's son seems to think that his father saw the debate as contiuing throughout history, so that theme (the trivium) comes up quite a bit here. Another idea that gets much play is the Gestalt contrast between figure and ground. In the famous McLuhan equation, the medium is the ground, and so overlooked, and the message is figure, and therefore unimportant. In Catholicism, McLuhan holds Christ's words to be the figure and the questions that He asks of every man to be the ground.

The book is filled with flashes of insight that may be more familiar to those who have read deeply into McLuhan. For example, "The European goes outside to be with others and home to be alone, while the American stays at home to be with others and goes out in public to be alone." "Is life in the magnetic city compatible with the survival of the Greco-Roman tradition?" and so forth. As usual, we have to read McLuhan slowly to get where he's going with some of his ideas.

But, inevitably he is going somewhere. There's a deeper Catholic humanism here than we have seen elsewhere. McLuhan's line was always that he simply told us what was going on, never to advocate any particular course of action or give any warnings. After reading this collection, I find that much harder to believe.