In his early works, Ong was primarily concerned with revealing the importance of writing and print in understanding the evolution of modern consciousness; in Fighting for Life, he analyzed the place of the word in causing human dissension. Ong had recognized the biological complement to human consciousness in his earlier writings, but he now made more extensive use of the Darwinian concept of struggle for existence. Ong was attracted to evolution’s sense of the present as growing out of the past. In Fighting for Life, he probed how competition is embedded in various levels of culture. He also showed how agonistic structures are present in educational, religious, and political institutions, and how adversary procedures have shaped social, linguistic, and intellectual history. Orality and Literacy is a summary of Ong’s work on the historical technologizing of the word. In this book, Ong makes clear that he belongs to no school of interpretation and that humanity’s progress into a new age will be mainly through a return to the unifying energy of orality. In 1986, Ong returned to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Jesuit poet about whom he had written so insightfully early in his career. In Hopkins, the Self, and God, he portrays Hopkins as a product of the Victorian age and his Jesuit education. He sees an evolutionary view of time in Hopkins’s poetry, but he also argues that the Jesuit poet’s faith was deepened rather than threatened by nineteenth century scientific ideas.
In his retirement years, after he became professor emeritus at Saint Louis University in 1984, Ong continued to develop the ideas that had preoccupied him throughout most of his scholarly life, especially his analysis of how humans use various technologies in gathering and communicating their knowledge. Many of his essays on these themes were collected, under the title Faith and Contexts, in four volumes and published as part of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and Social Order series. During his eightieth birthday celebrations, as he reflected on his life as priest and scholar, Ong saw a unity in the great variety of his contributions, since everything in the world “hangs together” because “God made it all.”
Ong’s reputation has derived from the insights he developed in dwelling intellectually in several contrasting milieus: the religious and secular, the Renaissance and modern, the scientific and humanistic. In particular, his career centered on the interface of word and culture, and one of his most influential themes was the evolution of the word from oral to script to print to electronic. Some of his analyses show similarities to those of Marshall McLuhan, for whom the medium was the message, but Ong’s work probed more deeply than McLuhan’s and was grounded with more thorough scholarship, and thus he has had a much more lasting influence among literary intellectuals.