Aquinas's Media?

While here in our old house in the California mountains, I found our copy of Aquinas's Summa.   The book is readily available online and can be purchased inexpensively on Kindle, but it's nice to read from a physical copy.    I will probably bring the first volume (of five) back with me to Oklahoma if I can fit it in our rental van.   

I've also found an introductory book about Marshall McLuhan around the house and so I have been thinking about his famous dictum "the media is the message."    I still don't have any grasp on how McLuhan thought, not really, but I have noticed -- who hasn't, nowadays? -- that this principle is very relevant to our times, and yet is often not addressed in a given controversy on the topic of your choice.  

My point?  While rereading yet again Aquinas's Prologue to the Summa, which states his intentions for the work, it occurred to me that he is basically describing -- very concisely -- his proposed medium.  

This leads to what turns out to be quite a big topic, for apparently McLuhan (a convert to Catholicism) thought of himself as a Thomist of a sort:

It is well known, however, that McLuhan considered himself a follower of the thirteenth century scholastic Thomas Aquinas; as he wrote to his friend Fr. John Mole, “I am a Thomist for whom the sensory order resonates with the divine Logos.”  While McLuhan’s intellectual corpus provides enough evidence to justify taking him at his word, it is also clear that McLuhan was a very unusual Thomist, and intentionally so.

One of the ways that Aquinas influenced McLuhan's thinking was in his treatment of media as a "formal cause".   

McLuhan also liked formal causality as a way to get at communication. His son, Eric McLuhan, notes, “Thomas [Aquinas] made much use in his work of Formal Causality; my father’s idea of a medium as an environment of services as disservices is exactly that of Formal Causality” (McLuhan, 1999, p. xx). Following Aristotle, Aquinas analyzed actions and relations in terms of four fundamental causes: material cause, efficient cause, final cause, and formal cause. In an example of a house cited by Eric McLuhan (2005), the bricks and wood constitute the material cause of the house; the work of the bricklayers and carpenters, the efficient cause; and the goal of a house to live in or to rent, the final cause. But formal cause—often referred to as the plan or blueprint—provides something quite different, and something quite different from a blueprint, whose visual analogy misses the point. Instead formal cause relates to the definition or nature of a thing, calling to mind something akin to Plato’s sense of Idea.

I can see further questions coming up here, and I put down the links and quotes to remind me to investigate further at some point.  For example, how do "means" and "method" fit in with form -- what the thing is?  Is McLuhan's maxim applicable uniquely to human communication?   But now back to the Prologue itself.

To understand the "medium" of the Summa I looked up the historical context of how it was taught, back in the 13th century.   From what I read, the Scholastic method of the cathedral universities of the time was a very early mode of what is still done today in academia.   You gathered everything you could find on a topic (this would be in theology, and the sources were mostly Scripture, Church Fathers, and the commentaries on the Church Fathers).  Then you tried to build a synthesized understanding of the topic and all of its ramifications presented by the different authorities.   The general idea was not critique, because the scholastics did not think of themselves as having superior wisdom to their forebears.    Yet there was a lot of creativity and intellectual energy in the pursuit as well as comparative thinking --- this is what the "disputes" were for, to take apparent contradictions seriously and try to reconcile them with the most likely truth of the matter.  

Thomas Aquinas apparently began writing the Summa Theologica when he was about 40, around 1265.   He had been appointed papal theologian by the newly elected Clement IV, and he had also been sent by the Dominican order to teach at a studium provinciale which was one of the order's first mid-level schools... past general schooling but preceding advanced university studies.   At that time the main textbook used for general theology was Peter Lombard's Sentences.   I read a bit about this when I was reading Jean Leclercq's book on Monastic Learning a couple of years ago.   Basically, this work was a collection of topically arranged quotes from the Church Fathers.... a sort of compendium; earlier in his academic life Aquinas had written a commentary on the Sentences.    

Of course, back in the 13th century all texts were in manuscript form.  There was no printing, no ready availability of the written word.   The method of teaching was divided into lectio and disputatio.   In the lectio, the teacher read from the text and commented on it -- explaining references, providing context, pointing out difficulties, so a bit like the current lecture of today.    The disputatio sounds more like a seminar with the students in dialogue with the teacher, working out ideas on the ground.

In the Summa's Prologue -- you see, I am getting to the point, though slowly -- you see a polite and positively framed critique of Lombard's Sentences and their use with students who were still beginners.   He lists the problems with the current books in relation to teaching -- 

• the multiplication of useless questions, articles, and arguments; 
•  the things such novices need to know are not taught according to the order of the discipline, but according as was needed for commenting on books, or according as an opportunity for raising a disputed question presented itself; 
•  frequent repetition of the same things brought weariness and confusion to the minds of the readers.

 His Summa, then, was intended to avoid less essential matters; to proceed in an orderly, systematic way; to avoid the repetition unavoidable in the more "collation" style approach.     But it incorporated the investigative, dialogic mode of the early Scholastics, and thus differed from the later neo-Scholastic manuals, which were more like topical reference books, apparently.   More here from the 1919 Catholic Encyclopedia.  

His positive goals:

Endeavoring to avoid these and other like faults, we shall try, trusting in God’s help, 

• to set forth whatever belongs to Sacred Doctrine as briefly and clearly as the matter itself may allow.

So this is an extremely simplified glance at the context and pretext for the book which became so influential in Catholic theology.     In the bigger picture of history, as is well known, Aristotle had recently been rediscovered via Muslim scholarship, and translated into Latin.   There was a sort of intellectual ferment going on -- sometimes compared to our day, but very different in the particulars.     Josef Pieper's Guide to St Thomas Aquinas is good background reading for this context and GK Chesterton's work on St Thomas is generally considered very perceptive by many longtime Thomists like Etienne Gilson.  

As to the "media" part of this --  McLuhan compared the printing press world to the new electronic world of the 20th century.   Or so I understand, since I haven't read his books, just quotes in articles and books about him.   He held that the mode of transmission mattered --  was part of the content delivered, and maybe more than part of it.    This would presumably be because of the kind of beings we are -- we understand with our minds, but in an embodied way.  St Augustine commented that when he learned his mother tongue, Latin, from his family, it was in a context of affection and exploration, but when he learned Greek, it was in a context of rote and punishments, and he hated it.     I guess this leads me again to McLuhan:  

McLuhans “Thomistic” theory of formal causality is related to his own theory of participation in various media, the distinction between hot and cold media. The various media change the way we see the world, and the media, in a certain way, stand in place of our sensus communis. These views were developed by Walter Ong (who wrote his PhD under McLuhan’s direction)in such works as Ramus’ Method and the Decay of Dialogue (Harvard U. Press). With print came an emphasis upon efficient causality. Electric media (the telegraph and subsequent technologies) re-introduce a sensitivity to formal causality. McLuhan writes to Peter Drucker (Letters, p. 259, Dec. 15, 1959):

” … I refer to formal cause not in the sense of the classification of forms” (the taxonomies of Linnaeus? – HM) “but their their operation upon one another.”

Please note that this is not relativism or historicism, or at least, is not meant to be (and is too tentative to add up to a commitment on anything).   Basically, any message seems freighted to a certain extent by its mode of transmission.   I think you could make a pretty Scriptural argument to that effect.  This participatory element is not altogether recognized by our rational minds, but is perceived nevertheless.   I see that to continue I would have to bring up Iain McGilchrist, and I've been working on this long enough, so I'll stop now.