The Company McLuhan Kept

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Aquinas, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Cambridge New Criticism

Marshall McLuhan did not arrive at media theory by accident. It was a long apprenticeship in literature, theology, and close reading. Before he became the man who said the medium is the message, he was a Canadian graduate student of English, a convert to Catholicism, and a critic who treated poems and advertisements with the same attention. The six influences named here are not a casual reading list. They are the company he kept while he learned how form works on the senses.

Chesterton opened the door to the Church and to paradox. Aquinas supplied analogy and formal cause. Cambridge New Criticism trained perception itself. Eliot showed what happens when thought splits from feeling. Joyce turned Thomism into a living aesthetic and gave McLuhan the map he later called “the road to Finnegans Wake.” Teilhard de Chardin offered a planetary image—the noosphere—that McLuhan translated into the global village. Together they taught him to look past content to structure, past statement to effect.

That lesson still matters. We live inside environments we did not design and rarely notice. Print once remade the West. Electric media remade it again. Whatever comes next will do the same. McLuhan’s value is not prophecy as fortune-telling. It is a method: watch the form, feel the sensory shift, name the environment before it names you.

G. K. Chesterton: Paradox and Conversion

McLuhan said it without hedging. Chesterton was responsible for bringing him into the Church. He knew every word. His conversion was completed in 1937, after years of what he later called culture-hunting that became religion-hunting. Chesterton did not argue him into dogma so much as keep despair from hardening into misanthropy. He opened European culture. He taught that a society’s food, clothing, arts, and amusements are finally determined by its religion—and that religion could be as great and joyful as the things it creates.

McLuhan’s first published academic essay, “G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic,” appeared in The Dalhousie Review in January 1936. The title is the thesis. Chesterton was not a system-builder. He was a man who could fix moral attention on passing things and still see the whole. He wrote by paradox. That made him hard on the reader, McLuhan said later, and it also made him useful. Paradox trains the mind to hold two truths at once. Media do that constantly. A technology extends one faculty and numbs another. It connects a planet and retribalizes it. Chesterton’s habit of turning a sentence until it clicked became, in McLuhan’s hands, the probe and the aphorism.

Late in life McLuhan named Chesterton and Thomas Aquinas as his two biggest influences. The pairing is exact. Chesterton gave play, rhetoric, and the courage to treat culture as a moral fact. Aquinas gave the metaphysics that kept the play from floating free. McLuhan loved Chesterton’s flourishes. He took the impulse to try new combinations of ideas and made it a method. The medium is the message. The medium is the massage. Those lines work because they are Chestertonian: a joke that is also a diagnosis.

Thomas Aquinas: Analogy, Formal Cause, the Sensory Order

McLuhan called himself a Thomist in the plainest language available. To Fr. John Mole he wrote that he was a Thomist for whom the sensory order resonates with the divine Logos. Concepts, he thought, derail religion. Analogy does not. Analogy resonates. It is inclusive. It is the cognitive process itself.

The sensory order sentence is the hinge between medieval philosophy and media study. Aquinas taught that created things exist by analogy with the font of being. McLuhan taught that media exist by analogy with the body. Wheels extend the foot. Books extend memory. Clothing extends the skin. Electric media extend the central nervous system. Each extension is a gain and a loss. McLuhan called the loss auto-amputation. What is amplified leaves another faculty idle. The formula is Thomistic even when the vocabulary is modern.

Formal cause is the other inheritance. Aristotle and Aquinas named four causes. The modern West, trained by print and by measurement, prefers efficient cause: what pushes what. Formal cause is the shape of the environment, the pressure a structure exerts whether anyone notices or not. McLuhan told Peter Drucker that his media studies had gravitated toward the center of formal causality and forced him to reinvent it. He queried local schoolmen and found they wanted nothing to do with it. Relativism, they said. They preferred static universals. McLuhan kept going. A medium is an environment of services and disservices. The audience is, in matters of art and expression, the formal cause. Fallen man is the formal cause of the Incarnation. Plato’s public is the formal cause of his philosophy. The same logic applies to television, to the book, to the computer.

He also read the Summa as a form, not only as doctrine. Each article moves through objections, response, and replies. The mind traces and retraces an S-shaped labyrinth. McLuhan thought that structure explained why Thomas could communicate before he was fully understood. Discontinuity, cubist order, participation: the page itself trains a kind of attention that print culture later tried to flatten. Electric media bring that labyrinth back. They ask for pattern recognition rather than sequence. Aquinas, read as a maker of forms, prepared McLuhan to see that request coming.

Cambridge and New Criticism: Training Perception

McLuhan reached Cambridge in the autumn of 1934. Manitoba had already given him a B.A. and an M.A. Cambridge required him to take another undergraduate degree before the doctorate. The requirement was a gift. He studied under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis and absorbed New Criticism while it was still a fighting doctrine rather than a textbook chapter.

New Criticism asked the reader to look at the poem, not the poet’s breakfast. Biography receded. Close reading advanced. Richards’s Practical Criticism put unmarked poems in front of students and demanded they say what the words did. He spoke of feedforward: perception trained in advance of the next encounter. Leavis added moral heat. Judgment was not a luxury. Culture and environment were one problem. McLuhan later credited the Cambridge faculty with setting the direction of his later work because they emphasized the training of perception. That phrase is the bridge. A medium, like a poem, is a form that works on attention. If you can be taught to feel what a stanza does, you can be taught to feel what a newspaper or a television set does.

He also found, in New Criticism, a revival of grammar in the old sense: not schoolroom parsing but the art of reading signs in their living order. His 1943 Cambridge dissertation, The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time, traces the trivium—grammar, dialectic, rhetoric—from Cicero to the English Renaissance. Modern life, he later argued, is marked by the re-emergence of grammar. Richards and Leavis exemplified the trend. The critic who can read a lyric for its tensions is already halfway to reading an advertisement, a comic strip, or an interface. The Mechanical Bride (1951) is New Criticism applied to industrial folklore. The later media books are the same habit pointed at electricity.

McLuhan did not remain a school New Critic. He kept the discipline and dropped the enclosure. The text became the environment. The close reading became a probe. Cambridge gave him the confidence to treat popular culture as worthy of the same intelligence once reserved for Donne.

T. S. Eliot: Dissociation and the Mosaic

Eliot entered McLuhan’s work through Cambridge modernism and never left. McLuhan wrote early notes and essays on him—“Eliot’s Hippopotamus,” “Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum”—and kept returning to the idea Eliot named the dissociation of sensibility. After the Metaphysical poets, Eliot argued, thought and feeling came apart. Later verse thinks, or feels, but rarely does both in one motion. McLuhan took that diagnosis out of literary history and into the history of media.

Print, in his account, favors the eye and the line. It rewards sequence, detachment, and private judgment. It is a hot, high-definition visual bias. Electronic media restore involvement. They are mosaic, simultaneous, tactile. They ask the audience to complete the picture. The dissociation Eliot described is, for McLuhan, a sensory fact produced by a technology, not only a failure of style. When the technology changes, the split can close—or open in a new place.

The Waste Land mattered as form. It is discontinuous. It juxtaposes voices and centuries. It withholds the connecting tissue and makes the reader supply it. McLuhan heard in that structure something like a newspaper epyllion: the modern page as collage. Cool media, in his later vocabulary, are low-definition and high-participation. Eliot’s poem trains the same muscle television would later demand. McLuhan also credited Eliot, with Leavis, for showing how aesthetic and moral perception could be trained together. The critic does not first extract a message and then judge it. He attends to the form until judgment and sensation arrive as one act. That is the posture McLuhan wanted for the student of media.

James Joyce: Applied Aquinas, Applied Joyce

If one name sits at the center, it is Joyce. McLuhan said his communication theory was “applied Joyce,” in the same sense that Joyce’s aesthetic was “applied Aquinas.” The working title for both The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media was “The Road to Finnegans Wake.” He told readers that nobody could pretend serious interest in his work who was not completely familiar with Joyce and the French symbolists.

The Wake is the key. It is oral and literate at once. It puns across languages. It treats history as recurrence rather than line. McLuhan believed the book could not have been conceived in any age except the one that produced the phonograph and the radio. Joyce heard the new environment early, the way artists do. The ten “thunders” in the Wake became, in McLuhan’s later reading, markers of technological change. Language in Joyce is a code and a sensorium. Senses overlap. The reader must participate. That is cool media avant la lettre.

Ulysses supplied the social diagnosis. Bloom the advertising canvasser lives at the frontier where words and pictures sell a detribalized city. The “Aeolus” episode runs on headlines and rhetorical machines. Gerty MacDowell shows a life shaped by commercial stereotypes. Joyce did not merely depict modern media. He showed how they split inner life and public life, how they make the city and unmake the old oral whole. McLuhan took those scenes as evidence, not decoration.

The Aquinas-Joyce axis is the other half. In “Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process” (1951), McLuhan argued that Joyce applied Thomistic principles of order and synthesis to literary form. Discontinuity in Joyce is not chaos. It is a structure that includes the reader, as the article in the Summa includes the objector. McLuhan’s own pages—especially The Medium Is the Massage, built with Quentin Fiore—perform the same inclusion. Fragment, image, headline, reversal. The book does not describe the electronic environment. It puts the reader inside it. That is Joyce’s lesson carried into design.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The Noosphere and the Village

Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit, a paleontologist, and a writer of evolutionary theology. He imagined the noosphere: a layer of mind wrapping the earth as the biosphere wraps it in life. Railways, automobiles, aircraft, and then electromagnetic waves would shrink distance until each person was, actively and passively, present in every corner of the earth. Minds would stimulate one another by proximity. The planet would acquire something like a brain.

McLuhan quoted that vision in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Electric culture, he wrote, provides life again with a tribal base. The externalization of the senses creates what Teilhard called the noosphere, a technological brain for the world. The world has become a computer, an electronic brain. That is the global village in theological dress. Tom Wolfe later argued that Teilhard was McLuhan’s hidden inspiration, kept quiet because questions of orthodoxy followed the Jesuit and because secular social science would have dismissed a Catholic cosmology. The paper trail is real even if the public acknowledgments were few. Walter Ong, McLuhan’s student at Saint Louis University, passed along mimeographed pages of Teilhard. The language of a nervous system for humanity, a membrane over the earth, a single organized consciousness, is the language McLuhan reused for electric media.

McLuhan was not a disciple. In private he could be tart. He disliked the idea that later is better, the lame semantic fallacy bred by the word evolution. Directional cosmic thrust struck him as a literate fantasy. He warned readers not to accept or dismiss Teilhard whole. What he kept was the image of interconnection and its cost. The global village is not a peaceable kingdom. It is intimacy without privacy, speed without reflection, tribe against tribe on a shared frequency. Teilhard supplied the planetary scale. McLuhan supplied the warning label.

What They Made Together

These influences do not sit in separate drawers. They braid. Chesterton and Aquinas gave McLuhan a Catholic realism: the world is analogical, culture is religious in its roots, form is not an afterthought. Cambridge gave him a technique for noticing form under pressure. Eliot and Joyce gave him modernism’s broken surface and its demand that the reader work. Teilhard gave him a name for the new enclosure of the earth. The media theory that followed is not a break with the humanities. It is the humanities pointed at technology.

McLuhan’s Catholicism stayed mostly private. He taught at Catholic institutions. He compared satellites to the Star of Bethlehem in correspondence. He had a lifelong interest in threes—the trivium, the Trinity. He sometimes said the Virgin Mary gave him intellectual guidance. None of that is required to use his method. It does explain why he refused both boosterism and despair. He would not celebrate the global village as progress. He would not curse electricity as fall. He wanted awareness. Effects first. Values after.

The method travels. A new medium arrives claiming to be a tool. It is never only a tool. It is an environment. It extends something. It obsolesces something. It retrieves an older pattern under a new name. Pushed far enough, it flips into its opposite. Print extended the eye and produced the public. Electricity extends the nerves and produces the village. Whatever extends cognition itself will follow the same tetrad. The student who has read Chesterton knows to look for the paradox. The student who has read Aquinas knows to look for formal cause. The student who has survived Richards knows to train perception before theory. The student who has read Eliot and Joyce knows that form is already an argument. The student who has read Teilhard knows the scale can be planetary without being benign.

McLuhan died in 1980. The environments have multiplied. The habit he learned from this company of writers has not expired. Look at the medium. Feel what it does to the senses. Name the environment while you can still stand slightly outside it. That is the work. The rest is content, and content is the juicy piece of meat the burglar brings to distract the watchdog of the mind.

Notes

1. Marshall McLuhan, letter and later remarks on Chesterton as the writer “responsible for bringing me into the church,” cited in Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1989), and in McLuhan Galaxy, “Influence of G. K. Chesterton on McLuhan,” February 2, 2011.

2. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, “G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic,” The Dalhousie Review 15 (January 1936): 455–64.

3. On Chesterton and Aquinas as McLuhan’s “two biggest influences,” see Marchand, The Medium and the Messenger, and the summary in Michael Sacasas, “McLuhan, Chesterton, and the Pursuit of Joy,” The Frailest Thing, January 26, 2011.

4. Marshall McLuhan to Fr. John Mole, on being “a Thomist for whom the sensory order resonates with the divine Logos,” quoted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion, ed. Eric McLuhan and Jacek Szklarek (Toronto: Stoddart, 1999), and discussed in “How To Be a Contemporary Thomist: The Case of Marshall McLuhan,” Reality Journal, December 11, 2020.

5. McLuhan on formal causality to Peter Drucker, December 15, 1959, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, ed. Matie Molinaro, Corinne McLuhan, and William Toye (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), 259; further remarks to J. G. Keogh, July 6, 1972, Letters, 412.

6. Marshall McLuhan, “Joyce, Aquinas, and the Poetic Process,” Renascence 4, no. 1 (Winter 1951): 3–11; reprinted Renascence 64, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 89–99.

7. On Cambridge, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, “training of perception,” and feedforward, see “Marshall McLuhan,” Wikipedia, and the biographical chapter in W. Terrence Gordon, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding (New York: Basic Books, 1997). McLuhan’s Ph.D. dissertation is The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time (Cambridge University, 1943).

8. F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment (London: Chatto & Windus, 1933), cited as an influence on McLuhan’s turn toward popular culture.

9. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), for the “dissociation of sensibility.” McLuhan’s early Eliot pieces include “Eliot’s Hippopotamus,” The Explicator 2, no. 7 (May 1944), and “Mr. Eliot’s Historical Decorum,” Renascence 2, no. 1 (Autumn 1949).

10. Donald F. Theall, “Marshall McLuhan and James Joyce: Beyond Media,” Canadian Journal of Communication 14, no. 4 (1989). McLuhan’s remark that his theory was “applied Joyce,” and the working title “The Road to Finnegans Wake,” are reported there and in Elena Lamberti’s later work on McLuhan and modernism.

11. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 32 and 240, quoting Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, on electromagnetic presence and the noosphere.

12. Tom Wolfe, sketch of McLuhan in The Wilson Quarterly (Spring 2004), arguing for Teilhard as a hidden inspiration; discussed in “McLuhan and Teilhard,” First Things, April 19, 2004. Walter J. Ong’s role in passing Teilhard to McLuhan is noted in Ilia Delio, “Marshall McLuhan: A Prophet of Teilhard’s Vision,” Center for Christogenesis, January 26, 2021.

13. McLuhan’s private reservations about Teilhard’s evolutionary directionality appear in correspondence quoted on the Wikipedia McLuhan entry and in The Medium and the Light.

14. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), on media as extensions and on hot and cool media.

15. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam, 1967). The watchdog-and-meat image for content is McLuhan’s, from Understanding Media.