Lonergan and the Level of Our Time 9781442685284

Table of contents :
Contents
Dedication
Editor’s Introduction
Frequently Cited Works
Part One. Studies
Chapter 1. A Theology for Our Time
Chapter 2. Some Background Notes to Lonergan’s Insight
Chapter 3. Doctrines and Historicity in the Context of Lonergan’s Method in Theology
Chapter 4. Lonergan’s Early Use of Analogy
Chapter 5. Transcendental Deduction: A Lonerganian Meaning and Use
Chapter 6. For a Phenomenology of Rational Consciousness
Chapter 7. Objectivity versus Projection in Lonergan
Chapter 8. Analogy of Proportion: A Favorite Lonergan Thought-Pattern
Chapter 9. How to Get an Insight, and How Not to
Chapter 10. Lonergan at the Edges of Understanding
Chapter 11. The Puzzle of the Subject as Subject in Lonergan
Chapter 12. Potentiality and the Real under Construction
Chapter 13. Policy: Note on a Neglected Concept
Part Two. Essays
Chapter 14. Development of Doctrine: Aid or Barrier to Christian Unity?
Chapter 15. Development of Doctrine
Chapter 16. Salvation as Wholeness: Theological Background for an Ecumenical Program
Chapter 17. Dogma versus the Self-correcting Process of Learning
Chapter 18. The Power of the Scriptures: An Attempt at Analysis
Chapter 19. Some Thoughts on Dreams and the Ignatian Preludes to Prayer
Chapter 20. Rethinking the Religious State
Chapter 21. Rethinking Moral Judgments
Chapter 22. Rethinking God-with-us
Chapter 23. Rethinking Eternal Life: Philosophical Notions
Chapter 24. Rethinking Eternal Life: Theological Notions
Chapter 25. Rethinking the Trinity: Taking Seriously the Homoousios
Chapter 26. The ‘World’ from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican II
Chapter 27. The Dynamics of Spirit–Body Communication
Chapter 28. Is God Free to Create or Not Create?
The Writings of Frederick E. Crowe
Index

Citation preview

LONERGAN AND THE LEVEL OF OUR TIME

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Lonergan and the Level of Our Time Frederick E. Crowe Edited by Michael Vertin

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2010 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4032-0

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Crowe, Frederick E. Lonergan and the level of our time / Frederick E. Crowe; edited by Michael Vertin. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4032-0 1. Lonergan, Bernard J.F. (Bernard Joseph Francis), 1904–1984 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. 3. Theology, Doctrinal. I. Vertin, Michael, 1939– II. Title. BX4705.L75C765 2010 230'.2092 C2009-907182-7

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP)

Contents

Dedication

vii

Editor’s Introduction Frequently Cited Works

ix xv

Part One: Studies 1 A Theology for Our Time 3 2 Some Background Notes to Lonergan’s Insight

16

3 Doctrines and Historicity in the Context of Lonergan’s Method in Theology 28 4 Lonergan’s Early Use of Analogy

41

5 Transcendental Deduction: A Lonerganian Meaning and Use 6 For a Phenomenology of Rational Consciousness

58

77

7 Objectivity versus Projection in Lonergan 102 8 Analogy of Proportion: A Favorite Lonergan Thought-Pattern 9 How to Get an Insight, and How Not to 10 Lonergan at the Edges of Understanding

126 133

11 The Puzzle of the Subject as Subject in Lonergan 155

119

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Contents

12 Potentiality and the Real under Construction 13 Policy: Note on a Neglected Concept

180

196

Part Two: Essays 14 Development of Doctrine: Aid or Barrier to Christian Unity? 209 15 Development of Doctrine 228 16 Salvation as Wholeness: Theological Background for an Ecumenical Program 244 17 Dogma versus the Self-Correcting Process of Learning 257 18 The Power of the Scriptures: An Attempt at Analysis 279 19 Some Thoughts on Dreams and the Ignatian Preludes to Prayer 294 20 Rethinking the Religious State

300

21 Rethinking Moral Judgments

315

22 Rethinking God-with-us

332

23 Rethinking Eternal Life: Philosophical Notions 24 Rethinking Eternal Life: Theological Notions

360 377

25 Rethinking the Trinity: Taking Seriously the Homoousios 26 The ‘World’ from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican II 416 27 The Dynamics of Spirit–Body Communication 28 Is God Free to Create or Not Create? 441

The Writings of Frederick E. Crowe Index

471

455

427

394

Dedication

I dedicate this volume to the memory of my five siblings: Jerry [Raymond], Arthur, Johnny, Murray, and Elizabeth. With this dedication, added to the dedication of my first book to my parents, I begin to acknowledge a debt that in the nature of things cannot ever be repaid. Still, one must try. My goal is not to pretend the impossible – to discharge it – but to honor it and keep it alive in our hearts. At one point in The Frontenac Mystery, novelist François Mauriac recounts the question posed by a mother to her son as she lifted her eyes to the topmost branches of the village’s familiar grove of pine trees. ‘Tell me, Yves, you who know so much, do the spirits in Heaven still think of those they have left behind upon the earth?’ Yves had replied earnestly that all separate loves would ultimately be perfected in one perfect love, single and absolute. Years later, gazing upon the face of his sleeping brother, he reflects upon his answer. Never would the Frontenac mystery know corruption, for it was one beam of the Eternal Love refracted through the prism of a race. The impossible union of wives and husbands, of sons and brothers, would before long be consummated. The whispering pines of Bourideys would see, moving not at their feet but far above their highest branches, a mother and her five children now made forever one.

From his store window, my father could look out over the rural road and the steep drop, the creek of water, and the rising sidehill to the top

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Dedication

of the hill crowning it. The hillside, a great rock, was quite ordinary; but it was utterly solid, substantial, real. In moving from the fictional reality of the whispering pines to the existential reality of the great rock, I move from Yves’s hope for the Frontenacs to my hope for the quite ordinary family of Crowes – the whole family, from my father Jerry to my sister Elizabeth. Two parents and their six children: as one beam of the Eternal Love, may they be made forever one. F.E.C. 30 April 2009

Editor’s Introduction

This is the fourth volume of Frederick Crowe’s work that I have been privileged to edit. The first volume is a collection of twenty-two papers that study, extend, and apply the thought of Bernard Lonergan. It initially appeared in 1989 as Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, and it was reissued in 2006.1 The second volume consists of three previously published investigations of Thomas Aquinas, all of them profiting from Crowe’s reading of Lonergan. It came out in 2000 as Three Thomist Studies.2 The third volume comprises twenty papers that, like those of the first volume, explore and develop and employ various facets of Lonergan’s work. It appeared in 2004 as Developing the Lonergan Legacy: Historical, Theoretical, and Existential Themes.3 Before sketching out the current volume, let me draw upon my introduction to the third volume in order to present Crowe to those readers who are unfamiliar with him. Crowe’s engagement with the work of Bernard Lonergan began in the late 1940s when, as a Jesuit scholastic at Christ the King Seminary (later Regis College) in Toronto, he had Lonergan as one of his theology professors. Lonergan was writing his Verbum4 articles during that 1 Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, ed. Michael Vertin (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1989; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 2 Three Thomist Studies, ed. Michael Vertin (Boston: Lonergan Institute at Boston College, 2000). 3 Developing the Lonergan Legacy: Historical, Theoretical, and Existential Themes, ed. Michael Vertin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). 4 ‘The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St Thomas Aquinas,’ Theological Studies 7 (1946) 349–92; 8 (1947) 35-79, 404–44; 10 (1940) 3–40, 359–93. Subsequently republished as Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. D.B. Burrell (Notre Dame: University of

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Editor’s Introduction

period; and Crowe, eleven years his junior, was mightily impressed by his professor’s scholarly erudition, intellectual creativity, and theological balance. He eventually sought out Lonergan to direct his licentiate thesis, ‘The Unity of the Virtues in St Thomas Aquinas’ (1950); and something of Lonergan’s influence extended into the doctoral dissertation Crowe later wrote at the Gregorian University in Rome, ‘Conflict and Unification in Man: The Data in the Writings of St Thomas Aquinas’ (1953). After defending his doctoral dissertation, Crowe extended his initial interest in Lonergan’s ideas, and they soon became the prime focus of his scholarly labor. For the next fifty-three years, he analyzed those ideas, traced their emergence and evolution in Lonergan’s intellectual history, compared them with the ideas of others, drew out their implications, developed them further, employed them to address a broad range of epistemological, moral, religious, and systematic theological issues, and fostered their availability to diverse audiences. He pursued these tasks through teaching courses and supervising dissertations during twenty-seven years as a professor of theology, giving public talks, guiding group research projects, cofounding (with Robert Doran) Toronto’s Lonergan Research Institute, guiding the establishment of no fewer than nine other Lonergan centers around the world, collecting and cataloguing all of Lonergan’s writings and editing many of them for publication or republication, co-editing (again with Robert Doran) the projected twenty-five volume Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan,5 and writing books and articles of his own with such regularity that at the time of his withdrawal from scholarly activity in 2006 his bibliography numbered nearly two hundred items – roughly half of them produced after his retirement from teaching in 1980.6 In sum, the acuity, depth, lucidity, cumulative magnitude, and fecundity of Crowe’s labor on and for Lonergan’s ideas are such that by the end of his career he had come to be widely recognized as the world’s foremost Lonergan expert.

Notre Dame Press, 1967); 2nd ed., ed. F.E. Crowe and R.M. Doran, vol. 2 in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). 5 Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. F.E. Crowe and R.M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988–). 6 Consult the comprehensive Crowe bibliography that appears at the end of this volume.

Editor’s Introduction

xi

The present volume comprises twenty-eight papers that collectively span the period from 1961 to 2004. Five of these appear for the first time here. The remaining twenty-three have been published previously, but they are being reissued because of their intrinsic importance, continuing timeliness, and relative unavailability. As in the first and third volumes, the papers are divided into two groups, with the sequence in each group being roughly chronological. The thirteen papers of the first group, ‘Studies,’ focus more or less on Lonergan himself and certain features of his writings. Their topics are largely philosophical, such as Lonergan’s use of analogy, the ‘transcendental’ dimension of Lonergan’s investigative procedures, the contrast between objectivity and projection, the limits of our understanding, various instances and aspects of the transition from potentiality to actuality, and the complex relationship of policy and ethics. Moreover, as a matter of special importance, several papers discuss the later Lonergan’s surprising discovery that one has no immediate insight into insight, and – more broadly – no direct knowledge (in the strict sense) of one’s own conscious operations as such. The fifteen papers of the second group, ‘Essays,’ extend and employ Lonergan’s work in various ways. Their topics for the most part are theological, such as the development of doctrine, the character of salvation, the relationship of religious believing and critical thinking, how the scriptures mediate divine meaning, the use of dreams to facilitate one’s praying, and divine freedom in creating. Six papers are devoted expressly to rethinking our perspectives on the religious state of life, on moral judgments, on life after death, on God in Godself, and on God as with us. In the original Preface of his book Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Lonergan approvingly cites the exhortation of the twentiethcentury Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset that one ‘strive to mount to the level of one’s time.’7 At least ultimately, one should try to address the needs of one’s own period, take on the problems of one’s own world, confront the challenges of one’s own age. Crowe regularly suggests that Lonergan envisaged his own lifelong scholarly enterprise as an attempt to comply with Ortega y Gasset’s exhortation.8 I suggest 7 METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 3/1 (1985) 4. 8 See, for example, ‘A Theology for Our Time,’ in the present volume 3–4; ‘Lonergan’s Vocation as a Christian Thinker,’ in Developing the Lonergan Legacy 9; ‘Insight: Genesis

xii

Editor’s Introduction

in turn that Crowe’s work as a Lonergan scholar may be interpreted as striving to follow the same exhortation. Crowe, like Lonergan, is radically committed to both personally engaging the present era and assisting the church to do likewise; and his lifetime of loving labor on and for Lonergan’s ideas is motivated by his view of them as fostering the achievement of that goal. Third, it may be the case that, like me, some readers reckon both Lonergan’s work and Crowe’s work on Lonergan as peculiarly valuable assets in their personal efforts to interact with and in some way contribute to the twenty-first century. This threefold consideration is what underlies my choice of a title for the present volume: Lonergan and the Level of Our Time. I am happy to conclude this Introduction with several expressions of gratitude. First, I thank the editors of the following journals and the publishers of the following books for permission to reprint material that previously appeared in the form indicated by the respective introductory notes to the chapters mentioned: Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings, for chapter 14; International Philosophical Quarterly, for chapters 7 and 11; Josephinum Journal of Theology, for chapter 27; Review for Religious, for chapter 26; Science et esprit, for chapters 20–25; The Importance of Insight, for chapter 28; Theoforum, for chapter 8; Theological Studies, for chapters 3 and 17; and Word and Spirit, for chapter 18. Second, I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its generous support of this project. Third, I thank Robert Doran for timely assistance with his scanner, and Andrea Di Giovanni for skillfully transforming twenty-eight electronic files from a wide variety of sources into a common wordprocessing format. Fourth, I offer especially heartfelt thanks to Daniel Monsour. His work of checking and updating the notes has been a model of editorial professionalism, and this meticulous labor has contributed enormously to the quality of the volume. Finally, and most importantly, let me retrieve and reapply the concluding comment from my Introduction to the third volume: I offer Frederick Crowe my profound thanks for the elegant written and Ongoing Context’ ibid. 42; and ‘Bernard Lonergan as Pastoral Theologian,’ in Appropriating the Lonergan Idea 144 n. 34.

Editor’s Introduction

xiii

expressions of luminous meaning and holy value that he provides in this book, and for the inspiring incarnate expressions of the same that he has long provided by his life. Michael Vertin St Michael’s College University of Toronto 1 May 2009

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Frequently Cited Works

The footnotes to the papers in this volume frequently cite certain works of Bernard Lonergan and of Frederick Crowe, as well as certain standard reference works. To simplify the footnotes, citations of these works omit bibliographical details and sometimes also employ abbreviated versions of the titles. A list of these works, indicating the abbreviated titles where pertinent, and providing full bibliographical details, follows below. The list is divided into works by Lonergan, works by Crowe, and standard reference works. Each section is organized alphabetically according to title. When a given writing has been published in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, quotations from that writing are from the Collected Works edition, unless otherwise noted. Biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), unless otherwise noted.

Certain Works of Bernard Lonergan ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds’

‘Bernard Lonergan Responds,’ in Foundations of Theology: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970, ed. Philip McShane (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972) 223–34, 257. A subsequent response, also titled ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds,’ appeared with the publication of a second set of papers from the same Congress. This second publication is titled Language Truth and Meaning: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970, ed. Philip McShane (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972). Lonergan’s response appears on pp. 306–12, 343.

xvi Collection

De Deo Trino I: Pars dogmatica Divinarum personarum

‘Gratia Operans’

Grace and Freedom

Insight

Macroeconomic Dynamics

Frequently Cited Works

Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, ed. Frederick E. Crowe (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; New York: Herder and Herder, 1967). 2nd edition, Collection, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988; reprint edition, 1993). De Deo Trino I: Pars dogmatica, 2nd edition (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964). Now available in English translation as The Triune God: Doctrines (see below). Divinarum personarum conceptionem analogicam evolvit Bernardus Lonergan S.I. (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1957; 2nd edition, 1959). A third, revised edition appeared in 1964 as De Deo Trino II: Pars systematica and is now available in English translation as The Triune God: Systematics (see below). ‘St Thomas’ Thought on Gratia Operans,’ Theological Studies 2 (1941) 289–324; 3 (1942) 69–88, 375–402, 533–78. See immediately below for information on the publication of these articles in book form. Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas, ed. J. Patout Burns (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; New York: Herder and Herder, 1971). Collected Works edition: Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Part 1 of the Collected Works edition (pp. 1–149) re-edits the articles that appeared first in Theological Studies, and later in book form, edited by J. Patout Burns. Part 2 (pp. 151–454) publishes for the first time Lonergan’s dissertation, completed in May 1940, ‘Gratia Operans: A Study of the Speculative Development in the Writings of St Thomas of Aquin.’ Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (London: Longmans, Green; New York: Philosophical Library, 1957). 5th edition, revised and augmented, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis, ed. Frederick G. Lawrence, Patrick H. Byrne, and Charles

Frequently Cited Works

Method in Theology

The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ Phenomenology and Logic

Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964 Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 A Second Collection

A Third Collection

Topics in Education

The Triune God: Doctrines

xvii

C. Hefling, Jr, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 15 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; New York: Herder and Herder, 1972; 2nd edition, 1973; reprint edition, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ, translated by Michael G. Shields from the 4th edition of De constitutione Christi ontologica et psychologica, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 7 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism, ed. Philip McShane, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 18 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert M. Doran, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980, ed. Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran,Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 17 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). A Second Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, ed. William F.J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974; reprint edition, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, ed. Frederick E. Crowe (New York: Paulist Press; London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1985). Topics in Education: The Cincinnati Lectures of 1959 on the Philosophy of Education, ed. Robert M. Doran and Frederick E. Crowe, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 10 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). The Triune God: Doctrines, translated from De Deo Trino I: Pars dogmatica (1964) by Michael G. Shields, ed. Robert M.  Doran and H. Daniel Monsour, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 11 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).

xviii The Triune God: Systematics

Understanding and Being

De Verbo Incarnato ‘Verbum’

Verbum

The Way to Nicea

Frequently Cited Works

The Triune God: Systematics, translated from De Deo Trino II: Pars systematica (1964) by Michael G. Shields, ed. Robert M.  Doran and H. Daniel Monsour, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 12 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). Understanding and Being: An Introduction and Companion to Insight, ed. Elizabeth A. Morelli and Mark D. Morelli (New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1980). 2nd edition, Understanding and Being: The Halifax Lectures on Insight, revised and augmented by Frederick E. Crowe et al., Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 5 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990). De Verbo Incarnato, 3rd edition (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964). ‘The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St Thomas Aquinas,’ Theological Studies 7 (1946) 349–92; 8 (1947) 35–79, 404–44; 10 (1949) 3–40, 359–93. See immediately below for information on the publication of these articles in book form. Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. David B. Burrell (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967). 2nd edition, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 2 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). The Way to Nicea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology, translation of the first part of De Deo Trino I: Pars dogmatica by Conn O’Donovan (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976).

Certain Works of Frederick E. Crowe Appropriating the Lonergan Idea

Three Thomist Studies

Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, ed. Michael Vertin (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1989; reprint edition with a new editor’s introduction, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). Three Thomist Studies, ed. Michael Vertin (Boston: Lonergan Institute at Boston College, 2000).

Frequently Cited Works Developing the Lonergan Legacy

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Developing the Lonergan Legacy: Historical, Theoretical, and Existential Themes, ed. Michael Vertin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

Certain Standard Reference Works DB

DS

RJ

MG ML NEB NIV NRSV

Heinrich Denzinger and Clemens Bannwart, eds, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 31st edition (Barcelona: Herder, 1960). Heinrich Denzinger and Adolfus Schönmetzer, eds, Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 36th edition (Barcelona: Herder, 1976). M.J. Rouët de Journel, ed., Enchiridion Patristicum: Loci SS. Patrum, doctorum scriptorum ecclesiasticorum, 25th edition (Barcelona: Herder, 1969). Patrologiae cursus completus … Series graeca, ed. JacquesPaul Migne, 162 vols. (Paris: J.P. Migne, 1857–66). Patrologiae cursus completus… Series latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, 221 vols. (Paris: J.P. Migne, 1844–55, 1862–65). The New English Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). The Holy Bible, New International Version (Colorado Springs: International Bible Society, 1973). The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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Part One

STUDIES

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Chapter 1

A Theology for Our Time1

Since the title of my paper is ‘A Theology for Our Time,’ you will expect me to talk about theology. And so I will. But the theology in the title is a theology ‘for our time,’ and that gives the specific aspect of my theme. So let me start there, but in my own roundabout fashion. We are close to the end of the century now, and people naturally ask, ‘What were the great events of the century in Canada and the wider world?’ 1914–1918, of course, and 1939–1945. For Canada, certainly 1967 and perhaps 1995.2 Very few are going to mention 1949–1953. Why should they? Are those years of any great significance in history? Can anyone here think of anything special that happened then? My own view is that those years are very significant indeed in history, but in the history of ideas, which doesn’t make a big splash in the media. They are the four years Bernard Lonergan spent writing Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. I mention that book not because I am going to talk about it, but only because I want to take a line from the Preface that Lonergan wrote in September 1953: ‘[I]f I may borrow a phrase from Ortega y Gasset,’ he said, ‘one has to strive to mount to the level of one’s time.’3 ‘To mount 1 Originally presented on 10 November 1995 at St Mark’s College, Vancouver. Not previously published. 2 1967 was the year of Expo 67, the World’s Fair in Montreal that marked the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Canada as an independent country. In 1995 the voters of the province of Quebec rejected a proposal by the provincial government that (largely French-speaking) Quebec withdraw from (largely Englishspeaking) Canada. (Ed.) 3 METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 3/1 (1985) 3–7, at 4. The Preface from which I quote was replaced by a much longer one when the book was actually published. For a brief account of the history, see my ‘Note on the Prefaces of Insight,’ ibid.1–3.

4 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Studies

to the level of one’s time’: that defines Lonergan’s great effort in that monumental work, Insight. It defines indeed the aim of his lifework, and perhaps also you can see why I single out the phrase for tonight’s talk: I have come in my roundabout way to state my theme, ‘A Theology for Our Time.’ If I am to talk to you on this theme, we need some idea of ‘our time,’ of what it means to speak of our time and of the level of that time, and what it means to mount to that level. 1 Our Time I did my high school studies in New Brunswick from 1927 to 1930. We had a history book, divided very neatly into three parts: ancient history, medieval history, and modern history. We studied them in reverse order, why I don’t know: modern history in grade nine, medieval in grade ten, and ancient in grade eleven. It was an extremely neat division, and a very satisfying one as well, for it gave us the feeling that we knew something about history. There it was, all wrapped up for us to take home. Ancient history was certainly wrapped up, and so was medieval. What about modern? Did it end in 1927? If it was ongoing, was there to be a postmodern period, giving us four divisions instead of three? It never entered my head to ask. But years later I read in Karl Jaspers a statement that upset my whole neat scheme: ‘For more than a hundred years it has been gradually realized that the history of scores of centuries is drawing to a close.’4 Think for a minute on that phrase: ‘scores of centuries’! The phrase not only upset my neat periods of a few centuries each, it gave me a vision of what was going on in the whole sweep of history. For I remembered what I had been told, or perhaps read, of what that same Jaspers called the axial period of history. It began, he believed, about 800 B.C.E., when all around the civilized world, in Greece, Judea, Egypt, Persia, India, and China5 you have ‘the emergence of individualism.’6 As Lonergan put it: ‘[M]an became of age; he set aside the dreams and fancies of childhood; he began to face the world as perhaps it is.’7 There was a breakdown in the ‘massive civilizations’ that preceded, and with that

4 5 6 7

Karl Jaspers, Philosophy and the World: Selected Essays (Chicago: Regnery, 1963) 22. Understanding and Being (1990) 267. ‘An Interview with Fr Bernard Lonergan, S.J.,’ in A Second Collection 209–30, at 227. ‘Dimensions of Meaning,’ in Collection 232–45, at 238.

A Theology for Our Time

5

breakdown, according to Jaspers, a ‘burst of philosophic reflection and of individualism; it occurred precisely because those civilizations were not working …’8 What Lonergan and Jaspers seem to be saying is that today – ‘today’ not in the sense of 10 November, but in the sense of the last hundred years or so – we are going through a new axial period, ‘the history of scores of centuries is drawing to a close.’ Something is happening that parallels what happened once before, from 800 B.C.E. onward. If that is the case, and I think it is, then we can see the significance of ‘our time,’ and of the phrase Ortega y Gasset and Lonergan used, ‘to mount to the level of the time.’ 2 Mounting to the Level of Our Time But what that level is, and what its significance is, and how we are to define it, and how to mount to the level of the time: these are other questions. What precisely is happening in this new axial period? The first one, nearly three thousand years ago, is said to have brought the childhood of the human race to an end. The individual emerged, no longer a child told what to do, but an adult determined to act on his or her own. What that means and how to bring it about is the challenge we face in this new axial period. Can we pin that down in some precise fashion? Some would suggest that what is happening is the new technology. Here I think of my own father, who lived from 1871 to 1961, and in those ninety years saw incredible advances in technology. In his earliest memories there was the introduction on the farm of horse-drawn machinery. Previously harvesting had been done by hand: whole acres were cut with a scythe. I remember him telling us about the new mowing machinery that some neighbor had got when he was a boy. It came in parts and the whole village had assembled to figure out how to put it together and to see it work. Well, he lived to see cars and tractors come in, telephone and radio, television and travel by plane – a whole new world of technology. Now that is certainly one characteristic of our time. Adding my own experience to that of my father, I went from writing on slate, through pen-nib and inkwell, to fountain-pen and manual typewriter, and on to electric typewriter and word processor. There is no doubt 8 Understanding and Being 267.

6 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Studies

about the impact of technology on our lives, but surely that is not in itself the fundamental change. It’s the difference between asking your father in 800 B.C.E. whether you can have the family horse tonight and asking him in 1995 whether you can have the family car. It’s not a fundamental change. Nevertheless, it has a close connection with more fundamental changes. For example, what does it do to the institution of the family if, instead of quietly reading together, or maybe having an evening of song around the mother at the organ, if instead of that the whole family rushes through dinner and then takes off for entertainment elsewhere in the city? What does it do to the minds of workers if, instead of a sixteen-hour day, they get through the work in eight hours and spend the leisure eight in front of a TV screen? It is especially in the area of the mind that the significant changes take place. What are they? Negatively, we won’t expect anything flashy, changes that occur overnight. They will be more like the slow and hardly noticeable changes in mentality as we go through life: the mentality of youth, the mentality of middle age, the mentality of old age. When do they appear? How are they formed? Graham Greene has a line in The Power and the Glory that is relevant: ‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’9 That is a change in a relatively few years, but the counterpart in old age is a longer process: it is when with the experience of many years you begin to realize that there are no more doors to open. Churchill, running for office after the war, said ‘I have no unfulfilled ambitions’ – his way of saying, though I don’t think he meant it, that for him there were no more doors to open. Something like the change he professed are the changes that take place in the mind of the human race. To return to Jaspers: ‘For more than a hundred years it has been gradually realized that the history of scores of centuries is drawing to a close’ – ‘gradually’ realized, for it’s a slow process: we reach the age of ninety one day at a time. I say all this to prepare you for Lonergan’s views, which are not going to be flashy, and are not going to pinpoint a particular year when the world changed: 1492, 1776, or whatever, though we may assign one certain year to stand for the many. Lonergan’s idea of the level of our time will not be characterized by anything so simple. As a wag might say, ‘If it’s easy to understand, it’s not Lonergan.’ 9 Quoted by Gail Bowen in her Murder at the Mendel (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991) 150.

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So what are his views on our time and mounting to its level? The really significant changes, he would say, are in the new philosophy, the new scholarship, and the new notion of science – not particular scientific discoveries but the new concept of what science is. If the real advance is in science, scholarship, and philosophy, we must expect a slower rate of change. There is no sudden leap from the breakdown of the old to the creation of the new. The first axial period is considered to span six centuries, from 800 to 200 B.C.E. History moves faster in this day of mass education and instant communication, so our axial period may not take that long. Nevertheless, whatever it is will not emerge overnight. The notion of what science is has been forming slowly since Galileo. The new scholarship has been forming slowly since von Ranke, or perhaps since the Renaissance. The new philosophy has been forming – since when? That is a more difficult question. I once ventured the amateur view that, in terms of Lonergan’s cognitional levels, Plato represents the level of ideas, Aquinas represents the level of judgment, and Kierkegaard represents the level of selfinvolvement. If that view has any validity at all, it will indicate how slowly philosophy moves forward. 3 Theology for Our Time: A General Context Let us turn to theology. ‘A theology,’ Lonergan says in a much quoted line from Method in Theology, ‘mediates between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of a religion in that matrix.’10 If that is the case, and if the cultural matrix includes the philosophy of the time, the scholarship of the time, and the science of the time, then theology is going to be involved in the axial shift that seems to be occurring in our time. And that is the background position for Lonergan’s Method in Theology. Furthermore, if the axial shift is so profound and so slow to take shape, then the theology that will count is the one that takes the long view. We say of the military that they are always ready to fight the last war: the war of 1914–1918 calls for tanks, but the military is bringing in the cavalry; or the present war is one of guided missiles, but the military is bringing in the tanks. But let us not make the military a whipping-boy for a trait that is so common, in theology as well as elsewhere. It is easy to misread the signs of the times and to deal with symptoms rather than with the 10 Method in Theology xi (the opening line of the Introduction).

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disease, to work at marginal questions instead of central issues, to aim at writing the book of the month instead of building for the future. Christopher Dawson has said, ‘The foundations of our world are shaken and we shall not save it by replanning the superstructure.’11 Many theologians are repairing or replanning the superstructure; a few laid new foundations and built for the future. Lonergan, I believe, is one of the latter. 4 An Example After this long build-up you may be expecting more from this talk than I can provide. I am not going to set out Lonergan’s theology, not even a sketch of it. I think the best I can do in the time remaining is to take the example of one area of a theology for our time and try to show where Lonergan stands in regard to that, first positively, then more negatively, or at least with some caution. 4.1 History: The Positive Side The area is history, and my position is that a major need of a theology in our time is to acknowledge history. That sounds like a simple statement, too simple to dwell on at any length. In fact, it is not quite as simple as it seems. First, there are two senses of ‘history.’ There is ‘history one,’ the history that happens, and there is ‘history two,’ the history that is written or spoken about what happens. That we all came here tonight is something that happened; it happened even if no one ever mentions it in word or writing: that is history one. But perhaps you will go back home and write someone about the lecture you heard. There may be more than one letter and they may differ in their reports. One might say, ‘We heard an interesting lecture.’ Another might say, ‘We heard a long, dull lecture.’ Both of these are history two, the history that is written. Now Lonergan has a whole theory of history one as a matter of progress, decline, and redemption. This is a history that started with Adam and Eve and is found in every age and every land, wherever there are people. Again it is history that happens, even though no one ever puts it into words. It is a historical pattern that is built into our humanity. We are a race that progresses, that falls back, that is restored. 11 Christopher Dawson, Understanding Europe (New York: Image Books, 1960) 207.

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We are a race that does all three things simultaneously, though from time to time one or another aspect will be in the foreground. It is a theory of history, then, that gives a structure to the world of human events. Lonergan was writing on this from his earliest years in academe, and you can see how important such a theory could be in regard, say, to original sin, in regard to our redemption in Christ Jesus, and so on. But that is not the history I intend to talk about. So we come to history two, the history that is written. It also goes back a long way, perhaps not to Adam and Eve, as does history one, but at least soon after when people began to tell their memories in story and song. More formally, as far back as the Greeks, who began to write the history of wars and events like that. And this work went merrily on without being a problem to theology till about two centuries ago. What happened then? Well, for one thing, historians began to be more critical of their sources. ‘Is the Shroud of Turin really nineteen centuries old, as the sources say? Perhaps we should examine those sources more carefully.’ And so the scientific procedures of the historians took control of the field and put their stamp on the mentality of the times. There was a build-up of resources and techniques, the encyclopedias, the learned journals, the indices, the language dictionaries that developed two centuries ago, especially with the German Historical School of the 1800s. Another thing that happened, as time went on, was that historians became more conscious of subjective elements that affected the work of the historians. Perhaps the person who wrote home about tonight’s interesting lecture was a fan of Christopher Dawson, someone who felt that anyone who quoted Dawson can’t be all bad. And perhaps the person who wrote home about the dull lecture he or she attended was a student worried about a paper that had to be handed in to the professor on Monday, wanted to get back to work on it, and wished the lecture were over. This is the problem of history two, the history that is written. It’s not that people write lies, but that they all write from their own perspective. You have heard a dozen jokes about the English, the French, and the Germans, and the way their national characteristics show up in their productions. In one perhaps familiar to you, for I have heard it more than once, three nationals were asked to write an essay on elephants. The English author’s essay was entitled ‘How I Bagged My First Elephant’; the French author’s, ‘L’éléphant et ses amours’; and the German’s, ‘Das Elephant’ in twelve volumes.

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You can see that a theory of history in the sense of the history that is written will have important applications in theology. That is illustrated first off in studies of the four Gospels: Matthew with his emphasis on law, the sober factual account of Mark, the humanitarian Luke, and the mystical John. Now I intend to talk about history – but not about history one, the history that happens, nor about history two, the account of what happened. What then do I intend to talk about? Is there a third sense of ‘history’? Yes, there is. It is a sense that is related to the other two but differs from them. We call it ‘historicity’ and affirm it as a characteristic of the human race; and here we have one of the gravest theological problems of our time. This is not the historicity we affirm in exegesis. When we talk of the historicity of John’s Gospel or the historicity of a certain pericope in Mark’s Gospel, we mean the accuracy of the account. That is a factual question for factual historians. As the 1900s began, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier made his famous remark, ‘The twentieth century belongs to Canada,’ the point being that the 1900s would bring Canada to the fore the way the 1800s did for the United States. To acknowledge historicity in the exegetical sense might mean simply facing the fact that the 1900s have almost run out and Laurier’s prediction has only five years to be fulfilled. No, we are talking about the historicity that is a characteristic of the human race, of all our thinking, all our judging, all our choosing. To acknowledge history in the sense of historicity is much more than facing this or that occurrence or this or that failure to occur. It is rather to acknowledge a fifth column that is part of our human nature and works from within to undermine all our achievements. Our historicity is not a matter of facts we face but a matter of what we are. It says that human nature is made to develop, that our thinking is made to evolve, that new times call for new ideas, that not only are we responsible under God for creating a modern world but also we are responsible for creating our new selves. I called it a fifth column and said that it works from within to undermine all our achievements. That makes it sound like a traitor, but I want to turn that meaning right around and give it a positive sense. It does undermine our past achievements, but only to bring about a new and better state of affairs. It will be regarded as a traitor, and is so regarded by some in the church today, but only by those who resist all change, who claim that we have all the answers. But for St Thomas, who held

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that the human mind develops slowly and gradually from potency to act, who himself brought about one of the greatest developments in our history, for Thomas were he alive today ‘historicity’ would have a more positive sense. This is the historicity that Lonergan espouses, and it is his idea of the concept that I want to talk about. The first talk Lonergan gave when he was slowly recovering thirty years ago from major surgery that almost took his life, was called ‘The Transition from a Classicist World-View to Historical-Mindedness.’ It was hardly a talk at all in the formal sense of a prepared lecture. It was more a sketch of a talk, a few notes he made in response to a request from former pupils. But it seemed to electrify his audience and readers. It gave them a new insight into the need of our times, and it is one of the most quoted of all his many lectures: over and over you see footnote references to it. What is the transition of which it speaks? What is the classicist world-view? And what is the historical-mindedness that came along to replace it? Elsewhere Lonergan describes the matter more fully. There are the constants of Christianity and the variables. The constants are man’s capacity and need for self-transcendence, the Spirit of God flooding men’s hearts with God’s love, the efficacy of those who mediate the word of  God by word and example … But there also are the variables. Early Christianity had to transpose from its Palestinian origins to the Greco-Roman world. The thirteenth century had to meet the invasion of Greek and Arabic philosophy and science, and Thomas Aquinas … [used] a new knowledge to develop the faith and its theological expression … If we can be proud of our predecessors, we must also note that they took on the coloring of their age and shared its limitations … [T]he culture of  the time was classicist. It was conceived not empirically but normatively … as the right set of meanings and values that were to be accepted and respected if one was not to be a plebeian … a barbarian. Classicist philosophy was the one perennial philosophy. Classicist art was the set of immortal classics. Classicist laws and structures were the deposit of the wisdom and prudence of mankind. This classicist outlook was a great protector of good manners and a great support of good morals, but it had one enormous drawback. It included a built-in incapacity to grasp the need for change … In my opinion this built-in incapacity is the principal cause of the present situation in the Church …12 12 ‘The Response of the Jesuit as Priest and Apostle in the Modern World,’ in A Second Collection 165–87, at 181–82.

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Historical-mindedness would remedy that defect. It takes a look at the history of the first four centuries, and it sees the difference between the Palestinian thinking of The Shepherd of Hermas in the first century and St Augustine in the fifth, the change from one to the other. It would try to do in our time what Augustine did in his. Historical-mindedness takes another look at history, this time at the period from the fifth to the thirteenth century, and it sees the difference between the Greco-Roman thinking of St Augustine and the medieval thinking of St Thomas Aquinas, the change from one to the other. It would try to do in our time what Thomas did in his. As Newman said, ‘[T]o live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.’13 That enemy in our midst, that fifth column within our walls, turns out to be simply the dynamism of human nature, the indestructible force of what Thomas and Aristotle called the agent intellect, what Lonergan describes in these words: ‘the spirit of inquiry within us [that] never calls a halt, never can be satisfied, until our intellects, united to God as body to soul, know ipsum intelligere and through that vision, though then knowing aught else is a trifle, contemplate the universe as well.’14 4.2 History: Cautions When we criticize the old and recognize a new factor in human living, it is important not to rush from one extreme to another. So let us keep historical-mindedness in perspective. It teaches us to keep all times in perspective, and it must itself be kept in perspective. Does it mean, for example, that there is no longer a human nature that is something solid and reliable? No, but it means, first, that we relocate what is solid and reliable, and second, that we give equal importance, with the solid and reliable, to growth and change. So we relocate what is solid and reliable and unchanging: we transfer it from the products of that dynamism I mentioned to the dynamism itself. Let me illustrate that with a parable. Two pastors stood up, each in his or her church, to preach on the Sunday before an important election. Pastor X said, ‘Tomorrow you should vote for so-and-so. He is a Catholic; he contributes to our building fund; he is the one we want.’ 13 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) I, i, 7. 14 Verbum (1997) 66.

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Pastor Y did not mention so-and-so or any other candidate but rather said, ‘Tomorrow you will be exercising a privilege denied to many men and women in other lands. Thank God for the privilege, try to exercise it well, think over carefully the issues at stake, vote according to your conscience, and pray for those in other lands who do not enjoy the privilege of voting.’ You see the difference. Pastor X focuses on the product: so-and-so is the one to vote for. Pastor Y does not try to determine the product but goes to what is more fundamental: the dynamism that lies behind the product. He or she is concerned with the attitude of mind and heart you should have when you enter the polling booth. It is the difference between the dynamism and the product, between the unchanging in human nature and what is subject to ongoing and continual change. Perhaps by the next election so-and-so will turn out to be the wrong person, but no matter what the election brings you will have voted as wisely as is possible in the situation. That is what I mean by relocating the unchanging element in human nature. Secondly, that factor of ongoing and continual change is to be given equal status with unchanging human nature. Not as if we put them in the scales and found them to weigh fifty pounds each, not making them equal in that sense. But they should be given equal status in the sense that they are complementary features of what it is to be a human being living a human life, turning the five talents our generation received into the ten we can present to our Maker when we are called to account. My first caution, then, I thought of as avoiding a jump from one extreme to another. Furthermore we should recognize the dangers intrinsic to historical-mindedness. One is the tendency to belittle our ancestors. We give pain to the more conservative members of our church when we treat the past with contempt. But the remedy is not to turn back the clock to the Middle Ages. The remedy is to cease belittling our ancestors and instead to recognize their achievements, and then do in our time what they did in theirs. As Lonergan said in the passage I have quoted, we can be proud of our ancestors even while we note that they shared the limitations of their age. Another source of opposition to historical-mindedness is a real fear of relativism. If all the products of our dynamic spirit are subject to change, what becomes of our Catholic dogma? What becomes of the creeds of the various churches? Well, for what becomes of dogma we would do well to turn to what Pope John XXIII called for, a

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recognition of ‘the distinction between the unchanging deposit of faith and the changing modes of its presentation to meet the needs of different times.’15 Lonergan’s way of dealing with the old dogmas is to give them new meaning for our time. He concedes that it is not easy ‘to defend the mere repetition of formulas that are not understood,’ but he would ‘urge that in each case one inquire whether the old issue still has a real import and, if it has, a suitable expression for that import be found.’ Such advice is not much help without an example, and he provides an example in the most central dogma of our Christian faith, the one that is a stumbling-block to many today, the decree of the Council of Nicea, declaring that the eternal Son is God in the same sense as the Father is God: ‘For example, at Nicea the real import was whether Christ, the mediator of our salvation, was a creature. Today many perhaps will be little moved by the question whether we have been saved by a creature or by God himself. But the issue may be put differently. One can ask whether God revealed his love for us by having a man die the death of scourging and crucifixion? Or was it his own Son, a divine person, who became flesh to suffer and die and thereby touch our hard hearts and lead us to eternal life?’16 This turns the question right around, one hundred and eighty degrees. An old way to approach it was to think of paying a price to ransom us from the devil; and even when that was dropped, we thought of the debt of justice we must pay. But we were still looking at the question from our side. Lonergan’s way is to start from the side of God: how much love for us would God reveal by appointing, say, Peter or John or Stephen to die for us? It would not cost God much to do that. But God loved us enough to send the only Son, the dearly loved Son, to die for us. That is the point in recognizing Christ as divine. It is no longer a matter of paying an adequate ransom to the devil, or even of satisfying justice, so the redeemer must be divine. It is a matter rather of looking into the very heart of God and discovering there the extent of the divine love for us. That is the meaning of the divinity of Christ and of the dogma of Nicea. Think of Abraham willing in obedience to God the sacrifice of his only son. If we see God as the divine Abraham loving us enough to hand over the divine Isaac for our salvation, it gives us an entirely new perspective. 15 ‘Pope John’s Intention,’ in A Third Collection 224–38, at 225. 16 ‘Theology and Praxis,’ in A Third Collection 184–201, at 198.

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A theology for our time is therefore both perennial and ever new: perennial in the religion and the religious faith that is God’s gift, ever new in the need it has to change and develop if it is to mediate between our religion and the cultural matrix in which we live.

Chapter 2

Some Background Notes to Lonergan’s Insight1

Professor T.R. Miles, in his courteous but unenthusiastic review of Bernard Lonergan’s Insight, suggests that Lonergan has ‘misconstrued what he is doing,’ and recommends to him as ‘of crucial importance’ that he give ‘further attention to the logic of words such as “know,” “understand,” and “recognize.”’ This criticism, I think, does not express merely a difference on some particular philosophical problem, it touches the very method of philosophy. A better ground for debate could hardly have been chosen; for the question of method lies at the heart of Insight, and the differences between Miles and Lonergan on that question seem to me to be basic. Logic is in the forefront for the reviewer, but, while those familiar with the book itself would never maintain that its author despises logic, even the logic of words, neither would they regard it as of more than secondary importance in his conception of the philosophical enterprise. My intention in this essay is not to enter this crucial area of debate, but rather to take up what must be a prior question if Insight is to figure in the discussion. After all, before one can compare the merits of two approaches one must understand them; and if Miles thinks Lonergan has misunderstood the task of philosophy, I in my turn think Miles has somewhat missed the point of Insight. My intention, again, is not to re-examine the book or to attempt to do in a dozen pages what it apparently failed to do in 748; but I think I may render some

1 Thomas Richard Miles, who would eventually become well known as an investigator of dyslexia, was a professor of education and philosophy at Bangor University in Wales when he reviewed Lonergan’s Insight in Mind 70 (1961) 113–14. Crowe wrote the present essay in response and submitted it to Mind, but it was not accepted for publication. It appears here for the first time. (Ed.)

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service to the discussion by providing a few background notes to the book. It did not spring, fully armored, from the author’s brow in one mighty effort. It represents the slow growth of a quarter of a century and was preceded by some very important preliminary studies. The chief of these is a series of articles published in Theological Studies from 1946 through 1949 and entitled ‘The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas.’2 The series comprises some 200 compact pages with references to over 900 passages scattered from one end to another of the voluminous works of Aquinas and a proportionate number of references to Aristotle. Even on this merely quantitative showing, it is a mountain of labor; and one may reasonably expect it to have a very direct relationship to Insight. Perhaps then I can help orient readers of the book by indicating something of the content of the articles. The question is the Thomist background of Lonergan, but it will hardly be out of place to begin with the Augustinian background of Aquinas. Writing in his De Trinitate about the Word of God – not the temporal word spoken through the prophets or even the Son of God as incarnate, but the Son as eternal Word uttered before all ages – Augustine casts about in the universe familiar to humans for some analogy that will endow the name ‘Word’ with meaning for our human minds. His suggestion is that we should go to the ‘inner’ word of thought, the existence of which is not doubted, ‘for, although the words are not sounded, he who thinks utters [them] in his heart.’3 But we are not to stop with the auditory image. ‘Whoever is able to get hold of a word … not only before it is sounded, but even before the images of its sounds are revolved in fantasy [cognitione] … can see … in this dim reflection some likeness of that Word of whom it is said: In principio erat Verbum.’4 This ‘inner’ word does not belong to any language. ‘It is neither Greek nor Latin, nor any other language.’5 Augustine insists on this idea. He labors to bring out his meaning and returns in the next chapter to say: If anyone wishes to find some likeness of the Word of God … let him not study the word that sounds in our ears, or the word that is uttered with the

2 In 1967 these articles were republished in a single volume as Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas; and a second edition appeared under the same title in 1997 as vol. 2 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. The citations here are from the 1997 edition. 3 De Trinitate 15, x, 17. 4 De Trinitate 15, x, 19. 5 Ibid.

18 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Studies lips, or the word that is formed imaginatively in the silence of the mind (for the words of all audible languages can be thought in silence, and we run through songs in our imagination [animo], while the lips say nothing) … But we must transcend all these … We must come to that human word, the word of a rationally-souled being … that does not issue in sound, and is not formed by fantasy in the likeness of sound, for that has to be done in some determinate language, the word then that precedes all the signs by which it may be manifested.6

The interest of these quotations is not, at the moment, Augustine’s theological application, but simply their relevance to cognitional theory. I consider that the testimony of the great psychologist and self-analyst that Augustine was justifies our raising again the old question with a new insistence: Is there or is there not a distinct category and level of mental activity7 that lies beyond that of images? Augustine seems to think that on this point he has got hold of something rather good, he strives to bring it to clear expression in repeated efforts, and he does not seem very hopeful that the ordinary run of humans will be able to grasp it. Such testimony, it seems to me, constitutes a personal challenge to psychologists to study the data once more and see whether Augustine discovered activities that so far they have missed or failed to differentiate. Moreover, to our observation of personal experience we can add the weight of inference. What criterion are we using when we search our minds for the words that will translate correctly a sentence of a foreign tongue? Is it something similar in ‘external’ or imaginative form, visual 6 De Trinitate 15, xi, n. 20. 7 Where Augustine spoke of verbum mentis, verbum quod intus dicitur, etc., I have used ‘inner word.’ Moreover, I have kept the first word of this expression in quotation marks, since I am aware that there are various objections to it and I did not wish, by making unnecessary assumptions, to be drawn into quarrels that at present do not concern me. The essential question is one of categories and levels of activity. The difference in categories is sufficiently determined by examples. We distinguish chemical interaction from gravitational fall, biological intussusception from chemical interaction, and daydreaming from biological intussusception; and on such differences we base the distinctions between physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. Is there a similar distinction between a flow of images in the mind and the conception of an idea? The difference in levels may be determined through Lonergan’s notion of emergence: a lower level is in potency to the emergence of higher activities, as for example the merely biological is in potency to conscious activity. Does the flow of images provide a similar matrix for the emergence of an idea?

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or auditory, or is it an ‘idea’ that is ‘neither Greek nor Latin nor any other language,’ in virtue of which we select this or that ‘external’ word as suitable? It seems to me that only the latter view can avoid absurdity. The question sharpens if we observe the parallel between the modern scientific concept and Augustine’s ‘inner’ word. For scientists have reached concepts that are simply unimaginable. If they put them down on paper by means of x’s and y’s, they know they could just as well write $’s and #’s, were it not for arbitrarily established conventions. If recourse is had to images to popularize their science, they regard them simply as myths that create the illusion of understanding in those who are not willing or able to do the work of conceiving properly the scientific formulation. There seems at least to be a case for the Augustinian ‘inner’ word. However, with Augustine’s point we have gone only one step of the way. Once we admit the existence of concepts that are beyond images, the question arises of the origin of those concepts and their relation to the images. Here we come to the main point of Lonergan’s Verbum articles. He contrasts with great clarity and sharpness the two opposed views of ‘intellectualism,’ centered on insight, which he attributes to Aquinas in dependence on Aristotle, and ‘conceptualism,’ centered on the concept, which he finds characteristic of Duns Scotus and those who – often unwittingly – follow him in this question. In the following paragraphs readers should take these two terms in the sense determined by this historical contrast, not in some other sense that may be more familiar. Let us begin with Thomist intellectualism and its central act of insight. Here the most illuminating single statement of Aquinas is probably the following: ‘Anyone may discover in his own experience [experiri potest] that when he is trying to understand something, he forms images for himself by way of examples, and in these images he, as it were, sees [inspiciat] the solution of his problem [quod intelligere studet].’8 Like other famous dicta of Aquinas, this brief formula is not amplified much in the context, and one has to glean stray remarks from various works of his to fit it out with its proper complement of implications, relationships, illustrations, and applications. But, even as it stands, it provides a clearcut alternative to such devices as chewing a pencil-stub, drawing circles on the tablecloth, and a hundred others that fiction or common opinion or downright superstition recommend as effective means to achieving understanding. 8 Summa theologiae 1, q. 84, a. 7.

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The force of the Thomist formula may, however, come home to us if we advert to the different conditions of successful and unsuccessful attempts to understand. As Lonergan says, ‘Stare at a triangle as long as you please, and you will not be any nearer seeing that its three angles must equal two right angles. But through the vertex draw a line parallel to the base, and the equality of alternative angles ends the matter at once. The act of understanding leaps forth when the sensible data are in a suitable constellation.’9 That is, there is the emergence of an idea. As chemical action emerges on the basis of a proper collocation of elements, as life emerges from the complexity of manifold chemical processes, as new species emerge from the old when a set of gradually accumulated dispositions makes them viable, so in not wholly dissimilar fashion do ideas emerge in the cognitional sphere on the basis of a properly disposed set of images. The act of understanding, whose content is an idea, Lonergan names ‘insight,’ from the analogy of in-tueor or the medieval etymology of intelligo, namely, intus lego. We speak in English of the penetrating power of intelligence. Or, with Aristotle, ‘one may say that philosophers are in the position of people walking the streets; to know the façades of houses is easy, but to know the interiors difficult.’10 This intellectual penetration is called a seeing, in-sight, but only analogously. It is not a seeing through the organic eyes located in the upper part of my face, and it is not therefore a function of good eyesight. It is a matter not of seeing colors but of grasping reasons, relations, intelligible forms, principles, necessities. As the partly blind cannot see the objects that are plain to others, so the stupid cannot ‘see’ the reasons that are obvious to the intelligent. It is called in-sight because the intelligibility is immanent in the data presented to the senses and is grasped by alert intelligence wondering about the data. But the intelligibility is not itself in the order of data attainable by the senses. About Euclid’s solution to his first problem (to construct an equilateral triangle on a given base AB, which is solved by drawing two circles with radii equal to the base, one centered at A, the other at B, and marking the point of intersection), Lonergan says: What Euclid failed to demonstrate was that the two circles would intersect; nor can it be demonstrated from abstract concepts; for there are not two abstract circles, and even if there were, they would be 9 Verbum 27–28, with a reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX, 9, 1051a 22–23, and Aquinas’s Commentary on it, 9, lect. 10, nos. 1888–93. 10 Verbum 81.

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outside space, and so could not intersect. That the circles in question must intersect is known by insight into phantasm; draw or imagine the construction, and you will see this necessity; but you will see the two circles by a sensitive faculty, the necessity by an insight into the sensible presentation.11 Insight is of central importance in the intellectualist view of knowledge. It is the fertile source of all our definitions, conceptions, theories, hypotheses, suppositions, formulations of laws, systems, thoughts. It makes the difference, for example, between repeating a definition like a parrot and being able to define rationally, intelligently, with awareness of the relevant and the irrelevant, the essential and the unessential. Not only is it the fertile source of newly developing ideas, but it is the force behind the revision of old, outmoded conceptions; and, by the same token, it is the power of application of old ideas to new situations. For example, in the application of law it makes the difference between a blind, mechanical imposition of an iron code in a Procrustean fitting, and an intelligent, versatile, infinitely nuanced application that holds law and situation together in harmony. In both the emergence of the conception from the situation and the application of the conception to other situations, it is insight that makes the difference between intelligence and stupidity: it mediates in both directions between sensitive activity and abstract formulation. One can hardly say that the intellectualist view, as just presented, has carried the day among philosophers. Kant bluntly tells us: ‘All our intuition … takes place by means of the senses only; the understanding intuits nothing but only reflects.’12 And again: ‘The sum of the matter is this: the business of the senses is to intuit, that of the understanding is to think.’13 In Lonergan’s view this position owes something to Scotus, who likewise ‘flatly denied the fact of insight into phantasm.’ The consequences of this denial are far-reaching: The Scotist rejection of insight into phantasm necessarily reduced the act of understanding to seeing a nexus between concepts; hence, while for Aquinas, understanding precedes conceptualization which is rational, for Scotus, understanding is preceded by conceptualization which is a matter

11 Verbum 40. ‘Phantasm’ is a Thomist usage; translate: ‘images.’ 12 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. L.W. Beck (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1950) 36. 13 Ibid. 52.

22 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Studies of metaphysical mechanics. It is the latter position that gave Kant the analytic judgments which he criticized; and it is the real insufficiency of that position which led Kant to assert his synthetic apriori judgments; on the other hand, the Aristotelian and the Thomist positions both consider the Kantian assumption of purely discursive intellect to be false and, indeed, to be false, not as a point of theory, but as a matter of fact. While M. Gilson … has done splendid work on Scotist origins, there is needed an explanation of Scotist influence.14

Our next step should logically be a thoroughgoing study of the contrast between intellectualism and conceptualism as outlined in the Verbum articles, but I can do no more here than give some hints of their differences. Conceptualism, then, concentrates on the products of insight, on concepts and their combination into propositions through predication, on propositions and their combination into syllogistic sequences through logic. Intellectualism, on the contrary, concentrates on the intelligence that produces both concepts and propositions and governs their use and application with a versatility that transcends the rules of logic. It is doubly independent of logic: first, because it is prior to logic, which only arises as a systematization of the creative moment of insight; and second, because it continually breaks through the boundaries of the old logical systematization to create new areas for a more inclusive logic to systematize later. As biological activity cannot be fitted into the scope of chemical laws, so insight is a new beginning on another level and does not depend on logical derivation from present mental equipment. Conceptualism artificially divides intelligence and imagination; intellectualism links them in an interdependence that approaches symbiosis. Again, conceptualism would have it that concepts are formed in darkness. It explains their presence by metaphysical mechanics: there is ‘some metaphysical sausage-machine’ at one end feeding in the impressions of sense and imagination ‘and at the other popping out concepts.’15 For intellectualism, on the other hand, concepts are formed as ‘the self-expression of an act of understanding; such self-expression is possible only because understanding is self-possessed, conscious of itself and its own conditions as understanding.’ There is always abstraction, but ‘the Aristotelian and Thomist theory of abstraction is not 14 Verbum 39 n. 126. 15 Ibid. 48.

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exclusively metaphysical; basically, it is psychological, that is, derived from the character of understanding.’16 In this abstraction there occurs ‘the elimination by the understanding of the intellectually irrelevant because it is understood to be irrelevant.’17 Not only the process of conceptualization and formulation, but the very agent of the process emerges into light for the intellectualist. Aristotle and Aquinas both talked of ‘agent intellect,’ but for the conceptualist that does not indicate anything empirically discoverable; instead it is a conclusion of metaphysical reasoning. On Lonergan’s position, agent intellect is brought within the field of consciousness. It appears as the spirit of wonder and inquiry, the source of all science and philosophy, the dynamism accounting for all intelligent activity. This dynamism is not a hidden force, known only to God and metaphysicians; rather, it emerges into the awareness of every child who has ever asked ‘Why?’ It is utterly obvious in the scholar or scientist: ‘The fact of inquiry is beyond all doubt. It can absorb a man. It can keep him for hours, day after day, year after year, in the narrow prison of his study or his laboratory.’18 The focus of this wonder is data, the presentations of sense and the representations of imagination. Sensing and imagining as such are not instances of intelligent activity. Granted, habits of thought will govern imagination to a considerable degree: ‘In the first instance, phantasm has to produce the act of insight whereas, in subsequent instances, informed intellect guides the production of an appropriate phantasm.’19 But in themselves data of sense or imagination are just material for inquiry. They are intelligible in potency, and it is wonder that actualizes the potency. ‘Thus, pure reverie, in which image succeeds image in the inner human cinema with never a care for the why or wherefore, illustrates the intelligible in potency. But let active intelligence intervene; there is a care for the why and the wherefore; there is wonder and inquiry; there is the alertness of the scientist or technician, the mathematician or philosopher, for whom the imagined object no longer is merely given but also a something-to-be-understood.’20 Insight is the success of wonder’s effort.

16 17 18 19 20

Ibid. 56. Ibid. 53. Insight (1992) 28. Verbum 42. Ibid. 185.

24 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Studies

But this spirit of inquiry and personally active intelligence is alien to the conceptualist, who is illustrated by a familiar figure: A sergeant-major with his manual-at-arms by rote knows his terms, his principles, his reasons; he expounds them with ease, with promptitude, and perhaps with pleasure; but he is exactly what is not meant by a man of developed intelligence. For intellectual habit is not possession of the book but freedom from the book. It is the birth and life in us of the light and evidence by which we operate on our own. It enables us to recast definitions, to adjust principles, to throw chains of reasoning into new perspectives according to variations of circumstance and exigencies of the occasion. As intellectual habit is freedom from the book, so its genesis is not tied to the book. In every first instance there were no books. In every second instance what is needed is not a book but a teacher, a man who understands, a man who can break down the book’s explanation into still more numerous steps for the tardy and, contrariwise, for the intelligent reduce the book’s excessive elaborateness to essentials.21

Here we may introduce some very interesting remarks Lonergan has made in comparing Scholasticism with modern systems of logic. When a Scholastic, he says, comes upon a difficulty in his position, he draws a distinction. But the symbolic technique and rigorously deductive character of mathematical logic do not permit it to draw distinctions. Distinctions have to be included in initial definitions. They are equivalent to the introduction of a casual insight, to the transition from one logical formalization to another. Unless they are excluded once the deductive process has started, one is dealing not with a single welldefined logical formalization but rather with an undefined series of logical formalizations.22 I might add that the modern computer, which is so apt an instrument for the deductions of mathematical logic, seems to me also to have gone far beyond the sergeant-major and to have reached a limit in conceptualism. Give a set of premises, it too can deduce with ease, certainly with promptitude, one might even suppose with some electronic

21 Ibid. 193–94. 22 What Crowe says in this paragraph is based upon a course of lectures on mathematical logic that Lonergan gave at Boston College in the summer of 1957. Much later, in 2001, the lectures were published in Phenomenology and Logic, vol. 18 in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. See especially pp. 115–33 of that volume. (Ed.)

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analogue of pleasure, the systems of conclusions that are implicit in those premises. But the premises have to be given and, while the human conceptualist conceives them himself though he knows not how, the computer must have them supplied in the pattern of operations built into its software and the set of inputs provided by the operator. There is a world of difference between the infinitely fertile ‘reason’ of the human mind as defined by Thomist intellectualism and the ‘reason’ of the computer. ‘With remarkable penetration Aquinas refused to take as reason the formal affair that modern logicians invent machines to perform.’23 What we have been following in the path of Augustine and Aquinas is an analysis of human consciousness. Consciousness is at first just a  perpetual flow, a shapeless, undifferentiated, unorganized whole. Augustine sharply differentiated the concept from the image and showed his awareness of two quite distinct levels of activity in the human mind. But Aquinas took the further and still more subtle step of analyzing that higher level and differentiating within it insight, which is the occurrence of an act of understanding, and the concept, which is a mental construct, the product of insight. It was especially with this second step that Lonergan was concerned in the laborious researches of his Verbum articles. It is quite basic to his work; and I would say that unless readers are able to isolate the act of understanding in their own experience and distinguish it from the concept, they will be almost certain to miss the point of Insight. I recommend recourse to one’s own experience. For, as I have already indicated, many great thinkers in history have failed to discover the act of insight; and even Aristotle and Aquinas, to whom Lonergan appeals, will prove disappointing if read according to current interpretations. In this connection I find two reviews of Insight, one favorable and one unfavorable, to be equally significant. Frederick Copleston says in regard to the act of insight: ‘I suppose that some philosophers would wish to apply Ockham’s razor to such ‘acts.’ But it appears to me that  the term ‘act of understanding’ denotes a real psychological phenomenon.’24 On the other hand, the (anonymous) reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement informs us that Lonergan ‘emphasizes the Platonic, Augustinian and idealist elements in traditional philosophy

23 Verbum 71. 24 Journal of Theological Studies 9 (1958) 203.

26 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Studies

more than the Aristotelian and realist side.’25 I think the two reviewers bear witness to the same point. Copleston, I should say, gives his placet as a personal opinion in spite of the general failure of historians to discover this act in the philosophers, while anyone who thinks a book about insight emphasizes Platonic elements more than Aristotelian has obviously found nothing in Aristotle to correspond to the alleged act of understanding. Of course, study of one’s own consciousness has its problems too. It is easy in the sense that we do not have to devise and manufacture expensive apparatus to test our theories. But it is very difficult in the sense that normally we are extroverted in our orientation. When we do turn attention to subjective experience as a field for study, the data are shadowy and impalpable compared to the impression made by lightning, train whistles, or a policeman’s bludgeon. The field finally is so rich and variegated that its analysis and organization are apt to prove even more difficult than that of the material universe – on which we are still working after a good many centuries. I would be simply untrue to my personal history if I pretended that it is easy to isolate the act of insight in the flow of consciousness. And Lonergan says bluntly but I think truly: ‘All men are aware of their sensations. All educated men, at least, are aware of their thoughts and so of the division of thoughts into concepts, judgments, and inferences. But only Aristotelians are sufficiently aware of their intellects to turn this awareness to philosophic account.’26 Yet, in the last analysis, we must resort to personal experience, for only thus can we give a meaning to the testimony of historical thinkers on what they have discovered in their consciousness. When Aquinas wrote ‘quilibet experiri potest,’ he was not calling on the authority of the historical thinkers. I hope I have indicated why I doubt that attention to the logic of ‘know,’ ‘understand,’ and so on is of crucial importance in Lonergan’s task, or why at any rate he was led to concentrate on the experience of insight as more fundamental. I hope also, of course, that the title of this essay will be given its due force. It reads ‘Some Notes,’ for not only are there other sources than the Verbum study but I have not even touched on one of the other great issues treated there.27 Further, the title reads ‘Background Notes’ to Insight, for that book is not just a repetition in 25 Times Literary Supplement, 4 April 1958, 186. 26 Verbum 193. 27 That issue is the act of judgment and the corresponding question of being.

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modern languages of Aristotle and Aquinas. Even after one has learned from them what Lonergan learned and set forth in the Verbum articles, there still remains the problem of grasping his own contribution in Insight to the history of ideas. But these few notes may serve the modest purpose of a light that, while too feeble to illuminate the darkness, shows where the switch for one of the floodlights lies.

Chapter 3

Doctrines and Historicity in the Context of Lonergan’s Method in Theology1

The difficulty of reconciling a permanent element in Christian doctrines with the historicity that affects all human judgments, those of faith as well as those of the secular sciences, is the present form of a general problem that has been troubling theologians in their theology and believers in their beliefs for a century and more. The appearance of Mysterium ecclesiae,2 where – for the first time, so it seems, in a document of the Holy See – the element of historicity in the sources of our faith is expressly taken into account, has given Giovanni Sala occasion for the book that will be my point of departure in these reflections.3

1 Sala limits his objective rather carefully. He is not engaging in debate on the concrete question that triggered much of the current discussion

1 Previously published as ‘Doctrines and Historicity in the Context of Lonergan’s Method: A Review-Article,’ Theological Studies 38 (1977) 115–24. 2 Mysterium ecclesiae, an encyclical of Pope Paul VI, was published in Acta apostolicae sedis 65 (1973) 396–408. An ‘official’ English translation appeared in Origins: NC Documentary Service 3 (1973) 97, 99–100, 110–12. The translation speaks of ‘the historical condition that affects the expression of Revelation’ (p. 110, col. 3), translating the Latin ‘ex historica exprimendae Revelationis condicione.’ It may eliminate some confusion if we distinguish the present problem from that of dogma and history as it began to trouble the Catholic Church a century ago. At that time the precise problem was the seeming conflict in what dogma and history were saying about the past. 3 Giovanni B. Sala, Dogma e storia nella dichiarazione ‘Mysterium ecclesiae’ (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1976).

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(Hans Küng on infallibility),4 but pursues his own independent and unitary line of thought. His intention is to set forth a general philosophy of human knowledge and an epistemology that will enable him to deal with the issues involved, at least in the measure needed to illuminate the relevant passages of the Roman document, and so he  freely admits that much of his work will stand or fall with his epistemological premises.5 His first part provides those premises in four chapters: on human knowing in general, on the character it has of being incomplete and yet at the same time claiming absolute adherence, on its developing character, and finally on the form it takes in historical knowledge. Six chapters in the second part employ these ideas in a study of the word of God and the dogma of the church: revelation as a word of God that is true, a sample of the process from New Testament to dogma (taken from the field of Christology), dogma as concluding and also initiating a process of learning, dogma as going beyond biblical terms, the historical character and transcultural components of dogma, and finally the permanence of dogma. Three chapters in the third part apply this to the exposition of the notion of historicity in Mysterium ecclesiae. As the reader may have gathered from this brief table of contents, Sala is defending a thesis as well as setting forth his views on the topics listed. The thesis is the moderate third position of asserting both the permanence of dogma and its historicity, as against the alternative extremes of plumping for one and disregarding the other. From this viewpoint it is important to read the book as a unitary whole in which what at first seems like a one-sided emphasis is later brought into balance with compensating considerations. For example, a more objective approach is balanced by the recognition6 of subjective factors, a rather rational tendency by the acknowledgment7 of the role of feelings, an intellectual view of revelation by the introduction8 of the kerygmatic, and so on, right up to a discussion of the role of love in relation to the search for truth,9 and of the subject’s authenticity in relation to the

4 See Hans Küng, Unfehlbar? Eine Anfrage (Zurich: Benziger, 1970) [Infallibility? An Inquiry (New York: Doubleday, 1971)]. 5 Sala, Dogma e storia 6–9. 6 Ibid. 37–41. 7 Ibid. 81. 8 Ibid. 88. 9 Ibid. 305.

30 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Studies

objectivity of his judgments.10 It is clear to me that the author is alive to the complexities of the question, and fully committed to consideration of every factor that is real and significant. From another viewpoint one must remember the concrete situation in which Sala writes. For, just as truth is always truth in someone’s mind, so its expression can hardly be without relation to one’s potential audience, circle of readers, or partners in dialogue. Thus, two authors might wish with equal sincerity to do justice to the opposing elements of the question. But one, with an eye on those who deny the permanence of dogma, would concede the historicity, insist more on the permanence, and so appear more conservative; the other, with his eye on the reactionaries to change, would readily admit the normative character of the truth given us in our patrimony, but would be more urgent in stressing its historicity, and so might appear more liberal. From this viewpoint I am in full agreement with Sala on the need for moderation, balance, and a comprehensive effort at reconciliation. I am in agreement too with most of his positions taken one by one; but where his stress is on permanence, I would likely feel drawn more in my particular kairos to the cause of historicity. However, with such variations in emphasis, determined by time, place, and circumstance, there is no argument. The real interest in such an effort of reconciliation lies in the way an author understands the question, in the penetration of the ideas with which he endeavors to reach the level of his times and to come to terms with its conflicting demands. Sala has clearly done his own homework and has his own individual contribution to make, one of careful research, of analytic acumen, of reflective wisdom. But this personal contribution is made in the context of Bernard Lonergan’s thought, which supplies a kind of organon for the thesis of Dogma e storia.11 It is here, in this Lonergan context, that I would like to enter the discussion, not to challenge Sala’s

10 Ibid. 310–26. 11 Sala has been publishing for twelve years in the field of Lonergan studies. His doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of Bonn, was a study of the a priori in Kant and Lonergan. He has published studies of Lonergan in the periodicals of Italy, Germany, France, Austria, and the United States. He edited the German translation of some of Lonergan’s papers, Theologie im Pluralismus heutiger Kulturen (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1975); and he himself translated Method in Theology into Italian, Il metodo in teologia (Brescia: Queriniana, 1975). It is a great pity that Insight got translated into that language without benefit of his extremely thorough acquaintance with the book.

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presentation but to complement it with an account of my own difficulties in regard to doctrines and historicity, and with some reflections that have come to me as I worked toward a solution.

2 The topic, then, is chapter 12 of Lonergan’s Method in Theology, entitled ‘Doctrines,’12 and the immediate difficulty can be stated in the form of a seeming contradiction issuing in a dilemma for the reader. On one side, Lonergan seems committed by his view of methodical theology to radical creative work in the area of doctrines. They are to be the result of ‘the application of a method that distinguishes functional specialties,’ and indeed the result of selection by the theologian. For the method ‘uses the functional specialty, foundations, to select doctrines from among the multiple choices presented by the functional specialty, dialectic.’13 That is to say, the old doctrines are not enough in a new situation. If they ‘are to retain their meaning within the new contexts, they have to be recast.’14 There is to be a reinterpretation,15 the sort of thing which in fact went on even in the Old Testament and the New.16 There are ‘transpositions that theological thought has to develop if religion is to retain its identity and yet at the same time find access into the minds and hearts of men of all cultures and classes.’17

12 Method in Theology 295–333. An overlapping work that is roughly contemporary is Doctrinal Pluralism (The 1971 Père Marquette Theology Lecture, Marquette University, Milwaukee). The reader will notice that I tend to speak of ‘doctrines and historicity’ rather than of ‘dogmas and historicity.’ The latter expression emphasizes more the problem as it is determined by the character of dogma; the former emphasizes more the solution, based on the character of doctrines explained in chapter 12. The last paragraph of that chapter, setting forth ‘a distinction between dogmatic theology and doctrinal theology,’ I have found exceptionally helpful. I am not sure that the relation between doctrines and dogmatic theology was as fully worked out when Lonergan wrote what is now p. 132 in chapter 5 of Method. That chapter, we remember, was published three years earlier than the book, as ‘Functional Specialties in Theology,’ Gregorianum 50 (1969) 485–504. 13 Method in Theology 298. 14 Ibid. 305. 15 Ibid. 154, 319, 344–45. 16 Ibid. 306–307. 17 Ibid. 132–33.

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But then, on the other side, we find what seems to be a firm and determined commitment to the ‘word that comes to us from Christ Jesus.’18 The Christian theologian should also be an authentic Christian, ‘and so will be second to none in his acceptance of revelation, scripture, and his church doctrine.’19 Not only will he accept them. He has also a responsibility to defend them,20 and a responsibility to consider the influence he may exert on the faithful, and the influence his theological doctrine may have on church doctrines.21 Lonergan’s own fidelity to the doctrines of his church is shown in Method by his acceptance of the First Vatican Council’s doctrine on doctrine,22 and shown elsewhere in work done subsequently to Method in the field of Trinitarian and Christological doctrines.23 The question, then, that arises directly out of Method in Theology is whether we do or do not possess our doctrines before we begin theology. We seem, if we try to follow Lonergan, to be tossed from horn to horn of a dilemma. Either we already possess our doctrines through our tradition and faith-commitment, and then what are we doing trying to establish them in the theological task that Lonergan names ‘doctrines’? Or we do not already possess them, and then what becomes of our commitment as believers to the doctrines of the Christian tradition? One suspects that so gross a contradiction is not likely to occur in a thinker of Lonergan’s power, and so one very sensibly asks first whether the failure is not to be found in oneself. Actually, our argument did contain an oversight which, once noticed, is not hard to remedy; and so the contradiction, at least in its gross form, can be eliminated. For the dogmas to which my faith commits me are a word from the past, but the doctrines that Method would have us produce are a word of the future. This is basic and orienting, for it derives from the two phases of methodical theology: ‘If one encounters the past, one also has to take one’s stand toward the future.’24 So the chapter on doctrines lists primary sources, church doctrines, theological doctrines (of the past), and methodological doctrine. Then, over against them all, it sets up 18 19 20 21 22 23

Ibid. 298. Ibid. 331. Ibid. 323–24. Ibid. 332. Ibid. Notably in ‘The Origins of Christian Realism,’ first published in 1972 and reprinted in Second Collection 239–61. 24 Method in Theology 133.

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doctrines in the sense of the functional specialty: ‘There is a fifth variety of doctrines, the ones meant in the title of the present chapter.’25 And these are still to be formulated; for they result from method which ‘uses the functional specialty, foundations, to select doctrines from among the multiple choices presented by the functional specialty, dialectic.’26 However, blunting the horns of the dilemma does not eliminate further questions; it rather invites them. For example, we may accept dogmas from past tradition and try to formulate doctrines of the future, but we have still to ask how the doctrines are related to the dogmas. Lonergan’s summary answer is indicated in a line I have already quoted: the doctrines will be transpositions of the dogmas.27 What does transposition do? It does not give a new meaning to the old dogmas, for it is just their meaning that is permanent.28 Much less does it mean a new religion, for transpositions are needed precisely ‘if religion is to retain its identity and yet … find access into the minds and hearts of men of all cultures and classes.’29 But it seems to involve a rather fundamental change, for it is distinguished from ‘the adaptations needed to make … use of the diverse media of communication,’30 presumably as something analogous to that adaptation but taking place on a more fundamental level. Probably the most direct approach to its meaning is through Lonergan’s statement on the theoretical premises of the historicity of human thought, especially the second premise: ‘[H]uman understanding develops over time and, as it develops, human concepts, theories, affirmations, courses of action change.’31 That transition, when it regards the understanding of a truth, is transposition.32

25 Ibid. 298. 26 Ibid. 27 I am indebted to Lonergan himself for calling my attention to the role of this term. And now, on re-examining Method, I would say that ‘transposition’ belongs to a little list of key ideas there that have not been sufficiently noticed. The word did not manage to get into the extensive Index – no doubt a sign of how much remains to be understood in the book. But the term or the idea (under the form ‘recast,’ ‘reinterpret,’ etc.) is recurrent. See, for example, pp. 142, 150, 154, 168, 171, 304, 306–307, 319, 327–28, 344–45, 353, 362–63. 28 Method in Theology 322–23. 29 Ibid. 132–33. 30 Ibid. 133. 31 Ibid. 325. 32 The sources of Lonergan’s notion of transposition are surely to be found in the directly theological work in which he was engaged for nearly forty years as he thought through his Method, though it will require the most careful discrimination

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A second question follows. My first was put from the viewpoint of the new doctrines, the terminus ad quem of the transposition; but one might also turn to the terminus a quo and ask what happens to the old dogmas themselves in the transposition. The form of this question, I think, betrays a misunderstanding of what a transposition is and does. It is not an evolution of a material entity into a new form, as when thirteen colonies become the United States and, in so doing, cease to be colonies. If we want a visual simile, we might better think of an album of family pictures. Nothing happens to the wedding-day picture of my parents simply as a result of the fact that there is a different picture on their anniversary twenty-five or fifty years later. Similarly, we can say that nothing happens to the ancient dogmas in the transposition: they simply remain what they were. As the pictures are records at different times of one continuing reality, so the successive transpositions are expressions in differing cultures of the one meaning. A much more pertinent question regards ourselves and our relation today to the dogmas of the past. This is the difficult area, and I think it useful to recall the broad context in which the question arises. It is that of a community of belief that extends across time as well as space. I form one community of belief with Paul, the Nicene fathers, and others in my tradition. Further, a community of belief is not like common ownership of material goods, leaving minds and hearts otherwise free. Rather, it involves a common set of values, a common adherence to their concrete embodiment, and a common judgment on the facts and doctrines that support and/or depend on the values. So that the authentic beliefs and dogmas of my tradition from the year 30 through 325 to 1977 are in some fundamental sense our doctrines, and in that fundamental sense they are mine too. If, therefore, someone were to ask me point-blank about my acceptance of any doctrine authentically defined and taught at any time by my community, I would answer: ‘Yes, I accept that doctrine in the sense it had when my community formulated and defined it as the expression of our faith.’ to incorporate elements of this early work into a methodical theology, or to use it to illustrate his methodological precepts. See especially his De Deo Trino, 2 vols. For instant illustration I propose this simplified example: Nicea on the consubstantiality of the Son is a transposition of the Pauline attribution to the Son of the glory that in the Old Testament belonged to Yahweh alone. Again, the remark of George L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1952) 213, that the Nicene question ‘was whether both the Father and the Son were God in exactly the same sense of the word God,’ gives his transposition of Nicea into terms more appropriate today.

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At the same time I would question the validity of such point-blank tactics. Truth has an absolute character, but this character cannot simply be transferred to the economy in which truth functions and is communicated. There are two barriers to such transferral. One regards the distinction between content and exercise.33 Though it may be that a given content is not to be contradicted, it does not follow that I may impose that content on others, or find it relevant to me here and now, or even be required to utter it when challenged. The other regards the distinction within content between meaning and formula: the confession of the divinity of the Son may be made now in Pauline language, now in Nicene language, or today in still another language more appropriate and more pastoral.34 Other questions on our relation to the past are logically prior to that of the economy. I spoke of the ‘authentic’ doctrines of my community, and this leads me to the reflection that we cannot, through any blind commitment to the past, shirk the work of research, interpretation, and history, in determining what our community has authentically held or now holds. There is a responsibility laid on Christians for ‘purifying their tradition.’35 For example, once we held firmly that Jesus said the words and did the deeds attributed to him (as we thought) by the Evangelists. Few of us, however, hold that today. This surely is a purification of something that did not belong in the genuine tradition, and 33 This is the distinction used by St Thomas to clarify his position on the freedom of the will: ‘quantum ad exercitium actus’ and ‘quantum ad specificationem actus’ (Summa theologiae 1-2, q. 10, a. 2). 34 A pastoral theology would need its set of pastoral ‘notes’ (not necessarily so called) as counterpart to the old dogmatic ‘notes’ of de fide, probabilior, and so forth. For example, Emil Brunner thought of Trinitarian doctrine as Schutzlehre. A pastoral theology would determine what doctrines are mainly ‘defensive’ for us, and contrast them sharply with doctrines that directly affect the life of the believer. Similarly, the pastoral office would take account, in the profession of faith it requires, of the economy of communicating truth. We would not, if we could, confront Tertullian and Origen in their day with the definition of Nicea and force them to accept it or else. But then, if we could move in the opposite direction and set them down in post-Nicene times, would it be a responsible action to impose Nicea on them without a long preliminary education in fourth-century thinking? Well, our world is full of Origens and Tertullians and others at varying levels of development and with varying forms of culture. More generally, we would try to imitate the economy practiced by the Lord of revelation, and take account not only of the limited ability of the hearer to receive or profit from a given truth, but also of the limited role that truth plays in general in Christian living. 35 Method in Theology 299.

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the purification was accomplished largely through the specialties of research, exegesis, and factual history. A second illustration is from the field of the history of dogma. A few decades back, I personally – and, it seems, many others – would have said that the Nicene fathers taught implicitly the doctrine of distinct persons in one God. Today I would not try to make Cappadocians of the Nicenes by my ‘implicitly.’ I would simply say they taught no such thing, that the question of distinct persons in one God arose and was answered only half a century later. A third illustration is found in the very question of the permanence of dogma as it is treated in chapter 12 of Method, where there is a clarification of ‘permanence’ – it ‘attaches to the meaning and not to the formula,’ though we have no meaning apart from a formula36 – and as well the addition of the factor of historicity to complement that of permanence. How much purifying of the tradition is involved here may be estimated by the trauma many experience in accepting it. But when Method speaks of ‘purifying the tradition,’ it seems to mean something more radical than research, interpretation, and factual history. Lonergan speaks of the possibility that a tradition may become inauthentic: ‘[U]nauthenticity can spread. It can become a tradition. Then persons, brought up in an unauthentic tradition, can become authentic human beings and authentic Christians only by purifying their tradition.’37 And so a more radical exercise of the functional specialties comes into play for the theologian: ‘[E]valuational history … decides on the legitimacy of developments,’38 and dialectic ‘deploys both the truth reached and the errors disseminated in the past.’39 Thus, very ugly questions may arise for the theologian: Could one face, should one face, the awful possibility that his faith in the church, his very faith in Jesus Christ, is inauthentic, erroneous, that purification of his tradition requires central beliefs under these headings to be abandoned? We have moved very quickly to questions which involve the theologian personally in a radical way, which force him out of academic detachment and require him with Kierkegaard to concern himself infinitely with the ethical and the religious. Perhaps, however, theologians can be more direct in communicating with one another than Kierkegaard found possible. At any rate, I wish to try, well aware that words on paper are

36 37 38 39

Ibid. 323. Ibid. 299; see 80, 162. Ibid. 320; see 302, 312. Ibid. 299.

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but a small step toward the mutual encounter and dialectic through which we may achieve the personal growth that is ultimately necessary.

3 My first remark, then, is that the self-devouring monster which we have conceived as a possibility for the theologian is the product of an  isolated rationality. It has separated itself from its basis in ‘selfjustifying’ love,40 which is a basis not because we have reached it in critical examination and made it a principle, but because it is given and operative and a principle independently of our reasoning. It is, in fact, the principle of efforts to identify its own object and purify conceptions of that object.41 We do not, therefore, begin by cutting off the branch on which we sit. This would not be to face reality but very precisely to lose touch with reality in a morbidity whose remedy is not an argument but the letting what is be.42 My second remark recalls Newman’s ‘true way of learning,’ which he opposes to that (it seems) of Descartes. It does not consist in doubting everything that can be doubted till we get down at last to some indubitable truth on which we may then build again. On the contrary, ‘we ought to begin with believing every thing that is offered to our acceptance … In that case, we soon discover and discard what is contradictory to itself … the error falling off from the mind, and the truth developing and occupying it.’43 To the passive factor of letting be what is, this adds the positive factor of doing what we can in the best way we can. Thirdly, there is the further specification of that way. As we have given, in Lonergan’s self-justifying love, a new formulation to the trust that is operative in Newman, so we may give his learning procedures a  new technique through Lonergan’s dialectic. For the purpose of

40 Ibid. 123, 283–84. 41 Orientation to transcendent mystery, or love of God, ‘provides the origin for inquiry about God, for seeking assurance of his existence, for endeavoring to reach some understanding of the mysteries of faith’ (Method in Theology 341). 42 We know the way some religious persons torture themselves with the question of how much cruelty they could endure for their faith. There is an analogous morbidity in the theologian who worries where his theology may lead him. We know too the penchant of the late Middle Ages for asking about abstract possibles and the absolute power of God. This is academic morbidity on the grand scale in the schools – again, very precisely, the desertion of reality. 43 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) ix, 3, 2, 2 (1).

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dialectic is to build up, not to destroy; the higher level that sublates truth, ‘so far from … destroying it … needs it, includes it, preserves all its proper features and properties, and carries them forward to a fuller realization within a richer context.’44 Or, the authentic subjectivity which is the goal of dialectic leads to genuine objectivity.45 However, I mean to omit here all discussion of the technique of dialectic, not because it is unimportant but because in my opinion it is all-important; it is the very crux of the question and deserves more than a superficial exposition at the end of an article on another topic.

4 May I, however, for that very reason, conclude with a plea to Lonergan students for more concentrated attention on the topic of dialectic? And so, though I began this article by discussing with Sala chapter 12 of Method in Theology, I would end by moving discussion back to chapter 10. This chapter on dialectic is the point, I would say, at which Lonergan has lost most of his readers, perhaps without our knowing that we have fallen behind. That could be merely a judgment on my own experience, but I do not think it is. The chapter does occupy a strategic place in the structure of Method, and if, as most reviewers agree, the book as a whole is going to require slow and laborious study, then the difficulty is likely to be especially acute at this crucial point. Further, there is the significant fact that Lonergan’s own development to the point where he could write this chapter was so slow and laborious.46 Finally, the intrinsic difficulty, as it was in the late 1940s with the act of insight and in the late 1950s with the act of judgment, is the elusive achievement of selfappropriation, coming now in dialectic to the most difficult point of the 44 Method in Theology 241. 45 Ibid. 292. 46 Some time ago, in ‘An Exploration of Lonergan’s New Notion of Value,’ at the 1974 Lonergan Workshop at Boston College, I offered the following clues to a chronology of Lonergan’s development under this heading: ‘There are milestones of progress in the Boston College lectures of 1957, with their attention to the horizon of the subject and his existential concerns; in the Latin treatises of this period with their work on the consciousness of Christ and the theology of the three divine subjects; in the concluding section of the 1964 paper “Cognitional Structure,” with its brief but important linking of subjectivity to objectivity; most of all, in the Aquinas Lecture of 1968, The Subject.’ (See my Appropriating the Lonergan Idea 54.) I would now add to these ‘milestones’ a paper Lonergan read in 1967, ‘Theology in Its New Context,’ in A Second Collection 55–67.

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process. At any rate, it seems to me, five years after the publication of Method, that chapter 10 is a conspicuous hurdle to be surmounted by those who wish to understand what Lonergan is about in that book, and I personally would be especially interested in the views on dialectic of one who is as familiar as Sala is with Lonergan’s thought and as accurate an interpreter of it. However, in pleading for a collaborative effort to understand what dialectic means in itself and as a theological task, I certainly do not mean to suggest that we postpone all work either on the theology of such questions as revelation, kerygma, creeds, and so forth, or on the concept itself of the theological task named ‘doctrines.’ As for the first, theology cannot wait upon method in order to pursue its theological aims. The work must continue with such tools as are available,47 and Sala’s own discussion of the concepts pertaining to the word of God would be an example of the attempts we must make on that topic till a more methodical theology can be tackled.48 As for the second, we cannot so concentrate on dialectic as to leave the four specialties of mediated theology aside. Correlations are too numerous, the crosslight from phase to phase and from task to task is too illuminating, to permit us to understand one task in isolation from the others. From

47 In any case, to implement Method is not to create a whole new theology but to restructure its tasks, use work already done in some specialties, and work more creatively in others. I would say that the need for originality increases from specialty to specialty in the first phase, so that the immense amount of competent research now available could quite readily be taken over in a methodical theology, whereas dialectic would have to be developed much more creatively. 48 Sala would agree, I think, that a methodical theology of the word of God, of truth, and so forth, will require explicit attention to the eight functional specialties, and that his own work on these concepts in chapter 5 is an interim effort to give such guidance as is possible in a brief compass. But the question has repeatedly been raised about Lonergan’s own use in Method of such concepts as revelation, word of God, and so forth. It is clear that he is not giving us a theology (except for an element of a theology of dogma, and a hint of such an element for a theology of the word of God), but what is he doing? Can one justify his use? The suggestion may be worth thinking about that, in the image found on Insight 316, he is using a descriptive account as ‘tweezers’ by which we hold an object while explanation is being sought. The descriptive account could be summarized as that which scripture conveys to an amateur prior to all specialized exegesis and theology. Some such account is surely supposed by all of us about Jesus of Nazareth himself; and it is globally valid despite the corrections it accepts later from specialists. We do not lose contact with the real earthly Jesus while we await the results of the historical quest and of the changing, often conflicting, Christologies.

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this viewpoint I found it unusually stimulating, for my own concentration on dialectic, to be forced by Sala’s book to think over again some of the complex questions that surround Lonergan’s notion of doctrines and their historicity.

Chapter 4

Lonergan’s Early Use of Analogy1

Eleven years ago, in his Method in Theology, Bernard Lonergan devoted some paragraphs to the historian’s use of analogy, discussing the need of understanding the past in terms of the present, as well as the pitfalls that threaten the success of such a procedure.2 Three years later, in a paper at a Laval University colloquium, he noted the continuing importance of the psychological analogy for understanding the Trinity, and went on to assert a similar need to think analogously of consciousness if we are to construct a Christology to meet the questions of our time.3 These sample references to analogy in works that are regularly and justifiably called those of the ‘later Lonergan,’ seem quite innocent, too familiar and traditional to give pause to a busy reader. But they carry the freight of an extensive and multiform use of analogy in Lonergan’s early writings, with a wealth of hidden meaning that might be mined to enrich our understanding of his later usage. It seemed worthwhile, therefore, as a study in itself and as a contribution to this new journal, to assemble some of the data on analogy from Lonergan’s previous writings, and thus provide a better perspective for the samples noted in the Method and post-Method periods of his career.

1 Previously published as ‘Lonergan’s Early Use of Analogy: A Research Note, with Reflections,’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 1/1 (1983) 31–46. 2 Method in Theology 225–27. 3 ‘Christology Today: Methodological Reflections,’ in A Third Collection 74–99, at 93; see also 95. (This lecture was first published in 1976. The citations here are from its 1985 republication.) Lonergan’s analogy for the Trinity here is somewhat revised from his earlier work (see note 30 below), but that is not relevant at present.

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But is there more here, perhaps, than an interesting bit of history or lexicography? My own opinion is that Lonergan’s use of analogy has wider implications, serving as a key to his style of thinking, and as a directive for those who labor to accept the challenge and carry out the task that his thinking has presented. My historical sketch will conclude then with a few reflections on the practical significance of this topic. In the later ‘contracta et abbreviata’ account of the doctoral dissertation that Lonergan completed in 1940, two passages deal with analogy in some detail. Aquinas is shown to have used the analogy of Aristotle’s physical motion (motion in the transitive sense of moving an object) to understand the divine premotion by which the sinner is converted and justified.4 And there is developed, with a more personal input, the generalized theorem of divine operation in all created activity. On the  analogy of a swordsman’s use of his sword, Lonergan sets forth the ‘proximate’ analogy for the causation of the Creator and that of the creature (the ‘remote’ analogy being the dependence on God of the principle of operation as opposed to that of the operation itself).5 Such extensive interest in particular analogies is perhaps revealing, but there is no thematic discussion at this early date of analogy in general, or any special significance in Lonergan’s way of using it. The content of the analogies and the particular theological questions dealt with lie, of course, outside my terms of reference. The Verbum articles that followed a few years later do show just such a thematic interest.6 They are especially remembered for their exposition of Thomist cognitional theory and for their recovery and revitalization of the Thomist psychological analogy for the Trinity. Under the latter heading they are obviously important for Lonergan’s very personal, if substantially traditional, remarks on the relation of analogy to theology and to the understanding of divine mystery.7 But far more important for present purposes is the basis they lay for the use of analogy: the cognitional theory developed around the dynamism of 4 Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas 58–64. (The dissertation, completed in 1940, was later revised and published in four articles during 1941 and 1942 under the general title ‘St Thomas’ Thought on Gratia Operans.’ The citations here are from the subsequent republication of these articles in 2000.) 5 Ibid. 86–90, under the title ‘The Analogy of Operation’; see also 145–47. 6 Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas. (The five articles appeared from 1946 through 1949 under the general title ‘The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St Thomas Aquinas.’ The citations here are from the subsequent 1997 republication.) 7 Verbum, especially 215–16.

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intelligence as it heads for being and truth, the recognition of the proper object of intelligence in the ‘quiddity’ of material things, and the role, in the unfolding process of dynamic consciousness, of insight into what is imagined.8 That theory will lead in two directions for a position on analogy. One direction takes us to the analogy of matter and Lonergan’s personal and fateful discovery of an Aristotelian position on proportion: ‘[T]he ultimate subject of change … could be neither quid nor quantum nor quale … its nature could be stated only by recourse to analogy.’ Again, it is ‘what is known by intellect indirectly.’ And so we have, set forth here in Lonergan’s own manner, a notion that will be operative throughout his career, that of proportion and ‘the specifically Aristotelian analogy,’ namely, ‘natural form is to natural matter … as the object of insight is to the object of sense.’9 The other direction leads to the concept of being: ‘[T]he concept of being is an effect of the act of understanding,’ and it ‘cannot but be analogous,’ expressing intelligibility whatever the particular content. Thus, ‘the identity of the process … necessitates the similarity of the proportion, and … the diversity of the content … makes the terms of the proportion different.’ The proportion between essence and existence is traditional enough, but the characteristic feature, giving meaning to the analogy, is the process by which human consciousness advances from experience through understanding and concept to judgment, truth and being.10 Also to be noted in these articles is the remark ‘As there is an analogy of ens and esse, so also there is an analogy of the intelligibly proceeding est.’11 This is of key importance in the analogy for the Trinity, since Being is a divine attribute common to the Three, but the Father’s Est, as an act of utterance, grounds his personal relation to

8 Chapter 1 is especially to the point, but the relevant references would take in pretty much the whole book. 9 For the quoted passages, see Verbum 154, 157, 158. The whole section from page 154 to page 158 is subtitled ‘The Analogy of Matter.’ 10 Ibid. 57, 58–59. 11 Ibid. 208. A paper of 1949, ‘The Natural Desire to See God,’ continues this appropriation of analogy through understanding but focuses on our analogous knowledge of God. The key again: ‘… [W]e can understand directly and properly only what first we can imagine, and so the proportionate object of our intellects in this life is said to be the quidditas rei materialis.’ For the mysteries of faith, then, we have to complement such understanding ‘by the corrections of a via affirmationis, negationis, et eminentiae.’ See Collection (1988) 81–91, at 82.

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the Son and, as the uttered Word, is the second person of the Trinity. But, restricting discussion to present purposes, I merely note how this remark, in shifting the focus from the objectified concept to the objectifying act of understanding-expressing-itself, attaches analogy to its foundations in dynamic human consciousness. Insight, except for revisions not relevant here, was written over the course of the next four years, from 1949 to 1953.12 The ‘notion of being,’ understood as the anticipation of being inherent in the desire to know and as set in contrast with the concept of being, is now very much elaborated,13 and Lonergan’s position on the analogy of being is developed and revised accordingly. He asks whether the notion of being is univocal, with the same meaning in all applications, or analogous, with the meaning varying systematically from one field of application to another. One could answer, he says, that it is univocal, for the one desire to know underpins all other contents; or, one could say it is analogous, for that desire penetrates all other contents; or, one could say it is neither, ‘for this distinction regards concepts, while the notion of being both underpins and goes beyond other contents.’14 In other words, as I interpret Lonergan, one can form a concept of the ‘notion of being’ (indeed, what is the whole of chapter 12 but such a concept?), and one can say of this concept that it is univocal or analogous, depending on whether one considers it in itself as the desire to know or in its potential as productive of all concepts; but, strictly speaking, if one asks the question about the notion of being as notion, then the question loses its meaning and application. Further material in Insight can receive hardly more than a mention here. First, there is little reference to analogy in our notion of God, though it is acknowledged.15 But there is repeated use in this context of 12 Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, first published in 1957 (with a ‘revised and augmented’ fifth edition appearing in 1992). Lonergan gives the date of its composition in ‘Insight Revisited,’ in A Second Collection 263–78, at 268. But the attentive reader may have noticed in the Epilogue of Insight itself a revealing reference to ‘the motorcars of 1953’: see Insight (1992) 759. 13 Ibid., chapter 12, ‘The Notion of Being.’ This notion of being, I would say, is Lonergan’s transposition of the Thomist light of intellect, which was itself a development of the Aristotelian agent intellect and a replacement of the Augustinian vision of eternal truth: see Verbum 90–96. 14 Insight 385–86. 15 Ibid. 703. The validity of chapter 19 as a whole has been challenged and the question raised about Lonergan’s own present attitude to this approach, but it is clear to me that he still stands by what he wrote in 1953. See my 1981 article ‘Bernard

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the term ‘extrapolation,’ which has surely to be related to analogous knowledge in a more searching study.16 Secondly, there is a new application of analogy (‘a protracted analogy,’ Lonergan calls it), in which under various headings classical heuristic structures in science are compared with statistical.17 It is an early instance of a pattern that will be repeated. Finally, there is reference to the use that common sense is prone to make of analogy, to the grounds legitimating such a use, and to the dangers inherent in it. As always, the basic explanation is given in terms of understanding: ‘similars are similarly understood’; common sense exploits that fact without formulating it but, recognizing that situations differ, adds also the particular insights relevant to each,18 not without giving grounds for suspicion in the critical thinker.19 We have been examining major works of Lonergan and will return shortly to more of them. But at this point there intervene three little essays, each with a wealth of detail on analogy which I will try to summarize. One is a review article on Johannes Beumer’s Theologie als Glaubensverständnis, a book that dealt at length with the position of the Vatican Council (now Vatican I) on the way we may understand the mysteries of faith, namely, through the analogies supplied by creation and by the interlocking of mystery with mystery.20 This chapter of Vatican I had been, and continues to be, programmatic for Lonergan (how familiar to his students is the phrase, ‘Denzinger 1796’ – his shorthand reference to the passage in question), and he shows an acute interest, with generally favorable comment, in Beumer’s exposition. But the focus of the article is rather on the positive value analogical understanding has and on its relation to the tasks of theology, a focus I may merely indicate in passing.21

16 17 18

19 20 21

Lonergan’s Thought on Ultimate Reality and Meaning,’ in Appropriating the Lonergan Idea 71–106, especially 98–103. The more so, since the same term is used for interpretative procedures: see Insight 611–13. On extrapolation to God, see ibid. 659, 664–67, 693. Ibid. 85–89. The quoted phrase occurs on 85. Ibid. 198–99; see 199 for the quoted passage. Method in Theology will speak frequently of the ‘brands’ and ‘varieties’ of common sense (see 154, 272–73, 303), and so the question may be raised of the analogy of these. Insight 314; see also 322. ‘Theology and Understanding,’ in Collection 114–41. For this positive value, see Collection 125, the paragraph beginning: ‘Still, though it generates neither new certitude nor perfect understanding, the ordo doctrinae is most fruitful.’

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The second essay is the Supplement Lonergan wrote for the students in his Trinity course of 1954–1955.22 Here, under the three subtitles, ‘Analogia intellectus … Analogiae consectaria quae Deum respiciant … Analogiae consectaria quae hominem respiciant,’23 he gives what is probably his most extensive and organized account to date of the whole question. The analogy is that of divine, angelic, and human intellect, and Lonergan starts with an almost verbatim rendering of St Thomas, adding his characteristic emphasis to relate the question to understanding. There is reference to the analogy based on Platonist thought as arriving only at subsistent universals (and then positing intelligence to know them). There is rejection of the Platonic principle that knowledge supposes duality (with an account of the difficulty various thinkers, medieval and modern, experience when they talk of God in the context of that duality). And there is an exposition of the difference between ens quidditative and ens analogice: to apprehend God in his essence is to apprehend him quidditative, but to apprehend created being is to apprehend being only analogously and imperfectly. The third essay to be noted is a paper for the Fourth International Thomist Congress, in which Lonergan draws ‘a protracted analogy of proportion’ (an echo of a phrase we found in Insight) between Thomist and scientific thought.24 The comparison ‘concentrates on a structural similarity to prescind entirely from the materials that enter into the structures.’ For example, ‘the relation of hypothesis to verification is similar to the relation of definition to judgment,’ though that is not to say that scientific hypothesis is the same as Thomist definition, or scientific verification the same as Thomist judgment.25 The academic years 1955–1956 and 1956–1957 were productive ones for Lonergan in his bread-and-butter field of theology, resulting in

22 De SS. Trinitate. Supplementum quoddam composuit B. Lonergan, S.I. (Rome, in die festo S. Thomae Aquinatis, MCMLV). This is a work of three articles, the first two of which will later appear as Appendices I and II in Divinarum personarum … (see note 29 below). The third (‘Articulus Tertius Ex Imagine ad Exemplar Aeternum’), 30–50, has recently been translated and published as Appendix 2B of The Triune God: Systematics, translated from De Deo Trino II: Pars systematica (1964) by Michael G. Shields, as vol. 12 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007). [Subsequent references to this article will use the latter edition.] 23 The Triune God: Systematics, Appendix 2B, nos. 21, 22, and 23 respectively (626–45). 24 ‘Isomorphism of Thomist and Scientific Thought,’ in Collection 133–41, at 133. 25 Collection 133 and 134. The ‘protracted analogy’ runs through nine headings of comparison, 133–40.

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something like formal ‘treatises’ for Christology and the Trinity. We are back then at works of major importance, even if they are almost unknown to the wider academic world. These works were to undergo continuing revision till the year 1964, which marks the term of his ‘Latin theology’ as well as of the present study. As my readers will by now expect, the nature and role of theology itself are repeatedly discussed, with considerable revision of his ideas on analogy too. The first year then produced the smaller but important work De constitutione Christi ontologica et psychologica.26 Our first interest is in a section entitled ‘De methodorum analogia.’ Here Lonergan sets forth an analogy between theology’s path of discovery and scientific analysis, and again between theology’s doctrinal order and the synthetic exposition of a science.27 Secondly, Lonergan introduces this year his very personal analogy for the unity of the divine and the human in Christ: as by one and the same infinite act of knowing, God knows both what necessarily is and what contingently came to be, so by one and the same infinite act of his being the Word can be both what he necessarily is (divine) and what he contingently became (human).28 The following year brought up the Trinity in the academic cycle and produced a longer work, Divinarum personarum conceptio analogica, with an extended account of the psychological analogy; indeed, the whole work centers on that analogy, as the title indicates.29 Our topic remains, 26 De constitutione Christi ontologica et psychologica. Supplementum confecit Bernardus Lonergan, S.I. (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1956). [Now published in a Latin and English edition as The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ, vol. 7 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, trans. Michael G. Shields (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). Subsequent references to this work will use this edition.] 27 The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ 86–87; the whole section covers pp. 80–91. I need hardly mention at this point that the basis of analogy is not the concept but rather the act of understanding that generates the concept; see 86–89. On science and theology more generally, see pp. 54–55 below. 28 Ibid. 130–35. The content of the analogy lies outside my terms of reference, but I outline it here because, unlike the psychological analogy for the Trinity, it is quite unknown. Notice, at 136–37, that the explanation is said to be more than an analogy – a claim not made in later works, so far as I know. 29 Divinarum personarum conceptionem analogicam evolvit Bernardus Lonergan, S.I. (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1957). [Now incorporated into The Triune God: Systematics. The latter will be used for subsequent references to Divinarum personarum, a practice that employs the more easily accessible English volume but (let the reader be warned) sometimes obscures the chronological development of Lonergan’s Trinitarian treatises. On that development, see Crowe’s own account in note 43 below. (Ed.)]

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however, the nature and role of analogy, which are discussed not in the long exposition of the analogy itself but in an introductory chapter on the nature of theology.30 Three points come up here. One I mention, only to reserve it for a later paragraph: the recurring question of the analogy, if any, between the procedures of science and those of theology.31 The second is a new question: the difference between those categories which are first for us in the natural sciences (color, sound, and so forth) and those that are first for us in the human sciences (languages, domestic structures, and so forth), that is, in the field of the cultural. The former are said to be univocal and the latter equivocal.32 Hence these latter need a transcultural principle, and one not only on the side of the object (for example, through painstaking entry into a culture remote from ours), but one also on the side of the subject, through development of interiority.33 Here Lonergan goes on to discuss the theological aspect of the question. It is one that necessarily arises, for revelation occurred and the gospel was preached under very particular conditions, but nevertheless the church of God is to be universal, including all peoples, of every time, of every culture.34 The relation of the transcultural to the analogical surely

30 The term ‘analogy’ does not occur in the thesis statements that set forth the psychological analogy, but we are told that the divine processions are to be conceived ‘per similitudinem’ (pp. 764–65, 180–81). Other sections of the book do use the term: for example, question 15, ‘Quod analogice dicitur persona de divinis et de creatis [Is “person” predicated analogically of God and of creatures?]’ (336–39), and question 21, ‘Quaenam sit analogia subiecti temporalis et subiecti aeterni [What is the analogy between the temporal and the eternal subject?]’ (398–413). This last section is of great interest for Lonergan’s wider development, but again it lies outside my terms of reference. For the nature and role of analogy, see the introductory chapter – for example, 16–17, 744–49, 756–61, 104–109, 118–21. 31 See pp. 54–55 below. 32 The Triune God: Systematics 78–79. 33 Ibid. 78–83. 34 Ibid. 82–83. Further light on the transcultural problem is provided in the positive part of this same Trinity course, as reported by Lonergan’s students, De Deo Trino: Notae ab auditoribus desumptae, 1956–7 (also available in the various Lonergan Centers around the world). Here Lonergan draws a parallel between the ordinary knowledge of daily life and scientific knowledge, and then transfers it analogically to the parallel between the notion of God in the New Testament and that found, say, in Vatican I. See pp. vii–ix for the parallel and its analogical transfer, but also ix–xi for the differences between scientific knowledge and theological. Hence in religious doctrine we have a double historical movement: one is transcultural, and so we have ever new adaptations in the mission field; and the other is theological, heading for the primum quoad se (xi).

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calls for further study. Finally, a third point may be mentioned: the analogy for the unity of Christ, seen already in De constitutione Christi, is now repeated, and application of the principle extended to provide an analogy for the inhabitation of the Holy Spirit in those who are justified by divine grace.35 From these high matters we return the following year to philosophy and Lonergan’s Halifax lectures on Insight.36 They contain a neat account of analogy in the context of the question, What does a metaphysician understand? ‘It is not any particular class of beings, not the abstract residue of all beings, and not the ens per essentiam.’ What, then, does he understand? Lonergan’s answer is given in terms of analogy, the familiar ‘understanding of a proportion.’ The metaphysician leaves the knowledge of different types of beings to those working in the relevant areas: for him the various essences studied there function as a series of x’s. But beings are a compound of essence and existence, and the metaphysician is concerned with the proportion or analogy between essence and existence. ‘Metaphysics is understanding and exploiting the analogy in all being.’37 So, for metaphysics, there is understanding of analogy. But then, more fundamentally, ‘the analogies come from an understanding of understanding.’ First, there is understanding of human understanding to give a metaphysics of proportionate being (form is to potency as insight is to experience, and act is to form as the reflective ground of judgment is to insight); and then there is analogous understanding of absolute understanding to give the extended metaphysics of absolute being.38 In the academic year 1958–1959 Lonergan gave a course entitled De intellectu et methodo.39 It is of considerable significance for his overall development, but I note only two points for the present purpose. One is the remark that divine faith forces us to an analogy of truth. There is

35 The Triune God: Systematics 458–63. 36 Bernard Lonergan, Understanding and Being: The Halifax Lectures on Insight. This is a transcription and editing of tape recordings of the 1958 lectures. 37 Understanding and Being (1990) 201–202. 38 Ibid. 202–203; quoted phrase on 202. I believe Lonergan uses the term ‘extended metaphysics,’ but I have lost the reference, if I ever had one. 39 De intellectu et methodo, Rome, 1959 (available in the various Lonergan Centers). A note at the end of the typescript (p. 72) describes its genesis: ‘Praesentes notae cursus De intellectu et methodo a R. P. Bernardo Lonergan S.I. in Pontificia Universitate Gregoriana habiti a. 1959, collectae et ordinatae sunt ab aliquibus auditoribus ex his tantum quae in scholis colligi potuerunt …’

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scientific faith (in English we would more likely use ‘belief’), for no scientist verifies for himself all he knows; but he could in principle verify it for himself and so no analogy of truth is involved. Divine faith, however, shows that truth is not only what we can understand, but what God understands and reveals for our acceptance.40 Secondly, there is brought into play to specify our understanding of mysteries the notion (though the term is not reported) of inverse insight. As the mathematician understands that the square root of 2 is an irrational number, and thus opens up a new field of mathematics, so the theologian, understanding that divine mysteries exceed human intelligence, can discuss them in a way analogous to the mathematics of irrational numbers, without reducing the reality itself to something irrational.41 Let us return from method to Lonergan’s own work in theology. From an article of 1959, ‘Christ as Subject,’ I note only the remark, very useful it is too, that an analogy of faith obtains between ontological and psychological statements about Christ.42 More massively, the Christology and Trinitarian theology were being reworked under various headings during the next five years, to culminate in the publications of 1964 and bring to a conclusion a particular phase in Lonergan’s history.43

40 De intellectu et methodo 66. See also De methodo theologiae (note 49 below) 44, which makes the same point, though the word ‘analogy’ is not used there. 41 De intellectu et methodo 48 (and also see 39). The notion is explained at length in Insight 43–50. Is this the first time it is applied to divine mysteries? I would not be so rash as to say so, but I have no note on its previous occurrence in that context. It is used in Insight 709, 711, with reference to the problem of evil. 42 ‘Christ as Subject: a Reply,’ in Collection 153–84, at 182. The original article was published in Gregorianum 40 (1959) 242–70. ‘Analogy of faith’ is a rather famous term, but I would surmise that Lonergan’s use echoes, not Karl Barth, but Vatican I and the analogical understanding had through the interlocking of mysteries. At any rate that is just what is involved here, a ‘nexus mysteriorum.’ 43 De Verbo Incarnato. Dicta scriptis auxit B. Lonergan, S.I., Rome, 1960. This was followed by De Verbo Incarnato, editio altera, 1961, and De Verbo Incarnato, editio tertia, 1964. The pagination changes with each edition, but only the third introduces a significant revision (on Christ’s human knowledge). The history of the Trinitarian treatises is a little more complex. De Deo Trino: Pars analytica, auctore Bernardo Lonergan, S.I. (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1961) became De Deo Trino I: Pars dogmatica, editio altera et recognita, 1964. Meanwhile Divinarum personarum (note 29 above) went through ‘editio altera’ (slightly revised) in 1959, to become De Deo Trino II: Pars systematica, editio tertia et recognita, 1964. This latter volume shows substantial revisions at various points. [As indicated in previous notes, De Deo Trino II: Pars systematica is now available as The Triune God: Systematics. (Ed.)]

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Meanwhile, of course, work on method was going forward in a complex relationship to the theology, so that one has to simplify the history of this period quite ruthlessly in any sketch of its course and development. I note then that De Verbo incarnato rewrites the analogy already used for the unity of Christ, but the changes do not affect our present topic.44 Also new, I think, and helpful, is a succinct table of the Platonist, Aristotelian, and Thomist types of analogy. The first is an analogy of form; the second, of substance; and the third, of being.45 Then the De Deo Trino of 1961 gives us a fresh exposition of analogical understanding in theology,46 with a strong restatement of its positive role, even though it be of the type found in science as inverse insight.47 And there is a new scriptural basis for the psychological analogy for the Trinity.48 Work on method, I said, was going forward too, involved in the three great treatises (divine grace being the other) that served as the source for mining old ideas and the arena for testing the new, but more and more detached from them as Lonergan strove to generalize his way of doing theology. For the history of analogy, however, we need make only two remarks. In the course De methodo theologiae of 1961–1962, attention is given to the ‘worlds’ of the subject (the later ‘realms of meaning’ corresponding to the differentiations of consciousness). We read that the analogy of these worlds is established not from the side of the object, where the greatest differences obtain, but from the side of the subject and the operations that allow us to pass from world to world.49 De Verbo Incarnato 345–48 (1960); 252–55 (1964). Ibid. 308 (1960); 224 (1964). De Deo Trino: Pars analytica 277–80. See also 294, 295–96, and especially 300–303. Ibid. 302. This is a much fuller account of inverse insight into mysteries than we found in De intellectu, and it includes a very strong statement of its positive value: ‘non mera quaedam atque infructuosa negatio est, sed potius fundamentalis quaedam clavis in tota inquisitione theologica dirigenda atque regulanda’ [‘… is not a mere sterile negation but rather a fundamental key for directing and regulating the whole of theological inquiry’] (302). This positive value had already been underlined in Verbum 214–16, and in The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ 86–91. 48 De Deo Trino: Pars analytica 304–16. 49 Bernardus Lonergan, S.I., De methodo theologiae. Notae desumptae ab alumnis (2nd semester, 1961–62). But these notes do not cover all the topics treated in the course. That same summer, however, Lonergan gave 20 lectures on ‘The Method of Theology’ at Regis College, Toronto (9–20 July 1962), in which he treated the full list of topics, though presumably in abbreviated form. The tape-recording of these lectures has been transcribed by John Brezovec and is available at some of the various Lonergan Centers.

44 45 46 47

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Then there is the lecture in 1963 at the Thomas More Institute, called simply ‘The Analogy of Meaning.’50 A great part of the content of the lecture we find again in chapter 3 of Method in Theology, especially in the first part of that chapter, dealing with the various carriers or embodiments of meaning; but it is illuminating for Lonergan’s thinking to find him naming the pattern of it ‘analogical’ and doing so with the formality that a title bestows.51 As a final item in my historical sketch, I note that the 1964 volumes of De Deo Trino rework very thoroughly the earlier editions, both for the scriptural basis of the psychological analogy52 and for its speculative elaboration.53 In the latter there is a new stress on systematic analogy, which permits an organization of the whole Trinitarian doctrine, as opposed to a rhetorical piling up of examples that give little understanding.54 This revealing statement I will exploit presently for a better perspective on the overall pattern of Lonergan’s usage. I would not, on the basis of the sketchy research set down in these pages, attempt a comprehensive view of Lonergan’s understanding and use of analogy; but I would maintain that we have data enough to fix certain features to be included in such a view. One such feature stands outside the particular meanings we may give the term: it is the fact that ‘analogy’ itself is an analogous term with various meanings. But nowhere, so far as I know, does Lonergan offer a list of these meanings. Helpful here is his remark on Thomas Aquinas, to the effect that he is not a systematic thinker in the sense that logic requires, but uses terms and explains them with the degree of precision the occasion demands, which may not be at all the degree that another occasion demands.55 This is pretty much the pattern in Lonergan’s use of the term

50

51

52 53 54 55

On the analogy of the “worlds,” see De methodo theologiae 12; for some further references to analogy, see 27, 32, 36, 37–38, 45, 47, 51. Lecture given at the Thomas More Institute for Adult Education, Montreal, on 25 September 1963. Available now in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964 183–213. Besides the title, there are only passing references to analogy in the lecture: see 184–85, 205, 206–207, 210–11. [On 210–11, Lonergan responds to a question about the meaning of ‘analogy of meaning’ in the title of the lecture. (Ed.)] De Deo Trino I: Pars dogmatica 276–98. The Triune God: Systematics 140–81. Ibid., especially 168–71, 178–81. See Insight 199 for a related point: ‘[C]ommon sense may seem to argue from analogy, but its analogies defy logical formulation.’ Understanding and Being 53–54.

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‘analogy,’56 and it means that we must work to understand each occurrence in its context and never delegate the work to computers. What then are some of the meanings we find? If we recognize the determining role of understanding, and that seems clear as day, then the strictest meaning of the analogical is that it regards what cannot be properly and directly understood: transcendent being, of course; but, in the field of proportionate being, the metaphysical elements of potency and act (form, by contrast, being the direct and proper object of insight). But even in this strict sense, analogical understanding is truly understanding – a position that is firmly maintained in regard to such mysteries as the Trinity. Secondly, there is a broader but still technical sense in which one may speak of the analogy of classical and heuristic structures, the analogy of Thomist and scientific thought, the analogy of the various carriers of meaning, and so forth. There is indeed a proportion of four terms involved (A : B : : C : D), and there is indirect understanding of some; but all four may be directly understood, which is not the case with analogy in the strict sense. Thirdly, there is the very broad and very untechnical sense in which common sense understands one situation by analogy with another. The historian’s use of analogy (see my opening paragraph) would perhaps combine these second and third meanings. And I suppose the aberrations of common sense usage would give us a fourth and illegitimate sense of analogy. Another important division separates systematic analogies (more likely in the first two usages) from the mere piling up of metaphors (more likely in the last two). To make the point concrete, we note that Lonergan inveighs repeatedly against conceiving human knowing by taking the broad and easy path of analogy with looking.57 Still, he admits, with Quintilian, paene omne quod dicimus metaphora est,58 and in fact our language for cognitional activity is full of metaphors: one could point to such terms as insight, grasping, catching on, understanding. What Lonergan would object to, I think, is making any metaphor behind these terms serve as a systematic analogy – and all the more so since we can understand understanding in the data of consciousness and have no need at all of analogy for the task.

56 This is not to say that his usage is free of carelessness or mistakes, but merely to suggest the wisdom of examining the meaning in each case before laying charges. 57 Insight; see the Index, s.v. Knowing (and looking). And passim in Lonergan’s writings ever since. 58 Insight 567.

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Will the distinctions of the two preceding paragraphs serve to explain Lonergan’s position on the relation of science and theology? For he will compare specific features in the two,59 while seeming to deny, recently at least, a general analogy.60 This is a large question. An answer would have to take account of his very considerable development in regard to both terms, but my sketchy research does turn up certain stable features. For example: the assertion that we have but one mind and must use it whatever the field or object;61 that the study of scientific method can lead us back to invariant structures of cognitional activity;62 and that there is a great difference between science and its procedures, on one side, and theology and its procedures, on the other.63 The brief account we find in the opening pages of Method in Theology64 seems quite consistent with these continuously maintained positions. The question, however, may regard the affirmations in the Latin works of an analogy between certain procedures of science and theology.65 I grant that to put them into a computer with recent statements would create a mess. However, my advice would be not to put them into a computer but to try to understand them. To that end I would offer two clues. First, if the human mind is always the human mind then one must expect it to show some similarities in its procedures wherever it be at work. Next, I suggest that it is one thing to develop theology according to its own method, noting certain similarities with scientific method, and quite another to take scientific method as a model and attempt to make theology conform to it. A quotation may be helpful here. Lonergan has just denied that he conceives theology on the analogy of natural science, and then he continues:

59 For example, The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ 84–89; The Triune God: Systematics 104–107. 60 ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds,’ in Foundations of Theology: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970, 223–34, especially 224–25; Method in Theology 3–4. 61 Grace and Freedom 157. The reference is to an introductory section (155–92). See also The Triune God: Systematics 100–103; ‘Doctrinal Pluralism,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980, 86–87; ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds,’ in Foundations of Theology 225; and Method in Theology 4. 62 Grace and Freedom 156–57, 158, 162–63; Insight 14–17; Method in Theology 4. 63 ‘The Assumption and Theology,’ in Collection 74; The Triune God: Systematics 106–109; De Deo Trino. Notae ab auditoribus desumptae, ix–xi; ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds,’ in Foundations of Theology 227–30. 64 Method in Theology 3–4. 65 See note 59 above.

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However, to avoid analogy is not an easy matter. Over and above familiarity with the history of theology and with its current problems, there are two main steps. The first is an exploration of mathematics, natural science, common sense, and philosophy to uncover the basic and invariant structure of all human cognitional activity and so to reach a transcendental method … Such a method will be relevant to theology, for theologians always have had minds and always have used them. It will not be, however, the whole of theological method, for to it must be added the specifically theological principle that differentiates theology from other fields.66

What I would call to the reader’s attention here is not the two main steps that Lonergan outlines – they speak for themselves – but the context into which these two steps are to be inserted: familiarity with the history of theology and with its current problems. Lonergan, in fact, worked out his theological method in thirty-five years of wrestling with theological problems and theological history. It is a fact at once readily ascertainable and notoriously overlooked by many of his critics. My introduction suggested that this little piece of research might be rather more significant than just another item of history or lexicography, and I wish now to expand that idea. First, I hope that my research note will illustrate the wealth of material in Lonergan still awaiting study. Might it convey even the need of such investigation? This is all the more a desiderandum if my impression is correct that theologians especially tend to underestimate (perhaps even would like to forget) the Lonergan of pre-1965. It is true that implementing the eight functional specialties is a fascinating task, so challenging that one is easily drawn forward in forgetfulness of the need to go back.67 I may be

66 ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds,’ in Foundations of Theology 224–25. 67 For some years I was myself quite impatient with our delay in implementing Method in Theology. Then in 1979 I made some attempt to organize such a work, only to find out how big a task it is and how little prepared we still are for it. [Crowe is referring to his organizing of two teams of Lonergan scholars to investigate the implementation of the functional specialties ‘Foundations’ and ‘Interpretation’ respectively. Each team’s work eventually resulted in the publication of a volume of papers: Philip McShane, ed., Searching for Cultural Foundations (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984); and Sean McEvenue and Ben Meyer, eds, Lonergan’s Hermeneutics: Its Development and Application (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1989). (Ed.)]

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allowed then to insist, as I recently did, that research on Lonergan ‘is begun, and well begun, but only begun.’68 Secondly, analogy is somewhat more than just an instance of questions to be studied. Analogical procedures seem to enter widely and deeply into great ranges of our cognitional activity. Certainly they are essential if we would base a philosophy and theology on Lonergan’s intentionality analysis and transcendental method. When I said that it is quite impossible to run his statements through a computer program and get anything of value emerging, I meant this not just as a matter of fact but as a matter of principle. If much of his thinking is not only analogous but necessarily analogous, there is no way, short of reducing an idea to some impoverished subdivision of a division, to make his insights fit the requirements of logic. Thirdly, analogy is nevertheless an instance, and other instances can be assembled along a broad front: not just analogy, but scores of concepts are analogous. For example, the notion of the question. Lonergan lists three questions that are the operators of development, promoting us from one level of consciousness to another: questions for intelligence, for reflection, for deliberation.69 Now all three can be cast in a form that uses ‘is’: What is it? Is it so? Is it worth while? Then it becomes fatally easy to suppose that all three are questions in the same sense. And that is to distort the facts. The three are as different, almost exactly, as the three levels of intelligent, rational, and responsible consciousness.70 From this beginning one could go on to the analogy of love, of conversion, of dialectic, of system, of presence, of mediation, and so on and on.71 68 ‘The Present State of the Lonergan Movement,’ First Guest Editorial in Lonergan Studies Newsletter 3/2 (1982) 9. 69 The first two questions are found in Insight: see the Index, s.v. Questions. All three are found in A Second Collection: see the Index, s.v. Question(s). These three should not be confused with another trio that occur passim in A Second Collection and Method: the questions of cognitional theory, epistemology, metaphysics. 70 Almost exactly, but not quite, since the question for deliberation asks for a value judgment, and responsible consciousness requires more than a value judgment. 71 In fact, it seems to me a good exercise toward understanding Lonergan to work through a series of terms taken from an index to one of his works (from ‘bias,’ ‘context,’ and so forth, down to ‘sublation,’ ‘unity,’ and so on) and ask oneself: Is this term understood analogously, or univocally? One may also take up here the questions mentioned earlier: What is the relation between analogy and the various brands of common sense? and the transcultural? and extrapolation? and instances of isomorphism? On the latter, one may usefully study De notione structurae, a lecture

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I close this essay with a reference to a special case of analogy and to the need for working it out as fully as possible: the analogy of religious interiority. At one end of the spectrum we have ourselves, religious believers with our religious interiority to be pondered and understood. At the other end we have Jesus with his human consciousness and the religious interiority of God’s Son in human form.72 In between we have the apostles, prophets, evangelists, and so forth, as well as the mystics of all ages, but especially from those times when they began to describe more helpfully their experience. There is an analogy here, and I think it would greatly illuminate the relation between tradition and theology, turning a vexed question of authority and freedom into one of outer and inner word, as we meet it in Method in Theology.73 That is, there would be the inner word of Jesus finding expression in his spoken words and deeds, in his silence and his suffering. This expression, an outer word in a broad sense, is received, assimilated interiorly, and re-expressed by the appointed intermediaries between Jesus and the people of God. It becomes then an outer word for us, to be received in faith but given new expression in virtue of our own inner word, the gift of the Spirit – on the foundations, that is, of our interiority. A well worked out analogy of interiority would, it seems to me, be an invaluable aid toward solving a question that divides and plagues the church today.

given at the Aloisianum, Gallarate (Italy). This lecture was published in the student journal Apertura 1/2 (May 1964) 117–23; and it is now available as ‘The Notion of Structure,’ in Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 14/2 (1996) 117–31. The point to notice is on 122–23, where there is set up an isomorphism of the structures of reality or thing known, of knowing, and of objectivity, and all this is contrasted with the analogical knowledge we have of God and the angels. 72 This supposes that theology is not going to surrender unconditionally to the positive scholarship that tells us we can say nothing on the interiority of Jesus. Besides development from below upwards, there is development from above downwards; or, Christology is a two-way traffic, from Trinity to Christ as well as from Christ to Trinity (see ‘Christology Today,’ in A Third Collection 79–80). Further, within the procedures of development, there is the scissors-action of heuristic method (Insight 337–38 and passim), which by no means relies solely on positive data. 73 Method in Theology, passim; but see especially 108, 112–15, 211, 243, 289, 360, 361, 363.

Chapter 5

Transcendental Deduction: A Lonerganian Meaning and Use1

In chapter 11 of Bernard Lonergan’s Insight there is a section entitled ‘Self-Affirmation in the Possibility of Judgments of Fact,’ followed at once by the statement ‘We have performed something similar to what a Kantian would name a transcendental deduction.’2 Those aware of Lonergan’s long and strenuous wrestling with Kant’s thought, and interested in the challenge–response relation of the two thinkers, will find in this statement and Lonergan’s explanation of it material for rewarding study. That, however, is not my interest here.3 Nor do I propose to go into the meaning that historically has been given to the phrase ‘transcendental deduction,’ or into the debated possibility or impossibility of the procedure itself. I quote the statement of Insight only to raise my own set of questions, which have to do entirely with Lonergan’s thought and practice but find their occasion in the passage referred to. For the argument of that section is not, I think, especially characteristic of Lonergan; but the term ‘transcendental’ and the use of transcendental method are characteristic of him in a high degree. So one is led to ask whether there is a properly Lonerganian sense of ‘transcendental deduction’ as well, what it might be, and how extensive its application is in his actual usage. My answer, to anticipate my findings, will be that there is indeed a properly Lonerganian

1 Previously published in METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 2/1 (March 1984) 21–40. 2 Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 362. 3 Kant and Lonergan have been compared under various relevant headings in a good number of publications by Giovanni B. Sala; his basic work is Das Apriori in der menschlichen Erkenntnis. Eine Studie über Kants Kritik der Reinen Vernunft und Lonergans Insight (Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag Anton Hain, 1971).

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transcendental deduction, that it differs notably from the Kant-related form he uses in chapter 11 of Insight, and that it has a rather extensive application in Lonergan’s writings – in the field of history as well as in that of system. That last clause will, I fear, lead some readers to question at once the worth of my study. What can be hoped for from an investigation that goes haring off in a pursuit, long ago established as futile, of an a priori pattern in history? But even they may be curious to learn what Lonergan’s views on the matter are, or at least what views are consonant with his positions. To satisfy such curiosity pertains to my personal, not at all hidden, agenda: the promotion of detail into Lonergan’s ideas. One reads so much now of general exposition of his thought, and no doubt that kind of writing is needed when a new thinker comes on the scene with a comprehensive view of things. But it soon loses vitality if it is not followed by very particular studies. At present, in the  recurring cycle of general and particular, some of us feel keenly the  need of detailed study of a hundred unresearched topics in the Lonerganian corpus. Only by this means will the multiple misunderstandings that afflict discussions of Lonergan be cleared up, and the possibility of really grounded judgment on and evaluation of his work emerge. I hope my article may contribute something to that end. If I cannot pursue my topic in the exhaustive manner of a doctoral dissertation, I can at least introduce it and sketch some headings which a more thorough investigation might develop.

1 Our starting point is obvious enough: Lonergan’s procedure in the passage in which he admits to having performed ‘something similar’ to a Kantian transcendental deduction. His search, he tells us, is for ‘the conditions of the possible occurrence of a judgment of fact.’4 Such a judgment answers ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the question ‘Is it so?’ and supposes, if the answer is absolute, some grasp of an unconditioned. Now the ‘it’ that is to be affirmed in this unconditional way is not a bare ‘it’ but is known as linked to its conditions; that is, it supposes some act of understanding. Moreover, such an act of understanding has reference to a prior field of what can become fulfilling conditions, but in that prior state is simply given.5 4 Insight 363. 5 Ibid. 360–62.

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Thus, but in a much more schematic presentation than Lonergan’s, are established the familiar three levels of his cognitional process: the given of experience, the grasp of an intelligibility in the given, and the virtually unconditioned which grounds a judgment on that intelligibility. Lonergan goes on from this to a second point in his deduction, which is concerned not merely with the three levels but also with the conditions of the inquiring subject’s self-affirmation. But I need not complicate my presentation with that step. Nor need I take up the question of the objectivity of judgment, for Lonergan is not dealing here with the possibility of knowing an object but only with ‘what activities are involved in knowing.’6 Now the argument set forth here is not, I have said, especially typical of Lonergan’s procedures. First, it deals with conditions of possibility, and his concern is regularly more with actuality and its implications than with possibility.7 Secondly, the argument moves backward from a judgment of fact to its conditions. That is, it starts by supposing that one knows something, and it ends with the cognitional process that is required if one is to know something in the way supposed. But Lonergan’s direction is regularly the opposite of that: he prefers to start with the known characteristics of cognitional process and conclude to characteristics of what is known.8 Thirdly, the principle on which he bases what I am going to call his ‘transcendental deduction’ is that of the isomorphism of knowing and known, which principle can no doubt be related to conditions of possibility but is in itself another matter.9 It would, of course, be quite legitimate to investigate the occurrence in Lonergan of the Kant-related transcendental deduction with which my article began10 – legitimate and perhaps even rewarding. But my 6 Ibid. 363. 7 One simple index of this is his continued opposition to the discussions of late medieval Scholasticism on the absolute power of God; for example, in ‘Philosophy of God, and Theology,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 166, 187–88. 8 Insight 22–23. He had occasion to defend this position in a paper given in 1958 before the American Catholic Philosophical Association; see ‘Insight: Preface to a Discussion,’ in Collection (1988) 142–52, at 142–45. 9 Insight, Index, s.v. Isomorphism. See appendix to note 61, below. 10 One passage I would like to see studied is Method in Theology 109, where Lonergan deduces, from the experience of being in love in an unrestricted manner, the seven features Heiler found in all world religions. What sort of deduction, or what sorts, are employed here? The same work, p. 14, relates his use of the word ‘transcendental’ to the conditions of the possibility of knowing an object. See note 4, which begins on the previous page and carries over to page 14.

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acquaintance with Lonergan’s work leads me to expect still more rewarding results from an investigation of the transcendental deduction that pertains so much more to his way and to his system, namely, that based on the isomorphism of knowing and known. It is to be noted that the principle of isomorphism allows one to move in two directions, from the known to the knowing as well as from the knowing to the known, but the latter is the methodical procedure, in Lonergan’s view. It is also his regular practice, and it will be the focus of my study.11 Further, these procedures have their own quite legitimate claim to the title ‘transcendental deduction.’ There is deduction of conclusions from premises. The premises are ‘transcendental’ in Lonergan’s sense of the term, resting on cognitional activity that is invariant no matter what the cognitional content. And the procedures are part of an integral way which is commonly called ‘transcendental method.’ With those clarifications I turn to the more substantive question of the cognitional process and the conclusions about the known that may be deducible from its characteristics. But rather than set forth Lonergan’s cognitional theory in general, I propose to look for examples of transcendental deduction as I described it, and in those examples to discover features of cognitional process as well as our justification for using it to conclude to features of the known. We will find cases, I believe, of what we may call pure transcendental deduction, along with others in which to the pure core is added a further element derived not from the process but from the materials submitted to the process. Again, we will find this deduction applied most clearly in the area of the structural and invariable, but also, though less clearly, in the area of the historical, the area of the changing and developing content of our knowing. Finally, the investigation will provide material for reflections that will help delimit the role of transcendental deduction and determine its locus in the wider context of human knowing.

2 The first question, then, is whether and in what form and to what extent there occur instances of the procedure that I am calling ‘transcendental deduction.’ A full answer is not possible here, but it will be a helpful 11 There is also the intermediate step: moving from the structures of the knowing to the structured procedures involved in seeking the to-be-known. We will have an example of this in the canons of empirical method.

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beginning if we take one instance in which what seems to be such a deduction is carried out in some detail and with some logical rigor. An obvious candidate for the role of such an example is ‘the transition from latent to explicit metaphysics’ that we find in chapter 14 of Insight.12 For, first, there is Lonergan’s well known position that methodical metaphysics derives from cognitional theory;13 then add that he refers to the present transition as a deduction,14 and that he asserts his explicit metaphysics to be ‘implicit in the pure desire to know.’15 We do seem to have antecedent grounds for expecting this transition to be an instance of transcendental deduction, in which the premises will be found in cognitional process, and the conclusion will be what Lonergan understands by metaphysics: ‘the conception, affirmation, and implementation of the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being.’16 Let us turn from expectations to actual performance. The major premise is the isomorphism that Lonergan affirms between the structure of knowing and the structure of the known. If the knowing consists of a related set of acts and the known is the related set of contents of these acts, then the pattern of the relations between the acts is similar in form to the pattern of the relations between the contents of the acts. This premise is analytic.17

To this major are joined two sets of minor premises: a primary set which, on the basis of experience, affirms recurring structures in the process of knowing, and a secondary set supplied by reoriented science and common sense. The secondary minor gives the materials to be integrated, but the primary minor gives the integrating structure itself. Thus, every instance of knowing proportionate being is a unification of experiencing, understanding, and judging – from which minor premise, joined to the major, it follows ‘that every instance of known proportionate being is a parallel unification of a content of experience, a 12 13 14 15 16 17

Insight 424–25. Ibid. 5, 425–26. Ibid. 424. But see his critique of deductive methods later in the same chapter, 427–33. Ibid. 426. Ibid. 416. Ibid. 424. The point is made repeatedly: 127–28, 138, 140, 385; see, for example, 138: ‘For knowing and known, if they are not an identity, at least stand in some correspondence, and as the known is reached only through knowing, structural features of the one are bound to be reflected in the other.’

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content of understanding, and a content of judgment.’18 Here we have the structure of the known derived from cognitional process alone, a pure case of transcendental deduction in the sense defined. I add three notes in further clarification. First, though the primary minor (joined to the major) yields a pure case of transcendental deduction, the secondary minor does not, but takes us into materials known by science and common sense. Secondly, though the deduction is a priori with respect to every possible future case of knowing proportionate being, it is not independent of past experience: the primary minor is itself the product of repeated experience. (I shall return to this point later.) And, thirdly, the metaphysics to which this chapter concludes does not as yet contain statements on the nature of reality but only on the structure of the known. We can, if we wish, already refer to the known elements as potency, form, and act, corresponding to experience, understanding, and judgment. However, it is only in chapter 16 that Lonergan takes up the question whether these metaphysical elements are merely cognitional or also ontological: ‘Are they merely the structure in which proportionate being is known? Or are they the structure immanent in the reality of proportionate being?’19 (This point too will occupy us later.) The foregoing clear-cut instance of transcendental deduction will perhaps enable us to discover other instances that show the same pattern but do so less clearly. I do not intend to make an exhaustive list but I do wish, for a special reason, to set forth one other instance, that of ‘The Canons of Empirical Method’ in chapter 3 of Insight. To simplify discussion let us lay down as premise the familiar cognitional structure in which we observe data with a question, form a possible explanation to account for them, and then seek to verify or falsify the explanation. Such a structure determines at once three procedural rules: ‘turn to data,’ ‘ask for their immanent intelligibility,’ and ‘submit the resulting hypotheses to the test of reflective insight.’ But those rules give us already the core elements of the canons of selection, of relevance, and of parsimony – the first, third, and fourth of Lonergan’s list of six.20 18 Ibid. 425. 19 Ibid. 522–23. 20 Ibid. 94–97, 99–102, 102–107. Only the core elements of the canons are due to transcendental deduction, for they are canons, not of all and every cognitional activity, but only of that of the empirical scientist. Thus, the core of a canon of selection would apply both to empirical science and to a philosopher thinking out his Utopia, but the canon for empirical method limits inquiry to ideas that involve sensible

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Once again we are dealing in effect with an instance of transcendental deduction. This is not made explicit in chapter 3 itself, so far as I have noticed, but it becomes quite clear at the beginning of chapter 4, where the canons are said to be an anticipation of empirical method, one based on the nature of cognitional process. Thus, heuristic structures ‘anticipate a form that is to be filled. Now, just as the form can be anticipated in its general properties, so also can the process of filling be anticipated in its general properties.’ Further, the source of the anticipation is the nature of cognitional process: ‘If insight is to be into data, there is a canon of selection …’21 Etc. We now have before us two instances of a deduction from cognitional process, one that concludes to the structure of the known, another that concludes to the procedures of investigation. They are remarkably alike in premises and form. There is clearly a pattern here, and I believe that, once alerted to this pattern in Lonergan’s thought and procedures, we can skim through the pages of Insight and his later works to find further instances of the pattern. Nor should this be surprising in view of the famous ‘slogan’ which he formulated in the Introduction to Insight. If I quote once more this somewhat over-quoted passage, it is in the hope that the exposition I have given of transcendental deduction may endow it with new meaning: Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding.22

3 I wish to turn now to the historical aspect of consciousness and ask whether anything resembling Lonergan’s style of transcendental deduction can be applied there, and whether he himself supplies any

consequences. The core of a canon of parsimony might apply to guesswork, insofar as that could be called a cognitional activity, but the canon of parsimony in empirical science ‘forbids the empirical scientist to affirm what … he does not know’ (ibid. 102). And so on. 21 Ibid. 127. See also 65: ‘… a general anticipation based on cognitional theory.’ 22 Ibid. 22 (the original is in italics).

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instance of it. Since the fact will prove the possibility – ab esse ad posse valet illatio – it will be enough to deal with the second question if it turns out to have an affirmative answer, that is, if we can provide instances of grounded transcendental deduction in this area. But let me preface my search with some clarification of the sense in which I am using the word ‘historical.’ Readers of Lonergan are familiar with the recurring feature of consciousness which he regularly names its ‘levels’: experience, understanding, judgment, and responsibility. So prominent is this feature, and so simple is it for us to form a schematic picture of this four-leveled structure, that we too easily overlook the equally prominent feature of what happens when the structure is put to use. That feature stands to the structure itself as a variable content to an invariable framework, and it is best described, if we must be brief, as the ‘historical aspect’ of consciousness. It is a matter, if we allow ourselves a few more words, of the ongoing exercise of our intentional dynamism and of the cumulative results of the exercise, a matter then of the ‘wheel’ of progress as well as of the shorter and longer cycles of decline. It is a matter of diverse brands of common sense, of differentiation of patterns of experience and of realms of meaning. It is a matter too of the developing stages of meaning, of the conflicting horizons that result from the absence or presence of the various conversions, and finally of the interaction of the upward way of achievement (from experience through understanding and judgment to responsibility) with the downward path of tradition received (from level to level in the opposite direction). With that preface, let us go back to chapter 3 of Insight and the canons of empirical method. I said that I had a special reason for listing this example of transcendental deduction. The reason, however, did not lie in the three canons I then discussed but in the three I omitted. The three already discussed (selection, relevance, parsimony) pertain to the invariant structural features of knowing (experience, understanding, judgment); but the other three pertain to the on-going use of the structure, that is, to the historical aspect of consciousness. Thus, ‘If insights into data accumulate in a circuit of presentations, insights, formulations, experiments, new presentations, there is a canon of operations.’ Again, ‘If some data are to be understood, then all are to be understood,’ and so there is a canon of complete explanation.23 Still, ‘one must not jump to the conclusion that all will be explained by laws of the 23 Ibid. 127.

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classical type; there exist statistical residues,’ and so there is a canon of statistical residues.24 Clearly these three canons form a different group from those that correspond to the levels of cognitional structure. Just as clearly two of the three relate directly to the ‘historical’ use of the structure: one (operations) to the ongoing and cumulative character of inquiry, the other (complete explanation) to the extension of inquiry to all data without limit. If the last canon (statistical residues – third of this group, and sixth in Lonergan’s full list) seems to relate directly to data and so to an element in the structure, nevertheless it does so only by differentiating a new type of inquiry from the classical type. But with such differentiation we are once again dealing with variables and thus entering into the historical field by another route.25 Is this second group of canons derived, or can it be derived, by way of transcendental deduction, as I said the first group was or could be? As far as Lonergan himself is concerned, there does not seem to be, under this heading, any distinction whatever between the two groups. ‘If insight is to be into data, there is a canon of selection. If insights into data accumulate in a circuit of presentations, insights, formulations, experiments, new presentations, there is a canon of operations.’ Here two canons that belong to different groups are derived in exactly the same fashion; so are the other four in the sentences that follow those quoted. There is even a generalizing statement about the set: ‘Whether one likes it or not, heuristic structures and canons of method constitute an a priori.’26 And why – to take the question on its own merits – why should there be any distinction under this heading between the two groups? That a human person lives in time is as much a fixed feature of his life on earth

24 Ibid. 94. 25 The ‘Canons for a Methodical Hermeneutics’ of chapter 17 are even more involved in the historical aspect of consciousness; see especially the ‘canon of successive approximations’ (pp. 610–12). But so also do they show a greater mix of adventitious elements with the core of transcendental deduction, and need more careful study than I can give them in this sketch. Throughout this article, of course, I am speaking of the history that is written about, not of the history that is written (Method in Theology 175), and within that limited area primarily of the history that pertains to the development of one’s conscious intentionality: there is some reference to wider aspects in such topics as the three moments of human history. 26 Insight 127–28.

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as that he lives at all. That new questions arise on the basis of answers to the old is as recurring a phenomenon as the questions that arose out of the dynamism of consciousness in the first place. That an open consciousness, and especially a polymorphic one, can be differentiated into a variety of patterns is as characteristic of our way of being as is the open and polymorphic consciousness itself. There does not seem to be any antecedent reason for denying transcendental deduction to the historical side of consciousness while granting it to the structural side, if and insofar as that deduction is based, as it is here, on cognitional process. The two questions (on the structural and on the historical) come easily together in chapter 5 of Method in Theology, where Lonergan sets forth the eight functional specialties that constitute the integral work of theologians.27 That is, the levels of consciousness, the structural invariant, give the four specialties of mediating theology (research, interpretation, history, dialectic) as well as the companion four of mediated theology (foundations, doctrines, systematics, communications). But the distinction between the two phases of mediating and mediated theology is not at all a structural one in the way the levels are. It belongs rather to what I am calling the ‘historical’ aspect of consciousness.28 So the question arises whether the distinction relates to some pattern of history from which it could be derived transcendentally, in a way that is at least analogous to what we saw in the canons of empirical method. Of course, we have special materials once more, theological instead of those of natural science, so we will not expect a pure instance; but the question remains whether, in the historical area as well as in the structural, there is a core element amenable to transcendental deduction. Lonergan’s views on the matter come closest to formulation in the third section of the chapter, entitled ‘Grounds of the Division.’29 Here the division of theology into two phases is based on simple relations, like that of receiving tradition from the past and then handing it on, or 27 It may help to observe how chapter 1 of Method in Theology prepares the structural aspect, and chapters 2 and 3 the historical. But that is only an approximation: there is much of the historical in chapter 1 and of the structural in chapters 2 and 3. It is worth insisting: ‘historical’ means simply that we are in the field of meaningful events, which includes the events that happen in human consciousness. 28 I am adopting as mere convention the use of ‘structure’ for the levels of consciousness and of ‘pattern’ for the form of history. One could reverse the usage without disastrous consequences. 29 Method in Theology 133–36.

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that of harkening to the word and then bearing witness to it; or, put a little more eruditely, it is a matter of theology first in oratione obliqua and then in oratione recta. Now this seems to involve a pure element of invariant pattern analogous to the one we found in the canon of operations: that is, we live in time, and our use of the structure of consciousness is ongoing; moreover, it is ongoing from generation to generation. Thus, while the circuit of empirical method might be repeated several times in the lifetime of an investigator, the two phases of theology and of the slow-moving cultural field in general30 are more likely to involve a heritage received from a perhaps distant past and handed on responsibly to the next and many future generations. The element of responsibility is, in fact, very prominent in the cultural field (though who would deny that it pertains also to empirical science?) and modifies the pattern of ongoing operations. We have, then, a fourth level added to the three levels of cognitional process, so for that latter phrase we had best substitute something more inclusive, such as the ‘process of dynamic intentionality.’ The main point, however, is that the core element of the historical, the two phases, is as readily deducible from the process as are the specialties themselves. Again I add some clarifying notes. The first: though it is deducible that there will be four specialties in each phase of theology, what is not deducible is the content of any specialty, not even from that of its immediate predecessor. This, I would say, is what Lonergan means in his remark ‘This descent [of the second phase] is, not properly a deduction, but rather a succession of transpositions to ever more determinate contexts.’31 A second: though transcendental method is set forth in chapter 1 of Method according to the upward movement from experience through understanding and judgment to responsibility, chapter 5 shows us that this is but half the story. The method also applies, at least analogously, in the reverse direction of the downward movement. Further, it seems to me a good question whether the transcendental precepts (‘be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible’) do not need new modalities of application in this downward movement.

30 Lonergan does not limit to theology the use of his eight functional specialties; they ‘would be relevant to any human studies that investigated a cultural past to guide its future.’ See ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds,’ in Philip McShane, ed., Foundations of Theology 223–34, at 233. 31 Method in Theology 142.

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4 I have been laboring one point only of the historical aspect of consciousness: its ongoing character, and the consequent possibility in theology of deducing from that character two phases that regard the procedures if not the products of the theological specialties. But that is really a very simple matter, and the question naturally arises whether transcendental deduction can go beyond this elementary beginning and conclude in greater detail to patterns in historical process. This turns out to be a question of some complexity in Lonergan’s work, and all I can do here is introduce it, advert to a few key passages, and show some of the implications. Now there is one extremely interesting and directly relevant argument in the very early Lonergan, actually in the introductory pages of his doctoral dissertation.32 This 47-page essay, to which his students are continually drawn back as to a magnet, sets up the problem of achieving objective results in historical inquiry; and it proposes as means ‘a theory of the history of theological speculation … an a priori scheme that is capable of synthetizing any possible set of historical data irrespective of their place and time … In the present work this generic scheme is attained by an analysis of the idea of a development in speculative theology.’ Further, the basis for this construction is transcendental: ‘It is possible to construct a priori a general scheme of the historical process because the human mind is always the human mind.’33 Still, Lonergan is not so carried away by his idea as to suppose that he can in this way determine the concrete details, the materials, of history. When he comes to the generic scheme itself, he calls it ‘The Form of the Development,’ where the accent is surely on the ‘form,’ by contrast with the material content. And he states

32 ‘Gratia Operans: A Study of the Speculative Development in the Writings of St Thomas of Aquin’ (S.T.D. dissertation, Gregorian University, Rome, 1940). [Available now in Part Two of Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1 in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. The ‘introductory pages,’ the ‘47–page essay’ Crowe refers to in his next sentence, can be found on pp. 153– 92 of this volume of Collected Works, with the Preface on 153–54, the Introduction on 155–61, and the essay proper on 162–93. Subsequent reference to Gratia Operans will cite from these pages and use the form ‘Gratia operans,’ in Grace and Freedom …’] 33 ‘Gratia operans,’ in Grace and Freedom (2000) 155, 156.

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categorically that ‘there is no more a possibility of filling in the details of that scheme a priori than there is of predicting the future.’34 What, then, is the form of development that Lonergan works out? I cannot give it in detail, but neither should I leave my readers entirely in the dark, so here in rapid sequence are the seven stages of his general scheme. From the principle that the mind moves from the particular to the general, it follows that a speculative explanation will first center on a specific reason; this will then be generalized and given a significance beyond its worth. The insufficiency of the specific theorem will eventually appear and lead to the discovery of the generic explanation; and this too will be generalized and given for a time the status of the sole solution. The insufficiency of the generic theorem alone will, however, in due course become apparent; and there will follow the rediscovery of the specific theorem in a new setting, with a synthesis finally of generic and specific theorems in an adequate explanation.35 The material question in which this scheme is illustrated is that of the human need for divine grace. The specific theorem first offered in explanation is that of the different states of man: fallen man cannot without grace avoid sin. The generic theorem is that of the supernatural: eternal life is beyond the reach of man himself in any state.36 The sequence of the seven stages determined by the general form of development is then illustrated in the theology of grace from Augustine’s De correptione et gratia to the Prima secundae of Thomas Aquinas.37 Readers may wish to challenge this argument at many points: in itself, in its premises, in its application to the theology of grace. It is not my purpose to defend it, but only to show that, already at this early date, Lonergan was thinking in terms of our definition of transcendental deduction, and this in the field of history. I would especially note his deliberate recourse to cognitional theory for its premises. He is going to analyze the idea of a speculative development and will do so, he says, ‘solely from a consideration of the nature of human speculation.’38 His 34 Ibid. 157. See also 168: ‘… [W]hat we hope to establish is not any a priori form of history but mere sets of abstract categories that have a special reference to the historical process.’ There seems to be a slip in word usage here; it is in some sense a ‘form’ of history that he is trying to establish, so I suggest the emendation, ‘not any a priori chronicle of history.’ 35 Ibid. 180–81. 36 Ibid. 179. 37 Ibid. 181, 181–82. 38 Ibid. 157.

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a priori scheme ‘is not a hypothesis but a demonstrable conclusion.’39 He will correlate statements from the fifth to the thirteenth century ‘without making any hypotheses on the nature of grace … [but] merely in virtue of the assumption that the people in question were all men, all thinking, and historically interdependent in their thought.’40 With this example, which occurs at a highly intellectualist point in Lonergan’s personal development, we are at the other end of the spectrum from the simple ongoing character of human intentional process. Are there also instances of transcendental deduction that we might call middle-of-the-road? I believe there are; and I offer as one of them Lonergan’s analysis of human history, which he carries out on a broader scale by far than his analysis of speculative development, though not on the very broad scale of the general ongoing character of human inquiry. According to his own account, his thinking on this question began around 1937–1938. His analysis took the form of successive approximations, illustrated by analogy with three approximations to formulations of the planetary laws. A first approximation, then, to the form of history is given by ‘the assumption that men always do what is intelligent and reasonable, and its implication was an ever increasing progress.’ The second occurs with ‘the radical inverse insight that men can be biased’ with resultant decline. But, thirdly, there is ‘the redemptive process resulting from God’s gift of his grace to individuals and from the manifestation of his love in Christ Jesus.’41 It is especially useful to have this ‘form’ of history, because what we may call its three moments are not moments in a temporal sense but in the sense of forces at work. The human race does not first progress, then decline, and finally enjoy redemption: the three processes are going on simultaneously. So we are dealing with ‘form’ in a rather special sense of history, not attempting an impossible prediction of events in chronological order. The real question, however, is whether we have here something like a transcendental deduction. I would answer ‘yes,’ at least for the first two moments. My reason is mainly the close link between this analysis and that of progress-decline in Insight, where the premise, as we saw, 39 Ibid. 158. 40 Ibid. Lonergan makes his case, however, for a compound theorem, such as we find here in the specific and generic explanations of the human need for grace. Evidently he allows for the possibility of a simple theorem, so we have to ask whether the assumption of a compound theorem adds an adventitious element to the pure core of transcendental deduction. 41 ‘Insight Revisited,’ in A Second Collection 263–78, at 271–272.

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was indeed transcendental. Let us return to that book for a fuller account of the ‘wheel’ of progress. Thus, insight into insight brings to light the cumulative process of progress. For concrete situations give rise to insights which issue into policies and courses of action. Action transforms the existing situation to give rise to further insights, better policies, more effective courses of action. It follows that if insight occurs, it keeps recurring; and at each recurrence knowledge develops, action increases its scope, and situations improve.42

The idea of progress is thus attributed directly to insight into insight. But the idea of decline has a parallel basis, as the immediately following paragraph indicates: ‘Similarly insight into oversight reveals the cumulative process of decline …’43 Later in the book Lonergan will develop his concept of the shorter and longer cycles of decline,44 though the image of the wheel is perhaps less applicable when the dynamic of progress is replaced ‘by sluggishness and then by stagnation.’45 As for the redemptive moment, this too could perhaps be added on the basis of intentionality analysis, but only by those who have identified their religious experience and are able to see it as a third ‘moment’ in the unfolding drama of their personal history. With this account of the pattern of history I skirt but do not explore a whole great continent of discourse. Even that part of the continent which belongs to research into Lonergan’s thought awaits exploration in many areas, though much has been done already.46 For the particular question that has occupied me in this article, I would recommend attention to the stages of meaning that Lonergan describes in Method and elsewhere. They seem to form a pattern closely dependent on the 42 Insight 8. This is referred to as a ‘circle’ (59), a ‘circuit’ (59, 99, 127, 190, and passim), a ‘wheel’ (249, 251); it is found in the self-correcting process of learning (197) as well as in a developing social order (248–49, 251). In Method in Theology (366) and later works (for example, ‘Mission and the Spirit,’ in A Third Collection 29 – see note 50, below), the term ‘feedback’ occurs. 43 Insight 8. See also Method in Theology 55: ‘As self-transcendence promotes progress, so the refusal of self-transcendence turns progress into cumulative decline.’ 44 Insight 250–67. 45 Ibid. 254. 46 Without taking time and space to list studies of Lonergan’s notion of history, I can put readers in touch with a partial bibliography by referring to recent volumes of Dissertation Abstracts International. See especially the key words ‘Lonergan,’ ‘History,’ in the subject index.

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natural differentiations of consciousness, and so to be amenable to transcendental deduction.47 And, of course, those differentiations themselves,48 insofar as they are ‘natural,’ should be amenable to the same treatment, though I suspect that, with their multiplication, we might have to distinguish between the more fundamental forms and the less.

5 My purpose has been expository and even within that limitation directed more to opening up a field of inquiry than to exploring it. However, aware of the strong views and perhaps even stronger feelings that are sometimes manifested against the a priori and especially against its introduction into history,49 I wish to conclude my essay with a few notes that might in some measure disarm the critics and should, in any case, help them view Lonergan’s thinking in better perspective. A simple but very helpful observation is that, except perhaps in the introductory pages of his doctoral dissertation, the term ‘a priori’ is not by any means a favorite of Lonergan. Already, by the time Insight was written, it had yielded to the much more characteristic term ‘heuristic’ – as readers who trust the Index to that work may easily verify for themselves. There does remain a role for the apriori, but its limits are clearly indicated in a somewhat later article, in which Lonergan discusses the dynamism of human intentionality. In its broad lines this dynamism rests on operators that promote activity from one level to the next. The operators are a priori, and they alone are a priori. Their content is ever an anticipation of the next level of operations and thereby is not to be found in the contents of the previous level.50

Such anticipation is, of course, the business of Lonergan’s heuristic structures and methods. 47 Method in Theology 85–99. True, Lonergan has in mind mainly the Western tradition (85). 48 Ibid. 303–305, and passim. 49 That is not the whole story. Lonergan found support in Piaget’s work: ‘It enables one to distinguish stages in cultural development …’ (Method in Theology 29–30). And Kohlberg’s stages of moral development are well known; see Elizabeth A. Morelli, ‘The Sixth Stage of Moral Development,’ Journal of Moral Education 7/2 (1977–78) 97–108, for a critique of Kohlberg based on Lonergan; the critique, however, recognizes the validity in principle of such stages. 50 ‘Mission and the Spirit,’ in A Third Collection 23–34, at 28.

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A second point can be introduced by a quotation from the same article. The discussion now is of the analogy between evolutionary process and the development resulting from what Lonergan calls vertical finality. He explains: ‘By the analogy of that process is meant, not some basis for a priori prediction, but only a basis for a posteriori interpretation.’51 Of course we will be wary of applying this remark beyond the specific area that Lonergan has in mind. All the same, I see a close analogy between this a posteriori interpretation and the synthetic order in which for several years Lonergan set forth his Trinitarian theology. As students of that theology will remember, it begins with the analytic order, in which there is development from what is first for us (the sending of Son and Spirit) to what is first in itself (the divine nature understood in a new way as a dynamism issuing in eternal processions); but it is followed by the synthetic ordering of that development in exactly the reverse direction (from the new insight into the divine nature to the missions in time of the second and third Persons).52 This in turn has a formal resemblance to Lonergan’s use of transcendental deduction. I would like to be clear on that point: I am not saying that there can be transcendental deduction of Trinitarian theology, but only that the synthetic ordering of that theology illuminates Lonergan’s way of thinking and may help us understand and see in better perspective the data collected in my present study.53 Perhaps that will be clearer if I add at once a third point. Just as the synthetic order depends for its materials on the results of the analytic, so transcendental deduction, though it is valid a priori for every logical exercise of conscious intentionality, is nevertheless valid only in virtue of a premise which was itself formed a posteriori. Thus, in the transition for latent to explicit metaphysics, the set of primary minor premises ‘consists of a series of affirmations of concrete and recurring

51 Ibid. 27. 52 See Lonergan’s two volumes The Triune God: Doctrines and The Triune God: Systematics. 53 The data on the analytic and synthetic orders have also been collected. See Craig S. Boly, ‘The Development of the Twofold Way of Ordering Ideas in the Early Theology of Bernard Lonergan’ (PhD dissertation, University of St Michael’s College, Toronto School of Theology, 1982). [Now available as The Road to Lonergan’s Method in Theology: The Ordering of Theological Ideas (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991).] On the eight functional specialties as reorganizing existing branches of theology, see Method in Theology 136.

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structures in the knowing of the self-affirming subject.’54 Again, the method of metaphysics is ‘dictated by the self-affirming subject in the light of his pedagogically acquired self-knowledge.’55 And yet again, the method begins from people as they are and the conclusion is known ‘through the known structures of one’s cognitional activities.’56 And yet once more, ‘cognitional theory is determined by an appeal to the data of consciousness and to the historical development of human knowledge.’57 I will stop hammering, but it is worth noting that the transition from latent to explicit metaphysics starts with an analytic proposition but becomes an analytic principle with the introduction of existence: ‘Analytic propositions become analytic principles when their terms are existential; and terms are existential when they occur in definitive factual judgments.’58 This brings me to my final point. No amount of exercise in the ideal order is by itself constitutive of knowing; or, there is no way that transcendental deduction can by itself introduce existence. That is clear enough if we think backward from deduced conclusions to premises, to the formation of the premises, to the scattered affirmations from which premises are formed. But the relevant point for me is made by going forward from transcendental deduction. We have seen that this procedure allows us to conclude, on the basis of self-knowledge, to the structure of the known and likewise to the structured activities by which we inquire into the to-be-known. But what is the forward relation of transcendental deduction to the existence and nature of the philosopher’s world? This is a distinct question, for Lonergan defines his notions of being and objectivity, in the first instance, in such a way as to leave them compatible with any philosophy. It remains, then, to be determined whether the philosopher’s world is limited or unlimited, one or many, material or ideal, phenomenal or real, immanent or transcendent, a realm of experience, of thought, of essences, or of existents.59 In particular, to put the question as I did earlier in this article, are the metaphysical elements merely cognitional or also ontological? Or, to put it now another way, how can one grasp and affirm the evidence for

54 55 56 57 58 59

Insight 424–25. Ibid. 423. Ibid. 426. Ibid. 412. Ibid. 340. Ibid. 373–74. See also 386 and, on objectivity as an open notion, 408–409.

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a metaphysics? In Lonergan’s view the affirmation has to be made in dynamic terms, and he makes it with the help of a three-part metaphor: a breakthrough (‘one’s affirmation of oneself as empirically, intelligently, and rationally conscious’), envelopment (‘the protean notion of being as whatever one intelligently grasps and reasonably affirms’), and confinement (‘effected through the dialectical opposition’ of positions and counter-positions).60 Whatever name we give this argument it is to be clearly distinguished from the transcendental deduction that has occupied us throughout this article: the introduction of dialectic by itself is a guarantee of the difference. Or, to return to our topic sentence, if the existence of the philosopher’s world was not contained in the premises of the argument, then transcendental deduction cannot introduce it in the conclusion.61

60 Ibid. 508–509. 61 It is my pleasant duty, at the conclusion of this study, to thank Thomas Daly, of the Melbourne College of Divinity, for a careful reading and thoughtful critique of the manuscript. Appendix I have just noticed a paragraph that is very illuminating for this whole question. It occurs as note 8 in ‘Religious Knowledge,’ the second of three lectures Lonergan gave at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, in 1976, under the general heading ‘Religious Studies and/or Theology.’ [The lecture is now available under the same title in A Third Collection 129–45.] Here is the paragraph [now standing as note 8 on p. 145 of A Third Collection]: Distinguish three meanings of the term, transcendental: the most general and all pervasive concepts, namely, ens, unum, verum, bonum, of the Scholastics; the Kantian conditions of the possibility of knowing an object a priori; Husserl’s intentionality analysis in which noƝsis and noƝma, act and object, are correlative. The third of these meanings clearly corresponds to what I called, in the introduction to my article, ‘a properly Lonerganian transcendental deduction’ and the second to ‘the Kant-related form he uses in chapter 11 of Insight.’ (Also compare these three meanings of ‘transcendental’ with the two meanings of the term ‘transcendental method’ proffered by Lonergan in his 1970 paper ‘Philosophy and Theology’: see A Second Collection 193–208, at 207, summary comment 1.)

Chapter 6

For a Phenomenology of Rational Consciousness1

1 Introduction: Plea for a Phenomenology In July of 1957 Bernard Lonergan gave ten lectures at Boston College under the heading ‘Mathematical Logic’ and ten more under the heading ‘Existentialism.’2 The two sets have been published under the title Phenomenology and Logic,3 the word ‘Phenomenology’ having been judged by the editor to be more indicative of the content of Part Two than ‘Existentialism’ would be. In the course of a lecture on the ‘Nature, Significance, Limitations’ of phenomenology, Lonergan spoke as follows regarding one of these limitations. [T]he phenomenologist provides himself and the reader with the evidence in which they can grasp the virtually unconditioned, as I would put it, and so reach the absolute on which judgment is based. The evidence is set out. But the phenomenologist has not penetrated to the judgment itself, to the  rational process within which grasp of the virtually unconditioned and the judgment occur … There has not been done a phenomenology of

1 An earlier version of this essay was published in METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 18/1 (2000) 67–90. 2 The topics were set by the organizer at Boston College, who does not seem to have intended them to have some underlying unity. 3 See Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical and Logic and Existentialism, vol. 18 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Though the lectures of the second week were given under the title ‘Existentialism,’ Lonergan went back to a study of Edmund Husserl (247–65), offered a very positive exposition of phenomenology (266–79), and then gave a critique of Husserl and an exposition of his own views.

78 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Studies rational consciousness, of the process of asking, Is it so? and grasping the virtually unconditioned and on the basis of that absolute making your affirmation and taking your affirmation as the medium in quo cognoscitur ens.4

In the context of the high significance which the lectures had just assigned to phenomenology (under ‘Nature, Significance’) this remark comes to us as a plea, one that has gone largely unnoticed for forty years – necessarily so, of course, while the lectures remained recorded on tapes and were not readily accessible to investigators.5 This article takes one preliminary step toward a response to that plea: it may be regarded as offering prolegomena to a proper response. Further limits of the essay should be made clear. First, as I hope to show, a phenomenology of the term of rational consciousness, that is, of judgment, is not, on Lonergan’s own principles, possible. A phenomenology of the search for and process towards judgment is, however, quite possible and the real intent of his plea. Second, one cannot deal adequately with this question on the level of judgment, or reflective insight, without a corresponding concern with the prior cognitional level, that is, of direct insight.6 Here again, however, and even more explicitly, Lonergan’s principles preclude a phenomenology of insight itself, and we are reduced once more to study the search for insight rather than its attainment. A third introductory point disavows ambitious claims for this essay. As we shall presently see, a definition of phenomenology explains it as an account of data structured by insight. Readers may find my essay more useful in the extent to which they regard it, not as offering a phenomenology either 4 Ibid. 275. 5 There have been, of course, numerous studies of Lonergan’s cognitional theory and in many cases therefore a phenomenology materialiter, as Scholastics might say, but few to tackle the question formaliter. An exception is Michael Vertin, ‘Maréchal, Lonergan, and the Phenomenology of Knowing,’ in Matthew L. Lamb, ed., Creativity and Method: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, S.J. (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1981) 411–22. 6 These two levels and their relationship are so much a part of Lonergan studies that any lengthy exposition would be superfluous. Briefly, the sequence is the following: experience; inquiry into the intelligibility of the experience (the ‘what’ question); insight and its formulation as answer to the ‘what’ question; reflection on the validity of the insight as applied to these data (the ‘is it’ question); and, finally, reflective insight and the judgment it generates (‘yes, it is true,’ or ‘no, it is false,’ as the case may be). For further information I refer the inquiring reader to Lonergan, chapters 9 and 10 of Insight: A Study of Human Understanding.

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of the process to insight or of the process to judgment, but as collecting data from Lonergan, with some initial effort only at illustrating structures and processes. Such is the intent of the word ‘For’ in my title. Working at one remove from a proper phenomenology we still need to specify the sense in which we are using the word. Here we encounter ‘the multifarious and fluid ideas of sundry phenomenologists.’7 In a field of such diversity one need hardly apologize for whatever ‘fluid idea’ one chooses. In any case my choice is predetermined by my purpose, which is to initiate a response to Lonergan’s plea, not to someone else’s. I therefore adopt his sense of phenomenology. Of course, to quote Spiegelberg again, ‘Even if there were as many phenomenologies as phenomenologists, there should be at least a common core in all of them to justify the use of the common label,’8 and so I have to hope that Lonergan’s version may be found to contain that ‘common core’ and resonate to some degree in the minds of the ‘sundry phenomenologists’ who may examine it. Since, in his section ‘Nature, Significance, Limitations,’ he had defined his sense largely in relation to Husserl’s, though with his own variants, that hope seems reasonable enough. Lonergan’s definition of phenomenology, brief and simple, shows at once his personal approach: ‘It is an account, description, presentation of data structured by insight.’9 He enlarged this definition in the following four points. The data, or what is manifest, may be external or internal; there are no exclusions on principle. Still phenomenology is selective, it attends to significant data, seeking universal structures; so it calls for scrutiny, it takes time and effort. Thirdly, though it is an account structured by insight, it does not undertake a phenomenology of 7 Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965) 653. A striking indication of this variety may be had from John C. McCarthy’s review in The Review of Metaphysics (52/3 [1998–99] 677–79) of Lester Embree et al., eds, Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997). The review quotes Embree as follows (678): ‘The 166 entries are about matters of seven sorts: (1) the four broad tendencies and periods within the phenomenological movement; (2) twenty-three national traditions of phenomenology; (3) twenty-two philosophical sub-disciplines …; (4) phenomenological tendencies within twenty-one non-philosophical disciplines; (5) forty major phenomenological topics; (6) twenty-eight leading phenomenological figures; (7) twenty-seven non-phenomenological figures and movements of interesting similarities and differences with phenomenology.’ 8 Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement 653. 9 Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic 266.

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the extremely elusive insight itself and as such. And fourthly, it is an account of the data and not the subsequent conceptualization.10 The third point in the preceding paragraph is specific to Lonergan and occupies the center-piece of my own essay: I do not aim at an eventual ‘phenomenology of the extremely elusive insight itself,’ and this for the simple reason that we have no insight into insight. That statement requires reinterpretation of Lonergan’s cognitional theory on a most fundamental level and points to a major task in carrying his thought forward. I think it better to postpone that problem to my third section. But does denying a phenomenology of insight torpedo our whole enterprise before we start? Not necessarily. We distinguish what can be done from what cannot. If one cannot offer a phenomenology of insight itself, one may still attempt a phenomenology of the search for insight. Hence my second section will attempt to provide prolegomena to that search and to illustrate what might be done on the level of direct insight. I leave to my third section an account of what cannot be done on that level and why. As for the level of judgment, that too has its own quite special problem, and so I will suggest again that all that could be offered would be a phenomenology of the search for judgment – the fourth section will deal with those two points. 2 Direct Insight and Phenomenology The project I have in view is a phenomenology not of insight in general and not even of the act of insight in a particular case but of the search for insight in a particular case. I note that one could go forward from the act of insight to its conceptualization and eventually to a science – of botany, of physics, whatever; but that would take us out of the proper field of phenomenology, which insists so strongly on the prepredicative. Our journey is rather backwards from insight to the search for insight – not therefore to an understanding of botany or physics or any science, though perhaps to an understanding of what the botanist or physicist or scientist experiences in the search for truth. This takes us as close to the prepredicative as we can get. Now insights, we have been told, are a dime a dozen,11 so we have an unlimited field from which to choose a sample case. But there is a

10 Ibid. 266–69. There is great insistence on the prepredicative, instead of conceptualizations of it, as the proper area for phenomenology. 11 A favorite expression of Lonergan; see, for example, ‘Theories of Inquiry: Responses to a Symposium,’ 33–42, in A Second Collection, at 36.

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distinct practical advantage in choosing an example from mathematics rather than one from, say, studies in botany. The advantage is that we can manipulate the data with the greatest of ease, instead of, say, going into a wet and muddy garden, and risking contact with poison ivy. I propose, then, a study of the search for understanding of a circle. What are the data for such a search? Lonergan in fact anticipated my use of this example and described in some detail the search for understanding of a circle. He took his clue from a wheel and the ideal rim which we easily imagine as a perfect circle without bumps or dents. I follow him with slight variations.12 The question is this: How do we go from our ideal wheel without bumps or dents in the rim to the mathematical understanding of a circle? Well, I introduce bumps and dents into my image in order to focus on what causes them and so to remove the cause and return from the bumps and dents to a figure as round as I can make it. If I keep the wheel in the background of my mental search, I will realize that a bump is caused by a spoke that is longer in relation to its neighbors and a dent is caused by one that is shorter in relation to its neighbors. To remove a bump I therefore shorten the spoke; to remove a dent I lengthen it. But at this time I realize I have been operating with a supposition: I have made the spoke longer or shorter with reference only to the rim, overlooking possible variations when the spoke is sunk unequally into the hub. Therefore I have to imagine the hub decreasing to a point, an ideal center where the spokes meet. And now I notice a further oversight: my spokes could all be equal but the spaces between them at the rim could be flat. Therefore I imagine the number of spokes increasing without limit, till nowhere is there any space between them for the rim to become flat. Here the unwary searcher may indulge in a brief moment of triumph: ‘Why, here we have all we need for our understanding and definition of a circle: substitute for the rim an ideal line without bumps or dents, substitute for the spokes an ideal set of radii all equal, and substitute for the bulky hub an ideal center point where the radii all meet. Then it becomes clear that a circle, in geometric language, is the locus of points equidistant from a center!’ ‘But wait,’ someone says: ‘I can imagine a sphere, well-mapped on the model of the earth’s globe, and I can imagine the center of this sphere. From this center I imagine lines radiating out to numberless 12 Insight 31–32; also Understanding and Being (1990) 41–42, where there is adduced the example of points on the African coastline, equidistant (roughly) from the center of the earth, to force us to add ‘coplanar’ to our definition.

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points on the coastline of Africa as it is mapped on the surface. They are all equal and so all the points I imagine will be roughly equidistant from a center. Now, according to you, a circle is the locus of points equidistant from a center; so the coastline of Africa becomes a circle!’ Crestfallen, I revise my definition. I had overlooked a hidden supposition: my circle was imagined to be on a plane surface, not the surface of a globe. A circle, I now realize, is the locus of coplanar points equidistant from a center. Something like the foregoing, I surmise, would be an initial step, which could be filled out with multiple elements of experience, for a phenomenology of the search for insight in a geometric problem. But with the definition I have gone beyond what would pertain to a phenomenology: I have achieved the insight itself and objectified it in a concept; I am on the way to a systematic understanding of geometry, and therefore removed from the field of phenomenology. But before we leave this simple example let us notice the key role that a freely wandering imagination played in the description I gave of the search. Now it happens that I am able to adduce a prestigious authority in support of this procedure: it is similar to an operation that Husserl called ‘free imaginative variation.’13 It is a procedure I like to call ‘shuffling the data’: shuffle a pack of cards long enough and you will turn up a pair of aces. Which is what Lonergan himself was doing in another problem in geometry14 as he varied the data and thereby achieved an insight. In his striking phrase, ‘The act of understanding leaps forth when the sensible data are in a suitable constellation.’15 What is the point of these exercises and reflections? I would venture to call them, not a typical phenomenology, but an incipient one in the field of intellectual experience, a kind of blow-by-blow description of an intellectual’s way to insight. It will seem a bit staged to one whose interests are, say, aesthetic, or intersubjective. Certainly, my account differs considerably from the phenomenology of a smile that caught 13 Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, vol. 2, 680. It is similar too to a procedure I presented to Lonergan over fifty years ago when I was struggling to pin down an insight into the circle, a procedure I am happy to say he approved. 14 To show that the three angles of a triangle are together equal to two right angles. 15 Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (1997) 28. The possibility of the ‘shuffling’ I describe lies in the human faculty of forming free images. In Insight (see 299) this was listed among the essential steps of cognitional process, but its strategic importance is brought out only in a question session of Understanding and Being 313–15; and see 136.

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Lonergan’s interest and attention years later.16 But it is useful for my purpose of relating phenomenology to insight. And it illustrates what I take to be the omnivorous scope of phenomenology: all experience is grist for its mill, intellectual experience as well as intersubjective experience; there may be favorites in the family, but all the children belong. Lonergan’s favorites in the book Insight deal with intellectual experience and are often subordinate to ulterior purposes. Thus, the five points in chapter 1 describing insight17 have many elements of a phenomenology, but they go beyond it to locate acts of insight in a wider context. Further, they refer to insight into a problem of physics posed by Archimedes, not to insight into insight. It is the latter that must now engage our special attention. 3 The Special Problem of Insight into Insight The problem of insight into insight is a different matter altogether from the problem of insight into a circle or into a point of physics. Further, it is not just the problem in itself that is a teaser; there is the problem also of explaining the strange history of Lonergan’s thought. To put it bluntly, in 1954 he refers unconcernedly to insight into insight, but then years later (1981) declares quite confidently that there is no insight into insight. To trace the history of this apparent about-face and to find an explanation for it has been for me one of the most intriguing experiences in my long engagement with his thought. Let me first discuss the history of the relevant texts and then attempt to explain that history, that intriguing case of what was ‘going forward.’18 And because the history is rather complex, it will help to begin with an outline. Lonergan, then, seems to have ignored the problem in 1953, when he speaks of God as understanding understanding, though soon after he encourages us to understand what it is to understand. He certainly ignored it in 1954 when he wrote a new Preface for Insight and spoke with obvious approval of insight into insight. There is a hint of a problem in

16 Method in Theology 59–61. 17 Insight 28–31: ‘… insight comes as a release to the tension of inquiry … insight comes suddenly and unexpectedly … insight is a function, not of outer circumstances, but of inner conditions … insight pivots between the concrete and the abstract … insight passes into the habitual texture of one’s mind.’ 18 That is Lonergan’s phrase for history: see Method in Theology 178–79 and passim.

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early 1956 when he wrote De constitutione Christi ontologica et psychologica. The year 1957 and the lectures of that year at Boston College mark a turning point: he has sensed the problem much more acutely now, though I would not say he has grasped it in full clarity. In 1971 he seems to be answering an analogous problem in Method. Finally, he confronts the problem head-on and provides an answer in the Morfin interview of 1981. Now to the details of this outline. Accuracy in dates is important here, and I will regularly try to give the effective date of writing or  speaking rather than that of subsequent publication. There is a pre-history that I will touch on when I give my scenario of his developing thought, but our theme emerges only in 1953. In the summer of that year he finished writing Insight, and therefore with high probability that was also when he wrote his Introduction. It is in that Introduction that there occurs the famous slogan in which he speaks of understanding what it is to understand: ‘Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and … you will possess a fixed base … opening upon all further developments of understanding.’19 We shall see presently that understanding understanding is not exactly the same as insight into insight, and that may have been a factor in keeping the problem hidden; but it seems more likely that he was preoccupied with larger questions, and perhaps rather happy with his slogan. In any case he sees no conflict between the slogan, which encourages us to understand what it is to understand, and the statement on what seems to be a divine prerogative, namely, that God ‘understands understanding.’ This occurs twice in chapter 19, ‘General Transcendent Knowledge,’20 a chapter near the end of the book and so also to be dated with some probability in 1953 shortly before the Introduction was written. The next important date in our history is the summer of 1954 when, at the suggestion of his publisher, he wrote a new Preface to Insight.21 Here there occur passages in which Lonergan speaks quite unreservedly 19 Insight 22. Does Lonergan mean to distinguish ‘understand what it is to understand’ from ‘understanding understanding’? I do not think so; such questions are not on his agenda at this time. 20 Ibid. 671, 706. 21 In May 1954 Lonergan had sent his manuscript to Longmans, Green and Co. In conversations with T. Michael Longman in the summer of that year he was persuaded to write a new Preface describing, as the conversations had done, what the book was all about. See the Editors’ Preface, Insight xix.

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about insight into insight, even going so far as to say that the aim of the book ‘is to convey an insight into insight.’22 Again there is no hint of a latent problem or of a conflict with understanding understanding as a divine attribute. About two years later he even finds a similarity between his idea (though in terms of understanding, not of insight) and Hegel’s thought, and so he adds the following note to the page proofs that he was then (early summer of 1956) correcting. As he [Hegel] repeatedly proceeds from an sich, through für sich, to an und für sich, so our whole argument is a movement from the objects of mathematical, scientific, and commonsense understanding, through the acts of understanding themselves, to an understanding of understanding.23

But curiously it seems that just at this time (early 1956) he had himself provided a discordant element and what our hindsight can see as the threat of a conflict to come. It occurs in the Christology book written for his students at the Gregorian University just after he had finished correcting the galleys of Insight.24 There we have a statement that could be an important key to understanding the history of this question. We find it in section 5, De conscientia humana, Lonergan’s full thematic treatment of consciousness,25 where he notes that consciousness, internal experience, is not described but only indicated. The statement warrants closer study. The immediate context is the difference between consciousness of the subject and perception of an object. He repeats his position that consciousness is not perception

22 Insight 3–4, 21; for the quotation, see p. 4. 23 Ibid. 398. Lonergan added this note at the proof stage (see the editorial note on Lonergan’s note, ibid.). He was busy on the galleys from mid-January to the end of March (letter to F.E.C., 11 April 1956); three months later the page proofs had begun to arrive (letter of 12 June). 24 De constitutione Christi ontologica et psychologica (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1956) [translated and available since 2002 in a Latin-English edition as The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ, vol. 7 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan]; it went through four editions with only minor differences. The letter from Rome of 11 April 1956 (note 23 above) remarks that he had just then finished typing this work (while he worked on the galleys of Insight therefore); publication came in June as page proofs of Insight began to arrive (letter of 12 June). 25 But the first three sections of chapter 11 of Insight deal with consciousness, and there is an eight-page set of notes to De conscientia Christi (unpublished) issued for the students of his Christology course at Regis College in 1952–53. [The set of notes is available from the Lonergan Research Institute.]

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of  an object but instead is internal experience of oneself and one’s operations. He continues as follows. [T]his type of experience is not described but only indicated. Description supposes intellectual inquiry and includes what is known through insight and conception. But consciousness-as-experience is indicated inasmuch as a method is described by way of which one can go from an  experience structured by understanding and conception back to that  experience itself in the strict sense. Consciousness, however, is not  that  method of returning nor the return itself, but that to which one returns.26

Reading this with the 1981 interview in mind, we are struck by the anticipations and parallels. That the experience is not described parallels the denial of insight into insight; that there is nevertheless a way to indicate the experience parallels the substitution of insight into symbols for the now missing insight into insight. This discussion will be resumed when we come to the interview. In the 1957 lectures at Boston College what was ignored in 1954 and latent in this 1956 text begins to give difficulty. Lonergan has become acutely conscious of a problem with insight into insight, though just what the problem is he does not clearly determine. Speaking of the special problem of insight into insight and of providing a phenomenology in that area, he has the following to say: [J]ust as the phenomenologist is presenting data structured by insight, so a phenomenology of insight would be an insight into insight, and we’d be in an entirely different field, as you can figure out from what happens when one seeks an insight into insight … [W]hen the phenomenology … of understanding is attempted, then what will you be doing? You will be seeking understanding as structured by understanding, and that will be insight into insight, and it will bring you into an entirely different world from that of the phenomenologists. 26 The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ 173, 175. ‘Praeterea, haec experientia non describitur sed indicatur. Omnis enim descriptio et inquisitionem intellectualem supponit et id quod intelligendo et concipiendo innotescit includit. Indicatur autem conscientia-experientia inquantum methodus describitur secundum quam reditur ex experientia, quae intelligendo et concipiendo formata est, ad ipsam experientiam stricte dictam; neque conscientia est methodus redeundi vel ipse reditus sed id ad quod reditur.’ Ibid. 172, 174.

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Take it this way. You have your structured data and your insight. You can attend to the data that are structured, and your attention centers there. Or you can attend to the insight, and it’s a different focus of attention … But insight is an elusive thing. You get hold of insights properly only by considering the history of science, the history of philosophy, and so on. Just as if you just center on what is experience, in any given mode, it’s so elusive that it tends to vanish. You put insights together insofar as you say, ‘Well, a geometer understands the whole of Euclid …’ But that comprehensive grasp of the whole subject is not some phenomenon that you can pin right down and describe the structure. When you’re seeking insight into insight, not only have you a different term of attention, but your methods of procedure have to differ if you’re going to get anywhere.27

The clues are uniform: ‘figure out from what happens when one seeks an insight into insight’; ‘it will bring you into an entirely different world from that of the phenomenologists’; ‘insight is an elusive thing’; ‘not only have you a different term of attention, but your methods of procedure have to differ.’ There is obviously a problem when we have to figure out ‘what happens when one seeks an insight into insight.’ Lonergan seems to cling still to the possibility of such an insight, but he is clearly troubled by a difficulty, though he is not yet clear on what the difficulty is. Nor have I found any clear discussion of the problem between these lectures of 1957 and the Morfin interview of 1981. There is, however, a parallel problem that surfaces in Method in Theology in regard to ‘the divine,’ with a solution that again resembles that of the 1981 interview. ‘It [the divine] cannot be perceived and it cannot be 27 Phenomenology and Logic 356–57. There is a problem with the Halifax lectures a year later, where Lonergan speaks again of insight into insight and of understanding understanding: ‘… chapters 1 to 8 are concerned with understanding understanding, insight into insight’ (Understanding and Being 17). But a later lecture in that series does much to clarify this position. The context here is metaphysics, and the question primarily regards objects: what does the metaphysician understand? The object of metaphysical understanding is the series of finite beings, each structured in the proportion essence–existence. Further the mode of understanding is analogous, not proper (ibid. 201–202, and see 238). It seems strange to our hindsight that Lonergan could speak as he did about the problem of insight into insight in 1957 and not refer to it in 1958, but the contexts were different, and the analogous nature of metaphysical understanding is a different matter altogether from the phenomenology of insight. Recall too that according to our account of his history he had not yet conceived the problem clearly, and a problem not clearly conceived is less likely to spring up in another context.

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imagined. But it can be associated with the object or event, the ritual or recitation, that occasions religious experience; and so there arise the hierophanies.’28 A highly interesting footnote accompanies this remark. Note that here we are touching on the nature of projection, i.e. the transfer of subjective experience into the field of the perceived or imagined. The transfer occurs to make insight into the experience possible. At a higher level of linguistic development, the possibility of insight is achieved by linguistic feed-back, by expressing the subjective experience in words and as subjective.29

This text reveals an intermediate phase between 1957 and 1971. The need of some device ‘to make insight into the experience possible’ (1971) supposes a problem like that indicated when Lonergan says ‘You get hold of insights properly only by considering the history of science, the history of philosophy, and so on’ (1957). That one can substitute insight into symbols for insight into insight (1981) is parallel to the statement ‘the possibility of insight is achieved by linguistic feed-back, by expressing the subjective experience in words and as subjective’ (1971). In both cases the question is how insight is made possible, and in both cases the possibility is achieved indirectly. We have been anticipating elements in that interview of 1981, where finally Lonergan puts the problem quite clearly, proffering at the same time a clearly outlined answer.30 I feel obliged to quote or paraphrase that all-important interview at some length. It begins with a phrase describing insight as ‘tricky,’ recalling the ‘elusive’ of the 1957 lectures. But now we are given the reason: ‘It’s tricky though, eh? insight into phantasm, and we have no phantasm of our actual understanding.’ If insight is into phantasm, and there is no phantasm of our actual understanding, how can we have insight into insight, or understanding of understanding?

28 Method in Theology 88. The manuscript of this book was submitted to the press in 1971, which is therefore my date for references; there is a huge amount of archival material, which I have not studied for the present question, between the years 1957 and 1971. 29 Ibid., note 34. See also pp. 92 and 108. 30 An interview of 11 July 1981 with Luis Morfin, not yet transcribed from the taperecording. The tape was made available through the kindness of Fr Morfin and Fr Armando Bravo.

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So what are you going to do? You set up dummies: the language symbols, linguistic symbols; you relate the linguistic symbols to one another: sensation, imagination, feeling, inquiry, understanding, formulation, reflection, reflective understanding, judgment, judgment of value and decision, being in love with God, transforming your whole life. But you have to have all these things on their different levels, and their relation to one another each on its own level. So you create the phantasm, just as the mathematician does.

That answer recalls the footnote we just saw in Method. But Lonergan goes on to expand the analogy with mathematics. First of all in arithmetic. There is an infinity of natural numbers going on to infinity. Then you add operations. Addition and subtraction; so you start getting the negative numbers. And multiplying and division; with division you can get fractions, and with multiplying you get powers and roots. And surds: the square root of two; there is no number that corresponds to that.

Here Lonergan gives his proof on the surd question, after which Morfin intervened: ‘So in the case of the maths and in the case of the linguistics, the reference can be reference to an event?’ To which Lonergan replied. The reference is your insight into these symbols. And you know what the symbols mean. So you have not only the symbols but their meaning. And you have insight into this collection of meanings. And that provides you with the phantasm; you have the insight into this phantasm and the formulation of the insight and then the proof that that formulation is correct.

The exchange continues. Morfin: ‘But in the end you create the phantasm.’ Lonergan: ‘Oh, yes, you have to create the phantasm.’ Morfin: ‘But there is not a phantasm of the insight operations?’ Lonergan again: It [the set of operations?] provides the phantasms for the understanding. It gives an image, a sensible presentation. And just as you understand any other image, so you understand this one. That’s what the mathematician is doing; you don’t solve mathematical problems in your head, you write them down. And the same is true of cognitional theory; you need these phantasms, these structures.

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The conversation then turns to education, which was an initial interest of Morfin in the interview and adds a useful aspect of our question. Morfin: ‘So coming back to the process of education, the trick is to make the person aware of his operations through questions?’ Lonergan: ‘Well, up to a point. Because the philosophical problems arise, because children learn to talk. But they have no idea of the operations they are performing when they speak, and they’re given simple solutions if they ask any questions: how do you know it’s real? take a look!’ Morfin: ‘You can be very aware of your operations, but if you don’t use your operations you won’t learn …’ Lonergan: ‘In discovering them you learn a lot. No, I think it’s good to put these questions to children, and so on, but don’t keep insisting on it, if they’re not following you – they’re trying to become aware of them. Because it takes time; you have to be able to use words in a tricky way as symbols, as though they were images; words are standing for something else …’31 With that interview I believe we can see a parallel between the need ‘to use words in a tricky way as symbols’ and Lonergan’s position on description of consciousness as already quoted from his 1956 book. According to the 1981 interview there is no image of the act of insight itself, so there is no insight into insight itself: it is off the stage of intellectual inquiry. Similarly, in the 1956 book there is no image of consciousness as experience. So it cannot even be described, for description is an intellectual act and supposes some sort of insight: consciousness as experience is also off the stage of intellectual inquiry. There is likewise a parallel with the position of Method on knowledge of ‘the divine’: ‘the possibility of insight is achieved by linguistic feed-back, by expressing the subjective experience in words.’ So in all three cases there is a kind of end-run around the obstacle. For insight into insight we follow the example of the mathematicians, who have no insight into infinity or into the square root of two but understand the operations by which we get those numbers. Similarly, by setting up linguistic symbols for cognitional operations and understanding these symbols in their relationships to one another, we achieve a kind of substitute understanding of insight itself. The same procedure is invoked in Method for insight into religious experience. And De constitutione Christi has a parallel solution to the problem for consciousness: by 31 This discussion of insight into insight was rather incidental to the main purpose of the interview, which happens also to give us important statements on education, on economics, and on the role of policy in Christian life.

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understanding and conceiving the operations of method, in which formed experience or consciousness is given and can be described, we can, as it were, ‘un-form’ those operations and so get back to ‘ipsam experientiam stricte dictam.’ It is indicated, not described. So is there or is there not insight into insight? In the strictest sense of ‘insight,’ the answer is no: insight in the strict sense is insight into phantasm, and there is no phantasm of insight itself. There is a helpful parallel in regard to the possibilities of experience: we have experience of phantasms, experience of inquiry, experience of understanding, but we have no experience of experience. The very phrase heads to absurdity: if there is experience of experience, then there is experience of the experience of experience, and so on in a process to infinity – and not an infinity to which we move in a step by step process but an infinity of simultaneous experiencing. The mind boggles. Nevertheless there is a phantasm that can be called a phantasm at one remove from a phantasm of insight, yielding therefore at one remove an insight into insight. Is it legitimate on that basis to speak of insight into insight? In a schematic presentation that collapses the factors in cognitional theory, perhaps one may speak of this as insight into insight in a broad and transferred sense.32 I have given what will seem a disproportionate amount of space to the question of insight into insight. But the question raised is most important for Lonergan studies. It takes us deep into an aspect of his cognitional theory that so far as I know has not been studied. In any case the excursus was necessary in order to show why in Lonergan’s final position there is no phenomenology of insight as such, but only of the operations by which we strive to attain insight. One question yet remains. How do we explain Lonergan’s own history in this matter? How could he write so unconcernedly in 1954 of insight into insight, in oversight of his later realization that there is only a round-about path to such an understanding? There are general considerations that have their place here. For one thing, there is a time lag in the occurrence of questions. The mind does not send up objections and warning signals as soon as a novel idea

32 On Thursday, 29 March 2001, shortly before the initial version of this essay appeared in print, Crowe presented a summary of it for the graduate seminar of the Lonergan Research Institute at Regis College, Toronto. He supplemented his presentation with a one-page chart that diagrammatically portrayed the problem of insight into insight and the solution of that problem. That chart is inserted here as figure 1. (Ed.)

92 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Studies Figure 1 The problem of insight into insight, and its solution (Crowe, 29 March 2001) (1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

(6)

insight is insight into phantasm and we have no phantasm of insight

so what do you do? you set up linguistic dummies – you name the operations

you use the names as symbols for the operations

you relate the symbols to one another: inquiry follows

this creates a phantasm of the set of symbols, and so the possibility of insight into the set

insight into the set of symbols gives insight by proxy

(7)

(8)

(9)

(10)

(11)

(12)

experience, nameless and unformed

experience named and formed: e.g., image inquiry insight

names are used as symbols for image inquiry insight: this is the creative step in the process

the symbols are related to one another, giving a phantasm

the phantasm created by symbols is understood

understanding of symbols gives understanding by proxy of insight (insight into insight) and other data of consciousness

(13)

(14)

(15)

(16)

(17)

(18)

‘INSIGHT’ >>

INSIGHT (by proxy) !! INQUIRY (by proxy) !! IMAGE (by proxy) !!

Ĺ ? [insight] ?

insight

‘insight’

‘insight’

Ĺ ? [inquiry] ?

inquiry

‘inquiry’

‘inquiry’

‘INQUIRY’ >>

Ĺ ? [image] ?

image

‘image’

‘image’

‘IMAGE’ >>

Notes: Boxes 1 to 6 are more or less quotations from Lonergan on the problem and its solution. Boxes 7 to 12 are schematic versions of those quotations. Boxes 13 to 18 go more into graphics. Brackets in a box mean we don’t yet have names for the operations; the question marks reinforce that point. The shading there means that the whole area is nameless and unformed. The quotation marks in boxes 15 to 17 mean we are dealing with symbols there. The arrows in box 16 mean we are relating the operations to one another. The change from lower case to caps means eureka, we have understood. The sign ‘>>’ means our understanding is transitive by proxy from symbols to data of consciousness. The exclamation marks mean we have succeeded in our end run around the problem.

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is proposed: it is not a computer that beeps a reprimand at you as soon as you make a mistake. The advance is dialectical, in personal growth as well as in history. This is especially the case when the novel idea is as engrossing as the discovery in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas of insight into phantasm. In another context Lonergan traced over some centuries such a dialectical history in his study ‘The Form of Speculative Development.’ Somewhat simplified, it runs through the following steps. Discovery of a specific solution to a question and the tendency to make it the whole explanation, with oversight of the generic; then discovery of the generic and the tendency in turn to make it the whole explanation, with neglect of the specific; finally, the synthesis of specific and generic in an adequate solution.33 Some such pattern is perhaps involved in Lonergan’s history regarding insight into insight. I therefore suggest the following scenario for the development of his thought. First, the discovery and retrieval of insight into phantasm as set forth in Verbum must have been an intellectual thrill of a high order, easily accounting for the absence at first of further questions that might nuance the discovery. Insight was mind-boggling enough in itself, and to speak of insight into insight would be a distinct further step with its own time lag. I am not so rash as to say the phrase does not occur in the earlier Lonergan, but at least it does not occur where we might well expect it, namely, when he critiques a modern rendering of noƝsis noƝseǀs as ‘thinking thought’ and adduces instead with approval the medieval rendering: ‘intelligentia intelligentiae.’34 Here surely would 33 ‘Gratia operans,’ in Grace and Freedom (2000), chapter II-1, ‘The Form of the Development,’ 162–92. This dialectical sequence is illuminated years later in Method in Theology by Lonergan’s concept of sublation. 34 Verbum 196. For dating this passage recall that Verbum was originally five articles published in Theological Studies over a period of three years, from 1946 to 1949. The last article, in which this point occurs, was written in the summer of 1949: see my mini-essay ‘The Date of “For a New Political Economy”’ in Bernard Lonergan, For a New Political Economy 319–24. Another statement verging on our question is the following, Verbum 69: ‘this principle [of noncontradiction] does not arise from an insight into sensible data but from the nature of intelligence as such.’ A principle that does not arise from insight into sensible data but from the nature of intelligence as such could well be the radical initial breakthrough on this whole question, but the mediating statement that there is no phantasm for ‘the nature of intelligence as such’ is missing. See also ibid. 69–70: ‘that principle is the natural law of the procession of any concept from intelligence in act …’

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have been the place to speak of insight into insight, had that concept been an explicit part of his mental vocabulary at the time (1949 for this final instalment). While writing Insight, however, in the four years between 1949 and 1953, he dealt over and over with instances of insight: insight in mathematics, insight in science, insight in common sense, and so on. So that when in 1954 his publisher challenged him to write a new Preface the thought very naturally occurred to him: ‘Well, there is insight into everything else, so obviously there is insight into insight as well, and that could describe the overall purpose of the book.’ This is a new insight that he accordingly incorporated into the Preface, still without adverting to the problem latent in his usage. Meanwhile, the phrases ‘understand what it is to understand’ (the slogan in the Introduction, 1953), ‘understanding understanding’ (the reference to Hegel, 1956), and God’s ‘understanding understanding’ (chapter 19, probably 1953) occur without full integration into the general pattern. Of course, there is no denying the force of that slogan of 1953 (‘understand what it is to understand’),35 or of the 1954 statement on the aim of the book (‘to convey an insight into insight’). However, these points could easily occur to Lonergan without his adverting to further questions, as a good summary of what he had been doing through eight hundred pages. To see the problem of insight into insight is, therefore, a further step – one, however, that was bound to occur and one that Lonergan began to take in his 1956 volume with his remark ‘experientia non describitur.’ This movement accelerates. A year later the problem had clearly become pressing, though not yet clearly formulated, when in the 1957 lectures at Boston College he spoke of insight as an elusive thing and of its phenomenology as bringing us into an entirely different world. When did the problem find its clear formulation and adequate solution? The data at hand to me do not determine the answer: we are reduced to guessing, and one tiny date in the archival material could overturn all our guesses. Perhaps the sketch of a solution to a similar problem in the Method text of 1971 indicates some clarity at that time on the general problem as well and not just a solution of a particular

35 To be noted: understanding understanding is not quite the same as insight into insight. We do not say that God has insight, for that at once suggests insight into phantasm, which is the human way of understanding; but we say God has understanding, in a sense analogous to the understanding angels have and by a further step analogous to the understanding we have.

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problem, or it may merely illustrate the fact that sometimes a problem is only seen clearly when the solution emerges. In any case, both problem and solution were finally clarified at the time of the 1981 interview with Luis Morfin. I cannot conclude this section without stating again my belief that it dealt with a question that is most fundamental, both in the history of Lonergan’s own thinking and in the door it opens to new work that would carry forward his great discovery of insight. And I may be pardoned for insisting (as I have done for many years to a perhaps tiresome degree) that all large overviews of Lonergan and all attempts to locate him in grand historical panoramas, however necessary they be, are bound to be flawed to the extent that they must forgo patient attention to myriad particular details. 4 Reflective Insight and Phenomenology My procedure in this part follows the pattern of the second and third sections above, but abbreviated into one section: first to do what can be done, then (more briefly this time!) to give some account of what cannot be done and why. And as before, what cannot be done, at least on Lonergan’s principles, is a phenomenology of the ‘is’ itself of judgment; but what could be done, I suggest, is a phenomenology of the process toward the ‘is’ of judgment. To that end I will first list the main elements in the process, then indicate the process in three illustrative examples, and finally indicate the reason we cannot write a phenomenology of the ‘is’ itself . The main elements in the process, the operations by which we attain reflective insight and are able to pronounce the ‘is’ of judgment, are a complex set with great diversity. A simple listing would include the following: sense experience in all its variety, perception, free and schematic images, memory, data of consciousness as well as data of sense, the simple inquiry of wondering what (quid) something is, insight on that question and an idea about it, the expression of the idea in concepts or definition, the coalescence of several concepts, formation of hypotheses and theories, critical inquiry whether the theory is right, the judgment that something is as we conceived it, and so on. It is all of these, and not in an orderly march from sensing to judging, but in various and somewhat chaotic and sometimes conflicting activities: in checking sensation, in reasoning and the development of an idea, in the dialectical interplay of sense, memory, imagination, insight,

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definition, in derivation of conclusions from principles, in the stipulations of logic for clarity, coherence, and rigor, in reason returning from the synthesis of intelligibilities to its origin in sense and in naturally known principles, in critical reflection on one’s ideas, in advertence to the context of the inquiry, in habitual judgments from the past, in looking forward to a projected judgment, in the calling up of alternative judgments, in the plethora of possibilities that multiply with the acumen of the inquirer. Thus, in order to judge ‘… intelligence must reach the reflective act that terminates a sweep through all relevant evidence, past as well as present, sensible as well as intellectual, to grasp the sufficiency of the evidence for the judgment,’ to issue finally in that little two-letter word that has been the object of our search from the start: It is; it is so; that is the truth of the matter.36 The foregoing may make the task of judgment seem so formidable that we will wish to retreat into our private worlds where we can allow fantasy to substitute for judgment. But really the situation is not so desperate. We have been learning since infancy. Many judgments are now habitual and take care of routine activities throughout the day. It is an exception when we have to form a new judgment in unfamiliar territory, and then we may find that in fact we naturally engage in many or all of the procedures listed above. Against that background I turn to the process of making a concrete judgment of fact. As stated already there cannot on Lonergan’s principles be a phenomenology of reflective insight, but that leaves open the possibility of a phenomenology of the search for judgment and of the process by which one arrives at judgment. I will try to illustrate that process in three typical concrete judgments of fact. As in the second section, I will be working at one remove from a true phenomenology. There is again in this section an immediate practical problem of choosing samples. Judgments are not a dime a dozen: they are much 36 Verbum 194. See also ibid. 201: ‘Finally, by a reflective act of understanding that sweeps through all relevant data, sensible and intelligible, present and remembered, and grasps understanding’s proportion to the universe as well, there is uttered the existential judgment through which one knows concrete reality.’ My list of the activities involved in judging was pieced together from various loci in Verbum that describe the process: for example, 61, 71, 77, 150, 153, 194, 201, 242–43. And see Topics in Education 86: ‘… when one is making a judgment, one’s imagination runs through all the possibilities, and memory recalls all the facts, that might contradict the judgment one is thinking of making.’

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more dearly bought. Still, in concrete judgments of fact they are legion; some suit my purpose, but most do not. I need sample judgments that can be handled in a single part of a single article, samples that are open to examination by my readers. In dealing with direct insight I was able to retreat from the muddy garden of the botanist to a sort of armchair study of a problem in geometry. Not so here: concrete judgments can never avoid some such inconvenience as the muddy garden. Still, perhaps we can circumvent the problem by examining manageable judgments that have actually been made and examining the process that led to them. That is my strategy in the three samples I will adduce. Two of them come from historical authors. They were not written for my purpose but in my view serve it well. The third is a case of my own construction. The first case is Newman’s account of our assent to the concrete judgment of fact that Great Britain is an island. His first paragraph sets forth our certitude on the proposition, to conclude with the question: ‘[A]re the arguments producible for it … commensurate with this overpowering certitude about it?’ His second paragraph gives some of the arguments producible: [W]e have been so taught in our childhood, and it is so in all the maps; next, we have never heard it contradicted or questioned; on the contrary, every one whom we have heard speak on the subject of Great Britain, every book we have read, invariably took it for granted; our whole national history, the routine transactions and current events of the country, our social and commercial system, our political relations with foreigners, imply it in one way or another …’

And Newman goes on to evaluate these and other arguments.37 This is really an account of Newman’s study of the data in his own memory or at hand to him, data on a process in rational consciousness. It is, I think, a helpful indication of what a full phenomenology of rational consciousness might be. 37 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, edited with introduction and notes by Ian Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) 191–92. Seven times in his Grammar of Assent Newman refers to the judgment that Great Britain is an island: pp. 124, 125, 128, 130, 139–40, 191–92, and 206. Note that it is only one of three examples Newman gives, albeit a favorite. [The others are (1) that Father Hardouin’s claim that Terence’s plays, Virgil’s Aeneid, Horace’s Odes, and the Histories of Livy and Tacitus were the forgeries of the monks of the thirteenth century is false, and (2) that I in my own particular case shall die. (Ed.)]

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My second example is a case created by Lonergan. In the Halifax lectures of 195838 he concedes that the whole first part of Insight could be described as concerned with a phenomenology of knowledge, and he seems to apply this especially to his fictional account of a concrete judgment of fact (the now famous ‘Something happened!’) in chapter 10 of that book. The concession is hedged and possibly the difficulties raised in the 1957 lectures are operative here, but I believe we can take that account as an example of an at least incipient phenomenology of judgment of rational consciousness. Suppose a man to return from work to his tidy home and to find the windows smashed, smoke in the air, and water on the floor. Suppose him to make the extremely restrained judgment of fact, ‘Something happened.’ The question is, not whether he was right, but how he reached his affirmation.39

Newman’s concern was with the arguments producible for his certitude. Lonergan’s concern was similar, how his worker reached his affirmation. The factors involved are ‘two sets of data: the remembered data of his home as he left it in the morning; the present data of his home as he finds it in the evening.’ Similar too, though in different terms, are the final steps of judgment, Newman with his illative sense, Lonergan with his virtually unconditioned. But we need not go into areas that would take us beyond phenomenology; our purpose in adducing these two examples has been served sufficiently. My third example, a judgment of my own, has a motivation in the doctrine (Vico’s, I believe) that we understand only what we make. I will therefore use a judgment that I myself have created here and now in the writing of this essay, namely, that my third section above is a probably true and accurate account of a phase in Lonergan’s history. My judgment on that was, of course, implicit in my including that section in this essay and offering it to the reading public, but now I make it formally explicit and describe the process by which I arrived at it. The process began in earnest when I listened to the Morfin tape, with the vague general curiosity of seeing what it contained. My vague general curiosity became precise and particular on noticing Lonergan’s posing of the problem that there is no phantasm of insight and so no 38 Understanding and Being 271 (on the whole first part) and 305 (on chapter 10). 39 Insight 306–307.

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insight into insight, and his solution to the problem through the use of linguistic symbols. I inserted a very brief note on the problem in the Lonergan Studies Newsletter,40 but it did not seem to spark any interest. Perhaps none was to be expected, given that for some years Lonergan himself could speak of insight into insight without sensing the problem latent there. My own interest, however, grew apace. In working with the editors of Phenomenology and Logic I was struck again by the passages I quoted above showing Lonergan to be wrestling with the problem of insight into insight. I had already been puzzled by the Verbum statement that the principle of noncontradiction does not arise from an insight into sensible data but from the nature of intelligence as such,41 puzzled also by the Method passage on projection, and now I noticed the relevance of the short statement in the 1956 book De constitutione Christi ontologica et psychologica, ‘experientia non describitur sed indicatur.’ Here I note the element of luck that is so often a factor in research: I happened to be working on the publication of the 1956 book when the present question was in the forefront of my mind, otherwise I would not have adverted to the relevance and importance of that innocent-looking sentence. The sticky passages were, of course, the references in the Preface of Insight to insight into insight, especially the passage describing the aim of the book to be just to convey that insight. How did Lonergan get from that position to the position of the 1981 interview? It was clear that I would have to go foraging for data in a wide area of research. I began to collect these data and to pay close attention to the dates of the passages collected. An early and quite basic step was advertence to the fact that I could not assign the book Insight one single date. The relevant passages turn out to have three different dates: 1953 (most likely) for the slogan and the passages from chapter 19; 1954 for the published Preface; and 1956 for the comparison with Hegel. There was also the pre-history of the question to be studied in Verbum: a statement that at first simply puzzled me seemed now to portend the question made explicit only later. Likewise there was the history subsequent to the central block of data (Insight, the 1956 Christology book, and the 1957 lectures), namely, the Method footnote with its clear anticipation of the Morfin interview. 40 See Lonergan Studies Newsletter 18/2 (1997) 17. 41 Verbum 69; see also 47.

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There was no steady forward progress in this history, but rather a great number of corrections and reversals and new starts. Thus, my essay was well on its way when I recalled the relevant passage in Verbum and tried to integrate it into the picture. Again, the passages on insight into insight in the new Preface of Insight so took possession of me that for a time I quite overlooked the passage on Hegel and the statements of chapter 19 on the divine understanding of understanding. I was likewise hazy on the relative location in history of the new Preface, the 1956 book, and the 1957 lectures. The dates had to be pinned down; there was fortunately correspondence that settled some of them and in fact revealed errors in my earlier dating. And so on and on. I need not detail all the steps in the process and may come rather to some general reflections on how such a judgment is formed. I speak of ‘judgment,’ using the singular. True, it is a single judgment in the sense that it is matter of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the whole history as a unit. But the process on the way to that ‘yes’ or ‘no’ is a matter of many particular judgments on many little questions. It is a matter of ascertaining the dates of particular statements of Lonergan and trying to estimate their importance in the ongoing history. It is a process of correcting dates erroneously assigned, adding new data to the hopper, and modifying first impressions. The self-correcting process is not just a nuisance, it is a built-in positive and essential part of the process. If the process I described seems quite disorderly, that is very much to the point. Order is the result of correcting multiple disorders. In fact, on reflecting now on the whole process I see that it bears a close resemblance to the one Lonergan described at the end of his Verbum book. He is speaking of discovering what Aquinas meant. Some, he says, may feel that they know that already. But suppose that one doesn’t know. Then one has to learn. Only by the slow, repetitious, circular labor of going over and over the data, by catching here a little insight and there another, by following through false leads and profiting from many mistakes, by continuous adjustments and cumulative changes of one’s initial suppositions and perspectives and concepts can one hope to attain such a development of one’s own understanding as to hope to understand what Aquinas understood and meant.42

42 Ibid. 223.

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That much quoted passage, I submit, is a paradigm for interpreters and historians. It certainly describes what I did to write the little piece of history I have in my third section. I come to my final point. I have been writing prolegomena to a phenomenology of insight – in this fourth section, a phenomenology of reflective insight. I have said that a phenomenology of reflective insight is on principle impossible, and I must explain that. The situation is parallel to that of my third section, but the obstacle to a phenomenology is quite different. The impossibility on the level of direct insight comes from below: there is no phantasm of insight. But the impossibility on the level of reflective insight comes from above: there is no intuition of being, no understanding of the word ‘is’ in itself but only in its causes. We do not know existence intuitively. We come only discursively to posit existence: our knowledge of the existence of something is our knowledge of the truth of the proposition that that thing is. This applies with special force to our knowledge of God: ‘our knowledge of God’s existence is just our knowledge of the truth of the judgment “Deus est.”’43 But it is true not only of our knowledge of Being, but also of the knowledge we have of any being. As the first quotation from Lonergan in this essay put it, rational consciousness goes through the process of asking ‘Is it so?’ and of grasping the virtually unconditioned, and then on the basis of that absolute making our affirmation and taking our affirmation as the medium in quo cognoscitur ens. That is a quite fundamental point in Lonergan’s cognitional theory, but this is not the place to rehash old controversies. Lonergan’s plea for a phenomenology of rational consciousness awaits a full and proper answer. My hope is that my essay may spur phenomenologists familiar with his thought to take up the challenge.

43 Ibid. 21.

Chapter 7

Objectivity versus Projection in Lonergan1

The title of this essay may lead readers to expect a study of Lonergan in the context of and in comparison with the thought of Feuerbach, and indeed the essay was occasioned by a remark I read recently – I forget where, and it doesn’t really matter, for the position it exemplified is so widely accepted – to the effect that Feuerbach once for all destroyed the illusion of objectivity in our statements about God. Such a comparative study would doubtless be of interest, but I could claim some competence in only one side of it. In any case, the term ‘projection’ has a wider application, for it entered Lonergan studies quite independently of Feuerbach soon after the appearance of Insight. There seemed, therefore, to be reason for a separate study from Lonergan’s side alone of objectivity and projection. Projection, however, is not really a Lonergan term; and though it is in the background in most of this essay, it will serve rather as a kind of hidden foil to limit my study than as a theme for direct exposition. Some such limiting principle is needed, for objectivity in its full extent is rather a big chunk to bite off in one article. I should add, as a further limitation, that my purpose is expository rather than argumentative. My question is simply this: What is Lonergan’s position on objectivity insofar as it might seem to impinge upon the theme of projection? A final preliminary note: the exposition will be historical rather than thematic, gathering and ordering the data according to chronology.

1 Previously published in the International Philosophical Quarterly 40 (2000) 327–38.

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1 The Verbum Articles, 1946–49 I start my historical survey with a work that is apt to be overlooked in this matter: the Verbum articles, published as a series in 1946–49 and republished in book form in 1967, with a second edition in 1997.2 While the present question did not enter the discussion back in 1946, the questions raised at that time have direct relevance for it. The thrust of the articles was to argue for an intellectualism as opposed to a conceptualism. The latter deals with objects of thought: concepts, judgments, inferences; the former goes back behind these objects to the fertile insights that produced them. The contrast is between the fertility of the intellectual and the barrenness of the conceptual, and it lies behind any discussion of objectivity in Lonergan. Now insights are primarily a perfection of the human mind, an instance of knowledge by identity before being objectified in the inner word of concepts, judgments, and inferences. This is an Aristotelian principle accepted by Thomas Aquinas and Lonergan: ‘In his enim quae sunt sine materia, idem est intellectus et quod intelligitur.’3 Human knowing begins, then, with a subjective perfection, which, however, expresses itself through an emanatio intelligibilis (intelligible emanation) in an inner word. The difference can be put in terms of confrontation and identity, as is done in summary fashion in the concluding pages of the Verbum study. There are two radically opposed views of knowing. For the Platonist, knowing is primarily a confrontation … For the Aristotelian … confrontation is secondary. Primarily and essentially, knowing is perfection, act,

2 Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St Thomas Aquinas,’ Theological Studies 7 (1946) 349–92; 8 (1947) 35–79, 404–44; 10 (1949) 3–40, 359–93. Published as a book, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967); hereafter Verbum, 2nd ed., vol. 2 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). My references will be to the 2nd edition, but the dating must be understood to be 1946–49. 3 ‘For in those things which have no matter in their composition, understanding is identical with what is understood.’ The Latin is that of the translation used by Thomas to study Aristotle’s De anima (book 3, chapter 4, 430a 3); Thomas’s commentary: In III De anima, lect. 9, # 724 (Pirotta ed.). The text occurs in different form in the Metaphysics (book 12, chapter 9, 1075a 3); Thomas’s commentary: In XII Metaphy., lect. 11, # 2620 (Cathala ed.). It occurs in Thomas’s independent writings in Summa theologiae, 1, q. 14, aa. 2, 4. Lonergan quotes it in Verbum 46, 83–84, 193; also in Understanding and Being (1990) 238, 241. The principle enunciated for ‘those things which have no matter in their composition’ applies also to the identity of sensing and the sensed.

104 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Studies identity. Sense in act is the sensible in act. Intellect in act is the intelligible in act. In this material world, of course, besides the knower in act and the known in act, there are also the knower in potency and the known in potency; and while the former are identical, still the latter are distinct. Nonetheless, potency is not essential to knowing, and therefore distinction is not essential to knowing. It follows that in immaterial substances, as one negates potency, so also one negates distinction: ‘In his quae sunt sine materia, idem est intelligens et intellectum.’ A Platonist subsistent Idea of Being would have to sacrifice immobility to have knowledge; but Aristotle, because he conceived knowing as primarily not confrontation but identity in act, was able to affirm the intelligence in act of his immovable mover.4

The objectivity of knowing was not, therefore, the issue at this time. The focus was on the primary identity of understanding and understood, and on understanding as the fertile source of the inner word of concept, judgment, and inference. Lonergan, however, acknowledged the distinct question of objectivity and brought it into relationship with that of identity. First, he establishes the limits of the identity principle. Aristotelian gnoseology is brilliant but it is not complete: knowledge is by identity; the act of the thing as sensible is the act of sensation; the act of the thing as intelligible is the act of understanding; but the act of the thing as real is the esse naturale of the thing and, except in divine knowledge, that esse is not identical with knowing it.5

Then, he takes up the question of the transition from understanding as a subjective perfection to judgment as achieving objective knowledge: ‘Rational reflection has to bear the weight of the transition from knowledge as a perfection to knowledge as of the other.’6 ‘[T]he problem of knowledge, once it is granted that knowledge is by identity, is  knowledge of the other.’7 ‘Aquinas transposed this appeal [that is, Augustine’s appeal to eternal reasons] … to secure for the Aristotelian

4 5 6 7

Verbum 192–93. Ibid. 83; see also 158–62, and 258–59, note e. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 84.

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theory of knowing by identity the possibility of self-transcendence in finite intellect.’8 What does all this mean for the present question? It means a wider context and the introduction of new factors into the discussion. Before leaping into questions of objectivity, we go back to the origins of cognitional activity and begin to study the broad sweep of the mind at work. Our survey yields two ideas which are not only key factors in the present study, but rank also among Lonergan’s most personal contributions to Thomist studies. There is first the act of insight, of understanding, and this will receive its monumental exposition in a book a few years later (see our next section). Secondly, because insight is an act in which there is identity with what is understood, and so does not yet provide an object of knowledge, there is the expression of the insight through an emanatio intelligibilis, first in the inner word of concept or definition which is an object of thought, then in the inner word of judgment through which we know objective reality. The role of judgment will engage us in a moment, but I wish first to underline the role of intelligible emanation in the production of concepts and definitions. To that end I draw attention to the seemingly innocent phrase recurrent later, ‘insight and formulation.’9 One could say with a bit of exaggeration that this phrase reduces to three words the two hundred and some pages of the Verbum articles, but also without any exaggeration that for the full meaning of the phrase we must go back to those two hundred pages. I felt that this essay must study that beginning, and the present suggestion is that readers of Insight would profit from the same exercise. 8 Ibid. 197. The point is made concisely in Topics in Education 215–16: ‘… if knowledge is merely identity, you are never knowing anything. You have to go beyond that initial identity to reach a knowledge that is of something.’ And see ‘Christology Today: Methodological Reflections,’ in A Third Collection 74–99, at p. 92: ‘For Aristotle coincidence preceded distinction … Today detailed cognitional theory complements this Aristotelian opinion by conceiving human knowledge as a process of objectification.’ Also ‘Consciousness and the Trinity,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964 122–41, at 138: Aristotle’s view ‘is a basic analysis of knowledge, but it doesn’t deal with the problem of objectivity. Analysis of the judgment has to be added.’ 9 For ‘insight and formulation,’ see the indices to Insight: A Study of Human Understanding and to Understanding and Being, under ‘Formulation (vs. insight).’ But there is some variety in the terms used: ‘grasp’ for ‘insight,’ etc.

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But ‘insight and formulation,’ or ‘idea and concept,’ name only the first step in the movement from identity to fully objective knowledge. In this first step we have reached the object as it is in thought, not as it is in reality, and though the epistemology of the transition from object of thought to object of affirmation in judgment is explicitly considered in the Verbum articles, that is not their focal point. As for the word ‘projection,’ it does not occur in these articles except in reference to anachronistic projection of present usage on the past. 2 Immanent vs Projected Intelligibility The Verbum articles were followed a few years later by the book Insight, which sets up in its central chapters Lonergan’s basic philosophic positions.10 These I shall come to in our third section. Meanwhile, however, I would consider a sweeping objection to the general position of the book, applicable especially to its early chapters, in any case one that brought the term ‘projection’ into the Lonergan literature. It was raised by a reviewer of the book, who states what he would consider ‘to be the characteristic feature of his [Lonergan’s] entire study; namely, the absence of a distinction between those intelligibilities immanent in the  objects and patterns of experience, and those intelligibilities projected by the knower into objects and patterns of experience.’11 Attention to that objection will serve to bring out further aspects of Lonergan’s Verbum doctrine, for these ‘intelligibilities’ are what is grasped in the act of insight and expressed in the inner word. But now we have to attend to the total cognitional process by which we arrive at an item of knowledge. This involves three levels: experience, understanding, judgment. On the first level, that of experience,

10 Chapters 11 to 14 contain the key elements for those basic philosophic positions. For Lonergan’s own views, expressed twenty years later, on the structure of the book, and how additions came to be made to the core chapters, see his 1973 paper ‘Insight Revisited,’ in A Second Collection 263–78; the ‘twenty years’ is based on his remark, ibid. 268: ‘I worked at Insight from 1949 to 1953.’ 11 James Albertson, The Modern Schoolman 35 (1957–58) 236–44, at 238. This position was adopted a few years later by Edward MacKinnon, in the third of three articles, ‘Understanding according to Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J.,’ The Thomist 28/4 (1964) 475–522, at 512 (see also 488): ‘First, a point we have repeatedly stressed, he has not adequately distinguished between intrinsic and projected intelligibility.’ Albertson’s question was raised also at the Halifax lectures of 1958 and responded to by Lonergan; see Understanding and Being 335–37.

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there are the data, the given, sights and sounds and so forth, that fall on our senses as they do on the senses of brute animals. But, except perhaps in early infancy, insights arise not from the brute data but from the data as received into the imagination, as enriched there by memory, above all as processed through the creative role of free images. The role of free images marks the crucial difference between us and the brute animals. It is because we can, as it were, shuffle the data, turn them this way and that, add some from the mind’s store, discard others, that we can discover intelligibilities and rise to the second level of cognitional process. Stare at a triangle as long as you please, and you will not be any nearer seeing that its three angles must equal two right angles. But through the vertex draw a line parallel to the base, and the equality of alternate angles ends the matter at once. The act of understanding leaps forth when the sensible data are in a suitable constellation.12

Now this second level has two properties. First, all intelligibility is immanent in ‘the objects and patterns of experience.’ But secondly, all intelligibility emerges in the human mind, as the result of the mind working on experience. No intelligibility as such, then, yields knowledge of reality. Every intelligibility is in a first moment just an idea and needs verification in the original hard data served up by the senses. When the ‘act of understanding leaps forth’ we have come a long way from the original sense data, and we must go back to those brute data to ascertain whether the intelligibility we have ‘discovered’ is really their explanation and not just the intelligibility of an idea forged in the mind. Of course, we don’t shelve our intelligence in that return. We devise experiments to aid the process of verification, and so on. But our return is so far from being a projection that we are expressly concerned that it not be a projection, we devise experiments precisely to avoid projecting our idea on unwilling data, and we are satisfied with nothing less than the absolute character of ‘is’ in our search for the truth. The absolute character of the affirmation is not invalidated by a content that is only probable, as when we say, ‘It is probable that …’ Finally, with that ‘is’ posited absolutely we are on the third cognitional level, that of judgment, of affirmation, of truth, of knowledge, of objectivity in the sense 12 Verbum 27–28. On free images, see Insight 299. A longer description of the difference on this point between a brute animal and a human being is given in Understanding and Being 313–15, under the section heading ‘“Insight” in Apes.’

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intended in the title of this essay; and so we have come to a topic that should be considered in a separate section. 3 The ‘Is’ of Affirmation Let us take stock of the results attained. We begin the life of the mind on the level of experience, with brute data, proceeding through perception to data as processed in the creativity of free images, and so arrive on the second cognitional level at an ‘insight into phantasm,’ an idea. Ideas may multiply, and many of them will be wrong: ‘Insights are a dime a dozen,’ according to Lonergan.13 We therefore need to advance to the third cognitional level, testing our insights in an act of judgment – a reflective act, Lonergan says, that ‘reviews not only imagination but also sense experience, and direct acts of understanding, and definitions, to find in all taken together the sufficient ground or evidence for a judgment.’14 With true judgment we know not only the object of thought but also the object that is. We have reached objectivity in the key sense of an absolute judgment, the content of which ‘is withdrawn from relativity to the subject that utters it,’ the objectivity in virtue of which ‘our knowing acquires what has been named its publicity,’ that makes it ‘accessible not only to the knower that utters it but also to any other knower.’15 We seem in these simple statements to have all we need for a positive notion of objectivity, and for a contrast with the theory of projection. Yet Lonergan labors throughout four chapters, one of them specifically on objectivity,16 to establish what already seems well enough established. What is he doing there? I would name two points of his campaign that deserve attention in this essay: he disposes of the ogre of an ambiguous ‘real’; and he sets up a new epistemology.

13 ‘Theories of Inquiry: Responses to a Symposium,’ in A Second Collection 33–42, at 36; ‘Method: Trend and Variations,’ in A Third Collection 13–22, at 15. 14 Verbum 61. Ibid. 201: ‘Finally, by a reflective act of understanding that sweeps through all relevant data, sensible and intelligible, present and remembered, and grasps understanding’s proportion to the universe as well, there is uttered the existential judgment through which one knows concrete reality.’ Here, ‘existential judgment’ is used in the Thomist sense of existence. 15 Insight 402. 16 ‘Self-affirmation of the Knower,’ ‘The Notion of Being,’ ‘The Notion of Objectivity,’ ‘The Method of Metaphysics.’ In chapter 13, ‘The Notion of Objectivity,’ the key section for our purposes is the second, ‘Absolute Objectivity.’

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The term ‘real’ seems the natural antagonist to any theory of projection, yet its meaning is highly ambiguous, and its role in a study of objectivity is complex. It does not appear in any of the titles of chapters 11 to 14, and in my opinion it need not appear in the positive steps taken in those four chapters. The notion of objectivity contained in the term ‘is’ is just as lethal to projection theories, it is quite sufficient for the positive side of our argument, and it is not ambiguous. (As we shall see presently, I would make a similar claim for the use of ‘real’ and ‘is’ in the argument of chapter 19.) Nevertheless, the term ‘real,’ innocent and valid in its proper sense, keeps intruding with its fatal ambiguity. Why? We have to see how Lonergan exposes and demolishes that ambiguity if we are to maintain peaceful possession of our simple ‘is’ and proceed safely on our epistemological journey. For the critical realist the real is what is known through intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation. Not so on the opposed view. For the materialist, the real is what he knows before he understands or thinks: it is the sensitively integrated object that is reality for a dog; it is the sure and firm-set earth on which I tread, which is so reassuring to the sense of reality.17

It is because of that conflict that the word ‘real’ is a threat to be dealt with. The positive account of objectivity has no need of it at all: the notion of being is quite enough for that. But the notion of being is not enough to deal with conflict on knowledge and objectivity. It is not enough because there is no conflict within being. Being has no alternative, it is all-inclusive; outside being there is nothing. All that is positive in knowledge and objectivity is included in the notion of being. It is only the term ‘real’ that introduces confusion, conflict, and the dilemma on human knowing. From the horns of that dilemma one escapes only through the discovery … that there are two quite different realisms, that there is an incoherent realism, half animal and half human, that poses as a halfway house between materialism and idealism, and on the other hand that there is an intelligent and reasonable realism between which and materialism the halfway house is idealism.18 17 Verbum 33. 18 Insight 22.

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This problem, of the duality of a knowing that is sometimes animal, sometimes human, faced in the very introduction to Insight, haunting the whole book and much of Lonergan’s early writing, is the key to our ‘why?’ of a moment ago. To the question, then, of what these four chapters add to the objectivity reached in any true affirmation, the answer is that in one sense, the sense of positive input, they add nothing, but that in another sense, that of encounter with the ambiguous ‘real,’ they add a defensive strategy. Here, as elsewhere, the best defense is a good offense, and Lonergan’s offense is that of a whole new epistemology. What is that new epistemology? It will be agreed, of course, that it is not a matter of demonstration in logic. My knowledge of Euclid’s theorems is based on premises, as is my knowledge in any of the sciences; but there are no premises that demonstrate my knowledge of my knowing. In ultimate knowing our basis is the dynamism of mind, its need for coherence between itself and what it says about itself. Not therefore a formula that moves us mechanically from first principle to conclusion, but an argument that concludes with the choice of either accepting what Lonergan calls the basic positions or of being involved in incoherence. The basic positions include the following three: ‘[T]he real is the concrete universe of being … [T]he subject becomes known when it affirms itself intelligently and reasonably … [O]bjectivity is conceived as a consequence of intelligent inquiry and critical reflection …’ To contradict one or more of these is to fall into a counterposition.19 The ‘proof’ of the basic positions is the same immanent anankƝ that in chapter 11 forces me to say, ‘I am a knower’ or else fall into incoherence.20 In chapters 13 and following it forces me to take the basic positions on knowing, objectivity, and reality, under pain otherwise of that same incoherence. This is brought home to us by the military metaphor which Lonergan provides when he finally rests his case on knowing, objectivity, and reality. The evidence for a metaphysics, he says, has to be stated in dynamic terms, and the dynamism is not that of logic but that of an existential decision, to which I am brought in the three steps of a breakthrough, an encirclement (or envelopment), and a confinement. The breakthrough is effected in one’s affirmation of oneself as empirically, intelligently, and rationally conscious. The envelopment is effected through 19 Ibid. 413. 20 Ibid. 356.

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the protean notion of being as whatever one intelligently grasps and reasonably affirms. The confinement is effected through the dialectical opposition of twofold notions of the real, of knowing, and of objectivity, so that every attempt to escape is blocked by the awareness that one would be merely substituting some counterposition for a known position, merely deserting the being that can be intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed, merely distorting the consciousness that is not only empirical but also intelligent and not only intelligent but also reasonable.21

Chapter 11 provides the breakthrough, and chapter 12 the encirclement (envelopment). The confinement, the realization that there is no coherent escape from the basic positions, is nailed down in chapter 14.22 Objectivity is ultimately an achievement not of the object but of the subject. 4 Objectivity in Affirmation of God’s Existence The meaning of objectivity in affirmation of God’s existence is the same as it was for objectivity in the universe of proportionate being, namely, the absolute meaning of ‘is.’ ‘The world is’ is objectively true if the world is not just an object of thought but exists, if the world is real. ‘God is’ is objectively true if God is not just an object of thought but exists, if God is real. Further, as in the third section, the positive argument is simple enough, so Lonergan maintains that to make the judgment ‘God

21 Ibid. 508–509. See also 545–46: ‘They [the results of methodical thought] rest on a strategy of breakthrough, encirclement, and confinement. Inquiry and insight, formulation and critical reflection, grasp of the unconditioned and judgment are found to be necessary conditions of our knowing … From this breakthrough there results encirclement, for despite the protean character of the notion of being … there is latent and operative prior to all … determinations, the objective of the detached and disinterested desire to know, the objective to be reached through intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation. Being in this sense is a notion that cannot be controverted … and since it embraces all views and their objects, its acknowledgment is an encirclement. Still … the heuristic notion of being … need not be identified with the real … But at least the antithesis is sharp … and once the subject grasps that, unless he identifies the real with being, his statements are bound to be counterpositions that eventually are due for reversal, confinement has set in.’ 22 Chapter 13 leaves the question open; see the final paragraph, Insight 408: ‘Just as our notion of being does not decide between empiricism and rationalism, positivism and idealism, existentialism and realism … so also our notion of objectivity is equally open.’

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exists’ is not the real difficulty: that lies rather in answering the philosophic objections that may be raised. I do not think it difficult to establish God’s existence. I do think it a lifelong labor to analyze and refute all the objections that philosophers have thought up against the existence of God. But I see no pressing need for every student of religion to penetrate into that labyrinth and then work his way out.23

This section is therefore similar in two ways to our third section. It is similar in everyday commerce: as the simple positing of ‘is’ confers objectivity, known to be objectivity, on hundreds of daily affirmations, so everyone who prays or attributes a cause to the universe, though without constructing a natural theology, affirms or can affirm the existence of God. It is similar in the recondite ways of philosophers: as a new epistemology is needed to deal with objections from the side of cognitional theory, so a whole recondite natural theology is needed to deal with all the objections that can be raised against the existence of God. Further, it was Lonergan’s view that, in the present state of the sciences, the natural theology that is needed has to take a different form. We once argued on the supposition of continuity in the series of causes: from the lowest through the middlemost to the highest, ending with Aristotle’s prime mover or, in theist thinking, with God. But that continuity is now abandoned by science. What we have is instead correlation based on data, and there are no data on steps that take us beyond this world. ‘[T]his new notion of science introduced radically new problems in philosophy. In Aristotelian physics one ascended from the earth to the heavens and beyond the heavens to the first mover. There was no logical break between knowledge of this world and knowledge of ultimate causes.’24 That is no longer the case. Lonergan therefore takes another approach, continuous with his position on knowing-objectivity-reality. He still argues in terms of external causality, but not the causality of Aristotle’s physics, or the causality verifiable in data. W must go behind these notions ‘to their root in a universally applicable principle.’25 That ‘universally applicable principle’ is to be found, as we would expect from Lonergan, in the

23 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Philosophy of God, and Theology,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 157–218, at 208. See also Insight 705. 24 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Belief: Today’s Issue,’ in A Second Collection 87–99, at 95. 25 Insight 675.

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dynamism of the mind, and the clinching point is the incoherence of the opposite position. This is expressed in Insight by saying that ‘fact without explanation is nothing.’ Now the contingent universe exists; it is; that much is factual. But it is merely fact without explanation unless God exists. Next, the merely factual without explanation is nothing. For being is intelligible. What is apart from being is nothing, so what is apart from intelligibility is nothing. Hence to talk about mere matters of fact that admit no explanation is to talk about nothing.26 This is rude and harsh, and one may be tempted to take flight into the counterpositions, to refuse to identify the real with being, confuse objectivity with extroversion, mistake mere experiencing for human knowing. But … the counterpositions bring about their own reversal the moment they claim to be grasped intelligently and affirmed reasonably.27

Here as always we end up with the option: position or counterposition. Questions arise; they have to be faced; here, the question of the intelligibility of the universe as a whole. The question is the one made famous by Leibniz: ‘Why is there something and not rather nothing?’28 One may answer that there is no answer. But if the universe as a whole is not intelligible, then neither is any part of it, and to seek intelligibility by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation is a fool’s errand. 26 Ibid. 675–80, where it is asserted passim and in various ways that fact without explanation is nothing. 27 Ibid. 675. 28 ‘Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?’ Quoted on a frontispiece of Heidegger’s Existence and Being (London: Vision Press, 1949) vii. Werner Brock, ibid. 238, identifies the source: ‘the question which the aged Leibniz once advanced in one of his last works, the essay entitled “Principes de la nature et de la grâce fondées en raison” (# 7).’ Lonergan asks the question, ‘Why should there be anything at all?’ in Understanding and Being 244, in the context of the difference between metaphysics and the empirical sciences. It occurs again ten years later in the lecture at the University of Chicago Divinity School [30 March 1967], ‘The General Character of the Natural Theology of Insight.’ A reportatio (our only source) shows the context to be the same: the difference between metaphysics and the empirical sciences. In the latter ‘one event or existence can be accounted for by appealing to other events or existences. But no attempt is made or can be made to meet the questions, Why does anything exist? Why does anything occur?’ [The lecture, under the same title that Crowe mentions, is now published in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 3–9. Crowe’s quoted text occurs on 9.]

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The ogre of the ‘real’ returns here with redoubled fury, for Lonergan throws his argument into logical form as follows. ‘If the real is completely intelligible, God exists. But the real is completely intelligible. Therefore, God exists.’29 Again, as in the third section, I believe it would be possible to conduct the whole positive argument without mention of the real, simply in terms of being, and it would be extremely interesting to do so, at least as a thought-experiment. But there is no need to go through all that again. 5 The Later Lonergan Several clarifications of Lonergan’s views on objectivity belong to what we may call the Method period of his life.30 Here are a few that are directly relevant to our topic. First, there is his view of the sense in which God is an object, and of the sense in which God is not an object. The latter is the sense given by etymology, which varies slightly in different languages, but in all cases ‘connotes something sensible, localized, locally related presumably to a spectator or sensitive subject.’31 Kant does not break away from this etymological meaning, nor do logical positivism and other isms of the kind. Lonergan agrees that God is not and cannot be an object in this sense.32 But there is a second and quite different meaning of the word. ‘On this view, objects are what are intended in questioning and what become better known as our answers to questions become fuller and more accurate.’ Further, our intending is comprehensive. ‘We would know everything about everything … and, in that concrete and comprehensive sense, being … Moreover, it has always been in the context, at least implicit, of this meaning that the question of God and arguments for God’s existence have been presented.’33 It is in this sense that Lonergan himself ascribes objectivity to our affirmations about God. 29 Insight 695. 30 Method in Theology. Lonergan began writing this book in 1965; it was published in 1972. Work on the book is paralleled by the papers of A Second Collection, which start in 1966 and end in 1973; hence, the latter book is a very useful companion to Method in Theology. 31 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Natural Knowledge of God,’ in A Second Collection 117–33, at 121. 32 Ibid. 123. 33 Ibid. 123–24.

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A second point in the later Lonergan regards knowledge of oneself, a case of objectification needing separate consideration. Karl Jaspers ‘would contend that our self-appropriation is indeed an Existenzerhellung, a clarification of the subject’s own reality, but it is not objective knowledge.’ Lonergan readily agrees ‘that self-appropriation occurs through a heightening of consciousness and such a heightening reveals not the subject as object but the subject as subject.’ But he maintains ‘that this heightening of consciousness proceeds to an objectification of the subject, to an intelligent and reasonable affirmation of the subject, and so to a transition from the subject as subject to the subject as object.’34 This is an absolute positing of ‘is’ in regard to the subject as object, and is no more a ‘projection’ than any other affirmation. Thirdly, Method adds the factor of religious and mystical experience. Religious experience is ‘experience of the mystery of love and awe,’35 it ‘provides the origin for inquiry about God,’36 and thus, as subjectivity leads through inquiry to self as object, so intersubjectivity leads through inquiry to God as object of our love and knowledge. Mystical experience is another dimension, in which objectivity disappears in the unity of the worshiper with God: ‘In the ancient mysteries the mystic in a state of ecstasy became divine; and, in the writings of later mystics, experiences with a pantheist implication are not infrequently described.’37 Still, the mystics do not leave the world of objects altogether behind. [W]ithdrawal is for return. Not only can one’s prayer consist in letting lapse all images and thoughts so as to permit God’s gift of his love to absorb one, but also those that pray in that exhausting fashion can cease to pray and think back on their praying. Then they objectify in images and concepts and words both what they have been doing and the God that has been their concern.38

Other developments less germane to our topic may be omitted. For example, the role of authentic subjectivity in reaching genuine objectivity,39 the role of encounter and dialogue in reaching that 34 Method in Theology 262. 35 Ibid. 114; see also 341. 36 Ibid. 341; see Bernard Lonergan, ‘Philosophy of God, and Theology,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 170, 171, 203–208. 37 Method in Theology 59; on mediated immediacy, ibid. 29, 77, 266, 273, 342. 38 Ibid. 342. 39 Ibid. 265, 292, 338.

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authentic subjectivity,40 the focus more on the question of God than on answers (though the answer of Insight is still defended).41 6 Objectivity and ‘Projection’ I have been describing those aspects of Lonergan’s views on objectivity that, as far as I can judge, should be considered by anyone critiquing him from a Feuerbachian viewpoint. But they serve also for interpreting Lonergan’s own critique of Feuerbach, which I have found only once in his work and in so brief a statement that interpretation is especially needed. I will come to that in a moment, but it is important to notice first his acknowledgment of Feuerbach’s positive intention. In the following passage the focus is on Freud, but the evaluation is extended to other critics of religion, Feuerbach among them. [P]sychoanalysis concerns itself with the mental hygiene not only of individuals but also of cultures and civilizations. In this fashion Freudian thought comes to be classed along with the thought of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche. As they did, it too criticizes culture and … religion as a cultural phenomenon. As they did, it too reduces religion to a hidden movement of consciousness that is the source of an illusion and expresses itself in myth. As they did, it too is not content to destroy religion; it has a positive aim and would restore to man what is proper to him but had been displaced and lost in an alien transcendence.42

With that mitigating judgment in the background we may turn to the only locus I know in which Lonergan directly confronts Feuerbach on the present topic. He speaks of ‘a crucial issue’ that is ‘bound to confront anyone who investigates the history of religions on the basis of his personal self-transcendence.’ In that context he deals with Feuerbach in three short paragraphs that I must transcribe in full.

40 Ibid. 247; see also Bernard Lonergan, ‘Philosophy and the Religious Phenomenon,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 391–408, at 402–403. 41 ‘Philosophy of God, and Theology,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 174, 206–208. Also see Method in Theology 101–103; ‘Insight Revisited,’ in A Second Collection 277. On Lonergan’s defense of Insight’s chapter 19, see ‘Philosophy of God, and Theology,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 195: ‘There are proofs for the existence of God. I formulated them as best I could in chapter nineteen in Insight and I’m not repudiating that at all.’ 42 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Sacralization and Secularization,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 261.

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My starting point was our questions and answers, and it probably has not escaped you that such a basis fits in very neatly with Feuerbach’s contention that man’s notion of God is a projection on the sky of idealized human qualities. We seek understanding, and God is all-intelligent; we seek sufficient evidence for our judgments and God is all-knowing; we seek moral excellence and God is goodness and love. I must be content with two observations. First, such seeking is not mere quality but potentiality and finality; and it is potentiality and finality not confined to some category but, on the contrary, scorning any arbitrary burking of questions. Secondly, I note that the word, projection, recalls the cinematic projector and before it the magic lantern. But the slide or film does not experience, does not inquire intelligently, does not judge on the basis of sufficient reason, does not decide freely and responsibly. In brief, a projection does not differ from George Santayana’s animal faith.43

The primary element in Lonergan’s position should be clear and commonly acceptable: he starts from self-study. His specifically different contributions, however, regard what that self is that is discovered, and the relation of that self to the objective universe. Thus, it is important for him that the human self is potentiality and finality, in perpetual pursuit of God and the universe. Repeatedly, and especially in chapter 19 of Insight, he castigates an obscurantism that gives up that pursuit, that refuses to face the questions that arise, and especially the key question why there is something and not nothing. But I think the sharpest point of his critique, the one most directly relevant here, is in the paragraph beginning ‘Secondly.’ To grasp the force of his reference to Santayana, we have only to turn back to an earlier passage in the same paper, ‘A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,’ where we read this exposition. In 1923 George Santayana published a book entitled Skepticism and Animal Faith. The pair were considered opposites with skepticism the lot of an elite and animal faith the lot of the masses. But neither animal faith nor skepticism is compatible with the general dynamics of method: animal faith asks no questions, and skepticism answers none. For me the real alternatives are animal faith and critical philosophy. On the one hand, animal faith is the fate

43 Bernard Lonergan, ‘A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,’ a paper delivered to the International Association for the History of Religions, Winnipeg, 1980, published in A Third Collection 202–23, at 218.

118 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Studies of everyone who learns in childhood to speak his mother tongue, may entertain no doubt about all he believes he knows, but never has found out for himself and in himself just what are the events that come together to constitute human knowledge. On the other hand, in the measure that one finds out for oneself and in oneself just what these events are, one not merely is a critical philosopher but also one successful enough to be liberated, especially from animal faith in some unknowable thing-in-itself.44

Thus, in a confrontation of Lonergan with Feuerbach (or with any other thinker, for that matter) it is essential to get hold of his cognitional theory. For this reason I went back to the Verbum articles for my initial step. It is clear from these that the key event in Lonergan’s cognitional process is a subjective perfection, Aristotle’s act of insight; that a first objectification45 is the emanatio intelligibilis of the inner word; and that the second objectification, also Thomist but not found in Aristotle, is found in the act of judgment, an act in which the one judging transcends self to attain and know objective reality. Within this total cognitional process it is easy to locate the intelligibilities discovered either by science or by common sense. A more difficult question is the epistemology of this cognitional process, but the question has to be faced in a full account of subjectivity and objectivity. Subjectivity cannot be omitted, for we are dealing with the human mind and its intrinsic orientation to being. But there must be acknowledged, on one side, the inadequacy of merely logical process to reach the foundations of knowledge and, on the other, the peculiar nature of Lonergan’s foundational thought, which forces the thinker either to accept the compelling dynamic of our orientation to the real or to lapse into the incoherence of an animal realism. 44 Ibid. 210. 45 Alister E. McGrath, The Making of Modern German Christology: 1750–1990 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994) 68, informs us that George Eliot’s ‘projection’ mistranslates Feuerbach’s ‘Vergegenständlichung,’ which means ‘objectification.’ In that case everything depends on the meaning of ‘objectification,’ the making of an object: does it mean that we constitute an object in thought, or does it mean that we affirm the object to be, that the object is? One is a step in cognitional process; the other is an item of knowledge. Mostly the context will make one’s intention clear. Lonergan’s use of ‘objectification’ has been extensively studied in the doctoral dissertation of Timothy F. Keating, ‘Knowing the Theological Knower: A Genetic and Systematic Study of Bernard Lonergan’s Notion of Objectification,’ University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto, 1980. [Available at the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto.]

Chapter 8

Analogy of Proportion: A Favorite Lonergan Thought-Pattern1

Bernard Lonergan began his Insight with a series of instances of the act of insight or understanding, all of which, he said, ‘are rather remarkable for their banality.’ In defense of this procedure he appealed to the authority of Descartes: mastery in any field ‘is the fruit of a slow and steady accumulation of little insights. Great problems are solved by being broken down into little problems.’2 This simple strategy can be modified and invoked, I would claim, for the study of Lonergan himself. To grasp the full significance of his formidable thought, to see it as a whole and in its parts, to relate it to current ideas, is a daunting task even for those sympathetic to his views. However, accepting via Lonergan the advice of Descartes, it may be possible to deal with lesser problems, and with the accumulation of little insights to find easier access to the wider and deeper view. That defines the underlying objective of this essay on Lonergan’s use of analogy of proportion. It is quite brief, aspiring to no grand encompassing view of Lonergan’s thought. It is only one instance in some possible series of perhaps banal instances. It studies a small point that is separable from the great problems of philosophy and theology. Perhaps, however, as part of an accumulating series of such instances, it may help point the reader beyond the series to a deeper engagement with Lonergan’s thought. But my purpose is not confined to providing a side-light on Lonergan’s thought as a means to closer study. His affection for the analogy of proportion suggests that it has a value in itself, 1 Previously published as ‘Analogy of Proportion: Note on a Favorite Lonergan Thought-Pattern’ in Theoforum 32 (2001) 419–25. 2 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 27.

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and I will also follow that suggestion, arguing that this analogy has its own intrinsic value for promoting creativity and exactitude in our thinking. As a secondary purpose, I hope to convey something of that value. What is ‘analogy of proportion?’ There is an analogy between divine creation and human creation, and there is also an analogy between divine will and human will; but neither one of these is an analogy of proportion. We would, however, affirm an analogy of proportion if we said ‘As divine will is to divine production of creatures, so human will is to human production of human works.’ This, in effect, is what Thomas Aquinas affirms in his Prologue to the Prima secundae,3 and it shows the form of analogy of proportion. Generalized, it says that as a is to b, so c is to d – or, in the notation Lonergan liked to use, a : b :: c : d. A simple concrete use of the form (but not itself an analogy) is found in mathematics when we say that as two is to five, so four is to ten. I say that that illustrates the form of analogy of proportion, but is not itself an analogy. It is rather an identity: there is exactly the same ratio in each case. Analogy, by contrast, affirms partial similarity and partial dissimilarity. Analogy of proportion is a thought-pattern favored by Lonergan, and I propose in this little essay to give a few examples of his use of it, and to add some brief reflections on the rigor of thought that that analogy requires and promotes. Some instances of Lonergan’s use occur in carefully worked out form and in published works; some occur more spontaneously in marginal notations. It will be useful to have examples of both types. An early occurrence of the first type is identified explicitly as a ‘protracted analogy of proportion.’ It connects this analogy with instances of isomorphism between Thomist thought and scientific thought. It says that, as the structure of Thomist thinking is to the matter of his thought, so the structure of scientific thinking is to the matter of scientific thought. This isomorphism or analogy of proportion ‘concentrates on a structural similarity to prescind entirely from the materials that enter into the structures.’ Lonergan believes that ‘material differences are less significant’ when seen within similar structures.4 The analogy is ‘protracted,’ he says. That is, he finds it in several features of the isomorphism. Two of these may be noticed in illustration. One says: ‘the relation of hypothesis to verification is similar to the 3 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1-2, Prologue. 4 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Isomorphism of Thomist and Scientific Thought,’ in Collection (1988) 133–41, at 133. This essay was first published in 1955.

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relation of definition to judgment.’ The other focuses on the functional similarity in the scientist’s need for verification and the Thomist need for judgment. Put into form, as the scientist ‘has to verify his hypotheses because ultimately what counts is what in fact is so,’ so ‘the Thomist has to pass judgment on definitions because ultimately what counts is what God chose to be so.’5 A second occurrence of analogy of proportion penetrates to the divine economy. The question is how to understand the hypostatic union of the God-Man. Lonergan sets forth and rejects a number of analogies that have been offered, and then he presents his own. As by the same act of knowing God knows both what is necessary and what is contingent, and by the same act of willing God wills both what is necessary and what is contingent, so by the same act of being God the Son is what he necessarily is, namely, God, and what he contingently is, namely, a man. We need not  for present purposes go into the argument, objections to it, and Lonergan’s response to the objections. It is enough to have indicated his use of this analogy in its most sublime application. I should, however, take note of his remark that we are not dealing with the merely analogous, since in God to understand, to will, and to be are all one infinite act.6 A third occurrence of this type is the familiar one of the essence– existence relation, where we find a universal analogy of proportion in all finite things. In his 1958 lectures on Insight Lonergan makes the usual distinction between proper understanding and analogous understanding, describes the latter as ‘an understanding of a proportion,’ and affirms that ‘the metaphysician is concerned with the proportion between essences and existences, with the analogy of the series x1/y1, x2/y2, etc., where existences are indicated by the y’s and essences by the x’s.’7 In our model form, x1 is to y1 as x2 is to y2. Besides these published occurrences, which come in steady succession (1955, 1956, 1958), two instances of another type occur in hand-written notes. They are very brief but have special interest as showing how spontaneously Lonergan turned to this form to schematize his thought. One instance of this spontaneous type is found in a letter from Rome, dated 5 May 1954, and so is itself in close sequence with the three

5 Ibid. 133, 134. 6 Bernard Lonergan, The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ 136–37. 7 Bernard Lonergan, Understanding and Being (1990) 201, 202.

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published occurrences of 1955 to 1958.8 In this letter Lonergan had typed a paragraph on the progress of his work (call it paragraph x) starting with the topic sentence ‘The Method of Theology is coming into perspective.’ The paragraph continued with some details: In regard to the Trinity the method meant starting with the ‘imago Dei’ and proceeding to the limit; for the rest it meant the ‘ordo universi.’ ‘From the viewpoint of theology, it is a manifold of unities developing in relation to one another and in relation to God … From the viewpoint of religious experience it is the same relations as lived in a development from elementary intersubjectivity … to intersubjectivity in Christ …’ Lonergan then opened a new paragraph (call it paragraph y) to discuss other matters. Those other matters do not concern us. What does concern us is the fact that at some point before mailing the letter, Lonergan turned back to insert by hand in the narrow space left between paragraphs x and y the following notation: Religious Experience : Theology : Dogma :: Potency : Form : Act

The threefold form of this analogy can also be illustrated by a mathematical parallel: As two is to four and four is to sixteen, so three is to nine and nine is to eighty-one. Thus, by analogy with potency, form, and act, and with the greatest economy of exposition, we have Lonergan’s thinking in 1954 on the relationship of religious experience, theology, and dogma. Another example is impossible to date exactly, except that it is probably prior to the summer of 1953, when Lonergan moved from Toronto to Rome, and it would thus be in chronological sequence with the four just now mentioned. It is found on a scrap of paper used as a bookmark in a Regis College copy of Husserl’s Ideas.9 There are three notations there in Lonergan’s hand. The second reads: eidetic psi : empir psi :: maths : physics

8 Bernard Lonergan, unpublished letter to F. Crowe, 5 May 1954. 9 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson (London: Allen & Unwin, and New York: Macmillan, 1931). Students of Lonergan, and indeed any lover of detective stories, may relish our efforts to date that scrap of paper; on this, see below, the appendix to this essay.

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There is a reference to page 232, and turning to that page we find that Husserl had almost anticipated Lonergan’s cryptic formula. Husserl states his belief that it will become ‘at a time not so very far distant … a commonly accepted conviction that phenomenology (or eidetic psychology) is, methodologically, the basic science for empirical psychology, just as the material … mathematical disciplines … are basic for physics.’10 These five occurrences illustrate the main use of what I have called a favorite Lonergan thought-pattern.11 They suggest the following brief reflections. First, I regard the usage as opening new perspectives in a creative way. While my third example (essence-existence) is more familiar, the first two (Thomas and modern science, the theology of the God-Man) show this creativity in a new illumination of old questions. Secondly, I would see it also as promoting exactitude. In a field where so much of our understanding is only analogous, it is easy to indulge in fancy. Analogy of proportion resists that indulgence, bringing fantasy into relation with reality: What exactly is characteristic of  Thomist thinking, and what exactly is characteristic of modern scientific thinking? Reference to what is characteristic of Thomist thinking broadens the field to the question of Thomism in general and to usages that in fact are currently illustrated by students of Thomas. For example, it is a truism now that genuine Thomism is not simply repeating what Thomas said but doing in our own day what Thomas did in his. In effect it is saying, ‘As Thomas to his time, so we to ours,’ and it forces us to think out more exactly what the milieu was for Thomas and what exactly he did in it, and likewise to think out the corresponding milieu today and ways to work efficaciously within and upon it. 10 Ibid. 232. 11 I add one more occurrence of the analogy because of the peculiar form Lonergan gave it: Experience :: Understanding conception :: Reflection judgment. One can easily find ways to interpret this form in familiar Lonergan language. For example, it might combine two statements, meaning that experience is to understanding as understanding is to reflection, and that experience is to conception as conception is to judgment. The difficulty is in determining whether our interpretation is correct, whether that is what Lonergan is saying in his own private language. The occurrence is found in a chapter of work notes in Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism 197. [The lectures were originally given in 1957.] That Lonergan means this usage to stand in continuity with his regular form is clear from his having just used the regular form on p. 196: subject : habit :: object : act.

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This in turn suggests a range of particular questions that go beyond Thomism. There was a Syllabus of Errors in the mid-1800s. If we were to venture on an analogy of proportion here, it would start, ‘As the Syllabus in the 1800s so in the third millennium …’ what? Formulating that ‘what’ might prove quite profitable. Or, in the political sphere, ‘As the colonial powers to the native peoples in the 1600s and 1700s, so in our day …’ again, what? Though the ‘what’ may be asked independently of the form, still the form puts the question in a new perspective and requires attention to the four members of the analogy in their relationship to one another. I do not wish to leave this question with the innocuous examples I have just given, for I believe the power of this thought-pattern can be brought to bear on more radical matters. And so as my conclusion I propose one application that shows the analogy at work in a less familiar context. One of the most significant features of memory in the womb (the fact of such memory now seems to be accepted) is the continuity of consciousness from womb through birth. Now Christian thinking raises the question of another continuity, namely, between this life and the next, and so a possible analogy of proportion between the two instances: continuity of consciousness before and after birth and continuity of consciousness before and after death. Putting it in an attempt at form: ‘As consciousness is continuous between the unborn child and the delivered child, so it is continuous between this life and the next.’ Is that a meaningful and possible analogy? The answer may be yes or no, or the question may be declared insoluble. At the moment I would maintain only that the form itself of the analogy of proportion readily leads to the question, and raising questions is a very Thomist exercise, worthy of any support our thought-patterns can provide. Appendix: Dating Lonergan’s Notation on Husserl’s Ideas As stated in the text, a scrap of paper used as a bookmark in a Regis College copy of Husserl’s Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology has a notation, in Lonergan’s hand, using the analogy of proportion. In Lonergan’s ever developing thought, dating is generally important but often difficult. The present question is the date of Lonergan’s notation on that scrap of paper. The copy of the book has, inscribed on the fly-leaf, ‘Ad usum Vincentii V. Morrison Prov. Canada Sup.’ That kind of inscription was usual for Canadian Jesuits who acquired books while studying abroad, and with

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high probability it locates Fr Morrison’s acquisition of this copy of Ideas in the years 1932–34 when, a Jesuit of the Upper Canada Province, he was doing doctoral studies in Rome before returning to Canada to teach in the recently established Jesuit college of philosophy in Toronto. The copy in question bears the library stamp of that college along with the book’s accession number 35891, and it has a pocket in the back where borrowings could be recorded on an insert card. A few years later the library began to record borrowings by another system, and the cards recording previous borrowings were mostly scrapped. However, when Mark Morelli was a doctoral student in Toronto in the 1970s, he rescued a good number of these cards from the scrap heap and so provided a very useful mini-list of books Lonergan had borrowed from the library.12 Sometime, therefore, between 1934–35 when Fr Morrison joined the Toronto community and 1956 when he died, his copy (along with the scrap of paper, which has his notation too) was turned over to the community library. Lonergan lived in that community from 1947 to 1953 and again from 1965 to 1975 (less a year 1971–72 at Harvard) and could have borrowed the book at any time in those years after it became a library possession. There are three cards for books by Husserl that Lonergan borrowed from this library. From accession numbers, other names on the cards, and the state of the card itself (much used, little used), one borrowing can be dated with some probability in his 1947–53 Toronto period; the other two, again with some probability, in his 1965–75 Toronto period. But no card has yet been found to indicate when he borrowed Ideas. From personal memories, however, I can state that some years before his death Fr Morrison had moved from academic to pastoral interests. This could have been the occasion for turning his books over to the library. My guess is that that occurred some time prior to 1953, and that in this period Lonergan borrowed Husserl’s Ideas and scribbled on a scrap of paper he found there the analogy of proportion I have quoted above.

12 Now, in 2009, Mark Morelli is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. (Ed.)

Chapter 9

How to Get an Insight, and How Not to1

‘Stare at a triangle as long as you please, and you will not be any nearer seeing that its three angles must equal two right angles. But through the vertex draw a line parallel to the base, and the equality of alternate angles ends the matter at once. The act of understanding leaps forth when the sensible data are in a suitable constellation.’2 It is a puzzle to those who have some inkling of what it is to experience an insight that there is such widespread opposition to the fact that there is such an act as insight at all. The friendly and courteous Frederick Copleston conceded to Lonergan, but it was a concession, that there appears to be such an act.3 Less courteous reactions are more common. Of course, as Copleston says, there is the Scholastic dictum, ‘Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate’ (Entities are not to be multiplied without need), but ‘to have an insight’ is not to postulate some unknown entity to account for the data at hand. It is to attend to an experience that is there to be attended to. True likewise, it is not a case of pointing to an entity that is there externally, something observable by the eye for me and my partner in discussion. It is internal to each of us, and I can do no more than invite 1 Previously published as ‘“Stare at a triangle” …: A Note on How to Get an Insight, and How Not to,’ in METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 19/2 (2001) 173–80. 2 Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (1997) 27–28. 3 See Frederick C. Copleston’s review of Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, in The Journal of Theological Studies 9 (1958) 202–204. On 203, Copleston remarks: ‘I suppose that some philosophers would wish to apply Ockham’s razor to such “acts.” But it appears to me that the term “act of understanding” denotes a real psychological phenomenon.’

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others to attend to their internal experience. If, then, the very existence of internal experience is denied, there is little hope of fruitful dialogue. One understands such a position in behaviorists, but it puzzles students of insight that, in those who accept and attend to interiority, so many fail to discover this act that seems to others to occur so frequently. I just now used the phrase ‘attend to,’ and I believe it points to elements of a solution to our puzzle. What in fact do we attend to when we grope toward an insight? If we are attending to cognitional activity in the wrong place, we are not likely to lead others in a successful search. What, then, do we attend to? And what should we attend to? And what should we not attend to? The last question has one blunt answer in Lonergan. We are not to attend to just any image or sensible presentation: ‘Stare at a triangle as long as you please, and you will not be any nearer seeing that its three angles must equal two right angles.’ Obviously Lonergan would not direct our attention there. But neither are we to attend to the geometric construction, namely, a line through the vertex parallel to the base. That is indeed the fertile image, the ‘suitable constellation’ that produces the insight, but it is not yet there for us to attend to. We must find the construction before we can attend to it; and how do we find it? There has to be a step between the mere image and the successful construction: What is it? Is it the concept of a triangle that we should attend to? Clearly not, for that procedure labors under the same difficulty. Between the concept of a triangle and the claim that its angles equal two right angles, there is need of a logical intermediary; this is supplied by insight into the constructed constellation, but the question remains: How do we discover that constellation? ‘Stare at a concept’ takes us no farther than ‘Stare at a triangle.’ Before we continue, there is an objection to forestall. Lonergan was emphatic on the need to diagram problems, especially in geometry.4 His critique of staring at a triangle does not mean that we should do away with the diagram or image of a triangle. Quite the contrary. We are to retain the image but we must add the construction, the ‘suitable constellation’ that will issue in insight. Let us return to the question: What happened between the blank ‘stare’ and the ‘eureka,’ between the mere image of a triangle and the 4 See Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 781, the editors’ note d to chapter 1, and 783, the editors’ note c to chapter 2.

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fertile construction? That question did not concern Lonergan in the passage quoted. His point there was to show the fertile image at work, not to tell the story of its discovery, and he stated what was pertinent to and sufficient for his purpose. I do not believe it is sufficient for our purpose. Nevertheless he has left us a clue with the help of which we may discover what intervenes between the ‘stare’ of incomprehension and the ‘eureka’ of understanding. The clue is found in the Aristotelian context of his geometric solution. ‘Aristotle made this point [that we know a thing when it is actual] from the instance of geometrical problems; they are difficult when the construction is merely in potency; but draw in the construction, and one solves the problem almost by inspection.’5 The trick, then, is to find the right construction in potency and bring it to that construction in act. That clue, however, is remote and the puzzle remains; it has only been pushed back a step. For how do we know what construction is in potency to the desired act? The answer, I suggest, is very simple – quite unorthodox in logic, but effective in the long run. It is very simple. How do we know? We don’t know. It is unorthodox in logic: it amounts to trial-and-error, arriving at a conclusion without premises. But it works. Trying one thing after another, we eventually hit upon the right construction. Naturally we use our intelligence in the quest. If the problem regards a triangle, there is no use studying the batting averages of a baseball team: they are in remotest potency to a problem in geometry. But a triangle is composed of lines and angles: the constructions that are in proximate potency will presumably have to do with lines and angles. Let us see, then, what we can do with those two elements. We may start with the simplest experiment: extend one side of the triangle. But nothing happens in the mind. We extend two sides. Still nothing. Three sides, and in both directions. A blank. So we try a different approach: we bisect an angle. Another blank. We drop a median from the vertex to the opposite base. No help there. Never mind, keep trying. Then one fine day, by chance and by luck, and because we have run out of other possibilities, we happen to draw through the vertex a line parallel to the base. Voilà! Eureka! Bingo! Our procedural question was this: What do we attend to as we try to get an insight – specifically, an insight into a property of a triangle? We ruled out staring at an image: that just leaves the mind blank. We ruled 5 Verbum 27.

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out the successful image: that is the end, but what we want are the means to that end. We ruled out the concept: the concept is the fruit of an insight, not its fertile source. We were left with the potency of lines and angles to be arranged in various constructions, one of which we hope will be a ‘suitable constellation’ for the flash of insight. What then did we attend to? We attended to possibilities of explanation. Such possibilities are myriad. Insights, according to a perpetually quoted statement of Lonergan, are ‘a dime a dozen.’6 The same may be said of ideas, for human ideas and insights are almost interchangeable terms. Of course our intelligence enabled us to narrow down the field from thousands to dozens. For example, we excluded baseball batting averages. It is somewhere in the dozens of remaining possibilities that we hoped to find the solution to our problem. We should note in passing that there are two confusions to avoid here – one with regard to the meaning of the terms ‘idea’ and ‘insight,’ another with regard to their place in the order of cognitional process. First, with regard to meaning. ‘Idea’ and ‘insight’ are almost interchangeable terms, but ‘insight’ orients us to the experiential source of the act, whereas ‘idea’ orients us more to its content; and so we may speak of divine ideas but not of divine insights. Next, with regard to their place in cognitional process. Insights look ahead to an anticipated judgment, and it is in this sense that they were said to be a dime a dozen, for many insights are normally required if we are to make a correct judgment. But in the same cognitional process a deeper insight may look back to the lesser insights that made it possible, and those lesser insights and ideas may also, in their own context, be valued at a dime a dozen. Thus I had the ‘idea’ of extending the base of the triangle. It was mediocre as an idea, but still it was an idea and required its own little insight into the nature of an extended line. Similarly with the ‘idea’ of bisecting an angle, and with the other possibilities we tried. The possibilities are themselves acts of intelligence, based on previous experience. We expect them to flow more copiously in the expert, more slowly in the beginner – which, of course, is exactly what happens. Now it was only in the multiplicity of such ‘ideas’ that the fertile image appeared. It is our good fortune that ideas come cheap, for often we need to try dozens of them before hitting on the fertile one. 6 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Theories of Inquiry: Responses to a Symposium,’ in A Second Collection 33–42, at 36.

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It is worth pausing here for a moment to ask about the insight itself. Did something happen in that ‘eureka’ moment? Obviously yes. Was it just another line that happened? Obviously no. The line parallel to base, as a line, was no better than all the other lines we constructed. Was it an intellectual experience that happened? It would seem churlish to deny it. Is there then an internal act that we may call ‘insight’? At least we should be able to say with Copleston that it seems so. The pattern is clear-cut in our geometry example. We will not expect it to be so clear in human affairs. Still, there is a class of thinking there that approaches the clarity of geometry: the whodunit crime story. The illustration may be helpful. Assume the master of the house is murdered: Who did it? Could it have been the visiting cousin? Well, what motive would she have had, and what opportunity? Suppose it were the eldest son, badly in debt and needing his inheritance now. Suppose it were the housekeeper, goaded to fury by the master’s insults. And so on and on. The difference between the bewildered gardener and the quiet detective is that the latter actuates in thought various potential solutions and tries them out one by one until she (Miss Marple) or he (Monsieur Poirot) hits upon the one that explains it all. A few general considerations are now in order. One is the absolutely essential role of free images. In Insight the possibility of forming free images is listed among the basic steps of cognitional process.7 Later it is a strategic factor in the contrast between animal ‘intelligence’ and human. Lonergan draws on Köhler’s study of apes and the quite remarkable things apes can do, like putting together three pieces of a rod in order to reach a banana outside the cage; but if the three pieces are scattered about so that the ape cannot see them in one vision, it is helpless: ‘he isn’t able to make the free image, the freely constructed image … bringing it all together …’8 That creative role of free images deserves more attention. Here we have the advice of the master himself of phenomenology, as reported by Spiegelberg. The question regards ‘internal relations within one essence’ – whether, for example, ‘three sides, three angles, and certain shapes and sizes … are … required by the essence’ of what a triangle is. ‘The way to settle such questions is chiefly by an operation which Husserl called “free imaginative variation” ( freie Variation in der Phantasie).’ Spiegelberg 7 Insight 299. 8 Bernard Lonergan, Understanding and Being (1990) 313–15; and see 136: ‘unless we are like the animals that cannot form free images, we imagine.’

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suggests this ‘may involve two things: the attempt either (1) to leave off certain components completely or (2) to replace them by others.’9 My interest is not in that particular question or in any particular answer to that question, but in the method followed: the shuffling of the data. Lonergan himself has provided a sample of such an exercise: his study of the emerging understanding of a circle. He imagines a cartwheel, performs various mental experiments with the length of the spokes, the depth of their insertion into the hub, and so on. The fruit of this juggling is the insight that a circle is the locus of co-planar points equidistant from a center.10 I should not conclude this note without acknowledging that it greatly simplifies the process to insight. There is a multiplicity of factors that a more thorough study would have to consider. I have mentioned the difference between the expert and the beginner, but experts too will find a difference between their first experience of a particular insight and its later recall. ‘[I]n the first instance, phantasm has to produce the act of insight, whereas in subsequent instances, informed intellect guides the production of an appropriate phantasm; in other words, in the first instance we are at the mercy of fortune, the subconscious, or a teacher’s skill, for the emergence of an appropriate phantasm.’11 Again, that mention of the subconscious opens out a new and important area of study: ‘Perhaps, agent intellect is to be given the function of the subconscious effect of ordering the phantasm to bring about the right schematic image that releases the flash of understanding.’12 Similarly the mention of fortune involves Lonergan’s ideas on luck, chance, fate, fortune, destiny, ideas that he links with world order in emergent probability, with divine governance in universal instrumentality, with all of these understood as a created complement to divine providence.13

9 Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965) 680. 10 Insight 31–32. Garrett Barden and Philip McShane have provided a number of such ‘shuffling’ exercises in their Towards Self-Meaning (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), appendix, 126–37, where they speak of ‘intelligent juggling’ (128), of ‘trying to manipulate the figure’ and ‘disposing the phantasm’ (133); they have a link with Scholastic language in ‘illuminate the phantasm’ (ibid.). 11 Verbum 42. 12 Ibid. 93. And see ibid. 184: ‘… the cogitativa … operates under the influence of intellect and prepares suitable phantasms.’ 13 See Frederick E. Crowe, ‘Tracking Stray Ideas in Lonergan: “Luck,”’ in Lonergan Studies Newsletter 13/3 (1992) 27.

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What began as a note is threatening to grow into a treatise. Let me return to my starting point, simply to say that, instead of puzzling over the refusal of contemporaries to attend to insight, perhaps we should examine more closely what it is to which we ourselves attend and as advocates of insight are urging others to attend.14

14 There is an area to study that I have set aside here as too complex to discuss in a short note. I have been dealing with insight into the imaginable, but more and more clearly in his later work Lonergan came to the view that the data of consciousness are not imaginable, and that therefore we have no insight into them, no insight into the operations of interiority, no insight even into insight. A triangle is imaginable, a crime is imaginable, but insight into either is not imaginable. This opens a door to a new field of research in Lonergan studies. The present question then becomes: Are we staring at interiority in somewhat the same way as the helpless geometer stares at a triangle? Should we not rather find ways, as indeed Lonergan himself did, to circumvent the obstacle and bring the unimaginable into the focus of attention? [For Crowe’s more detailed account of this issue, plus his own effort to address it, see ‘For a Phenomenology of Rational Consciousness,’ republished as chapter 6 of the present volume. See also chapter 11, ‘The Puzzle of the Subject as Subject in Lonergan.’ (Ed.)]

Chapter 10

Lonergan at the Edges of Understanding1

This essay is going to look a lot like a response from a Lonergan viewpoint to the challenge of postmodernism, so let me say at once that it is not such a response. It was, however, occasioned by that challenge. I find that my second-hand acquaintance with postmodernism has raised new questions for me on Lonergan, plus new aspects of old questions. I propose to consider some of them here. However, I insist that what I offer is strictly a collection of data from Lonergan, interpreted and sometimes carried forward in the momentum of his thought. If the collection happens to bear some relation to postmodernism, well and good, but such is not directly relevant to my purpose.2 Using a metaphor I may later be pushing a bit far, I call the area of my study ‘the edges of understanding’ (from the side of the object it could be called ‘the edges of the intelligible’). From somewhere in my past 1 Previously published in METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 20/2 (2002) 175–98. 2 For an extensive comparison of Lonergan and postmodernism, see Frederick G. Lawrence, ‘The Fragility of Consciousness: Lonergan and the Postmodern Concern for the Other,’ in Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup, eds, Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age (Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward 1993) 173–211, an expansion of an article Lawrence originally published in Theological Studies 54 (1993) 55–94. My essay may be regarded as complementary to the Lonergan side of Lawrence’s. I am in debt also to James L. Marsh, ‘Post-Modernism: A Lonerganian Retrieval and Critique,’ International Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1995) 159–73; Jim Kanaris, ‘Engaged Agency and the Notion of the Subject,’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 14/2 (1996) 183–200; Elizabeth Murray Morelli, ‘Oversight of Insight and the Critique of the Metaphysics of Presence,’ ibid. 18/1 (2000) 1–15; and Gordon Rixon, ‘Derrida and Lonergan on Human Development,’ American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76/2 (2002) 221–36, and ‘Derrida and Lonergan on the Human Subject: Transgressing a Metonymical Notion,’ Toronto Journal of Theology 18/2 (2002) 213–29.

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reading (perhaps of Sartre) I retain a picture comparing intelligibility to the order of a well laid-out city where, however, the threatening jungle of the absurd encroaches on every side. We shall see in a moment that that picture is too neat. Besides the enemies without, there are fifth columns at work within the well ordered city; but it will serve as a first approximation to the more accurate view I hope to delineate. A point of entry for my essay is given by the charge that the philosophic effort to dominate cognitionally the world and all reality is guilty of totalitarian hubris. Is such an effort in any sense true of Lonergan? That is my initial question, and my direct contribution, after examining some of the achievements he attributes to human understanding (part 1), will be to set forth the limits of those achievements (part 2). Next, I will consider a number of special questions that cluster around the main one (part 3). I conclude (part 4) with some reflections on the general value question: Is the effort to understand all reality, the refusal to exclude from consideration any aspect of reality, the arrogance it is sometimes made out to be? To put it in other words, are the totalitarian ambitions of knowledge totalitarian like the totalitarian nations and states? Or are they universalist like Michelangelo and the uomo universale of the Renaissance?3 Or is there a third possibility, some distant counterpart of Michelangelo for our time? 1 The Pattern of Achievement When in 1964 we put together some studies of Lonergan to honor him as he reached the age of sixty, and were considering a title for the proposed volume, he himself suggested ‘Spirit as Inquiry.’ It was quite apt for his thinking at the time, and it became in fact the title of the published volume.4 It seems a good place to start my study. At any rate it has the backing of Aristotle, who made wonder the source of all science and philosophy.5 3 See Joan Kelly Gadol, ‘Universal Man,’ in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, vol. 4, ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973) 437–43. Also see Frederick E. Crowe, ‘Linking the Splintered Disciplines: Ideas from Lonergan,’ in Crowe, Developing the Lonergan Legacy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004) 252–66. Instead of the usual ‘universalist’ I will use Lonergan’s ‘generalist’: see note 70 below. 4 Frederick E. Crowe, ed., Spirit as Inquiry: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, S.J. (Chicago: Saint Xavier College, 1964). 5 Aristotle, Metaphysics, book 1, chapter 2, 982b 12–18; 983a, 12–18.

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If inquiry is characteristic of human spirit, successful inquiry establishes the realm of understanding and the intelligible. It is the realm of what is properly human knowledge, the quidditas rei materialis, the what of a material being.6 But such a being is a composite of three elements: potency, form, and act. Correspondingly, human cognitional structure is a composite: potency is experienced in the here and now of individuating conditions, form is grasped by insight into the what and why, and the act of existence is affirmed in a judgment.7 It is form that is most specifically the object of human intelligence; potency is intelligible only in relation to the form it assumes; existence is intelligible only in its cause. In the Latin that was the vehicle for so much of Lonergan’s early work, potency is intelligible only in alio, existence is intelligible only in causa, but form is intelligible in se.8 Widening the range of inquiry into the intelligible, though anticipating our next section, we may say that both sin and God are unintelligible to human minds, but sin is unintelligible by a deficiency of intelligibility whereas God is unintelligible by an excess of intelligibility.9 But the wonder in the question, and the answer to that wonder that insight is, are only the beginning of the effort of intellect to dominate reality. Insight is the pivot intrinsic to the process, but insight does not of itself give knowledge of the real. It is in itself an identity with the form that is grasped, but for knowledge of the real it must first be expressed in a concept, and the concept be proposed conditionally, and the conditions be submitted to weighing of the evidence, and the conditioned statement become an unconditioned before being affirmed in a judgment. The first step in that list is objectification of the insight. ‘For human understanding, though it has its object in the phantasm and knows it in

6 Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (1997) 168, 173–75, 200. 7 On the correspondence of experience-understanding-judgment with potency-formact, see Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 424–45 and passim (see the Index, s.v. Isomorphism; also note 32 below). 8 Bernard Lonergan, De ente supernaturali, 1973 ed. (mimeographed at Regis College, Toronto) 64 [p. 90, §142 in the unpublished English translation by Michael G. Shields]; quoted in Bernard Lonergan, Understanding and Being (1990) 418, editors’ note d; see also 428, editors’ note e. During the twenty-five years in which Lonergan taught theology, the medium of lectures, notes, and books for classroom use was Latin. 9 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, ‘Analytic Concept of History,’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 11/1 (1993) 1–35, at 14. [Crowe’s ‘Editor’s Introduction’ appears on pp. 1–4.]

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the phantasm, yet is not content with an object in this state. It pivots on itself to produce for itself another object which is the inner word as ratio,’10 as a concept. But no more than insight does the concept give knowledge. That is established already in Verbum, though the objectivity of knowing was not the issue there. The focus was rather on the primary identity of understanding and the understood, and on understanding as the fertile source of the inner words of concept, judgment, and inference. Lonergan, however, acknowledged the distinct question of objectivity and brought it into relationship with that of identity. First, he assigned the limits of the identity principle. Aristotelian gnoseology is brilliant but it is not complete: knowledge is by identity; the act of the thing as sensible is the act of sensation; the act of the thing as intelligible is the act of understanding; but the act of the thing as real is the esse naturale of the thing and, except in divine self-knowledge, that esse is not identical with knowing it.11

Then he added the transition from understanding as a subjective perfection to judgment as achieving objective knowledge: ‘Rational reflection has to bear the weight of the transition from knowledge as a perfection to knowledge as of the other.’12 ‘[T]he problem of knowledge, once it is granted that knowledge is by identity, is knowledge of the other.’13 Thus far, the general pattern of coming to understanding and knowledge. As exemplified in modern science, it should present no difficulty. I would say the same of various extensions of the pattern, on which I will not delay: for example, in common sense, in hermeneutics, in ethics, in human studies. Two extensions, however, merit an extra word. There is, first, metaphysics and its aspirations to go beyond the intelligibility of the many material things in their genera and species and essences. It is beyond science; it is analogous; it is an understanding of proportion.14 It is truly understanding but the understanding is of a heuristic structure; it does not grasp the whole determinately. So Insight gives Lonergan’s definition of metaphysics as follows: ‘the conception,

10 11 12 13 14

Verbum 47–48. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 84. Understanding and Being 200–202.

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affirmation, and implementation of the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being.’15 Next, there is our knowledge of God. For metaphysics, though it falls short of understanding God, does go beyond empirical science and is a pointer if not a bridge to knowledge of God. ‘Why is there something and not nothing?’ We ask science, and science, unless it surreptitiously imports some metaphysics, is silent. My existence and the existence of the world itself is unintelligible except by reference to a cause outside the world, a cause of which science knows nothing. This simple reasoning could be developed to the dimensions of an encyclopedia, but in itself it is within the range of any intelligent person. [B]ecause it is difficult to know what our knowing is, it also is difficult to know what our knowledge of God is. But just as our knowing is prior to an analysis of knowledge and far easier than it, so too our knowledge of God is both earlier and easier than any attempt to give it formal expression.16

Such in briefest outline is the orderly city of human knowledge, the construction erected by spirit as inquiry. It seems a good launching pad for Lonergan’s thought on the edges of intelligence. We are relatively secure within the orderly city but we stand at its boundaries, looking out over the encroaching forces of irrationality, the vast areas of the unknown, of what is in some sense unknowable. 2 The Limits of Achievement The limits of understanding are so closely interwoven with its achievements that it is impossible to separate them. One can only emphasize one or the other; and as my first section emphasized the achievements while touching on the limits, so my second will emphasize the limits without ignoring the achievements. Continuing the metaphor I have been using, I will study areas of resistance that limit the imperialism of 15 Insight 416: ‘proportionate being,’ that is, ‘proportionate’ to our human intellects. 16 Ibid. 705. See also Bernard Lonergan, ‘Philosophy of God, and Theology: The Relationship between Philosophy of God and the Functional Specialty “Systematics,”’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 208: ‘I do not think it difficult to establish God’s existence. I do think it a lifelong labor to analyze and refute all the objections that philosophers have thought up against the existence of God. But I see no pressing need for every student of religion to penetrate into that labyrinth and then work his way out.’

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intellect; and I will divide these limits into those arising internally, that is, from within the cognitional realm, and those arising rebelliously in areas that refuse to be colonies of cognition. 2.1 Limits from Within the Cognitional A first limit to intelligence is located in the occurrence of insight itself and might be regarded as a kind of fifth column within the citadel of knowledge. It has two aspects, one in the object of insight, the other intrinsic to the act of insight. The first and simpler aspect regards the object. Here I enlarge a little the point made earlier on the empirical residue as a boundary for understanding. The here and now is simply discarded by understanding as unintelligible; it ‘cannot be an explanatory factor in any science; it is irrelevant to all scientific explanation; it is irrelevant a priori; time and place as such explain nothing.’17 Yet it has to be named, and it has to be related to the directly intelligible, and so Lonergan develops his notion of inverse insight, the insight that there is no insight into the empirical residue, into particularity.18 The other aspect is not so simple: intrinsic to insight is its own particularity, the particularity of the act itself, and not just of its object. The act of insight as an act cannot pretend to dominion over a universe of reality, or even claim wide-ranging validity as intelligence. It is always particular: not only insight into ‘these data,’ but also ‘this insight’ into these data. In the language of Aristotle’s knowledge-by-identity theory, in which insight is a subjective perfection identical with the form that is understood, insight into an eclipse means identity with this eclipse-form alone, not with some universal eclipse-form, still less with the multitude of actual eclipse-forms. It is only the concept emanating from insight that releases the insight from its particularity and objectifies it as a universal. If from single insights we turn to their combinations, these seem to extend the boundaries of intelligibility and conquer larger areas of reality. Still, while it is true that insights coalesce and bring together further and further areas of intelligibility,19 even then they have no pretensions to dominion over the whole of reality. That is a goal, but it is one that

17 Verbum 53. 18 Insight 43–50. 19 Verbum 61–71, 76–78.

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will never be realized. The intending of human intellect is without limit; the achievement is limited on all sides. We make limited gains on a limited front, and there is always a beyond.20 Further, the great advances in knowledge are like an inverted pyramid, erected on a narrow base. (And sometimes some great inverted pyramid of science or philosophy topples over, to be abandoned or rebuilt on a new base.) Insights coalesce, and do so again and again, so that the resultant is far removed from its modest beginnings. For example, my personal history is a basis for local history, and this in turn for that of my country, that of my country for that of the West, and so on, so that the most profound and comprehensive view of world history is tied by an umbilical cord to the minute world of the author’s own experience in the here and now. Even the great sweeping judgments that we find, say, in Lonergan’s stages of meaning rest on the coalescence achieved on the second level, the conceptual, and that in turn falls back on the first level, particular representations. Judgments are always linked to the here and now.21 The here and now, which we had to discard in order to achieve an understanding of form, returns to effect the application of abstract form to concrete reality. There is a further barrier to any imperialist project intellect might conceive. Intrinsic to the reflective insight that enables us to make a judgment there is another fifth column. For the key word here is ‘is,’ and the key act is the unconditional positing of that ‘is.’ But the ‘is’ of existence or occurrence, the esse reale denoted by the ‘is’ of affirmed judgment, is not the direct object of insight. Though the question is warmly debated, with the school of the highly respected Étienne Gilson affirming an intuition of being, it is Lonergan’s position that we have no such intuition,22 that existence is in itself above our understanding, and like matter below is not intelligible to us except in another. At this point the impasse for intelligence becomes absolute in ways that extend

20 Repeatedly Lonergan contrasted Aristotle’s notion of science as knowledge of the necessary, and the modern notion of science as continually undergoing revision and so satisfied with the best available opinion at the time. See Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Future of Thomism,’ in A Second Collection 47–48; ‘The Subject,’ ibid. 72; ‘The Absence of God in Modern Culture,’ ibid. 103–104, 112; ‘Theology and Man’s Future,’ ibid. 139–40. Also, Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 191: ‘as in natural science, so too in critical history the positive content of judgment aspires to be no more than the best available opinion.’ 21 Verbum 75–76; hence judgments made in sleep are irrational. 22 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Metaphysics as Horizon,’ in Collection (1988)188–204.

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the two ways pointed out earlier. Going beyond the empirical and the existential, the impasse may regard sin, the objective falsity, the absolute denial of intelligibility.23 On the other side, beyond the edge at which we can only assert that God is, without knowing what God is, there is the higher edge attained by the mystics. Lonergan seems to recognize this as an intermediate state, where there is an understanding of things divine that is beyond the human, but short of that ultimate understanding where edges vanish in the knowledge God shares with creatures.24 I have been dealing mainly with the limits of individual understanding. But does not the human community achieve much more than we have granted to the individual? Besides the coalescence of insights in the person there is the enormous strategic advance achieved by the human race through education. There is a vast difference between the infant world and that of the adult. The latter adds past and future to the present; it adds an imagined spatial complex to the immediate space of the nursery; it retains the past and builds an enlarged future; and so on. And it is education that allows each generation to take possession of their accumulated heritage in a few years instead of in long millennia.25 Yes, all that is true, but the enlargement of the heritage only accentuates the fact that there is an unconquered area for the individual. The great whole is parcelled out among many, each of whom knows something and believes the rest, so that there is a sacrifice of knowledge to belief; and while knowledge grows ever greater so too does the sacrifice. In the optimism of the Renaissance they spoke of an uomo universale, but now we regard Michelangelo as the last of those giants.26 Today the idea of someone omnicompetent in the arts and sciences, in technology as well as in philosophy, in theology and the unconscious, in the many languages of humankind – the idea is ludicrous. For this is the age of specialization, in which we know more and more about less and less.27

23 Sin is objective falsity: Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas (2000) 113–16, 148, 329, 331–33, 341, 344. 24 Verbum, 102–104. Method in Theology 29, 58–59, 77, 106 n. 4, 107, 266, 273, 341, 342. 25 See the several occurrences of ‘socialization, acculturation, education’ that describe the passage of the infant to the adult world in Bernard Lonergan, ‘Religious Experience,’ in A Third Collection 119, 122; ‘The Ongoing Genesis of Methods,’ ibid. 156; ‘Natural Right and Historical Mindedness, ibid.181; ‘Theology and Praxis,’ ibid. 197; and ‘A Post–Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,’ ibid. 217. 26 See note 3 above. 27 For Lonergan on specialization, see ‘Aquinas Today: Tradition and Innovation,’ in A Third Collection 35–54, at 36–40.

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This is not just a matter of quantitative division. There are ‘differentiations of consciousness’ that affect the style and character of the differences. We shall return to this point. I have spoken of the limits of understanding in some of their more general manifestations. A number of particular cases may be simply mentioned. There is insight into phantasm but no insight into insight.28 History can be understood only after it has left our life and time.29 Statistical science predicts nothing determinate with surety.30 Much of our understanding, not only of God’s existence, but of things in this world, is only by analogy.31 And so on, in a list that considerably restrains any imperialist ambitions from the cognitional side. 2.2 Limits Imposed from Without: Rebellious ‘Colonies’ It is time to raise a new question. To say that the cognitional is limited in its own empire does not attack the question at its root, for is not that empire itself but one aspect of human operations, and so but one empire among others? Must not meaning be given a wider compass than its cognitional application? That question opens up a new horizon altogether, within which two areas of limitation need special discussion: feelings and freedom. I speak of them as ‘colonies’ of the cognitional empire because these two areas emerged under the tutelage of cognition and attempts are continually made to subsume them under the cognitional hegemony – hence, ‘colonies.’ But there has been ongoing resistance to that subsumption (justified resistance, in my opinion) – hence, ‘rebellious’ colonies. We come then to the recalcitrant area of feelings, the first ‘colony’ whose rebellion against the hegemony of the cognitional I shall consider. Feelings accompany the cognitional on every level. They are as all-pervasive as the cognitional. Animals seem to feel pain and satisfaction in the way the rest of us do: feelings occur, then, on the first level of intentionality analysis. Again, there is a thrill in gaining an insight, whether it be the minor insight on how to catch my opponent’s king in

28 See chapter 6 of the present volume, ‘For a Phenomenology of Rational Consciousness.’ See also chapter 11, ‘The Puzzle of the Subject as Subject in Lonergan.’ 29 Method in Theology 177–79. 30 Insight 76–91. 31 See ‘Analogy’ in the indices of Insight and Method in Theology. Notice also the title of the work Divinarum personarum conceptionem analogicam, note 45 below.

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a bridge game or the major one of understanding the ideas of a great thinker: feelings, therefore, on the second level. When we come to the level of judgment, the matter is not so simple, but there is a security in reaching judgment after a long and painful search, say, about one’s religious beliefs or the results of a laboratory experiment, that manifest feelings on the third level. But the prime exhibit belongs on the fourth level. One cannot speak with full detail on such personal matters, but perhaps readers will have experienced the torment of a bad conscience, and the peace that follows on setting right what was wrong. In all four cases feelings are known, and so they are brought somehow under the dominion of knowledge. But then the cognitional emperor would instinctively take a further step. So ingrained is the attitude that makes the cognitional supreme in human activity that, not satisfied with knowing feelings, the cognitional would also assimilate them to itself, reducing them to some type of cognition. That reduction does not work; it ends in frustration; feelings simply do not comply. I suggest, then, that we abandon altogether the effort to make feelings a subdivision of knowledge, and take instead another approach: namely, to regard feelings as a distinctly different area, isomorphic with the cognitional the way the ontological is (and, as we shall suggest, the voluntary also is) but independent and self-governing. The ontological has its own independent realm of potency, form, and act, isomorphic with experience, understanding, and judgment. It is known to us and so is included in the wide sweep of the cognitional; but it retains its independence: potency, form, and act are not cognitional activities. I suggest that we regard feelings as another such realm, parallel to the cognitional, known like the ontological through experience, understanding, and judgment, and thus also included in the wide sweep of the cognitional, but like the ontological an equal partner in the human enterprise, having its full autonomy.32 Like the ontological elements, feelings are not cognitional activities. This may be related to meaning. We are apt to think of meaning as correlative with knowledge, but that view can be challenged. The realm of feelings is also meaningful: it has a plenitude of meaning, only it is a

32 On isomorphism of cognitional and ontological structures, see note 7 above. For agreement of Lonergan with Aquinas on this point, see Frederick E. Crowe, ‘St Thomas and the Isomorphism of Human Knowing and Its Proper Object,’ in Crowe, Three Thomist Studies 207–35. I here and there omit the fourth level for the sake of simplicity.

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meaning not reducible to the cognitional. Then, an immediate question is to find terms proper to the structural elements in the domain of feelings: proper, that is, not cognitional, not transferred from the cognitional, but its own. Above I used ‘satisfaction’ for the positive side on the first level, ‘thrill’ for the second, ‘security’ for the third, and ‘peace’ for the fourth, but they were meant only to illustrate the variety of feelings on the different levels. No doubt better labels can be found.33 A tableau would help here. An older tableau had one panel, namely, the cognitional, with its three levels of experience, understanding, and judgment, and sometimes a fourth added for decision. At each level a horizontal arm could be extended, like the arm on some computer screens, to bring form, say, into the embrace of understanding. But the one panel was considered a sufficient basis for listing all human activity. In the tableau I am proposing, it is nowhere near being sufficient for that. Rather, there are three panels, with a fourth to be added, rotating side by side round one vertical spindle, each with its own independent life and character, and none subordinate to another. One can start with the cognitional, twirl the panels to come to the ontological and the others, or start with the ontological and go on to the others, or start with the felt, and go on to the others. The original cognitional panel remains; the ontological panel, isomorphic with the cognitional, makes a natural second; what we need to add is the concept of a third panel exclusively for feelings, also isomorphic with the cognitional, but like the ontological totally its own. If my suggestion about the voluntary and the good is accepted there will be a fourth panel swinging on the same hinge. We come, then, to our second rebellious ‘colony’: the realm of the voluntary. The will is a faculty that follows the direction of intellect. Few doctrines of Aquinas seem better established than that.34 However,

33 As an adjective for the whole realm, I will use the ‘felt,’ corresponding to the ‘cognitional,’ the ‘voluntary,’ and the ‘ontological.’ A further need is to establish interstate relations between the ‘powers.’ A simple illustration: feelings are ‘known’; knowledge is ‘felt’; both belong to the universe of ‘being’; all three can be approved or disapproved and so related to the ‘voluntary.’ 34 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, q. 87, a. 4 c.: ‘actus voluntatis … inclinatio quaedam consequens formam intellectam’ [‘the act of the will … an inclination consequent on the form understood’]; Summa contra Gentiles 2, c. 48 (ad finem): ‘cum intellectus per formam apprehensam moveat voluntatem.’ [‘since the intellect through the apprehended form moves the will.’] See the Leonine Thomist indices under ‘voluntas’: for example, ‘bonum intellectum est obiectum voluntatis,’ with

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although it is true, it is not the whole truth. Ever since Pascal’s ‘The heart has reasons that reason does not know,’ there has been a growing movement to explore those reasons of the heart that are not reasons in a strictly cognitional sense. But for now I remain within the thoughtpatterns of Scholasticism, where the general schema for free acts is the following: judgment (intellect) of the good end; orientation (will) to the good end; deliberation (intellect) on means to that end; choice (will) of a particular means in a free decision. My remarks center on the act of deliberation. It is a cognitional activity, but one under the control of the will in two ways that limit cognitional ambitions. First, it is the orientation of will that sets deliberation on its course; and next, it is the intervention of will that puts an end to deliberation and thus is responsible for free choice. Take that second factor first. Deliberation may be a cognitional activity, but as cognition it has no term; it could go on for forever, did not will intervene to put a stop to deliberation and make a choice. In the language of Aquinas: ‘Choice then follows the final judgment [of deliberation] and the will brings it about that [the judgment] is final.’ In that of Kierkegaard: ‘As soon as Roetscher sets himself the task of explaining Hamlet, he knows that reflection can be halted only by means of a resolve.’35 Aristotle’s dialectical syllogism bears on the same point: ‘in working out a course of action … the intellect does not move in the mold of the scientific syllogism but on the model of the dialectical syllogism or the rhetorical persuasion.’36 This gains clarity in Lonergan’s doctrine that foundations are found in what we are rather than in propositional first principles, and that it is conversion that makes us what we are.37 It gains further clarity from the proverb that doctors could use the same knowledge to kill you that a wealth of references. This is a key point in Lonergan’s Trinitarian theology; see Bernard Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics 180: ‘cum voluntas sit appetitus intellectum sequens’ [English translation on 181: ‘since will is the appetite following naturally upon intellect’], and 494: ‘voluntas est appetitus intellectum sequens’ [English translation on 495: ‘the will is an appetite that follows the intellect’]. I use the terms of faculty psychology (‘intellect’ and ‘will’) as did Aquinas, and likewise Lonergan in his earlier writings. 35 Both quotations are in ‘Universal Norms and the Concrete Operabile in St Thomas Aquinas,’ in Three Thomist Studies 48 note 38. For a schema of the process, see ‘Complacency and Concern in the Thought of St Thomas,’ ibid. 90. A useful set of ideas in Aquinas is the duplex via: from res to anima, and from anima to res, ibid. 81–91. 36 Grace and Freedom 97, 300. 37 Method in Theology 267–68.

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they can use to cure you. How will they use their knowledge? It depends on what they are: ‘the end appears to each man in a form answering to his character.’38 Such choices are the work of will imposing its good or evil orientation on the workings of mind – and indeed in the last analysis becoming responsible for that orientation. In the tussle of intellect and will, then, it seems to be will that finally controls my life. Of course, we recognize the power of ideas. Over and over Lonergan referred to Marx in illustration of that. But it was passion that drove Marx to set forth his ideas, and that fact reveals the respective roles of ideas and passion. The ideas of a thinker are set forth for all the world to ponder to the end of time; but the passion of the thinker is interior from the start, and it may lose much of its power when the thinker has disappeared from the human scene. We have still to deal with the first of the two points I made a moment ago. Closer to our experience than conflict of intellect and will is their cooperation, and here too knowledge is subordinate to will as its instrument. When applied to the exercise of virtue, this cooperation results in various forms of asceticism or principles for a good life. When linked with technology, the will has power to change the world that initially we just contemplate.39 Here we are dealing with the ‘engaged’ subject and not with the aloof scholar. But just here we find another failure of intellect. A better world may be willed and willed most intensely, but will has no power to create: it can only urge intellect to find ways and means to the end. Intellect, however, must deal with refractory materials and through them find a way to the desired end. It works as the ‘hired help,’ the proletarian work force, the instrument of will. This is the ultimate in cognitional failure to dominate reality. Let us return to our tableau of panels rotating as equal partners on the one spindle. The good that is the object of willing is structured the way knowledge is; that is, there is the good of sensitive appetite, the

38 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 3, chapter 5, 1114a 30; translation taken from The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 11th printing, 1941) 973. In Aquinas: book 3, lect. 13, In decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum, Marietti edition, 1934, no. 516; or Summa theologiae 1, q. 83, a. 1, ob. 5: ‘Qualis unusquisque est, talis finis videtur ei.’ In Thomist thought God gives the initial orientation to good in the non–free will of the end; but acts contrary to that end can lead to a rationalization in which a good end is rejected for an evil one. 39 ‘Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,’ in A Third Collection 169–83, at 176: ‘I have said that people are responsible individually for the lives they lead and collectively for the world in which they live them.’

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good of order, the good of value, to which we may add as a fourth level the good to be done. The same structure must be found in the activity of will. This suggests that we add to the tableau described above a fourth panel of the good and of willing which, along with the ontological, stands side by side, integral and autonomous, with the cognitional panel and the panel for the felt.40 It does seem, on the basis of all we have found explicit or implicit in Lonergan, that his thinking, while it gives full value to the cognitional, is far from a cognitional imperialism. 3 Special Questions A flock of special questions now appears on the scene. Let us select five of them for brief consideration. Though they perhaps relate more directly to current debates, my focus remains a study of Lonergan. 1. Immediacy of Being. There is a question about the immediacy of being. In general, experience for Lonergan is immediate and there is a world of immediacy, but its main inhabitants are infants. ‘A first world is the world of immediacy: it is the world of the infant … the world of immediate experience … A second world is the world mediated by meaning … the world of grownups … It is a universe of being, that is known not just by experience but by the conjunction of experience, understanding, and judgment.’41 In particular, the pure desire to know, when it is functioning, is immediate. Likewise the levels of consciousness, when they are functioning, ‘are immediate in their content though mediated by reflection in their formulation.’42 ‘[I]t is not true that it is from sense that our cognitional activities derive their immediate relationship to real objects; that relationship is immediate in the intention of being; it is mediate in the data of sense and in the data of consciousness … similarly, that relationship is mediate in understanding and thought and judgment …’43 40 In a further refinement we might make separate panels of the voluntary and the good, related to one another the way the cognitional and the ontological are. For the structure of the good, see Insight 619–21. For more on the mutual influence of intellect and will, see the duplex via of note 35 above. 41 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Existenz and Aggiornamento,’ in Collection, 224–31, at 224–25. 42 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Openness and Religious Experience,’ ibid. 185. 43 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Cognitional Structure,’ ibid. 218. See also ‘The Subject,’ in A Second Collection 69–86, at 75: ‘The notion of being first appears in questioning. Being is the unknown that questioning intends to know …’

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Still more in particular, ‘… the main method in metaphysics is a mediation of the immediate.’44 Thus it is not at all the thought of Lonergan that being is immediate. On the contrary, as I said in the first part, being is reached at the term of a long and complex process of thinking, forming concepts, reflecting, weighing the evidence, and finally, in a true judgment, attaining being, the real. What is immediate is the question, the intention of being; but being is remote from understanding, it lies beyond the edges of understanding and has to be mediated. 2. Presence. Presence is a term that occurs in different contexts in Lonergan. A useful place to start is the schema on the question of the divine persons inhabiting the just and thus present to them. The schema has four steps. There is an approach to presence in spatial propinquity, but this is not enough: we do not say that two stones side by side are present to one another. In animals, however, a psychic adaptation follows spatial propinquity, the latter being only a condition of presence. A third point is the human capacity to form free images, and thus through memory of the past or imagination of the future, we can be moved strongly. ‘Presence,’ then, turns out to be a word of various meanings. Already we have a presence based on spatial propinquity, and another based on the sensitive and human freedom of imagination. But human beings can go farther still. They are persons in that they operate according to their intellectual nature. Here person is joined to person, as one who is known is present in the knower, and as the one loved is present in the one loving. So the poet spoke of a friend as the very half of his soul.45 Presence to another had already been touched on in the Verbum study, where the dynamic presence of the beloved in the intellect and will of the lover is affirmed also of the presence of God to the soul; but as well there is added the new and important notion of the presence of the soul to self.46 To complete the sketch in Verbum particular mention is made there of the experience of the mystics.47 That presence to self which had merely been mentioned in the Verbum study receives extensive treatment in Lonergan’s Christology 44 ‘Metaphysics as Horizon,’ in Collection 189. 45 Bernard Lonergan, Divinarum personarum conceptionem analogicam (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1956) 230–32. A second edition of this work, under the title De Deo Trino I: Pars systematica (note 34 above), repeats this passage without change, 250–52. [Now see The Triune God: Systematics 502–507.] 46 In the Index of Verbum, s.v. Presence. 47 Verbum 102–104.

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and the question of the consciousness of Christ, for consciousness is the presence to oneself in the internal experience of self.48 Further, besides the presence of Christ to himself in consciousness, there is the presence of Christ to us, and here the ambiguity of the term must be kept in mind. The distinction between the infant’s world and the adult’s requires similar discrimination in speaking of presence: ‘Besides the presence of parents to their infant child, there also is the presence of the parents to one another’ – a different matter. Now ‘the presence of Christ to us is not presence in the world of immediacy … divine revelation comes to us through the mediation of meaning.’49 3. Decentering. The role of decentering is patent in Lonergan. It appears in a general way with his emphasis on intentionality, for the whole thrust of intentionality is away from a center in the subject. It is illustrated in the shift from description (things in relation to ‘me’ as center) to explanation (things in relation to one another, quite apart from their relation to ‘me’). Lonergan actually uses the term ‘decentering’ in this connection: unless we ‘decenter’ our apprehension of  space, we have to think of those at the antipodes as standing on their heads.50 But decentering is illustrated par excellence in self-transcending love. Stages on the way are cognitional, moral, and religious selftranscendence.51 The transcendence achieved in knowledge took Aquinas beyond Aristotle’s knowledge by identity: ‘Aquinas transposed this appeal [that is, Augustine’s appeal to eternal reasons] … to secure for the Aristotelian theory of knowing by identity the possibility of self-transcendence in finite intellect.’52 But the stages culminate 48 Bernard Lonergan, The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ: Part 5, ‘Human Consciousness’ [156–89]; Part 6, ‘The Consciousness of Christ’ [190–285]. For a brief survey of Lonergan on consciousness as presence, see Collection 293, editorial note n for the article ‘Christ as Subject: A Reply.’ Add Bernard Lonergan, De Verbo Incarnato, which carries forward his thought on presence. Note that consciousness of self is not knowledge of self. There is a useful parallel with the mediation of being: as the intention of being is immediate while the actual judgment of being is the term of a long process, so internal experience of self is immediate while knowledge of self comes as the term of a long and difficult process. 49 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Christology Today: Methodological Reflections,’ in A Third Collection 77–79. 50 Bernard Lonergan, Topics in Education: The Cincinnati Lectures of 1959 on the Philosophy of Education 162–65. 51 In the Index of A Second Collection, s.v. Self-transcendence. 52 Verbum 197.

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in love. One can hardly think of a more decentering factor. As Paul’s hymn to love declares, love seeks not its own.53 Hence Lonergan’s repeated assertion that when the transforming love given through the Spirit is ours, ‘it takes over. One no longer is one’s own.’54 Decentering, however, did not eliminate Lonergan’s keen interest in the subject. Early on he handled the pseudo-problem of epistemology in regard to the subject–object relation: ‘the critical problem … is not a problem of moving from within outwards, of moving from a subject to an object outside the subject. It is a problem of moving from above downwards, of moving from an infinite potentiality … towards a rational apprehension that seizes the difference of subject and object in essentially the same way that it seizes any other real distinction.’55 Some twenty years later, in a lecture specifically on the subject, we get a wider view. The lecture deals first with the neglected subject and the attitude that truth is so objective it can get along without minds.56 Then, there is the truncated subject that does not know himself or herself and so has an impoverished account of human knowledge.57 There is, thirdly, the immanentist subject unable to achieve intentional self-transcendence.58 There is the existential subject who is not only a knower but a doer affecting the world of objects and even more affecting the subject.59 Finally, there is the alienated subject who has to discover that ‘this world is good, worthwhile, a value worthy of man’s approval and consent.’60 Decentering for Lonergan, then, was never a rejection of subjectivity. How could it be, given his deep study of interiority and consciousness? The subject is ‘the experienced center of experiencing, the intelligent center of inquiry, insight, and formulations, the rational center of critical reflection, scrutiny, hesitation, doubt, and frustration.’61 The 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61

1 Corinthians 13:4–7; New English Bible, v. 5: ‘is never selfish.’ For example, see ‘Christology Today’ in A Third Collection 77. Verbum 98–99 (date of passage quoted: 1946). See ‘The Subject,’ in A Second Collection 69–73. Meanwhile he had adopted the current turn to the subject, ibid. 69–70, and in particular the move from substance to subject: see ‘Existenz and Aggiornamento’ in Collection 222–24; Topics in Education 81–82; and Bernard Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964 71, 107. ‘The Subject,’ in A Second Collection 73–75. Ibid. 75–79. Ibid. 79–84. Ibid. 85–86. Insight 434.

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subject and his or her world live in symbiosis both in actual fact and in Lonergan’s thinking. 4. Giving. The position on love as self-transcending has implications for the notion of giving. The supreme gift of God’s love is hidden in mystery, but we can draw up a series, Thomist fashion, that points beyond itself to that mystery. There is the very low form found in the do ut des exchange (I give that you may give), which is little more than bargaining. An imperfect form is supposed in the biblical ‘Who has ever made a gift to him, to receive a gift in return?’62 The Lord’s injunction ‘when you give a party, ask the poor … For they have no means of repaying you,’ would take us a step higher.63 On this intermediate level one may very well feel unable to make a true gift, for always the giver puts the recipient in his or her debt. But then we have to rise with Lonergan to the perfect gift which is God’s gift of divine love: ‘he whom God sent utters the words of God, so measureless is God’s gift of the Spirit.’64 This measureless gift becomes visible in the way Paul declares: ‘He did not spare his own Son … and with this gift how can he fail to lavish upon us all he has to give?’65 In the technical language of Lonergan’s theology, this giving without measure is unrestricted love. What is unrestricted, after all, has no restrictions: it rises above all thought of return. No theologian would suppose God to have ‘ulterior motives’ in the divine giving, even though we do love in return and ought to do so. But is it possible for us to give in a way that participates in the way God gives? One can only use analogies in approaching mystery, but such analogies for divine giving can be found. A novel I read seventy-five years ago (the title, I think, was The Master Revenge) has the protagonist, at considerable cost to himself, saving the life of an enemy who had treated him unjustly,

62 New English Bible, Romans 11:35. This denial of such ‘agreement’ of Creator and creature supposes that this sort of giving does actually take place between creatures. 63 Ibid. Luke 14:13–14. 64 Ibid. John 3:34. 65 Ibid. Romans 8:32–33. My strategy follows that of Aquinas in Summa contra Gentiles 4, c. 11, where in one of the finest passages in the whole Thomist corpus he goes through deepening types of procession pointing finally to the eternal procession of the Word. As with Newman’s polygon that does not attain circularity no matter how often the sides are multiplied (John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, edited with introduction and notes by I.T. Ker [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985] 207–208), you do not attain the perfection of the divine procession: you see that as the goal of the series, but the goal remains mystery.

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when the enemy not only did not know of the donor’s act, but did not even know that the danger had existed. It was quite impossible for him to feel in debt to the donor – a ‘revenge’ truly worthy of the ‘Master.’ What we can realistically imagine in fiction can actually happen in human lives. 5. Retortion. Much attention has been given to the argument from retortion, the argument, namely, that any attempt to refute Lonergan’s position on human knowing inevitably makes use of that position. To the question ‘Is the argument valid?’ one can only answer ‘yes.’ But to the question ‘Has it any positive value, or is it a sterile pursuit?’ I would answer that it is sterile in itself but has the positive effect of freeing thought from handicaps and allowing it to grow in freedom. It is a weed-killer in the vegetable garden of thought. It can perform a useful service in eliminating the weeds, but with that done, the argument loses its point, so stow it away in the potter’s shed till it is needed again. In Insight in fact retortion gets only brief attention: two paragraphs in a long chapter.66 It appears repeatedly in the Lonergan literature in answer to repeated attempts to find a valid refutation of his position. 4 The Dynamism of Inquiry Questions multiply, but the time and space allotted us do not, and I must conclude. The question that gave me entry to my series of topics was whether the effort to understand all reality, the refusal to exclude from consideration any aspect of reality, is the arrogance it is sometimes made out to be. My answer began with human spirit as inquiry, and to that I return; for the Lonergan position is based on questions as given, and on our attending to them not only for the sake of knowing but also for our involvement in the individual and collective enterprise of building a better world. I conclude with a few reflections on the relevance of this to the total divine-human enterprise. That questions are ‘given’ is already significant. They are ‘given’ in the sense that they occur spontaneously. It is not a matter for deliberation, as if we had a choice. Questions occur whether we will it or not. Some are matters of everyday life, too trivial to spend time on. Some occur only to deeper minds, as the question what God is occurred to Thomas Aquinas, and the question why there is something rather than nothing occurred to Leibniz. Of course we are free to ignore them, to 66 Insight 359–60.

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brush them aside, as we are free to attend to them, to develop them, to pursue lines of thought that promote their occurrence; but the basic occurrence is a given, in the sense not only of a datum for thought but as a gift from a giver. Questions are given, however, only to those to whom they occur. The persons are few, I would guess, to whom the question what God is has occurred, or the question why there is something rather than nothing. No one will blame those to whom the questions do not occur. Considerable blame, however, is meted out to those who, when questions do occur, welcome them and pursue an answer to the limits of understanding and beyond. Instead of trading epithets here, it is better to make this difference itself a question and try to understand it. To that end I invoke and expand Lonergan’s differentiations of consciousness. That phrase refers, of course, to differentiations on the side of the subject; but other differentiations occur on the side of the subject’s world, and so we have the genera and species of the physical and bio-universe, the social institutions and cultural achievements of the humanly constructed world, and so on. This suggests the need of a wider umbrella that would cover differentiations across the confines of world and subject, differentiations on the whole human scene, differentiations throughout the creation enterprise. Under that wider heading I have assigned a separate territory to four such differentiations: the cognitional, the ontological, the felt, the voluntary. But how do the differentiations arise? What differentiating forces are at work? On the infrahuman level there are the forces of evolution. These are well enough known, so it will be more interesting to take them for granted and consider instead the differentiating forces in the human world. First of all, an initial plasticity found in the infant but not in the puppy is open to an enormous development in the infant, a development denied the puppy.67 More positively, the source of difference may be found in ‘the locality, the period, the social milieu’; again, the variation will depend ‘upon native aptitude, upon training, upon age and development, upon external circumstances, upon … chance.’ And further, in the drama of life, each person will find and develop ‘the possible roles he might play.’68

67 ‘Aquinas Today: Tradition and Innovation,’ in A Third Collection 38; ‘Religious Experience,’ ibid. 119; ‘Religious Knowledge’ ibid. 133. 68 Frederick. E. Crowe, ‘“All my work has been introducing history into Catholic theology” (Lonergan, 28 March 1980),’ appendix E: ‘Origin of Differentiations of

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That provides a wide scope indeed for the emergence of the four main divisions I suggest for the world enterprise. Then, within the cognitional realm there are subdivisions. Some people are interested in geometry, some in the knowledge of God, some in the family tree. Our interest in this article regards subdivisions in the category ‘philosophy,’ where that word is taken in a wide sense to include empiricist, idealist, realist, and other branches. More to the point, it is also taken to include opponents of philosophy, for to oppose philosophy and offer reasons for that opposition is to be a philosopher. That last group is the presently relevant one: those who charge it is hubris to attempt to control all reality through knowledge. It is these who might be partners in dialogue with Lonergan, were not that dialogue contrary to their principles. Still, half at least of the dialogue must be attempted from the side of Lonergan and like thinkers. We speak of bridging a gap, as cities on opposite sides of a river might do. But in that example each side can see the other and build so as to effect a union. If there is permanent fog on the river they can still reach out tentatively, and eventually meet through trial and error. But what if the other side doesn’t want a union? One can only add to the charge of hubris by trying to understand even hostility to understanding, as Lonergan has done,69 and as this essay itself tries to do with its dogged pursuit of his thought. The study I have made identifies Lonergan’s approach clearly enough as what he calls generalist.70 He is not a generalist in the way Michelangelo is said to have been a uomo universale. The advance of learning and its dispersion among specialties makes Michelangelo impossible today. Still the questions continue to occur, and they will continue as long as Aquinas and Leibniz find successors. A way to handle them has to be found. Lonergan found his generalist approach in the study of method as pertinent to all learning. No questions are to be brushed aside, but instead of answers a way of approach is defined:

Consciousness,’ in Developing the Lonergan Legacy 109. [The quoted remarks in Crowe’s appendix are from Lonergan, and the appendix indicates where in Lonergan’s writings they can be found.] The mention of ‘chance’ reminds us of the role Lonergan over and over assigned to luck in the work of scholars. 69 Chapter 17 of Insight opens [p. 553] with the remark ‘If Descartes has imposed upon subsequent philosophers a requirement of rigorous method, Hegel has obliged them not only to account for their own views but also to explain the existence of contrary convictions and opinions.’ 70 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Questionnaire on Philosophy,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 352–83, at 382–83. Also see note 3 above.

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the way of method. Whether or not that will eventually yield a distant counterpart to the uomo universale remains to be seen. Meanwhile what is to be said on the general charge of the ‘totalitarian’ ambitions of knowledge? In a sense an answer is beside the point both for defenders and for accusers. For defenders, because inquiry for them is less an argued position than it is a compulsion.71 For accusers, at least those most thoroughly anti-rational, because reasoned argument is on principle ruled out of order. It may be necessary to wait for the experiment of history to decide for one side or the other by retiring its opponents from the scene – a rather unphilosophic way to deal with matters philosophic, but no doubt effective in the long run.72

71 Insight 28: ‘… the fact of inquiry is beyond all doubt. It can absorb a man. It can keep him for hours, day after day, year after year, in the narrow prison of his study or his laboratory.’ 72 This is said to be the case in science: ‘As Max Planck testified, a new scientific position gains general acceptance, not by making opponents change their minds, but by holding its own until old age has retired them from their professorial chairs,’ Insight 549. On the ‘experiment of history,’ see ibid. 779, editorial note c.

Chapter 11

The Puzzle of the Subject as Subject in Lonergan1

To make the subject as subject my theme seems to involve me in contradiction from the start: the contradiction between the theme, which is said to be the subject, and the act of making it the theme, where that act has already turned the subject into an object of thought. Indeed, the contradiction seems implicit already in the three words ‘subject as subject,’ for does not that ‘as’ mean that we are dealing with an aspect of the subject, reflecting on the subject, and so making the subject an object of study? Nevertheless my title speaks of a ‘puzzle’ rather than a ‘contradiction,’ and a puzzle ought in principle to be soluble. My chosen title, then, commits me to attempt to talk rationally about the subject as subject and not be involved in contradiction. How that can be, if it can be, is the focal interest of this essay. Let us be clear on the terms of the problem, as I shall call it. The problem is not precisely one of attending to the subject. To ask any question whatever about the subject is to attend to it; to say anything whatever about the subject is to attend to it. The problem is how to attend to the subject without turning the subject into an object, and thus abandoning the search for the subject as subject. Ask anything, say anything about the subject, and that pesky ‘subject as object’ is there, implicit in the theme: it follows me like my shadow, however I fulminate against it. Of course, it is the subject that says all that, but it is a new subject – which I at once make into an object again simply by attending to it and thus starting a new round in the endless cycle of

1 Previously published in International Philosophical Quarterly 43/2 (2003) 187–205.

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the search for the subject. Our project does indeed seem to be sabotaged on principle and in its very beginning. This essay will present the problem in Lonergan as it may be pieced together from passages in his lectures and writings (part 1). He did not attempt a systematic answer, or even a systematic formulation of the problem. He did, however, study more explicitly a similar problem and its possible solution when he dealt with insight into insight (part 2). I will therefore exploit that problem and its solution, and raise the question whether there may not be such a similarity with our question as will enable us to transfer that solution to our case and speak coherently of the subject as subject (part 3). I will conclude with some reflections on the wider import of this question (part 4). 1 The Problem of the Subject as Subject Obviously we must adopt some view of the subject if we are to talk about it at all. For Lonergan the key concept here is consciousness: ‘A subject is a conscious person.’2 Since our interest at the moment is not the person, that term can be set aside, and we are left with consciousness as the term to study. 1.1 Consciousness Lonergan’s early interest in cognitional theory had centered not on consciousness but on understanding, a term whose meaning he found in the intelligere of Augustine and Aquinas, and explored in his own Verbum articles of 1946–1949.3 Nevertheless, a thoughtful footnote in those articles did refer to consciousness in the later sense he gave the word: ‘Concomitant consciousness is awareness of one’s act and oneself in knowing something else,’4 and this sense figures largely a few years later in Insight.5 It is, however, in his study of the consciousness of Christ that Lonergan gives us his most thorough treatment up to that time of the 2 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Christ as Subject: A Reply,’ in Collection (1988) 153–84, at 182. The article was first published in 1959. 3 Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas. Originally five articles in Theological Studies, 1946–49, under the title ‘The Concept of Verbum in the Writings of St Thomas Aquinas.’ 4 Verbum (1997) 198, note 28. 5 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 344–46.

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concept. There he defines consciousness as internal experience, in the strict sense, of oneself and one’s acts. It is experience in the strict sense – that is, in the sense it has in the compound activity of experiencing, understanding, and judging. It is not therefore a perception, and Lonergan devotes a good part of his book to refuting the view of consciousness as perception. Still less is it knowledge: consciousness of self and knowledge of self are two quite different things. Further, it is internal experience, not therefore the experience of colors or sounds or flavors or any similar act of perception. All of these are experienced but the experience is the external experience of an object. All of them are also accompanied by conscious acts (seeing, hearing, tasting), and we have internal experience of those acts; but that internal experience is not experience of the acts as objects. Further, they are accompanied by internal experience of the subject, that is, of oneself as seeing, oneself as hearing, oneself as tasting, and so on; but as with acts so also with the subject: consciousness of oneself, the subject, is not consciousness of an object.6 The same work, in another approach, defined consciousness as that by which the subject is made present to himself or herself,7 and Lonergan came to stress this aspect more than experience of acts. In one sample passage he distinguishes three senses of ‘presence.’ Chairs are present in a room but not to the room: their presence is merely material. Next, one person is present to another, and this is quite different from mere material presence. But there is a third sense: ‘a person has to be somehow present to himself for others to be present to him.’8 It is this self-presence that is consciousness in its primary sense: ‘inasmuch as we are … present to ourselves … we have consciousness in the true sense of the word.’9 This concept of consciousness, as both internal experience of self and presence to self, is supposed in Lonergan’s discussion of the subject as subject.

6 Bernard Lonergan, The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ 156–69. More broadly, see 156–285, and also 18–31. 7 Ibid. 255, 257: ‘… consciousness is conceived as experience … through which the operating subject is rendered present to itself under the formality of the experienced … By the very fact that a subject is operating with regard to any object at all, it is always rendered present to itself …’ (254, 256: ‘… conscientia concipitur ut experientia … per quam subiectum operans sub ratione experti sibi praesens efficitur … eo ipso quod subiectum circa quodlibet obiectum operatur, semper sibi praesens efficitur …’). 8 Bernard Lonergan, Understanding and Being (1990) 15; also see 16. 9 Bernard Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics 378–81, at 379 (English) and 378 (Latin).

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1.2 Heightening Consciousness by Attending to Acts We have now to notice a very important word, one that Lonergan regularly associates with the problem of the subject, namely, the ‘heightening’ of consciousness. To arrive at the subject as subject, so we are told in texts to be cited shortly, you need to ‘heighten your consciousness.’ The meaning of this recurring phrase is not altogether clear. Granted, to achieve this ‘heightening’ we are just as regularly told ‘attend to your consciousness’; but ‘attend to’ is itself too vague and general to help us much. Our first task, then, will be to determine what Lonergan means by ‘heightening consciousness.’ I find that the data for a positive response indicate three different meanings, but they also show a negative side that is highly interesting. In the first set of texts to be adduced, ‘heightening consciousness’ means attending to conscious acts rather than to the objects of those acts. The problem is not characteristic of Lonergan’s early writings, so I omit them and turn at once to Insight, where we read: ‘consciousness can be heightened by shifting attention from the content to the act, but consciousness is not constituted by that shift of attention.’10 The Boston College lectures of 1957 on existentialism hint at the problem involved: ‘In an incomplete and elusive fashion the subject can shift his attention from object to act and subject.’11 The same lectures differentiate external experience (of an object) from internal experience (not of an object): ‘I see colors, but I do not see seeing, I do not see myself seeing.’12 Here too there is this second hint of the problem: ‘That subject in his own living has a certain presence to himself, in some queer sense of the word ‘presence’ – it is not the same as the presence of objects – that experiences the terror of death, the agony of suffering, and the torture of guilt.’13 This line of thought made its way rather slowly into Lonergan’s writings, and so I leap ahead to an essay first published in 1964: ‘Objects are present by being attended to; but subjects are present as subjects, not by 10 Insight 345. (For accurate chronology, note that, except for revisions not relevant here, the book was ready in manuscript in 1953.) This is the only reference to ‘heighten’ in the Index of the Collected Works edition of 1992; there is no entry on that word in the 1958 Index. 11 Bernard Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism 197. What this recurring ‘hint’ is will be explained presently. 12 Ibid. 196. 13 Ibid. 316.

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being attended to, but by attending.’14 The last academic year in which Lonergan taught Scholastic theology was 1964–1965. From then on, new interests take over in his writings and lectures, and texts like the following occur more frequently: ‘you have to produce in yourself acts of understanding and heighten your consciousness to the point where you are not just understanding an object but are aware of this as understanding.’15 In Method in Theology the topic recurs with further nuances: ‘With these questions one turns … to the appropriation of one’s own interiority, one’s subjectivity … Such appropriation, in its technical expression, resembles theory. But in itself it is a heightening of intentional consciousness, an attending not merely to objects but also to the intending subject and his acts.’16 Again, with a third hint of the problem, it is a matter of ‘attending not merely to scientific objects but also attending, as well as one can, to the conscious operations by which one intends the objects.’17 And yet again, in a passage on Jaspers that anticipates the second of Lonergan’s three usages: [S]elf-appropriation occurs through a heightening of consciousness and such a heightening reveals not the subject as object but the subject as subject. I should contend, however, that this heightening of consciousness proceeds to an objectification of the subject … to a transition from the subject as subject to the subject as object. Such a transition yields objective knowledge of the subject just as much as does any valid transition from the data of sense through inquiry and understanding, reflection and judgment.18

The series continues in the post-Method period: ‘It is only when we heighten consciousness by adverting not only to objects but also to 14 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Cognitional Structure,’ in Collection (first published as an article, 1964) 205–21, at 210. Here, at 209, we have the useful list: ‘material presence … intentional presence, in which knowing is involved, and it is of two quite distinct kinds … the presence of the object to the subject … the presence of the subject to himself.’ 15 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Method: The Basic Problem,’ unpublished lecture, Rockhurst College, Kansas City, MO, 20 October 1968, p. 20 of the manuscript (ed. Thomas J. Merfeld). While Lonergan had made a breakthrough in his work on method in February of 1965, very serious surgery and a long convalescence slowed down the elaboration of the method. 16 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 83. 17 Ibid. 260. 18 Ibid. 262.

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activities, when we begin to sort out the activities …’ that we begin to move from consciousness to knowledge.19 And late in life: ‘All our intentional acts also are conscious acts. But to advert to them as conscious, we have to deemphasize the intentional and heighten the conscious side of the act.’20 A moment ago we quoted a passage in which Lonergan spoke of self-appropriation as a heightening of intentional consciousness. That is clarified here: consciousness is heightened, but the intentional is deemphasized. This fairly wide sampling of texts shows the persistence of the question of ‘heightening’ and as well the sameness of the answers. Despite the variety in the nuances the samples add, they all illustrate one simple positive meaning Lonergan gives to ‘heightening of consciousness,’ namely, shifting attention from objects to the acts of the subject. Six of the quoted texts explicitly and two others implicitly present this view. Further, the act of ‘attending’ to the subject is not seen as a problem, and its meaning is taken for granted: we must return to that point later. On the negative side, I three times mentioned hints the texts gave of a problem, but I defer explanation of that remark to the end of part 1 of my essay, for it leads directly to part 2. Meanwhile let me present the  data on the two other meanings Lonergan gives to ‘heightening of consciousness.’ 1.3 Other Meanings of ‘Heightening Consciousness’ I mentioned in citing one text in my sampling that it added a new line of thought: while regularly the texts speak of heightening as a shift of attention from the intended objects to the intending subject, this one in critique of Jaspers adds a movement in the opposite direction: now, heightening of consciousness proceeds to an objectification of the subject, and the objectifying is itself seen as a heightening. As quoted above: ‘heightening of consciousness proceeds to an objectification of the subject … to a transition from the subject as subject to the subject as object.’ 19 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Religious Experience,’ in A Third Collection 115–28, at 117. This was the first in a series of three lectures on Religious Studies and Theology, Queen’s University, 2–4 March 1976. 20 Bernard Lonergan, ‘A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,’ ibid. 202–23, at 210–11. This paper was originally given at the XIVth Congress of The International Association for the History of Religions, Winnipeg, 18 August 1980. (It was also given at Boston College in June of that year.)

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This feature deserves separate study. First of all, it is not just an isolated text in answer to Jaspers, for the theme of objectification had been thoroughly worked out in the first chapter of Method. Familiarity with transcendental method, Lonergan says there, ‘is not to be achieved by reading books … It is a matter of heightening one’s consciousness by objectifying it … In what does this objectification consist? It is a matter of applying the operations as intentional to the operations as conscious,’21 that is, experiencing the levels of consciousness, understanding the levels of consciousness, judging the levels of consciousness, and deciding to operate in accord with the levels of consciousness. I draw attention to the clause ‘heightening one’s consciousness by objectifying it.’ Heightening, then, is achieved both in going from object to subject and in going from subject to object. Neither is the Method text an isolated statement, for the general point had been made a few years earlier in ‘Cognitional Structure.’ There what Method later calls an ‘objectification’ was called a ‘reduplication,’ but the argument followed the same path. The topic is knowing what knowing is, and Lonergan writes as follows. Where knowing is a structure, knowing knowing must be a reduplication of the structure … if knowing is a conjunction of experience, understanding, and judging, then knowing knowing has to be a conjunction of (1) experiencing experience, understanding, and judging, (2) understanding one’s experience of experience, understanding, and judging, and (3) judging one’s understanding of experience, understanding, and judging to be correct.22

In terms of the present discussion the second ‘knowing’ in ‘knowing knowing’ is a subjective act (though it has an object, mental or extramental) and the first is an objectification of that act. That brings us to a third meaning for ‘heightening of consciousness.’ In discussing self-appropriation Lonergan speaks of a distinct sense of heightening that is not precisely a matter of shifting attention from content to activity (though it does attend to activity), nor the heightening achieved by objectification, but rather a heightening that comes with a

21 Method in Theology 14. 22 ‘Cognitional Structure,’ in Collection 208. Also see Bernard Lonergan, ‘Philosophical Positions with Regard to Knowing,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964 214–43, at 221–26.

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move from a lower level of activity to a higher, as from dreaming to waking, from the empirical to the intellectual, and so on. To heighten one’s presence to oneself, one does not introspect; one raises the level of one’s activity. If one sleeps and dreams, one is present to oneself as the frightened dreamer. If one wakes, one becomes present to oneself, not as moved but as moving … If one is puzzled and wonders and inquires, the empirical subject becomes an intellectual subject as well.

And Lonergan continues with applications to the rational and responsible levels.23 1.4 The Problem: Contradiction in Attending to the Subject? Our third meaning of heightening consciousness presents no difficulty in itself, for it follows the familiar steps of self-appropriation, but it was preceded by this statement. I have been attempting to describe the subject’s presence to himself. But the reader, if he tries to find himself as subject, to reach back and, as it were, uncover his subjectivity, cannot succeed. Any such effort is introspecting, attending to the subject; and what is found is, not the subject as subject, but only the subject as object; it is the subject as subject that does the finding.24

We have come to the heart of a problem latent in our list of ‘heightening’ texts: Lonergan’s persistent need to attend to the subject along 23 ‘Cognitional Structure,’ in Collection 210. Also see ‘Existenz and Aggiornamento,’ ibid. 222–31, at 222: being oneself is ‘a becoming aware, a growth in self-consciousness, a heightening of one’s self-appropriation.’ 24 ‘Cognitional Structure,’ ibid. 210. The statement there that the reader cannot ‘uncover his subjectivity’ is to be read along with Phenomenology and Logic 215, where the subject as subject is said to be ‘discoverable through consciousness’: we can discover the subject in experience and nonetheless remain unable to present it for study. (Other ‘conflicts’ will be noticed presently.) See also Understanding and Being 15–16: ‘Now what on earth do you do to get that presence of yourself to yourself? Do you crane your neck around and look into yourself to see if you are there? First of all, that cannot be done. You cannot turn yourself inside out and take a look. In the second place, even if you could, it would be beside the point. Why is that? Because if you could, what you would arrive at would be, not the third type of presence, but only the second.’

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with his recognition of the impossibility of isolating the subject as subject for study. At the start of my essay I indicated how seemingly contradictory is the effort to focus on the subjective. Lonergan on introspection reinforces this point. We watch for internal experience of, say, insight; but in the very watching the experience as experience tends to vanish. ‘Introspection is a shift of attention from the object to the subject … whenever you understand anything, you do so consciously, but you do not do so introspectively. You do so introspectively when you provoke insights … and watch for the experience of the insight.’25 Watching the parade of objects in consciousness we watch for the watcher watching: ‘As the parade of objects marches by, spectators do not have to slip into the parade to become present to themselves … and they are present to themselves by the same watching that, as it were, at its other pole makes the parade present to them.’26 But in the very watch for experience, and in what seems the discovery of the experience, the experience itself slips away. One therefore seeks the experience indirectly in history: ‘You get hold of insights properly only by considering the history of science, the history of philosophy, and so on. Just as if you just center on what is experience, in any given mode, it’s so elusive that it tends to vanish.’27 This tug-of-war between access to the subject and non-access results in what seem like conflicts in Lonergan – for example, the conflict between his familiar position on the levels of self-appropriation, which suppose attention to subjective acts and to consciousness (‘If one is

25 ‘Philosophical Positions with Regard to Knowing,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964 223. 26 ‘Cognitional Structure,’ in Collection 210. See also ‘Existenz and Aggiornamento,’ ibid. 229: ‘That conscious being is not an object, not part of the spectacle we contemplate, but the presence to himself of the spectator, the contemplator. It is not an object of introspection, but the prior presence that makes introspection possible. It is conscious, but that does not mean that properly it is known; it will be known only if we introspect, understand, reflect, and judge.’ Also Understanding and Being 138–39: ‘Consciousness of the subject is much more easily reached in introspection than consciousness of the different types of act … That unity [of the subject] is given; it is not merely a postulate; it is a verification of the transcendental ego, of what would have to be postulated if we did not have the consciousness of this identity that perceives and inquires and understands.’ And further, Method in Theology 15: ‘discovery [of the subject] is not a matter of looking … It is an awareness, not of what is intended, but of the intending. It is finding in oneself the conscious occurrence, seeing, whenever an object is seen …’ 27 Phenomenology and Logic 357.

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puzzled … the empirical subject becomes an intellectual subject’), and his position on the impossibility of finding, ‘uncovering,’ one’s subjectivity. Further, that conflict is matched by a conflict in regard to objectification. For on the one hand we are objectifying the elusive subject, but on the other hand the process is as straightforward and non-elusive as any process from data to judgment. The statement on that point is worth repeating: ‘Such a transition yields objective knowledge of the subject just as much as does any valid transition from the data of sense through inquiry and understanding, reflection and judgment.’ It is true that we can distinguish two cases of being ‘accessible’ – accessible to consciousness but not accessible to inquiry – so that in an abstract way and ‘on paper’ the two positions on ‘accessible’ can be reconciled; but in the one subject who is both conscious and inquisitive, there remains a conflict intrinsic to objectification. 1.5 The Reality of the Subject as Subject The perplexity of the case does not lead Lonergan to regard as unreal the subject as subject and so to dismiss it from the universe of rational discourse. He does, however, advert to the special sense the ‘real’ has in this context. What is the reality of this subject as subject? It is reality in a very prior and probably conceptually incomplete sense, but nonetheless in a very real sense. The subject as subject is reality in the sense that we live and die, love and hate, rejoice and suffer, desire and fear, wonder and dread, inquire and doubt … [T]he subject as subject … is the victim of all these things and the origin of all these things … That subject is reality in that ontic sense prior to any ontology, prior to any conception of himself as there … The subject as subject is Descartes’s Cogito transposed to concrete living. It is the subject present to himself, not as presented in any theory or affirmation of consciousness, but as the prior non-absence prerequisite to any presentation, as the a priori condition of any stream of consciousness.28

Lonergan regards it as a simple conclusion that this prior reality is the subject as subject. ‘Now what is this prior reality, this ontic, evident, normative something that grounds horizon, the critique of horizons, 28 Ibid. 315–16.

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and the determination of the true horizon? It is easy enough to proceed to the conclusion that that reality is the subject as subject.’29 The topic belongs, then, in the universe of rational discourse, but the admission that the reality of the subject as subject is ‘conceptually incomplete’ underlines the cognitional difficulty of talking about it and adds a further hint on what the basic problem is. 1.6 Clue to a Possible Solution In this first part of my essay, I have been concerned to present the problem in Lonergan of the subject as subject. The data are disparate. They deal with consciousness of the subject and speak of three different ways heightening of consciousness may occur: in shifting attention from objects to acts of the subject, in proceeding from subject and acts to their objectification, and in moving from a lower level of conscious activity to a higher. They speak also of the difficulty, even the impossibility, of getting at the focus of our whole study, the subject as subject. They insist at the same time on the reality of the subject as subject. Sometimes they make the subject as subject accessible, namely, to consciousness, and sometimes inaccessible, namely, to inquiry. How is one to handle these disparate data on a still unformulated question? There is a clue to a possible answer. In introducing my first set of texts, those on the turn from object to subject, I spoke of a negative side of high importance, and I identified three texts that hint at the problem of heightening consciousness. The texts are: first, ‘In an incomplete and elusive fashion the subject can shift his attention from object to act and subject’; next, ‘some queer sense of the word “presence”’; and third, ‘attending, as well as one can, to the conscious operations.’ Put together the phrases ‘as well as one can,’ ‘incomplete and elusive,’ and ‘some queer sense’; add to them the phrase ‘conceptually incomplete’ describing the reality of the subject as subject; and from all this you have a remarkable resemblance to the tricky, the elusive character

29 Ibid. 313–14. Lonergan reaches his conclusion in an argument he summarizes as follows (Phenomenology and Logic 215): ‘The argument is: the prior reality is not object as object or subject as object; there only remains subject as subject; and this s[ubject] as s[ubject] is both reality and discoverable through consciousness. The argument does not prove that in the s[ubject] as s[ubject] we shall find the evidence … it proves that unless we find it there, we shall not find it at all.’

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of insight that occupied Lonergan in the latter part of his life. This suggests that his work on insight into insight may illuminate the darker area of the subject as subject. So let us turn to part 2. 2 A Similar Problem and Its Possible Solution I speak of a problem similar to ours, and a preliminary task is to distinguish it from a pseudo-problem created by a pseudo-similarity. The exposure of that false similarity was already implicit in our denial that consciousness is a perception, but I approach it now from another viewpoint. The fallacy is this, that a parallel linguistic use of the preposition ‘of’ means a parallel position in cognitional theory. Thus, to solve a problem in geometry, I draw a triangle. I see the triangle and may say that I have external experience of the triangle, that I have sight of the triangle, that I have perception of it. When I turn now to the conscious side of the experience, and attend to the internal experience of my act of seeing, I adopt a parallel use of grammar: I say that I am conscious of my act of seeing, that I am aware of it. At this point the fatal mistake may occur, that of giving the ‘of’ of consciousness a function and meaning parallel to that of the ‘of’ of perception. I have perception (sight) of the triangle, and I am conscious of my act of seeing; the two of’s are grammatically similar; now the triangle is an object of my seeing, and it seems natural to say in a similar way that my seeing is the object of my consciousness. Thus, my seeing of the triangle and my internal experience of the seeing would be parallel. How neat and simple! It is perhaps advertence to this danger that leads some philosophers to bracket the preposition and write ‘conscious (of) self.’ Let us turn from a false similarity to one that I believe to be real: the similarity of the problem of the subject as subject to that of insight into insight. Both derive from the general problematic of consciousness, and so it may prevent some confusion to notice at once that the data to be adduced deal sometimes with the particular aspect, and sometimes with the general. The problem of insight into insight came to Lonergan’s attention, it seems, only midway through his career, but it acquired ever greater clarity from 1956 to 1981. I have followed that journey elsewhere, and my present readers are referred to that earlier source for details.30 The 30 See ‘For a Phenomenology of Rational Consciousness,’ chapter 6 of the present volume.

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journey, they will find, reveals the quite disorienting fact that on this question Lonergan’s position underwent a profound change: from making insight into insight a fundamental element in his book on insight, he came to realize that in a strict sense insight into insight is not possible. Let me chart the course of his realization in its five steps. 2.1 The Problem of Insight into Insight (1) The first clear sign I have noticed of his new concern appears in De constitutione Christi ontologica et psychologica, the supplement he wrote for his Christology course in 1956. The issue there was not specifically insight but rather consciousness in general, and we are told that consciousness is not described but only indicated.31 That phrase ‘not described’ points to the problem, and that word ‘indicated’ to a stab at a solution. Why is it not ‘described’? Because that would involve intellectual inquiry and discussion; in other words, it would turn consciousness into an object of study. But if the experience cannot be described it can be ‘indicated,’ and the indication is explained: ‘But consciousnessas-experience is indicated inasmuch as a method is described by way of which one can go from an experience structured by understanding and conception back to that experience itself in the strict sense.’ We have here, as far as I know, Lonergan’s first recognition of a fundamental problem of consciousness: its stubborn refusal to submit to study. It is also his first positive approach to the newly elusive case of insight, a first step in the direction to be followed by the later attempts of 1957, 1959, 1972, and 1981. It says very little, but it does go beyond the two obscure terms ‘heighten’ and ‘attend to.’ (2) The next step is found in the lectures of 1957 on existentialism. Our earlier quotations from those lectures spoke of the elusive character of consciousness. Insight has the same character: it defies phenomenology, which ‘is not concerned with insight as such. Insight as such is something extremely elusive.’32 Later in the same lectures we are told: ‘You have your structured data and your insight. You can attend to the

31 The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ 172–73. [The Latin word used on p. 172 is indicatur.] I call this the first clear sign of Lonergan’s new concern about insight, but there is an earlier text that may be relevant, namely, Verbum 69: ‘this principle [non-contradiction] does not arise from an insight into sensible data but from the nature of intelligence as such.’ 32 Phenomenology and Logic 268.

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data that are structured, and your attention centers there. Or you can attend to the insight, and it’s a different focus of attention.’ Here too occurs the already quoted remark: ‘But insight is an elusive thing. You get hold of insights properly only by considering the history of science, the history of philosophy, and so on. Just as if you just center on what is experience, in any given mode, it’s so elusive that it tends to vanish.’33 The reference to history adds a positive step, though we are not told exactly how history achieves it. (3) A further advance is made in 1959. ‘The data of consciousness are not imaginable. But St Thomas holds that no mere man in this life can understand anything at all at any time without conversion to phantasm. How can one get intellect to operate with respect to data that are not imaginable?’ In reply to his own question Lonergan quotes a well-known Scholastic theorem: ‘acts are known by their objects, potencies by their acts, and the essence of the soul by its potencies.’ He builds his solution on that theorem: ‘There exists, then, an associative train linking imaginable objects with conscious experiences. It is by exploiting that link that intelligence investigates the nature of sense, imagination, intellect, will, and the soul.’34 Like the achievement based on history, the argument from an ‘associative train’ is not fully explicit, but some light is provided by a later work. In 1965 Lonergan remarked that ‘sensitive and intellectual acts are among the immediate data of consciousness; they can be reached not only by deduction from their objects but also in themselves as given in consciousness.’35 The fact that they are given in consciousness is, of course, familiar by now. The ‘train’ in the ‘associative train’ argument of 1959 would be understood in Scholasticism as basically deductive, bringing us by reasoning to the nature of sense, imagination, and so on. And the word ‘associative’ is perhaps an obscure effort in 1959 to achieve what became explicit in 1965, the link of the deductive train with the fact that sensitive and intellectual acts are not only deducible from their objects but are also given in consciousness. 33 Ibid. 357. 34 ‘Christ as Subject: A Reply,’ in Collection 173–74. Of course twentieth-century physicists also deal with the unimaginable (see Insight 15), but with unimaginable objects, not with the unimaginable subject; and even then their unimaginable objects are not per se unimaginable: one could conceive a demon with enough ‘brain-power’ to imagine them. The phantasm for the scientist is supplied by the symbols he or she uses. 35 Verbum 5 (in the new Introduction; originally ‘Subject and Soul,’ Philippine Studies 13 [1965] 576–85, at 579).

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(4) A few years later Method in Theology takes another step. The divine, like the act of insight and any data of consciousness, cannot be perceived and it cannot be imagined, but the subjective religious experience occasioned by an object or event can be projected into the field of the perceived or imagined; and this transfer occurs – here is the point of present relevance – this transfer occurs ‘to make insight into the experience possible.’36 In other words, insight into religious experience is not possible in a direct approach. The problem here remains basically the same, but the solution is new, at least in part: now not study of the history of science and philosophy, but a new application of association. The divine ‘can be associated with the object or event, the ritual or recitation, that occasions religious experience, and so there arise the hierophanies.’37 This time there is the added factor of projection: ‘we are touching on the nature of projection, i.e., the transfer of subjective experience into the field of the perceived or imagined,’ where insight is possible. ‘At a higher level of linguistic development, the possibility of insight is achieved by linguistic feed-back, by expressing the subjective experience in words and as subjective.’38 (5) The phrase ‘linguistic feed-back’ is important: it links Lonergan’s position in 1971 (when he had completed the manuscript for Method) with the interview of 1981 that focuses on the linguistic angle for a solution. Let us turn to that interview. First, it puts the difficulty quite baldly. ‘It’s tricky though: insight into phantasm, and we have no phantasm of our actual understanding.’ How then can one have insight into insight? Or, as he asked in 1959, ‘How can one get intellect to operate with respect to data that are not imaginable?’ The text is short, but clear enough. It is clear too that

36 Method in Theology 88 and note 34. 37 Ibid. 88. 38 Ibid. note 34. Lonergan’s full view on projection needs more study. For the present we may simply note that here he remains on the level of understanding. It is another question when we proceed to the level of judgment and say that religion is ‘a mythical projection of man’s own excellence into the sky’ (Method in Theology 243; more on Feuerbach in ‘A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,’ in A Third Collection 218). Even on the level of understanding Lonergan prefers the term ‘association’ to ‘projection,’ as in Method in Theology 108: ‘Only in so far as the temporal, generic, internal, divine can somehow be associated with or – in the language of the naive realist – “projected” upon the spatial, specific, external, human, can an insight be had and expression result.’

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Lonergan meant what he said: the long account that follows, spelling out the way we get around the difficulty, is testimony to the difficulty’s reality. So how does Lonergan get around it? Conceding the elusive character of the act of insight and agreeing that ‘we have no phantasm of our actual understanding,’ he continues: So what are you going to do? You set up dummies: the language symbols, linguistic symbols; you relate the linguistic symbols to one another: sensation, imagination, feeling, inquiry, understanding, formulation, reflection, reflective understanding, judgment, judgment of value and decision, being in love with God … But you have to have all these things on their different levels, and their relation to one another each on its own level. So you create the phantasm, just as the mathematician does.39

We have no phantasm of insight itself, but we have a phantasm of the dummies we construct, and they provide an object for insight. Further, in the language of 1959 and later years Lonergan might have said that we associate these dummies with the elusive insight, but his 1981 terminology is more precise: we use those imaginable dummies as symbols of the unimaginable acts that are our concern; we understand the symbols, and that understanding is a stand-in for the non-understanding of the unimaginable act of insight. The new and, I believe, important factor is the role of symbolism given the dummies: their association with the elusive act of insight is that of a symbol to the symbolized. 2.2 Indirect Approach to Understanding Insight Can we get any closer to a direct understanding or give a more specific meaning to our indirect approach? I have used the term ‘stand-in’ to describe the relation of the understanding actually reached to the understanding desired but inaccessible. I might also say it is ‘borrowed’ understanding, somewhat in the sense in which Lonergan speaks of the ‘borrowed’ content of a judgment. In the plainer language of football we might say that we made an end run around the problem. Other terms are suggested in the footnote to this paragraph, but my favorite

39 Bernard Lonergan, interview with Luis Morfin, July 1981, quoted from taperecording. The use of ‘dummies’ is a Lonergan tactic. An easy way to understand it is by way of mathematics: in algebra we set up a problem calling for a number as its solution, and we say ‘Let x be the number’; that x is a simple form of a dummy.

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expression is to say that we have achieved insight into insight ‘by proxy.’40 Symbols are the means; understanding by proxy is the result. We have, then, five attempts by Lonergan to understand, in a roundabout way, the otherwise inaccessible act of insight, or in general the otherwise inaccessible data of consciousness. Our narrative of this history began with his position in 1956: we can indicate what we cannot describe, and the indication has meaning. Then, in 1957 he expanded the field of data, turning to the history of science, philosophy, and other disciplines as the source of our insights. Next, in 1959 he appealed to an associative path, a series of steps from imaginable objects to the soul: along that path he seems to have seen the possibility of an association with the data of consciousness. Fourthly, he turned to religious experience: the divine is ‘associated with the object or event, the ritual or recitation, that occasions religious experience,’ and we project our subjective experiences into the field of the perceived or imagined. Finally, he substituted symbols, which we can get at, for the insight into insight, which we cannot get at. It was a long drawn-out struggle, with various solutions succeeding one another. There is no clear genetic sequence in the various solutions, but neither is there repudiation of earlier positions by later. The solution based on linguistic symbols seems to me the most satisfactory, but it does not exclude the first, in which consciousness is not described but indicated. The successive attempts can thus be understood in their

40 I am seeking a descriptive term for this indirect and substituted understanding. On ‘indirect,’ note that ‘direct’ is used in a number of senses: as contrasted with the reflective understanding we have in judgment (Insight, chapter 10); as contrasted with inverse insight (ibid. chapter 1, 43–50); as contrasted with introspective understanding (‘Christ as Subject: A Reply,’ in Collection 174). I use ‘indirect’ here in a general sense to include the various approaches that fail to yield proper understanding of the subject as subject. See also Phenomenology and Logic 199: ‘The existence of the horizon comes to light not directly but indirectly’; and Method in Theology 87: ‘the generic cannot be … directly perceived, or directly represented … [Time] cannot be directly perceived, and it can be represented only by a highly sophisticated geometrical image.’ On ‘borrowed’ content see Insight, 300–301. The terms ‘transfer,’ ‘projection,’ and ‘association’ (see above, the text at notes 36–38) might also be exploited. Or we could speak of understanding at one remove, or of substituted understanding, and could perhaps explore the ‘as if’ philosophy for ideas. In the use of ‘proxy’ the parallel would be this: as in law proxy gives someone authority to act for another, so in the cognitional field symbols give an understanding that is a substitute for another (proper) understanding.

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variety as aspects more or less compatible with one another, each striving from some particular approach to establish a beachhead on the continent of understanding. One hopes that further archival research will bring to light other phases of this history, but meanwhile we have a sufficient basis to proceed to part 3 of our study. 3 The Solution Transferred to the Subject as Subject What has all the wrestling with insight into insight to do with the subject as subject? At the end of part 1, I noted some phrases that suggested a link between the subject as subject and the problem of insight into insight. I would now exploit that link in hope of shedding light on the subject as subject. I see this as a move from a particular case to the general. The quest of the subject as subject is the general goal of our inquiry, and the attempt to reach insight into insight is an attempt in one particular case to reach that general goal. From the paradigm case of the elusive act of insight we may move to any conscious act, for none of the data of consciousness is imaginable; not only insight but all these data have the same elusive character. Thus, there is an antecedent probability that any light we reach on insight into insight may point to a solution also of the general problem of the subject as subject. It remains, however, to go beyond antecedent probability and ask whether any of Lonergan’s five stabs at insight into insight can be adapted and transferred to the general problem. I take up the question in the five steps followed in part 2. We have seen that in 1956 Lonergan made his first indirect approach to consciousness. At that time consciousness was not described; it was, however, ‘indicated’ by a backward movement, a return from objectified experience to pure experience: consciousness is that to which one returns. This gives us the two poles of a possible movement. It suggests the question whether the same two poles are operative for the subject as subject. I would say that they are, with movement along the same path, but that the movement relevant for us is in the reverse order, from pure experience to objectified experience rather than from the objectification back to experience. That is explicitly the movement in Lonergan’s account of objectification of the subject. As quoted above, ‘heightening of consciousness proceeds to an objectification of the subject … to a transition from the subject as subject to the subject as object. Such a transition yields objective knowledge of the subject just as much as does any valid transition from the data of sense through inquiry and understanding, reflection and judgment.’ Further, that reverse order is supposed in

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Lonergan’s account of the ontic ground of the horizon we choose. ‘Now what is this prior reality, this ontic, evident, normative something that grounds horizon, the critique of horizons, and the determination of the true horizon?’41 Lonergan concludes that the subject as subject is the ontic rock, the basis in any movement to objectification. What the text of 1956 does is enable us to see that movement from subject to object as a procession from pure experience to objectified experience. There is communication, then, between the subjective and the objective, whether we go from subject to object or from object to subject. I come to my second point. In 1957 Lonergan stated, ‘You get hold of insights properly only by considering the history of science, the history of philosophy, and so on.’ I have not found any exegesis he gave of this statement, but there is an alternative way to get hold of insights, and perhaps the contrast between the two ways will be helpful. The alternative way is that of introspection in which we ‘provoke’ insights: ‘In blinking your eyes, you direct the question to the experience of seeing, and so your attention is drawn to the subject.’ Now in introspection ‘you provoke insights by puzzles, experiments, and so forth, and watch for the experience of the insight.’42 To say, then, that we get hold of insights properly in the study of history may mean simply that history speeds up the slow process of introspection, makes it more accurate, and certainly yields insights of far greater moment. In any case the link with the subject as subject is found in their common aim, and in a procedure that is basically common (history on the large scale of what is going forward in the world of the human, and history on the small scale of individual experience). My third point brings us to 1959. In that year Lonergan reached conscious acts by their association with a well-known train from objects through acts and potencies to the soul: there is, he says, ‘an associative train linking imaginable objects with conscious experiences.’ Whatever Lonergan understood by this association, and whatever its  relation to the deductive train, to link imaginable objects with conscious experiences is to follow on particular points the general path

41 Phenomenology and Logic 313–14. For a longer quotation see the text at note 29 above. 42 ‘Philosophical Positions with Regard to Knowing,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964 223. Elsewhere Lonergan remarks that in general it is easy to produce sensations and find consciousness on the empirical level, but ‘forethought and ingenuity are needed when one is out to heighten one’s consciousness of inquiry, insight …’ (Method in Theology 15). On introspection see the text at notes 24 and 25 above.

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‘indicated’ by Lonergan in 1956, the return from the pole of objectified experience to the pole of pure experience. Consciousness, or the subject as subject, or pure experience is the pole one reaches. My fourth point. In Method Lonergan saw the divine ‘associated with the object or event … that occasions religious experience,’ and he saw subjective religious experience itself as ‘projected’ into the field of the perceived or imagined, where insight became possible. May we not do likewise with the subject as subject, namely, associate it with objects and project it into the field of the perceived or imagined object, where insight becomes possible? If religious experience can be ‘projected’ in this way into the field of the perceived or imagined object, so surely can any subjective act – and if any subjective act, then why not the subject itself, thus again making rational discussion of the subject possible? Finally, in 1981 Lonergan invokes his ‘dummy’ tactic and uses ‘data-inquiry-insight’ as a symbol of the unimaginable act of insight. I suggest that we might do likewise with the subject as subject, using the linguistic and imaginable term ‘subject as subject’ as symbol of the non-linguistic and unimaginable reality we would understand. Thus, the term ‘subject as subject’ has two distinct meanings. In one it is the perfectly clear term for a linguistic exercise; in the other it means the unimaginable and elusive consciousness. To make the first a symbol of the second is not arbitrary. The linguistic and imaginable ‘subject as subject’ is a term which we formulate quite simply and objectively in a linguistic exercise. We do so with the purpose of reaching the unimaginable ‘subject as subject’; and if it does not bring us that far, it may still serve as an intelligible symbol of our goal, and thus enable us to speak rationally of the unimaginable subject as subject. 4 Concluding Reflections Let us take our bearings. We all learned as children how to use ‘object’ and ‘subject’ in the context of grammar. Later as students now of philosophy we came to think on a more sophisticated level of the object of sense, of the object of imagination, of the object of thought, of the object of judgment. Then, removing the restriction imposed by the ‘of’ phrase, we may think of the object, not as object of some branch of philosophy, but simply as object: the object as object. Grammar seems to have yielded without rebellion to philosophy.43 43 True, some philosophers struggle with the epistemology of the subject–object relationship, but Lonergan had already taken a position on that in the second verbum

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If we now try, however, to do for ‘subject’ what we did for ‘object,’ we run into difficulty. We can think easily enough of the role of the subject in grammar. We can likewise think of the subject psychologically as the object of studies of the psyche. Thirdly, we can think of it ontologically as the object of a branch of philosophy. Then, again removing the restricting phrases, we come to think of the subject simply as object. So far, no problem. The difficulty arises when we use the same procedures in a further step and attempt to think of the subject as subject. That brings us face to face with our basic problem, the difficulty or perhaps impossibility of thinking coherently of the subject as subject. So we have to ask how, starting from simple linguistic exercises, we got ourselves into this seemingly irrational box. It is clear that somewhere we began using words as mere poker chips without reference to their intrinsic meaning or assigned value. At that point we were transferring an exercise in grammar to an invalid statement on cognitional achievement. We were merely playing with words, at best following a logical procedure, and achieving no more than a conceptual result. We say ‘being as being,’ and ‘object as object,’ so also we say ‘subject as subject’ – one is as easy to say as the other. A child could do as much. A statement on cognitional achievement, however, is another matter. At this point Lonergan’s ‘dummy’ tactics came to our rescue. Following the example he gave of insight into insight (part 2) we do indeed think of the subject as subject and in so doing make the subject an object. But now we use that objective term as a symbol of the inaccessible subject as subject. Is that position meaningful? It has not the full meaning proper to human intelligence, the meaning achieved when we understand the quidditas rei materialis, which is the proper object of human understanding.44 But it has meaning insofar as we reached it through rational article, Verbum 98–99: ‘… the critical problem … is not a problem of moving from within outwards, of moving from a subject to an object outside the subject. It is a problem of moving from above downwards, of moving from an infinite potentiality commensurate with the universe towards a rational apprehension that seizes the difference of subject and object in essentially the same way that it seizes any other real distinction.’ The critical problem mentioned here and Lonergan’s position on it remain what they were in the 1940s. The problem of the subject as subject is, however, a new one. See also ‘Philosophical Positions with Regard to Knowing,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964 236–37: the root trouble is ‘living in the picture world … imagining knowing’; people imagine a subject and they imagine an object and then they have to imagine a bridge between them. The statement (Phenomenology and Logic 197) ‘Between subject and object there is a cleavage, a radical opposition’ does not touch Lonergan’s position that both are contained in being. 44 Verbum 168–69, 173–75.

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and meaningful operations. Our control of results is achieved through our control of the operations we perform to get the results. Here a reference to mathematics is helpful, for in mathematics we have terms that are unimaginable but nevertheless meaningful due to the operations by which we reach them. Take the negative numbers as an example. Ten from fifteen leaves five, but what about taking ten from five? We have no image of ‘minus five’; it’s a novelty on the mathematical scene, and still more on the cognitional scene. Nevertheless, we conceive the notion, give it the name ‘minus five,’ create a graphic symbol for it, and use the imaginable symbol fruitfully in mathematical exercises. What meaning has it? Well, at least we know how we got to it: just by generalizing the operation of subtracting. That move gives meaning to what otherwise seems unreal, and it validates mathematical exercises based on the concept. But just as in the world of mathematical symbols we naively think we understand ‘minus five’ quite easily, never adverting to the cognitional oddity of the term, so likewise we seem to understand the subject as subject quite easily, for we know the mental exercises by which we got to the phrase. The phrase is imaginable, we understand the words, conceive the phrase as a symbol, use it for that imperfect understanding of the subject as subject which I called understanding by proxy, and so are able to talk meaningfully of the subject. One loose end remains to be tied up. All through this essay the word ‘attending’ has been used without explanation, yet it is central to the action. Why does Lonergan, usually so careful to clarify his terms, leave this one unexplained? I suggest that it has a context so immediate and familiar in Scholastic usage as to make explanation unnecessary. The remote context is the dynamism of human intellect, ever searching for understanding; the intermediate context is the thesaurus of terms and categories and habitual judgments ready in the human mind to be called upon without need of introduction; and the immediate context is the freedom of roving intellect to search by trial and error for the appropriate terms and categories. Thus, a question has arisen about the human subject; one doesn’t explain the emergence of the question or ask for its passport; one finds it there as a given and simply takes for granted the working of the dynamism. In search of an answer, intellect throws up, from its quasi-infinite store, terms and ideas that might be relevant – another step taken for granted. There may be a whole series of such terms and ideas before the foraging intellect finds one that promises results. And

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so we ‘attend’ at will to an object of inquiry, we ‘shift attention’ from  object to activity, and so come to the puzzle with which this essay began. So much for the problem of the subject as subject in Lonergan. Our inquiry leads, however, to a deeper problem and an unexplored universe of thought that I can only indicate. From all the preceding discussion one gets the sense of a new problematic moving toward formulation in Lonergan’s mind, namely, the presence of a discord, a discontinuity, a dissymmetry between the real and the cognitional in the area of the subject. Let us call it heteromorphism and thus set it in contrast to the isomorphism that is familiar to his readers. There were elements in his thought that might have been developed in this area of the heteromorphic: for example, his case against essentialism,45 and his account of motus imperfecti.46 Again, Lonergan, no doubt following Aristotle and Aquinas, holds that an operabile cannot be demonstrated.47 Is that another hint of the heteromorphic? But he was probably led in the opposite direction by his absorption with a twofold isomorphism: one between the ontological potency-form-act and the cognitional experience-understanding- reflection, and the other between the dynamism of mind and the dynamism of proportionate being.48 A similar absorption with the complete intelligibility of being49 would have had the same inhibiting effect. 45 In the indices to Understanding and Being, to Collection, and to Verbum, s.v. Essentialism. 46 Verbum 110–16. 47 Phenomenology and Logic 172. 48 Insight, Index, s.v. Isomorphism. Lonergan did recognize an early dissymmetry in the cognitional and the real, but he thought that with further development of language it would tend to disappear. Important here is Method in Theology 92: ‘early language can come to dominate the spatial field yet remain unable to handle adequately the generic, the temporal, the subjective, the divine. But these limitations recede in the measure that linguistic explanations and statements provide the sensible presentations for the insights that effect further developments of thought and language.’ Do the limitations recede completely? Or is there an irreducible dissymmetry between language and reality? See also the text on the limits of intelligibility, quoted in my next note. 49 Insight, chapter 19. But from the start Lonergan acknowledged the limits of intelligibility. See the essay from his student days, ‘Analytic Concept of History,’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 11 (1993) 5–29, at 14: ‘Action according to nature is intelligible to man. Action contrary to nature is unintelligible. Action above nature is too intelligible for man.’

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In spite of those inhibiting factors I believe Lonergan has been moving us to a quite radical overhaul of our categories, of our foundations, of our universe of thought. All he has said on being and intentionality remains intact, to be debated and accepted or rejected on its own merits; but subjectivity is another universe altogether. In that universe the pure desire to know may operate, but it does so on a strange playing field in a different ball game that has its own rules and does not recognize our structure of experience-inquiry-understanding-judgment. When we try to apply that structure, subjectivity simply refuses to cooperate: like a sulky mule, it balks. We have to learn another set of rules, if there is another set; but we have no language for them, we are in the position of some hypothetical Scholastics trying to answer Aquinas’s questions but without Aquinas’s panoply of matter and form, essence and existence, substance and accident, and all the Thomist world of thought, and indeed without having the questions well formulated. We have even to face the prospect of a new universe that may remain permanently inaccessible to our inquiry. But the case is not entirely negative. I indicated above some elements in the earlier Lonergan that he might have developed in a study of the heteromorphic (critique of essentialism, motus imperfecti, the operabile, the limits of the intelligible); but there is a line of thought in the 1956 work on consciousness that may hint at a deeper unity of the heteromorphic and the isomorphic. It is his characterization of consciousness as a special perfection of being: ‘… “psychological” and “conscious” add nothing to being but merely indicate being of a certain degree of ontological perfection.’50 Is there a hint here of a bridge to subjectivity, not the one Lonergan ridicules, a bridge from a subject inside to an object outside, but a bridge from the universe of being to the universe of the subject? Does the ‘subject’ find its home at a higher level of ‘being’ – beyond the levels of the material, the intelligible, the existing, the worthwhile, beyond all these on its own level of subjectivity? The passages on the ‘elusive’ and the ‘conceptually incomplete’ show Lonergan discovering the problem: does this passage on consciousness and being point to a solution?

50 The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ 231: ‘Since “psychological” and “conscious” add nothing to being but merely indicate being at a certain degree of ontological perfection …’ [Ibid. 230: ‘Cum “psychologicum” et “conscium” non addant super ens sed tantummodo ens dicant in tali gradu perfectionis ontologicae …’] – followed by Lonergan’s conclusion. Also see 190–91, 246–49; and Phenomenology and Logic 196: ‘consciousness is a property, quality, of acts of a given kind.’

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Centuries ago our Greek ancestors discovered the world of form and logos. It must have been at first a disorienting experience, introducing a dissymmetrical element into a previously peaceful universe. In the Middle Ages our Scholastic ancestors discovered Aristotle. That was certainly a disorienting experience for those living in the world of Augustine. Is our modern ‘discovery’ of consciousness a similar advance, creating a similarly disorienting experience? There is much work to do on Lonergan’s thought on the matter, and further work to do to relate him to the enormous current literature on our question. When all is said and done, what have we achieved? Not much, but not much is possible when the very attempt to achieve something seems to invalidate itself. As Bacon said, however, we conquer nature by obeying her, and we must be satisfied with what nature makes possible. There are scientific exercises where we modify the data in the very act of observing them, but scientists are not thereby inhibited from performing those exercises and talking about them intelligently and rationally. In a similar way, Lonergan’s thought may make it possible for us to talk meaningfully about the subject as subject, even while our very talk is modifying the data and turning the subject into an object. It is a further question to ask, ‘What good is it all?’ People happily exercise their subjectivity all day long without the convoluted questions of the thinkers, just as they happily exercise their cognitional dynamism all day long, innocent of cognitional philosophy. Why worry them? It seems glib to answer, ‘What good was the ascent of Mount Everest? It’s there, and climbers cannot resist its challenge.’ But there is a real parallel here with Everest. The subject too is there, and the compulsion to understand it is not to be resisted. Even if the attempt fails, just to have made the attempt brings a measure of peace to the intellectual conscience.51

51 I owe a debt of thanks to Michael Vertin, with whom I discussed this project in its early stages, for his astute comments. I should also mention my debt to the late Pierre Thévenaz, What Is Phenomenology? and Other Essays, ed. James M. Edie (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1962), and especially his essay ‘Reflexion and Consciousness of Self’ (ibid. 113–32). Vertin and Thévenaz have been most helpful to me in my attempt to grasp the problems of consciousness.

Chapter 12

Potentiality and the Real under Construction1

The good under construction is a good to be realized and so also is a reality under construction. As such it is reality on the way, reality as not yet complete, reality in fieri rather then reality in facto esse: in a word, reality as potentiality becoming actuality. That connection persuades me that a study of potentiality itself under the aspect of its realization might be a contribution to the theme of this 2003 Lonergan Workshop. It is true that potentialities are one thing and their realization another, true also that potentialities as such are prior to any construction, to any fieri, be it motus or world process or any other being-on-the-way. On the other hand, it is only in the construction, the fieri, the motus, the process, that we can discover the potentiality; for things are known only insofar as they are actual.2 There are then three factors that enter a discussion of potentiality: first, potentiality itself (we shall find Lonergan calling it ‘sheer potency’);3 second, potentiality in the process of being realized (the esse incompletum); and third, potentiality realized. The second is the focal object of our study, and we need samples of potentialities being realized that may serve as paradigms or at least illustrate the notion we are examining.

1 Prepared as a paper in absentia for the 30th annual Lonergan Workshop, Boston College, 16–20 June 2003, where the general theme was ‘The Good under Construction: Lonergan’s Contribution.’ 2 First, clear up our use of terms. By ‘potentiality’ I mean the same as ‘potential,’ with only a grammatical difference, and the same as ‘potency’ too, as the latter is understood in ‘potency-form-act’ (not as it is understood in ‘divine potency’). 3 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 395

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1 Two Paradigm Instances of Potentiality Being Realized What shall we choose for samples? The whole world is in fieri – we might even quote scripture on that: ‘the whole created universe groans in all its parts as if in the pangs of childbirth.’4 However, the whole world with its indeterminateness will not serve as a sample, so I turn to particular cases. Given the availability and centrality of the Thomist (and Aristotelian) concept of motus, that heading suggests itself as a good place to start our study. But physical motion is rather low in the hierarchy of beings-in-process, so I add a second sample, one from the other end of the spectrum of possible candidates. Here a good entry is provided by Lonergan’s view of the infant as potentiality. Let us consider each of these two samples. 1.1 Motus as Potentiality Being Realized For the Thomist view of motus there is a wealth of material available, beginning with the commentaries on Aristotle. Happily, Lonergan has saved us personal study of this material with his splendid overview of motion, its related terms, and its realizations.5 But even this overview gives us far more than we need to know on the matter, so I will use Understanding and Being with its simpler but quite adequate account. … Aristotle’s Physics is fundamentally a theory of motion, and motion is defined as the incomplete realization of three of the predicaments. Local motion is an incomplete realization of being there … Again, quality, or change of quality … What is ‘becoming white’? Well, it’s an incomplete realization of ‘being white’ … Similarly, for quantity.6

I chose motus for my first paradigm not only because it is Thomist and was taken up by Lonergan, but also because it is so neat and readily

4 Romans 8:22. 5 See Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (1997) 110–16. 6 Bernard Lonergan, Understanding and Being (1990) 366. Lonergan did not bother to spell out the obvious ‘becoming’ of quantity, but if we want his wording we could use the ‘bulk’ of Insight 480: ‘growth is not merely an increase in bulk but also an increase in differentiation.’

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understood as not something but a process towards something.7 However, in comparison with other instances of potentiality in their wide sweep, it ranks rather low. Far more important is my other sample: the potentiality of the infant. 1.2 Infancy as Potentiality Being Realized We turn then from Lonergan on motus to Lonergan on the potentiality of the infant. His remark on this is brief indeed but fertile in its ramifications. It occurs in a discussion of faith and beliefs. ‘So, faith as believing depends upon judgments of value, and the judgments of value depend upon apprehensions of value. Underpinning apprehensions of value are our loving and hating.’ This faith is the lumen fidei. ‘It is identical with God’s gift of his love … It is love that founds positive apprehensions of value and especially of potential value. The loving mother sees not the actual, but the potential values in her child. She does what she can to actuate them.’8 That potency and that actuation are our present concern. What is the infant actually, where ‘actually’ is taken in the metaphysical sense? What is its esse incompletum? We have to ask the indulgence of innumerable proud parents who know that their infant is too beautiful for words, but metaphysically the child is just the incompleteness, the on-the-way-ness of the adult – and not very far on the way either. Even sociologically it is an extremely deficient specimen of homo sapiens. Shakespeare had an expression for it: ‘Mewling and puking in its nurse’e arms.’9 Lonergan puts a similar evaluation in a wider context. [M]en of widely different temperament and character began, as infants, from instances of sensitive consciousness that not only were remarkably similar but also remarkably undifferentiated; there were sensations, but perceptiveness was undeveloped; there was nothing to remember, and 7 Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas (2000), part II, 288: ‘In defining motion Aristotle explained that it is not “something” but a process “towards something.”’ See also part I, 84 & note 84; part II, 289–90 & note 104, and 291. 8 Lonergan Workshop, Boston College, 19 June 1974, Question session 3, p. 4; the question (p. 3) had been on the relationship of faith and belief. [The question session is unpublished but available at the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto.] 9 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 2, scene 7.

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powers of imagination were latent; affects were global affairs of elementary types; and skills were limited to wailing.10

The point is made again in the still wider context of the migration of tribes. ‘The annual crop of infants is a potential invasion of barbarians, and education may be conceived as the first line of defense.’11 They really were born as barbarians, but they are the future of the human race – spem gregis, in a phrase I dimly recall from my Latin studies. Think of a hundred million adult barbarians, not helpless like infants in their cribs, but some adult Neanderthal race, really invading our world, meeting us face to face, with power to annihilate us: how might we bring them to our level? That’s the problem Lonergan so often refers to as the socialization, acculturation, and education of new arrivals, the process of actuating the potentialities of our infant barbarians, and so saving the future of our race. Here is the place to mention Lonergan’s view on the plasticity of the human infant. He compares the infinite potentiality of human offspring with the fixed patterns of the animal. Piaget’s studies of his own children ‘revealed that, if the human infant acquired slowly and laboriously what came to the animal cub spontaneously or at least rapidly, still the great advantage was on the side of the infant. The infant was slow because of its enormously greater plasticity, and it took longer because it learned immeasurably more.12 10 Insight 478. 11 Bernard Lonergan, Topics in Education: The Cincinnati Lectures of 1959 on the Philosophy of Education 59. On the process of socialization, acculturation, and education see ‘Religious Experience,’ in A Third Collection 115–28, at 119, 122; ‘The Ongoing Genesis of Methods,’ ibid. 146–65, at 156; ‘Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,’ ibid. 169–83, at 181; ‘Theology and Praxis,’ ibid. 184–201, at 197; and ‘A PostHegelian Philosophy of Religion,’ ibid. 202–23, at 217. Several paragraphs here are copied almost verbatim from an earlier paper of mine: see ‘The Future: Charting the Unknown with Lonergan,’ in Lonergan Workshop 17 (2002) 1–21, at 9–11. [Now available under the same title in Developing the Lonergan Legacy 347–68, with the pertinent pages at 355–58.] 12 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Aquinas Today: Tradition and Innovation,’ in A Third Collection, 35–54, at 38. Also ‘Religious Experience,’ ibid. 119: ‘Where the kitten or puppy is born with built-in instincts and skills, the human infant is born with a helplessness that leaves room for an indefinite plasticity.’ And ‘Religious Knowledge,’ ibid. 129–45, at 133: ‘In man … there is an all but endless plasticity that permits the whole of our bodily reality to be fine-tuned to the beck and call’ of the person. ‘The agility of the acrobat, the endurance of the athlete, the fingers of the concert pianist, the tongue of those that speak and the ears of those that listen and the eyes of those that

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Of course Thomas would grant with Aristotle that there is an esse in the growing entity – esse incompletum says as much – and Lonergan would grant even more willingly that socialization, acculturation, and education are the esse incompletum of the adult to be. Many would wish to go further and declare them to be realizations of actuality in their own right and not just a becoming of some potentiality. This may seem to create a difficulty for those who look to the terminus rather the way. The difficulty is compounded when we read Christopher Dawson, a favorite author of Lonergan, writing on the theme of culture. Here is Dawson’s view. Culture, as its name denotes, is an artificial product. It is like a city that has been built up laboriously by the work of successive generations, not a jungle which has grown up spontaneously by the blind pressure of natural forces. It is the essence of culture that it is communicated and acquired, and although it is inherited by one generation from another, it is a social not a biological inheritance, a tradition of learning, an accumulated capital of knowledge and a community of “folkways” into which the individual has to be initiated.13

Surely one must think of culture as something, not just as on-the-way to something; and this is reinforced by the fact that we ourselves contribute so much to the being, the something, that the culture is. Nevertheless culture too, just as it is the result of earlier becoming, so also in all of its realizations is on the way to a further realization; and later generations will look back on our present achievement as on the way to theirs. The mother, Lonergan says, does what she can to realize the potentiality of her infant. In a parallel way, the human race receives the esse incompletum of earlier realizations, does what it can to overcome their incompleteness, and hands on its achievement in aid of a more fully realized potentiality. From a wide perspective, then, socialization, acculturation, and education are part of a millennia-long becoming; and as the becoming was

read,’ leading up to free images, insight, judgment, empathy. Also Insight 213: ‘the initial plasticity and indeterminacy’ of the human child grounds ‘the later variety’; and see the Index of the book under ‘flexibility.’ It is remarkable how often Lonergan returned to this idea. 13 Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education (London and New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961) 3.

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prior to being, so it will continue through further millennia in the history of the race to be prior to the next ‘something’ that our culture becomes. The race is involved in a never-ending becoming, and the something that it is at any particular moment is only an ever-shifting something on the way to an ever-receding goal. In a fundamental way, therefore, the gurgle of the infant and the dissertation of the doctoral candidate share a common status as part of a long becoming. It must be noted, however, that our potentiality is ambiguous. Take those hundred million babies born into the world since this time a year ago. As human beings they are incomplete in a high degree; their importance lies in what they are to become. But what are they to become? An adult Neanderthal race? Or graduates with doctorates from our universities? They have to be brought to the level of our world, which is a world mediated by meaning and motivated by value. That’s the task of socialization, acculturation, and education; it  is a first-class instance of actuating human potentialities for a better world. So much for our two paradigms cases of potentiality under construction: briefly the paradigm of Aristotle’s motion, and more at length the characteristically human paradigm: our making of ourselves as we grow from infants to adults. 2 Other Instances of Potentiality Being Realized If we turn now from these two particular cases, the natural step is to generalize, to see the whole world as under construction. But that would mean either the whole in its wholeness, and then we would have nothing determinate to say, or the whole in all its particular contents, and then we would be dealing with an infinite multitude that defies any exhaustive inventory. The best we can do is adopt a favorite ploy of Lonergan and think of approximations – headings that remotely anticipate the whole world but nevertheless are determinate enough to be studied one by one. Such are the space-time world, nature, the human, religion, history. These can be seen as a linked series. The space-time world has a potentiality for nature. Nature has a potentiality for the human. Humans have a (qualified) potentiality for God. Further, within these wide-ranging categories there are subordinate potentialities: of the nervous system for sensation, of sensation for intelligence, and so on. I will devote a few lines to some of these, delaying where it seems profitable.

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2.1 Potentiality and World Process In the space-time universe sheer potentiality becomes a somethingon-the-way through emergent probability, and emergent probability falls under the sway of a wider intelligibility through finality. These are sufficiently explained in Insight,14 and I add only a pair of reminder notes. The first: emergent probability is a factor in human affairs too, not just in the space-time world or the world of nature.15 The other: as we shall presently see, Lonergan linked finality to potentiality in his answer to Feuerbach.16 Indeed they are closely linked, and when we add the third factor of emergent probability, we have the basis of possibility and world process. The three factors form a unity, for potentiality is related to finality as openness to dynamism, and finality is related to emergent probability as dynamism to its instrument. Let that suffice for world process, since our focal interest is  potentiality. 2.2 Nature Physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology lead in giant steps to the threshold of the human: ‘In this fashion one proceeds from the subatomic to the chemical, from the chemical to the biological, from the biological to the sensitive, and from the sensitive to the intelligent.’17 These may be regarded as aspects of the process from nature to man. At every step we may apply the axiom: ‘the imperfection of the lower is the potentiality for the higher.’18

14 See the pages listed in the Index to Insight, under ‘Emergent probability.’ Note that Lonergan writes: ‘The concrete intelligibility of Space is that it grounds the possibility of … simultaneous multiplicities named situations. The concrete intelligibility of Time is that it grounds the possibility of successive realizations [of situations] in accord with probabilities. In other words, concrete extensions and concrete durations are the field or matter or potency in which emergent probability is the immanent form or intelligibility’ (195). 15 Insight 234–37. 16 ‘A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,’ in A Third Collection 218. 17 Insight 294. 18 Ibid. 691.

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2.3 Common Sense Practicality From common sense as potentiality to its realization: ‘the practicality of common sense engenders and maintains enormous structures of technology, economics, politics, and culture.’19 Notice that common sense as incomplete not only needs completion on the spot but also engenders and maintains its own completions. Would common sense and the pure desire to know also engender philosophy? Would this mean that common sense is potentiality for technology, economics, politics, and culture, as above? Is there a link here with ECA1 on the potentiality of nature? Earlier I posed the prospect of an invasion by Neatherthals as a problem for education. Think of the similar problem for technology. My shoes (not to mention laces), my clothing, my chair, my pencil: How might we train those hundred million primitives to manufacture, distribute, and use all our artifacts? No doubt in the practical matters of daily life they would learn faster. 2.4 ‘Man’s Making of Man’20 The potentiality of the material world is for the human, but the potentiality of the human world is an infinity. One may compare it, first, with the animal world: ‘For the animals, safely sheathed in biological routines, are not questions to themselves. But man’s artistry testifies to his freedom. As he can do, so he can be what he pleases.’21 Then, in comparison with the world of the infant and that of the adult: ‘The world of the infant is no bigger than the nursery, but the world of the adult extends from the present back to its past and forward to its future. It includes not only the factual but also the possible, the ideal, the normative.’22 Then, in general: on being oneself, what Lonergan calls man’s making of man – let us say, in more acceptable language, the process of our making of ourselves, the process of the self-constituting subject.23 19 Ibid. 234. 20 This subtitle is in quotation marks, since it occurs (repeatedly) in Lonergan, and if we are to study his thought we must know and discuss his terms. 21 Insight 208–209. 22 ‘A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,’ in A Third Collection 211. One example of many: the infant world is the potentiality of the adult world. 23 See editorial note h for Lonergan’s article ‘Openness and Religious Experience,’ in Collection (1988) 295 on ‘man’s making of man.’ The note (with marginal addita)

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2.5 The Social Character of Becoming Any wide-ranging view of Lonergan’s thought must attend to its pervasive social character. The very words ‘socialization,’ ‘acculturation,’ and ‘education’ indicate that character. So does the increasing attention given the social character of learning and knowledge. On so vast a topic I restrict my reference to one quotation: ‘In the main it is not by introspection but by reflecting on our living in common with others that we come to know ourselves.’24 Likewise of special interest, given Lonergan’s long struggle with economics and his return to it in the evening of his life, is the relation of potentiality to that branch. It is most interesting that he sees economics as a link, perhaps the chief link, between the merely material world and the world of human culture, joining the potentiality of one to the actuality of the other. ‘[B]etween the potentialities of nature, whether physical, chemical, vegetal, animal or human, and on the other hand the standard of living, there is a gap to be bridged … some effort to make. Such an effort is termed economic activity.’25 Steps in the actuation of the potentiality are listed: ‘As technology evokes the economy, so the economy evokes the polity.’26 These studies of process reveal us to ourselves. ‘What is revealed? It is an original creation. Freely the subject makes himself what he is … Concern with subjectivity, then, is concern with the intimate reality of man … with the perpetual novelty of self-constitution, of free choices making the subject what he is.’27 This was a concern of Lonergan back

24 25

26 27

makes reference to the following Lonergan articles: ‘Cognitional Structure,’ ibid. 205–21, at 220; ‘Existenz and Aggiornamento,’ ibid. 222–32, at 223–24; ‘Dimensions of Meaning,’ ibid. 232–45, at 233–34 and 243–44. See also the marginal references in editorial note j for Lonergan’s article ‘The Natural Desire to See God,’ ibid. 270–71; in editorial note j for his article ‘Insight: Preface to a Discussion,’ ibid. 288; and in editorial note l for his article ‘Dimensions of Meaning’ ibid. 311. Finally, see Bernard Lonergan, The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ 18–31, and his lectures on existentialism in Phenomenology and Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism, esp. 291–94. ‘Cognitional Structure,’ in Collection 220. Bernard Lonergan, For a New Political Economy 205–206. See also ‘A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,’ in A Third Collection 211: ‘meaning is efficient … We imagine, we plan, we investigate possibilities … Over the world given us by nature, there is an artificial, man-made world …’ Insight 234. ‘Cognitional Structure,’ in Collection 220.

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in 1953, as he wrote in his first preface to Insight: ‘For a change in man, a development of potentialities that are no less real because, like all potentialities they are latent, not only is itself a fact but also can be a permanent source of new facts that cumulatively alter the complexion of the old.’28 2.6 Potentiality and Religion There is another field in which potentiality plays a basic role: religion. Here we find Lonergan taking issue with Feuerbach. Feuerbach saw religion as a projection of human qualities into an object of worship. Lonergan’s answer is intriguing. The human quest ‘is not mere quality but potentiality and finality; and it is potentiality and finality not confined to some category but … scorning any arbitrary burking of questions.’29 In other words he is saying, ‘Let’s get to the point: it’s potentiality, not quality, that is the key to our human nature and our history and our religion.’ 2.7 History In the three factors of potentiality, finality, and emergent probability we have the basic possibility of history.30 I note first that on at least one occasion Lonergan distinguished possibility from potency: ‘I would distinguish possibility as something conceptual and potency as something real.’31 I’m not sure that he used the distinction very much himself, but it forces us to reflect on our usage. So I speak of real possibility. The conceptual possibility of history would lie, I suppose, in the ability to get our ideas straight and formulate a concept that at one remove intends being, intends it in the way every concept does. But real possibility is fully concrete: it intends this being as potentially in this matter. Lonergan’s term for that possibility is ‘potentiality.’

28 Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Original Preface of Insight,’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 3/1 (1985) 3. 29 ‘A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,’ in A Third Collection 218. 30 Crowe, ‘The Future: Charting the Unknown with Lonergan,’ in Lonergan Workshop 17 (2002) 9–11. [Also in Developing the Lonergan Legacy 355–58.] 31 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds,’ in Philip McShane, ed., Language, Truth and Meaning:Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972) 306–12, at 311, and 343.

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3 Features of Potentiality From instances of potentiality I turn to its features: tension and dynamism, openness, its positive side, its assured results. 3.1 Tension as a Feature of Potentiality The basic trait, the presupposition for all the others, is incompleteness, dynamism, tension. These terms are almost interchangeable in connotation, and are regularly so in denotation. Yet I believe the order in which I listed them has some meaning: we may say that there is tension because of incompleteness, but we would not say there is incompleteness because of tension. Parallel to that, I would not say there is incompleteness because of dynamism; rather there is dynamism because of incompleteness. Still, the concepts are so interlinked that it doesn’t much matter what order we use. I begin with a brief, simple, and fundamental statement: ‘For the real is dynamic inasmuch as it is incomplete …’32 The wide-ranging feature of incompleteness is found in both being and knowledge of being: ‘For it is not only our notion of being that is heuristic, that heads for an objective that can be defined only in terms of the process of knowing it, but also the reality of proportionate being itself exhibits a similar incompleteness and a similar dynamic orientation towards a completeness that becomes determinate only in the process of completion.’33 Lonergan then gives a useful list of the terms, positive and negative, that I see as interchangeable. This theorem [finality] … affirms that the objective universe is not at rest, not static, not fixed in the present, but in process, in tension, fluid. As it regards present reality in its dynamic aspect, so it affirms this dynamism to be open. As what is to be known becomes determinate only through knowing, so what is to be becomes determinate only through its own becoming. But as present knowing is not just present knowing but also a moment in process towards fuller knowing, so also present reality is not just present reality but also a moment in process to fuller reality.’34

32 Insight 476. 33 Ibid. 470. 34 Ibid. 470–71; see also 472, 474, and 476.

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There is a verbal link with our topic: ‘potency is a tension of opposites,’35 and a link as well with the positive feature to be studied presently: finality has ‘its thrust towards a fuller future.’36 There are also failures in the thrust to higher forms: irritability in the cell foreshadows in a rudimentary way the development of sensitivity, but it is a potentiality that the plant neglects and the animal exploits.37 3.2 Openness as a Feature of Potentiality Another feature of potentiality is openness to the future, to the human, to history, and to the infinite. This complements the basic features. It is almost synonymous with incompleteness and complements tension and dynamism: openness is useless without dynamism; dynamism is blocked without openness. Thus it is regularly implicit, though not so often mentioned as its partners. ‘As it [finality] regards present reality in its dynamic aspect, so it affirms this dynamism to be open.’38 Thus openness is related to dynamism as potentiality is related to finality. The openness of potentiality comes out of the past but heads directly into the future. And it is infinite: infinite on the side of the physical world in openness to all material forms, infinite on the side of experience in openness to the intelligible, infinite on the side of the human world to be created by meaning and values. My two final thoughts on potentiality constitute an attempt to see it positively and constructively in a world view, thus justifying the title of my essay. 3.3 Potentiality as a Positive Force We should beware of a fixation on the negative side of potentiality: on what it is not, on its incompleteness, on its role as the limitation of being. This is valid if we focus on the aspect of passive potency, that is, on what we found Lonergan calling the ‘sheer potency’ at its base.39 This aspect was the contribution of Aristotle who, as we saw early in our essay, explained motion as not something but a process towards

35 36 37 38 39

Ibid. 476. Ibid. 474. Ibid. 481. Ibid. 470. Ibid. 395.

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something. This was said, no doubt, with a focus on that ‘sheer potency’ and in comparison with its realization, incomplete or complete. But there is a complementary side: it is found in chapter 15 of Insight. Let us collect the data. The chapter in question is entitled ‘The Elements of Metaphysics.’ Our quest is for data on the positive dynamism of potentiality, and the relevant sections are those on development and finality. The dynamism comes across as a kind of imperial power: ‘human intellect is a potential omnipotence.’40 If ‘potential’ spells limitation, ‘omnipotence’ spells overcoming limitation and defines being as ‘whatever is to be known by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation.’41 The ‘whatever’ rules out any curtailment of the application of potentiality. What Lonergan says of the power of intellect may be transferred to the range of potentiality. To repeat a key quotation, in the human race there is ‘the dynamic orientation of intelligent and rational consciousness with its unrestricted objective. This orientation is man’s capacity to raise questions and thereby to generate knowledge. Immanent within man, it is a spark of the divine. Cognate to God, still it is knowing, not in act but in sheer potency.’42 Indirectly this applies to potentiality. It is not nothing. Indeed, it has a reality that would be fearful in the hands of a malevolent power. Hence I give it the title ‘a benevolent juggernaut.’ Still, there remains a tendency to think of potentiality negatively. To counter that tendency I have collected some texts on world process. Mutatis mutandis they apply, and are expressly applied by Lonergan, to the character of potentiality and the way it achieves its purpose in world process. Because probabilities are low, numbers have to be large; because occasions are rare, time intervals have to be long … By itself, this is a very modest conclusion. Still … the potentialities are extremely significant … [T]his incapacity for systematic divergence, when combined with large numbers and long intervals of time, is equivalent to a positive tendency, to an intelligible order, to an effective thrust, that is no less explanatory than the rigorous conclusions based on classical laws.43

40 41 42 43

Ibid. 393. Ibid. 395. Ibid. Ibid. 137.

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‘Positive tendency,’ ‘intelligible order,’ ‘effective thrust’ – these features of potentiality are far from mere nothings. Further, they are accompanied by a whole series of texts that on the side of results complement the ‘effective thrust’ of our quotation. Lonergan’s favorite word for this is ‘assured results,’ but in a variety of ways and using a variety of phrases he makes the same point. A few passages bring this home. ‘Probability … is concretely successful in the long run.’44 ‘The increasingly systematic character of world process can be assured’ through large numbers and long intervals.45 ‘[G]iven sufficient numbers and sufficient time, even slight probabilities become assured …’46 ‘[T]he effect of large initial numbers is to assure at least one situation in which the whole series of schemes will win through.’47 It is a process ‘that is bound to work.’48 The ‘realization of any possibility can be  assured …’49 It must be noted, however, that results may be preempted. Potentiality for x is no longer assured when potentiality for y is realized and usurps the field. Of course, on the supposition of large numbers and long intervals of time there will arise another potentiality for x, and this time, or at least eventually, it will be realized.50 These texts zero in on the positive side of potentiality. Other texts make the point in various contexts related more or less closely to our topic. ‘Thirdly, there is the principle of finality. The underlying manifold is an upwardly but indeterminately directed dynamism towards ever fuller realization of being.’51 ‘What is to be known by understanding is what is yet to come, what may be present virtually or potentially but as yet is not present formally or actually.’52 ‘Higher integration is on the move, for growth is not merely an increase in bulk but also an increase in differentiation …’53 Psychic development consists in ‘a

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Ibid. Ibid. 149. Ibid. 150. Ibid. Ibid. 473. Ibid. As a point of interest, Lonergan’s favorite expression for the certainty of results is that they are ‘assured.’ His favorite expression for the operator of the result is ‘effective probability.’ 51 Insight 477. 52 Ibid. 478. 53 Ibid. 480.

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sequence of increasingly differentiated and integrated sets of capacities for perceptiveness, for aggressive or affective response, for memory, for imaginative projects, and for skillfully and economically executed performance.’54 Insight into dream symbols, and so forth, ‘reveals to the psychologist a grasp of the anticipations and virtualities of higher activities immanent in the underlying unconscious manifold.’55 A fine paragraph on the explanatory properties of world process lists the data they account for, ending with six words that summarize a whole volume; these properties account, Lonergan says, for ‘stability without necessity … assurance without determinism … development without chance.’56 3.4 Potentiality as Expanding Empire A still wider context underlies our position. ‘[H]uman intellect is a potential omnipotence, a potens omnia facere et fieri.’57 If ‘potential’ spells limitation, ‘omnipotence’ spells overcoming limitation and defines being as ‘whatever is to be known by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation’:58 the ‘whatever’ is to be given its full meaning and application. In the human race there is ‘the dynamic orientation of intelligent and rational consciousness with its unrestricted objective. This orientation is man’s capacity to raise questions and thereby to generate knowledge. Immanent within man, it is a spark of the divine. Cognate to God, still it is knowing, not in act but in sheer potency.’59 On the benevolent juggernaut: the grounds for it are permanently present in the incompleteness of the universe, permanently operative in the dynamism of the universe, and permanently assured of success in the long periods of time, the vast numbers that eventually bring up the new state or quality or suchness. In any case a quite different picture – different from incomplete being – emerges from chapter 15, namely, the dynamism of potentiality. It comes across as a kind of juggernaut – though a benevolent juggernaut, it is true. Maybe a better comparison is with the infinite patience of

54 55 56 57 58 59

Ibid. 481. Ibid. 482. Ibid. 151. Ibid. 393. Ibid. 395. Ibid.

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God, waiting through the myriads of myriads of millennia for the fulness of time and the opportune situation for the Incarnation. In the same way finality uses large numbers and waits through long intervals to get its way, to win through, assured of success.

Chapter 13

Policy: Note on a Neglected Concept1

Towards the end of his life, Bernard Lonergan felt a pressing need to study the idea of policy. For although policy is now a respected object of study in secular universities, it is often neglected in Catholic scholars’ thinking about the role of the church in the world. Here, as elsewhere, Lonergan felt the need to bring the church to the level of the times. It was a task that he then left to his followers to complete and implement, almost in the manner of a last will and testament. His appeals, however, were hidden in interviews that escaped the attention accorded his greater works. Consequently, my basic purpose here is to bring his thought and the urgency of his plea to wider attention – and this not just for speculative reasons, as one might argue whether or not there is a real distinction between essence and existence, but for the practical reason of the need to find actually operative policies for many areas in our troubled times. Bishops and theologians in their respective roles, legislators in their government, the electorate in its responsibility to choose between political parties – people in all these groups experience the same difficulty with the times. They search confusedly for a remedy. A crucial step in their search, I believe, is to gain a clear understanding of the role of policy. 1 Introduction In relation to Thomist and Scholastic thinking, policy is a newcomer among cognitional categories. Indeed, a few years ago the same might

1 Not previously published.

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be said in general of its appearance on the academic scene. When I went to college, we had the limited choice of perhaps five undergraduate degrees as goals. To announce that I was studying for the degree of Bachelor of Policy would have stumped my audience. I might as well have said I was studying for the degree of Bachelor of Gobbledygook. But today the typical university regards the area of policy as an integral and important part of its program of studies, with various subdivisions and specializations. This means that those of us who have fallen below the level of the academic times have some catching up to do if we would qualify as dialogue partners in the present-day world and make the contribution Catholic thought has traditionally made to improving the world. By catching up I mean, most immediately, learning a new language, but remotely and more fundamentally, acquiring a new set of insights that are the tools of dialogue, uniting the realm of thought with the realm of data. To that end I will begin by mentioning a concrete case that involves both ethics and policy and enables us to define their boundaries and their relation to one another. Next I will draw on Thomas Aquinas for some familiar background principles that provide a context for the study of policy. Then I will turn to my own specialty and examine Lonergan’s work for an update on the concept of policy. My topic, then, is policy; but my goal is not to enter into dialogue with professional experts in policy or to advance the theory of policy as a specialty in social studies. My purpose is rather to bring attention to a gap in the intellectual leadership of those who make decisions, and to argue a case for giving policy its rightful role alongside ethics in our thinking and deciding. The concrete issue that will illustrate what I am about is the position of Aquinas on the question of the religious rites of unbelievers: Are they to be tolerated or not? That is a matter for policy to study and make recommendations about. It is hardly a question today; but St Thomas transferred his reasoning on it to a similar question on prostitution, invoking in support of his conclusion the authority of St Augustine. The latter question remains a live one in our own time, and it demands an appropriate policy. Only recently an article in the journal of the Italian Jesuits, Civiltà Cattolica, called for state-run brothels as a lesser evil.2 Here the distinction between ethics and policy becomes operative. 2 See the brief news report headed ‘Brothels better than the street, Jesuit journal says,’ in The Tablet (London), 13 January 2001, p. 58.

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Thomas considers the question from the most fundamental vantage point. He is talking about government, and he claims that human government is derived from divine government and should imitate the divine. Now God allows some evils to remain in the world, lest with their removal greater goods might also be removed, or even that still worse evils might ensue. [T]hose who preside in human government may rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be hindered or even worse evils be endured. As Augustine says, Take away prostitutes from the human situation and you will have caused licentiousness to disturb everything.3

This example identifies two components of the question, components we must carefully distinguish in order to relate them to one another. There is the ethics of sexual activity in a brothel, and for Thomas there was no question on the evil which that is; but there is also the decision of public authority to allow or not to allow brothels to exist, and that is a question not of ethics but of policy. So far as I know, Thomas did not use the word ‘policy,’ and I wonder whether there was even such a word in his vocabulary; but he talked of regimen politicum, he is copious on prudence, and he is detailed on ethical judgments. Let me sketch his position on the latter. 2 Thomist Doctrine on Practical Knowledge The most general context for Thomist ethical doctrine is the distinction between speculative reason, which works in one way, and practical reason, which works in another. The former deals mainly with necessary principles, and so its conclusions too are necessary. But practical reason deals with particular contingencies; and the further you descend toward particulars, the more you recede from the necessary.4 Thomas goes on to say that speculative truth is the same for all, though it may not be known by all, but practical truth is not the same for all. And so he states rather bluntly that ‘universal moral statements are not very useful, because actions deal with particulars.’5

3 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2-2, q. 10, a. 11 c. 4 Ibid. 1-2, q. 94, a. 4. 5 Ibid. 2-2, prolog. One consequence of this deficiency is a notable pluralism in the rules governing conduct. Thus, though the law may prescribe the golden mean of

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We need not follow Thomas’s position on the relation of speculative and practical reason, or on the deficiencies of the latter. I introduce it mainly in order to distinguish that topic from the topic of policy. Regularly in these matters Thomas thinks in terms of right or wrong, of the ethical, rather than in terms of what is pragmatically feasible. His question is ‘What should the law be?’ But that is not the question when we discuss whether or not to allow brothels. The moral law on right and wrong in the activities they condone is clear enough. The question then is rather one of policy: whether to enforce the moral law or allow it to be broken. A policy, of course, requires the application of practical reason to a concrete case; and in that respect it is like ethics. But the concrete case is not in the field of ethics, of what would be a good law. It may in some cases mean a choice between a greater and a lesser good, but in the limit it operates rather in the field of evils: it is a balancing of evils and deciding what balance will do the least harm. 3 Knowledge of Particulars I have said that a policy, like ethics, requires the application of practical reason to a concrete case. All action, and especially moral action, regards particulars. The question is how we get to the particular. First, let us be clear on what does not suffice, namely, dividing and multiplying universals. Multiply them as you will, they are still universals in their own territory. ‘Add abstraction to abstraction and one never reaches more than a heap of abstractions.’6 In this event the gold medal goes to the act of insight. It is insight that at some point, instead of piling up the heap, gets us behind abstractions to their concrete origin. It is in line with Thomas, I think, to say that his ethics gets to particulars by anticipation. That is, we start with universals, and we add particulars in the way Newman added divisions in the sides of a polygon. Newman inscribed a four-sided figure in a circle, then divided the four sides to give eight sides, then divided the eight sides to give sixteen, and so on in a series. It is clear that in the series the whole polygon virtue for everyone, still what that mean is is not the same for everyone. With Aristotle, Thomas would say that a shoe that fits is the mean for him, but he would not require everyone to wear that size (In 2 Eth., lect. 6, nn. 310–14). And he provides various examples: Summa theologiae 1-2, q. 91, a. 5 c. and ad 1m; q. 98, a. 2, ad 1m; q. 107, a. 1 c. 6 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Healing and Creating in History,’ in A Third Collection 100–109, at 104.

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comes nearer and nearer to coincidence with the circumscribing circle; but it is equally clear that it will never reach that coincidence, that it is prevented by its own supposition from reaching it, for in taking half the side of the polygon we ipso facto leave the other half.7 In a similar or analogous way further and further divisions of an idea point to the individual, and approach the individual, but never achieve coincidence with the individual. Thus far ethics and policy have a common focus: both have to deal with the particular. There are, however, two differences. One is that ethics may have to be content with approaching but not reaching the particular in the way just described. Policy does not enjoy that privilege: it is obliged to deal with the concrete, and it has to take a position on the concrete; it is tied by definition to the here and now. Augustine and Thomas could not evade their question by writing a treatise on the good. Such a treatise may be needed, but finally they must answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a concrete question. The second difference is that the particular for ethics is an instance of the good. In policy the particular is an instance of the pragmatically possible or feasible. Often policy-makers must face a choice of evils, weigh alternative evils, and decide between them – which are to be allowed, and which are not to be allowed. In short there is a hierarchy of evils, and in making policy we have to deal with that hierarchy. Even more than is the case with ethics, then, we are involved with the concrete. 4 Lonergan on Policy My reference to Aquinas and Augustine presented policy in a general way. By comparison, Lonergan’s position on policy will appear complex; but his world too was considerably more complex than theirs, and it is in the context of one’s world that policy must be formulated. The data for our inquiry are twofold: the writings of the late 1960s and the 1970s, and the less organized approach of Lonergan’s participation in congresses and interviews, especially the interviews of 1981. The two sets of data might be called, in a rough approximation, the ‘academic’ and ‘pastoral’ approaches. 7 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, edited with introduction and notes by I.T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) 207–208.

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Of the two the more difficult to document, but the more revealing for our purpose, is what I called the ‘pastoral’: Lonergan’s participation in congresses and interviews. The Tekippe bibliography8 lists several congresses in the 1960s and 1970s in which Lonergan was a participant; and Lonergan himself refers in the interviews of 1981 to congresses he attended, but his references do not clearly specify which congresses he means. There was one in New York (or perhaps Washington) in September 1967 specifically on abortion. Another in November of that year at the University of Notre Dame was on Christian Secularity. These two, more than others, seem to have given new impetus to his thought on policy.9 The word ‘policy’ occurs, of course, in earlier work, but in the interviews there is a pastoral application. He was quite impressed at ‘a recent Notre Dame meeting’ by a professor of policy from Chicago who was insistent: ‘You have to get into policy,’ she said, and this may have been a turning point for Lonergan.10 Another congress held ‘a few years ago’ and reported in the same Caring interview introduced him to a London psychiatrist, who also seems to have influenced him.11 Some event or influence would have to be postulated to account for what seems a new interest in 1981. The sources in Lonergan’s writings are easier to control, and they provide a better basis for an overview of his thinking. A first step in what I called his ‘academic’ approach is familiar. It distinguishes social science and social policy. Social science is empirical science. ‘It is concerned, not with what is right or wrong … but with what in fact is so …’ 8 Terry J. Tekippe, ed., Primary Bibliography of Lonergan Sources (New Orleans: Notre Dame Seminary, 1 September 1996). [A later version of the bibliography, updated to December 2004 is available online at http://arc.tzo.com/padre/pri.htm. The list of congresses and interviews Crowe refers to can be found between pp. 20 and 52 of this updated version.] Very helpful for comments on this bit of history is the set of interviews published in Pierrot Lambert, Charlotte Tansey, and Cathleen Going, eds, Caring about Meaning: Patterns in the Life of Bernard Lonergan (Montreal: Thomas More Institute Papers, 1982). 9 They are reported in Caring about Meaning, interview of 19 February 1981, 164. See ibid. 165: ‘Policy is an important thing.’ Lonergan himself, speaking informally a few months later (Interview with Luis Morfin, 11 July 1981), remarked: ‘What can be done: that’s the idea of policy … You do what you can.’ [A recording of the Morfin interview is available in the Archives of the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto.] 10 See Caring about Meaning 164. 11 Ibid., and also consult the recording of the Morfin interview.

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But social policy proceeds from decisions; and the decisions are, or at least may be, motivated by genuine values.12 The mention of values reveals a gap left by the distinction between science and policy. A second step, then, is to insert social ethics between social science and social policy. ‘The ethics adds the value judgments from which social science rigidly abstains and by which social policy should be guided.’13 We are now on the home ground of policy, and we may begin with the wider context of discussion: integrated studies would distinguish policy-making, planning, and the execution of the plans. Policy is concerned with attitudes and ends. Planning works out the optimal use of existing resources for attaining the ends under given conditions. Execution generates feedback.14 Special importance must be accorded that feedback. It supplies scholars and scientists with the data for studies on the wisdom of policies and the efficacy of the planning. The result will be that policy-making and planning become ongoing processes that are continually revised in the light of their consequences, and they oblige policy-makers to be continually alert to the need of changing with the changing data.15 We live in a world in which, even for Thomas and much more for ourselves, the details and particular adaptations of law are subject to swings and variations; hence there is always need to check and recheck our policies.16 Lonergan even uses the term ‘experimentation’ in cases where the social sciences have not yet provided us with the knowledge we need for a definite policy.17 The mention of experiment in matters of conduct may startle some readers, so I remind them that the task is provision of a workable policy rather than formulation of an ethics. We may be balancing greater and lesser goods; but in the crunch we are balancing evils, not determining the good, and the balance changes. Policy-making, therefore, must not look for neat and assured and permanent results. Recall the proverb: ‘Politics is the art of the 12 Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Example of Gibson Winter,’ in A Second Collection 189–92, at 189–90. Lonergan refers here to ‘Max Weber’s celebrated distinction between social science and social policy.’ 13 Ibid. 14 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 365–66. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 366. 17 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Moral Theology and the Human Sciences,’in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 301–12, at 301.

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possible.’ But what is possible today may not be possible tomorrow. Taking a parallel position in regard to policies, we may say that policy-making too is the art of the possible. This sounds like a witty write-off of policy, but in fact it describes one of its main features. Furthermore, policy must remain in touch with its creative source, the work of social scientists. Theirs is the arduous task of effecting an advance in scientific knowledge, of persuading eminent and influential people to consider the advance, and of having them convince practical policy-makers and planners both that the advance exists and that it implies such and such revisions of current policies and planning with  such and such effects.18 Feedback is, of course, indispensable in their task. 5 Other Concrete Cases The immediately previous considerations seem to take us away from the kind of policy Augustine and Aquinas had to formulate. They remind us that besides the weighing of alternative evils, policy must often weigh alternative goods. Let us return therefore to our opening line of thought and the avoidance of the greater evil. That is the case for some of the choices envisaged in the interview of Lonergan by Luis Morfin.19 It seems that Morfin had listed topics to discuss. Lonergan noticed that policy was on the list and asked, ‘Have you clear ideas on policy?’ There emerges the characteristic of policy: ‘What can be done: that’s the idea of policy … Nemo ad impossibile tenetur … The policy is good if it gets some good done, if it avoids some evils … That’s good morals.’ Lonergan criticized the highly abstract way the Latin nations of Europe approached cooperatives, where there is ‘the absence of the notion of policy,’ and he contrasted it with the very successful British way. ‘So policy is a good idea.’ Much more important than a policy on cooperatives is a policy on abortion. Lonergan discusses this, not to propose a concrete policy of  his own but to underline the need of a policy and to assign it a place in our thinking and deciding. We are dealing with an undoubted evil – an evil, however, that in the present situation can not be totally eliminated. Can it be reduced? That is the task assigned to policy-making. 18 Method in Theology 366–67. 19 On the Morfin interview, see notes 9 and 11 above.

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In 1967 Lonergan attended a New York conference on abortion. It was possibly at this conference that he was impressed by the advice a British psychiatrist at the conference offered him regarding Canada. If your government makes abortion something legitimate, for heaven’s sake keep it out of the hospitals. A good abortionist can do the job just as well as any highly-qualified gynecologist, and no gynecologist wants to do a stupid thing like that. You can have clinics, all the medical security possible, and you won’t be destroying the image of the doctor as a friend and preserver of life, and you won’t be driving the nurses crazy …20

Here is a case of a need for policy, of doing what you can, of eliminating some evil when you cannot eliminate it all, of doing some good when you cannot achieve more, of allowing a great evil (abortion clinics) in order to avoid a greater one (making hospitals the purveyor of death instead of what they are meant to be, the friend and preserver of life). I cannot insist too strongly that I am not, with this example, proposing and recommending a specific policy in regard to legislation on abortion. Nor was Lonergan doing so. His approval refers rather to the necessary role of policy in dealing with a great evil. It is not in his competence or mine to determine whether this is a good policy or bad, whether what may be a good policy in England is good in Canada, whether what is good in the late 1960s is good now forty-some years later, whether indeed the evil is so monstrous as to defy any attempt to deal with it rationally. I am simply illustrating the nature of policy and arguing for its rightful role in our decision-making. Other debates are raging today on other questions, often without reference to the position of Augustine and Aquinas. The need for the voice of policy to be raised and heard is pressing. But who are competent to formulate a policy? It is a complex matter demanding the collaboration of many forces in the community: bishops who not only are guardians of the Christian message but also understand the human situation; social scientists who provide us with the relevant data; legislators who not only grasp the principles involved but also are in touch with what is politically possible; thoughtful journalists who not only aim at a headline but also carefully analyze current situations. And so 20 Caring about Meaning 164. The speaker Lonergan quotes was Norman St John Stevas, later a Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom and Baron St John of Fawsley.

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on through the list of possible contributors. All of them, of course, have always to be watchful lest laxity in policy lead to laxity in ethics. In concluding, however, I would note that the urgency of the question may be measured by the terrible ease with which serious accusations are leveled against opponents in the debate. Such accusations are the inevitable result of ignoring the nature and role of policy. They quite overlook the distinction between policy and ethics and the complexity of their relationship. In illustration let us suppose Thomas Aquinas were to vote today on allowing a brothel in his city. Suppose he found the conditions fulfilled for allowing it, and suppose that – true to his principles and Augustine’s – he voted ‘Yes, allow it.’ Would anyone charge him with being in favor of licentious conduct?21

21 I wish to thank David Eley, Michael Shields, and Terence Walsh, all three of the Society of Jesus, for their help in defining and presenting my topic.

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Part Two

ESSAYS

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Chapter 14

Development of Doctrine: Aid or Barrier to Christian Unity?1

My title has two parts. The first, ‘Development of Doctrine,’ was chosen by the president of this society, and it is quite clear. The second, ‘Aid or Barrier to Christian Unity?’ is my own contribution to the choice of topic, and it is involved in some obscurity. Perhaps, then, an introductory word is in place to clear up preliminary questions arising from my specification of the title. One such question is why a novice in the field of ecumenism should presume to speak to you on that subject at all. My answer is partly to lay the blame on the Holy Spirit, who all too clearly means to involve everyone, expert or novice, in the ecumenical movement. Something wonderful, pentecostal, challenging, is going on in regard to Christian disunity, and we cannot evade the responsibility laid on us by the Spirit. Further, the invitation to speak on development of doctrine seemed to direct me in a rather special way towards the ecumenical aspect, for I have a strong conviction that the question of development is crucial in ecumenism. I have said so previously in writing, though without eliciting much action or reaction;2 and the chance to say so again before this audience proved irresistible.

1 Previously published under the same title in Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings 21 (1966) 1–20. 2 See Frederick E. Crowe, ‘Development of Doctrine and the Ecumenical Problem,’ Theological Studies 23/1 (1962) 27–46. For proper evaluation notice that the article was originally written under the title ‘How Inflexible Is Catholic Dogma?’ Crosslight (Montreal) 2/4 (1961) 14–26; this whole issue was devoted to ecumenism, but the specific topic assigned me was that indicated in the title I used.

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A second question might be why I leave the title in question-form rather than taking a positive stand for one side or the other. Here I should first insist that the underlying statement is fully positive: development is a crucial question for ecumenism. If the statement is true, it does not really matter whether development turns out to be an aid or a barrier: we have to study it anyway. But there is a point in leaving the title in question-form, namely, that the consequences of development depend in a measure on our own attitude towards it. A river can be, and prima facie is, a barrier between peoples who live on opposite shores. Nevertheless it can also become the common highway to a further goal, and I am going to suggest that development plays an analogous role in Christian unity and disunity. A third question will arise in regard to the words ‘Christian unity,’ for my illustrations will point discussion almost exclusively towards the Catholic-Protestant situation. This limitation perhaps has an excuse in my personal history, for I grew up at a time and place in which we were still very busy fighting the Protestants and felt very much more acutely our state of division from them. But in a wider historical context the limitation is gratuitous; and doctrinally, of course, it is without justification. So I can only plead the necessity of brevity, and hope that the principles to be enunciated will have a wider application than I make of them. And now to my paper, which proceeds in four main steps.

1 My first point is that God reveals Godself in sacred history and that this is revelation in a primary sense: history is the fundamental medium of revelation. God is a God who acts, and God’s mighty acts in the world are the divine word and message to the human race. Most of all God acted in the incarnate Son, and so the very epitome of revelation is the Christ event: ‘Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.’3 I do not propose to justify this position now. I simply assume it as a proposition that crops up everywhere these days in theology and indeed has become practically a cliché. But it is important to use clichés accurately too, so I allow myself two remarks in clarification of my use. 3 Hebrews 1:1–2.

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The first is that the doctrine can be based on a good Thomist principle. St Thomas says that, as humans use vocabulary to convey their meaning, so God uses the very course of events to convey God’s.4 In other words, history is God’s language. We move our vocal chords and human language issues from our lips with a meaning for other people; God moves the elements in the universe, the stars in their courses, people in their various activities, and a divine language is written in history for us to read and understand. I do not say that the Thomist doctrine on this point is identical with the modern: there are obvious differences. St Thomas was not thinking of universal history, he was explaining certain types of the New Testament found in the Old. And he certainly did not give any primacy to this medium of revelation. He holds, in fact, that if the typical sense of scripture is to profit us, it must be established elsewhere by the literal sense of some passage.5 But Thomas is in the habit of getting down to fundamentals. His principles often have a virtuality that extends far beyond the point he is making at the time, and I think that is what happens here. The principle that God uses people and things and events as we use our vocal apparatus, this principle becomes available as a foundation for the modern doctrine that revelation is primarily the concrete totality of history centered in the Christ-event. My other remark is the following. In my use of this doctrine, the propositional aspect of revelation is definitely retained. Nowadays it is customary to oppose the new view of revelation through history to the old view of revelation through true statements. I therefore ask for some attention to the point I am making and some effort not to involve me needlessly in the charges and counter-charges that are flung about by those who see an opposition between the old view and the new. My position is simple enough: I do not reduce revelation exclusively to propositions uttered by God, but I maintain that true propositions are an essential element in revelation. Further, I contend that God makes true statements through history with the same ease as prophet or evangelist using voice-box or writing materials. A simple way to advert to the truth-element in revelation is to analyze the encounter with God that the person who is a believer undergoes. What is this encounter? We think first on the simplest level of the 4 Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibet VII, q. 6, a. 2; see also a. 1. 5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, q. 1, a. 10 ad lm; Quodlibet VII, q. 6, a. 1 ad 3m and 4m.

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face-to-face experience the apostles enjoyed when they saw and heard the Lord. But birds and beasts saw and heard the Lord, so something beyond this simple meaning of encounter is required, something specifically human. Now what differentiates us from bird and beast? We may locate the specifically human in wonder and idea; but wonder and idea were common to believers who said, ‘You are the Messiah,’6 and to unbelievers who said, ‘It is only by Beelzebul … that this fellow casts out the demons.’7 We are therefore carried forward another step to the necessity of the true idea as an intrinsic element in the encounter with God, the necessity of truth in the sense defined by John’s purpose in writing his gospel, ‘that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah.’8 As used here by John, that little word ‘is’ determines as clearly as need be the propositional element in revelation. If I repeat that this element does not exhaust revelation, that there are prior elements on the cognitional side, and subsequent elements on the side of loving response, I must insist also that truth is intrinsic to revelation, and that without it belief is mere enthusiasm and theology a superfluity. Pardon me for spending so long on what is so obvious: the undefined clichés that clog popular theology force one to a tedious clarity. I said, further, that God utters truth in the sense defined by ‘is’ with the same ease as prophet or evangelist, and this too I must tediously insist upon, for it underlies the specific defense of development to be expounded here. It is quite common to talk of revelation through the medium of history. It is not so common to understand history as a divine language that makes statements in the strict sense. But what is lacking in history to invalidate it as a language that makes statements? Not the quality of the perceptible required for a sign: events are as perceptible as inkmarks on paper or vibrations on the eardrum. Not the quality of meaning deriving from the speaker, if St Thomas is right. Not the possibility of interpretation by people, if the current view on prophets as primarily interpreters of history is correct. There does not really seem to be anything against history as language in the strict sense, except the anthropomorphism that God must speak with a voice-box and write with a pen. Now it makes a great difference in our understanding of development when we take seriously, in the Thomist sense, the principle that 6 Mark 8:29. 7 Matthew 12:24. 8 John 20:31.

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God speaks through events. The difference appears clearly in the way authors with other views reconcile development with the doctrine that revelation was completed in the apostolic era. For example, both Karl Rahner9 and Eduard Schillebeeckx10 make strenuous efforts to show how later developments are contained already in the knowledge of the apostles and early writers of the church, and how the process of development is a true explicitation of what was implicit in that knowledge. But when we invoke the Thomist principle (neither of these authors does in the present question, as far as I know), a different program is open to us. We have a word spoken already that said far more than human interpreters till the end of time can fathom. Amos and Jeremiah, Paul and Matthew, Luke and John, all are human interpreters of that one word that is salvation-history in its totality – inspired interpreters to be sure, but human interpreters who do not exhaust the meaning of the divine language. Therefore, instead of using the analogy of making explicit what was implicit, we might think of an archaeologist before a document written in a strange language: the word is uttered, but its meaning remains to be discovered in its full range. The difference in language-media is the crucial point. The meaning of human language is limited by the mind of the human author,11 and this

9 Karl Rahner, ‘The Development of Dogma,’ in Theological Investigations, vol. 1: God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1965) 39–77. See also ‘Considerations on the Development of Dogma,’ in Theological Investigations, vol. 4: More Recent Writings, trans. Kevin Smyth (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966) 39–77. 10 Eduard Schillebeeckx, ‘Exegesis, Dogmatics and the Development of Dogma,’ in Herbert Vorgrimler, ed., Dogmatic vs. Biblical Theology (London: Burns & Oates; Baltimore: Helicon, 1964) 115–45. 11 What of the sensus plenior? It is contradictory to predicate a contingent truth of God without a contingent reality that corresponds ontologically, an ‘extrinsic denominator’ for the predication, a terminus ad extra conveniens [appropriate external term] (see Bernard Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics 438–47: ‘God is creator of the world’ is true only if the world really exists in dependence on God. Similarly, ‘God says that in the beginning was the Word’ is true only if there is the created reality of the appropriate statement uttered by God, in this case through John the evangelist. But the created reality defines and limits the contingent truth (it is the ‘terminus ad extra conveniens’), and it seems to me nonsense to predicate of God two different utterances and refer each to exactly the same extrinsic denominator. In other words, in so far as the defenders of the sensus plenior hold that in the same scriptural passage God intends two different meanings, but assign no difference external to God to account for the difference in predication, I think they are involved in incoherence.

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is acknowledged by exegetical procedures that build up dictionaries specifying the meaning of biblical words, try to discover the mind of Paul or Matthew or John, and so forth. But the language of salvation history is not a human language. Its meaning is not limited by human minds but is measured only by the total intelligibility of the universe and the revelatory purpose God had in creation and redemption. There is then a vast surplus of meaning in history and the Christ-event. It is revelation in the strict sense of statements about the divine realities; and therefore the development of doctrine does not involve new revelation, it merely penetrates further and further into the meaning of a revelation given once-for-all in Christ. It is true that the first interpretations are basic to all others. Only on the basis of the ‘orderly account of the events … as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word’12 can we say anything at all about the meaning of the Christ-event. But this is equally true of all re-interpretation of the past. It is analogous to perception, as psychologists use the term, in which immediate sensation plays a necessary but insufficient role, with other

However, there are at least three ways that occur to me of attributing a positive value to the quest for a sensus plenior. First, it testifies to the enduring belief of the faithful that there is a surplus of meaning in revelation beyond what we have yet understood, however one may finally explain it. Secondly, much that is said in favor of the sensus plenior demonstrates the occurrence in the sacred writer of what Lonergan calls the ‘heuristic’ concept (Insight: A Study of Human Understanding; see the Index under that word). Thus, our concept of being is heuristic: it is an indeterminate anticipation of what we may one day understand. Thus too the Old Testament concept of the Messiah is heuristic, but notice that this heuristic sense is the sense of the human author. Thirdly, a statement may be uttered in a larger or a smaller context: thus, ‘not guilty’ in the smaller context of a dictionary might mean just ‘not guilty’ but in the larger context of the total legal process of a country might mean the assertion of one’s right to go free unless convicted of crime. This gives two different extrinsic denominators for predicating a ‘word’ of God: there is the smaller context of the human author, in which God means what the human author means; and there is the larger context of the total process of interpreting the primary word of revelation that is sacred history. In this process God’s ultimate intention is to bring us to the fullness of meaning. We can argue that his ultimate intention pervades every particular interpretation he inspires, and therefore that in the larger context he means the whole in each part. This gives a defined meaning to the sensus plenior, but at the same time it makes it superfluous by identifying it with the sense of history: the meaning God ultimately intends us to find in history is the meaning he puts there as he ‘utters’ it. 12 Luke 1:1–2.

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elements entering from memory, understanding, and the rest. It is, in fact, analogous to the interpretation of human language, where the mere inkmarks on paper are quite insufficient without the vast accumulation of interpreters’ knowledge gathered in dictionaries, grammars, and other tools of the trade. Before leaving this first part, let me illustrate its two main contentions from the New Testament itself. The doctrine that Christ is himself a word to the human race is beautifully illustrated in the second letter to the Corinthians. Paul is defending himself against the charge of being fickle, of saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ at the same time. In this rather childish context he writes one of those soaring passages for which he is dear to theologians: As surely as God is faithful, our word to you has not been ‘Yes and No.’ For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you …, was not ‘Yes and No’; but in him it is always ‘Yes.’ For in him every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes.’13

There was a question about God, whether God was faithful to God’s own promises. God answers ‘yes’ to the question. The divine answer is a statement, but that statement is not the sound or shape of the English ‘y-e-s,’ or even of the equivalent Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic. That statement is the very person of the divine Son sent into the world and answering the question in his own reality as God-Man. The doctrine that no human words, inspired though they be, exhaust the meaning of God’s primary word to God’s people, is illustrated by collecting the New Testament titles given to Christ. Vincent Taylor, in a little book called The Names of Jesus,14 lists forty-two of them, some with subdivisions: Jesus is ‘Son,’ he is ‘Lord,’ he is ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega,’ and so forth. Every title adds something to our knowledge of the incarnate Word, and so to our knowledge of what God is saying in the Son; but by the same token every title is partial. Neither is there any reason to suppose that taken all together they exhaust the meaning of God’s utterance when speaking the divine Son into the world. In fact, there is plenty of reason to suppose they do not, if we remember that the riches

13 2 Corinthians 1:18–20. 14 Vincent Taylor, The Names of Jesus (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1953, 1962).

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of that Son are boundless,15 and that the judgment with which God governs the course of salvation history is unsearchable.16

2 My second point deals with the counterpart to God speaking; that is, it deals with humans hearing. More specifically, it deals with the basic condition for hearing on the side of people, which is the human capacity for learning. That capacity is manifested in questions, and it is the question that promotes that progressive penetration of the word of God by which we define development. The occasion of Paul’s doctrine on Christ as the divine ‘yes’ was the (tacit) question ‘Is God faithful to God’s own promises?’ The great discourse in Romans 9–11 on the destiny of Israel was likewise the fruit of a question. The whole book of Job is one long struggle with the question ‘How reconcile the justice of God with God’s treatment of the law abiding humankind?’ The forty-two titles given Christ in the New Testament are just so many responses to the question who he is: ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’17 ‘Are you the one who is to come …?’18 ‘If you are the Messiah tell us plainly.’19 ‘Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.’20 The four passages are all forms of one question, but the answer is an infinite series. It is extraordinary how prominent the question is in the Bible as an occurrence, in actu exercito. It is just as extraordinary how little attention the biblical reference works give it. You can find articles on the word ‘inquire,’ but you will find hardly anything on the question as an activity of the biblical writers, on the question as a religious exercise, on the question as a force in Jewish or Christian life.21 Yet questioning is the most fundamental of specifically human activities, and this in the

15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Ephesians 3:8. Romans 11:33. Mark 4:41. Matthew 11:3. John 10:24. Luke 2:19. The problem should be raised on a wider front of the insights to be gained by studying the cognitional activity of the people of God and not just their language and concepts. This I have illustrated in sketchy fashion in ‘Neither Jew nor Greek, but One Human Nature and Operation in All,’ in Appropriating the Lonergan Idea 31–50.

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sphere of the sacred as well as the profane. Lonergan says, ‘When an animal has nothing to do, it goes to sleep. When a man has nothing to do, he may ask questions.’22 Newman makes a similar point on the emergence of the Trinitarian question from the baptismal formula: ‘It was impossible to go on using words without an insight into their meaning.’23 Now, I believe it clarifies the course and process of development if, instead of seeing it as the explicitation of the implicit, we examine it rather as the response to the native human activity of questioning. Again I have some remarks in exposition of my point, this time three. First, it clarifies the difference between exegesis and theology, while enabling us to define both as study of the word of God. Both are driven by the intellectual dynamism that is manifested in the question. But the exegete properly asks what Paul or Matthew or John said and thought about God and God’s dealings with people, and then we have what Lonergan calls theology in oratione obliqua. The theologian, on the other hand, properly asks about God as such and God’s dealings with people, and then we have theology proper, theology in oratione recta.24 The difference is illustrated in conciliar definitions, which rarely tell us what scripture says, however much they quote it in support. Ordinarily, they tell us what is or is not: the Son is equal to the Father, people are not able to keep the law without special grace, and so forth. In the present context this means that exegetes study the revelation that comes to us through the sacred writer, revelation in the derivative sense that is already an interpretation, the divine word that is also a human word. But theologians study the primary revelation that is the universe in its historical course, the divine word that is not a human word. Exegetes therefore should think of their work as asking not just about the intelligibility of the divine realities but also about their meaning. For scientists and philosophers the world has intelligibility as corresponding to understanding; but, for theologians who adopt the notion of revelation I have described, the world has meaning as corresponding to a word spoken by God to be heard by the human race, and study of theology takes on the same intersubjective quality as study of scripture does.

22 Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 34. 23 John Henry Cardinal Newman, Tracts Theological and Ecclesiastical (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924) 152. 24 See Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 133–36. [Writing in 1966, Crowe draws on his knowledge of Lonergan’s unpublished writings to invoke a distinction that Lonergan did not present in print until 1972. (Ed.)]

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My second remark is that there are two types of question that are native to the human mind.25 There are questions for direct understanding. In the presence of data, sights and sounds, experience in the strict sense, the human mind is in a state of wonderment; and the answer to this state of mind is an idea, a possible explanation. But all ideas as such are merely possible explanations. The dynamism of human intellect carries one to a further question, the question for reflection: ‘Is my possible explanation the actual one? Is my bright idea correct?’ And the answer to this state of mind is a judgment dealing with truth, being, or what is. This pattern also helps clarify the process of development. The individual, charismatic, and theological elements of development all find their fullest exercise in responding to the first question, the question on the level of understanding and ideas. But the institutional and authoritative elements, those pertaining to the church as a body, these find their proper exercise on the second level, the level of judgment. This means that the widest range of possibilities obtains on the level of ideas, and unlimited freedom reigns. How can you prohibit the occurrence of an idea? If it occurs, it occurs; and there is nothing pope or council can do about it. How, in fact, do ideas occur? How did the idea of Mary’s Assumption first occur? Was it in the meditation of some sleepless eremite, in the dream of a pious widow, in the study of a dull theologian reading the dull work of another dull theologian, in the effort of a preacher to create a sensation, under inspiration in a mystic? Who knows how it first occurred, and in any case what difference does it make? Ideas are a dime a dozen, though bright ideas might come a little higher. But truth is not so cheaply won. Truth is not just an idea, even though it be a bright one. Truth is single, truth is objectively determinate, truth in the field of mystery is reached only with the help of God giving more than the natural light of judgment can attain. It may be that we do not always advert to the two distinct steps determined de jure by the two distinct questions. Perhaps de facto we jump uncritically from the occurrence of an idea to its assertion as truth. But the magisterium has the job of reminding us, sometimes painfully, of the difference. Freedom for individuals to get ideas, yes. But freedom for individuals to pronounce them true? Naturally, individuals form their opinions, but it is the whole church that has the role of defining truth. Securus judicat orbis terrarum. 25 See Insight. Various references are given in the index, s.v. Questions, but see especially pp. 296–99.

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My third remark will be brief. Questions go on for ever, mostly in a dialectical process. Questions never cease: the answer to one becomes the basis for another. We ascend the mountain of divine mystery by a series of plateaus. The meaning of Christ is always subject to new questioning and, when Teilhard de Chardin asked about the relation of Christ to the Omega-point of evolution, he was doing essentially what Paul and Matthew and John did, each in the terms familiar to him. Further, the questions tend to take a dialectical pattern as first one side and then the other is considered in a relationship that is partly opposition, partly complementarity. From the unity of Christ at Ephesus we came to the duality of his natures at Chalcedon; from the primacy of the pope at Vatican I to the collegiality of bishops at Vatican II.

3 My first point was the idea of revelation through history. It seemed to me to supply a principle of development in the inexhaustible meaning of the word spoken. My second point was the human capacity to learn as manifested in questions, which seemed to me to supply a principle of development on the side of people hearing, one that is quite unlimited in intention. But on this side we have as yet not an adequate principle of attainment. Judgment in the field of divine truth is more than human, so we need a divine principle of development on the receiving side as well, and this – my third point – we find in the doctrine of the gift of the Holy Spirit. In Karl Barth’s Trinitarian doctrine, the Father is Revealer, the Son is Revelation, and the Holy Spirit is Revealedness, where ‘Revealedness’ means the impartation of revelation or its reception on the human side through the work of the Spirit.26 I do not use this analysis of revelation to prove the Trinitarian doctrine, as I think Barth does; but it seems to me valid as an explanation of the ‘economic’ Trinity and helpful for the present question. It is clear enough, in fact, from St John’s theology that the role of the Spirit is not to bring new revelation but is determined in every respect by virtue of the Son’s role: ‘He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.’27 The Spirit is sent, therefore, to enable us to receive the Son: in the present 26 See Claude Welch, The Trinity in Contemporary Theology (London: SCM Press, Ltd, 1953), passim but especially pp. 168–72. 27 John 16:14.

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context, the Spirit’s role is that of enabling us to hear the word of revelation completed in the Son. Now, John expresses his notion of revelation most often in terms of Christ’s human Word or words, and therefore he conceives the role of the Spirit as that of recalling the word Christ spoke: ‘the Advocate, the Holy Spirit … will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you.’28 Luke also thinks in these terms. As Peter meditates on the vision recorded in chapter 10 of Acts, his understanding of Christ and his mission undergoes a development. It is the Holy Spirit who speaks to Peter on this occasion and leads him forward in his development,29 but in a later explanation this development is interpreted as recall: ‘And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said …’30 All of which accords with what we now know of the sacred writers’ habit of attributing words to Jesus that expressed their own theology. If, however, we think of revelation as primarily given through sacred history, and of hearing the word as most fundamentally interpreting and hearing the word of history, then the role of the Spirit has to be correspondingly modified. The Spirit will not merely recall the words of the Lord to the apostles but will help them and us interpret the word of God that was spoken through events in the history centered on the Christ-event. I do not think there will be any real difficulty over such a modification for those who admit my first point, but I wish, for the third time, to make some remarks in clarification. The first is a truism. The Spirit is really given. The sending of the Spirit is just as real as that of the Son. It has a purpose as essential for salvation-history. It results in a presence as significant for the life of the church. In some way it is even more advantageous for the church to have the Spirit than the Son: ‘it is for your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate will not come to you …’31 I apologize for the truism: creatures of sense that we are, we must continually remind ourselves that the Spirit’s presence is really real. My second remark is less of a truism, but I hope not less true. It is this, that whereas the Christ-event happened at a definite time and place long ago in Palestine, the Spirit-event did not happen at a definite time and place in a once-for-all fashion. It did not merely happen long

28 29 30 31

John 14:26. Acts 10:19. Acts 11:16. John 16:7.

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ago in Palestine, it goes on all over the world till the end of time. The Christ-event marks a point at the center of history, but the Spirit-event characterizes the whole messianic era that is spread over ‘these last days,’ a period of we know not how many centuries. The Spirit is permanent gift – no one will quarrel with that. ‘I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you forever.’32 But I am saying a little more than is ordinarily understood by ‘permanent gift’: I am saying the giving is a recurring activity. For the Spirit resides in the hearts of people, nowhere else on earth; and people keep recurring. So the Spirit is continually being sent from the Father in the name of the Son. Schillebeeckx refers to Pentecost in the New Testament as less an event on a particular day than ‘a continuous activity’;33 and if the Spirit is permanent gift, then our argument should extend that continuous activity till the end of time. Earlier I indicated some doubt that we really take seriously the doctrine of history as revelation. Now I must express my doubt that we really take seriously the extension of the Spirit-event through the whole messianic era. When we take both points seriously, the consequences for a theory of development are quite remarkable. If history is the primary medium of revelation, we eliminate the objection that development requires new revelation. Now we may add that, if the giving of the Spirit is a continuous activity, we eliminate the objection that the once-for-all character of the early church excludes from us the power of hearing revelation in the same way that early Christians did. For we have clarified the hapax character of Christian beginnings, which has been such a bone of contention between Catholics and Protestants. Certainly there was an original, a unique, a once-for-all character in the events of the Holy Land some twenty centuries ago. But in what does that once-for-all character consist? We can put it under two headings: the sending of the Son, and the apostolic witness to the Son. And what is not hapax and unique and once-for-all? It is the sending of the Spirit, which is continuous throughout time. Some such view is really postulated by the relation of the Christian era to that of the preparation for Christ. For on the contrary view we would have God speaking to us still from the Old Testament, but we would have no corresponding activity in the centuries following Christ. It would be as if, following the sending of the Spirit, real initiative on 32 John 14:16. 33 Eduard Schillebeeckx, ‘Ascension and Pentecost,’ Worship 35/6 (1961) 336–63, at 341.

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the part of God had ceased, and the twenty centuries after Christ had suffered a diminution of providential care in comparison with the twenty that preceded.

4 My final step is to relate the foregoing three points to the question of Christian unity, especially as it affects Catholics and Protestants. I intend to view this aspect, as I did the first three questions, in the widest possible perspective. This will serve the jesuitical purpose of avoiding details of scholarship I am not prepared to handle, but it has the better purpose of keeping us out of the ruts of old controversies: we have been in them so long, they are worn so deep, and it is so hard to move freely in a broader sweep once you are in them. Therefore I am going to ask what happened in the 1500s, but to ask that question with the utmost generality. I omit all discussion of scripture and tradition, of original sin and the state of human nature, of faith and justification, of the sacraments and sacrifice. Behind these particular quarrels, what really was happening? Speaking always from a doctrinal viewpoint – my concern at the moment is not with the state of morality at the time – I suggest that most fundamentally what happened was the clarification of the difference between the 1500s and the first century as documented in the New Testament. It was the Reformers who saw the difference most vividly; and, unable to account for it, they rejected the 1500s in favor of a return to the beginnings. Catholics, on the contrary, clung tenaciously to what they had in the present. They could hardly deny the asserted difference, and they affirmed in their own way a continuity with their beginnings; but they were in fact no more able than the Protestants to link their present adequately with the past of the New Testament. In other words, there was a common failure to understand the fact of development. How could it be otherwise? If the 1500s discovered the fact of difference, it would be only the 1800s that would discover the fact of development (Vincent of Lerins is really of slight significance here), and only the 1900s that would begin to assess the discovery accurately. If this hasty sketch is valid, the consequences for ecumenism are important. For it means that agreement on the beginnings of Christianity does not eliminate difficulties between Catholics and Protestants. There is, in fact, a large measure of agreement on beginnings. Catholic exegesis is hardly distinguishable from Protestant, as is proper; and the

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problem of apostolic tradition, if not eliminated, is cut down to size, as is also proper. And in some circles the highest optimism reigns, as if at last we had practically overcome the barriers that divide us. But of course these are not the circles that are most attached to dogma, and I cannot share their optimism. In my view the real differences are only now emerging with all clarity. The real and crucial differences regard not the beginning, but what happened afterwards: they regard the fact and significance of development. At this point it could be objected with great show of reason that I have simply loaded the question in favor of the Catholics. For the thrust of my first three points is certainly to justify a theory of development. Development is therefore legitimate and is to be accepted. Catholics accept it, Protestants do not. The conclusion follows easily: Protestants need only do their homework in the theory of development, and all will be well again in the body of Christ. The matter is not quite so simple. I indeed believe that Protestants must attend to development more than they have done in the past. At present it is almost exclusively a Catholic question – you can look in vain in most of the great Protestant works of doctrine for even a mention of the question.34 I believe too that my first three points do justify development, and do so in a way that should appeal to Protestants on their own principles. I believe further – and I am sorry that I have not been able to go into this aspect – that development responds to Protestant aspirations to make the word of God immediate, relevant, and contemporary, and could thus be for them a positive help to unity. But we Catholics have our own homework to do if development is to be not like the river that is a barrier, but like the river that is a common highway to a common goal. For it is not just the general position we take for a development after the New Testament that repels Protestants. It is also our rather one-sided way of viewing development, a way whose correction might make the notion more palatable to Protestants. In my view, the summary statement of what Catholics have to do is this: we must attend more to the process itself and less exclusively to the results of the process. The Marian dogmas and other definitions

34 Or you meet occasional references that simply reject development. Thus Max Thurian, ‘Développement du dogme et tradition selon le catholicisme moyen et la théologie réformée,’ Verbum Caro 1/4 (1947) 145–67, tells us: Not development but repetition.

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are results of the process, and we know that each side approaches the discussion of such dogmas with something of a chip on its shoulder. But suppose we together look more at the process. Suppose we study the movement of ideas even in the New Testament itself, where we might observe, for example, the shift of emphasis from an other-worldly spirituality in the letters to the Thessalonians and Corinthians, when the parousia seemed imminent, to a more this-worldly spirituality in the pastorals, where the church seems to be settling in for a longer stay. This kind of approach, carried through the critical periods of history, would bring out the complementarity of apparently opposed ideas in the dialectic. It would enable us to assess more accurately both the contribution of the other side and the defects of our own side. It would expose the relativity of the merely relative. And it would link our efforts more cooperatively with those of the Protestants in the ongoing process that is our common penetration of the meaning of the Christ for us and for our times. Since I have spent some time in justifying development more especially for the sake of Protestants, let me spend my few remaining minutes in drawing attention to some Catholic deficiencies of understanding. My first brief and really quite obvious suggestion: can we not be less grudging in learning from Protestants? Gold is where you find it, and so is intelligence, even religious intelligence. Yet how hesitatingly we have moved towards an appreciation of scripture, towards a proper devaluation of merely human works and merely human institutions, towards the liberty of the individual, towards the idea of perpetual reform in the church. A footnote to this heading: if the Reformers of the 1500s had ideas worth adopting, their descendants of the 1900s will have them too. If the movement that broke with the Catholic Church had within it elements of a valid development, then we may expect that development has also gone forward among Protestants in their state of separation from us. My second suggestion, still within the bounds of the obvious: that we, as individuals, pay some attention to the possibility – the real, concrete possibility – of being carried ourselves into heretical positions. Some supporters of Ephesus, within one generation of their triumph, were backed straight into heresy by their refusal to accept Chalcedon. Suppose there is a similar dialectical movement between Trent and the present, and suppose our fathers at Trent defined Catholic truth legitimately indeed but onesidedly, and suppose the Reformers in their underlying intention stood for valid aspirations whose hour for

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fulfillment has now come in the great church.35 Can any of us claim immunity from the danger to which the followers of Cyril succumbed at Chalcedon? My third suggestion: to attend more to the process is to welcome more warmly the dialectical play of ideas that is necessary to the process. At the term of discussion, when judgment is pronounced, you have truth and error as white and black. Between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ non datur tertium, at least regarding the specific issue settled. But in the process there is a stage prior to truth, a stage in which you have not only a tertium, but a thousand possibilities: truth is ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but ideas are a dime a dozen. After Nicea you either hold the equality of the Son with the Father or you are a heretic; but on the way to Nicea you have the long dialectic of ideas by which the question was sufficiently clarified to make Athanasius and Nicea possible.36 There were indeed mistaken judgments on the way, but not such as merited immediate condemnation. Must we always have our fingers on the trigger of condemnation? It is a safe bet that if the ‘Death of God’ theologians were Catholics, they would have been condemned by now, but is there not some advantage in having them around to jolt us out of our complacent intellectual lethargy? We suppressed Modernism sixty years ago and have not yet come to terms with its legitimate aspirations. When should a movement of ideas be checked, and when should it be allowed to run its course? That is a pastoral question, to be decided on pastoral principles. However, it seems to me that in the future we should be more willing to let ideas occur and be debated, and trust that the self-correcting process of human learning, guided by the Holy Spirit, will bring us to the truth in 35 Writing in 1966, Crowe would undoubtedly have been gratified if he had been able to foresee the Joint Declaration on Justification that emerged thirty-three years later, in 1999. In this document, the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation rescind the mutual anathemas that stem from the period of the Reformation; and they declare that the theological differences that arose in that period, whatever their precise character, should no longer be considered churchdividing. (Ed.) 36 Bernard Lonergan, De Deo Trino I: Pars dogmatica (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964); see the ‘Pars Prima’ of the book, the Praemittenda (pp. 15–112), and the ‘Aspectus Dialecticus’ (pp. 137–54) in the proof of Thesis I. [The Pars Prima of the book, the Praemittenda of De Deo Trino I, is available in English translation as The Way to Nicea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology, trans. Conn O’Donovan (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1976). However, the entire text of De Deo Trino I, with Latin and English facing pages, has now been published as The Triune God: Doctrines, vol. 11 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. (Ed.)]

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due time and will thus enrich us with a clearer apprehension of what we hold and what we do not hold. My fourth suggestion: if particular movements are to be allowed their freedom for the sake of the definitive development that will result, we should remember as well that the status quo itself is not the goal but a point in the process. The Catholic totality that we receive from our fathers, accumulated tradition in the widest possible sense of the word, is in fact a hodge-podge in which defined dogmas mingle with opinions and outright mistakes, pious practices can be infected with superstition, and the merely relative readily assumes the character of the absolute. As such, that totality is always subject to critical evaluation and discrimination. All of us, as we go through life, are involved in a process of correcting mistakes, discarding untenable opinions, expelling superstition, cutting the merely relative down to size. If everyone in the church does it, why be troubled that the church as a whole must be committed to such self-criticism? This should trouble us the less, since in fact we implicitly subject New Testament Christians themselves to the same discriminating tests. They practiced baptism on behalf of the dead,37 but we do not. Paul required women to cover their heads when they prayed or prophesied, and he argued his case with full theological thoroughness; but we regard his precept as conditioned by his times and circumstances. They gave the Lord forty-two names; we legitimately allow several to remain in disuse, as being less meaningful for us today (not so legitimately do we fail to exercise our creative imagination in supplying other names that suit our times).38 37 1 Corinthians 15:29. 38 Some may find it self-contradictory to talk in one and the same paper of the infallibility of the whole church and of the whole church being involved in the selfcorrecting process of learning. But infallibility refers to a definitive judgment in which the truth function of the church is at stake, whereas the self-correcting process is prior to that definitive judgment and then the truth-function of the church is not yet at stake. In general the truth-function emerges only when a question demanding ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for an answer is somehow present. Meanwhile various ideas may enter one’s mentality, various opinions may be current, without truth being an issue. Thus, as far as I know, the ‘three storied universe’ of the early Christians never came up for the judgment ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ The question of whether the Son is equal to the Father did come up, but prior to that there were many ideas pertaining to truth-on-the-way and contributing to the final formulation of the question. As a matter of fact, Arius contributed greatly to the formulation of the Nicene question.

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My fifth and final suggestion is a little more general: attention to the process of development brings out the need for a theology of change as such. We have a theology of what is, but we need a theology of what goes on. And this is all the more necessary since the changes now taking place are much more radical than they were in earlier times. The movement of the last centuries has not been just from one point of particular objective dogma to another. Rather, it is a movement on much more fundamental levels, like the movement from an other-worldly ethic to a this-worldly, or – even more radically – from the object itself to the subject, from the study of God to ourselves as studying God. Surely we need stable bases and fixed points of reference: I hope I insist on this as much as anyone should. I merely say that in our new universe they are not enough: we need Telstars as well as lighthouses. I might continue the list of suggestions, which has by no means run out – one does not so easily exhaust the obvious – but my time has run out. May I make this remark in conclusion? The five suggestions of my fourth point are already platitudes to many of you and will surely be merely hilarious reading for a future generation. If I have judged it proper to utter them in the present state of rather general uncertainty in the Catholic Church, I would ask those of you who have already gone far beyond me in this direction not to judge the whole paper by its final part. I myself would wish it to be judged by its first part, where I have borrowed from Aquinas a principle that seems to me both fertile for present problems and neglected by most of those who treat them.

Chapter 15

Development of Doctrine1

This article will be concerned with the fact of development of doctrine and with such understanding of the fact as is required to justify it and answer the stock objections. There is great need for a real theology of development, incorporating a study of the human process in which it occurs; but I do not find it possible in this short article to do more than point to such issues. About the fact of development, understood in some vague sense, there is hardly any dispute today; but for two reasons we must give it some attention. First, facts have a history. Truth does not stand in timeless isolation. ‘Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,’2 it is concrete and has an origin in history, whatever the absolute character of the positing of it. This applies especially to the communion of faith, which stretches in unity over time and space, so that understanding our faith means following its history. It is just this that ‘development’ has taught us; and it would be an egregious blunder, in an article on development, to forget that the doctrine of development itself developed, that here too the church came to admit a truth she had not at first adverted to. Secondly, the vague sense of development has to be specified, and with each elaboration of the idea we must again ask the question of fact: ‘Does development in the specified sense occur?’ So I must begin now with some definition of my terms, and then ask whether there is development in that sense. By ‘doctrine’ then I mean primarily a dogma of faith, and secondarily the various states of mind on the way to dogma or that raise the question of truth. Theologians distinguish development of dogma and 1 Previously published in American Ecclesiastical Review 159/4 (1968) 233–47. 2 The second line of John Keats’s ‘Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art.’ (Ed.)

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development of theology. The definition of Nicea would be a dogmatic development of Trinitarian doctrine; the thought of Aquinas would be merely a theological development. The distinction is valid, for it regards the real difference between true judgments and mere ideas. It is useful insofar as ideas proliferate with great rapidity while true judgments of faith are slow to form. But ultimately the distinction is unsatisfactory for anyone whose reflection brings him to the question of truth: Is the Trinitarian theology of Aquinas a mere idea, or is it a true understanding of the reality? Does the Son really proceed from the Father the way St Thomas thinks he does? Eventually, I hope, theologians will come to speak of the development of ‘formed judgment’ in the church, for ‘judgment’ may apply either to tenets of faith or to the probabilities of theological science. Meanwhile we speak of the development of dogma without excluding reference to other judgments in the area of faith. By ‘development’ I mean the sort of thing we observe or infer in the growth of a plant, the evolution of biological species, the specialization of skills as boys grow into violinists or football players. Growth, change, evolution, differentiation, unfolding, expansion: there is a vague generic notion underlying them all. But when we ask whether there is a development of doctrine, we must be more specific; we cannot simply use metaphors from other fields. The question then refers to the formation of new judgments of faith, and some analysis of judgment is required. If we look at the examples ‘Is there a God?’, ‘There is a God,’ and ‘There is not a God,’ we see that the proper contribution of judgment to the cognitional process is to add ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a reflective question whose terms are already fully formulated. Further, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ may answer any reflective question, from ‘Is this the body of Christ?’ to ‘Did it rain last night?’ So the differentiating factor lies in the terms of the original question; and if we wish to know whether there was a real development of doctrine at Nicea, we have to ascertain whether there was a new question put in new terms. Development is to be distinguished from adaptation, for adaptation may or may not require development. There is adaptation in various ways and in various areas. As the New Testament presents him, Christ adapted his temper to the situation, as when he drove the dealers from the temple with a whip of cords3 but allowed himself to be led without a struggle to his passion.4 He adapted his human relationship to his 3 John 2:15. 4 Acts 8:32.

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hearers, as when he explained his parables to his disciples,5 excoriated the lawyers and Pharisees,6 and was silent before some of his examiners.7 Paul adapted his apologetic according to his audience, as when he began in the synagogue with an account of Israelite history,8 preevangelized the simple Gentiles with an account of the God who sends rain from heaven and gives crops in their seasons,9 and approached the more philosophical Athenians with a reference to the God in whom we live and move and exist.10 The evangelists apparently adapted the images used by the Lord when they took stories he told with one point and retold them with another.11 Paul adapted the very message of the gospel when he dropped the ‘Son of Man’ terminology in use among the Jewish Christians and preached Christ as ‘Lord’ and ‘Son of God’ among the Gentiles. Adaptation in the field of doctrine could involve a development, but it could also mean a simple selection from an already abundant variety of doctrines, or a mere change of image (from ‘drachma’ to ‘dime’). We always have to ascertain whether really new judgments of faith were made, and that means determining whether there was a new question about the divine mysteries. To take a modern example: those who speak of transignification in the eucharist are rightly trying to adapt the doctrine to today’s mentality. Does such adaptation require a development as well? I think it does. We are asking about the change of meaning when bread becomes the body of Christ, and we are asking about the relation of that change in meaning to what happens at mass. There are new questions, and the present perplexity in regard to their answer illustrates the extreme difficulty in developing a new dogma of faith about the eucharist. Finally, I note that my assigned topic is development of doctrine, not development of moral precepts. Morals involve doctrine, but they involve another factor too. St Thomas discovers two causes for change in law: one is our growing understanding, the other is a change in the situation.12 Now, the second factor especially complicates the development 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Matthew 13:18–23. Matthew 23. Mark 14:61. Acts 13:16–22. Acts 14:17. Acts 17:28. See Joachim Jeremias, The Parables of Jesus, rev. ed. (London: SCM, 1963). Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1-2, q. 97, a. 1.

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of morals. Truth in the concrete (in fact, there is no other truth) has an absolute character that makes it independent of the speaker. Even when it affirms a relation to one person alone – for example, ‘Her name is Mary Smith’ – it is valid for all. So what the Jewish Christians believed of Christ as the Son of Man could not be denied by Gentile believers, even if it had little meaning for them. But morality in the concrete cannot be transferred to all. That the economic situation was such and such in the Middle Ages is true for us; but that interest should not be charged, if made into a concrete precept, does not apply to us. And if left in the abstract (as applying to such and such a situation), it is not sufficient guide for conduct. So, understanding the question in these terms and with these restrictions, we ask: Is there in fact a development of doctrine? Obviously, we accept the sanction Vatican I gave the formula of Vincent of Lerins: ‘Crescat igitur … et proficiat … intelligentia, scientia, sapientia.’13 But the formula does not really tell us very much. It is quoted by way of concession; and the primary purpose of the paragraph, studies of the council show, was to condemn Günther’s ideas on development. Of course, the concession is made in the late nineteenth century, in a new context twenty-five years after Newman’s book,14 and we may therefore presume the council meant more than Vincent did. But that very fact shows that we cannot dispense with history if we are to come to an informed acceptance of development. The early emphasis of the church then was definitely not on developing the truth entrusted to her, but on guarding it as a most sacred deposit. This attitude is implicit in the fervor and conviction with which the gospel was preached, as illustrated in Paul’s impassioned letter to the Galatians: ‘… if we or an angel from heaven should proclaim to you a gospel contrary to what we proclaimed to you, let that one be accursed.’15 But it grows more explicit in the later New Testament when the church is now some distance from her origins, various heresies have begun to arise, and there is a felt need to preserve the truth originally given. Thus, the pastorals, 2 Peter, and other late letters are full of references to false teachers, heresies, the need of guarding the deposit, ‘the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.’16

13 DS 3020; ND 136. 14 John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine was first published (London: J. Toovey) in 1845. 15 Galatians 1:8. 16 Jude 3.

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The same emphasis, innocent of aspirations to change, prevailed for a long time in the church without correction or complement. We know the eagerness of Papias to learn ‘what Andrew said, what Peter said, what Philip, Thomas … and any other of the Lord’s disciples said.’17 Later in the same century Irenaeus, in a work now given the significant title Against Heresies, appeals to the tradition coming down from the apostles (see especially Book III). So does Tertullian in another work where the title tells the story, On Prescription as an Argument against Heretics. Such authors are often quoted as witnesses to the value of unwritten tradition in the early church, but the main point now is not how the tradition came down, but that in the mind of the church it did come down in articulated doctrines, that the church was a backward-looking church, that her doctrines had been given her and her job was to receive and retain them. There was no interest whatever in innovation, and very little in adaptation as an expressly formulated objective. Conciliar developments do not radically change this attitude. The Nicene fathers introduced the unscriptural term ‘consubstantial’ into the creed they adopted but were put on the defensive for doing so. Athanasius defended the term by citing the need to reject Arian doctrine more clearly. What it did, in his view, was ‘to concentrate the sense of the scriptures.’18 From this time on, appeal will still be made to the past, but the past now includes the great councils. As the early church balked at adding anything to the apostles, so the later church will balk at adding to the councils. Vincent of Lerins in 434 will speak of growth and development, but his statement, even more than in Vatican I’s quoting of him, will be a grudging concession. His natural and spontaneous attitude is much better represented in his famous rule of faith that allows nothing except what was always and everywhere believed by the whole church: ‘… quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.’19 We can hardly deny that this attitude safeguarded the most precious aspect of the faith: that, as Vatican I declared, the doctrine of faith is not set forth as a philosophical discovery to be perfected by human talents but as a divine deposit to be faithfully preserved.20 At the same time, it

17 Fragment quoted by Eusebius: see RJ 94. 18 See Newman’s translation of De decretis Nicaenae synodi, §20, no. 4 in Select Treastises of St Athanasius, Library of the Fathers; see also §§19, 32. 19 Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, chapter 2: see RJ 2168. 20 DS 3020.

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was definitely onesided. It did not, and could not before the rise of historical consciousness, take account of the fact that we are ‘historical,’ which, put in brief and simple terms, means that for us to live is to change. But God’s gifts are related to the recipient. God gives grace to us through sacraments or their equivalent, because we are creatures of sense and sense experience, and we need signs in the same order. Similarly, because we are historical, God gives God’s word of truth to us in such a way that there is a place for change and development. An explicit theory of development is therefore dependent on an explicit theory of humans as historical beings. There could be only vague anticipations of it in the long centuries before the rise of historical consciousness. True, those anticipations are quite remarkable. Origen, for example, seems to have had a clear idea of doctrines not formulated by the apostles but capable of later formulation. Early in his De principiis he lists doctrines explicitly given in the apostolic preaching and others left to be discovered by more thoughtful believers. Similarly, Gregory of Nazianzen was well aware that the divinity of the Holy Spirit had not been clearly formulated before his time, and in fact that knowledge of the Trinity came in a historical process requiring three distinct steps.21 St Thomas had a doctrine of implicit belief containing the explicit, as therefore having the potential to develop;22 he understands it primarily of Old Testament faith in Christ. He also had a remarkably clear notion of the way creeds collect, clarify, and synthesize the various doctrines of scripture.23 Renaissance Scholasticism was greatly concerned with the problem of conclusions from articles of faith. There were even incipient ‘theologies of history’ in people such as Augustine and Joachim of Flora. All these ideas and movements are pertinent, some more, some less, to the emergence of a theory of development of doctrine. Nevertheless, the explicit formulation of the theory was the work of the nineteenth century. The development of doctrine is itself a doctrine that developed and, like other doctrines, it developed under the impact of current ideas. The idea of development as constituting the inner meaning of history, the study of the literature of the past under the aspect of its changing attitudes, the elaboration of a theory of biological evolution – all this was creating an atmosphere. Theologians were as much involved in the movement as others, at least historical theologians 21 Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 31 (theologica 5), nos. 25–27: see MG 36. 22 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2-2, q. 1, a. 7. 23 Ibid. a. 9, ad 1m.

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were. So the idea of doctrinal development was building up in the Tübingen school, especially in Möhler. It made a victorious breakthrough in the work of the still Anglican Newman, first in a sermon of 1843 (significantly, on the text ‘But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart’), then two years later in his pioneering book An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Here finally was formulated that complementary aspect of faith that was implicit in church practice but was so much later emerging than the pastoral formula to Timothy that he guard the deposit.24 We now take Newman’s view, in its general lines, so much for granted that we may be puzzled when asked for its basis in revelation. Our answer may mention the parables that show the church growing in various ways till the end of the world. We may also think of the more precise references to growing in knowledge of the Lord25 and advancing beyond ‘the rudiments of Christianity.’26 But I would say that the fundamental factor in the church’s faith is simply an understanding of the way God adapts the divine word to human needs. Thus this word itself developed within the Old Testament and within the New. One sees it in the difference between the early speeches of Acts, which seem to contain primitive elements, and the Logos Christology of John. There is a parallel development in the doctrine of the Spirit and even of the Father. Add that Christ himself learned and grew in wisdom.27 The parables of growth now become items in a general pattern and we realize that, though one can argue abstractly that development in the time of revelation does not mean development after the close of revelation, a concrete understanding of God’s ways goes farther: it justifies belief in continual development in the reception and assimilation of God’s word. Understand the need for development, add the doctrine of the Holy Spirit’s assistance in actual development, and you can use the historical facts of development to formulate the sense of the dogma more precisely. Then I think it becomes clear that there is development in the sense I defined. Take Nicea as an example. The terms are new: the very opposition to them, illustrated so painfully in the fifty years that follow Nicea, shows how new they were. The question was new: the long history preceding Arius’ clear formulation of subordinationism and

24 25 26 27

1 Timothy 6:20. 2 Peter 3:18. See Hebrews 6:1. Hebrews 5:8; Luke 2:52.

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Athanasius’ corresponding formulation of the idea and implications of consubstantiality, shows how far the earlier church was from the Nicene question. The terms at Nicea were new; the question was new; the dogma was new. If it is a fact that there are new dogmas of faith, and if this fact itself is not just a bit of philosophy or history but a judgment of faith, then it will be mystery in the traditional sense, to be pondered in the heart and elaborated into a theology as we seek to understand it. The church is only now ready for such an elaboration as she was ready for the Trinitarian elaboration only when the basic dogma was clearly formulated. However, theologians have just begun work on our doctrine, and so I think the most profitable procedure at the moment will be to consider the obvious objection against development. This will require a deeper penetration of the mystery and still keep us firmly engaged with reality. The objection, then, as phrased by Owen Chadwick, is this: ‘[T]hese new doctrines, of which the Church had a feeling or inkling but of which she was not conscious – in what meaningful sense may it be asserted that these new doctrines are not “new revelation”?’28 The force of the difficulty lies in the undefined but universally held faith of the church that revelation was completed in the apostolic age. The times were fulfilled in the coming of the Son of God.29 In him the law came to perfection.30 In him creation has its consistency and unity.31 God’s legates culminate in him.32 In him the old sacrifices are abrogated.33 And in him, to come to the precise point, revelation reached a fullness expressly contrasted with the old fragments: ‘Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son.’34 Moreover, this revelation is communicated to us by the apostles, who were privileged witnesses: ‘[B]ut God … allowed him to appear, not to all the people, but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.’35 So now we do not expect a new 28 Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957 [2nd edition, 1987]) 195. 29 Galatians 4:4. 30 Matthew 5:17. 31 Colossians 1:16–17; Ephesians 1:10. 32 Matthew 21:33–37. 33 Hebrews 9:26. 34 Hebrews 1:1–2. 35 Acts 10:40–41; see Acts 1:21–22.

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revelation on earth; we rely on ‘the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.’36 We await only the final revelation which will also be the end of the world.37 The difficulty is real enough but not at all insoluble. It illustrates, however, a principle that we can discover also in Trinitarian development: no dogma is an island; it does not emerge alone but in a complex of new ideas and judgments. The doctrine of development cannot develop without a corresponding development in the doctrine of revelation and of the communication of God’s word to the human race. This related development has been going steadily forward. It is fairly clear by now that the apostolic word is God’s word in a derivative sense, that God’s primary word is spoken in the Son – not in the Son’s human utterances either, but in the very appearance of the Son on earth, in his life, death, and resurrection, in everything that pertains to his presence on earth as the sacrament of God. The comprehensive word is ‘history.’ We can generalize divine revelation as the cumulative whole of history, reaching its climax and its fundamental meaning in the Son who appears at its center. The significance of this for development is that the meaning of history is God’s alone. Paul spoke a word that is his and God’s, but the meaning is limited by the meaning Paul gave it. History basically is a word that humans cannot speak; but God speaks it as easily as we move pen or vocal chords. It follows that its meaning is measured by the infinite mind of God, unlimited by human conceptions. It follows too that there is a vast surplus of meaning in revelation that will never be exhausted. Paul was tapping this surplus when he said that the Son is the Father’s ‘yes’ to the question of Israel.38 Teilhard de Chardin was tapping it when he investigated the relation of world evolution to the incarnation. And we may expect our descendants of the year 3000 to be continuing the process without fear of exhausting the divine word. Furthermore, to aid our progressive assimilation of this word there is the sending of the Spirit, who is as real as the Son, as really sent, as really present. But the Spirit’s coming is not once for all as that of the Son was. It is over and over again, repeated as often as new sisters and brothers are born to Christ, or as often as a new Council of Jerusalem is convened. It is this continuing sending of the Spirit that is our 36 Jude 3. 37 2 Thessalonians 1:10; 1 Peter 1:5; and passim. 38 2 Corinthians 1:20.

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guarantee of subjective reception and assimilation of the Word, since it was the single event of the sending of the Son that contains the fullness of objective meaning in God’s revelation.39 Between the once-for-all character of the Son in the world and the ever-and-again character of the Spirit, there is a variety of degrees. There is a shading off from the once-for-all character of Christ to that of the last writer of the New Testament that prepares us for this. The apostles too had their once-for-all character, residing in their role as eyewitnesses: ‘what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our own hands, concerning the word of life – this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it.’40 The author here speaks in the name of the first apostles, but the once-for-all character of their role had already loosened to admit a man like Paul who is also called a witness.41 It is loosened still more to admit later writers – sub-apostolic surely, some of them, but sharing a degree of the once-for-all character. The point is that ‘once-for-all’ has no mystical and sacred character in itself. The important thing is what happened. Christ ‘happened’ once-for-all; the Spirit ‘happens’ over-and-over-again; and when we come to human agents of the world’s communication, the important thing is still what happened and not the degree in which they share the Lord’s once-for-all character. Peter does not possess it the way the Lord does, nor Paul the way Peter does, nor the author of 2 Peter the way Paul does. The very impossibility of assigning a precise meaning to ‘death of the last apostle’ or ‘apostolic age’ shows how imprudent it is to build on such a foundation. The recourse, then, to apostolic tradition, which surely characterizes the church, does not mean recourse to an ultimate understanding or formulation but rather to a witness that is our sole avenue to a reality we seek to understand and formulate better and better. I believe that this approach reconciles the doctrine of development with the doctrine of revelation ‘completed in the apostolic age,’ but it does remain somewhat formal: whatever the meaning of the incarnation

39 I have developed this a bit in ‘Development of Doctrine: Aid or Barrier to Christian Unity?’ Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 21 (1966) 1–20. [See chapter 14 of the present volume.] For St Thomas on history as God’s language, see Quodlibet VII, q. 6, aa. 1–3. 40 1 John 1:1–2. 41 Acts 22:15; 26:16.

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in God’s mind, that is the content of revelation. This does not tell us anything specific about that content; still less does it tell us anything about the way that content comes to formulation in the dogma of the church. It is the latter that really concerns us now, and I would like at least to indicate the factors involved, beginning with background issues. First, I think it is a mistake to talk so much about ‘events’ that we forget that the ‘substance’ of things is involved. The eye more easily follows a moving object, and the mind more easily attends to events than to substance. But the whole universe is God’s word, not only the events but the persons and things at their center. Secondly, I think it is a mistake to oppose ‘history’ and ‘propositions.’ When Paul understood the Son as the Father’s ‘yes,’ he understood him as a proposition: if the term is offensive, let us not be insensitive to the niceties of taste in our fellow-believers, let us find another – but not to the detriment of truth. Thirdly, I think it is a mistake to submit all other biblical categories to demythologization, but to exempt the category of ‘word’ itself. There is a persistent effort to maintain a mystique of ‘the word of God,’ though in its material aspect it is just as anthropomorphic as ‘the arm of God’ and as open to magical interpretation as the sacraments. If we proceed from the material aspect to meaning and truth, I think we can accept the prophetic dictum ‘The word of the Lord came to me’ and still understand that word generally as an interpretation of history in which the proper judgmental element is supplied by prophetic light (in the Thomist sense) and the formal element by the ideas conceived in a human way by prophet or writer. Perhaps it will help clarify the background of development if we speak of a twofold translation: there is the translation from divine language into human, and there is the translation from one human language into another. God’s language is or can be history, and this has to be translated into human language for purposes of communication. Just as Hebrew has to be translated into English for the English-speaker, so history has to be translated into Hebrew, Greek, and so forth, for people in general. The prophets translated the exodus into Hebrew. The apostles translated the Christ-event into Greek. Christ himself was the translator par excellence. Reflecting on his own meaning in the Father’s mind, he worked it out in Aramaic language and communicated something of his understanding to his disciples. That ‘communication’ introduces the second stage of translation: from Aramaic to Greek, from Greek to Latin, and so to all the languages

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of the world. It is not only that languages differ in a material way: cultures differ too, with corresponding problems of translation. There is also the complication of the interaction of human language and divine. The later prophets had both the ongoing rush of events to interpret and the word of earlier prophets coming down to them. Christ had the Old Testament interpretation of events to integrate with the meaning of his own being-in-the-world. The apostles had their memory of the Lord’s words plus the events of the early church. We have still to learn from events, though I should say that, after Christ, events have a significance like that of matter in Scholastic hylomorphism: Christ is the ‘form’ of history, giving its permanent meaning through all material changes. Against these background issues we can set the main problem engaging theologians today. Every development is in effect a new translation from divine language into human. As we have a series of English translations of the Bible, so we have a series of theological translations of history. At a basic level the church is doing what the prophets did, what Christ did, what the apostles did. But there are two main differences. One regards the changing cooperation of God and us. We are more on our own now. Bonhoeffer said God was teaching us that we could get on very well alone. A Catholic would rather say God is teaching us to use more and more of the human capacities that God gave us. The other difference is more central in today’s problematic of development: we have not a developing word in the way prophets, Christ, and apostles did. Christ is the center of history. The primary word has already been spoken, and we have no access to that word except through the derivative word of the apostles. Consequently, we have the job of translating an original ‘text’ that is not available. We have to work from a text that is already a translation. This may look like a logical impossibility, but it has in fact been going on for a long time, and theologians have been trying to give a name to a way of dealing with scripture, a way they vaguely recognize as legitimate. Thus, some speak of the ‘consequent’ sense of scripture. More often today we speak of ‘hermeneutics’ in a sense that goes considerably beyond the ‘literal’ sense of scripture to dogma and theology. To me it clarifies the procedure somewhat to think of this later dogma that results as a ‘new translation’ of God’s primary word. However, new dogma is related to the divine mysteries not only directly as a new translation, but also indirectly through its continuity with the first translation of the apostles. It is the development of that first translation. That is the aspect theologians are studying nowadays.

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In regard to this problem, a first counsel is to avoid a too mechanical view of language that would limit it to verbal expression. We are quite familiar with the idea of unwritten tradition, but have not fully exploited this factor. Nor have we taken account of how a way of life, an attitude towards the world or money or other people, may live on from generation to generation without spoken words. I have a brother in whose mannerisms our father lives on in almost exact reproduction; but I do not think that, till I put these words on paper, there was any articulation of this ‘tradition.’ And the Christian way of life can be handed on, with a whole ‘dogma’ of values embodied in it, without translation into dictionary language. To push this farther and into the concrete field of Christology, I recall here the remark of Robert Franks in regard to the New Testament on Christ: ‘Mention has been made of the recent stress on the unity of the New Testament. A unity there is, but it is one of attitude, not of doctrine.’42 I recall also Lonergan’s remark that the best proof of the divinity of the Son in the New Testament is the movement of ideas by which ‘God’ changes through ‘God the Father’ to ‘the Father,’ and the corresponding movement by which Jesus moves from an extraordinary man through ‘Son of God’ to ‘the Son.’43 ‘Attitude’ and ‘movement of ideas’ are really verifiable in the New Testament, but not by quoting so many words. Finally, beyond attitude and movement of ideas there is the theology of the New Testament as a whole, a theology that is not the view of an individual human author or the sum of them all but is God’s alone, a synthetic view of the Trinity in the world and thus correlative to God’s primary word. The New Testament truly contains inexhaustible treasures, but the treasures are unlocked only by development. 42 Robert Franks, The Doctrine of the Trinity (London: Duckworth, 1953) 58. 43 Bernard Lonergan, De Verbo Incarnato (Rome: Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, 1964) 28–29, 49–50; see pp. 19–20. [Crowe seems to have in mind the following text on p. 20 of De Verbo Incarnato: ‘Quae sane evolutio in ipso nominum usu rem nostram proxime tangit. Ex unico Deo Iudaeis noto transitur in Patrem et Filium. Qui dicebatur Deus, dici incipit Deus Pater quasi locum alteri praeparans et etiam Pater quasi locum alterius agnoscens. Qui autem dicebatur Filius hominis vel Filius Dei, dici incipit Filius sine addito ut etiam postea ei addatur nomen Deus. (This development in the use of names has a direct bearing on our thesis. It is the transference of the name “God” from the one only God of the Jews to the Father and the Son. The one who has been called “God” now begins to be called “God the Father,” as if preparing the way for another, and also “Father,” as if acknowledging room for another. And he who was being called “Son of Man” or “Son of God” now begins to be called simply “Son,” with the result that subsequently the name “God” also was applied to him.)’]

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How does this development take place? Generally theologians describe it as a transition from the implicit to the explicit: it was implicit in the faith of the apostolic church that there are three persons in one God, but this was made explicit only in the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries. The implicit may be more or less near to explicit formulation: that the Son is God in the same sense as the Father is God was nearer, that the mother of the Lord was assumed in bodily fashion into heaven was not so near to explicitation. Generally too theologians agree in lining up the extremes to be avoided in specifying this explicitation. One extreme is that of mere logical conclusions: we find articles of faith that serve as premises from which to draw conclusions. Such reasoning is part of development that puts all human cognitional processes to work in its service, but it does not seem able to account for all the data of history. The other extreme is a kind of mystical approach, one that assigns more ‘vital’ factors as cause of the process – but leaves them totally mysterious, inscrutable to human reason, so that while the faithful rely on the magisterium of the church, no one knows how the magisterium reaches the judgments it does reach. But, though there is an agreement on exclusion of these two extremes, there is not yet a consensus on more positive specification. Schillebeeckx appeals to the ‘full’ sense of scripture, and he seems to think of it as vaguely present in the apostolic consciousness: the Spirit assists the process of development much as a teacher helps a student find the answer to questions. Rahner speaks of what is ‘com-present,’ ‘consignified,’ and ‘communicated,’ in the original apostolic message. He uses the example ‘N.N. is my mother,’ which ‘contains’ far more than a cold affirmation of a biological relationship, and similarly the statement ‘Christ died for us’ contains a wealth of meaning that is con-signified. The process of articulating the con-signified is complex: we use the analogia fidei; the trend is toward simplicity and the unity of the mystery; there is a parallel in the relation of the praeambula fidei to individual faith; and so forth. Lonergan’s express study of development concentrates on the process by which early dogma was formed. He sees it as a movement towards the ‘catholic’ and universal, both on the side of the object and on the side of the subject. Thus, the many images and titles by which the relationship of the Son to the Father is described in the New Testament, most of them with meaning for a particular people of a particular time, are made universal in Athanasius’ understanding of consubstantiality: the Son is God in the same sense as the Father is God. Concomitantly, subjects undergo their own process of universalization

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when they abstract from their private views to confess one faith with the whole church. What these theologians have had in mind, I think, is no more than the provision of a set of guidelines for a scientific treatise on development. But who is both able and willing to work out a full-scale explanatory account that would respond to the challenge of Newman’s more descriptive essay? I do not know whether there are any volunteers at the moment. In any case the reader will agree that the question cannot be handled in a short article purporting only to introduce the topic of development of doctrine.44 44 In case any of my readers wishes to pursue this topic further, let me offer some bibliographical suggestions that he or she may find useful. Some Bibliographical Suggestions on the Development of Doctrine An English bibliography must begin with John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (now in Doubleday paperback: Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1960 [6th ed., Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989]). On Newman we have the critical work of Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman. The Idea of Doctrinal Development (see note 28 above – Newman represents an aboutface from Bossuet) and Jan Hendrik Walgrave’s expert study Newman the Theologian: The Nature of Belief and Doctrine as Exemplified in His Life and Works (London: Geoffrey Chapman; New York: Sheed & Ward, 1960). Continental literature on Newman is growing fast, with some of it appearing in English. On Möhler there is an article by Gustav Voss, ‘Johann Adam Möhler and the Development of Dogma,’ in Theological Studies 4/3 (1943) 420–44; also a very helpful little book by Hervé Savon, Johann Adam Möhler: The Father of Modern Theology (Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1966). The Catholic Theological Society of America [CTSA] has in its Proceedings often returned to the topic of development. See, for example, John J. Galvin, ‘A Critical Survey of Modern Conceptions of Doctrinal Development,’ CTSA Proceedings 5 (1950) 45–63; Cyril Vollert, ‘Doctrinal Development: A Basic Theory,’ ibid. 12 (1957) 45–74; Frederick E. Crowe, Development of Doctrine: Aid or Barrier to Christian Unity?’ ibid. 21 (1966) 1–20 [see chapter 14 of the present volume]; and Robert L. Richard, ‘Changeable and Unchangeable Elements in Conciliar Teaching,’ ibid. 22 (1967) 21–31. Henri Rondet handled this topic for the Encyclopédie du catholique au XXème siècle in Les dogmes changent-ils?: Théologie de l’histoire du dogme (Paris: Fayard, 1960) [English translation: Do Dogmas Change? trans. Dom Mark Pontifex (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1961)]. J.H. Walgrave handled the topic for The New Catholic Encyclopedia (see vol. 4, pp. 940–44, s.v. Doctrine, Devlopment of). Much attention is focused today on Eduard Schillebeeckx, who has articles in his own Revelation and Theology, vol. 1, trans. N.D. Smith (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1967) and in Dogmatic vs Biblical Theology, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (London: Burns & Oates; Baltimore: Helicon, 1964). [See note 10 in chapter 14 of the present volume.]

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For two of Karl Rahner’s treatments of development, see ‘The Development of Dogma,’ in Theological Investigations, vol. 1: God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1965) 39–77; and ‘Considerations on the Development of Dogma,’ in Theological Investigations, vol. 4: More Recent Writings, trans. Kevin Smyth (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966) 39–77. On Bernard Lonergan, some of whose thought on development of doctrine is still available only in Latin, see, in particular, De Deo Trino, 2 vols. (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964). [Both volumes are now available in English as The Triune God: Doctrines and The Triune God: Systematics, respectively vol. 11 and vol. 12 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. (Ed.)] Lonergan’s thought on doctrinal development has received critical exposition in two articles by Robert L. Richard, the one mentioned above, and in ‘Contribution to a Theory of Doctrinal Development,’ in Spirit as Inquiry: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, S.J., ed. Frederick E. Crowe, 205–27, a special issue of Continuum, 1964. Most non-Catholic work on development has been critical of the idea, but A.A. Van Ruler’s article ‘The Evolution of Dogma,’ in the symposium Christianity Divided: Protestant and Roman Catholic Theological Issues, ed. Daniel J. Callahan, Heiko A. Oberman and Daniel J. O’Hanlon (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961) 89–105, is an exception. Also note a recent book by Maurice Wiles, The Making of Christian Doctrine: A Study in the Principles of Early Doctrinal Development (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967). On the ecumenical aspect, see the volume edited by Nicholas Lash, Doctrinal Development and Christian Unity (London and Melbourne: Sheed & Ward, 1967).

Chapter 16

Salvation as Wholeness: Theological Background for an Ecumenical Program1

The theme of this paper was assigned to me, and the history of the assignment will clarify the terms used in my title. The context was provided by ecumenical discussions between representatives of the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches. The majority decision of the committee of which I am a member was that the best hope of ecumenical progress lies in working together for the world and its needs rather than in tackling directly questions of doctrine and worship. It was hoped that the gospel character of the program would be preserved by setting as our goal the salvation of people, while the need of a modern transposition of the biblical term was indicated by conceiving of salvation as wholeness. My task was to provide a theological background against which concrete proposals for ecumenical cooperation might be  set and intelligently discussed.2 This assignment, it seems to me, involves various aspects of theology. Historically, it is a matter of an

1 Previously published in Canadian Journal of Theology 14/4 (1968) 228–37. 2 In February of 1968, representatives of the Lutheran Council in Canada and the Canadian Catholic Conference began planning for the first national Roman Catholic/ Lutheran consultation in Canada. Three “regional working groups” were set up, based respectively in Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Quebec. The Ontario group had four Lutheran and four Catholic members, and Frederick Crowe was one of the latter. This group met periodically during the summer and fall of 1968. The present paper was prepared in response to a request made by the meeting of 9 September. It was presented by Crowe at the meeting of 2 December, with a response by Ulrich Leopold, one of the Lutheran members. Apparently the exchange was well received, since the meeting decided that a replay of it would constitute the Ontario group’s contribution to the national consultation. The latter took place on 27–29 January 1969 at Port Credit, Ontario. (Ed.)

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oscillation between the ‘this-worldly’ and the ‘other-worldly’ in the centuries of the church. Analytically, it is a matter of the natural– supernatural relationship and unity. Comprehensively, it is a matter of the divinization of humanity by God’s gracious plan for salvation. These aspects I will now try to set forth. I start with the biblical meaning of salvation, relying on the article by F.J. Taylor in Richardson’s Theological Word Book of the Bible.3 In the Old Testament the idea was first closely linked with victory in battle or ‘deliverance from danger and tyranny or rescue from imminent peril.’ Then the notion takes a more religious turn, becoming associated ‘with the earlier prophetic idea of divine righteousness. The mighty work of God … is in saving the humble … the poor and the dispirited. The last of the Servant Songs … suggests that this saving work can be carried out only through suffering.’ And always it is God who is the savior. As we approach Christian times, we find that ‘men came to despair of salvation in the present order … to look for the coming of that day when God would interpose his mighty arm … and out of judgment bring full salvation to those … acquitted …’ Taylor finds that in about one-fifth of the New Testament occurrences the relevant noun or verb refers to salvation on the last day. But our future destiny is determined by our present standing before God: the Synoptics see Christ as saving in the present, and John definitely thinks of a present possession of eternal life. There are references to deliverance from various specific evils, but Matthew’s account4 makes Jesus savior from sin, and this expresses the meaning of the New Testament as a whole. In summary: ‘Salvation is from darkness to light … from alienation to a share in divine citizenship … from guilt to pardon … from slavery to freedom … from fear of hostile powers to liberty and assurance … and all these definitions carry a strong moral content.’ Already, therefore, in New Testament times there had come to the surface the ambiguity that later polarized into two sharply contrasting positions and today grounds the question we must face in any Christian program of ‘salvation’: Is salvation this-worldly, or otherworldly, or both? If both, how are the two aspects related? The New Testament speaks with equal clarity of saving from disease and saving from judgment. Is one a mere symbol and promise of the other? Or has 3 F.J. Taylor, ‘Save, salvation,’ in Alan Richardson, ed., A Theological Word Book of the Bible (London: SCM Press, 1950) 219–20. 4 Matthew 1:21.

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it a value in itself – in some measure independently of the other? In that case, what is the relationship of temporal welfare to eternal salvation? Christian thought, in attempting to solve this question, has followed a complex sequence that it will be hard to summarize. But I do not think we can form well-founded opinions without at least a rapid survey of history on the point at issue, so to that I must turn, amateur historian though I be. It is almost a commonplace now that the Old Testament mentality is this-worldly, while the New Testament mentality is other-worldly. This view surely has a basis in fact. We think at once of promises of a land flowing with milk and honey, and of seeing one’s children and one’s children’s children to the third and fourth generations. In contrast, the New Testament attitude seems oriented to the return of the Lord when this world will come to an end. Our earliest account of conversion to Christianity tells the Thessalonians how they ‘turned to God from idols, to serve a living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead – Jesus, who rescues us from the wrath that is coming.’5 But surely such simple a contrast is one sided. The Old Testament is not just this-worldly. It knows the supra-temporal character of God and looks towards a day of the Lord that is hardly to be fitted to the measure of this world. The redemption through suffering and death that we meet in the Servant of Isaiah, and the development of apocalyptic in Judaism prior to Christian times, also contribute to a more complex picture. And neither is the New Testament just other-worldly. The feet of the Christian are planted solidly on the ground, as many a prosaic precept shows: ‘Anyone unwilling to work should not eat.’6 Indeed, Matthew’s criterion of judgment on the last day could hardly be amended by the most radical secularist: ‘For I was hungry and you gave me food … in prison you visited me.’7 If these are discrepancies, how can we reconcile them? If ambiguities, how can we resolve them? I do not think a clear solution is possible unless we see the people of God as a ‘student’ body, arriving slowly and with many detours at a better and better grasp of the divine plan for our salvation. I see that plan as having a built-in tension between what we now know as the this-worldly and the other-worldly, but I could 5 1 Thessalonians 1:9–10. 6 2 Thessalonians 3:10. 7 Matthew 25:35–36.

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describe it more theologically as the natural and the supernatural, or the human race and its divinization. This tension results historically in various states of imbalance, which are due to a deficient grasp of the whole plan. The imbalance is overcome in a learning process that runs through the period of revelation, from Old Testament to New Testament and in the New Testament itself, and that continues in an unending process through history. The Old Testament and the New would from this viewpoint be opposed, not as fixed ‘positions’ but rather as related steps in the learning process; and the process continues through time in a cumulative sequence, the steps and stages of which I think can be indicated rather clearly. There was first of all the great outburst of one-sided other-worldly fervor. Prepared for by deepening Old Testament attitudes, it exploded in the tremendous experience of the death and resurrection of Jesus. In him so obviously ‘the fulfilment of the ages has come.’8 He is so clearly the one ‘who comes from above’9 in whom the other world has broken in upon us. In the outpouring of his Spirit we have so vivid a sign of what will happen ‘in the last days.’10 The first Christians could not but be gripped by enthusiasm for that ‘other’ world of messianic blessings that he would establish on his return. Thus they lived remote from this world at Jerusalem: ‘… the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions …’11 So other-worldly are their expectations that they do not even initiate missionary activity till persecution destroys their idyllic existence. Even then, Paul brings to his young churches the same strongly other-worldly message: ‘… the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none … For the present form of this world is passing away.’12 However much Christian charity excluded immorality and promoted concern for neighbor, it is clear that there is at this stage little or no conception of a set of values proper to this world. But even in New Testament times a reaction sets in and the imbalance begins to be ‘corrected’ by a swing towards the other pole. A particularly clear illustration (and a sharp contrast with Paul’s early attitude)

8 9 10 11 12

1 Corinthians 10:11 (NEB). John 3:31. Acts 2:17. Acts 4:32. 1 Corinthians 7:29–31.

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is found in the pastoral letters with their concern for the institutions of the church, and their justification – against rising heresies – of using the good things of this world: ‘They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.’13 Less vivid but equally significant is the contrast between Luke’s gospel and those of Mark and Matthew. Whereas our first two evangelists write for the Christian community, Luke writes for the world at large. He is the first ‘apologist’ whose work we have in writing; and from his mentality derive, directly or indirectly, the great apologists of the second century, Justin and his comrades. The apologetic phase yields insensibly to the imperial in a long and remarkable history that reaches its climax in the ecclesiastical domination of the Middle Ages. Politically, the trend is shown by that extraordinary sequence in which the apologies of the second century lead to the decree of toleration by Constantine, and that in turn to the imposition of the Catholic faith by Theodosius, and this again in a series of steps to the veto power that the medieval popes exercised over the nomination of emperors. Culturally, the sequence is just as striking and more significant for our present purpose. Clement of Alexandria, in opposition to the ‘integrists’ of his time, had espoused the cause of a wide assimilation of Greek culture. In the Middle Ages, this assimilation had become a total domination of culture. There was indeed a cultivation of what we now regard as secular values: crafts, poetry, drama, architecture, philosophy, and so on. But they were not cultivated as secular values; rather, they were mere servants of the church and the faith. Philosophy, for example, was the ancilla theologiae. There was indeed a unitary world and integration of a sort, but the unity contained a latent power of disruption because the integration was not bilateral. In short, the secular values had little or no autonomy: the whole of Europe was run, in Congar’s phrase, like a vast monastery under its abbot pope. The next phase was that of the self-assertion of the secular. Art, science, philosophy, government – all the branches of human activity – made their declaration of independence. They refused to exist any longer as servants. Guilds would be replaced in due course by labor unions. Hagiography yielded to stories of chivalrous love. Science became empirical. Philosophy turned to its own bases in rational reflection. The universities developed in freedom of thought. Governments 13 1 Timothy 4:3.

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rejected papal influence. All along the line there was a repudiation of the servant role – in many cases linked with a bitter counter-offensive from whose divisive consequences we still suffer. This stage has a peculiar complexity, owing to the Catholic-Protestant division in the west and the ambiguities latent in the attitude of both churches. The Catholic trend is popularly characterized as a retreat into the ghetto. With governments, universities, arts, crafts, and sciences removed from its control, Rome simply washed its hands of the whole secular enterprise. This view has its solid grain of truth, but it hardly gives the whole story. I think, for example, of my Jesuit predecessors, their cultivation of the classics and the sciences in the schools, their esteem for native customs and ‘secular’ religious practices on the missions. On the other hand, the Reformation is popularly seen as contributing to the emergence of the secular. This also has its truth. Though I should think the first influence was rather from the side of emerging humanism, there can hardly be any doubt that the road of progress and advancing culture lay with the northern Protestant nations and not with the Catholic south. But Luther’s own position contained an ambivalence, represented in his promotion of the secular state and his violent opposition to Erasmus. A sign of the complexity in Roman Catholic and Protestant attitudes is found in the Protestant social gospel and the Catholic social encyclicals. The social gospel was, by and large, an effort to penetrate the social order with the gospel message, so that sin and grace would be discoverable not only in the individual but also in society as such. The kingdom was still God’s kingdom. The social encyclicals, so important a phenomenon under Leo XIII, Pius XI, and subsequent popes, were rather an acknowledgement of a natural order of justice and right, to be authentically taught by the church, even though the message was not that of revelation. There is another aspect, not at all marginal, to complicate further this long and already complex history. It is that of the religious movement, understood in the broadest sense to include both Roman Catholic and Protestant trends. The early hermits retreated into the desert to commune with God and banish the devil, just when Constantine’s attitude was assuring the safe entry of the church into the world. Whether their move was reactionary or not is somewhat obscure. In any case the movement was to have an enormously significant role that cannot be overlooked even in this short survey. From hermit to Benedictine, through Franciscan and Dominican to Jesuit, and then on to the

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astounding though still hidden upsurge of ‘secular institutes’ in our day, there has been a persistent history, not only of search for union with God in the cloister, but also of commitment in various forms to a program of leaving the world the better to serve the world. Luther had the idea of making vocation and the state of perfection more egalitarian; that is, he brought them out of the monastery to be shared by the whole people. But his followers too felt the call of the Spirit to something ‘more.’ There were the Pietists in direct line of descent, with their long history of opposition to theology and their other-worldly hymns. There were movements such as the Society of Friends, with their repudiation of the cultural life of the times. There is today the emergence again of old-style religious orders, in the Reformed tradition at Taizé and in the Lutheran stronghold of Germany itself. Does anything at all emerge from this sketchy history of so long a period, which embraced so many complicated factors? Even with all my historical inaccuracies and imperfect generalizations, does any message come through? It seems to me that two things at least are clear: that there is an unresolved tension between the this-worldly and the other-worldly, and that it is common to Catholic and Protestant churches alike. Since Vatican II, the Roman Catholic Church has been emerging, not without struggle and pain, from its four-century retreat to the ghetto. The conciliar documents, especially ‘The Church in the Modern World,’ ‘Ecumenism,’ ‘The Relationship of the Church to Non Christian Religions,’ and ‘Religious Freedom,’ have given it a new orientation. Yet the tension I speak of seems only to have been accentuated. Nor can Protestants, who were far ahead of Roman Catholics in some aspects of the new orientation, claim to have solved a tension that seems inherent in the Christian way. The death-of-God movement may have run its course, but it left us with a new sense of the gap between our faith and our culture. The new secularity, which we all recognize as giving a needed emphasis to the values of this world, has extreme difficulty in retaining the fullness of the gospel message, the transcendence of God, and the absolute character of the response to be given to the divine invitation. It is clear to me that there is an urgent need for a theoretical basis for tackling the practical problem, and here I think Roman Catholic theology is ahead of the Protestant. In two long, slow steps (represented by Philip the Chancellor and Maurice Blondel), with a third on the way, a theorem of the distinction, relationship, and unity of the natural and supernatural elements in God’s salvific plan has been worked out. The

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point of departure in scripture is an undifferentiated unity: save for a few precious hints in approval of a created natural order, the vision is wholly concentrated on our immediate relation to God and to the new order of being introduced by God’s Son. The necessary work of analysis and of the affirmation of a distinction within creation of ‘natural’ elements, fitted to our measure, and ‘supernatural’ elements beyond our measure, was the slow work of twelve centuries. It was not mere speculation. It was the answer to myriad questions posed from Pelagius to the Scholastics. For example: What can we do on our own without grace? Why is not everything grace, since it is all the gift of God? The distinction reached its first clear articulation in Philip, the Chancellor of  the University of Paris, around 1230, with a pairing off of nature and grace, knowledge and faith, natural love and supernatural charity, and so on. The subsequent period of history was precisely that of the emerging autonomy of the ‘natural.’ I do not know whether this sequence has been thoroughly investigated, but it seems antecedently probable to me that the distinction itself was operative in setting the natural free. At any rate, the theoretical distinction was followed by the pragmatic rebellion. Further, the distinction had rough sledding in the academic world itself. Protestant theologians were little inclined to accept the theorems of the medieval Catholic, and on the Catholic side there were the persistent efforts of Baius and his successors to eliminate the distinction. Further still, the ineffectual efforts of the orthodox Roman Catholics to bolster it up did not do justice to the real merit of the distinction. They relied too much on a hypothetical and rather useless natura pura as a basis for their thinking, with the supernatural viewed as something ‘added’ in a special act of divine gratuity: this approval made the whole supernatural destiny of the human race seem like God’s afterthought, tacked on extrinsically to an idea already integral in itself. The impasse was broken around the turn of the present century – largely through the work of Maurice Blondel, with his concern to relate the natural and supernatural intrinsically and to insist on their harmonious unity, while not denying the fundamental distinction itself. Since his time a new approach has been taken by Roman Catholic theologians. I do not myself think that Blondel solved the problem: what he gave was a direction and an impetus. His role was to recall us to the unity of the divine plan, to round out the process represented by the pair in Maritain’s phrase distinguer pour unir.

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But the task of conceiving the unity in an acceptable way still remained. That third step may be possible now, the key notion being the role of meaning in human life. The notion came to clear formulation only during the last century, perhaps too late for Blondel to exploit it fully. But recently Lonergan has taken it up and elaborated it in the context of Roman Catholic thought. Meaning, as he explains it, is constitutive of the human. Therefore it is not a merely objective intelligibility to be grasped by us, as happens when we study astronomy; rather, it is an intelligibility that enters into the very being and constitution of the object itself. A country is in large measure what the country means to its people. Laws, customs, institutions – all these, in human affairs, are what they mean. I think this idea may be applied effectively to the present problem. The sacraments are what the sacraments mean, and they mean what God instituted them to mean. Human life in all its aspects is what human life means, and the meaning is constituted by God from all eternity according to the divine plan, which is to restore all things in Christ, to make us sharers in his divine being. The transformation of the human by the divine is a real transformation; thus the medieval distinction of natural and supernatural remains valid. But the unity of the human world made divine is not accomplished by some process like adding block to block, or gluing together two material components; it is rather a penetrating transformation of the whole by the power of meaning. My purpose has been to establish a theological background for discussion, but it is time now to relate what I have said to our ecumenical objective: salvation as the wholeness of people. The wholeness of people, then, is the state of being that corresponds to God’s plan of making people sharers in God’s own nature. There is a human measure of things, from which the measure of the secular derives; otherwise, there is nothing to be made divine. The human, moreover, has its autonomy, as has the secular, in its objectives, its fields of inquiry, its methods, its laws, its principles. We do not expect a supernatural elaboration of the multiplication table, and neither should we look to revelation for solutions in a whole range of psychological, sociological, political, and other problems. Nevertheless, the human and secular are in themselves deficient, un-whole, with a measure of un-being. A clear religious manifestation of this deficiency is our human impotence to keep a law even when we can humanly know it.14 Wholeness, therefore, 14 Romans 7:7–25.

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is the result of ‘adding’ the supernatural, but the addition should not be conceived mathematically. It is the intimate and complete transformation of all the human, so as to give it, not a new material reality, but a new meaning. Christian marriage, in almost every outward manifestation, may differ little from non-Christian marriage; but it is different, because its meaning is different. It has the meaning of the union of Christ and his church.15 The unity of human wholeness thus conceived is not the perfect unity of God, but is a tending toward that unity. It is a unity-in-tension or a tension-in-unity. There is inherent in us, simply because we are finite, a fear and unwillingness to commit our human values to the great ocean of the infinite. That means that the cross and resurrection are an essential part of the pattern for achieving complete wholeness. Sooner or later we must totally renounce the human in order that we may receive it back wholly integrated with the divine. Because we are many, each with our own history, each with our own relationship with God, there are many ways in which we are called to and achieve our destiny. Some of us, like Paul,16 are called to an earlier anticipation of death and resurrection and a more immediate concern with the transformation of things human; others, as he implies, are called to a fuller participation in and cultivation of the human values to be transformed. The thesis is complex, but so is the reality, both of the divinized human world we encounter in our life of faith and of the vicissitudes of theological attitudes through history. I think then that only a complex thesis can provide a sufficiently comprehensive background for discussion of the human salvation in the modern world. It now appears that salvation, if we consider the terminus a quo or deliverance from, looks to the state of un-wholeness, un-being, the regio dissimilitudinis17 that is mostly conceived in human terms as the destruction of what it means to be humanly happy. But salvation, if we consider the terminus ad quem, admits two aspects. There is the restoration of the human, the fully human, not only with material needs supplied but also with sin erased, moral helplessness overcome, and psychological disturbances remedied. This is the area of the old gratia sanans. Then there is the divinization, not necessarily a second step, but a second aspect, in which, according to God’s ultimate purpose, we are to be like God, to live like 15 Ephesians 5: 21–33. 16 1 Corinthians 9. 17 Augustine, Confessions, VII, 10:16.

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God, to know as we are known. This is the area of the old gratia elevans. The human and the divine remain distinct measures, and it is false to say that to be fully human is to be divine. However, it is true to say that I am not fully and wholly myself unless I become divine. From this viewpoint the manifold possibilities of service to the human world are an obvious field for the common exercise of the apostolate of concern for our neighbor’s salvation. The order to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit those in prison always has application: the poor in one form or another, the economically, socially, psychologically poor, these we have always with us. The work of the young men and women in Canadian University Students Overseas and the  Peace Corps cannot be foreign to the churches. Concern over the Vietnam War, over racial discrimination, over violence in law enforcement as well as in crime:18 all this is as Christian as concern for prayer and fasting, and a more pressing demand on conscience. Nor can one validly object that this concern is a betrayal of the Christian message unless it is accompanied by the express proclamation of the gospel. We are indeed to give to the thirsty in the Lord’s name, but this is a definition of our intention rather than a formula to be imposed on the recipient. If Christ died for all, and all are in some sense his sisters and brothers, then it cannot be a merely human act, and an evasion of the gospel demands, for a Christian to help them in their human need. I think the reactionaries are mistaken on this point. Since 31 October 1967, the Reformed church in the Netherlands has been agitated by an open letter of twenty-four pastors challenging the social orientation of the church since the Second World War, by asking whether such an orientation is biblically justifiable and fulfils the evangelical task of preaching. The movement has become a tempest, and my source hopes it will not harm ecumenism.19 I would hope, first of all, that it will not harm commitment to the gospel itself. What is to be said of the opposing thesis that cooperation in common social program is the best form of ecumenical endeavor? This position has considerable support today. Stephen C. Rose says that a future page of history will read: ‘For the first time since the Reformation, Christians were brought together not merely on the basis of creeds and doctrine,

18 Crowe adverts here to certain matters that were of intense concern to Christians (and others) in North America during the late 1960s, the period in which he was writing this paper. (Ed.) 19 J. Dupont, ‘Lettre ouverte à l’Église réformée de Holland,’ Irénikon 41 (1968) 267–70.

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but because they heard the voice of one God calling them to work together in the streets and alleys, factories and offices, hospitals and legislative offices of a world in need of sacrificial service and dedicated commitment.’20 Similarly, Robert McAfee Brown writes: ‘[F]or the foreseeable future, cooperation in the “secular arena” may be the most fruitful line of ecumenical advance.’21 No one who believes in God our Father can object to this program in itself. No one who follows the gospel or the prophets will insist on creed and ritual while overlooking ‘the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.’22 This, however, does not quite respond to the present question. Matthew immediately adds: ‘It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.’ Our question concerns one of those ‘others’ – specifically, the ecumenical demand to work for unity. Our question is this: How are we to join this concern for justice and mercy to a genuine concern for the Lord’s ecumenical precept without allowing the first concern to be an occasion for neglecting the second? Obviously, our work for the world must be done in the name of the Lord; it must be a cooperation; and it must lead to greater understanding and love for one another. Is that all? I would say that we must go further. The object of our apostolate, if it is salvation as wholeness, is not merely to convert sub-human conditions of existence into human. It is also, as God’s agents and co-workers, to be God’s instruments in converting the human into the divine. This necessarily involves the word of God or the gospel, with its power of transforming the meaning of human life. It necessarily involves a reference to the death and resurrection of Jesus, and therefore a reference to the sacrament by which we are baptized into his death23 and to the Eucharist in which we show forth the death of the Lord until he returns.24 In other words, if our work together is to be a truly ecumenical effort with a truly ecumenical purpose, I do not think we can avoid the question of common doctrine and common worship. Nor can we avoid the reflection on ourselves that will lead to confession of our sins of 20 Stephen C. Rose, ed., Who’s Killing the Church? A Renewal Reader (Chicago: Renewal Magazine, 1966) 5. 21 Robert McAfee Brown, ‘The Pope’s Credo,’ Christianity and Crisis 28/3 (22 July 1968) 163. 22 Matthew 23:23. 23 Romans 6:3. 24 1 Corinthians 11:26.

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disunity and a plea for forgiveness of one another. Cooperating as Christians, working for Christ in his poor and hungry and oppressed, is a truly Christian activity: it is the primary Christian obligation, and it falls on all of us together. But to undertake only this and yet call it ecumenical would be, I am very much afraid, an evasion of a further obligation, a rejection of the impulse the Spirit has been giving us for so many years in Faith and Order, Life and Work, and so forth.25 The ecumenical purpose is to eliminate the scandal of disunity. It cannot be accomplished without reference to our terminus a quo, the sins of the past; and it cannot avoid setting its own terminus ad quem, that unity of belief and worship that God means us to have. I hope that we will not silence the ecumenical voice of conscience with the reflection that we are, after all, attending to the main Christian duty.

25 ‘Faith and Order’ and ‘Life and Work’ are the names of two twentieth-century movements of Christian ecumenism – the first concentrating on doctrinal and organizational issues, the second on practical and social issues. The two movements merged in 1938 to form the World Council of Churches. Their concerns continue to be addressed by the WCC through its commissions, commissions in which the Roman Catholic Church participates even though it is not a full member of the WCC. (Ed.)

Chapter 17

Dogma versus the Self-correcting Process of Learning1

The problem I am addressing began to emerge about two centuries ago and has been with us in fairly clear formulation most of our own century. Thus, Maurice Blondel in 1904 and Van Austin Harvey in 1966 were able to state it in approximately the same terms. Blondel defines his problem as that ‘of the relation of dogma and history, and of the critical method and the necessary authority of doctrinal formulae.’2 He tells us his task is ‘to achieve the synthesis of history and dogma while respecting their independence and solidarity …’3 The execution of the task has a twofold danger: ‘… some tend to behave as though history had to depend absolutely on dogma, others as though dogma had to proceed exclusively from history and be subordinate to it.’4 Harvey’s approach is different but fundamentally he deals with the same question. Over and over he charges that ‘orthodox belief corrodes the delicate machinery of sound historical judgment.’5 He examines the three greats of the passing era, Bultmann, Tillich, and Barth, and concludes: ‘None of the three theologians makes clear how it is possible to be both a critical historian and a believer.’6 The new quest of the historical Jesus 1 Previously published in Theological Studies 31/4 (1970) 605–24, and in Philip McShane, ed., Foundations of Theology: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970 22–40. 2 Maurice Blondel, History and Dogma, in The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (London: Harvill Press, 1964) 222. 3 Ibid. 224. 4 Ibid. 5 Van Austin Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (New York: Macmillan, 1966) 119. 6 Ibid. 164.

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and various other efforts to solve the problem also fail in greater or lesser degree to achieve their goal. The mention of Blondel and Harvey will help those who move in other thought-worlds than mine to locate the problem. But it also serves to bring out the tenacity of a question that has changed so little in sixty years and is so much the same for such different writers. Blondel and Harvey differ widely in approach and in solution. Blondel was a philosopher by trade. He worked in the context of Catholic modernism. His solution was given in terms of a Catholic tradition that is ‘not a limitative and retrograde force, but a power of development and expansion’;7 his explanatory principle was a philosophy of action: ‘“To keep” the word of God means in the first place to do it …; and the deposit of Tradition … cannot be transmitted in its entirety … unless it is confided to the practical obedience of love.’8 Harvey, on the other hand, works in the context of Protestant thought determined by Troeltsch. His explanatory categories are strongly historical. He postulates a perspectival image of Jesus, a memory-impression that controlled the views and beliefs recorded in the gospels. He reconciles the conflict between doctrine and history by a theory of ‘soft perspectivism’: ‘This difference in perspective may be such that the two descriptions of the same event also differ, but the two descriptions are not logically incompatible …’9 The contrasts, then, between Blondel and Harvey are obvious, but so is the similarity in conceiving the problem: the difficulty of holding fast to absolute beliefs on historical events when scientific research repudiates traditional ‘history’ and itself attempts to reach no more than probabilities subject to perpetual correction. I am not going to follow the direction taken by either Blondel or Harvey, profitable though that might be. Among other reasons, my own personal inclination leads me to address the problem in the context of Bernard Lonergan’s thought. ‘In the context of’ is a handy phrase that enables me to avoid the claim that I speak for Lonergan and allows me to think in the way that is now second nature to me without always distinguishing original elements from the form they may have taken in my mind. There is a preliminary historical question regarding change or development in Lonergan’s own thought. I have stated my topic in terms 7 Blondel, History and Dogma 275–76. 8 Ibid. 274. 9 Harvey, The Historian and the Believer 252.

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of dogma and the self-correcting process of learning; and I have done so deliberately in order to make the opposition sharp between the absolute of faith and the continual revision implied in a process that gradually eliminates misconceptions, mistakes, and plain errors. The preliminary question, however – our own little historical problem – is whether Lonergan’s thinking has so changed that these terms are no longer pertinent. The self-correcting process of learning is still pertinent.10 In fact, one of Lonergan’s latest publications applies it to the area of religious doctrines in a way hardly seen so explicitly before.11 But does the concept of dogma any longer apply? There are good reasons for asking the question, and I really have to delay on it a moment. There is no doubt that Lonergan’s thinking has undergone a profound reorientation in the last five years, and that in a way which bears directly on the present question. If we take his De Deo Trino to mark a kind of term in the prior phase and compare it with some of his later work, we find extremely significant differences. In the Trinitarian treatise we read, like a kind of refrain, the assertion that theology rests on truths, not on data: ‘non a datis sed a veris incipit [(theological science) begins not from data but from truths].’12 And this is expressly set in contrast to the sciences, both natural and human. But when we come to his chapter on the functional specialties of theology, we are struck by the fact that through several pages of what he seems to regard as his definitive statement he is able to list and describe all eight functions, to assign the ground for their division and to state its need, all without once using the word ‘truth.’ We read fourteen pages in that chapter before the word occurs, and then it does so rather innocuously.13 Or we 10 The self-correcting process of learning was an important theme for Lonergan at least as early as 1953, when he completed the manuscript of Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. See, in the book’s Index, s.v. Learning process, self-correcting. 11 See chapter 2, on ‘Functional Specialties’ in theology, in Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 125–51. See in particular 141: ‘Judgment [is open] to acknowledgement of new and more adequate perspectives, of more nuanced pronouncements, of more detailed information.’ [Prior to the publication of Method in Theology, the chapter appeared as an article entitled ‘Functional Specialties in Theology,’ in Gregorianum 50 (1969) 485–504, with the quote found on 500. Crowe’s reference to this piece as ‘one of Lonergan’s latest publications’ is, of course, from Crowe’s own standpoint as one writing in 1969 or 1970. (Ed.)] 12 Bernard Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics 32, 33. 13 It seems that Crowe has in mind the following sentence found on Method in Theology 139: ‘… in an educated and alert consciousness a childish apprehension of religious

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might compare the faculty psychology of the 1964 treatise, where Lonergan can still speak of the intellect’s influence on the will,14 with the disappearance of such language from the work of the last two or three years. His present cast of mind is much better represented by statements such as this one: ‘man exists authentically in the measure that he succeeds in self-transcendence, and … self-transcendence has both its fulfilment and its enduring ground in holiness, in God’s gift of his love to us.’15 The differences are striking and I think it important to advert to them. At the same time, their exaggeration would be as wrong as their neglect. The chapter on functional specialties may not use the word ‘truth,’ but it uses the idea under other names: what is reasonably affirmed, judgments of fact, elimination of contradictions and fallacies, the refutation of error, the distinction between correct and incorrect understanding, and so forth.16 Furthermore, De Deo Trino had already distinguished between the truth on which theology rests and the truth towards which it strives. The latter deals with an object that grows and changes, it begins with hypotheses, and it may reach no more than probability.17 True, this is stated of the truth of theological understanding, not of the truth of revelation; but already in 1964 it does provide for the self-correcting process of religious learning, just as in 1969 the role of truth is still maintained. There is a development but not a revolution. To get an accurate view of the transition, we should examine The Subject, the Aquinas Lecture for 1968. Here the new orientation seems to be emerging clearly. Truth is objective, yes, but do not be fascinated by objectivity, for there also is

14

15

16

17

truth either must be sublated within an educated apprehension or else it will simply be dropped as outmoded and outworn.’ (Ed.) The Triune God: Systematics; see, for example, 110 [111]: ‘Iam vero cum intellectus sit voluntatem movere atque dirigere … [It is the intellect’s function to move and direct the will …].’ Crowe’s reference in the text to ‘the 1964 treatise’ is, of course, to the prior Latin edition of this work. (Ed.) Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Future of Christianity,’ in A Second Collection 149–63, at 155. The article appeared originally in Holy Cross Quarterly 2/2 (1969) 5–10, with the quoted statement on 7. For example, see Method in Theology 132: ‘Doctrines express judgments of fact and judgments of value. They are concerned, then, with the affirmations and negations not only of dogmatic theology but also of moral, ascetical, mystical, pastoral, and any similar branch.’ The Triune God: Systematics 38–43.

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the subject to consider.18 The new attitude is spelled out, the faults of the old orientation are exposed, and there is an admission of today’s alienation from dogma. Still, that alienation is regarded as a reaction against the previous one-sided insistence on objectivity;19 and nowhere are we exhorted to abandon all attachment to dogma. A similar point is made in ‘The Absence of God in Modern Culture.’ Here there is reference to the ‘softening, if not weakening, of the dogmatic component once so prominent in Catholic theology,’20 but this is attributed to the theologians’ inability to ground their objective statements; and I see no reason to think Lonergan accepts it as an optimum state of affairs or that he has abandoned his own great labor to overcome that inability. When he says, in the latest article to appear, ‘faith claims truth and certainty,’21 I do not think he regards the claim as false. What has happened between 1964 and 1969, 1 would judge, is that a new understanding of values and their role has been added. This does not eliminate the role of truth; rather, it supplies it with a better dynamism, especially in the religious sphere. In any case, the problem is real for many of us. It exists in our minds in terms derived from Lonergan’s earlier work, and I will set it forth in those terms as best I can, with the nuances that distinguish our concept of the problem from those of Blondel and Harvey. There are such nuances, and to advert to them may forestall possible misunderstandings. Where Blondel’s concern was apologetics, and Harvey’s the morality of historical knowledge, Lonergan’s concern has been cognitional process. He has worked on a level so fundamental that it should be relevant both to Blondel’s interest and to Harvey’s, but he himself has made few 18 Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Subject,’ in A Second Collection 69–86, at 69–73. It is in this paper too that Lonergan criticizes the old faculty psychology: see 79–80. [The essay was originally the 1968 Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University.] 19 Ibid. 71. See 76 on the absolute objectivity of judgment. 20 Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Absence of God in Modern Culture,’ in A Second Collection 101–16, at 110. [The article was originally given as a lecture at the University of St Michael’s College, Toronto, on 15 February 1968. Subsequently it was presented as the 1968 Cardinal Bea Lecture at Fordham University. It was first published in The Presence and Absence of God, ed. Christopher F. Mooney (New York: Fordham University Press, 1969) 164–78, with the quotation from 172.] 21 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Theology and Man’s Future,’ in A Second Collection 135–48, at 140. The article originally appeared in print in Cross Currents 19 (1969) 452–61, with the quotation from 455. [Crowe’s reference to this as Lonergan’s ‘latest article to appear’ is, of course, from Crowe’s own standpoint as one writing in 1969 or 1970.]

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forays into either of their fields. Again, his work on dogma was of course done in the context of theology, much of it in the narrower context of dogmatic treatises; whereas his work on the self-correcting process of learning was confined largely to his philosophical work Insight. Therefore we have to put the two together. Our problem, then, can be set up as follows. The relevant aspect of dogma, which it shares with all truth, is the absolute character of the positing of it: ‘Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon was a contingent event occurring at a particular place and time. But a true affirmation of that event is an eternal, immutable, definitive validity.’22 The absolute character of dogma can be the more strongly affirmed in that it rests on the infallible knowledge of God: ‘Sed qui in verbo Dei invenitur sensus, a divina scientia eaque infallibili procedit [But the meaning that is found in the word of God proceeds from God’s infallible knowledge].’23 But the self-correcting process of learning seems to suppose just the opposite of this absolute character. It seems to suppose mistakes and errors – and in our beliefs as well as in our independent affirmations: ‘Mistaken beliefs exist, and the function of an analysis of belief is overlooked if it fails to explain how mistaken beliefs arise and how they are to be eliminated.’24 Just as mistaken beliefs have the same roots as error in general, so their correction has the same general remedy: there is no radically new element in ‘the problem of eliminating from one’s own mind the rubbish that may have settled there in a lifelong symbiosis of personal inquiry and of believing. For learning one’s errors is but a particular case of learning.’25 That general case of learning is familiar to many of this journal’s readers: ‘the spontaneous and self-correcting process of learning is a circuit in which insights reveal their shortcomings by putting forth deeds or words or thoughts, and through that revelation prompt the further questions that lead to complementary insights.’26 Lastly, though the role of learning in historical studies is not

22 Insight (1992) 402. Distinguish the absolute character of judgment from ‘the comprehensive coherence that is the ideal of understanding’ (ibid. 368). 23 The Triune God: Systematics 32, 33. 24 Insight 735. 25 Ibid. 736. 26 Ibid. 197. To be noted: sometimes the term ‘self-correcting process’ is applied more precisely to common sense, in which case it is the common sense parallel to the advance of science. This seems to be more or less the regular usage in Insight and it becomes explicit in Lonergan’s article ‘Natural Knowledge of God’: ‘Common sense meets such questions by … the self-correcting process of learning. Natural science

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stressed (Lonergan’s category of ‘history’ was not at all fully developed at the time of Insight), still it is sufficiently acknowledged: ‘As the data assembled by historical research accumulate, insights are revised continuously in accord with the concrete process of learning.’27 Our problem, then, is this: Does the self-correcting process of learning apply to dogma? If it does, how can dogma remain dogma? If it does not, how can dogma and historical inquiry deal with the same historical event? How can one bring them into confrontation? It seems as if they must be kept in quite separate and watertight compartments, the modern version of the double truth. To meet this problem, I will adopt tactics something like those that agnostics have used against proofs of the existence of God: they force their opponents to qualify and to qualify until, they say, the thesis has died the death of a thousand qualifications. I think the method is legitimate for me, simply because the present problem rests on a thousand misconceptions, and clearing them up eliminates the problem. My first step, then, is to ask about our starting point: Is it the present, or is it the past? I will affirm that it is the present, and I will point out the particular cognitional stance involved in such an affirmation. Secondly, I will go on to ask about the fixed dogmas that our present has inherited from the past and about their relation to human thinking and future progress. Finding that dogmas already given leave us considerable freedom to continue learning in a human process, I will ask, thirdly, how those dogmas themselves arose, and whether the learning process that was then involved required the reversal of the believer’s former world. My fourth step will take us to that former world of our beginnings: I will ask whether there are dogmas in scripture and in what way they may exist there. My last step will be to ask how theologians and believers can live at peace with dogmas being based in the scriptures despite the perpetual revisions that may result from critical work on the gospels and the other writings that record the historical origins of our religious beliefs.

meets them by the process of direct and indirect verification’ (in A Second Collection 117–33, at 126). However, the term is also applied to science in Insight 328. Note also that during the learning process ‘one’s own judgment is in abeyance’ (ibid. 311). 27 Insight 564. The question is complex: there are revisions forced by further data, and there are those due to the advent of new investigators; in regard to the latter, we can escape relativism by passing from a descriptive to an explanatory viewpoint.

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1 Starting Point: Present or Past? My answer to the first question is that our starting point is the present. Since this is going to result in a difference of stance between Roman Catholics and Protestants, where the latter may appear to be left floundering with the problem while the former escape, I would like from the outset to assure my Protestant sisters and brothers that I am not abandoning them. I may even adduce principles that will help them remain Protestant! But my concern now is analysis of the data. In some sense, surely, all of us who were born into Christian homes have the present as our starting point: it is from parents, pastors, and teachers that we learn our faith and through their witness that we adhere to Christ. But we Roman Catholics continue throughout life, or may so continue, to take as our proximate rule of faith the church’s dogma, presented to us by those who are authorized to speak for the church. Protestants, I suppose, somewhere along the line are taught that the scriptures, not the institutional and present church, are the only rule of faith; and so, as soon as they begin to read scriptural criticism, they are involved in the problem of the historicity of the records. The difference is that Catholics postulate continuity of the church’s present doctrine with that of the past – and indeed can do so according to our dogmatic principles. Protestants, by contrast, in order to be Protestants and remain consistent with their Protestant position, must postulate discontinuity.28 I am not sure that Luther, in order to be a protestant, a reformer, needed to postulate discontinuity; but to be a Protestant, to belong to a separated church and to justify that separation, one must, it seems, postulate discontinuity. I certainly do not mean to affirm that the proximate rule of faith, the magisterium of the church, which sufficed for us when we were children and is still operative for us in adulthood, can be made an excuse for intellectual complacency and laziness. The proximate rule has to derive from the original rule. Our beliefs are not independent of certain historical events said to have occurred many centuries ago, and we cannot be indifferent to what historical research discovers in regard to

28 This difference I first heard expressed by Lonergan himself in his 1962 institute on the method of theology [held on 9–20 July at Willowdale, Ontario], but I believe it is widely recognized. Ritschl, we are told by Philip Hefner, was bothered by the problem of continuity, which is the Catholic principle, and discontinuity, which is the Protestant principle (see Faith and the Vitalities of History [New York: Harper & Row, 1966] 31–32).

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those events. We must put our dogmas into confrontation with what the historians say actually happened, and achieve a symbiosis of what we believe with what we can rationally assert by means of historical science. However, I do mean to affirm that the problem loses some of its urgency for us. We can postpone it or, if we do address it, we can live in relative peace of mind while our investigation goes on. We have what Lonergan calls our existential history, prior to narrated history, to critical history, to methodical history,29 to support us in the meantime. However, that is a denominational difference in faith-attitude: theologically it is not the main thing. The basic difference here is one of general cognitional stance, what might be called today the mindset; and this strikes me as much more important for sorting out the various misconceptions that lie behind our problem. The instructive parallel is the difference between Newman and Descartes.30 Descartes would begin with a universal doubt and go on to establish all knowledge on the secure basis he discovered by this method. However, what actually happened was that many accepted his starting point but could not follow his footsteps and so ended in skepticism. Newman, on the contrary, would prefer to begin from a universal credulity, with the prospect of eliminating error in due course as the truth develops and occupies the mind. This he regarded as ‘the true way of learning,’31 and the very terms he used show how relevant his cognitional stance will be to our problem of dogma and the self-correcting process of learning.

29 Bernard Lonergan, De Verbo Incarnato 9–11. 30 This point too I owe to Lonergan: see the reportatio by F. Rossi de Gasperis and P. Joseph Cahill of his course De intellectu et methodo (given at the Gregorian University, Rome, in 1959) pp. 44–45. [A photocopy of a mimeographed edition of the reportatio is available at the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto; the pagination Crowe gives here is taken from this copy.] Also see Insight 737–38. 31 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, edited with introduction and notes by I.T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) 243. The passage is worth quoting at greater length: ‘Of the two, I would rather have to maintain that we ought to begin with believing everything that is offered to our acceptance, than that it is our duty to doubt of everything. The former, indeed, seems the true way of learning. In that case, we soon discover and discard what is contradictory to itself; and error having always some portion of truth in it, and the truth having a reality which error has not, we may expect, that when there is an honest purpose and fair talents, we shall somehow make our way forward, the error falling off from the mind, and the truth developing and occupying it.’ Newman had formed this mentality some time before he wrote the Grammar; see pp. 66–67 of that work, where he quotes one of his earlier writings.

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2 Dogmas: Relation to Learning and Progress In our second step, therefore, we assume the cognitional stance of a Newman rather than a Descartes. We take the dogmas that are the rule of faith for the Catholic child as they are for the Catholic theologian, and we ask about their relationship to human thinking and learning, especially to the historian’s progress in the study of the gospels and to the modernist’s attempt at a contemporaneous doctrine. Now, without making an exhaustive inventory but confining myself to the dozen or so dogmas that enter the theological work I have done (really there are hardly more than that), I would say that they are not likely to be directly touched by gospel criticism. My favorite dogmas are the conciliar definitions of the fourth and fifth centuries, definitions which, Lonergan says, are couched in ‘catholic’ language. That is, the movement of thought in patristic times was away from the particularities of the Hebrew mind, or of the Pauline or the Johannine mind, towards what is universal.32 ‘What the Father is, the Son is too’ – that is the gist of the Nicene dogma.33 But such a statement is a long way from direct conflict with statements on the human consciousness of Jesus. Even the dogma of Chalcedon, where it deals with the human and historical as in the statement ‘Whatever man is, the Son is too,’ does so in a way that leaves our faith free from the vicissitudes of gospel criticism. Similarly, if we go in the other direction, towards development of a theology based on the dogmas, there is little restriction on the learning process. The thing is that the dogmas are not a continent but a beachhead, not the sea of infinity but little islands scattered on the sea. They are not boundaries (at least, not just boundaries), they are also openings 32 Bernard Lonergan, De Deo Trino I: Pars dogmatica 10–11, 13, 112 [The Triune God: Doctrines 17–21, 25, 255]. There are also indications of this idea in vol. 2, The Triune God: Systematics; see, for example, pp. 42–45, 48–53, and 112–15 (to be remembered: the long introduction of vol. 2 was largely worked out before that of vol. 1). There is a section ‘De usu fontium …’ in Lonergan’s course of lectures De methodo theologiae at the Gregorian University (see the reportatio made by his students, 1962, pp. 56–57 [available at the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto; the pagination is taken from this bound copy of the reportatio]). It is extremely useful on the question of that limited general truth a theologian asks of scripture, and on the way he may attain it with certainty despite the repeated revisions of exegesis. 33 Notice that when I call this formula ‘catholic,’ I am affirming that it leaves behind the particularities of the Greek mind as well as those of the Hebrew. Nicea was not a capitulation to Greek philosophy but a victory over it; see De Deo Trino I 5–112 (summary on 112). [The Triune God: Doctrines 7–255]

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to further investigation – not a summa theologiae, but fragmentary items of knowledge. As Karl Rahner says of Chalcedon, it is not an end but a beginning.34 Once we realize the extremely narrow strip of infinity occupied by the dogmas and, as well, the general heuristic character of their formulation, we are freed from many of the difficulties that arose from a false perspective in which dogmas loomed as the very horizon of religious thought. On the side of the object there is room for infinite advance; on the side of our concepts we are not bound by any supposed determinateness of our categories. 3

How the Dogmas Arose

I said that dogmas are not likely to conflict directly with the results of gospel criticism. But this suggests that there may be an ultimate confrontation. In fact, there is a relationship. The dogmas claim to be true: their truth may be largely heuristic in conception, but it does refer to a concrete, historical figure who lived at a certain place in a certain time. So we have to take a third step and ask about the emergence of the dogmas. I am not yet dealing with the scriptures, though I am heading in that direction. I am concerned here with the process of the formulation and acceptance of dogmas, and the relation of that process to the total consciousness of the believer. We need now a concept of the total object of that consciousness in its conglomerate aspect. Lonergan uses the neat little phrase ‘the subject and his world.’35 It is that ‘world’ that I am interested in, but under a particular aspect. The original concept is Heideggerian, I think, but Richard Palmer makes Heidegger’s world ‘a structural whole of interrelated meanings and intentions.’36 I would qualify that statement

34 See Karl Rahner, ‘Current Problems in Christology,’ in Theological Investigations, vol.1: God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst (London: Darton, Longman & Todd; Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1965) 149–200. Notice the title of the German original: ‘Chalkedon – Ende oder Anfang?’ (in Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und Gegenwart, vol. 3, ed. Aloys Grillmeier and Heinrich Bacht [Würzburg: EchterVerlag, 1954] 3–49). 35 In the chapter on functional specialties in Method in Theology 130. 36 Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1969) 133. Notice (132) that Heidegger’s world (at least in the phrase quoted) is not objective over against a subject, as Lonergan’s is. Notice also (133) that it is unobtrusive: the structural whole and the place of elements within it appear at the moment of breakdown.

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somewhat. I think much of this world is unstructured, many of its elements are not related to the rest in any specific way. It is a conglomerate world, more like the contents of a wastepaper basket, or the collection of treasures a boy carries around in his pockets, or the odds and ends of furniture stored away in the attic of an old homestead. It is the total intentional object, then, of consciousness. It is the aggregate, the summation from beginning to end of the stream of consciousness, the integral of an extended lifetime, the deposit of long-continued experience. It consists of images, memories, mental schemata and associations, links vaguely made and half-forgotten, things loved or feared, old ideas and new worries, questions and puzzles, answers half-glimpsed, poems learned long ago by heart, words concrete and abstract. It is a matter of suspicions, guesses, opinions, beliefs, assumptions, judgments and prejudgments, information and misinformation, commandments and precepts, graces accepted and rejected, causes to which one is committed or projects for which one is responsible. It is the whole precipitate of a lifetime; but, like the patrimony of a community, it is quite undifferentiated, a hodgepodge, a conglomerate object that stands to mindset as materials to their meaningful arrangement. Biologically stored in brain cells and nervous system, consciously it is vaguely objectified as the one vast world within the horizon of the mind, only partially explored and largely unorganized. I think we need this concept, this view of one’s world; for it is within such a total object that small and fragmentary bits of truth emerge, and it is within the religious counterpart of this ‘natural’ world that small and fragmentary bits of dogma emerge into religious consciousness. The truth may have a fundamental role, linking us to the real as gravity links us to mother earth, but like gravity it need not figure largely in our consciousness or in our ‘world.’ No, it is the world itself in its totality that makes us what we are existentially, not the truth that is embedded within it, not even the truth that happens from time to time to emerge into a differentiated object. When some special experience occurs, like hearing the good news of salvation, or feeling the twinge of conscience, or conceiving a great idea, or realizing at long last and accepting some fundamental truth, the experience occurs against the background of the former totality and settles into its more or less modest place in the new totality. In the context provided by this totality we can set the self-correcting process in general and achieve the increments of truth that pertain to learning, even religious learning, without magnifying the step to the

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cataclysmic proportions of a complete overthrow of our world. We can do this as individuals; and we can do it as a church, for the whole church is a learning church. What makes the learning process a traumatic experience, not to say disaster, for many of us, is our misapprehension of what is going on. We make truth the object of mind, looming up in solitary splendor. Not only that, but we take elements to belong to the level of truth when in fact they are mere suppositions or assumptions or plain picture-thinking. Or, when we actually have a dogma, we take it to be the comprehensive statement of the matter instead of being just a glimpse of the total truth. Then learning becomes a traumatic experience indeed. Instead of a modification in the arrangement of the furniture in our world, the world itself is overturned. The truth we have learned now looms as a totality set in direct opposition to a ‘truth’ (translate: ‘supposition’) that we held before as though it too had been a totality. But in fact it was previously there as part of the mind’s furniture, undifferentiated, imprecise. In Lonergan’s phrase, it had not been ‘promoted’37 to the status of truth. What is the process of this promotion?38 The immediate factor in most dogmas was the question for reflection, the ‘yes or no’ question.

37 ‘Natural Knowledge of God,’ in A Second Collection 122–23. The first instance of this use of ‘promotion’ that I have noticed is in ‘Cognitional Structure,’ in Collection (1988) 212; but there it is not used of the transition from understanding to judgment. Another instance is in the chapter on ‘Functional Specialties’ in Method in Theology 141. A while back there was an instructive example of the confusion that can be caused by such misapprehension as I described of the ‘truths’ we hold. When the decision was made to exclude various ‘saints’ from the Roman calendar, those who thought these figures pertained to the truth of their faith were badly shaken. But others, who regarded St George, for example, as part of the furniture of the religious mind rather than as someone whose existence had been promoted to the level of truth, were quite unruffled. For them St George, like Tobias, Santa Claus, the Holy Grail, and so forth, still pertains to the furniture of the Catholic mind; but he is more clearly located now in the conglomerate. 38 I cannot here think of going into the judgmental process in detail. I must simply refer those not familiar with Lonergan to his Insight, especially chapters 9–11. For an account of the dialectical process that goes on as the church learns a new truth, let me refer to my essay ‘The Conscience of the Theologian with Reference to the Encyclical,’ in Conscience: Its Freedom and Limitations, ed. William C. Bier (New York: Fordham University Press, 1971) 312–32. [The essay was part of the Proceedings of the Seventh Biennial Institute in Pastoral Psychology held at Fordham University, 16–20 June 1969. (The encyclical Crowe refers to is, of course, Humanae vitae.) Substantially the same essay appears as ‘The Responsibility of the Theologian and the Learning Church’ in Appropriating the Lonergan Idea 172–92.]

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But generally a long period of clarification precedes such a question. Thus, at Nicea the question was whether the Son is God in the same sense as the Father is God. The question is limpidly clear in those terms, which I borrow from G.L. Prestige;39 but even at Nicea it was clear enough. My present point, however, is that that question could hardly have been asked without the labor of clarification implicit in New Testament writings and beginning in earnest some 150 years before Nicea. During that period of mental effort the church was in the position we are in today with regard to collegiality: they did not even know what question to put in a ‘yes or no’ form. So the ideas have to occur, they have to occur in all their variety and opposition. What we call subordinationist ideas of the Son had to appear on the scene for the consubstantiality of the Son to be clearly conceived. Similarly today, a one-sided view of the papal role, a tendency toward absolute monarchy in isolation from its subjects, such an idea had to appear and have its vogue before we could begin to conceive the situation properly. Still the conciliar way is not the only way. There is a variety of methods by which cognitional elements in general are promoted to the level of truth. There is the formal, authoritative way in which the scientist works, striving to devise a crucial experiment that will settle the matter definitively. There is the opposite extreme of a question too rudimentary to require more than an understanding of everyday language and a set of sensing apparatus. ‘Is it raining out?’ The matter is settled by looking out the window.40 But in between there is the type of community judgment illustrated by Newman’s example ‘Great Britain is an island.’ It is not settled by taking a look, and I doubt whether anyone 39 G.L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1952) 213. 40 The question of the virtually conditioned and its use in simple statements of this sort came up at the Lonergan Congress in 1970, so I must explain that I do not mean that ‘knowing’ the fact that it is raining is equivalent to ‘taking a look,’ though my written words may have suggested that. The full story, it seems to me, is that looking out the window is a final step in reaching the virtually unconditioned, and the judgment in this case seems simple only because there are a great many conditions that exist in a habitually fulfilled state in my mind. For one thing, the words ‘raining,’ ‘out,’ etc. have a meaning that is part of my habitual knowledge; however, they became part of my habitual knowledge only in a laborious process in which other conditions of various kinds were fulfilled. Again, knowing the difference between sleeping and waking is one of the conditions of rational judgment. That too is now habitual with me, but once it was not. I had to learn it, and in the process of learning I had to reach a virtually unconditioned in which various conditions of a quite different kind from those presently relevant were fulfilled.

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ever performed a crucial experiment on the question. How, then, is it promoted to the level of truth? By something, I should say, that is parallel to what Lonergan calls ‘indirect verification’ in the field of science: ‘the law of falling bodies was verified directly by Galileo, but it also has been verified indirectly every time in the last four centuries that that law was among the presuppositions of a successful experiment or a successful application.’41 In a similar way, a long history of wars and commerce and adventure testifies indirectly to Britons’ supposition that they live on an island. I am not saying that community beliefs cannot be wrong: they can indeed be wrong, and for a very long time, but not when the belief comes by the very process of living under daily verification of this indirect kind. Not at least among rational people – though fanatics (members of the Flat-Earth Society!) we have always with us. You see where I am heading: towards the real area of controversy, the gospels. We have dogmas in the church, religious cognitional elements that have been promoted to the level of truth by a formal process parallel to that of science. There are ideas; then there are opposed ideas, debate, perhaps even violence, a long process of clarification; and finally there is the settlement of the matter by conciliar action. But the question is whether there are other ideas promoted to the level of truth by a more informal process, especially before the dogmas appeared. The classic instance of dogma occurred three centuries after Christ. How did the truth exist during those three centuries? How was it contained in the scriptural accounts of Jesus? We have come to the fourth step of our investigation. 4 Dogmas in Scripture? Let us begin with the religious ‘world’ of believers during New Testament times. Its total intentional object is every bit as conglomerate as the one I described for the man in the street. It is filled with assumptions, guesses, memories, pictures from the Old Testament, images of Jesus (a ‘perspectival’ image, if you like), images too of the apostles and holy places, of saint and sinner, with commitments and hostilities, beliefs, suspicions – the whole bit. Such believers’ way of looking at the structure of the universe, their view of what we call the three-storey 41 ‘Natural Knowledge of God’ in A Second Collection 125. See also Bernard Lonergan, ‘Belief: Today’s Issue,’ in A Second Collection 89.

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universe, can be located without trouble in the conglomerate, at a level far below that of belief. It has not yet been promoted to truth; it has not yet been tested; it has not yet even been questioned. If the question about the universe’s structure were put, and the answer ‘The universe is a three storey job’ were given, I might say that here at last we have a good solid error; but I think this would be to distort somewhat the minds of primitive Christians, who would hardly conceive the question in the way I ask it. What, then, in this conglomerate object has been promoted, at least informally, to the level of truth? A detailed answer can be given only to individually specified questions, each of which must be answered on its own merits. But I would list a few categories of ‘truth’ that can be found in the scriptures. The first is one that in fact all of us tacitly accept and affirm by our conduct even though we may be denying it by our theological dissertations: it is the truth of the original kerygma, much as it is found in 1 Corinthians 15:3–4. This is so obviously foundational to the whole enterprise of sacred science that to regard it as mere imagination, the expression of mere subjective experience, a mere idea, would eliminate all truth from the Christian religion and invalidate the whole quest from the beginning.42 I do not say that this proves the truth of the kerygma: I say it proves that we tacitly accept its truth in making our commitment and engaging in our enterprise. I do not say either that the kerygma has reached the carefully defined stage of the Nicene definition, but I do say that it is sufficiently well defined for us to build our religious lives and our theological pursuits on it as a basis. Finally, I would make a parallel with Newman’s ‘Great Britain is an island.’ In each case you have something so foundational that to reverse it would be almost literally to overturn one’s world. It may also be that, where Newman’s proposition is indirectly verified by a good many centuries of history, the kerygma is verified in its own way by Blondel’s ‘faith in action.’ But that is not really germane to my purpose; for at the moment I am not verifying our Christian faith for anyone, I am simply trying to locate the element of truth where it belongs. There is a second set of cognitional elements in the New Testament that I would regard as promoted to the level of truth, those on which there has been something like particular reflection, express argument, and duly formed judgment by those whose charismatic qualities equip them to speak for the church. This set is not well defined in my thinking 42 See, for example, 1 Corinthians 15:12–19 and Galatians 1.

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yet, but a step toward clarification would be to compare two candidates for inclusion and ask why I would accept one and reject the other. I would wish then to include Paul’s position on the law-gospel question; I would not wish to include his theological treatise on the headdress of women in church. Why do I spontaneously make this distinction when Paul argued both questions so explicitly? There is less difficulty perhaps about including the law-gospel doctrine, since this was so closely linked with the foundational truth of Christianity, was so widely debated within the church and settled (at least in practice, with dogmatic implications) by something like a general council. But why would I not include Paul’s position on women’s headdress? I suppose the marginal character of the question is relevant in helping us determine how thoroughly Paul formed his faith-judgment, but if that judgment were really formed I would wish to include even marginal items. I suppose, too, that the fact the question arises in the moral field is relevant, since a moral question may be settled one way today and another way tomorrow when the situation is different. But there are dogmatic elements involved, so we must look further. The narrow extent of participation in the church is relevant, again as a clue to how well and duly formed Paul’s judgment may have been; but those who hold the apostles were prophets and more than prophets would not regard this as decisive if Paul as an apostle were really operating on the level of truth. This is, I think, the fundamental point. So what I am really saying is that Paul had not quite fully promoted this matter to the level of a truth of faith: he was really only ‘arguing’ for what seemed to him to be proper Christian conduct. My view gains antecedent probability from the context as I described it, but it is also half-expressed in Paul’s very conclusion: ‘But if anyone is disposed to be contentious – we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God.’43 That seems to mean ‘Well, even if my arguments are not convincing, do as I say anyway.’ It would put this cognitional element in the conglomerate somewhere beyond a mere idea, but somewhere short of truth. It would locate it perhaps where we would locate a sober probability in a developing science. All this means that we cannot escape our responsibility for judging in the twentieth century simply because the church of our fathers spoke in the first century. We not only have to form our judgment on new questions as the early church did, we also have to form our judgment on whether the early church had duly made up its mind. It is not a matter 43 1 Corinthians 11:16.

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of judging whether the early church was right. We are not today going to judge the objective question all over again: if that has already been done, then the decision is normative. But we are judging the stance of  the early church: Do we or do we not have a duly formed faithjudgment of Paul or another apostle or the church as a whole? We have to exercise our own judgment, then; we cannot shirk that responsibility. This applies to the third set of elements in the New Testament, elements that I think have been promoted to the level of truth: certain reflected statements where the existential sense of the word ‘is’ can be determined. The word ‘is’ does not always mean such a statement; for it can occur in a question, or in a supposition, or in argument on the way to truth, or in a simple piece of fiction where the real affirmation is never articulated at all.44 But when John says at the end of his gospel that he has written it in order that his readers might believe ‘that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God,’45 it is clear enough not only that this is the existential use of ‘is’ but that the statement is the reflected and utterly central core of his faith about Jesus. If the evangelist’s charism means anything at all, or – if you wish – if the early church’s acceptance of his gospel as her faith means anything at all, then here we have a cognitional element promoted to the level of truth and normative for the later church. I would go further and say the same about the other evangelists insofar as their ‘theses’ can be determined; for each of them has a thesis too, though it may not be articulated as neatly at the end of his gospel as it is in John’s. There is no need to demand from them an elaborate conceptualization of their message, any more than it was necessary to do so in regard to the kerygma itself. There is no need to suppose that any of them, or all of them together, wrote the definitive Christology. Even if they are just like the blind men around the elephant (and I think the most trenchant critics would grant at least that much), they have said something true and normative. 5 Dogmatic Foundations and Perpetual Revisions I come now to my fifth and last question, which is perhaps the step the reader has been waiting for. All that I have said might be admitted by

44 This was not well put. There is a difference between the use of ‘is’ in a question or supposition and the positing of ‘is’ in a statement, but the existential intention is present in each case (i.e., ‘existential’ in the Neo-Thomist use of the word). 45 John 20:31.

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believers familiar with the problem of Blondel or Harvey, but they might still say that I have not met the historians where they take their stand, on the question of the ipsissima verba and the ipsissima facta of the historical Jesus. I have talked about the gospels, but I have not talked about Jesus of Nazareth. Do not expect too much from me at this point. I am neither an exegete nor a historian, and I do not intend to take time out for several years to equip myself to do their work. What I promised to do is talk about the way dogmatic theologians (and believers) can live at peace with their dogma on Jesus and even relate it to work on the historical Jesus, allowing for the perpetual revisions that advancing historical science may require. I will illustrate this rather briefly and in just one example; but that example is taken from a crucial area, that of the knowledge Jesus had. There is a dogmatic thesis that Jesus had what we call ‘the beatific vision.’ It is commonly regarded as a ‘truth’ that is proxima fidei – that is, an element of doctrine that is just short of having been promoted to the level of an article of faith. The authorities would certainly take a dim view of its denial, and – on independent theological grounds – so would I. It has a history. I have not traced it through the New Testament, but the scriptural basis is growing clear in John’s conception of the Savior. The fathers took very difficult and important steps in distinguishing Jesus’ human operations from his divine ones. The Scholastics elaborated distinct elements in his human knowledge. But I would say it is possible for a naive realist to read all this long history and still be utterly incapable of handling the problem of Jesus’ ‘beatific vision’ and his ‘ignorance’ of the last day, a problem that would seem to put dogma and history in direct conflict. That problem loses its urgency, however, on a Lonerganian view of Jesus’s human knowledge. No reader of this journal thinks of the beatific vision as resulting from a special pair of binoculars enabling one to see an old man with a long white beard. The beatific vision is understanding: it is understanding of God, where God is comprehensively conceived as ipsum esse. In the rolling Latin into which they translated John Damascene: ‘totum enim in seipso comprehendens, habet ipsum esse velut quoddam pelagus substantiae infinitum et indeterminatum [for encompassing all in Godself, God possesses existence itself as a sort of infinite and indeterminate sea of substance].’46 Now Lonergan’s thesis of 1964 on 46 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, q. 13, a. 11.

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Jesus’ knowledge (I believe it was his last piece of work as a ‘Scholastic’ theologian) struggles with the relationship of this scientia ineffabilis, which is that of a vision of God that cannot be uttered, to a scientia effabilis that characterizes Jesus’ historical life and can be communicated to his fellow humans.47 I will not go into this: if it is familiar I need not; and if it is not familiar, a few minutes of explanation would not help much. But let us remind ourselves that scientia ineffabilis does not mean simply that human words are lacking. It means more fundamentally that human ideas and concepts are lacking. The illuminating parallel is that of the mystics – illuminating because they talked much more about their psychological experiences than Jesus did. They simply could not express what they had ‘seen’ (translate: ‘understood’), so they had to resort to ‘pictures’ of a garden being watered or of a castle that has rooms within rooms, the interior mansions. The point is that Jesus did not look at a series of ‘objects’ of knowledge lined up on the shelves of the divine mind, and then turn to communicate to his disciples the secrets of that vast warehouse, perhaps making a mistake as he did so. There is an infinity between the object of his vision and particular items of the created world and human history. What was given to Jesus was not an encyclopedia of the divine ideas, all conveniently arranged in alphabetical order (Aramaic language). There just is not and cannot be any such direct transfer as naive realism would conceive from beatific vision to daily life. The one is so remote from the other as an ‘item’ of knowledge that in the course of a long lifetime, or even in the course of an era of human history, people might never bring them into relationship: much less, then, is this going to occur in the short span of thirty years. I say it is remote as an item of knowledge. I do not mean that it does not guide and guarantee particular items, only that it does not do so in the way a premise guides a conclusion, or a yardstick guarantees my estimate of length. It is more like our notion of being. That is only a notion, where Jesus had understanding; our notion is empty, only an anticipation, where the understanding of Jesus was full and actual. But there is a similarity of role. Just as our notion of being is remote from our judgment on today’s weather as an item, though guiding and guaranteeing it in a fundamental way, so the vision Jesus had can be related both remotely and immediately to his judgments in the human and historical sphere. Just 47 See De Verbo Incarnato 332, thesis 12a.

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as our notion of being hardly comes to our attention, though it is so basic in human consciousness, so the vision of Jesus could guide his judgments without having the alerting character of an alarm bell or compass needle. I would go farther, then, than Blondel. Where he explained the early church’s expectation of an imminent parousia in terms of what the disciples could absorb of the master’s message,48 I would explain it more basically in terms of what the master could himself conceive in a human way. I would say that, side by side with the vision of God, in a relationship that was both remote and immediate, there was the conglomerate that is the world of every human being. Within this conglomerate, guided and guaranteed by the vision, but in such a way that the relationship could perhaps remain unattended to, a vision of humans and the human world slowly emerges. This emergence is quite compatible with the normal biological and psychological stages of human growth. There is nothing in the vision of God that prevents a boy of twelve who is just coming to puberty from reflecting in a way he never did before on the meaning of life, or coming to a sense of his vocation and realizing that he must devote himself untrammeled to the Father’s business. As the years go on, this understanding of human destiny, of one’s responsibility for conducting oneself in such a way as to remain open to communion with the All, of the awful possibility of closing oneself to such communion, of the terrible consequences of the daily kairos, this understanding may grow sharper and express itself in the parables of crisis. Along with this there may begin to emerge the understanding of a need for a fundamental option between the ‘merely human’ and the divinely human, of the need to die to the human in order to set it in proper proportion and to begin to live the divinely human life. But this whole process is compatible with, indeed supposes, no formed judgment whatever on a variety of questions (which may include the date of the last day) that are not immediately related to the task in hand. While one could develop this basic sketch more fully, I find myself satisfied that it allows us quite adequately to reconcile Jesus’ human experience, which historians investigate, with a particular doctrine – a quasi-dogma – that is of some importance in theology. Let me recapitulate the last four steps of my argument. There is dogma; it is normative, the core of our faith and the basis of our theology; 48 Blondel, History and Dogma 246, 275, etc. But notice, 284, that Blondel too acknowledges a finite element in the human knowledge of Jesus.

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but it is of a sort that leaves historians singularly free to pursue their investigations. The dogma arose in a learning process, but the effect of its emergence was not to overturn one’s religious world, it was merely to bring some elements in the conglomerate object of consciousness into clear relief. There is basis for dogma in scripture, but we have hardly yet begun to work out in any systematic way the catalogue of such unformulated dogmas, or the conditions under which we might affirm them to be contained in scripture. Further, the elements that seem the most likely candidates for inclusion in the catalogue are not such as to corrode ‘the delicate machinery of sound historical judgment.’ This is tested, sketchily, in the particular case of the knowledge Jesus had. I consider that the supposed opposition between dogma and the selfcorrecting process of learning has died the death of a thousand qualifications. Perhaps, if it enjoys a resurrection in the minds of my readers, I will be pushed to a more accurate account of my position – or, if that proves impossible, to an abandonment of what is untenable.49

49 The following question was also put to me at the Congress: ‘Do you exclude a priori at least some propositions that would falsify dogma – for example, that Jesus was a fraud? Must you not hold that historical investigations cannot produce evidence for such a proposition? And then do you not determine history by dogma?’ To this I would answer that there are propositions that in principle are not falsifiable – for example, the fundamental validity of cognitional process in general, which has to be assumed in the very attempt to falsify it. Next, there seems to be a somewhat similar situation in faith. The adherence of faith is a first in its own order: all further pursuit of truth about Jesus supposes such an adherence as its basis. That Jesus is a fraud would therefore be excluded by faith somewhat as the falsifiability of cognitional process in general is excluded by one who tries to understand the process and judge upon it. But now it seems to me we must go deeper. To deny the fundamental validity of cognitional process is not only to issue in internal contradiction but also and more importantly to reject cognitional process and its validity as a value. Similarly, to open the question whether Jesus was a fraud is not only an internal contradiction for believers but a rejection of the value that has been revealed to them. Believers accept that value and regard it as impregnable by history, but I wonder whether historians do not accept parallel values of their own that they attach to the past and assume in the very exercise of their vocation. In any case, if they escape internal contradiction in regard to Jesus by not believing, we cannot say they forever escape the more fundamental confrontation with values whose rejection is far more serious than internal contradiction.

Chapter 18

The Power of the Scriptures: An Attempt at Analysis1

A well known text tells us that ‘the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword.’2 To the author of this text, the Jewish scriptures, which we call ‘the Old Testament,’ were the word of God in a special way. In due course those Christian writings that we now name ‘the New Testament’ also came to be recognized as the word of God; and so there resulted the application of our text to the whole Bible, and the emergence of our faith in the power of the scriptures. This faith animates the movement to put a Bible in every home, and indeed in every hotel room; it determined a great deal of Reformation doctrine and piety; and it has lately been a prominent factor in the Catholic return to the scriptures. Moreover, it is not just an article of faith to which we assent in blind obedience to authority. It also corresponds to the experience of many of us who treasure this holy book, and have copies as marked up as a schoolboy’s manual – so often handled that they are ready to fall apart at the binding. However, there is a notable ambiguity in this apparently simple and obvious notion of the power of the scriptures, and a notable ambivalence in the reality itself. As for the notion, at the same time as we profess our belief in the power of the scriptures and verify it in our experience, we also require for their proper understanding a scholarship that lies beyond the capacity not only of the multitude of believers but even of theologians engaged in working daily with the scriptures. As for the reality, on the same day that we pick up the holy book and experience 1 Previously published in Joseph Plevnik, ed., Word and Spirit: Essays in Honor of David Michael Stanley S.J. (Willowdale, ON: Regis College Press, 1975) 323–47. 2 Hebrews 4:12.

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for ourselves the consolation of the scriptures,3 we read in the press of a new sect, the Children of God, who justify their hatred of parents by an appeal to the Bible: ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother …’4 Of course, we did not have to wait till 1975 to find examples of such fanaticism, but that only underlines our problem. There is then an ambiguity and an ambivalence in the power of the scriptures that surely call for discussion. I would not exaggerate. There is, perhaps, a sense in which I am simply creating a problem that for many does not exist. For multitudes of believers the power of the scriptures remains the simple thing it has always seemed outside schools of theology. They just read and experience what Paul and the author of the pastorals wrote about, namely, ‘God’s word, which is also at work in you believers,’5 ‘the sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation.’6 Similarly, I would say there is no problem under this heading for the fanatics, since they are not about to allow scholarship to upset their convictions; and we on our side are well enough aware that the root of their trouble is to be touched only by conversion and not by our arguments. But there is also a sense in which the problem becomes real to some of us. It is brought home with special force, I would say, to those of us who in our prayer-life would meditate on the scriptures, and yet through our theological work come to realize, slowly and painfully, how little we know of them, and how much we must rely on the erudition of scholars to interpret them. We seem then to be like Paul listening to those who spoke in tongues: ‘[I]f the bugle gives an indistinct sound, who will get ready for battle?’7 If understanding the scriptures is so dependent on scholarship and specialists, then they really do not give forth a trumpet-call that is clear to me. True enough, in my daily work I can have at hand the commentaries of the experts to guide me; but that is not a practical device for my prayer-life. Nor does it deal with the problem raised in regard to the church of earlier centuries, which lacked the scholarship available today. These two areas provide test cases that are worth a closer look. The problem for prayer-life may be illustrated by the Spiritual Exercises of

3 4 5 6 7

Romans 15:4. Luke 14:26. 1 Thessalonians 2:13. 2 Timothy 3:15. 1 Corinthians 14:8.

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St Ignatius, in which the scriptures supply the material for a great part of the prayer. What shall I do in my own preparation for an exercise, and what shall I say to those I may be directing, once I become aware of the great and ever widening gap between the mentality of the biblical writers and that of my own generation? If I try to bring scholarship to bear on every text, do I not defeat the purpose of meditation? And yet, to eschew scholarship and trust in some unanalyzed power of the scriptures seems to make them operate in a way akin to magic. The other problem area is that occasioned by knowledge of history. Today we know that the church at an early stage was largely cut off from biblical ways of thought and immersed in those of the western world. Are we then to say that the great heritage coming down to us from patristic and medieval times, based (as those times believed and we would grant) on the scriptures, is widely defective? And the great mystics who meditated on hardly any other book: Is their bequest to us suspect because they did not know the scriptures’ history? The problem is a modern one. It could come into focus only in our times, when it is obvious that dealing accurately with the scriptures requires thorough specialization in the field. I would not say that it presses with terrible urgency on either exegete or theologian, much less on the rank and file of believers. We vaguely conceive the problem, but other problems seem far more urgent, and anyway we are confident that somehow we will muddle through. Nonetheless I think this question, unimportant as it may seem for practical life, will repay the effort to get beyond the vagueness and triviality with which we may have conceived it. It may bring to light fundamental notions that will prove useful in determining where the power of the scriptures lies, and thus enable us to appeal intelligently to that reservoir of power, and where their power does not lie, and thus enable us to avoid blindly promoting biblicism. I cannot tackle the problem with the knowledge of the scriptures had by the scholar whom we honor in this volume; I can only approach it from the viewpoint of a theologian and his thought-world. Further, the theology that I know best is that of Bernard Lonergan, and so it is on his categories that my reflections must draw. But in this collection of essays that combines the reflections of people in various departments, I should like to make my contribution too, in the way that I find possible. Briefly the line of thought that I will develop is focused on Lonergan’s view of the world mediated by meaning. The scriptures are constituted by the meaning they have; and that meaning mediates the world of

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Jesus, who in turn by the meaning he has mediates the transcendent world of his Father. That seems clear and simple – though of course it also does not seem to say very much. However, it is a theologian’s unhappy lot to have to complicate the clear and simple, so I will proceed to that task. Let me pause only to utter a warning word. The mention of Jesus as one who mediates God to us is bound to bring to mind the scriptural text on the ‘one mediator between God and humankind’8 and the complex biblical doctrine that lies behind that phrase. My obvious warning word is that the biblical notion belongs to a thought world differing considerably from that of philosophers and theologians. We should not therefore assume a coincidence but rather expect a difference in the two uses of ‘mediation.’ There are three terms in the phrase ‘world mediated by meaning.’ The third of these, ‘meaning,’ is extraordinarily complex and comprehensive in Lonergan’s thought, especially that of the latest period; and for that very reason I cannot begin to do it justice here. But readers will find this less of a handicap in that they can undertake their own study of the term in Lonergan’s usage, which is well documented in the published writings of the last thirty years. Perhaps, then, I need do no more here than make two remarks that will link ‘meaning’ with other key elements in Lonergan’s thought. Meaning seems to be equated with intentionality, and it is considered to be constitutive of human living.9 On the first term, ‘world,’ I will also be brief, but for a different reason. Though again it is a pervasive and comprehensive term, Lonergan’s use of ‘world’ is not well documented and could only be defined after a long, minute, and painstaking study. Hardly anywhere, so far as I remember, does he stop to explain his usage or supply an analysis of the term.10 Once more then I limit myself to two remarks. First, ‘world’ 8 1 Timothy 2:5. 9 See the brief phrase in Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Transition from a Classicist WorldView to Historical-Mindedness,’ in A Second Collection 1–9, at 6: ‘intentionality, meaning, is a constitutive component of human living.’ Or, that in ‘Theories of Inquiry: Responses to a Symposium,’ ibid. 33–42, at 42: ‘… intending is just another name for meaning.’ 10 The only place I can recall where ‘world’ was defined by Lonergan is in De methodo theologiae (unpublished mimeographed notes by students of lectures Lonergan gave at the Gregorian University, 2nd semester, 1961–62) 11: ‘Mundus non est obiectum quoddam sed potius obiectorum complexio, neque tantum obiectorum actu cognitorum, sed potius obiectorum quae cognosci possunt [A world is not some particular object but rather a complex of objects, and not only of objects that are actually known but rather of objects that can be known].’ [The page Crowe cites is taken

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in the present context is not the cosmos of the physicist or the evolutionist: it is not the material universe. Next, this time more positively, ‘world’ has become related to intentionality. Its meaning can be gathered from the opening lines of ‘The Subject’: ‘There is a sense in which it may be said that each of us lives in a world of his own. That world usually is a bounded world, and its boundary is fixed by the range of our interests and our knowledge.’11 ‘World,’ then, is no longer the subhuman universe. It is correlative to the human subject, and it is constituted by meaning. The remaining term, ‘mediation,’ is an important factor in Lonergan’s thought as far back as his summer institute at Regis College in 1962 on the method of theology. At that time he had begun to make extensive use of Piaget’s theories of development, but he discovered that the grouping of operations and then the grouping of groups that Piaget had exploited ran into obstacles in certain fundamental sets of antitheses: the antitheses between the world of the sacred and that of the profane, between the world of common sense and that of theory, and between the world of the external and that of interiority. However, the notion of mediation could be invoked to clarify influence across the boundaries from world to world, for development in any field has repercussions in any other. Thus all development mediates the development of the subject; and all development, including that of the subject, mediates the development of religion. The following summer, in an institute at Gonzaga University in Spokane, the notion of mediation was taken up outside the context of theology and subjected to an elaborate analysis. Avoiding Hegel’s idealist notion of mediation, and developing a generalized notion that went beyond Aristotle’s logic, Lonergan applied mediation to the world of the mechanical, the organic, and the psychic, as well as to that of the mental. Further analysis of the notion led to the idea of a functional whole, conceived as constituted by mutually mediating parts. Moreover, there is a self-mediation that occurs by virtue of the whole having from a bound copy of the lecture notes held at the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto.] Notice that here the accent is on knowledge; and compare Lonergan’s remark in ‘The Subject,’ quoted immediately in my text: ‘its boundary is fixed by the range of our interests and our knowledge.’ 11 Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Subject,’ in A Second Collection 69–86, at 69. See also p. 85: ‘Then easily we pass into the whole human world founded on meaning, a world of language, art, literature, science, philosophy, history, of family and mores, society and education, state and law, economy and technology.’

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consequences that transform the whole itself. In the realm of consciousness a new dimension is added: now there is not only organic but also intentional mediation. Self-consciousness goes a step further still, when intentionality becomes autonomous: human development is the mediation of autonomy. Finally, there is mutual self-mediation, which has its occasion in encounter, in love, in loyalty, in faith. The history of Lonergan’s thought on mediation remains to be studied and written, but since the notion will be a key factor in this essay, I thought it important to indicate at least that the history exists. Otherwise the simple and artless exposition of the idea that I am about to quote from Method in Theology is bound to appear no more than that: simple and artless. In fact, it is the precipitate of a long and complex development. With that precaution let us turn to the second chapter of Method where, in the context of a discussion of operations, we find this passage: Finally, there is the notion of mediation. Operations are said to be immediate when their objects are present. So seeing is immediate to what is being seen, hearing to what is being heard, touch to what is being touched. But by imagination, language, symbols, we operate in a compound manner; immediately with respect to the image, word, symbol; mediately with respect to what is represented or signified. In this fashion we come to operate not only with respect to the present and actual but also with respect to the absent, the past, the future, the merely possible or ideal or normative or fantastic. As the child learns to speak, he moves out of the world of his immediate surroundings towards the far larger world revealed through the memories of other men, through the common sense of community, through the pages of literature, through the labors of scholars, through the investigations of scientists, through the experience of saints, through the meditations of philosophers and theologians.12

I find that it illuminates the power of this idea if I go back to my own boyhood and try to recover the experience, or the successive experiences, by which my childhood world was expanded into the world in which I now live. As I came to experience the power of language, I was enabled to move in imagination beyond my little home and little circle of family and near neighbors, into the whole universe thrown open to me by song and story and movie and history. Very few of us, I suppose, 12 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 28.

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have had an experience as vivid as that of Helen Keller, when she suddenly learned to use words as language, as having meanings. But perhaps some of us can recall modest experiences of an analogous nature. Personally, I still remember a treasured moment, when I was literally at my mother’s knee with my first-grade primer in hand, and she explained some now forgotten point to me. I have no other explanation for the way that scene has remained in my memory these long years than that it was my version of the Helen Keller experience, the experience of moving out of the world of immediacy into the world mediated by meaning. That little book, with its strange characters grouped in such unintelligible combinations, became – with the help of the pictures on every page and my mother’s guidance – the magic casement ‘opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.’13 The experience was renewed when I began to read narratives of fiction and adventure. My first was Robinson Crusoe (boy’s version, of course), or maybe it was Robin Hood. At any rate my mediated world suddenly expanded so rapidly, became so glorious in appearance, was filled with such extraordinary people, and included so many features I had not yet laid eyes on – ‘snowy summits old in story,’14 ‘the moving waters at their priestlike task,’15 and a thousand others – that I almost lost contact with the world of immediacy in which I had to live and move and have my being, and through which alone my mediated world could be established as part of the real. (I daresay that here we are close to the root and center of the psychological disturbances that often mark childhood and youth). Furthermore, this kind of experience did not cease with boyhood. Later in life, when two or three times I began the study of a new language, there was a repetition of this expansion of my world, an experience of moving into mysterious lands that had hitherto lain beyond my horizon. This short and simple piece of autobiography seemed important for my purpose. I do not expect readers to be especially interested in its details or the way it relates to me; but I hope they will be interested in the idea it attempts to convey, that of the function of meaning in establishing our world, and the possibilities for our topic of the world mediated by meaning. I am hoping it will give a somewhat better clue and easier approach to the riches hidden in the lines I have quoted: ‘the far 13 From ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ by John Keats. (Ed.) 14 From ‘The Splendor Falls on Castle Walls,’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson. (Ed.) 15 From ‘Bright Star,’ by John Keats. (Ed.)

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larger world revealed through the memories of other men … through the pages of literature … through the experience of saints …’ Of course it is this last that I am especially interested in, the larger world revealed ‘through the experience of saints, through the meditations of philosophers and theologians.’ We are coming to the central point of my essay: that by its meaning the New Testament (for simplicity’s sake I omit the Old) mediates to its reader the world of Palestine and the Mediterranean of nineteen and twenty centuries ago, mediates certain events that took place in Palestine and Jerusalem around the year 30, mediates Jesus and his world. Although this is clear enough now for practical purposes, it may usefully be spelled out a little more for theoretical purposes. To that end let us construct a series of steps and see it at the climax of a gradation. The biography of a great man mediates to us his life and times, and it expands our world accordingly. The world of great accomplishments on earth is integrated with the humdrum world in which we spend the most of life. Secondly, the lives of spiritual men and women mediate to us their spiritual experience and the strange and mysteriously attractive world of a life that rises above material greatness. Again this new world opened before us is integrated into our smaller world, which becomes wider and deeper and more sublime. But, thirdly, there are dimensions that transcend all these; and we discover them in the lives of the saints, when the magic casements open on a world that is totally beyond our secular experience, a world of supreme value, truth, beauty, a world of mystery, inspiring awe and yet attracting us so powerfully as to put all other attractions in a subordinate place. The figure of Abraham has come down to us as one who, beyond almost all others on our human level, mediates this transcendent world. Since the day when the Lord said to him, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you,’16 he has been the symbol of one whose face was steadfastly set on something beyond. ‘By faith Abraham obeyed the call to go out to a land destined for himself and his heirs, and left home without knowing where he was to go.’17 The ‘land’ for the believer is not fixed geographically, even though Genesis says ‘they set forth to go to the land of Canaan,’18 and Hebrews says that by faith Abraham ‘stayed for 16 Genesis 12:1. 17 Hebrews 11:8 (NEB). 18 Genesis 12:5.

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a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land.’19 The ‘beyond’ symbolized by this journeying is that of faith, the transcendent ‘beyond.’ Such a figure too is Jesus in his human mind and heart and in his human conduct. His wisdom was great, he spoke with authority, he had compassion on the multitudes as well as zeal for his Father’s house, he showed tenderness for little children – we could prolong the catalogue of the qualities that made him great humanly and spiritually, but they would not of themselves indicate his chief human function. That function was to mediate the divine: ‘Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying “A great prophet has arisen among us!” and “God has looked favorably on his people.”’20 For present purposes I would analyze the effect Jesus had on his people as follows: his mind and heart were transparent in his outward appearance and conduct, and his mind and heart were completely oriented to God. That is to say, his words and deeds mediated his interiority, and his interiority mediated God. Because his mind and heart were fixed on God, and because ‘[t]he words that the mouth utters come from the overflowing of the heart,’21 I would grant a strong antecedent probability to the views that greatly limit his references to himself – the view, for example, that he did not refer to himself as Son of God, or perhaps even as Son of Man. How could one oriented so completely to the transcendent occupy himself much with self-analysis? Similarly I would find nothing anomalous in his unconcern with the arts and the sciences, with human rights and the emancipation of slaves, with the advance of technology and the betterment of the human condition, and with the other causes to which those of us with a different earthly vocation may rightly devote our talents. His vocation was to call people to their ultimate destiny, that fullness of mind and heart that he himself enjoyed. To move towards that goal a minimal supply of this world’s goods suffices, and so he would pray simply ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’22 But if his very being and appearance, his words and deeds, mediated the transcendent God to those who went about with him – to those, in Peter’s words, ‘who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of

19 20 21 22

Hebrews 11:9. Luke 7:16. Matthew 12:34 (NEB). Matthew 6:11.

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John until the day when he was taken up from us’23 – then in an analogous manner the book that tells of this experience to other generations, this book also mediates the transcendent God. That is, it mediates Jesus to us, who in turn mediates his Father. Further, though under analysis the mediation falls into two phases, and the sacred book mediates God at a second remove, the transition nevertheless is so direct as to be almost unnoticeable. Just as the outward being of Jesus is transparent to his interior, so his interior can be said to be transparent to God. Let us delay a little on the mediation a book exercises. Materially, a book is a quantity of pulp pressed into thin sheets that are covered with inkmarks and clipped together. But the material is not the fundamental reality. The latter is constituted by meaning. This meaning is directly the expression of certain men and women. It is the overflow of their own minds and hearts, the manifestation of their feelings, hopes, devotion, conviction. We have become so used to the miracle of language and the written word that we take this wonder lightly. We readily focus on a book merely in its material reality, as being of such-and-such a size and costing so many dollars. A book is there on the shelves as the rocks are there on the mountainside or the trees are in the forest, part of the naturally given. We have to stop occasionally to remember that a book is actually the construction of human spirit and shares the spiritual being of its creator. The real reality of the book – that which makes it ontǀs on, we might say – is constituted not by pulp and ink but by meaning. Furthermore, the meaning is not just the expression of these men and women, mediating their interiority to us. It is transitive to the object on which their minds and hearts are fixed, the object of their feelings, hopes, devotion, conviction. As Jesus had his mind and heart fixed on God, expressed that orientation in his words and deeds, and thus became a world of meaning pointing to God, transitive to God, so the book that records the experiences of the early Christians and expresses their minds and hearts becomes a world of meaning pointing to Jesus, transitive to Jesus. Have I said anything thus far that was not already more forcefully expressed in the Lutheran view that the scriptures speak to me of Christ and, if they do not speak of Christ, they are but straw? For daily purposes of practical piety, the area in which I agreed our problem might be found unreal, perhaps not. One picks up the sacred book, one reads, one is drawn and edified and consoled. But on the theoretical side, 23 Acts 1:21–22.

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which also has its claims upon us and finds the problem to be real, I believe that the intentionality analysis underlying the position I have outlined may have useful implications and operate efficaciously towards solving the ambiguity and ambivalence inherent in the power of the scriptures. First, to take a very general view, it gives us a set of technical concepts for studying the situation. Since the accent here is on mediation, let me illustrate the advantages of technical concepts by reference to the media of modern communications. A radio or television set can be used by almost anyone, regardless of his or her knowledge of technology, so long as it works and no problems arise. But when it stops working the technician must be called in to ascertain the trouble and make the necessary repairs. In a real sense, we all are receiving sets for the word of God, and by his mercy the sets for the most part function without trouble. But when trouble arises it must be looked on as likewise coming from him, the dispensation of his wisdom and providence. It is his way of telling us that we, who are chosen to hear his word, are expected to ponder his ways and our own being, and to come to learn the operation of the apparatus he has given us. In this sense the technical terms of intentionality analysis may put us in a position to do what Luther’s practical attitude was not called upon to achieve. Second, coming down to details, the analysis we have given brings out the distinction between the mediating and the mediated realities, and it enables us to approach old questions from a new perspective. The book is a mediator or a medium. Are there different media to the one mediated reality? If so, is one indispensable and the others expendable? And in any case, what would their relation to one another be? These are old questions in new form, but the new form may help us to put the emphasis where it belongs, on the mediated rather than on the mediating reality. It may also help us appreciate the role of certain subsidiary mediating realities such as the Holy Land itself, and thus give new meaning to such old pious practices as the pilgrimage. If I may turn again for a moment to autobiography, I have had the experience of arriving at Nazareth, finding it almost impossible to relate to Jesus through the marketplace or even the shrines of the city, but realizing a communion with him that evening as the full moon rose over the eastern hill. The same moon rose for him over the same hill. Though time has passed and the city has changed, the basic geography remains the same; and it mediates the life of Jesus on earth in a way that I find deeply moving.

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Third, mediation, like expression, is a device. Its perfection and efficacy are measured not just by truth or falsity but by adequacy. Thus it may be quite faulty in details – untrue, if you like – but still mediate the true reality. A recording may be scratchy and tinny, a long way from high fidelity, but the piece of music it mediates is still Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The image on the television screen may jerk and waver and be clouded by snow, but it nevertheless mediates this program and not another. Similarly, the novice in the scriptures, quite innocent of the erudition of the scholars, and therefore receiving an inaccurate picture of Jesus and the Christian message, may be perfectly justified in finding the Lord Jesus in this book, and through the Lord Jesus finding God. At one stroke we have accomplished two objectives. Study of the medium, of its grammar, word usage, logic, thought patterns, is put in another perspective and a clearly subordinate role; and deficiencies of the medium lose their importance in the shift of emphasis to the mediated reality. Fourth, the notion of mediation through meaning allows us to approach from another angle the problem of what endures in the word of the scriptures and what, as particular and time-conditioned, is apt to lose its efficacy with the changing times. The key term here is ‘cultural,’ which we find explained as follows: ‘by the “cultural” I would denote the meaning we find in our present way of life, the value we place upon it, or, again, the things we find meaningless, stupid, wicked, horrid, atrocious, disastrous.’24 The cultural may and does change, but the forms it takes develop on an underlying structure in us that remains and is open to this variety. Moreover, the structure in us is paralleled by a world that is constituted in relation to that basic structure. In somewhat greater detail, there is a set of structured operations that occur in certain patterns of experience and with differing qualities of consciousness involved, proceed in different manners toward their goal, and thus constitute different realms of meaning and different worlds. Again, there are diverse heuristic structures within which operations accumulate, there is a contrast between differentiated and undifferentiated consciousness, and there are other differences according to the diverse conversions one has or has not undergone, resulting in dialectically opposed positions on knowing, objectivity, the real, and the worthwhile.25 This is a technical way, with all the complexity of the 24 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Belief: Today’s Issue,’ in A Second Collection 87–99, at 91. 25 Method in Theology 286–87.

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technical, to speak of permanent structure on one side and of the means by which cultural variations occur on the other. In much plainer language we can take two short texts from Matthew. ‘So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own’26; and ‘The demons begged him: “If you cast us out, send us into that herd of swine.’’’27 The first text surely speaks to every age and culture; the second just as surely does not. The technical language of Lonergan’s intentionality analysis would, I think, help in forming a precise view of that difference and accounting for it accurately. Fifth, let us turn to a topic I have avoided up to now: religious subjects and their world of immediacy. We began our analysis by speaking of children and the world of immediacy that is theirs before they learn a language. We spoke as if the world mediated by Jesus, and at another remove by the scriptures, was a further and indeed, infinite extension of those children’s world of immediacy. So it is, but that is not the whole story. For religious subjects’ world of immediacy is not constituted simply by their immediate surroundings; it is constituted interiorly by God’s gift of his love, by the love which floods our hearts through the Holy Spirit who is given to us: Before it enters the world mediated by meaning, religion is the prior word God speaks to us by flooding our hearts with his love. That prior word pertains, not to the world mediated by meaning, but to the world of immediacy, to the unmediated experience of the mystery of love and awe.28

So we have to specify more carefully the sense in which the scriptures and the human presence of Jesus mediate the world of the transcendent to us. The mediation is not between a null point that we are and the infinity that God is. Rather, it is between God and human subjects already in love with God, already experiencing immediately the mystery of love and awe. What does it mean to mediate a world that is already in some sense immediately present to us? The answer seems to be that the divine reality is mediated for imagination, thought, judgment, and decision. The mediation is for the divine reality as objectified, and that is a distinct and necessary step for the sort of beings we are: 26 Matthew 6:34. 27 Matthew 8:31. 28 Method in Theology 112.

292 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Essays By its word, religion enters the world mediated by meaning and regulated by value. It endows that world with its deepest meaning and its highest value. It sets itself in a context of other meanings and other values. Within that context it comes to understand itself, to relate itself to the object of ultimate concern, to draw on the power of ultimate concern to pursue the objectives of proximate concern all the more fairly and all the more efficaciously … One must not conclude that the outward word is something incidental. For it has a constitutive role. When a man and a woman love each other but do not avow their love, they are not yet in love … What holds for the love of a man and a woman, also holds in its own way for the love of God and man.29

In my view this is the most fundamental of the five points I have tried to make regarding the advantages we might derive from seeing the scriptures as mediating Jesus who in turn mediates God. But it is also the most undeveloped to date, and I have to leave it with these rather cryptic indications of its relevance. In these five ways and perhaps in others, the use of intentionality analysis and the concept of mediation by meaning may help us deal with the problem I set up as I began this essay. The scriptures, even when they are badly translated, even when they are read with ignorance of the biblical mentality, may still mediate to us the Lord Jesus and the saving facts of his life, death, and resurrection. There is an extremely important truth that Kierkegaard was trying to get at when he maintained (I write from memory) that all we need know is this: the Son of God entered the world, lived thirty-three years, died, and rose again. There is a global apprehension of Jesus through the scriptures that is quite compatible with egregious mistakes in detail. I would say that it is compatible even with the atrocious and cruel errors of the fanatics. But of course the mistakes of piety and of theologians, and much more those of fanatics, underline the importance of reaching more precise knowledge than that of a global apprehension. They also illuminate our need for the scholarship of those who devote their lives to specialized knowledge of the scriptures. I received the invitation to join in this volume honoring Father Stanley and his scriptural scholarship at a time when I was already committed rather heavily. So I am forced to leave this essay undeveloped. Worse, I 29 Ibid. 112–13.

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have not been able to furnish the bare rooms of my structure with appropriate examples and comment. The basic insight of the essay came to me suddenly one day as I was attending the first Karl Barth Colloquium at Victoria University in Toronto, but the exhilaration of that moment, ‘The first fine careless rapture,’30 has disappeared now under the weight of the conceptual apparatus that is a theologian’s stock-in-trade. But with all its imperfections I hope the essay may foster a little the study and efficacious reading of those scriptures whose message Father Stanley and I, in different ways and with different equipment, have labored together for nearly a quarter of a century to understand and relate to modern problems.

30 From ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad,’ by Robert Browning. (Ed.)

Chapter 19

Some Thoughts on Dreams and the Ignatian Preludes to Prayer1

The religious significance of dreams is an old topic with a solid basis in biblical writings. Recent times have seen a revival of interest in this religious aspect, but it is an interest with a difference: there is now the possibility of using modern psychology to help us interpret even the religious meaning of our dreams.2 Still, the new interest is like the biblical in having a very practical side. The relevance of dreams is extended beyond its theoretical import, and they are put to use in the everyday techniques of the spiritual life: counseling, formation, and the like.3 My own interest at present is precisely in that practical side, and the purpose of this essay is to suggest two simple uses that may be made of the dream in daily prayer. One use is to supply an image for the first Ignatian prelude (the composition of place), and the other use is to lend the support of feeling to the petition we make in the second prelude (the grace we ask for). It is not my intention, therefore, to speak of the religious interpretation of dreams. That would undoubtedly be a profitable further step, but I claim no competence in such interpretation. Hence my interest here is in using dreams rather than in analyzing them. 1 Not previously published. 2 Thus, for example, in Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language (Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1968), John A. Sanford uses Jungian psychology in an extension of the biblical interpretation of dreams. A book contemporary with Sanford’s is Morton T. Kelsey’s Dreams: The Dark Speech of the Spirit: A Christian Interpretation (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968). 3 For example, see John O. Meany, ‘Dreams and the Counseling of Religious,’ Sisters Today 42 (1970–71) 265–68; and ‘The Role of Dreams in Religious Formation Groups,’ Review for Religious 31/1 (1972) 70–75.

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My two uses correspond to two needs we experience in prayer, First, with the passage of time and changes in our ways of thought, some of the old images have lost their efficacy for us. Thus, the Ignatian image of the soul imprisoned in the body, and the whole composite in exile among brute beasts, does not make much of an impact on many of us. This holds also for some of the biblical images: the ‘crisis’ parables were certainly meant by Jesus to convey a sense of the urgency of the moment, but what sense of urgency is conveyed to us today by the story of the ten girls who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom? Secondly, there is the need to integrate our feelings with the full set of psychological activities that carry us toward God. If it was legitimate to distrust feelings at a time when they threatened to undermine doctrine, today there seems no need for such a reactionary stand. Now it is just these two deficiencies that the dream is so well calculated to remedy. As for the relevance of the image, relevance is relevance to me; and nothing is more mine than my dream. It is, in effect, my private parable. And we can say this without any extravagant claims that it is a revelation from God or even a grace from God. Further, we know well enough what strong feelings are aroused by a dream, feelings that carry over into our waking state. They are there to be utilized in prayer, available – even begging – to be integrated into our total psychological state. Let me illustrate with a dream that is rather common among those of my own generation, one that I know has done for some of us what the crisis parables of Jesus did for his audience. We grew up when trains were the way one traveled on important journeys to distant places, and a dream that is fairly common among us runs somewhat as follows. I am packing a bag for a trip; there is a need to hurry, for the train will leave on the hour; I cannot find the socks I am looking for, or the bag will not close properly, or the person who is to drive me to the station is somewhere else, or the road itself changes direction and I have to look for the right one. Image replaces image in the illogical sequence that typifies dreams, but there is a vital factor that pervades the whole dream and is especially pertinent to the purpose of this essay. It is the need I feel, the sense of urgency to catch that train, to avoid missing out on what I vaguely know to be a great opportunity. Hence the sense of impending loss when I cannot get my bag packed, when my driver fails to arrive, when I lose the way, and so forth. Let me repeat that I am not giving a religious interpretation to the dream. It does indeed seem to me that religious persons who have

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meditated on the last things, who have taken the crisis parables to heart and tried to apply them to life, will be likely to give expression to that message in their dreams by way of images that make it personally vivid and meaningful. In other words, the dream probably does have a religious meaning. But my present point is independent of such a view. It is simply that one can, as it were, lift the image and its accompanying affect out of the dream and use them in prayer, much as one can lift an image out of daily life and use it in a homily. Just as Jesus did this without evaluating or interpreting the conduct of the person whose actions were described, but simply using it for purposes of illustration, so we can use the dream – image and affect – without interpretation. If this much be granted, then the application to Ignatian meditation is relatively simple. The first prelude for Ignatius was the composition of place, the forming of a spatial framework within which the action moves. This is supplied ready-made in the dream. In the example I have given, the first prelude would consist of recalling the room where I was packing, orienting it with respect to the railway station, imagining the road from my house to the station, and so on. The second prelude requires a little more thought, but I believe it is here that the dream may have its most powerful impact. This prelude consists in asking for the grace that I desire, and it is extremely important to the course of the subsequent meditation that I know what I want and that I really want it, with a felt sense of my need. Feelings can become a very powerful instrument here, and the point of using the dream-material is precisely that we often wake up with feelings already aroused, sometimes very deeply aroused, by the dream. In other words, the feelings are ready to be taken over and used, just as the image was ready to be taken over and used in the first prelude. In the present example, the second prelude would consist of asking for one of the graces linked with getting ready, watching always, being prepared. Finally, the subsequent course of the meditation could follow the well-trodden paths, the familiar ‘points’ of meditation, based on scriptural accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds, on the reflections of wisdom, and related themes. I believe that this idea may recommend itself by the simple twofold fact of experience that I have noted. On the one hand, the common experience of finding that the traditional images make little impact when we use them in the preludes. On the other, the experience of waking from dreams with not only a very vivid image in our minds but also a very powerful movement orienting our emotions: our heart may be

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pounding, we may have a sense of loss or desolation, we may have glimpsed some extraordinary possibility and still be excited by that glimpse, we may be utterly afraid, we may be moved by the futility of life as we are presently leading it, or any of countless images linked with intense feelings. These feelings are a force that needs only to be directed, a waterfall that needs only to be harnessed. More abstractly, they are consciously oriented in the dream towards an object that is only vaguely conceived; and in prayer this object can be specified religiously without losing the impact of the feelings. Let me illustrate the idea with six brief examples. All of them are more appropriate for the early stages of the Ignatian Exercises (the ‘Principle and Foundation’ and the ‘First Week’), but for purposes of illustration that is no drawback. In fact, there is an advantage in beginning there where most of us feel at home; and perhaps I may invite those who find the idea helpful to take it up and illustrate it in other areas of prayer. Further, I will not bother to specify the first prelude that would correspond to the dream, since it will be sufficiently obvious. I will merely suggest a possible second prelude and indicate how material might be found in scripture or elsewhere for the subsequent period of prayer. Nor will I take time here to look up and list specific texts for meditation. That would be a useful additional step; but if readers find my basic suggestion to be sufficiently promising, they can easily take that additional step on their own. In my first example, I dream that I am asleep with my room in darkness. Suddenly I awake (in my dream) to become aware that the door of my room is half open. There is a sensation of fear: Who is there? Does he intend to do me harm? The second prelude will utilize that sense of fear with which I awoke (and in this recurring dream I have in fact generally awakened), to ask for graces related to fear of the Lord. The material for subsequent meditation might be found in scriptural passages on the divine Judge, in reflections on the omnipresence of God, and in similar texts. My second example: I am playing bridge and pick up an extraordinarily good hand, but I carelessly open the bidding with one spade. There are passes all around, and I realize with deep disappointment that I missed a game and possibly a slam through my careless opening bid. I say ‘Can we bid again? I wasn’t thinking.’ The answer is ‘No, sorry, you had your chance.’ Bridge players will appreciate the frustration one feels at missing such an opportunity. One can utilize that frustration in the second prelude to ask for graces linked with seizing the

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kairos of the moment. Matter for meditation may then be found in scriptural texts such as those highlighting the one life I have to lead or the one opportunity presented by each moment. In the third example, I am boating on a river. I come to the brink of a very high falls but go sailing out into space without any fear. I land on a low hedge beside the river below, crawl out of the boat onto a low wall, and cling to it in desperation even though the drop to safe ground is only about three feet. The second prelude might have to do with recognizing real dangers and not being frightened by what is no danger at all. Pertinent material for meditation might be such texts as the one about straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel. The fourth example: the phone rings in my dream and I awake with a start. As in the first example I offered, I do in fact wake up in this recurring dream, with my heart pounding at the unexpected summons. The second prelude and the material for meditation could be much the same as those in that first example. In my fifth example, I am saying Mass. I become confused near the end. I cannot find the chalice. I ask ‘Did I put in the offertory?’ I go back and start the Mass over again from there. But everything goes wrong: the wine and water cruets get mixed up, and so forth. The second prelude might ask for some grace linked with putting right the orientation of my life, the offering of myself to God in God’s service. For meditation material there are many scriptural texts on the importance of a right intention. Sixth example: There is a scene of destruction and excavation. On the horizon, huge trees lie on their side, their roots jutting fantastically into the sky. The mood is one of desolation. The second prelude might have to do with humility, the possibility of a fall from grace, and similar themes. Scripture supplies material for meditation on the passing of great persons or great institutions: How have the mighty fallen? These few examples will surely suffice for illustration. I hope it is quite clear that I am not offering material to others for their meditations. The point of this essay is that the dream is private, made to order, cut to one’s personal measure. That applies in a special way to the affects associated with the images in the dream. The images themselves can be described; and if the description is vivid enough, they can be transferred from one person’s imagination to another’s. But the affects are intensely private and personal, and they cannot be so transferred. The fear, the desolation, the sense of great opportunities to be seized or missed, the futility, the guilt – none of these can be readily conveyed to

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others so that they become their feelings. Neither can the sensations, which are sometimes so clear and startling that we can hardly believe they have no real object – for example, the sense that the phone has rung. But to hear a description of a scene and form an image of it, without being able to share fully the feelings of the observer, is a little like being an uncharged battery with the task of starting a car. In other words, in order to utilize the built-in power of dreams, one must rely on those that are one’s own. I offer this idea, then, in the hope that others may find it as useful as I have found it in morning prayer. But I am conscious of a certain need for direction in its application, and so I hope also that those with some expertise in spiritual guidance will take up and develop my suggestion. Let me conclude with some of the cautions that have occurred to me in the course of the years. One is that we are apt to move in a rather narrow range when we use material from our own dreams to determine our topic of prayer. For that reason, the method might be found profitable for a limited period of some weeks, with a return to more ‘public’ topics of prayer afterwards. I could imagine also that some would make an allegory of the dream, supplying each detail with its specific appropriate meaning; but it strikes me as more profitable to neglect the details and attend to the main thrust found in the dream-affect – that is, to treat the dream as a parable rather than an allegory. Again, one could spend exaggerated amounts of time trying to find appropriate scriptural material to go with the dream, or deciding between optional directions the preludes might take, or even choosing between different dreams that may have occurred during the night. Then there is the question of preparation on the preceding evening for morning prayer, and whether and how this may be modified when I propose to use my dreams but do not know beforehand that an appropriate dream will occur. These are some headings that suggest the need of further consultation on the value of this device. Let me also add that it is not a panacea for the problems of prayer. The general obstacles to any type of interior prayer, the busy-ness of life, effusio ad exteriora, and so on, will interfere with the use of dream material too: the dreams will be shoved aside on waking because we have not the time to think about them a bit, or we will not even bother to try to recall them. Nevertheless, I believe that most people who take the idea seriously and are willing to expend some effort will find that it adds new dynamism to their prayer-life.

Chapter 20

Rethinking the Religious State1

The centenary of Aeterni Patris came and went a few years ago, providing an occasion for reflecting very seriously on the present situation of Catholic thought, and in particular on the perennial problem of relating tradition and innovation. In this encyclical on Thomas Aquinas, Pope Leo XIII had sketched a generic solution to the problem when he coined the phrase ‘vetera novis augere et perficere.’2 To augment and complete the old by adding the new – that is a phrase which of course echoes the gospel passage on the householder who knew how to bring out of the house’s stores things new and old. It was also destined to acquire a life of its own. It may be that Leo himself was less enthusiastic about the new than he was about the old, but what is certain is that in its new life the phrase became a kind of motto for those who wished to come to terms with modernity without wholesale rejection of their past. That purpose of integrating new things with old remains the basic orientation of the present essay, but my specific purpose is exploration of the new. The exploration will be limited, but the context is general and requires a word of explanation. No one, I suppose, could anticipate back in 1879 the extent of the nova, the new things, that the twentieth century would bring. Not everyone today realizes how radical the nova now are. Many would regard the new developments in a somewhat quantitative way: for example, we had arts and sciences before, but now we have several new forms of each, as well as much more data on the old forms. On this 1 Previously published as ‘Rethinking the Religious State: Categories from Lonergan,’ Science et esprit 40/1 (1988) 75–90. 2 Pope Leo XIII, ‘Aeterni Patris,’ in Acta Sanctae Sedis 12 (1879) 111.

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view, the new would be regarded as added springs or tributaries flowing into a main stream that continues to follow its usual course. The level runs higher, so wharves must be raised and the span of bridges extended; but otherwise things are the same. Others, however, find this view of things quite inadequate. Using the same metaphor, they would say that the new age has not just increased the volume of the stream; rather, it has restructured the whole watershed. More literally put, we are dealing not just with a few new ideas and concepts but with a whole new approach and way of thinking. It may take years for the church to reach a consensus on this question, but in the meantime we have to act according to the light we enjoy. That involves, for those of us who take the second view of the situation, a rethinking of all our Catholic realities. The stress here is on the word ‘rethinking.’ There are revolutions in realities, as when a people rises up, overturns its previous government, and installs a new form. But there also are revolutions in thought, revolutions that do not involve an immediate change in the reality that is rethought. When Thomas Aquinas rethought the whole Catholic thing in the thirteenth century, he did not introduce a new God, or any new persons in God, or any new graces or sacraments in the church. But he did introduce a profoundly new way of thinking about those realities. Naturally such a transformation in our thinking will affect in some degree those realities that are subject to our control, but the extent of the real changes that may be involved would have to be determined in each case; they would not follow automatically nor could they be settled a priori. A useful paradigm here is provided by the various transpositions of christological dogma over the centuries. The early church in Palestine thought of Jesus as the biblical Son of Man coming in the clouds to the Ancient of Days. This was transposed in the world of Paul into the Lord who has primacy over all created things, the one in whom all things are held together.3 This in turn was transposed into the Nicene Son who is consubstantial with the Father, which can be transposed again (via Athanasius) into the statement that the Son is God in the same sense as the Father is God. None of this changes one iota of the Son’s eternal reality, or even of his earthly work so far as that was completed in his years in Palestine, though it may and I suppose should affect our relation to the eternal Son and to his earthly mission. 3 Colossians 1:15–17.

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I have begun my essay with these general matters because the topic I wish to discuss is but a particular instance of a general revolution in our whole way of thinking. This change is far more radical than even that represented by Thomas Aquinas seven centuries ago. Hence I must not only introduce my essay but also set it in the context of a whole series of ventures in rethinking that the times require, a series that I hope to return to in subsequent studies of particular questions. The extent of the revolution may be judged by comparing the Middle Ages with that axial period several centuries before Christ that is described by Karl Jaspers.4 The Middle Ages are said to be part of a renaissance, a rebirth, a new life for an old learning. But the axial period was not so much a rebirth as it was a first birth, the coming to life of something not found before on the human scene. Now, there is reason to believe that our present times correspond rather to the axial period than to the medieval period. At least Jaspers himself has more than hinted at this view in his remark ‘For more than a hundred years it has been gradually realized that the history of scores of centuries is drawing to a close.’5 In the light of that remark we might surmise that whereas Thomas Aquinas related the gospel to the long-established culture of the axial period, our modern problem is to relate it to the emerging culture of the twenty-first century – an enormous task that would require a volume even to sketch but must at least be hinted at in this introduction to what is a small contribution to the larger enterprise. At any rate it is in that context that I will set the following essay on rethinking the religious state. If all things are being thought through again in a radical way, then the religious state too comes up for scrutiny. The rethinking must be radical, surely as radical as that effected seven centuries ago by Aquinas, and if Jaspers is right even more radical than that. As long as the modern age was merely adding physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, to our heritage, and developing a corresponding technology, any rethinking of religious life could be a patchy affair. Active orders would have to train teachers in the new fields, and perhaps there would be some change in the life-style even of contemplatives (typewriters instead of quills); but the idea of religious life would not change either in its basics or in the immediate derivatives from the

4 See Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953). 5 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy and the World: Selected Essays and Lectures, trans. E.B. Ashton (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1963) 22.

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basics. However, if we believe that our century is bringing in a whole new way of thinking, then we would be shirking our responsibility if we did not try to rethink the religious state ab ovo and throughout. Readers may be aware of the vast literature already extant on this question. I beg to be excused from taking account of it here. My own field is the thought of Bernard Lonergan, which is difficult enough in itself to require all my energy for exposition and all the space the editor will allow me for publication. Later there may be time and occasion for comparative study, but for the present I propose simply to concentrate on two key areas for rethinking and apply to them categories I derive from Lonergan. I will use his notion of differentiations of consciousness to conceive the basic idea of religious life, and his notion of merging horizons to illuminate the problem of religious who are active in the world’s business. How basic his categories will prove to be I leave to history to determine. If the history of scores of centuries is indeed drawing to a close, the new world will not emerge overnight, nor will basic categories be established in a single essay on a particular topic. 1 The New Context: Religious Consciousness In the Leonine formula of nova and vetera, the vetera were represented largely by Thomas Aquinas. We have by no means mined all the riches of Aquinas, and certainly not the wealth of his writing on the religious state; but it is possible to characterize his basic approach and set it in contrast to that of the twentieth century. The transition is in general from objects to subjects, from grades of being to differentiations of consciousness, from terms of operations to the operations themselves, from metaphysics to intentionality analysis, and so on. That is, when Aquinas thought of what we would call the subject, he did so mostly in metaphysical categories that had found their first application in the object. His terms were matter and form, potencies, habits and acts, efficient and final causes, and the like. In particular, potencies were specified by their acts, and acts by their formal objects, so that the focus throughout was on the object. I see no reason to deny the validity of any of the various elements in all this, and I realize there is a great deal of Thomist psychology still to be exploited. Nevertheless, the focus has shifted since the Middle Ages from metaphysics to the data of consciousness and to categories derived from these data and from the subjective side of intentionality. Perhaps it will help eliminate useless controversy to add that this does not mean any isolation of subject from object, any

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more than the Thomist object was isolated from the subject. It is the direction of the relation that has changed: a rough approximation would be that for Thomas there was a world to be apprehended by a subject; for us there is a subject to be studied along with his or her world. Our application of this to the religious state begins with the virtue of religion, which is what Thomas employed as a basis for his categories on the religious state. Religion for him is the virtue that orients us to God.6 As habits and virtues in general are distinguished according to the diverse aspects of the object, so also is the virtue of religion, which has as its object the exhibiting of reverence to God as to the first principle and governor of creation.7 Our task then will be to rethink this in  twentieth-century terms, for which I propose as our core concept Lonergan’s differentiations of consciousness. There is differentiation of consciousness when we turn our critical attention to interiority, appropriate the self we find there with its various interests and concerns, distinguish the several realms of interest and concern that may develop in consciousness along with their appropriate procedures, and on that basis both relate the realms to one another and deliberately shift from realm to realm by a conscious change of procedures.8 The whole process can be easily related on the objective side to the Thomist formal object, but the point is that the focus is not on that side: rather, it is on the side of the subject. Of course the subject exists in interrelation with other subjects and forms a community with those who enjoy the same differentiation of consciousness, with a common language and a distinct mode of apprehension. The scientific differentiation may be taken to exemplify the way such communities are formed and function: A different, technical language is needed to speak of the scientist’s world. Only a new and distinct social group masters that language. Specialist journals report to the initiated new advances and discoveries. Specialist books are written to set forth their achievements and their aims. Specialist methods are developed to reach their distinctive goals, and specialist criteria are employed to test their success.9

6 7 8 9

Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2-2, q. 81, a. 1. Ibid. a. 3. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 84. Bernard Lonergan, ‘Aquinas Today: Tradition and Innovation,’ in A Third Collection 35–54, at 40.

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Similar descriptions might be provided for the artistic, the scholarly, and the other differentiations; but perhaps better than any technical description is the simple narrative of an experience like the following. During the composition of these pages I had been working at my typewriter in the daytime and reading War and Peace in the evening. One evening I turned from Tolstoy to a modern Whodunit, and I found that a conscious effort was needed to shift from the Russian world of 1812 to that of a murder mystery in a modern city of the west. The subject forms such a unity with his or her world that one must change with the other. In my example it was a change of mood that was required, but in more basic matters there is a new language, a new way of proceeding, a whole new approach. A similar ploy may be helpful now as we turn to the concept of religiously differentiated consciousness. Lonergan gives us here and there a technical description, but I suggest that the simplest way by far to grasp this differentiation is another experience, not this time one that I narrate but one that the reader may recall or undergo without trouble: to dip into the psalms and immerse oneself in the psalmist’s pattern of thinking. No doubt it is possible here too to speak of potencies and formal objects; but more important for the present approach is the kind of image the psalmist-subject calls to mind, the range of feelings associated with those images, the religious procedures through which the feelings are expressed, the whole self-revelation that we find set forth in the psalms and that gives meaning to the psalmist’s religious world. With that in mind we can turn to Lonergan’s description and analysis of religiously differentiated consciousness. The key element in the subject now is love, but a love of a special kind, one without any reservations or qualifications whatever. Human lovers tend, of course, to declare their love for one another in similar terms, but the religious person can only regard this as latent idolatry. The love that is truly without reservations is oriented positively to what is transcendent in lovableness, surrenders completely to that lovableness,10 makes it the ruling force in life and all its activities, and transforms all our previous values and meanings. Here is a classic description of the effect of such falling in love: [B]eing in love with God is the basic fulfilment of our conscious intentionality. That fulfilment brings a deep-set joy that can remain despite 10 Method in Theology 105, 240–41, 278.

306 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Essays humiliation, failure, privation, pain, betrayal, desertion. That fulfilment brings a radical peace, the peace that the world cannot give. That fulfilment bears fruit in a love of one’s neighbor that strives mightily to bring about the kingdom of God on this earth. On the other hand, the absence of that fulfilment opens the way to the trivialization of human life in the pursuit of fun, to the harshness of human life arising from the ruthless exercise of power, to despair about human welfare springing from the conviction that the universe is absurd.11

Such are the everyday effects of having a religiously differentiated consciousness. If we try now to go behind the effects to the experience and reality, we find such elements as these. There is an experience of mystery, of a mystery that ‘is not merely attractive, but fascinating,’12 evoking our awe, an experience that ‘remains within subjectivity as a vector, an undertow, a fateful call to a dreaded holiness.’13 Behind the everyday effects there is a conversion that is cataclysmic: the horizon in which our knowing and our choosing went on is dismantled and abolished, and there is set up ‘a new horizon in which the love of God will transvalue our values and the eyes of that love will transform our knowing.’14 There are stages in this transformation, however, notably those we call the ascetic and the mystical. The latter seemed to have a special interest for Lonergan. Here the love of God sets up ‘a different type of consciousness by withdrawing one from the world mediated by meaning into a cloud of unknowing. Then one is for God, belongs to him, gives oneself to him, not by using words, images, concepts, but in a silent, joyous, peaceful surrender to his initiative.’15 If Lonergan has explained what differentiations of consciousness are and what religious form they may take, he did not, so far as I know, apply all this to the state of life that we call ‘religious.’ That application will be a matter of transposing once again from the Thomist world to ours of the twentieth century. For Thomas religion as a state of life in the church came under the general heading of religion as a virtue, but

11 12 13 14 15

Ibid. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 106 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Unity and Plurality: The Coherence of Christian Truth,’ in A Third Collection 239–50, at 242.

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obviously he had to add the specific difference, and this he found in the concept of totality. All those who worship God can be called ‘religious,’ but the word is used in a special way of those who dedicate their life totally to religion, withdrawing for that purpose from worldly pursuits.16 On this basis, and relying heavily on the end-means structure he derived from Aristotle, Thomas explained the traditional vows of the religious state. The chief point in the Thomist argument is that the religious state is an exercise moving one to the perfection of love – the end – with the counsels and vows functioning as means to effect withdrawal of the affections from what would be an obstacle to perfect love.17 Can we transpose this concept of totality from the Thomist world to that of Lonergan’s subject? For a start we might recall points already made: ‘fulfilment’ of conscious intentionality through being in love; love as a first principle that dominates one’s living and enables one to endure all adversity; and the resulting transvaluation of our values and transformation of our meanings. This surely pertains to the totality in question, and it begins the transfer of totality to interiority; but I believe we can sharpen the idea by recourse to an analogous ‘totality’ that we see in the absorption of scientists in their pursuits. Lonergan has a vivid and powerful description of the way inquiry can totally dominate the consciousness of a scientist: [T]he fact of inquiry is beyond all doubt. It can absorb a man. It can keep him for hours, day after day, year after year, in the narrow prison of his study or his laboratory. It can send him on dangerous voyages of exploration. It can withdraw him from other interests, other pursuits, other pleasures, other achievements. It can fill his waking thoughts, hide from him the world of ordinary affairs, invade the very fabric of his dreams. It can demand endless sacrifices that are made without regret though there is only the hope, never a certain promise, of success.18

I am sure this description of ‘totality’ in the scientific consciousness could be matched by accounts of artists and scholars, with their similar absorption in their pursuits according to their respective differentiations of consciousness; but the single example from the scientific world will serve as a clear view of what totality can mean within 16 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2-2, q. 81, a. 1 ad 5m. See ibid. q. 181, a. 1. 17 Ibid. q. 186, a. 2 and passim. 18 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 28–29.

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consciousness. So perhaps we may return now with new understanding to the religious absorption I mentioned earlier, where the love of God sets up ‘a different type of consciousness by withdrawing one from the world mediated by meaning into a cloud of unknowing. Then one is for God, belongs to him, gives oneself to him, not by using words, images, concepts, but in a silent, joyous, peaceful surrender to his initiative.’19 Along such lines, I believe, religious might rethink their religious state and give it a meaning in our time that would parallel the meaning it had in the Middle Ages for people such as Thomas Aquinas. I repeat: this rethinking neither invalidates the work of Thomas nor automatically transforms the outward style and institutional embodiment that total religious dedication should assume. I am not therefore rewriting the vows or remodeling traditional forms of religious life: I am simply investigating the idea of that life in order to discover its basis in interiority. But interiority requires expression, and so the comprehensive phrase remains: ‘the subject and his or her world.’ However, there is a very basic institutional division between contemplative forms of expressing the religious idea and active forms. Both, but especially the latter, can be rethought in terms derived from Lonergan. 2 Contemplative versus Active: Single versus Merged Horizons We are rethinking the religious state in terms derived from Lonergan’s work, and I have suggested a way of grounding the whole idea of the religious state in terms of differentiated consciousness, beginning then with interiority. A further step is to ask how the present approach applies to the various ways in which religiously differentiated consciousness finds expression in this human world. The immediately observable expression has traditionally been found in the religious vows, which are more or less the common mark of the religious state. My present concern, however, is with the division between the contemplative and the active forms of the religious state, a differentiation especially in need of elucidation today, and one that, I feel, is brilliantly illuminated by the use of Lonergan’s categories. The pure contemplatives are the pure expression of the totality that is the distinctive trait of the religiously differentiated consciousness. In them totality of expression approaches the limit of perfect coincidence 19 ‘Unity and Plurality,’ in A Third Collection 242.

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with the totality of interior dedication. It was to give total expression to the totality of their dedication that the early hermits went into the desert, and even today a cloistered monk like Thomas Merton could be attracted to the still greater solitude in his hermitage. In a culture from which God is so notably excluded and the theological virtues replaced by humanitarian activity, religious people are apt to blur the distinction between God and world, between the supernatural and the natural, and to develop a religious form of activism along with a social gospel to give it a Christian foundation. They will tend then to criticize the ways of cloistered religious as a deviation from the social message of the gospel, and a copout from the responsibility for our neighbor that the gospel imposes on us all. Leaving aside the more fundamental aspects of the question and the general problematic of God and world, one must wonder whether this criticism does not smack of an imperialism that we all ought to repudiate. Would it not have God call everyone in the same way, inhibiting the divine freedom and reducing the rich diversity of the gifts of the Spirit? The pure contemplative life, I would prefer to say, is a higher activism – one that we need today more than ever, as a sign of the total dedication that is basic to the religious. Thus, where some theologians have divided the states of life into religious and secular, and argued about their relative merits, I believe a case could be made for first distinguishing between contemplative and active states, and then subdistinguishing both according to the religious or secular state that is chosen. Thus contemplatives, be they ‘religious’ or ‘secular,’ would be united in a deeper unity; and their state, so far as it is visible, would be an unambiguous sign of the totality toward which the religious consciousness directs us all. Those in the active life, though they be divided into ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ states, would be similarly united in the deeper unity of those who engage in the world’s business; and their state of life, as such, remains an ambiguous sign of their dedication. The question of relative merits we could leave, as one of my professors used to say, for a rainy day. In any case, I believe that it is in the light of the pure contemplative, and only in that light, that we can understand the active form of religious life. Of course it is impossible for anyone to withdraw entirely from the ‘world,’ for there must be title deeds to property and all manner of nuisances like that: even Merton had a quite practical sense of the  way his hermitage would relate to the mother monastery. But among contemplatives such matters are limited as much as possible,

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and measured by the material necessities for survival that obtain in the contemplative life as in other forms. Not so in the active orders, among those engaged as teachers, nurses, social workers, missionary preachers, university presidents, and so forth. Their choice of state is based not on material necessity but on their particular call; and if our basic idea has any validity in rethinking the religious state, we have to find it applicable to their active life as well. Here I would introduce an idea of far-ranging application, one that Lonergan borrowed from Gadamer, one that he applied briefly here and there in his own work, but one that needs far more thorough study than is possible in this essay. It is the idea of merging horizons, which I will briefly set forth now and apply to the active form of religious life. The general concept of horizon is implicit in notions already discussed, for differentiations of consciousness involve different horizons bounding one’s interests and concerns. In the literal sense, a horizon ‘is the limit of one’s field of vision,’ and so ‘for different standpoints, there are different horizons.’20 The same is true when we turn from geography to the scope of our knowledge and the range of our interests: they too have boundaries, which vary with the times, with our social background and milieu, with our education and personal development. These differences Lonergan classified as complementary, or genetic, or dialectical, and named them ‘differences in horizon.’21 I suppose that the differentiations of consciousness of which he most often speaks – the artistic, the theoretic, and the scholarly – would usually be complementary differences in horizons, with a mixture at times of the genetic, and aberrations that might become dialectical differences. What then is the merging of horizons that I find relevant to the present question? The phrase itself occurs in the title of a paper Lonergan gave at the University of Toronto in 1970, and that paper happens to be our best, if sketchy, source for the idea. The full title is ‘Merging Horizons: System, Common Sense, Scholarship.’22 Though there is reference to merging of systematic consciousness with that of both common sense and scholarship, the merging most fully set forth is that which occurs within scholarship itself. ‘For the scholar, as it were, lives in two worlds, possesses two horizons.’ Scholars, that is, have their own immediate

20 Method in Theology 235. 21 Ibid. 236. 22 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Merging Horizons: System, Common Sense, Scholarship,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 49–69.

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environment in which they live in their own times with their own occupations, but they also move out of this ‘to enter the milieu and to understand the ways of thinking, speaking, acting of another real or fictitious place and time.’23 The way they move into that other horizon is important. They do not commit the anachronism of reading contemporary common sense into the past; neither do they commit the archaism of employing an ancient common sense in contemporary speech and action. Rather there is a merging of two horizons: It is a matter of retaining the common sense that guides one’s own speaking and acting and that interprets the words and deeds of other people in one’s milieu, and nonetheless acquiring the ability to interpret the words and deeds of other people, real or fictitious, of another, often remote place and time.24

Two further illustrations of such merging may be helpful. There is a merging of commonsense and scientific understanding in the technician, and there is a merging of scholarly and scientific understanding when one applies modern economics to the understanding of ancient empires.25 This is the idea I wish now to apply to the problem of the active religious congregations. Their difficulty is generically the same as that of the hyphenated priest. After World War II, in a France that had become a missionary country, priests were taking jobs in field and factory in order to make contact with their alienated flocks. Someone coined the phrase ‘worker-priest,’ and this quickly became generalized as ‘the hyphenated priest’ to indicate those priests who worked in other fields – social, academic, professional, whatever – in other fields than that for which their ordination directly marked them. Now this is almost exactly the problem that we are dealing with in members of an active religious institute or congregation, and my suggestion is that we invoke the concept of merging horizons to help them understand their situation and thereby control and manage it. Here there would be a religiously differentiated consciousness merging with another in a way analogous to that of the technician who combines science with practice, the medical doctor who combines knowledge of medicine with diagnostic exercise, and so on. 23 Ibid. 53. 24 Ibid. 53–54. 25 Ibid.

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Very helpful here is Lonergan’s discussion of the mystical state and its merging with daily life. For example, he would first distinguish in Thomas Aquinas the theoretic stage in which Thomas was immersed in his theology, then the stage of conflict when his mystical experience interfered with his theology (which now seemed only straw to him), and a third (hypothetical) stage that Lonergan suggests might have been realized in Thomas if he had lived longer.26 In this third stage Thomas, like Teresa of Avila, would have achieved the unitary exercise of his work and his mystical life. This would have been the complete merging of two horizons, and it is something analogous to this that I suggest to active religious as the solution to the problem of unifying the totality of their dedication to God with immersion in the work of this world. Of course my suggestion functions only as a heuristic notion in Lonergan’s sense of that term: the working out of the notion in determinate form remains a further task. 3 On Becoming a Subject: Enter Kierkegaard This essay is only a beginning of that rethinking of the religious state which it seems to me our times require, and only a beginning of that tapping of resources which I think Lonergan’s work provides. For one more example of such exploiting of his ideas, I would mention his ‘brands of common sense’27 as a category for understanding the diversification of religious orders under the unifying umbrella of ‘active religious.’ For a further example I would mention his dialectic of progress and decline for understanding the history of an individual religious life, even the history of an order or congregation.28 But there is a quite different dimension to be remembered in all such discussion, and I wish to conclude my present reflections by at least adverting to it: the personal existential concern of the religious. From the viewpoint of content, I have tried to make my essay an academic study. In this regard it might be classed with a mathematics paper on the square root of minus one. Even if my essay focused on the subject, it necessarily made an object of the subject in order to discuss the subjective. But I am a subject before discussing my subjectivity and making

26 See ‘Unity and Plurality,’ in A Third Collection 242. 27 Method in Theology 276, 303. See Insight, chapters 7–8. 28 See Method in Theology, chapter 10, 235–66; general structure of progress and decline, 52–55; dialectic of religious development, 110–12.

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myself an object, and so are all of my readers. Moreover, it happens that I am a subject who is also a religious, as perhaps are some of my readers. I cannot discuss these academic questions without the occurrence in my consciousness of related personal and existential questions, and then I must ask myself whether the latter should be excluded from such an essay as the present one. Notice that this is not the question I set aside at the beginning of the essay, the question of feedback from rethinking a reality to the modification of the reality itself insofar as it is subject to our control. The latter is, or at least can be, an entirely objective question; whereas the present question is a matter, as Kierkegaard would put it, of becoming subjective.29 Hence my subtitle for this final section: ‘Enter Kierkegaard.’ We are dealing with questions of personal authenticity, questions that arise for the religious and must be faced personally. But is the fully existential question a topic for discussion in the pages of a theology journal? If Lonergan’s notion of dialectic has any validity at all, it must be discussed sometime, somewhere, somehow; for, as he says in one of his most quoted phrases, ‘objectivity is simply the consequence of authentic subjectivity.’30 When, where, how, I will not try to determine; but I would like to open the door to such discussion and to face, though at one remove, the fears and problems one must expect to encounter. If I may use a simile from parachuting, I suppose it is one thing to sit at one’s desk writing an essay on that exercise, it is another to be falling in space and pulling the cord that I hope will save me, and it is a third – between the first two – to be shivering at the open exit of the airplane before the jump. I am here in that intermediate position. The fears are many and the problems various. There is the fear of laying myself naked and open to the eyes of my readers, for my commitment is to total surrender to God and I am aware of my infidelity to that commitment. At the same time, I know there is no greater force in the spiritual struggle than the autobiographies of the converted: from Augustine to Emilie Griffin they continue to challenge and inspire us. We can go part way in a communal discernment of the sin-history and grace-history of my order, but only part way. The

29 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press; paperback edition, 1968) part 2, chapter 1: ‘The Task of Becoming Subjective.’ 30 Method in Theology 265. See also 292: ‘Genuine objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.’

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evangelical profession of sinfulness is one thing, but the sacramental confession of sins according to species and number is quite another. There are problems too: for example, the problem of our partners in dialogue. If we have to reform our lives and perhaps remodel our state of life and must finally perform this task within the family of those who have recognized and continue to recognize a value not perceived or accepted by others, it remains that we must do so in openness to public critique. This is especially difficult in regard to those who have left us – and perhaps very quickly developed a theology to justify their new choice. Then the temptation is strong to engage in polemics. The temptation must be resisted. Or perhaps we should say that the adversaries in polemics will be ourselves, as we ask ourselves how much our own theology was constructed to justify our choices. There is also the problem of thinking freely under the eye of authority, a problem rendered more acute for those who, like myself, have a vow of special obedience to the pope. In the long decades of discussion that must ensue before the present revolution reaches its term, we must expect a variety of relationships. If the ideal is a pope who entrusts to us the task of thinking out a new modus vivendi to be proposed then to him for dialogue and discernment, there is almost bound to occur another who will feel threatened by any rethinking at all – and then the Jesuit way of life in the third millennium would have to be rethought vicariously by non-Jesuits. The purpose of this section has been merely to introduce the fully existential dimension of the complex question of being a religious today: there is no need then to prolong the catalogue of fears and problems to be faced in the existential sphere. But it seemed important to advert to that dimension. The objective question of rethinking the religious state may be conceptually separable from that of being a religious, but to remain enclosed in the objective is to leave oneself open to the ironic thrusts of Kierkegaard, a prospect I do not relish. Still, I do not think Kierkegaard had the last word. If Lonergan is right, it is possible to combine objectivity and subjectivity.

Chapter 21

Rethinking Moral Judgments1

This essay continues the ‘rethinking’ series that I began in a previous study.2 In the latter, I sketched the general context of such a project and my general purpose of mining the thought of Bernard Lonergan for categories that might help us in the task. Against that broad background I studied the religious state as a particular instance of an idea and institution that needs to be reconceived in our day. In the present essay I propose to follow the same pattern, writing against a general background that remains largely the same, but taking for study another instance of ideas and institutions that need to be rethought: namely, the judgments that guide moral conduct, and in particular the foundations of those judgments and the process by which the judgments are derived. The background remains largely the same, but there is one important difference. An element in any contextual background is the relation of the rethinking to the reconstitution of the reality being rethought. When the topic is the one God and the three divine persons, only those who are considerably left of center will claim that our rethinking is going to affect the reality. We rethink what we mean by ‘God’ and we rethink what we mean by ‘person’; but whatever the new ideas by which we conceive the three persons and the one God, we do not expect any resulting change in the divine reality. In other areas of theology, that does not hold in the same way or to the same extent. In the area now 1 Previously published as ‘Rethinking Moral Judgments: Categories from Lonergan,’ Science et esprit 40/2 (1988) 137–52. 2 See Frederick E. Crowe, ‘Rethinking the Religious State: Categories from Lonergan,’ Science et esprit 40/1 (1988) 75–90. [Reprinted as chapter 20 of the present volume.]

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under investigation, the situation is especially complex, and it requires clarification before we begin. The problem could be put in three words: ‘Values have dates.’ I take the form of that remark from Lonergan, who once said ‘Concepts have dates.’3 What I am adding is a parallel under one heading between concepts and values. That is, ideas develop; we grow in understanding; and so we conceive, say, fire (a favorite example of Lonergan) in different ways at different stages in the advance of science. But values develop too. We grasp the good life differently as we grow – the child differently from the adult, later generations differently from earlier. We refine our moral apprehensions, and this refinement is more than just cognitional: it is a development on a new level of intentionality. Hence we have to extend the notion of ‘dates’ (history) from concepts to values and the ethical field. Extending notions, of course, must be done with due regard for what is specific to each field; and the move from concepts to values introduces a special complexity into the question. Concepts are or at least may be mere instruments in which we express our changing understanding of what possibly is an unchanging reality. But values are not mere instruments of the mind: they enter intrinsically into the reality that is to be created. Consequently, since ‘rethinking’ in the moral area is linked to the refinement of our values, it regards not only what is but also what may come to be as the result of our refined values and new decisions. Does ‘rethinking’ not then take on a quite different or perhaps entirely new meaning in this context? For we are not dealing with something that is, something that remains fixed while we struggle to conceive it. That would be the case not merely with God, but also (more or less) with so material a being as a wood-fire. Aristotle’s fire would burn our fingers just as our fire would burn his, for what fire is remains fairly constant from Aristotle’s time to ours, even though he conceived his fire as an element and we conceive ours as a form of oxidation. In the field of morality, however, we are not dealing with what is, but with what ought to be done; and thus the situation seems quite different. The situation indeed is quite different, but not totally different. As shown in our study of the religious state, there is the idea of the religious state, and there are the various religious communities with their various ways and means of realizing that idea. So too here, there is the idea of morality, and there are the various ethical codes that differ in 3 Sebastian Moore, ‘For Bernard Lonergan,’ Compass: A Jesuit Journal. Special Issue Honouring Bernard Lonergan 1904–1984 (March 1985) 9.

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some degree from one age to another or even among cultures contemporary with one another. In the present study I will be concerned more directly with the idea of morality, its foundations, and the dynamism by which a code of morality is formulated. It ought to be possible to work with what is, to deal with the invariants of the human condition, and to rethink those invariants in the way the times require, all without entering into the particular questions of conduct that signal a changing reality and require the expert judgment of trained moralists. That sentence defines the limits of my purpose: to remain on the level of foundations and methodology. I will not attempt to formulate a code of ethics, even along general lines; and much less will I take up the detailed questions of conduct with which beleaguered moralists have to deal. That much could undoubtedly be surmised from the statement that I propose to rethink morality in terms deriving from Lonergan. For it is surely clear by now that his contribution is seminal, programmatic, architectonic, instrumental, that of a method, an organon: there are various ways of putting it, but they all agree in saying that he has provided us with categories of utmost generality, that the general categories are fertile agents for rethinking our doctrines, morals, and institutions, but that it is another task to apply them to particular cases. Indeed it is a double task, or a task with two stages of implementation. The first stage is to apply the general categories to the particular fields, as I tried to do earlier for the religious state and am attempting now for moral conduct. But within the particular field there is a further division between foundations and application in detail. If the categories are really of utmost generality, they will apply to all particular cases without exception, but fully concrete application has to be left to the expert. For it is essential to remember that ‘application’ here is not a mechanical measuring, as when one ‘applies’ a yardstick to a length of rope. Instead, it is the exercise of intelligence; intelligence cannot function without data; and mastery of the data requires familiarity with the area under study. Nonetheless, I have tried to understand the viewpoint of the experts, for one must orient one’s contribution in the direction of their problems, if there is to be any contact between the particular and the general, and any fertilization of one by the other.4

4 A main factor in such mutual enrichment is dialogue between the two areas of interest. For this reason I am especially grateful to Bela Somfai, Professor of Moral Theology at Regis College in the Toronto School of Theology, for having read a draft of this article and given me his comments from the side of Catholic moral theology.

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1 The Foundations of Moral Judgments When we speak of rethinking, we must be clear at least on the point of departure while we struggle toward the point of arrival. The point of departure for most Catholic theologians will be Thomas Aquinas; and I repeat here what I already said in the previous essay of this series, that we have not yet exhausted or even come near exhausting the riches of Thomist thought. But the world will not wait for that eventuality, one in any case that may never come to pass. So we must try to delineate the Thomist approach and ask how that approach is to be rethought in our categories, now that seven centuries of history can be brought to bear on the question. Thomas, then, saw morality as a matter of practical judgments formed by intellect and executed by will, where intellect becomes the instrument of will in that execution. As stated, our concern in this essay is focused on the first element, namely, the judgments of moral conduct. These in Thomist thought reduce to principles. If the principles are secondary, they reduce in turn to first principles; and the latter reduce finally to the first of all first principles, the synderesis, which is closely connected with conscience. How did Thomas conceive the synderesis? His further reflections turn to metaphysics rather than to the intentionality analysis that is a modern concern. That is to say, he thought of an essence (determined by the human soul), which unfolds in potencies (faculty psychology), which potencies are actuated in a first act by habits (the virtues and vices) and in a second act by operations. When we come to differentiation of the potencies, the specifying factor (in the sense of specifying our knowledge) is the object: potencies are specified by their operations, and operations are specified by their formal objects. One could round out this simple picture with remarks on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, on the fluidity of the object in moral matters and the role of particularity in relation to universality, on the relation of law and prudence, and so on;5 but the sketch drawn is a rough approximation to the basic Thomist view of morality. The details are extremely

5 See my articles, ‘Universal Norms and the Concrete Operabile in St Thomas Aquinas,’ Sciences ecclésiastiques 7 (1955) 115–49, 257–91, especially the subsection ‘The Retreat of the Operabile from Intelligibility,’ 277–87. [Edited and reprinted in Three Thomist Studies 1–69. The section ‘The Retreat of the Operabile from Intelligibility’ is found on 56–65.]

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well worked out and the Thomist ‘system’ is a worthy partner in dialogue for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I am not sure the same can be said for much modern thought on morality and its foundations. The obsession with logic, with wonderful systems in which endless conclusions are spun out with impeccable propriety from premises that come out of the air, seems to me to lack the realism and the flexibility that characterize the moral reasoning of Thomas, and to be poles apart from the wisdom that is a factor in his synderesis and a fortiori poles apart from the dynamism of incarnate spirit that characterizes his successors. It will be worth our while to spend a moment on this obsession with logic. A focus for study may be found in the tired old ‘is-ought’ controversy, with the state of the question very helpfully set forth in the following pair of quotations: An error exposed by Hume, but still frequently committed, is that of arguing from premises that contain only descriptive terms, and no copula except ‘is,’ to a conclusion that contains an ‘ought’ … arguments of this sort cannot be valid, but they are often made plausible by the ambiguous use of such words as ‘reasonable,’ ‘fitting,’ … and ‘good’ itself, any one of which may be used first in a purely descriptive sense and then interpreted in a sense that is partly descriptive and partly prescriptive.6

This position, already clear enough, may be reinforced by similar views attributed to Sidgwick: Sidgwick … rejected what he took to be the traditional utilitarian attempt to define ethical concepts like ‘good’ and ‘ought’ in terms of nonethical concepts like ‘pleasant’ or ‘conducive to most pleasure’ and in this way to justify the construction of a purely factual, scientific morality. No reduction of ‘ought’ to ‘is,’ of ideal to actual, had yet been successful, he held, although he hesitated to say that no reduction could possibly succeed.7

If I use this pair of quotations to refer to the ‘tired old is-ought’ question, it is not to reject the position taken by the authors, not to challenge their challenge, as it were. Indeed, I would be even more categorical than Sidgwick in affirming that we cannot logically derive ‘ought’ from 6 J.L. Mackie, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 3 (1967), s.v. ‘Fallacies,’ 169–79, at 178. 7 J.B. Schneewind, ibid., vol. 7, s.v. ‘Sidgwick, Henry,’ 434–36, at 435.

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‘is,’ and I see no future in efforts to establish an ‘ought’ by formulating better logical premises or by ejecting gremlins from logical procedures. But without disputing the validity of logic or the legitimacy of its limited role, I reject the tyranny some logicians would impose on cognitional operations. They create an abyss in cognitional process and stand on its edge, calling out that it is too wide to leap across, but overlooking the fact that all the while there is a well-built natural bridge at hand which we have only to use and we are across the awful gap – which is a way of saying there was no gap in the first place. The bridge is the dynamism of incarnate spirit, which we may set forth in quite different quotations, this time from Lonergan. Modern science, he says, derives its distinctive character from [the] grouping together of logical and non-logical operations. The logical tend to consolidate what has been achieved. The non-logical keep all achievement open to further advance. The conjunction of the two results in an open, ongoing, progressive and cumulative process.8

It is the artificial and arbitrary imposition of logical criteria on every cognitional operation that is the straitjacket. Lonergan’s own aim and way, in contrast, is to get out of the abstract and static context dictated by logical clarity, coherence, and rigor and into the concrete, open, and ongoing context dictated by attention, inquiry, reflection, and deliberation.9

Attention, inquiry, reflection, and deliberation – these are the operations that reveal the dynamism of incarnate spirit and provide the ‘bridge’ from ‘is’ to ‘ought.’ This I propose briefly to study. The word ‘is’ expresses a judgment of fact, and the word ‘ought’ expresses a judgment and exigence of conscience based on values apprehended. The expression as immediately encountered is linguistic, but the linguistic expression in its initial and creative moment derives from objectifications in consciousness. Thus far there is no problem for most Thomists. But now we have to take a further step: What is the source of 8 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 6. 9 Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Response of the Jesuit as Priest and Apostle in the Modern World,’ in A Second Collection 165–87, at 170.

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these objectifications of consciousness? Here we are at the heart of Lonergan’s thought. The source of the objectifications is the immanent and recurrently operative dynamism of incarnate spirit. The dynamism is given. If it is not given, as we suppose to be the case with animals in regard to the higher levels of consciousness, then the is-ought question does not arise. But neither does any other question: ‘When an animal has nothing to do it goes to sleep. When a man has nothing to do he may ask questions.’10 Further, the dynamism is given in a structured form. The buzzing of the physical universe results in experience for the sensing subject; experience gives rise to ‘what’ questions and ‘why’ questions in the intelligent subject; answers to ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ give rise in the rational subject to ‘is-it-so’ questions; answers to these give judgments on the world that is; and reflection on the world that is brings to consciousness the world that could be and through my intervention might become, and thus on a fourth level the responsible subject emerges. On this basis the difference between Lonergan’s liberated subject and the repressed subject of the logician can be more clearly determined. The logician tries to move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ in the objectified world of linguistic expression, or at best in the objectified world of formulations in consciousness; but here the most strenuous struggles end in failure. For Lonergan, the move from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ refers to the move on the subjective side from the third level of consciousness to the fourth, and there is no struggle at all – simply the natural unfolding of a structured dynamism. The struggle now, if there is any, would have to be against the natural stream. It would be a struggle not to respond to the emergent ‘ought,’ and if ‘ought’ keeps on rearing its head, to suppress it – which is exactly what happens in the rationalizations of bad conscience. Of course, there is a natural objectification of consciousness here: just as the dynamism on the third level is naturally objectified in the word ‘is,’ so there is a natural objectification of the dynamism on the fourth level in the word ‘ought’ and the resulting responsibility. But the way from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ is not found in the objectification, least of all through the resources of logic; rather, it is found by going back to the subject and the dynamism that is the source of all the objectifications. Now the impasse at which logic arrives in this question not only overlooks the dynamism that is the real force in the move, but it also overlooks the fact that the same dynamism has carried the perplexed 10 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 34.

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subject through three stages already in which logic had nothing directly to do with the move. This, I believe, is illuminating for the is-ought question; so at the risk of seeming pedantic I suggest the following simple reflections on the matter. Take first the difference between starlight falling on a stone and the same starlight falling on my eye and enabling me to see the star. What logic is there that could derive from the light itself, either in star or in ‘light-waves’ in the ‘ether,’ my act of seeing the light? It is not logic but the dynamism of sensitive life that makes the difference between the stone and me. Take next the difference between the starlight falling on the eye of Thales’ dog and the same starlight falling on the eye of Thales. What logic is there that could derive, from the act of seeing starlight, the ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ that perhaps sprang to Thales’ mind, while the mind of his dog (one presumes) was a blank? It is not logic but the dynamism of intelligence, the wonder of Aristotle that is the beginning of all science and all philosophy, the intellectus agens of Aquinas: this is the source of Thales’ ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ Thirdly, take the difference between the child who reads mythical tales about the way Orion got into the skies, and the same child twenty years later, now an astronomer who is not content with a myth about Orion but produces theory after theory to account for this constellation, only to discard them all till one is reached, if ever, that has been submitted to crucial experiment and promoted to the level of truth. What logic is there that could derive an existential judgment (‘existential’ in the Thomist sense) from a mere idea, that could move us from ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ to the affirmation of fact: ‘It is; this is really and truly the case’? Once again, it is not logic but the dynamism of incarnate spirit, operating now on the third level of rational consciousness, that makes the difference between the myth of the child and the judgment of the astronomer. Against the background of these three ‘illogical’ leaps (‘illogical’ in the sense that they all do naturally what logic is not capable of doing at all), the advance from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ falls into perspective as a perfectly normal move of the type that all of us make a hundred times a day. The impotence of logic need not distress anyone. Logic is impotent to move us from inanimate reception to seeing; nevertheless, we see. Logic is impotent to move us from seeing to asking why; nevertheless, we ask why. Logic is impotent to move us from a ‘why’ question and its possible answers to an ‘is’ judgment; nevertheless, we judge that something is. Similarly, logic is impotent to move us from statements of fact to twinges of conscience and responsible decisions; nevertheless,

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conscience works, and we do make responsible decisions. In other words, to return to our metaphor, instead of bemoaning the width of a chasm we cannot leap across, we take the bridge that is there for the taking. Logic is not abandoned in this procedure, but in the total perspective it falls into place with a limited role to play in one subordinate scene in the drama of cognitional process. It is clear by now that I would not only severely limit the role of logic, but in a more radical step I would go behind all objectifications to the dynamism of consciousness from which they derive. This position will find support in my second and third sections, but meanwhile I would assure apprehensive readers that there is no question here of constituting objective reality by subjective acts. My eye does not confer visibility (in the sense of ‘able to be seen’) on the star; my intelligence does not give intelligible form to starlight; my judgment does not make the star exist. Our position is realist throughout. On the fourth level, however, there is the already noted difference: the goal of conscience is not the world that exists, but the world I ought to create. In terms of objects, we are not now dealing with potency-form-act as constituents of what is, though we might say we are dealing with this whole potency-form-act world that is, and considering it as potency to the world that might be. We consider ‘not only the factual but also the possible, the ideal, the ought-to-be for which we keep on striving though we never attain.’11 In this area of the possible, values are created; but that is far from asserting that values are merely subjective. On the contrary, what is possible is linked inexorably to what is, the ideal is the further potential of the real, and the ought-to-be is discoverable in the complex of our world and our relation to it. I find a deep relevance to this view of the human race as the creator of its values in the Prologue Thomas Aquinas wrote to the Prima secundae of his Summa theologiae.12 The first volume of his work had dealt with the exemplar, God, and the creation that proceeded from divine creative power. Now he comes to men and women who are created in 11 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Dimensions of Meaning,’ in Collection (1988) 232–45, at 233. 12 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1-2, Prol: ‘… postquam dictum est de exemplari, scilicet de Deo, et de his quae processerunt ex divina potestate secundum eius voluntatem; restat ut consideremus de eius imagine, idest de homine, secundum quod et ipse est suorum operum principium …’ [‘… now that we have treated the exemplar, namely God, and of those things that come forth by his power in accordance with his will, it remains for us to treat of his image, namely human beings, inasmuch as they too are principles of their actions …’].

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the image of God, and what aspect does Thomas choose to treat? It is men and women as the principle of their own actions, having dominion over their works the way God has dominion over creation. This is a way of saying that the human race is most fully itself on the level of responsible conduct; or, in Lonergan’s terms, it is on this level that the dynamism of human consciousness is fully engaged and operative. 2 Deriving Determinate Ethical Principles The question that has occupied us so far had to do with foundations: What is the ultimate basis of moral judgments and so of moral codes and moral conduct? Lonergan’s specific contribution to the traditional answer, I have argued, lies in the dynamism of human consciousness. But to accept that position leaves unanswered most of the questions that concern ethicists and moral theologians. Can methodology take a further step in the direction of their problems? It seems to me that, without attempting a code of ethics, one can still ask a further general question: What resources lie in human intentionality to take us from the heuristic to the determinate, to move from the operative but indeterminate, merely anticipatory and heuristic stage of the dynamism to determinate moral principles? What is the ‘mechanism’ by which this advance is achieved? A clarification is in order before we begin to answer this question. Some would ask the question in terms of what they call ‘substantive’ precepts. I avoid this term because it seems to imply that the heuristic role of the dynamism of consciousness lacks ‘substance’ and so lacks content. I would agree that it lacks determinate content in the sense of particular precepts such as ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ But I would insist that the dynamism itself can be objectified in the transcendental precepts ‘Be attentive.’ ‘Be intelligent.’ ‘Be reasonable.’ ‘Be responsible.’ Further, even before it is objectified, it is an intentional force, with an intentional content; and that content is strongly cognitional. The transcendental precepts indeed are totally empty of any content that regards external action: they do not command either to kill or not to kill, to steal or not to steal. But they are not empty of content that regards the operations of the subject; on the contrary, they contain the maximum degree of concreteness. There is an analogy here with the concreteness of metaphysics. As metapysics refers to concrete potency, form, and act, though without specifying the form, so the transcendental precepts refer to concrete

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operations, though without specifying what external act is to be performed through these operations. And this analogy rests in turn on the analogy between the notion of being and the notion of value. As the notion of being underpins, pervades, and goes beyond all particular concepts of this or that being, so the notion of value underpins, pervades, and goes beyond every particular twinge of conscience or article of an ethical code. The terms I prefer, then, are not ‘empty’ and ‘substantive,’ but rather ‘heuristic,’ ‘transcendental,’ ‘indeterminate,’ on one side, and ‘objective,’ ‘categorial,’ ‘determinate,’ on the other. With that clarification I return to the question. The dynamism of human consciousness spontaneously issues in acts: acts of attention, inquiry, insight, attempts to formulate, reflection, deliberation; but in the first instance the acts are only heuristic and transcendental. How then do we move from the heuristic and transcendental to the objective and categorial? The general answer lies in the two interlinked steps of the formation of conscience: there is the refinement of the moral sense, a more discerning apprehension of what really and truly is worthwhile; and there is the sublation of the prior cognitional levels by this developing moral sense. The refinement of the moral sense is a large question in itself. It is a never-ending process that continues throughout life for the individual person, and throughout history for the human race: discussion of that must be left to another occasion. But discussion of the cognitional element and of its sublation on the moral level belongs directly to the purpose of this essay, and some space must be given it. Lonergan’s fourth level, then, does not set truth aside; on the contrary, it carries it forward to incorporate it into the activities of conscience and bring it to bear on the ‘possible, the ideal, the ought-to-be’ world. Moral conversion of the subject, he says, in no way interferes with or weakens his devotion to truth. He still needs truth, for he must apprehend reality and real potentiality before he can deliberately respond to value. The truth he needs is still the truth attained in accord with the exigences of rational consciousness. But now his pursuit of it is all the more secure because he has been armed against bias, and it is all the more meaningful and significant because it occurs within, and plays an essential role in, the far richer context of the pursuit of all values.13

13 Method in Theology 242.

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Thus, for Lonergan, insight does not cancel out data when it goes beyond them; rather, it incorporates them into the concept and sublates them there. Judgment does not cancel out insight when going beyond it; rather, judgment incorporates insights into its affirmation of an intelligibility. Similarly, the level of values does not dispense with attention, intelligence, and judgment; rather, it incorporates data, ideas, and truth into its own operations. In the judgment of value, then, three components unite. First, there is knowledge of reality and especially of human reality. Secondly, there are intentional responses to values. Thirdly, there is the initial thrust towards moral self-transcendence constituted by the judgment of value itself. The judgment of value presupposes knowledge of human life, of human possibilities proximate and remote, of the probable consequences of projected courses of action.14

The sequence would be somewhat as follows. In the primitive stages of any development – whether of the human race as it emerges into the world of homo sapiens, or of any culture as it takes a new step forward in the discovery of values – there will occur, perhaps in the consciousness of some moral genius, the emergence of a sense of uneasiness and so of responsibility in regard to some of the society’s mores. This is the already mentioned refinement of the moral sense: there will be an impulse of conscience, which will find expression in determinate acts. There will form a pattern of such twinges of conscience, and the resulting acts will arouse in others similar twinges of conscience. Sooner or later the corresponding moral principles will become enunciated in the public conscience of the community: ‘Slavery is evil.’ ‘Nuclear war is evil.’ ‘Male domination of women is evil.’ And so forth. I do not see any particular difficulty at this stage. But various secondary questions arise. For example, what is the force of these moral principles? Are they hard and fast rules for the whole human race forever and ever? I am not sure the modern world has much to add here to Thomas Aquinas. His synderesis was definitive for all morality, and Lonergan’s four transcendental precepts (‘Be attentive,’ ‘be intelligent,’ ‘be reasonable,’ ‘be responsible’) would lie behind the synderesis and be even more definitive – not in the sense of being more universal but in the sense of being more basic. Synderesis and the transcendental 14 Ibid. 38.

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precepts, then, are fixed till God makes us something other than we at present are as a human race. But from that point onward there would be a hierarchy of normativity, as explained by Aquinas in his account of law: What lies nearest the synderesis shares in the highest degree its stability; what is on the margins shares more and more in the changes and vicissitudes of this unstable world.15 In sum, then, as to the way objective secondary principles relate to first principles, Lonergan would be largely content with the Thomist view. The major contribution he would make to the development of Thomist thinking is on the subjective side: the input into all moral principles – including the principle of principles, the synderesis – from the dynamism itself of incarnate spirit. Moreover, this dynamism is operative not only to provide foundations for any code of ethics that might be developed but also to power the intentional mechanism by which one erects determinate principles on the foundations. However, in this derivation of all principles, primary or secondary, there is a stress on the particular factor of insight – a factor that, while it can be found in Thomas, is so much more explicit in Lonergan as to require special discussion. 3 The Role of Insight When logic has been reduced to its properly subsidiary role in the elaboration of a code of ethics, attention may turn to the more positive and creative factors in this elaboration. The question regards the cognitional apparatus by which principles are formed, developed into a system, applied to concrete cases, and revised if need be. For Lonergan the key role here is played by insight. And, as I argued in the journal Sciences ecclésiastiques over thirty years ago,16 that position finds solid support in Aquinas. Perhaps there is no need to take up the historical question again. However, we may summarize the conclusion regarding the role of insight – insight which comes into play at every step. An insight is needed for the emergence of a particular concept of good and a particular precept of conscience. Insights are needed to develop a code in which principles are linked with one another in a coherent system. An insight is needed finally to determine the relevance of a precept in a given case, that is, to transfer it from a code of ethics in a book or in a mind to a particular situation, to apply the abstract to the concrete. 15 Summa theologiae 1-2, q. 94, aa. 4–5. 16 See Crowe, ‘Universal Norms …’ (note 5 above).

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Now insight as a psychological fact, as an event that occurs in consciousness and is distinctly identifiable there, is not yet fully accepted in the world of philosophers. Still, I do not feel called in this essay to argue the fact. What could I add to the persuasive power of Lonergan’s Verbum articles and his book Insight? It seems better to take his work as a basis (hypothetical, for those who do not accept his position) and to go forward from that to study some consequences of advertence to insight in moral matters. Three headings suggest themselves in this context. The first regards the question of how to use our cognitional resources to deal with a changing moral code. It is in the application of moral principles, and in the insight required for the application, that the need for change of a code of ethics arises. A changing code of ethics is what especially alarms a community with a strong attachment to tradition; and so it is here that the nerve of the problem is exposed and touched and must be painfully attended to. The need can be more or less urgent, more or less radical. Suppose, then, a concrete instance of conduct, a practical moral question arising in a certain situation to which we would apply our moral code. We may find that the situation is a clear-cut instance of what some precept envisages. In that case, no new or additional insight is needed to understand the situation, and thus application takes place without development of the moral code. But it may also happen that the situation is different from that envisaged by the precept we would apply, or by any other we can find in our code. The difference may be minor, so some sort of application can be managed, though it is no longer clear-cut. But perhaps the difference is major: a radically new situation has emerged, and then application becomes impossible. Where the difference is only minor, we need an amendment to the original precept or law; and in fact our governments are continually amending the code by which a country is governed, and common sense continually adds a further insight in order to apply its quasi-general proverbial knowledge to this situation. But the case of a radically new situation is not so simple. Here we encounter the kind of about-face of which Albert the Great spoke when he said that the moral law forbade private ownership in the first stages of human history but prescribes it in the present (medieval) stage.17 That change took place 17 Dom Odin Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Louvain [Belgique]: Abbaye du Mont César, and Gembloux [Belgique]: J. Duculot, Éditeur, 1948) tome 2, p. 98, quoting a Brussels manuscript.

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perhaps in times that are lost to history, so that we have no account of the agony experienced by conscientious people in the time of transition. But some changes occur before our very eyes, and then we are able to observe the agony. We know, for example, something of the turmoil among moral theologians not so many centuries ago, when the medieval proscription of interest on money-loans was seen to be no longer applicable or just. It is the kind of change of which the twentieth century furnishes multiple instances. It is the kind of change, I suggest, that conceptualism is quite unable to handle, but one that a healthy intellectualism that gives its due role to insight will not find an impossible hurdle.18 A second point on the role of insight is that it allows our moral code to assume a positive rather than a merely negative character. This is a point that Lonergan made repeatedly. Without developed understanding … moral precepts narrow down to lists of prohibitions, and human living settles into a helpless routine without a capacity for vital adaptation and without the power of knowledge that inspires and directs the movement from real possibility to concrete achievement.19

This is put in terms of conceptualism in the paper ‘Healing and Creating in History’: Concepts are ambiguous. They may be heuristic, but then they merely point … Again, concepts may be specific, but then they are definite, rounded off, finished, abstract. Like textbooks on moral theology they can name all the evils to be avoided but get no further than unhelpful platitudes on the good to be achieved. For the good is never an abstraction. Always it is concrete. The whole point to the process of cumulative insight is that each insight regards the concrete while the cumulative process heads towards an ever fuller and more adequate view. Add abstraction to abstraction and

18 Conceptualism, in Lonergan’s understanding of the term, deals with concepts that combine into propositions, and propositions that combine into syllogisms, but these are cut off from their fertile source, which is insight into phantasm. Lonergan’s key work dealing with conceptualism is Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas. 19 Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Role of a Catholic University in the Modern World,’ in Collection 108–13, at 111.

330 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Essays one never reaches more than a heap of abstractions. But add insight to insight and one moves to mastery of all the eventualities and complications of a concrete situation.20

A third consequence of giving a key role to insight is the possibility of linking the question of a changing moral code with the far wider question of a philosophy and theology of history. It has long been my conviction that if Catholics and, in particular, if Jesuits are to live and operate on the level of the times, they must not only know about theories of history but also must work out their own. The precepts of the moral law, while rich and detailed in prohibitions (malum ex quocumque defectu), are of extreme generality in their positive content (bonum ex integra causa). But what moves men is the good; the good is concrete; but what the concrete good of Christian living is, we shall come to know only by thematizing the dynamic of Christian living in this world, in itself and in its relations to liberal progress and Marxian dialectic.21

With this question, the relation of history to moral science, we open a door on another world altogether from that of a closed conceptualism. It is a world in which principles emerge through discovery and discernment, and equally are brought up-to-date through discovery and discernment; but it is also a world in which moral discovery and discernment are integrated with the whole question of human destiny on this planet. I cannot take up that question here, but it seemed important to introduce it and thus provide a context in which rethinking in the moral field can proceed more effectively. Let me conclude then with the following long quotation, which will not only identify our new question, but also summarize much of the present essay: First, just as the abstract apprehension of man provides itself with abstract ontological and ethical foundations in primitive propositions from which its doctrines, criteria, norms, etc., are deduced or somehow proved, so the more concrete and historical apprehension of man provides itself with its appropriately concrete foundations in structural

20 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Healing and Creating in History,’ in A Third Collection 100–109, at 104. 21 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Questionnaire on Philosophy: Response,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 352–83, at 366.

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features of the conscious, operating subject, by a method that has come to be named transcendental. Secondly, the stock objections that historical-mindedness involves one in relativism and situation ethics are to be met by adverting to the distinction just drawn. One cannot ground a concrete historical apprehension of man on abstract foundations: but this does not establish the inadequacy of the quite different foundations provided by a transcendental method. Thirdly, what moves men is the good, and good in the concrete (verum et falsum sunt in mente, bonum et malum sunt in rebus; bonum ex integra causa, malum ex quocumque defectu). If at one time law was in the forefront of human development, as one might infer from the language of the Deuteronomist, from the fervent praise of law in the Psalms, from the role of law in the history of the clarification of such concepts as justice, responsibility, guilt; still, at the present time it would seem that the immediate carrier of human aspiration is the more concrete apprehension of the human good effected through such theories of history as the liberal doctrine of progress, the Marxist doctrine of dialectical materialism and, most recently, Teilhard de Chardin’s identification of cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis, and christogenesis.22

22 Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Transition from a Classicist World-View to HistoricalMindedness,’ in A Second Collection 1–9, at 6–7.

Chapter 22

Rethinking God-with-us1

This is the third in my series of efforts to bring the thought of Bernard Lonergan to bear on the problem of a theology for our time.2 As in the first two essays of the series, the focus is not on new realities: there is no new God, no new person in the Trinity, no new mission of Son or Spirit, no new gospel or church. There may be practical consequences of any new theology, and I shall argue that in this case there are; but the focus is on rethinking the realities that in faith we already hold to be. Models for this are not lacking in our tradition. Nicea rethought the particular question of the divine status of the Word. Augustine did a more general rethinking of the entire Christian faith. However, the great example of rethinking is now, and will be for the foreseeable future, what Thomas Aquinas did in the thirteenth century: not preaching a new God or new gospel, but rethinking an ancient faith in a new way. All three were attacked for innovating: Nicea in the bitter struggles of the next fifty years, Augustine especially in regard to his doctrine on grace, Thomas

1 Previously published as ‘Rethinking God-with-us: Categories from Lonergan,’ Science et esprit 41/2 (1989) 167–88. 2 Frederick E. Crowe, ‘Rethinking the Religious State: Categories from Lonergan,’ Science et esprit 40/1 (1988) 75–90; and ‘Rethinking Moral Judgments: Categories from Lonergan,’ ibid. 40/2 (1988) 137–52. [Reprinted as chapters 20 and 21 of the present volume.] The course of the argument, dealing regularly with the positions of others, requires me to use the terms they use and to speak regularly of Father and Son in God, but I recognize, with the rest of the world, that God is neither male nor female, and that this is true of all three persons. I wish to thank Robert M. Doran and Gregory H. Carruthers for reading this essay and giving me the benefit of their encouragement and criticisms. I also thank Francis X. Clooney for orienting me in a field with which I am not familiar, world religions.

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Aquinas – the irony of history – for abandoning Augustine to go haring after Aristotle. The same propensity of rethinking to evoke attacks appears in our own time. No doubt, in the nature of the case, it is bound to appear in every new age; and I see no remedy for it except time and patience. This third essay, then, has the same general purpose as the first two in the series. It is written in the conviction that new times need new expressions of our faith (John XXIII), and in the judgment that, while it was only in selected areas that Lonergan thought out such new expressions, still he provided an organon and general categories that can be profitably used in any area of philosophy, religious studies, and theology. The present essay differs, however, in dealing with a specifically Christian question. The first essay was indeed written out of a concern for a Christian form of the religious state, but it took as its basic category Lonergan’s notion of religious consciousness, which could be relevant to the study of any of the world religions, and indeed to the experience of any religious person. Similarly, the second was written out of a concern for a Christian form of conduct, but the basic category for rethinking the question was Lonergan’s view on the relation of ‘is’ and ‘ought’; and so it could be applied wherever human nature is found, even though Christian conduct might have its own distinctive character. But to speak of God-with-us, in the sense of the divine Three among us, the Three whom the Christian scriptures know as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is to deal directly with a Christian question. Though I believe that Lonergan’s thinking here is equally fundamental, and has much to say on the question of Christianity and world religions, that question is a further one, only touched on here. What I propose to do, after briefly setting forth a doctrinal supposition, is to discuss two sets of ideas available for this rethinking of the Three-among-us, then relate those ideas to their organizing principles in philosophy, and end with some questions and suggestions on the implications this account might have for our Christian life and for the direction Christian theology may take in our time. 1 The Eternal Three and God-with-us To speak of God-with-us in the extended sense that applies to Father and Spirit as well as to the Savior the virgin would conceive and bear3 3 Matthew 1:23.

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is to speak of what is called the ‘economic’ Trinity; and the question will naturally arise of the relation of the economic Trinity to the ‘essential’ Trinity, the relation of the Three among us to the Three as they are eternally in themselves. If I bypass that question here and simply assume as Catholic doctrine that the economic Trinity is the essential Trinity among us, it is not to deny the importance of the questions involved in this much discussed question. It is simply to assert that they belong to prolegomena that are far too complex to handle in a short essay. That is, once we affirm the doctrine of the eternal Three, it becomes a non-question whether they are the Three among us. If they are not the three among us, then these three are three others, and we are not talking about God-with-us; but if it is the eternal Three who are God-with-us, then we may proceed to speak about their way of being with us, which is what I am proposing to do here. What, then, of the doctrine of the eternal Three? This is where the fundamental questions arise, questions that are prolegomena to the whole of theology, questions which occupied Lonergan throughout most of his life, questions that are far too complex to deal with here. I am thinking of questions such as the meaning of the word ‘is,’ and the validity of using that word when we speak of God; the meaning of a divine affirmation of the mysteries hidden in the divine being, and the form that expression of that revelation took in scriptural times; the validity of transposing that expression to the conciliar expressions (here, Nicea and Constantinople), and of the whole subsequent development from the councils; and the complex dialectic in which all these transitions are put through the purifying and refining crucible of the learning and growing process. These are questions to which Lonergan gave far more attention than he did to the question this essay will treat. It is impossible to do justice here to the positions he took in their regard. I cannot, in order to demonstrate the meaning of ‘is,’ reproduce the long argument of chapters 9 to 14 of Insight;4 nor can I summarize chapter 19 of that book, to establish the validity of using ‘is’ of God. Neither can I distill a Lonergan doctrine of revelation and scriptural expression from the corpus of his  writings, or study the numerous loci in which he justifies the

4 See Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 296–455.

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movement from the scriptures to the councils,5 or summarize his study of the essential Trinity for the theology behind the Trinitarian missions.6 Questions of this kind are the core of Lonergan’s lifetime contribution, and that ultimately is where we must engage him if we disagree with his views on the Three among us. True, a context for the latter will be helpful, but to provide it and still remain within the limits of my essay, I must confine my remarks to simple statements of his position. ‘Is,’ then, is a metaphysical word, with a latent metaphysical content in ordinary usage, and an explicit metaphysical content in philosophic usage. That is to say, with ‘is’ we are beyond the empirical level where we can point to data. We are also beyond the level of intelligence where we have insight into data and the word ‘intuition’ could be given a meaning with an experiential reference. When we say ‘X is,’ there is nothing we can point to that would serve as object of empirical perception for that ‘is,’ and neither is the act of existence to which the word is refers intelligible in itself. The validity of uttering the word ‘is’ is not established logically – and it cannot be, since the word would have to occur in the premises, and how would one establish them? But the contradictory position is self-destructive in any who pretend to grasp their position intelligently and affirm it reasonably. Then the critical problem becomes a question of discriminating between two kinds of realism, that based on animal extroversion, and that based on intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation. Further, not only is the scope of ‘is’ unrestricted – for we ask whether God is, and the question has a meaning (to declare it meaningless is to admit we understand the question!) – but we suppose the intelligibility of the universe in all our questions and answers, and the universe is unintelligible unless God is, and hence we rationally affirm the existence of God. There is an extrapolation analogous to that in mathematics, where we proceed validly from numbers verifiable in experience to numbers not verifiable in experience: ‘the extrapolation to the transcendent, though conceptual, operates from the real basis of proportionate being, so that some elements in the transcendent idea

5 Bernard Lonergan, De Deo Trino I: Pars dogmatica [now available in English as The Triune God: Doctrines, vol. 11 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (Ed.)]. See also Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Origins of Christian Realism,’ in A Second Collection 239–61. 6 See Bernard Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics, chapters 2–5. See also Bernard Lonergan, The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ, part 3.

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will be verifiable just as some of the positive integers are verifiable.’7 Again, ‘we have worked out the outlines of a metaphysic of proportionate being, and so we have at our command at least one segment in the total range of the idea of being.’8 So the whole process of coming to say ‘God is’ loses its philosophic dread once we see that ‘is’ is already a metaphysical term. Lonergan did not speak much about revelation, but it is clearly at the basis of his theology that God once in a while said something doctrinal, not only about creation but about the divine being too. That this is possible for God can hardly be disputed by those who reverence the scriptures: to worship a God who loves, exhorts, threatens, punishes, repents, calls, encounters, but not to allow that God the privilege of communicating truth about the divine being – that would not seem entirely coherent. Whether God actually did communicate such truth, and where and how, and by what means it may have been handed on to us, these are questions that involve not only familiarity with the scriptural data, but also a theory of communication, of signs and symbols and data, of inquiry and concepts and truth, of truth that may be expressed in various ways and transposed from context to context. If for the first, the scriptural erudition, Lonergan was often content to rely on the scholars, the second is surely a field in which he did his own homework as well as most others did. I think that here, as elsewhere, the nub of the question regards the word ‘is,’ and doctrinal revelation simply specifies the question as it regards the divine use of the word. We cannot dodge the meaning of ‘is’ and the validity of using that word in God-talk, whether it is God who talks or we ourselves. The assumption in this essay is that ‘God speaks’ has as much claim on our attention as ‘God saves,’ and we do not need to have God speak in the manner of Euclid, in order to discover an ‘is’ in the divine word and a truth in what we hear. When we turn then to the Trinity, we find certain given truths whose history theologians may trace, whose meaning they may transpose into new expressions, but whose truth they do not and cannot establish on rational grounds. Newman listed nine propositions that ‘contain the Mystery’: they affirm the divinity of the Three (each ‘is the One Eternal Personal God’), their distinction from one another, the two eternal

7 Insight 665. 8 Ibid. 666–67.

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processions.9 Thomas Aquinas, with a lot of help from Augustine and others, carried the argument a step further to argue that the temporal mission of a divine person includes the eternal procession of that person, and adds a temporal effect: ‘missio includit processionem aeternam, et aliquid addit, scilicet temporalem effectum.’10 Lonergan dots the i’s and crosses the t’s of this doctrine with his question on the active and passive constitution of the mission, and the active and passive production of the temporal effect.11 Perhaps it will be agreed that if, within the limits of a brief essay, one is to say anything on categories from Lonergan for rethinking Godwith-us, we must bypass these questions of the origins of Trinitarian doctrine, of the superstructure that was built upon the New Testament basis, and of the philosophical conceptuality we need to speak coherently in this area. I proceed then to two sets of ideas that strike me as helpful in rethinking at least some aspects of the economic Trinity. Of these two, one set follows the steps of the divine initiative, and seems somewhat closer to piety, prayer, preaching – to simple faith, one might say. The other studies the matter more from the human side, and may be found more technical, with a relevance to the narrower circle of specialists in theology. 2 God-with-us as Love On first thought, it might seem quite unnecessary to rethink the question in popular categories. After all, we have the scriptures, with all their wealth of detail on Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: what more do we need? The need appears, I would say, once we focus on the word ‘Trinity.’ The New Testament indeed provides a wealth of material on Father, on Son, on Holy Spirit, but not in a way that gives us a unified idea of their being. The unity of Father and Son is implicit in those very names, but the Spirit cannot easily be ‘thought’ as included in this idea. When groping efforts were made in that direction by patristic theologians, quite silly questions emerged, as in asking whether the first person is the grandfather of the third. The psychological analogy did provide a unified idea for all three; but it did so in the rather specialized

9 John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, edited with introduction and notes by I.T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) 91–92. 10 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, q. 43, a. 2 ad 3m. 11 The Triune God: Systematics 466–73.

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terms of theology, which are not those of scripture, and are not readily transposed to terms more suited to popular religion. So we keep on trying out new ways of conceiving the Three among us. Lonergan’s favorite way has an attractive simplicity, as well as being closely tied to the scriptures: a loving God bestows the divine Love on us in the sending of the Spirit, declares that Love in the sending of the Son, and promises the consummation of Love in a final union. The scriptural bases for the first two steps (of Love bestowed and Love declared) should be considered together. For the first, ‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’12 For the second, ‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’;13 or again, ‘God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.’14 To call these texts the scriptural bases for Lonergan’s view is not to deny but rather to suppose some nonscriptural elaboration, but that further elaboration does not take us far from our base. Thus for understanding the Spirit as Love bestowed, there is the rich Augustinian doctrine, further developed by Thomas Aquinas, of the Donum Dei, of the third person as God’s first and foundational gift to us. The reason for any gift to another, Thomas says, is the love we have for that other: ‘Ratio autem gratuitae donationis est amor: ideo enim damus gratis alicui aliquid, quia volumus ei bonum. Primum ergo quod damus ei, est amor quo volumus ei bonum.’15 We might enlarge on Thomas and illustrate the point from parents and their children. From the moment of birth the child receives from its parents a steady flow of gifts – food, clothing, shelter, nursing, care, education. But their very first gift, the source and ground of all the others, is the gift of their love: it is because they love their child that they bestow on it everything else. In the same way, God’s gift of the Spirit is the first gift of all, the reason for every other gift. For understanding the Son as divine declaration of love, Lonergan makes a more personal addition to Thomas Aquinas; but his analogy

12 13 14 15

Romans 5:5. Romans 5:8. 1 John 4:8–9. Summa theologiae 1, q. 38, a. 2 c [‘The distinguishing feature of a freely given gift is love, for we give something to someone freely because we wish him well. Hence what we first give him is the love by which we wish him well’].

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is taken from the same general milieu – the familiar case of a man and woman in love. When a man and a woman love each other but do not avow their love, they are not yet in love. Their very silence means that their love has not reached the point of self-surrender and self-donation. It is the love that each freely and fully reveals to the other that brings about the radically new situation of being in love and that begins the unfolding of its life-long implications.16

There follows a simple application of the analogy to the need of sending the Son in declaration of what the Spirit is for us. … God’s gift of his love has its proper counterpart in the revelation events in which God discloses to a particular people or to all mankind the completeness of his love for them. For being-in-love is properly itself, not in the isolated individual, but only in a plurality of persons that disclose their love to one another.17

Finally, the third step remains in the context of love, and is likewise scripturally conceived. Lonergan speaks of ‘the threefold giving that is the gift of the Holy Spirit to those that love (Rom. 5:5), the gift of the divine Word made flesh and dwelling amongst us (John 1:14), the final gift of union with the Father who is originating love (1 John 4:8, 16).’18 So the three steps center on the divine initiative of love: love given, love declared, love consummated; and in the sequence Spirit, Son, and Father. If I am hopeful that this simple way of rethinking the Three-among-us may prove fruitful for Christian piety, I must also concede that there is

16 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 112–13. See also his article ‘The Response of the Jesuit as Priest and Apostle in the Modern World,’ in A Second Collection 165–87, at 173–74. 17 Method in Theology 283. 18 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Aquinas Today: Tradition and Innovation’ in A Third Collection 35–53, at 53. See also Bernard Lonergan, ‘Questionnaire on Philosophy: Response,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 352–83, at 358: ‘First, there is the ontic present of God’s love flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit he has given us. Second, there is the objective past in which God’s revelation of his love to us through Christ Jesus has been mediated down the ages by the ongoing Christian community. Thirdly, there is the eschatological consummation …’

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one very obvious objection: we have reversed the order of the two missions. Where the tradition thinks of the Son being sent first and then the Spirit, this analogy has the Spirit given first, with God’s love then declared in the sending of the Son. What the objection states is true. But it is also true, and very traditional, that what is first for us is not first in itself; on the contrary, what is last for us is frequently first in itself. Thus the scriptures tell us of what is first for us, the sending of Son and Spirit into the world; and it was only long afterwards, through the psychological analogy of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, that we came to understand something of the Three in themselves. On the other hand, what they are in themselves is certainly prior to the divine missions, and therefore that is the order of Thomist discussion in the Summa theologiae. Similarly, there is nothing radical in conceiving the sending of the Son as first for us, but second in the divine and eternal plan to the sending of the Spirit.19 3 God-with-us and Our Experience Our first set of categories was simple and scriptural, attentive to the divine initiative, more adapted, I think, to prayer and worship, preaching and Christian daily life. We shall ask presently whether and how the same ideas might be useful in Trinitarian theology. The second set I will propose for rethinking the Trinity is drawn from study of the 19 These opposite orders, of what is first for us and of what is first in itself, are basic in coming to terms with scripture on this point. One cannot deny that there the order is the sending of the Son, then the sending of the Spirit. But it is also difficult to deny that Mary had the Spirit throughout her life, or that John the Baptist, Joseph, and the Old Testament saints died in a state of grace, which in Thomist theology argues the gift of the Spirit. If we admit the two inverse orders, there should be no difficulty in seeing in the scriptures an order of manifestation, on the analogy of the manifestation of the Son’s divinity: ‘on the human level he was born of David’s stock, but on the level of the spirit – the Holy Spirit – he was declared Son of God by a mighty act in that he rose from the dead’ (Romans 1:3–4 [NEB]). Indeed, if God is a good pedagogue, this has to be the order for manifestation of Son and Spirit, given our native orientation to the external, with attention only later to the interior. (It is to be noted that Lonergan too came only in his later years to think of God giving the divine Love in the Spirit, and declaring that Love in the Son.) I do not claim this is the whole story, and I gratefully acknowledge a suggestion of Gregory Carruthers that we can do better justice to the scriptural order if we think of the temporal effect of the mission of the Spirit: there is a new specificity and fullness in that mission that is contingent upon the Son being faithful in his mission even to the cross.

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human side (intentionality analysis), and is already theological, or at least more technical, in character. Briefly, there is outer experience of the presence of the Son. There is inner experience of the presence of the Spirit. Ordinarily (I do not wish to pronounce on the extraordinary experience of the mystics) there is in this world no experience of God (the Father), but there is experience of the mystery of mysteries – experience, so to speak, of the absence of experience. First, then, there is our experience of the presence of the Son. It may be called vicarious for us and immediate for those who had seen the Lord, but even our vicarious experience is of the same space-time universe in which the first disciples lived. A little theological gem on this point is hidden away in Lonergan’s Latin theology: ‘non … ad Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum … acceditur nisi hic locus hocque tempus sensibus innotescunt et per imaginationem continuantur donec ad Palestinam, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Ierusalem ante duo millia annorum perveniatur.’20 The question here is of outer experience, experience of shape, color, weight, sound, and so forth, experience of what appears to the senses: ‘sensibus innotescunt.’ So the disciple could speak of what our eyes have seen, what our ears have heard, what our hands have touched, of the Word of life.21 It is an experience shared by believers and unbelievers, and for that matter shared in large part by the birds and beasts of the Holy Land, many of whom saw the Lord and heard his voice. Such experience then is not by itself salvific. It needs the interior complement of the movement of the Holy Spirit: ‘No one

20 The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ 30 [English, 31: ‘… we cannot approach our Lord Jesus Christ … save by beginning from this particular time and place familiar to us through our senses and then proceeding by our imagination until we arrive at the Palestine, the Bethlehem, the Nazareth, and the Jerusalem of two thousand years ago.’] See Insight 166–67: ‘It is true enough that only a fragment of concrete extension and of concrete duration falls within human experience. Still, one can take that fragment as origin. Beyond the extension that is experienced, there is further extension … beyond the duration of experience, there is further duration …’ 21 1 John 1:1. The translation of the Revised Standard Version for this verse is: ‘That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.’ This translation shows the text to be the forerunner of Chalcedon’s ‘one and the same,’ pointing to the identity of the One who was from the beginning and in the fullness of time came to dwell among us. But my present point is simply that, dwelling among us, the Son was the object of outer experience.

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can come to me unless drawn by the Father’;22 and the Father draws through the Holy Spirit: ‘no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.’23 So we come to our personal experience of the presence of the Spirit within us. It is related to our experience of the Son, as inner experience is related to outer, or as the ‘invisible’ mission of the Spirit is related to the ‘visible’ mission of the Son. Now ‘the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and selfcontrol’24 – a catalogue in which several items, notably the first three, are experienced interiorly. It is the experience of which the New Testament so often speaks, but one that has seemed elusive compared to our experience of the Son. It is an experience that, in the absence of a ‘philosophy of interiority,’ really is elusive, an experience that now as at Corinth long ago can be accompanied by the most bizarre manifestations. So the institutional church has not lacked grounds for being exceptionally watchful of claims based on this experience. Nevertheless, it is the presence of the Spirit that our institutions must depend upon if they are to be religious sources and not just courts of religious law; and it is the presence invoked at ecumenical councils, at liturgical gatherings, at any assembly of believers. One of the great needs of the present church is a theology that will study the experiential aspect of this presence and provide rules for discerning its guidance. Such a theology could build on past efforts. There is a long history of relating our inner and our outer experience in the Christian church, even if it is not discussed under that name. When we talk of charism and institution, of the people of God and the authorities, of the inspirational and the organizational, and so on, we are really talking among other things about our inner experience of the Spirit and our outer experience of the Son carried forward in the Body of Christ that is the church. Both are essential; and ultimately, as data or manifestations of God-with-us, they have the equality that the missions of Son and Spirit have. The sending of the Spirit into the world is every bit as real as the sending of the Son, and the Spirit is as present among us as the Son is. However, although in our Christocentric religion there has been no shortage of attention to the presence of the Son, we have lacked categories in which to speak of the presence of the Spirit, and so 22 John 6:44. 23 1 Corinthians 12:3. 24 Galatians 5:22.

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to relate the two missions to one another in experience as well as in doctrine. The inadequacy of the invisible-visible contrast becomes evident at once with the admission of data of consciousness on an equal footing with data of sense: to be invisible does not mean to be present without manifestation in experience. We shall see presently how Lonergan’s philosophy of interiority may help us speak to that situation. But even more neglected than the role of the Spirit is the role of the Father in the divine threefold entry into our world. What needs to be thought out in the context of the presence of Son and Spirit, and our double experience of their presence, is the absence of the third element of God-with-us and the way to relate this to our experience of the presence of Son and Spirit. Like the long obscurity of the Spirit while the focus was on the Son, there has been an obscuring of the personal role of the Father, both in the final state of eternal life and in the present temporary state of the Father’s absence.25 This third area is that of the not-yet, but not merely of the not-yet; there is also the to-be, and a consciousness of the lack of what is to-be. There is a sense of our potential infinity, and therefore of an infinite emptiness. There is an experience of the dark night of the senses and of the human spirit. It is the absence, the lack, the need, the hunger, the emptiness, the longing, the abandonment, experienced in our human condition as long as we are separated from the presence of the Father in our world. There is an analogy here with Paul’s experience of exile from the Lord,26 but I stress the word ‘analogy’: we are speaking of a different absence. The absence of the Lord Jesus is a sacred part of Christian experience, understood in continuity with grief for a departed dear one; but it is not part of the experience of the non-Christian religions. Nor in Trinitarian terms is it the basic experience of absence even for us Christians. Rather, it is the absence, as experienced absence, of God as ‘fons divinitatis,’ the absence of God the Father, originating person in the sending of Son and Spirit, God our eschatological hope. In traditional language, but the term is understood experientially now, it is the absence of ‘the beatific vision.’27 25 I will argue presently that this is due at least in part to a failure to integrate the resurrection into the total picture of the Three among us. 26 2 Corinthians 5:6. 27 Relevant here is the suggestion Lonergan made in The Triune God: Systematics 470–73, that the four great graces might imitate, respectively, the four real relations in God, with the light of glory being a participation of divine filiation, and therefore having a particular relation to the Father. The suggestion was first made in an earlier, 1957

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It is important, then, to keep in mind the limitations of the presence of the Spirit among us, and the limitations of the presence of the Lord Jesus in our human world – the limitations, consequently, of our experience of their presence. Neither one is a substitute, nor are both together a substitute, for the vision of God that we call blessed. And experience of divine presence must always be kept in the perspective of the equally important experience of the divine absence, the experience we have as a pilgrim people. Since this aspect of the Three among us, this divine absence of the Father, has received so little attention in theology, I would like to develop it somewhat here; and I begin on the level of philosophy. I would say that the philosophic counterpart to our theological absence of the Father, and the corresponding experience, is that of the question of God. Perhaps it is safe to say that most of us do not find God to be a question; but perhaps few of us are philosophers. In fact, we are faintly puzzled when we read Thomas Aquinas on the natural desire to see God by the divine essence.28 Or, when we read in Lonergan that the question of God is more important than the answers.29 One may go further and say that most of us do not find the universe a question. Why is

edition of that volume, Divinarum personarum conceptio analogica 214. This highly speculative idea has not attracted much attention, but it caught the interest of John Courtney Murray, who was deep into Lonergan’s Trinitarian theology at the time, made it the theme at a meeting of Jesuit theologians he convened in 1959, and chose the four entia supernaturalia as a topic of discussion. This is the place to advert to the relation Lonergan saw between the doctrines of creation and of the Three among us: briefly, as the natural order imitates the divine substance, so the supernatural order, the four entia supernaturalia, imitates the four Trinitarian relations. 28 Summa theologiae 1-2, q. 3, a. 8. 29 In the Dublin lectures on Method in Theology in 1971, Lonergan put in the form of a question what chapter 19 of Insight had put in the form of a syllogism: ‘Lectures: Method in Theology,’ Dublin: Milltown Park (unpublished; in the question-andanswer period), p. 49 of the transcript made under the direction of Conn O’Donovan [pp. 518–19 of the transcript made by N.W. Graham; both transcripts are available at the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto]. Also see Bernard Lonergan, ‘Philosophy of God, and Theology, Lecture 1: Philosophy of God,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 174: ‘… the question about God is much more important than the proof of God …’ Further, Bernard Lonergan, ‘Insight Revisited,’ in A Second Collection 263–78, at 277: ‘In Method the question of God is considered more important than the precise manner in which an answer is formulated …’

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there something and not nothing? For some three hundred years30 this question has absorbed the philosophers, nagging at their subconscious, perplexing their conscious thinking, disturbing their religious thought, be it reverent or atheistic. But questioning of this kind is only the pale philosophic copy of the desire of Trinitarian spirituality, once we have learned of the sending of Son and Spirit, to glimpse the mystery of mysteries, the originating divinity who is principle of the presence of Spirit and Son among us in our exile. We experience the harvest of the Spirit, at different times and in different ways. We read the gospels and the tradition coming down to us from those who saw with their own eyes, heard with their own ears, touched with their own hands, the One who was from the beginning. But we call out to the Father for understanding of the mystery of evil, for assurance of the divine truth we have received, for communion with dear ones who have gone from among us, and there is never an answer. With Christ on the cross we feel abandoned. Thus Lonergan can say that ‘an orientation to transcendent mystery is basic to systematic theology. It provides the primary and fundamental meaning of the name, God.’31 It is not only God who is silent. No word comes back from those who have gone before us. Not from our dear ones, not from our brothers or sisters in religion, not from Mary, the mother of the Lord, not from Jesus himself. They have gone into the presence of the originating divinity and seem to have forgotten us. If there have been authentic apparitions of Jesus, of his mother, this seems only to deepen the longing for the revelation and presence of the Father. All this, I suggest, belongs to the Trinitarian spirituality of our relation to the Father. 30 Étienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947) 318, attributes the question to Leibniz. Werner Brock, in his introduction to the four essays of Heidegger published as Existence and Being (London: Vision Press, 1949) 238, speaks of ‘the question which the aged Leibniz once advanced in one of his last works, the essay entitled “Principes de la nature et de la grâce fondées en raison” (§7): “Why is there something rather than nothing?”’ Lonergan phrased the question, ‘Why should there be anything at all?’ – see Understanding and Being: The Halifax Lectures on Insight 244. 31 Method in Theology 341. See also Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Response of the Jesuit as Priest and Apostle in the Modern World,’ in A Second Collection 165–87, at 174: ‘United in Christ through the Spirit, Christians are to … look forward to a future consummation when their love of God will not be just orientation to mystery but coupled with a knowledge of God similar to God’s knowledge of them (1 Cor. 13:12).’

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4 The Integrating Philosophy The above has been a recasting of the very traditional doctrine of the invisible mission of the Spirit, the visible mission of the Son, the nonmission, the non-advent, of the Father. It is a recasting of some aspects of our Trinitarian doctrine; and the question arises of inserting these aspects into an integral system, preferably but not necessarily that which structured medieval theology so comprehensively and so efficiently. This section will attempt two steps in response to that question, one adhering more closely to the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, the other moving somewhat beyond it. In our first point, then, we consider the eternal Three, not so much for the theology of the processions, relations, and persons, as for the psychological analogy by which Thomas ‘explained’ these doctrines. He saw what he called a convenientia in the manner in which Son and Spirit entered our world while the Father did not, a convenientia deriving from who and what the Three are in the Godhead.32 We must try to do the same for the rethinking that we have attempted in Lonergan’s categories, relating it to the psychological analogy by which we ‘understand,’ though so imperfectly, the Trinity. In the terms of Lonergan’s 1964 theology, the reasonableness (convenientia) of the doctrine is not too complex. The Spirit is proceeding Love, is given as Love, abides in our hearts interiorly as Love, is present there as Love – a presence with a rich harvest, including a response of love that is experienced interiorly. The Son is proceeding Truth: not cold, abstract truth, but such a truth as issues in love, ‘Verbum, non qualecumque, sed spirans Amorem.’33 Truth has an absolute objectivity, and so it is fitting that we should experience the presence of the Son objectively, in external experience. The Father is the Intelligere Dicens in the Trinity, the source of all divinity, the Understanding that issues in Truth, and in such a Truth as will issue in infinite Love. Therefore, since the Father is the hidden, original, abysmal Source of the other persons in God and of their mission to us, it is fitting that the Father remain hidden in this life and be instead the final

32 Summa theologiae 1, q. 43, passim in Thomas’s introduction to the question and in the text (but one should not rely on the titles given the eight articles of this question – they are from Thomas’s editor). 33 Ibid. a. 5, ad 2m. Lonergan’s development of Thomist theology is most conveniently found in his The Triune God: Systematics.

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revelation, the One who becomes present to us through our understanding, in the light of the beatific vision. However, rather late in life Lonergan had begun to change his way of explaining the psychological analogy, and that complicates our present point. I say ‘had begun’ to change, because I do not think he thought the matter through, and this complicates our study still further. Thus in a lecture of 1975, he stated his position as follows: ‘in God the origin is the Father … identified with agapê … Such love expresses itself in its Word, its Logos, its verbum spirans amorem, which is a judgment of value. The judgment of value is sincere, and so it grounds the Proceeding Love that is identified with the Holy Spirit.’34 It is possible to relate this to the earlier doctrine: the Spirit is still proceeding Love, the Son is still proceeding Truth, and the Father still utters a Word. One could say that there is no real change in the way the Son is conceived, since the verbum spirans amorem of Thomas Aquinas is quite readily transposed into a judgment of value. The main change regards the first person, now conceived as originating love expressing itself in a judgment of value. However, this is far too facile. There is a deeper question involved, one that we cannot handle unless we take into account and carry forward Lonergan’s new thinking in the mid-1970s after Method was completed. For, just at the time of this 1975 lecture, he had begun to talk of the two ways of human development: the way up from experience through understanding and judgment to value and decision; and the way down from value to views based on those values, and so to understanding and finally to experience made mature and perceptive. But though he had begun this line of thought already in the paper of 1975, Lonergan did not really bring it sharply into focus until 1977 and the two major papers of that year, one before the American Catholic Philosophical Association and the other before the Catholic Theological Society of America.35 Now if Lonergan in 1977 was still thinking this development through, he was hardly likely to be thinking in 1975 of its application to our

34 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Christology Today: Methodological Reflections,’ in A Third Collection 74–99, at 93. 35 See Bernard Lonergan, ‘Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,’ in A Third Collection 169–83 (see p. 181 for the reference in my next paragraph) and ‘Theology and Praxis,’ ibid. 184–201; statements on the two ways of human development: pp. 180–81, 196–97.

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analogy for the Trinity. It seems to me, speaking now from the viewpoint of 1977, that what he was after in 1975, in the first step of the psychological analogy, was the knowledge born of love that he took from Pascal but did not fully develop in Method. If that is the case, then the Three and their processions should ‘logically’ have been conceived now on the analogy of the way down, in the full sequence of the movement from love to knowledge rather than from knowledge to love. In the ‘logic’ of that sequence, there are some options; but using the scheme of ‘Natural Right and Historical Mindedness’ I would tend to think of Father, Son, and Spirit in terms respectively of love, knowledge born of love, and experience made mature and perceptive. But would Lonergan have followed through in this way? In particular, would he have taken the step of using experience for an analogy to the Holy Spirit? Maybe yes, in some quite eminent sense of experience; but maybe no. I have not found an answer to that historical question in the record he left us. As for the objective question in itself, on use of the downward movement for a Trinitarian analogy, I think it likely that we will get Lonergan’s answer only by carrying his idea beyond the point he himself had reached in 1975. Meanwhile, we remain with his very Thomist analogy of 1964, modifying it only in the conception of the first person as originating Love uttering a Word. In this first point we tried to relate our rethinking of the Trinity to the traditional analogy that was so important in the integral Trinitarian theology of Thomas Aquinas. Our second point now moves us beyond Thomas in a new philosophy of experience. Notice: it is not a philosophy of experience, much less a theology, that is divorced from doctrines. On the contrary, it supposes doctrines to be the natural complement of experience. We may consider three steps. The first is a philosophy of interiority. This needs no elaboration if we think of it in terms of self-appropriation and remember that the whole of Insight was written ‘in aid of a personal appropriation of one’s own rational self-consciousness.’36 More important are the fruits of such a philosophy. They are enormous. Insight, for example, provides a basis on which to relate the areas of science and common sense and so to end

36 Insight 769. See also Understanding and Being: the whole opening lecture, 1–32, sets forth the notion of self-appropriation. For the relation of this to a similar exercise in appropriation of one’s feelings, see Bernard Lonergan, ‘Prolegomena to the Study of the Emerging Religious Consciousness of Our Time,’ in A Third Collection 55–73, at 57–59.

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their centuries-old rivalry. That is an integration of two kinds of knowing; but there is also a possibility, more relevant to the present question, of relating levels of knowing to one another. From this viewpoint I would say that a philosophy of interiority provides the categories, so long lacking, in which we can organize the religious data on the Holy Spirit and relate what we experience religiously to what we hold in our doctrines. Our faith in the divinity and mission of the Spirit goes back to the beginning: the scriptures are as rich in references to the Spirit as they are in references to Christ. That implicit faith has been quite explicit since theologians began to write books with the title De Spiritu Sancto (Basil in 375), and since councils began to attend to Catholic doctrine on the Spirit (Constantinople in 381). But despite this strong tradition, there has been in the church a shying away from direct reliance on the data of the Spirit’s presence, a recourse to the safe and palpable realities of conciliar definitions, codes of canon law, and the institutions of the hierarchic church. We invoke the Spirit at gathering after gathering, but we are more than a little afraid that the Spirit will operate in a way that will involve us in discerning our own interior. We would prefer to have the Spirit alone take the responsibility. Of course that distrust of inner experience has been fed, from early times to ours, by various aberrations in those who appeal to the Spirit. But there is an underlying factor, lodged deep in human nature, that makes its own contribution: by nature, or perhaps by original sin, we are philosophic behaviorists. We attend easily and naturally to external data, far less easily and naturally to the data of consciousness. Once we eliminate that hidden behaviorism we may be able to deal directly and efficiently with the religious data on the Holy Spirit. And it is this behaviorism that Lonergan’s philosophy of interiority meets head on. A second step is Lonergan’s generalized empirical method.37 It is a concept that may at first seem quite alien to the missions of Son and Spirit, but in fact it has a singular efficacy in our effort to see the two missions in unity. Scientists have focused on the data of sense in their empirical method. Behaviorists deny the very existence of distinct data of consciousness. Lonergan’s generalized empirical method puts the two sets of data on an equal footing and thereby provides a philosophy for relating the role of the Spirit in our hearts to the role of the Son taking flesh in our world. To make our crucial point once again: if there is 37 Insight 96, 268, etc.

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a sending of the Spirit as real as that of the Son, if there is a presence of the Spirit as real as the presence of the Son, if there are data on the presence of the Spirit that are no more to be ignored than the data on the Son, then we need a philosophy that will enable us to hold all this in view per modum unius; and such a philosophy, it seems to me, we may find in generalized empirical method. A third step takes us to a further generalization, one that may enable us to integrate the role of the Father into a theology of God-with-us. Lonergan did not really map out that further generalization, much less give it a name; but he provided elements that, I believe, we may profitably organize. It is a matter of uniting what can be pointed to in the data of inner and outer experience with what is simply a pointing in our experienced orientation to mystery. Son and Spirit are present in our world through created and therefore finite graces, those of the hypostatic union and sanctifying grace; but besides these and the resulting data, there is a felt orientation to the infinite. We could speak of a generalized basis for the empirical and the trans-empirical; or we could give the empirical a wider extension to include ‘experience’ of the mystery of mysteries; or we might search for a basis to integrate what is cognitively apprehended with the orientation to the unknowable that is  given in the gift of God’s love. To find the right name is of some importance, I think, but to identify what we are talking about is more important still. I mean, then, the phenomena Lonergan speaks of in the context of the orientation effected by God’s gift of divine love: ‘Such a positive orientation and the consequent self-surrender, as long as they are operative, enable one to dispense with any intellectually apprehended object.’38 This ‘orientation to transcendent mystery … provides the primary and fundamental meaning of the name, God.’39 My suggestion, then, is that we develop a philosophy of experience that takes us behind both the data of sense that relate to the Son and the data of consciousness that relate to the Spirit, a philosophy that directs 38 Method in Theology 278; on this point Lonergan refers to Karl Rahner and William Johnston. See also ‘Philosophy of God, and Theology, Lecture 3: The Relationship between Philosophy of God and the Functional Specialty “Systematics,”’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 199–218, at 204: ‘the gift occurs with indeed a determinate content but without an intellectually apprehended object’; and ibid. 207: ‘there exists an unrestricted being in love, a mystery of love and awe, a being grasped by ultimate concern, a happiness that has a determinate content but no intellectually apprehended object.’ 39 Method in Theology 341.

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us to the realm of the infinite God, the ‘fons divinitatis,’ on whom there are no data,40 but to whom we are drawn in our orientation to ultimate mystery. 5 Some Implications and Consequences Ideas have consequences. All the rethinking in the world will not change what God has done in sending Son and Spirit and promising full self-communication. But if we rethink the Trinity among us, both our daily religious practice and the perspective of our whole theology are bound to be affected. In other words, consequences may be found in the two areas of practical matters and doctrinal expressions. Let us begin with the former, taking as a particular sample the liturgical cycle of the church. The present liturgical cycle is strongly Christic. In a year of fifty-two weeks, the Holy Spirit is allotted one Sunday, the Trinity one more, and none at all is assigned specifically to the Father. I am sure that many besides myself have felt like a sheer physical pain the cutting back of the liturgy of the Holy Spirit: where we once had at least an octave, we now have only one day. But a new sense of the Father’s role among us may lead us also to feel the absence of something specific in the liturgical sequence that would relate to the first person of the Trinity. I would therefore propose something like the following. Let there be a Christic half of the year that remains approximately what we now have from Advent to the Ascension. The latter feast would mark the transition to the ‘Spiritist’ period, with the ten days before Pentecost being regarded specifically as another time of Advent, only now a period of preparation for the advent of the Spirit. There 40 ‘God is not a datum of human experience,’ in Lonergan’s paper ‘Belief: Today’s Issue,’ in A Second Collection 87–99, at 95. Also ‘The divine is not a datum to be observed by sense or to be uncovered by introspection,’ in his paper ‘The Absence of God in Modern Culture,’ in ibid. 101–16, at 107; and, ‘there are no data on the divine,’ in his paper ‘Natural Knowledge of God’ in ibid. 117–33, at 120. To speak of data for the presence of Son and Spirit in the world, and to deny data on God (the Father), will add to the impression of subordinationism which some already find in the doctrine of the divine processions. There may be a remedy for this in a proper understanding of the processions, to which one has to return on this question. However, the simplest solution is not to stop with the processions but to go on to the eternal relations: here we find the Father is constituted as Father in relation to the Son, just as much as the Son is constituted as Son by the opposite relation – each, as it were, ‘needs’ the other to be a person.

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would follow a long period of the Spirit, parallel to the Christic period that began the year. It is probably too optimistic by far to expect that the ‘gospel’ readings during much of this period be taken from the Acts of the Apostles; but such a practice would underline the equality of the roles that Son and Spirit have among us, and it would have a basis in the name scripture scholars sometimes give to Acts: ‘the Gospel of the Spirit.’ This period of the Spirit would take up much of what is now called ‘ordinary time.’ ‘Ordinary’ in liturgical usage means ‘ordinal,’ but it has come to mean for most worshipers simply ‘everyday.’ The new cycle would at least eliminate that pejorative sense, making this time of the Spirit ‘extraordinary,’ just as the time of the Son is, and the time of the Father. Here we come full circle. The fall of the year, at least in the northern hemisphere,41 would coincide with the third ‘extraordinary’ period in the liturgy, that of our eschatological hope of the Father. Happily, this would fit very well into both the calendar and the liturgical cycle. There is already in the fall of the year a consciousness, expressed most graphically in the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, of the eschatological dimension of our faith and worship. Now there would be a new meaning derived from understanding this liturgical time as one of expectation of the final state, a third Advent. There is truly an advent of the Father: though we are accustomed to think of death as a matter of our going to God, it is more basic theologically to think of God as coming to us in the final self-donation of the Trinity. This whole suggestion on a new liturgy is not really as radical as it may appear at first sight, since much of the present liturgical cycle would remain, though with new emphases and a new perspective. If the suggestion seems to have some validity, then it would remain to work out the details. With the present attention in the church to the Spirit, we may hope that the terrible neglect the Spirit has suffered through much of our history may slowly but surely be corrected. Still, this is the area in which I would expect opposition to new ideas

41 I cannot help thinking here of my friends south of the equator who have suffered so much from the cultural imperialism of the northern hemisphere. For them the fall of the year is not the season of All Saints and All Souls, but the season of Easter. Is there any solution to this problem, short of their having a different liturgical year, as they already have a different academic year, a year in which Advent and Christmas would occur in May and June?

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to be the strongest. The role of the Father among us, since it begins in absence and terminates in a state that seems sufficiently remote, is not as likely to threaten established ways as giving a proper role to the Spirit is. I turn now to the area of the doctrinal expressions and theological perspectives that would follow from this rethinking of the Trinity. As before, the aim is not the overthrow of old doctrines, but only a new mining of the riches that were given us from the beginning in the one Son and the one Spirit and the promise of the one Father. I take three questions, again, as samples of the implications our rethinking might have. One question regards the relation of Spirit in the world to the nonChristian world religions. Lonergan’s view on this is clear, if tentative. I am inclined to interpret the religions of mankind, in their positive moment, as the fruit of the gift of the Spirit, though diversified by the many degrees of social and cultural development, and distorted by man’s infidelity to the self-transcendence to which he aspires.42

If this view has any validity, it is bound to have consequences for what is sometimes called ‘the wider ecumenism.’ For more than a hundred years it has been Catholic doctrine that salvation extends beyond the community of those who declare themselves members of the church.43 But there has been an unresolved question on the way God’s salvific grace works outside the visible church, and a question – given the universal availability of grace – of whether it is necessary to carry on Christian missionary activity. I will not try to apply Lonergan’s theology in areas in which I have no competence. I will simply remark that Lonergan’s account of the missions is surely relevant to a solution of these questions, since in that account those whom God loves through the gift of the Spirit have already received salvific grace, but their need 42 ‘The Response of the Jesuit …,’ in A Second Collection 174. 43 The question seems to have come to a head in the centuries of exploration and of discovery of the peoples of the world who had never heard of Christ. The first steps in the church’s dealing with the situation can be followed in the earlier editions of the Enchiridion symbolorum …: DB 1295 (= DS 2305), in ‘Errores Iansenistarum’ (1690); DB 1648 (not in DS), from Pius IX on rationalism and indifferentism, ‘Singulari quadam’ (1854); and DB 1677 (more briefly in DS 2865), from Pius IX on indifferentism, ‘Quanto conficiamur moerore’ (1863).

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for the Christian word is the same need the whole world had at the incarnation for a declaration of God’s love.44 A second sample question is that of the meaning to be given to the role of Christ’s divinity in our redemption. Lonergan agrees that it is not easy ‘to defend the mere repetition of formulas that are not understood,’ but he adds the following illuminating remark. Personally I should urge that in each case one inquire whether the old issue still has a real import and, if it has, a suitable expression for that import be found. For example, at Nicaea the real import was whether Christ, the mediator of our salvation, was a creature. Today many perhaps will be little moved by the question whether we have been saved by a creature or by God himself. But the issue may be put differently. One can ask whether God revealed his love for us by having a man die the death of scourging and crucifixion? Or was it his own Son, a divine person, who became flesh to suffer and die and thereby touch our hard hearts and lead us to eternal life?45

This quiet suggestion has been little noticed, though it appeared some twelve years ago. One may wonder whether the point so simply made has come home to theologians, and so it may not be superfluous to expand it a little. The obvious analogy for what God has done in giving up the only Son is the sacrificial spirit of Abraham. ‘The time came,’ we read, ‘when God put Abraham to the test.’46 We could translate, ‘The time came when God began to prepare us to understand the divine love for us, to form in our minds and hearts the image of a father giving up his only son.’ Genesis continues: ‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and … offer him … as a burnt offering.’47 So ‘Abraham built an altar … and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar … Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son.’48 44 More on this in my Son of God, Holy Spirit, and World Religions: The Contribution of Bernard Lonergan to the Wider Ecumenism (Toronto: Regis College Press, 1985); now reprinted under a shortened title in my Appropriating the Lonergan Idea 324–43. 45 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Theology and Praxis,’ in A Third Collection 184–201, at 198. 46 Genesis 22:1. 47 Genesis 22:2. 48 Genesis 22:9–10.

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Here we get in scripture a bit of what we may reverently call nonsense: ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy … for now I know that you fear God …’49 The all-knowing God, of course, knew already that Abraham was a God-fearing man. So what was the need of this ‘test’ performed long ago on Abraham? The need was not God’s need to know Abraham, and in the long view it was not Abraham’s personal need to know himself and his God (though that may have been an immediate factor). The need in the great sweep of the ages was our need to have a symbol and a proof of what it is for a father, freely and for the sake of a higher cause and a deeper love, to give up a beloved son in whom all his hopes reside. We needed it so that hundreds and hundreds of years later, when the Father in heaven gave up the only Son for our sake and delivered him over to his executioners, we would understand something of that Father’s love for us. God’s love for us is ‘measurable’ – measurable in the paradoxical sense of being beyond measure – in extrapolation from Abraham’s sacrifice of all he had or hoped for in his son Isaac. God could and did send Peter and Paul to their deaths too, handing them over to their executioners, and in some sense doing it for us; but what did that ‘cost’ God, compared to what it ‘cost’ when ‘He … did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us all …’?50 We speak in foolish terms; but behind the folly there is a meaning that may not have been articulated but has supported us all through our history: the meaning of God’s declaration of the divine love for us, the declaration made by the Father, primarily by the Father, on the cross of Calvary. It has been said that for long centuries Catholics saw Christ as wholly divine and somewhat human, and that some are turning now to a Christ who is wholly human and somewhat divine. If that is the case, I have no doubt that one factor in this groping is the inability to see any meaning in the death on the cross of one who is wholly divine. It is precisely to counter that trend that Lonergan would see in Calvary the meaning I described, and thus he would transpose Nicea to our time: the meaning, not directly of God the Son dying, but of God the Father giving up the Son in declaration of the divine love for us.51

49 Genesis 22:12. 50 Romans 8:32. 51 We should not think of the Father arbitrarily sending the Son to death for merely extrinsic reasons; rather the way of death was chosen because of its intrinsic relation to our salvation. Why that should be is a large further question: see Bernard Lonergan, De Verbo Incarnato, Pars V: ‘De Redemptione.’

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Let me conclude this list of samples of the new light on old doctrines that comes from our exercise in rethinking theology. I have suggested that an integral view of God-with-us will result in a new view of the role of the Spirit in world religions. I also suggest that it will result in a new sense of what redemption by one who is wholly divine means to us. It can hardly be expected that it will not result also in some new emphasis or perspective or aspect of the Father’s role among us. I believe that there is such a consequence, and that it regards the resurrection. This will be my third and final sample. The argument is that the element of dark night before the infinite mystery of God has been obscured by pretty pictures of the resurrection. Relying on these pretty pictures, we first of all forget that ‘while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord.’52 Worse, however, we do not even advert to the absence – more fundamental for the Christian life – of God the Father, the absence of understanding before the great and awesome mystery of the Infinite, the Eternal, the Source of all divinity. Our rethinking, then, has implications for the doctrine of the resurrection. We are forced to remember that when we have lived out our dark night and passed through the dark exit, we enter into a life that cannot be imagined in any picture, however pretty. Already in this present state our life is one that ‘is hidden with Christ in God,’53 and ‘what we will be has not yet been revealed.’54 The inexplicable silence of those who have gone before us should alert us to the infinite distance that separates our present life from the life to come. As there is no proportion between the nothingness from which we came and the being we enjoy in the present life, so there is no proportion between our natural being and the divine life that is to be ours. Realized eschatology, despite all its benefits, and despite the truth it can appeal to in the Spirit as ‘pledge that we shall enter upon our heritage,’55 has obscured the complementary truth of the distance between the pledge and its fulfillment. I am not therefore impressed by the critiques I have been hearing or reading for thirty odd years on the deficiencies in Lonergan’s theology of the resurrection. Given his lifelong preoccupation with the most

52 53 54 55

2 Corinthians 5:6. Colossians 3:3. 1 John 3:2. Ephesians 1:14 (NEB).

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fundamental questions of theology, it occurs to me to ask whether his theology on this point too might be somewhat deeper than his critics have suspected, to wonder whether he might be onto something in our tradition that many of us have missed. It is not that he had developed a full theology of the resurrection. But as I see it, his work on one chief element in it, the beatific vision,56 has made him more aware of the mystery of life beyond the grave; and he has refused, in the absence of a clear dogma on what the risen life consists in, to substitute myth for the mystery. In my view we badly need a dogma on the resurrection, though it is also my view that the church is not yet ready to declare precisely what her faith is in this area. The first part of that statement is bound to raise the hackles of those who attend only to the divisive effect of dogma and ignore its unitive effect, so I should explain. We need a dogma, as the church in the fourth century needed a dogma on who and what Christ was. He had forty-two titles in the scriptures, according to one count;57 and yet only slowly, through the dialectic and contradictions of two centuries, through deviation to extremes and new search for the center, through the painful and purifying process of learning, did the church find an expression that was judged fundamental to her life and true to her tradition. The declaration of Nicea, that the Son was God in the same sense as the

56 In his years at the College of the Immaculate Conception in Montreal, Lonergan more than once taught courses that involved the doctrine of the beatific vision. Notes for these are extant in the Archives at the Lonergan Research Institute. More accessible are his Christology manuals with their theses on Christ’s beatific vision; but notice a development on this point from the De constitutione Christi of 1956 [now available with Latin and English facing pages in Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 7, as The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ] to the De Verbo Incarnato of 1964. [The ‘development’ to which Crowe refers is not some shift in Lonergan’s basic stance regarding the beatific knowledge itself that is possessed by Christ as human. Rather, it is the emergence of Lonergan’s effort to provide a detailed account of the relation between this ‘ineffable’ beatific knowledge and the ‘effable’ historical knowledge that also is possessed by Christ as human. For a rich and nuanced elucidation and extension of this development, see Charles Hefling, ‘Another Perhaps Permanently Valid Achievement: Lonergan on Christ’s (Self-) Knowledge,’ Lonergan Workshop 20 (2008) 127–64. See also Hefling, ‘Revelation and/ or Insight,’ in John Liptay and David Liptay, eds, The Importance of Insight (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007) 97–115. (Ed.)] 57 Vincent Taylor, The Names of Jesus (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1953).

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Father is God (Prestige’s way of putting it),58 did indeed separate the Arians from the church; but it united those who believed the Nicene dogma. There is a parallel groping and a parallel need today for our belief in the resurrection. A dogma on the question would certainly be divisive, but that has to be. What we believe about Christ is all-important, is in large measure constitutive, for our identity as Christians. I do not favor persecuting the Arians: let them live in peace with the beliefs they no doubt sincerely hold. But their beliefs are not our beliefs, and we are not ourselves, we are not the church of our forebears, without our belief in the divinity of Christ. In the same way, we are not the church of the first century without a stated belief in the resurrection. Dogma is assuredly divisive, separating those who reject it from those who do not; but it is just as assuredly unitive for those who accept it. Having said that, I add immediately that we are not yet ready to declare a dogma on the resurrection. I say this on the same ground that, in my view, leads so many today to an ambivalent attitude toward Nicea, namely, that we don’t know what we mean by truth or how we arrive at it. Hence we don’t know what to do with dogma; we don’t know how to handle the truth there is in scripture, or how to justify its transposition from scripture to the councils; and in particular we don’t know how to formulate our faith in the resurrection. In all these areas we are a learning church, and the first thing the learning church has to learn is our need to learn. Then we may be ready for a new dogma. I have given some samples of the direction thinking may take with the importing into theology of Lonergan’s organon and categories: one sample, the liturgy, from the area of practice; three samples from the area of doctrinal expression. They are only samples. More important than any sample is the general idea of an integral view of God-with-us, a view that is impossible unless we hold that the Spirit’s presence among us is as really real as that of the Son, and unless we hold that the divine self-donation of the Father is as important as the sending of Son and Spirit for a full theology of the Three among us. Finally, I have written merely as a theologian. What that means I may best describe by narrating a dream I had while I was writing. In this dream I was being urged to go out on stage, mount the podium, and 58 See George L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1952) 213. [Prestige writes that the question the Council of Nicaea ‘had to settle was whether both the Father and the Son were God in exactly the same sense of the word “God.”’]

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direct the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. We were in the wings of the stage, the orchestra was already tuning up, and there was an emergency: would I not take over? ‘But I know nothing, simply nothing about music.’ ‘Oh, it’s really easy; you can do it.’ ‘But I don’t even know the gestures. What do I do at the end? My God, how will I even know when we have come to the end?’ At this point a merciful Providence woke me up. I never had to direct that piece of music; but I did have to return to my article on the Trinity, with an ignorance infinitely more vast than I would have brought to the podium of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

Chapter 23

Rethinking Eternal Life: Philosophical Notions1

Some years after starting this ‘rethinking’ series, I take the opportunity to recall its purpose.2 It is very simply the purpose set forth by Pope John XXIII in opening the Second Vatican Council. The Council, he said, had not been called to reiterate old dogmas: we do not need a council for that. Rather, the need is to move forward: ‘iter pergentes,’ in the colorless Latin of his curial writers; taking ‘un balzo innanzi,’ a leap forward, in his own more dramatic language. And that forward leap, he said, involves the study of modern methods of research and of the literary forms of modern thought.3 The need discerned by Pope John did not end with the Council but has grown steadily more urgent. So, for thirty years now the church has struggled to suit action to words, and to rethink her old dogmas with modern methods and in modern terms. From that viewpoint the generic purpose of this series coincides with the purpose of all those who heed the prophetic call of Pope John. From another viewpoint the series has its own specific purpose: to explore the work of Bernard Lonergan

1 Previously published as ‘Rethinking Eternal Life: Philosophical Notions from Lonergan,’ Science et esprit 45/1 (1993) 25–39. 2 Previous studies in the series: ‘Rethinking the Religious State: Categories from Lonergan,’ Science et esprit 40/1 (1988) 75–90; ‘Rethinking Moral Judgments: Categories from Lonergan,’ ibid. 40/2 (1988) 137–52; and ‘Rethinking God-with-us: Categories from Lonergan,’ ibid. 41/2 (1989) 167–88. [Reprinted as chapters 20, 21, and 22 of the present volume.] 3 Acta Apostolicae Sedis 54 (1962) 785–95, at 791–92; ibid. 55 (1963) 43–45, at 44. For the relationship of these two talks by Pope John, see Joseph Komonchak, ‘What’s Happening to Doctrine?’ Commonweal 112/15 (1985), pp. 456–59, and his letter, ibid. 112/20 (1985) 654.

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for methods and ideas that may contribute to the desired forward progress. Lonergan’s legacy is not, however, an orchard in which we reach up and pick fruit ready to eat off the trees. It is more like a deep vein of ore that has to be mined, and then my studies may be seen as drilling operations to take samples from the vein. The particular topic of the present essay was suggested by the one preceding it. I had occasion there to touch on the question of Lonergan’s theology of the resurrection, which seems strangely deficient to some of his readers, and on the need – if we are to tap the vein of ore at this point – for a far more thorough study than has yet been attempted of his thought on the matter. I am now taking a preliminary step toward meeting that need. It is only preliminary; for although the question is theological, I prefer to start with some philosophical prolegomena. I am satisfied, in an area so central to our faith, to proceed slowly. My concern, then, is the question of what it could mean philosophically to be, to be alive, to be humanly alive in eternity. For philosophy, of course, the question is hypothetical: Suppose there were eternal life for the human race, how would philosophy understand it? To limit the inquiry even more, I will consider only the metaphysical side. What eternal life might mean to human consciousness therefore remains another question. 1 The Being of Being Alive: ‘Is’ and ‘Being’ Within the limits indicated, my first concern is the being of being alive. Thomas often quoted Aristotle to the effect that to be alive is the very being of living things: vivere viventibus est esse.4 He would repeat this on his own, adding a distinction: sometimes to be alive means the being itself of the living thing, and this pertains to the essence of the soul, which is the principle of being for the living thing; and sometimes it means the functioning (operatio) of the living thing.5 So we must speak of being, which is one of the most fundamental notions of human thought – but also one of the most elusive. It is easy to neglect the question of being. It is particularly easy to do so in the

4 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, q. 18, a. 2, sed contra, and passim. 5 Ibid. 1-2, q. 56, a. 1 ad 1m: ‘… vivere dupliciter sumitur. Quandoque enim dicitur vivere ipsum esse viventis: et sic pertinet ad essentiam animae, quae est viventi essendi principium. Alio modo vivere dicitur operatio viventis: et sic virtute recte vivitur, inquantum per eam aliquis recte operatur.’

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theology of the resurrection, where we have so many beautiful narratives supplied by the early tradition, narratives that feed the piety and prayer of most of us far better than a dissertation on being could. Still, if we want to form a clear idea of what it is to be alive, it seems essential to have some clarity on what it is to be, and in particular on what it is to be in the state that ‘follows’ our death. Lonergan’s position will be much more intelligible if we realize that he does not begin with the term ‘being,’ which is used only by philosophers and a few theologians, but with the term ‘is,’ which all of us use over and over and over, every day of our lives. After all, it is only in chapter 12 of Insight that he comes to the notion of being. That chapter was preceded by a chapter on self-affirmation (where the predicate of ‘I am a knower’ must not obscure the existence-claim of ‘I am’), and both chapters were preceded by a long study of ‘is’ and the way we reach it and are able to utter it rationally.6 The fact is, there is a metaphysics latent in our positing of ‘is’ – latent not in a dictionary meaning of the word, and not in the implications of a concept, but latent in the very use of the word and the implications of that usage.7 We have words to refer to what we experience, and words to refer to what we understand. But ‘is’ is quite different, and the criteria for its proper use are quite different: there is no way of pointing to the component of things that ontologically corresponds to its utterance. We can point to something red to show the meaning of ‘red,’ and we can diagram a triangle and point to the data in which we understand triangularity. But we cannot point to the ‘is’ of ‘Something is’: when we use that word we are willy-nilly into metaphysics. An irony of the many assertions of the invalidity of metaphysics is the metaphysics latent in those very assertions. 2 The Double Aspect of ‘Is’ Coming, then, to the present question, I turn to unpublished notes on the knowledge and will of God that Lonergan provided for a course he gave in 1950 at Regis College, Toronto. Here we find a short section

6 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Chapter 12 is on the notion of being, chapter 11 on self-affirmation, chapters 9 and 10 on judgment, and chapters 1–8 on illustrations of insight preparing for the actual judgment made in chapter 11. 7 Ibid. 416.

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called ‘A comparison of eternal being and temporal.’8 It begins with the Thomist doctrine that nothing is past or future to God, but all things are present in simultaneous being – in their simul esse, as the Latin has it, and it will avoid unnecessary problems if we keep that Latin tag as a kind of fixed technical term of reference, with a meaning to be distinguished from that of contemporaneity. Just what does the expression ‘simul esse’ mean? ‘Is,’ Lonergan tells us, means two things. Basically and always it means being and truth, and in this sense it does not differ from ‘was’ or ‘will be.’ But it also connotes a comparison between the time of the object and the time of the one making a judgment on the object, and in this sense ‘is’ does differ from ‘was’ and ‘will be.’ Now in temporal beings to have been, to be, and to be going to be are really different. The immediate seat of the difference is in the ‘when’ of a thing, its quando; but the ‘when’ is such as to affect also the ‘being’ of the thing. For before a temporal being is, it was not; after it has been, it is not; and while it is, its ‘to be’ is perpetually passing into ‘to have been,’ and its ‘to be going to be’ into ‘to be.’ But in eternal being to have been, to be, and to be going to be are the same. Eternity is said to be altogether and at once. It is simultaneous entirety, a life that is tota simul – another Latin term it will be convenient to keep for a fixed term of reference. There are two ways, then, to compare beings. One way applies to all things that are, insofar as they are; while the other way applies only to temporal beings insofar as their being is limited to a particular time that is the same or different for two beings. Alexander’s horse was not simul with Caesar’s, for they were at different times; but each was simul with the sun, though when the sun had esse simul with Alexander’s horse its esse simul with Caesar’s horse was still in the future. But God has esse simul with both horses, and without the limitation to which the sun was subject; for to have been, to be, and to be going to be are the same in God, who does not exist in time. Lonergan concludes that simul esse is a property of being: to be simul follows from what philosophers call the ratio of being (sequitur ipsam rationem entis), except when the accident of a ‘when’ intervenes to limit the simultaneity. God is not limited in that way and therefore God is

8 Bernard Lonergan, De scientia atque voluntate Dei, c. 3: ‘De comparatione entis aeterni et temporalis.’ [These unpublished notes have been re-edited by Crowe himself, assisted by Conn O’Donovan and Giovanni Sala, and may be consulted at the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto.]

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simul with all things even though these, when compared with one another, are not simul in time. To put it another way, it is commonly held that time contains all things; but a careful philosopher will say rather that being contains time as a part of being, namely, the accidental being of ‘when.’ In virtue of their being, therefore, beings are simul except where the limitation of time, their quando, interferes with such simultaneity. And of course, since operation corresponds to being, it follows that God’s knowing and willing, like God’s being, are simul with all things. Thus far Lonergan, in almost literal translation. No doubt he derived the basic idea in this doctrine from Thomas Aquinas, but he seems to have carried it a step beyond the Thomist context. Perhaps it will be possible for us in turn to carry Lonergan’s thought a step further and apply it in a context other than the one in which he wrote. To that end I will consider the timeless and eternal aspects of the being of things, then human being in its timeless and eternal aspects, and finally the ‘after’ life. Let us take these headings in order. 3 The ‘Is’ in Eternity of the Things That Are There is no need to dwell here on the temporal use of ‘is.’ It is familiar to all who have gone to primary school, learned the grammar of tenses, and speak accordingly: ‘Today is Thursday, tomorrow will be Friday.’ But whether or not they realize it, there is a metaphysics latent in their usage, a metaphysics deriving ultimately not from the accepted meanings of words, but from the natural dynamism of intelligence and reasonableness toward ‘is,’ and from the non-empirical character of that ‘is.’ This amounts to saying that, even on the basis of a simple analysis of everyday usage, ‘is’ has a timeless aspect. But Christian philosophy goes further. A thing not only ‘is’ with a timeless aspect, it also is present to God in God’s eternity. ‘To be’ for a theist has the consequent and additional meanings of ‘to be present to God,’ ‘to be simul with the divine now,’ ‘to be in eternity,’ and ‘to receive being from the divine creative act.’ Further, the timeless aspect of ‘to be,’ which lies within the range of human reflective understanding, offers an excellent analogy for ‘to be in eternity, simul with the divine now,’ which lies outside that range. We are able, then, without any blind leap into the dark, not only to find in the everyday temporal ‘is’ a timeless aspect and the reality of a

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universe of being that transcends time, but also to take the further step of considering the presence to God of all things that are, past, present, and future. Caesar’s horse is as real, as really present to God in the divine eternal ‘now,’ as is anything existing in this temporal now of November 5, 1992, in which I write. To God the Israelites ‘are’ fleeing from Egypt, Jesus and the disciples ‘are’ entering the upper room, Thomas Aquinas ‘is’ composing his Summa theologiae, Columbus ‘is’ sighting land in the West Indies. All these beings and events ‘are’; they are in the sense of forming part of the total four-dimensional universe of material being, and even more in the sense of being present to God in the divine eternity; they ‘are’ and ‘are present’ to God just as much as I am as I write this, and just as much as you are as you read it. A simple reflection on the absurdity, indeed the unconscious arrogance, of the opposite view will bring this home to us. We tend to think of our favored position of being here and now, as compared with the situation of our disadvantaged ancestors who have vanished from the scene: we are, while they, the poor unfortunates, are not. But what particular claim on God has our present reality that makes it superior to what we are pleased to call the past reality of former generations? Am I more real to God than my grandparents because I live in 1992 and they lived in 1892? That would be absurd. The year 1892 with all that belongs to it is just as real to God ‘now,’ just as present to God in the divine eternal ‘now,’ just as much the object ‘now’ of a divinely operating act of creation, as is the year 1992; and so is the year 1274, the year 33, or some year centuries before Christ. What makes us hesitate over a truth so obvious to the theist metaphysician is the first and obvious aspect of that everyday word ‘is’: namely, the temporal aspect that is so natural and familiar that we have difficulty breaking away from it. Under that aspect I ‘am’ but Thomas Aquinas ‘is not’: we can say only that he ‘was.’ But which is the more basic: the temporal aspect of being, or that which is a property of being as such and belongs to the very ratio of being? Or, to take the theist step and put the question another way, which is the more valid criterion of the reality of a thing, its presence to me, or its presence to God in the divine eternity? It seems to me there is clear truth in saying that Moses, Thomas Aquinas, and Columbus all ‘are’ in the basic meaning of the word. But of course the basic meaning is not the obvious meaning. It underlies the temporal meaning of daily discourse, but because it is not obvious we cannot use the word ‘is’ for Moses, Thomas, and Columbus without

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some explanation – or after explanation, without some symbolic way of denoting the difference of this basic use from the obvious use. We could speak of ‘is-A’ for the real presence of a thing to God in eternity, and ‘is-B’ for the temporal aspect in which a thing is present to other temporal things that have the same here and now; or perhaps we could use ‘IS’ and ‘is,’ or think up still other pairs of expressions. They are apt to be awkward as forms of speech, and some of them appear to the eye but not to the ear; nonetheless, we do need at least two brief but related forms of expression. I say ‘at least two,’ for we already have three meanings of ‘is’: the temporal meaning, the meaning that pertains to the ratio of being, and the meaning of being present to God. For our own dictionary distinction of the first two meanings I would favor saying of a thing that it ‘is’ when we refer to its existence in its temporal now, and saying that a thing ‘belongs to the universe of being’ when we prescind from its temporality and refer to its being in that radical sense that does not say whether its being is temporally past or present or future, the radical sense that regards rather its convertibility with reality and truth. In this sense we will not say that Moses, Thomas Aquinas, and Columbus ‘are,’ but we will say that they ‘belong equally with us to the universe of being.’ (Of course, ‘belong’ is also a verb in the present tense; but at least attention is removed from the verb and its immediate suggestion of a temporal reference, and it settles instead on the atemporal noun ‘universe of being’.) We cannot, however, repeat this dictionary meaning with every use of the verb ‘to be.’ Hence, for practical purposes in this essay, if the context does not suffice, I will simply add quotation marks to denote that radical sense. I do not therefore say that Moses, Thomas Aquinas, and Columbus are in their temporal aspect, but I will say that they ‘are’ in their timeless aspect. Furthermore, I will extend this usage of ‘are’ to the presence of things to God in eternity; but generally the context will differentiate these two uses of ‘are’: belonging to the universe of being, and being in the presence of God. So much, I think, is in direct line with Thomas, implicit in his thinking, with an analogous use sometimes emerging explicitly – as when he attributes a kind of eternity to the matter underlying changing forms, and says that in this sense ‘Omnes creaturae Dei secundum aliquid in aeternum perseverant.’9 But we have a certain advantage over Thomas 9 Summa theologiae 1, q. 65, a. 1, ad 1m [‘All God’s creatures survive forever in some way’].

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in this question: the concept of four-dimensional reality which I mentioned earlier, and which I would invoke now for further light on is and being. In this concept, space-time is a unity of four dimensions: length, width, height, and duration in time. In Newtonian theory, space and time were separable into two elements; but later theory speaks of a space-time continuum in which Newtonian separation is not possible in any absolute sense. In consequence, what Thomas could attribute to prime matter, a very inferior component of being, we can attribute to the whole of material creation, and thus arrive at another sense in which we say that a thing is. Perhaps we should pause here for an overview of these multiplying senses. There is (1) the everyday use of ‘is,’ which has a double aspect: that of a temporal reference and that of convertibility with truth and reality. Then there is (2) the use in which, while not fully escaping the world of time, we in some measure overcome it in affirming a fourdimensional world that includes all time as readily as it includes all space. And finally there is (3) the use in which the radical independence of time (and space) that is a property of being is utilized to think of the presence of all creation to the eternal ‘now’ of God. A similar listing can be made of the way the accident ‘when’ affects the being of a creature. (1) Alexander’s horse was limited to a certain ‘when’ in temporal history; so was Caesar’s; and the two ‘whens’ differ. But (2) there is a measure of escape from this limitation in a four-dimensional view of the universe of material being in which the limits of a particular ‘when’ are overcome by the summation of every ‘when’ into a total universe. And (3) there is the full escape possible to creatures on being taken into God’s eternity and sharing in it as they share in God’s being: in that state Alexander and Caesar, whatever be the case for their horses, escape the limiting ‘whens’ that separated them by more than two centuries on earth. But let us return to the present point, which is simply the advantage over Thomas given us by the modern four-dimensional view of the material universe. This view helps us understand both the basic sense of ‘is’ and also its application to our being present in the eternal ‘now’ of God. For while remaining within the limits of human understanding it goes beyond the obvious everyday sense of the word and points toward the sense which is the specialty of metaphysicians; but then – going further still – it points beyond that toward the sense that human understanding cannot attain, namely, our being present to God in eternity.

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As long as we continue to think of our universe as constituted by a reality of just three dimensions, we cannot say that it exists and is; some of it exists and is, but a great part of it was and is no longer. But we can say that our four-dimensional universe exists and is, if time is included as one of its dimensions. Thus, in summating every instant of time in an integral view, and prescinding from the differences of past, present, and future, the four-dimensional being of the universe provides an image of an eternal ‘now.’ It is assimilated on one side to the being this word processor has here and now; and it is assimilated on the other side to the being Moses, Thomas, and Columbus have as present to the eternal God. It gives a second analogy for eternal being, to be added to our first analogy of the basic aspect of ‘is.’ 4 The ‘Is’ in Eternity of Human Being Now this has special implications for human ‘being,’ for the function of the ‘soul’ in human being, and for the ‘reanimation’ that we believe in faith, and suppose here philosophically, to occur in the resurrection. We will come to the latter in due course, when we talk of the ‘after’ life; but I think it may be worth our while, in this obscure area of human thought, to repeat for human being the points already made for beings in general. For what can be said in general of the things that are can be said also of us. In particular, not just the universe but we too are what we are as four-dimensional, in the totality of our temporal existence from the first moment of being in this life to the last. This will have significant implications for our being in eternity. So let us revert to the metaphysics of  everyday conversation, apply it to ourselves, and extend it to a metaphysics of eternal life. For simplicity’s sake I will speak of ‘my’ being, and later of ‘my’ life, instead of using ‘human’ being and ‘human’ life in the abstract, or using ‘human beings’ and ‘human lives’ in the plural. The metaphysics, then, of my life ‘here on earth’ and ‘in time,’ gives us two aspects of a single I am. There is the familiar aspect of I am in which the present tense of the verb is an intrinsic part of my self-affirmation. This aspect refers to my being here and now in this present moment; and continuing the usage I started with ‘is,’ I will say without quotation marks that in this aspect I am, as contrasted with my nonbeing a century ago when I was not. But there is also the less familiar aspect in which ‘I am’ applies also a century ago, for it means only that I belong to the universe of being extending over all centuries.

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Next, there is the sense, also less familiar except to philosophers and perhaps scientists, in which my total existence includes my being over time. For, since the universe of being is four-dimensional, so too the micro-universe of ‘me’ is four-dimensional and situates me in the total four-dimensional universe of being. Now this way of thinking, just as it mediates between Lonergan’s first and second aspects of ‘is,’ so also it mediates between the two aspects of ‘am’: the radical sense in which I say that I ‘am’ (being convertible with truth and reality) and the familiar sense in which I say that I am (though I was not last century). Finally, there is the sense in which I am present with all of creation to the eternal God. This last is not another act of human existence, as if I had one existence here on earth, and another before the eternal God. I ‘am’ in one act of existence, but the same existence that for me is spread out over innumerable moments in time is all one before God. This is an aspect in which ‘I am’ is true of the present moment, but equally true of every past moment, and potentially true of every future moment of my temporal existence. Under this aspect I can say I ‘am’ in the eternity of God. I see this aspect, even more than the four-dimensional view, as summating the totality of my being, from my first moment to my last. Whereas in the first aspect ‘I am’ and ‘I was’ exclude one another (for the present is not the past), the other aspect belongs equally to both and can be affirmed simultaneously of both. Lovers say ‘Time stood still’; but metaphysicians say ‘The scattered moments of time are summated in relation to the eternal now of God.’ In this aspect ‘I am’ participates in the infinite and eternal ‘I AM’ of God. I not only participate in the being of God, I am present to God. More important, God – creating, sustaining, affirming, loving – is present to me. Since this aspect is a summation into a totality, the totality too is present in its totality to God. It is ‘eternally’ present, in an eternity that is analogous to the eternity of God; and it is imaged in the timelessness of what belongs to the universe of being, of what cannot be dislodged from the universe of being but is part of the granite mountains of being. As I participate in the being of God, so I participate in God’s eternity. Negatively, there is the infinite abyss of nothingness, beyond even the ‘regio dissimilitudinis’ of which the church fathers spoke.10 I do not belong to that abyss but to the realm of being. In eternity ‘I am’ is incompatible with my not being.

10 There is an extensive literature on this phrase of Plato. See, for example, Pierre Courcelle, ‘Tradition néo-platonicienne et traditions chrétiennes de la “Région de dissemblance” (Platon, Politique 273d),’ Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 24 (32ème année, 1957) 5–33.

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Moreover, here comes into play the principle that ‘is’ means simul esse except when limited by the accident of a ‘when.’ Remove that limiting ‘when’ altogether, and our being is assimilated to God’s. My first and last moments in time are simultaneous with one another in this aspect of their being – not contemporary with one another, for ‘contemporary’ means ‘together in time,’ but simultaneous – because each is simultaneous with the being of God, each ‘is’ in a presence to God that excludes their not-being. Again, that simul esse means that I ‘am’ together with all else that ‘is’ in that eternity: we all ‘are’ simultaneously, by the mere removal of the accident of a ‘when.’ However, we must avoid statements such as ‘When Columbus sailed, I am’; for ‘When Columbus sailed’ puts him in a temporal context. Much more, of course, will we avoid applying to ourselves statements such as ‘Before Abraham was, I am.’ We must remember too that that accident of a ‘when’ is fully removed only through our presence to God, and that this is the basic factor ontologically. We ‘are’ as sharing in the divine being; we ‘are eternally’ as sharing in the divine eternity; we are together in a simul esse because the ‘when’ that limited each of us, dividing us in time from one another, is removed in our sharing of the divine eternity. There is an old objection to the distinction of persons in the Trinity. It says that things identical with the same thing are identical with one another. It is clarifying to adapt that axiom here and ask whether things that are simul with the same thing are simul with one another. The answer is ‘yes,’ but only if simul is understood in the same sense in both parts of the assertion. Simul means having the same now, and so the ‘now’ must be understood in the same sense throughout. Caesar’s now is temporal, God’s is eternal, and they are simul only because God’s now includes all temporal ones. The same can be said of my now and God’s. But that does not make my now and Caesar’s simul. The case is different if the temporal when of both my now and Caesar’s is removed, as is the case in our participation in the divine eternity: insofar as my now and Caesar’s are both assimilated to God’s, they are simul with one another. 5 The ‘Is’ of the ‘After’ Life If now we are to speak of death and the ‘after’ life, and ask what ‘reanimation’ means and what meaning, if any, that word ‘after’ holds when time is no more, we have to consider what ‘soul’ is, what its function, how we are to understand its relation to ‘body’ in life and in death.

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Lonergan can take us a few steps beyond the ordinary Scholastic notion, which conceives soul as the form of matter in vegetative, animal, or human beings. First, as soul is the intelligible component of all living things, so soul is the intelligible component in what I am. As he wrote back in 1946: Aristotle’s basic thesis was the objective reality of what is known by understanding … When, then, Aristotle calls the soul a logos, he is stating his highly original position, not indeed with the full accuracy which his thought alone made possible, but in a generic fashion which suited his immediate purpose; and it is that generic issue that remains the capital issue, for the denial of soul today is really the denial of the objectivity of the intelligible, the denial that understanding, knowing a cause, is knowing anything real.11

The intelligible, then, not only is understood and affirmed cognitionally: ontologically it is. It may readily be granted that what is affirmed to be, also is; for that is the meaning of affirmation. Lonergan’s point, however, is the affirmability of the intelligible. Next, intelligibility and the intelligible are found in the totality that I am. We do not find it by dividing – as when we think of the soul ‘leaving’ the body – but by summating: we search for the central, uniting intelligibility of all the aspects exhibited by this flesh and these bones (‘all the conjugates,’ in Lonergan’s terminology).12 Further, this summation is not just a summation of present conjugates. Our human intelligibility is the intelligibility of a four-dimensional reality, the intelligibility of my whole temporal life. Soul is therefore the form of that four-dimensional reality: it is not just the form of my present reality, it is the form of my reality throughout time. When, therefore, we think of the ‘separated’ soul as having a relation to the ‘separated’ body, or as a Thomist would prefer, a relation to particular prime matter, materia designata, we must allow the ‘designation’ to sweep over time from the first moment of ensoulment to the last. ‘Separation,’ however, will not be a key category in the notion of death and resurrection that I will presently set forth; rather, it is a

11 Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (1997) 33–34. [Crowe’s reference to the year 1946 is a reference to the first publication of the first Verbum article in Theological Studies.] 12 Insight (1992) 102–105. Unified in the concept of the ‘thing,’ 270–75.

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feature of our life on earth. The point is worth amplifying. There is a real separation of the soul in time from our past reality and from our future reality. ‘Separation’ is a built-in deficiency of our being in time, part of the limitation introduced by our quando. At this moment my soul is ‘separated’ from all I was in the past and all I will be in the rest of my temporal life – I mean ontologically separated, for there is of course the intentional union of memory of the past and anticipation of the future. If dying is thought of as separation, then I am dying throughout life. Equally, if resurrection is thought of as a uniting, then I am rising throughout life, as my soul is united to the emerging reality of the next moment. In a four-dimensional view, however, to some extent we overcome this separation. In other words, to the traditional static view of metaphysics we add the dynamic: this central, uniting, intelligible form plays its role through time and in a developmental function. There is an intelligibility in my history as well as in my anatomical structure. Moreover, it is an intelligibility in all of my history: in my biological, psychic, intellectual history, and in any and every other aspect of my history, save for the special case of the unintelligibility of sin. As cosmologists think of a four-dimensional universe, so we must think of a single human intelligibility of four dimensions. As geneticists think of a developing organic life, so we must think of a single intelligibility in our development throughout life. That intelligibility ontologically is soul. This is so much a part of Lonergan’s thinking that in his 1951 lectures ‘Intelligence and Reality’ he listed nine metaphysical elements. In addition to the usual six – the potency, form, and act of the conjugates, and the central potency, form, and act that unite the conjugates – there are also the potency, form, and act of a universe in which genera and species are subject to emergent probability.13 Similarly, we may say, besides the intelligibility of each of my myriad conjugates, and the intelligibility of my central form (soul) uniting those conjugates here and now, there is the function of my central form (soul) in providing a genetic unity in development over time. 13 Notes for the course ‘Intelligence and Reality’ given at the Thomas More Institute, Montreal, 1950–51, p. 24. [The Notes may be consulted at the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto.] The three extra metaphysical elements are group potency, form, act. Group form is emergent probability; group act is the functioning of a world order through emergent probability; and group potency is the minimum set of substantial and conjugate potencies, forms, and acts that must be postulated to account for functioning through emergent probability.

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What the four-dimensional view unifies only to some extent, our view of being with God in eternity unifies in full perfection. We are often urged to see our existence in time sub specie aeternitatis, and this can be transferred analogously to a view of our being with God in the divine eternity and sharing in the divine eternity. But that being with God is not just a view. It is a fact: I am, I exist, I live in God’s eternity. So what happens in death? We must, if we would understand the resurrection, be as clear as possible on this question. Putting together Lonergan’s thought on being, on the soul, on the dynamic metaphysics of a developing human being,14 I would say that death is not only a matter of the soul ‘leaving’ this body (understand ‘body’ regularly here as materia designata), but also and much more a matter of its being released from the limits inherent in the present state of this body, to assume its complete role as the intelligible form of the total four-dimensional matter that is my potency to be human and to exist. It is traditional doctrine that in the resurrection my ‘soul’ is ‘reunited’ not to any body whatever, but to my own body. Then for a static metaphysics the question arises of which body will be animated. Will it be the one I had on dying, the one I had on being born, or one somewhere in between? If, however, in a dynamic metaphysics we think of a developing four-dimensional reality, we easily think of soul as limited in temporal life to a role in a temporal now; and just as easily we think of soul escaping that limitation in death and being given unhampered freedom to exercise its unifying, governing, creative role over the whole four-dimensional reality. There is an intelligible unity extending over all the time between pre-embryonic material and corrupting corpse, and it is this unity that comes alive in the new ‘risen’ life. Death and resurrection can be conceived, then, not as the soul’s leaving and reentering the body, but as its escape from temporal limitations, and an expansion of its life to a share in the simultaneous totality that every temporal life has in its presence to God. This accords with, and adds a new dimension to, the view of Boethius that eternity is the ‘interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio.’15 There is the metaphysical possibility of my being present to my whole life, to the totality that in ‘time’ was spread out but now in eternal life is ‘tota simul.’

14 I brought some of these themes together in another context in ‘The Life of the Unborn: Notions from Bernard Lonergan.’ See Appropriating the Lonergan Idea 360–69. 15 Boethius is quoted passim by Thomas; see Summa theologiae 1, q. 10, a. 1 [‘complete possession, simultaneous and perfect, of life without end’].

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The ‘is’ of the ‘after’ life can now be handled with great dispatch. It is standard Thomist doctrine that ‘esse’ is not of itself limited, that it is the potency of essence that limits the act of existence, and that the various grades of being are a function of the form that with prime matter constitutes the essence. When soul, therefore, is understood in the static moment of a limited here and now, the ‘is’ of existence has to be given a similar limitation. But when soul is understood as the form of a dynamic, developing four-dimensional reality in its total being, the ‘is’ of human existence is released from that limitation in a transtemporal expansion that is part of our eternal life with God. The metaphysics of eternal life is therefore in continuity with the metaphysics of temporal life. The soul is the intelligible form of this flesh, these bones, but not simply their form in the here and now. Rather, it is their form in their totality over time, held together imperfectly in their four-dimensional unity here, held together fully in the ‘after’ life by their simul esse with God and all creation, once time is no longer a limiting factor. One more of the many questions that arise must be given brief mention here: the meaning of the word ‘after’ in this context. Toward the beginning of my essay, I spoke of the state that ‘follows’ our death. The quotation marks were meant to indicate the ambiguity of the word ‘follows,’ and that same ambiguity attends our use of the word ‘after.’ Of course it has the everyday meaning for us who remain as survivors: ‘After A’s funeral, we opened the will …’ The question, however, is whether it has any meaning for A in the simul esse that all creation has with God. From the viewpoint of metaphysics the answer is parallel to what we have said about ‘is.’ Since being (and therefore ‘is’) of itself transcends time and every quando, and since our being is most really real in its presence to God, from that viewpoint the word ‘after’ in its temporal sense would disappear from the vocabulary of the blessed, and it would remain only insofar as our temporal being remains. This, however, is the limited approach of metaphysics. Perhaps something more positive could be said from the viewpoint of intentional consciousness, something that I have entirely omitted from consideration here. I have limited this discussion of eternal life to topics on which, I think, philosophy has something to say; within philosophy I have limited it to metaphysical topics; and within metaphysics I have limited it to the question of being. But philosophy has its existential side, and so

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I wish in conclusion to point to some of the existential consequences of this exercise in the metaphysics of eternal life. One consequence is simple, obvious, and immediate: the heightened responsibility I bear with the realization that my every action has its eternal aspect, that every idle word and every passing thought become part of the granite mountains of the universe of being, that they do not vanish into the past but remain and are in eternity. If we must use the language of time (and it is hard to avoid it), the familiar expression that ‘our good works go before us,’ that they are sent ahead and stored up for our ‘future,’ is closer to the truth than the view that they vanish into the past. But it is most accurate to realize that they simply ‘are’ and that with every moment we are building eternal reality, adding another brick to our house of being. In daily converse we forgive and try to forget, but the universe of being cannot forget. What others have mercifully ‘forgotten’ has entered the storehouse of being: it forever ‘is,’ and in every ‘now’ of temporal existence we are responsibly (or irresponsibly) adding to that storehouse of being. Another consequence is a heightening of the lesson of acceptance. For now we must accept everything. Nothing is got rid of, swept under the carpet, consigned to oblivion. It all is, and I have eternally to accept its eternal reality. Not only must I accept the universe: much more to the point, I must accept myself as I am in the total four-dimensional reality that cannot now be changed. The ancient wisdom of the Greeks was expressed at Delphi in the precept ‘Know thyself.’ The wisdom of our times, gained through long study of our psychological depths, would add ‘Accept thyself – and the universe.’ What Lonergan might add to that is a keener sense of the present reality of the whole universe of being. There are further consequences in the double attitude we have toward our past: repressing the displeasing, clinging to what is dear to us. I think of the enormous energy we expend in our temporal life concealing our past from others – and from ourselves. I think of the agony of remembrance, the fierce inner (and outer) activity we engage in to repress the memory. But I think also of our grief at the death of our dear ones, of our efforts to make them in some degree immortal (keepsakes, pictures, letters), desperate efforts to escape the limits of time and history, to make that to be ‘not past’ in time which truly ‘is past’ in time – efforts sometimes carried to the point of pathological hallucinations. I need not dwell on the therapy the ‘philosophy’ of eternal life that I have sketched may bring to these conflicting attitudes.

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But what philosophy may have to say, however true and therapeutic, can be hardly more than a shadow of what revelation may teach us. This article remains therefore in the area of prolegomena to a theology of eternal life, and for the more particular purposes of my research just a preliminary step to a study of what Lonergan might contribute to the question.16

16 I am greatly indebted to Robert Croken, Robert Doran, and Michael Vertin for reading this article in typescript and alerting me to numerous deficiencies. I hope I have managed to eliminate at least some of the latter.

Chapter 24

Rethinking Eternal Life: Theological Notions1

In the previous essay I approached the question of eternal life through a study of philosophical notions in the work of Bernard Lonergan2 – notions that, on the hypothesis (as philosophy would consider it) of eternal life, might give a glimmer of understanding of what that life could be. But of course the question is theological through and through, so the most important aspect remains to be studied. Further, even on the philosophical level, I was concerned mainly with a metaphysics of being; and I prescinded from the conscious aspect. That aspect could hardly be studied in any case except in relation to the theology of the immediate knowledge of God, so the omission was justified. But any integral theology of eternal life would have to include the consciousness of the blessed, so even the fragment of theology that is offered here must take account of it. Let me underscore that the present essay is indeed but a fragment of theology. The range of inquiry, as in the philosophical preliminary, is severely limited. A major restriction is the omission of the role of love: I speak of cognitional activity only. Even then I narrow down the question to the context of the previous article, where my concern was the reality before God of whatever ‘is’ in the most basic sense of that word. But to be in human fashion means self-appropriation, and especially cognitional self-appropriation. Now the Catholic tradition speaks of the ‘beatific vision’ enjoyed by the blessed in the next world: that is the 1 Previously published as ‘Rethinking Eternal Life: Theological Notions from Lonergan,’ Science et esprit 45/2 (1993)145–59. 2 ‘Rethinking Eternal Life: Philosophical Notions from Lonergan,’ Science et esprit 45/1 (1993) 25–39. [Reprinted as chapter 23 of the present volume.]

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overwhelming element, and therefore the supposition of any theology of eternal life. And it is here that my question arises: What is the relationship between the self-knowledge of the blessed and their immediate knowledge of God? For besides the life and knowledge in which we see God face to face and know as we are known,3 there is the life and knowledge of our little seventy-year span of life on earth, present to us moment by moment during those seventy years, present to the blessed in one single total act insofar as they share in the divine eternity and the tota simul of the divine knowledge. Now there has to be some communication between immediate knowledge of God and those two modes of selfknowledge in the blessed. It is this communication that is the focus of the present study. My procedure remains what it was when I began this series, to draw on notions from the work of Bernard Lonergan.4 How much his thought may contribute to the church’s progress in her understanding of eternal life is another question, to be answered in the slow evaluation of history. 1 The Question of Human Living in Eternity The basic premise of my approach derives from my previous essay. Vivere viventibus est esse, we learned from Aristotle via Thomas Aquinas; and reversing this we may say, Esse viventibus est vivere. If we have established that our always vanishing life on earth simply ‘is’ in its totality before God in eternity, it follows that we ‘live’ eternally before God in the totality of our four-dimensional existence: as we ‘are’ in eternity so we ‘live’ in eternity. We have talked of the sense in which we have eternal being:5 we must deal now with our eternal living.

3 1 Corinthians 13:12. 4 Lonergan taught the course De novissimis at the College of the Immaculate Conception, Montreal, in 1942–43 and again in 1945–46; and he ran seminars on related topics in 1943–44 and 1945–46. However, he did not publish anything in this area. Later, in his years at the Gregorian University (1953–65), he several times taught the course De Verbo Incarnato. His work in Christology will be our chief published source. 5 For utmost clarity, let us recall that our eternity is not identical with God’s. The blessed share in God’s eternity insofar as they share the divine life, and all being imitates the divine eternity as convertible with truth and reality, and as present to the eternal ‘now’ of God.

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The varieties of knowing in the blessed may be briefly recalled. There is a difference between the way we know ourselves in properly human knowing and the way we know ourselves when in the resurrection our four-dimensional totality is informed by the soul, and a knowledge – or a mode of knowledge – is possible that is not possible to a being that exists in time. And both these modes of knowledge are affected by the presence in one human consciousness of immediate knowledge of God. So there are three phases to consider. In our temporal existence there is the familiar knowledge that we have of ourselves and our ‘world’ and God, a knowledge that ‘is’ and ‘remains’ in eternity. Next, there is the new atemporal knowledge of ourselves and our ‘world,’ a knowledge that accrues to us by virtue of our immediate knowledge of God. It is atemporal insofar as it shares in God’s eternal ‘now’ and knows our seventy-year existence as a unit, transcending the succession of temporal acts. And since it includes our temporally unfolding knowledge in its object, it is also a knowledge of our knowledge. Thirdly, there is the immediate knowledge of God that is the essence of the blessed state. Now, while affirming all that is new and glorious in the state of the blessed, and recognizing its vast (we may even say infinite) superiority to ordinary human knowing, I wish to bring forward the argument of the previous essay. I maintain the ‘enduring’ reality of our present humble existence, and I affirm the identity of what we call ‘this present life’ with an underlying human component of what we call ‘the after life’: they are one and the same. We are now in our eternity, where ‘are’ means both belonging to the universe of being and being present to God, and ‘now’ means our participation in the eternity of God. But as we ‘are’ in that sense of ‘now,’ so we ‘live’ and ‘know’ in the same sense in our eternal being. Consequently, when we speak of ‘the eternal aspect’ of this present life we are not speaking of another life than the present one. There is another life, or another level of life, founded on the immediate knowledge of God that the blessed enjoy; but the eternal character of our life on earth, its eternal belonging to the universe of being, its eternal presence in its reality to God – all this is simply the one earthly life of seventy years as present to God, and so present in some measure to the blessed as well. We habitually think in terms of this life and the next, the old life and the new, one life and another. All that is quite valid; but then we tend to go further and add that ‘this’ life, the ‘old’ life, is in every way over and done with. I am suggesting that that is not the case: the one life we

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know here on earth is the same life that, as one component of our blessed state, is present to God in the divine eternity. It is; and insofar as it is, it is timeless, ‘forever’ part of the universe of being. The year 1892 in the life of my grandparents is as truly present to God as the year 1992 in my life is: both are ‘now’ to God. My argument that 1992, just because it is ‘now’ for me, is in no way privileged in relation to 1892, which was ‘now’ for them, applies as much to being alive as it does to being. All being, all living, is simul with God. The point I have made so often, that metaphysically we must conceive words like ‘forever’ not basically in terms of time but in terms of being, is applicable as well to the being that consists in living. But to be human and to be humanly alive involves self-knowledge, the capacity to reflect, to take possession of ourselves and our lives, activities that the earth-bound mind must regard as over and done with at death. It is faith that assures us that they are not over and done with, and this introduces an entirely new dimension into the discussion. For that same faith regards as mystery any self-knowledge ‘beyond’ the grave, any capacity to reflect, any possession of ourselves and our lives: it is a mystery sharing in the mystery that is immediate knowledge of God. Whether as philosophers we form the hypothesis of an ‘after’ life, or whether as believers we affirm it, we are dealing with what is beyond human understanding. How are we to conceive this living in eternity that is a mystery beyond human understanding? In two permanently valid directives, the First Vatican Council provided some guidelines for reaching the limited understanding of mystery that is possible to us: study the connection of the mysteries among themselves, and search for analogies in the things we understand naturally.6 Both directives have helped me in my attempt to rethink eternal life, as I hope the body of my essay will show; but before we come to that, perhaps some preliminary points – at least of a negative nature – may be made. If the underlying unit of my eternal human life is not another life than the one I live on earth, do I at least re-live that same life in eternity? Is it like a re-run of a movie? I would say not, not in any sense that is relevant here. We do speak of re-living the past in memory; but that is an additional act of living, and ‘re-living’ is not an accurate expression 6 DS 3016. Analogy seems to be the basic way, for the connection of the mysteries supposes some understanding already, which can only be analogous; and that will certainly be the case in the present study.

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for it. And in any case, it is difficult to see what role memory plays when all is present ‘now.’ So we do not re-live our lives: the living – the one and only living – of a simply human life is the present living, the one we enjoy or suffer here on earth from conception and birth to death. Neither is there a continuation of this present life in some fictional ongoing series, like a movie sequel, or further chapters, a resuming of the narrative at the point where we left it off, a rejuvenation that lets me become a youth and play hockey again, and so on and on. All this is the fantasy of reaching our peak at twenty-seven, dying at seventy or eighty (to use the biblical numbers), and in the next world picking our life up at a point where we are forever twenty-seven, and then living it that way for the eons of eternity. Negative points like these might be multiplied, for it is easier to say what mystery is not than to say what it is. True, we are dealing with what in itself is intelligible, for it is simply our life on earth. But how it is present as a unity to the eternal ‘now’ of God, and how it is related to our immediate knowledge of God, this is not intelligible: it is mystery. Since I do not see much hope of progress through negative statements, or through metaphysical conclusions, or through a priori properties of life, I turn to the two pointers given by the First Vatican Council: the connection of the mysteries among themselves and analogies from creation. 2 Jesus on Earth and the Blessed in Heaven Let us take our bearings as we approach the mystery of eternal life. In summary, if the previous essay has any validity, there is the ensouled body (or the embodied soul) in its four-dimensional space-time totality, a body totally ‘informed’ by virtue of the soul’s reunion with its materia designata. And to this metaphysical side we add the conscious. We assume – what there is no reason to deny – that there is consciousness, knowledge of self, all the knowledge in fact that we acquired or were given on earth. This is only to be consistent with our basic premise: that our being on earth is also a component of our being in eternity, and that our living on earth is also a component of our living in eternity. On this basis we ask about the unity of the human consciousness of the blessed in whom this knowledge is joined to immediate knowledge of God, and in whom this life is joined to life in the Infinite. The First Vatican Council directed us to study the connection of the mysteries among themselves. The mysteries I propose to compare are

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the life of Jesus on earth, about which theology has reached reliable conclusions, and the life of the blessed in heaven, which I think may be illuminated by the more solidly based Christology. Traditional Catholic doctrine holds that there is immediate knowledge of God, along with human life and knowledge on earth, in Jesus of Nazareth. Lonergan has studied this question with great thoroughness,7 and examination of his work seems to offer solid ground on which to approach the question of the life and consciousness and knowledge the blessed enjoy. 2.1 Jesus’ Immediate Knowledge of God: Ineffable In the question of immediate knowledge of God (Lonergan’s term for the biblical ‘seeing God face to face’), the crux of the matter, as in so much of his theology, is his account of what human knowing is. Positively, it is a compound of the three activities of experiencing, understanding, and judging; negatively, it is not an activity to be assimilated to ocular vision.8 Linked to his account of human knowing is his position on the proportionate object of human knowing: it is a compound of potency, form, and act, isomorphic with the triple structure of knowing activity.9 God, not being composed of potency, form, and act, is beyond that proportionate object: ‘God is not a datum of human experience,’10 and so in this life we have only analogical knowledge of God. Further, knowing in the life of glory is an entirely supernatural gift, as much beyond ordinary human knowing as God is beyond the proportionate object of human knowing. A consequence of this doctrine is the ineffable character of any immediate knowledge of God in a human mind. Just as it was not acquired on the basis of bodily and sensitive operations, through

7 See Bernard Lonergan, De Verbo Incarnato, 3rd ed., thesis 12 (‘De scientia Christi’) 332–416. 8 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 296–303 (chapter 9, ‘The Notion of Judgment’). More briefly, Bernard Lonergan, ‘Cognitional Structure,’ in Collection (1988) 205–21, at 206–208. 9 Insight, see Index under ‘Isomorphism … of knowing and known.’ 10 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Belief: Today’s Issue,’ in A Second Collection 87–99, at 95. See also ‘The Absence of God in Modern Culture,’ ibid. 101–16, at 107: ‘The divine is not a datum to be observed by sense or to be uncovered by introspection’; and ‘Natural Knowledge of God,’ ibid. 117–33, at 120: ‘God is not among the data of sense and he is not among the data of human consciousness.’

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understanding and judgment, so it cannot be manifested in that way: it is ineffable, it cannot be stated in a human way.11 We can therefore understand it only analogically, and Lonergan’s analogy is the notion of being he had set forth in Insight.12 The notion of being is not a concept of being, or an affirmation of being, or an idea of being. It is an anticipation of these, a conscious drive to know what is, ‘a positive and effective inclination both to inquire intelligently and reflect reasonably.’13 It is an ‘intention of being.’14 In this way Lonergan transposes what Thomas Aquinas had said of the light of agent intellect: ‘in lumine intellectus agentis nobis est quodammodo omnis scientia originaliter indita.’15 Now this provides an analogy for immediate knowledge of God, a comparison that combines similarity and dissimilarity. The notion of being is dissimilar to ‘seeing God face to face’ in that it is not knowledge but only the anticipation of knowledge. But it is similar in that it is all-encompassing without always reaching particular items, just as ‘seeing God face to face’ is knowledge of the All without necessarily being knowledge of particular beings. Thus Jesus could know God, and in knowing God could know the All, but without knowing the date of the last judgment, for example. What makes this doctrine incomprehensible to some is a cognitional theory that assimilates human knowing to ocular vision: Jesus cannot see the All without seeing the date of the last judgment. It has further trouble with the conjunction of divine and human knowledge in Jesus, for this must be like seeing with two eyes; and then what is inaccessible to Jesus’ human eye is still accessible to his all-seeing divine eye, so how can one speak of his ignorance? 2.2 The Unity of Ineffable and Effable Knowledge in Jesus We are approaching the question of the unity in the blessed of their immediate knowledge of God with the knowledge of themselves and 11 De Verbo Incarnato 334–35. Lonergan exercises a certain freedom with the Latin language in his use of ‘effabilis’ and ‘ineffabilis’ (‘expressible’ and ‘inexpressible’). For clarity’s sake, and to have two cognate technical terms of identifiable meaning, I propose to do likewise with English and use ‘effable’ along with ‘ineffable.’ 12 Insight 372–98 (chapter 12, ‘The Notion of Being’). 13 Ibid. 545. 14 Ibid. 379. 15 Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 10, a. 6 c [‘In the light of agent intellect, all knowledge is in a certain way implanted in us from the beginning’].

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their world that grew incrementally on earth and is given in a new way with their knowledge of God. We look for clues in Christology, where a related problem takes the following form: How can Jesus find words from his own inner resources to fulfill his mission, to preach the kingdom of God, to reveal what he alone knows of the Father,16 and to be our way, our truth, and our life? In other words, how is he to make effable the ineffable? How is he to turn what is in itself ineffable into a message that may be communicated in a human way, to be received in a human way, through bodily and sensitive operations?17 Directly to the point: How are the effable and the ineffable united in his human consciousness? There is no answer to the problem except through the labor of searching for metaphorical pictures and analogical concepts that will give us some glimmer of understanding. Just as we go laboriously from created things to the perfections of God, so Jesus searched in the reverse direction in order to convey his message, in order to go from understanding what God is to the images and narratives of Palestinian life. The experience and history of the mystics clarify the question, though I do not remember seeing this illustration in Lonergan’s De Verbo Incarnato. They keep telling us that what they experienced in the mystical state cannot be expressed in human words, that when they use human words, as they must if they would speak to us at all, those words are woefully inadequate to the purpose. We may legitimately assume that the mystical experience bears some resemblance to Jesus’ immediate knowledge of God, and so the labor of the mystics to tell us what they experienced gives us some idea of the ways of thought in Jesus. He did not have, in order to describe his search, the vocabulary developed over the fifteen centuries till Teresa’s time. He would not even explicitly think, ‘I have a problem,’ but he would have a problem nevertheless; and it would be similar to that of the mystics. Omitting other questions that arise in this context, let me stay with what is relevant to our concern: the unity of ineffable and effable knowledge in the consciousness of Jesus. Lonergan finds this unity not only in the subject, and in the human consciousness that Jesus had, but also

16 For example, Matthew 11:27, Luke 10:22, and John 1:18. 17 De Verbo incarnato 332: ‘Christus … viator … scientia effabili eos elicuit actus cognoscitivos naturales et supernaturales qui vitam suam constituerunt humanam et historicam’ [‘Christ … as wayfarer … elicited by effable knowledge those natural and supernatural cognitional acts which constituted his human and historical life’]. For an explanation, see ibid. 344–49.

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in the object of knowledge, in the mutual relations by which effable and ineffable were joined.18 To ‘explain’ this unity, which means to find an analogy for it, he has recourse again to his theory of knowledge. Scientists while they are searching do not yet understand, and have not found the solution to the problem that engages their attention; nevertheless, they recognize the solution as solution when they do find it. In other words, there is a unity in their consciousness between the anticipation of knowledge sought and the actuality of knowledge found. Similarly, there is a unity in Jesus’ consciousness between the immediate knowledge of God and the human means he found to communicate it.19 Yet there is the greatest disproportion between the two types of knowledge, and it is revealed in those to whom a higher knowledge is given that cannot be readily grafted onto a prior normally acquired knowledge. In Jesus, for whom normal human knowledge was only slowly and gradually added to his immediate knowledge of God, the disproportion would not be manifested by violence to the body. But in Paul, who received his special revelation as an adult with an already greatly elaborated human development, the disproportion was manifested in violent fashion when he was transported out of his body.20 Some years later Lonergan will point to the higher stages of mystical experience in which opposition is overcome, violence vanishes, and the two types of knowledge coexist side by side in peace and harmony. Thus he will say of Thomas Aquinas: ‘At the end of his life his prayer became so intense that it interfered with his theological activity. But earlier there could have been an alternation between religious and theological differentiation, while later still further differentiation might have enabled him to combine prayer and theology as Teresa of Avila combined prayer and business.’21 3 Effable and Ineffable Knowledge in the Blessed Now we must turn to the eternal life of the blessed. Our question regards the unity of the immediate knowledge of God that the blessed enjoy with the knowledge they have of themselves and their world, 18 Ibid. 348: ‘Quae conscientiae humanae unitas non solum identitate subiecti constituitur sed etiam mutuo ipsorum actuum ordine.’ See also 405–409 (‘De unitate conscientiae humanae’). 19 Ibid. 407. 20 Ibid. 337. 21 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Unity and Plurality: The Coherence of Christian Truth,’ in A Third Collection 239–50, at 242.

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whether the latter was gained bit by bit on earth, or given in a new way with immediate knowledge of God; and we ask whether the mystery of this unity resembles in some degree the mystery of the unity of Jesus’ consciousness on earth. 3.1 Background Positions and Suppositions It may be useful to collect our background positions and suppositions – those that lie scattered through the preceding paragraphs, and those we may legitimately add to them. There is immediate knowledge of God in the blessed, and there is a subjective aspect to this: I know God face to face. It is I who know, though my knowing is given to me and is metaphysically a ‘pati.’22 There is knowledge of as much of creation as God grants. It is knowledge of an object. It is a sharing in the divine knowledge; but again, though this is knowledge of an object, it is my knowledge. It is I who know, and my knowing has a subjective aspect. There is awareness of self – consciousness as inner experience, in the sense Lonergan explained in preparing to study the consciousness of Christ.23 If knowing an object here on earth is accompanied by awareness of my knowing activity and of myself as knowing and acting, then a fortiori there is awareness of my activity in eternal life and of myself as knowing and acting. Awareness of self becomes knowledge of self insofar as this inner experience is submitted to understanding and judgment.24 Since this is possible in temporal existence, then (a fortiori again) it should be possible for the blessed. Hence in my blessed state there is knowledge of myself. Just as I ‘am’ in my totality, joined to my mortal body in its full four-dimensional reality, so my self-knowledge ‘is’ in its fullness. We suppose, finally, a unity of consciousness in the blessed, such that there reside in a single human consciousness the three knowing activities of eternal life: the temporal knowing activity that ‘remains’ in 22 There is a view according to which ‘I see,’ ‘I know,’ etc., involve ‘me’ in an exercise of efficient causality. That this is not the view of Thomas, that my seeing is a pati even though it is I who see, was demonstrated at length in Lonergan’s Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas 116–21. 23 Bernard Lonergan, The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ, Part 5 (‘De Conscientia Humana’) 156–89. 24 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Cognitional Structure,’ in Collection 205–21, at 208–11 (‘Consciousness and Self-knowledge’).

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eternity, then the activity in which I know God immediately, and finally the resulting activity in which – sharing God’s eternal ‘now’ – I know myself, my life, my world as a single object of a single act. We suppose further that there is not only a unity but an interrelationship among these three modes of knowing, an interrelationship of activity and of content. A simple consideration justifies these suppositions: how else would the blessed realize the divine goodness to themselves and praise God’s forgiving mercy on them? 3.2 A Tentative Position on Eternal Life in the Blessed Our question is whether the mystery of our eternal life is illuminated by the mystery of the knowledge Jesus had on earth. Lonergan’s thesis De scientia Christi dealt simply with the earthly life of Jesus, not with his risen life, so we have no direct source in him for our specific problem. Still, the similarities between Jesus and the blessed suggest the possibility of making an indirect transfer, for in both cases we are dealing with the conjunction in one human consciousness of immediate knowledge of God with knowledge of created reality. If we attend to the dissimilarities we should be able to take some cautious steps forward. There is close similarity then in the primary gift: immediate knowledge of God. This needs no detailed explanation. Jesus had (and has) a human mind, and immediate knowledge of God is absolutely beyond the proportion of that human mind. We too have human minds, and the gift of knowing God immediately is absolutely beyond what is proportionate to them. No doubt there are different degrees in this immediate knowledge and differences as well in the grounds for its bestowal,25 but they do not invalidate the similarity. There is a high degree of similarity in the secondary gift: knowledge of creation through immediate knowledge of God. Augustine had spoken of a twofold knowledge of the angels, one in which they know ‘res in Verbo,’ another in which they know ‘res in propria natura.’26 Thomas Aquinas provides a basis for the knowledge ‘in Verbo’ when he says ‘the Father utters himself and every creature in the Word he begot.’27 On the question of the fullness of the knowledge Jesus had ‘in

25 De Verbo Incarnato 390–91 (on immediate knowledge of God as pertaining to the hypostatic union, Christ’s plenitude of grace, and his mission on earth). 26 Quoted by Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 3, q. 9, a. 3. 27 Ibid. 1, q. 37, a. 2 ad 3m: ‘Pater dicit se et omnem creaturam Verbo quod genuit.’

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Verbo,’ our preference has been stated: to say rather that he knew all in knowing the All than to say that he knew all things singly – ‘Omne’ therefore rather than ‘omnia,’ and especially all that pertained to his mission.28 Here there is a high degree of similarity in the blessed, if we accept the position of Thomas that no created intellect (not even Jesus’) can know ‘omnia quae Deus facit vel potest facere,’29 and his further position that the perfection of our intellects is to know ‘species et genera rerum, et rationes earum,’ and that this is what the blessed know.30 There is similarity in the embodied character of the knowledge that Jesus on earth had and the blessed in eternity have. In Jesus this aspect was so normal as to pass unnoticed. Except for special manifestations, as in the transfiguration on the mountain, he lived a normal bodily life, even with his immediate knowledge of God. Paul, on the contrary, was transported out of the body by the special knowledge given him, as are the mystics in the earlier stages of their experience. This may well be for all of us a feature of our dying, but we can hardly suppose that it is a permanent feature of eternal life: otherwise, why would there be a resurrection? There is similarity too, one must suppose, in the subjective aspect of  the matter. Jesus not only knew the Father,31 but (here we refer to Lonergan’s position)32 he was conscious of his activity, and of himself as knowing, acting, obeying, suffering, and so on. The blessed know and love God and praise the divine goodness, and presumably all this is conscious activity. Besides similarities there are differences, and one of them may be put as follows. In Jesus the cognitional process moved toward relating his ineffable knowledge to an effable knowledge that he was acquiring day by day. Further, the second term of this relation is basically within the grasp of ordinary human understanding and knowing: Jesus saw, heard, experienced the same external world his contemporaries did. The images of salt, grain, sun and moon, masters and servants, came to him in daily life to be filed away in the storehouse of memory and to be called upon at need as he struggled to phrase his message. 28 29 30 31 32

De Verbo Incarnato 341–44. Summa theologiae 1, q. 12, a. 8 [‘all that God makes or can make’]. Ibid. ad 4m [‘the species and genera of things, and their principles’]. Matthew 11:27. The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ, Part 6 (‘The Consciousness of Christ’) 190–285; also De Verbo Incarnato, Thesis 10 (‘De Conscientia Christi’) 267–310.

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But cognitional process in the blessed differs in two ways, one for each of their two modes of knowing themselves and their world. In regard to the first and ordinary mode, the process moves toward relating immediate knowledge of God to a knowledge that – true enough – is natural, the way we may think of ‘natural’ knowledge in Jesus, but a knowledge also that at the ‘end’ of seventy years is ‘already’ complete, in contrast to the knowledge Jesus was slowly acquiring. In regard to the other mode of knowledge, in which the blessed share with God a knowledge that is tota simul of themselves and their world, we are dealing with a knowledge that is not natural in either term of the relation, but one in which the process moves from mystery to mystery. Still, the differences are not such as to negate the similarity. Our position therefore remains: that the mystery of Jesus’ consciousness and knowledge on earth, about which a reliable theology has developed, can illuminate the mystery of the knowledge the blessed have in heaven, a mystery on which theology has made far less progress; more specifically, that it can illuminate the unity of their immediate knowledge of God with their knowledge of themselves and their world. 3.3 Analogies for the Unity of Consciousness in the Blessed The First Vatican Council spoke of another and, it seems, more basic means to reach the limited understanding we may attain of divine mysteries, namely, the direct route from analogy to mystery. Analogies are where you find them. In the classic case of the Trinity, they range from Patrick’s three-leaf shamrock to the Thomist psychological triad of intelligere-verbum-amor. They may or may not have some intrinsic link with the mystery they would ‘explain.’ As simple aids to understanding they are neither true nor false, though they become true or false if they are asserted – that is, if they are raised to the level of judgment and thus claim to represent the mystery as it really is. On that basis I offer two analogies for understanding the unity of consciousness in the blessed, who bring with them all the knowledge they acquired on earth, who ‘see’ God ‘face to face’ or have immediate knowledge of God, and who also by virtue of sharing in the divine ‘now’ know themselves and their world as a totality, as the single object of a single act. It happens that both analogies are found in Lonergan, but so far as I know he never used them the way I propose to do; and they have no special link in his work with the mystery of eternal life

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(except perhaps the link of the hidden ‘system’ that is likely to pervade all the work of a strong thinker). The first idea I would propose for an analogy is that of sublation. Used by Lonergan in different applications, it is spelled out most fully in his Method in Theology, in relation to the three conversions – intellectual, moral, and religious, with the second sublating the first, and the third sublating the second (and ipso facto the first). He explains the notion to mean that … what sublates goes beyond what is sublated, introduces something new and distinct, puts everything on a new basis, yet so far from interfering with the sublated or destroying it, on the contrary needs it, includes it, preserves all its proper features and properties, and carries them forward to a fuller realization within a richer context.33

Applying this at once to the topic of conversions, he goes on to say that moral conversion … promotes the subject from cognitional to moral self-transcendence … sets him on a new, existential level of consciousness and establishes him as an originating value. But this in no way interferes with or weakens his devotion to truth. He still needs truth … The truth he needs is still the truth attained in accord with the exigences of rational consciousness. But now his pursuit of it is … more secure … more meaningful and significant …

And there is a similar sublation in the religious conversion that goes beyond moral.34 Now this may give us some notion of what happens when our lesser human knowledge is taken up into and joined with our immediate knowledge of God, and our lesser human living is taken up into and joined with the life we share with God in the state of the blessed. For it is the suggestion of the preceding essay and this one that the life I am now leading ‘is’ in eternity. Naive realists would say it is ‘there,’ but critical realists will say simply that it ‘is.’ It is not past and gone. It has not vanished into a realm of what used to be. It is not destroyed: it is

33 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 241. 34 Ibid. 242.

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retained and included, with all its sin35 and sorrow, all its grace and repentance; but through the immediate knowledge of God it is put on a new basis, is carried forward to a fuller realization in an infinitely richer context, has a far deeper meaning. Thus the notion of sublation, which we can understand, seems to give us a clue to that life of the blessed, which we cannot understand. My second analogy is found in Lonergan’s view of history. I suggest that the relation he sees between historical experience and historical knowledge,36 and the account he gives of the thought process from historical experience to written history, can be an analogy for the way immediate knowledge of God unites with normal human knowing, and with the sublation of that normal knowing in the blessed. The human race is historical in its being, where ‘being historical is the history that is written about. It may be named … an existential history – the living tradition which formed us and thereby brought us to the point where we began forming ourselves … But from this rudimentary history’ we may ‘move towards the notion of scientific history.’ This is a turn ‘from the vécu to the thématique, from the existenziell to the existenzial, from exercite to signate, from the fragmentarily experienced to the methodically known.’37 More briefly and simply, it is a move ‘from the fragmentary experiences, that are the source of his [the historian’s] data, to knowledge of a process as a whole.’38 I suggest then that, just as the knowledge acquired on earth and remaining in the resurrection can be conceived as sublated, without itself disappearing, into the immediate knowledge of God, so also it can be conceived as fragmentarily experienced in ordinary human knowing and methodically known when joined to immediate knowledge of God. It can likewise be conceived as a vécu that is thematized in the light of glory, as an existenziell that becomes existenzial in that light, as something that is first exercised in itself and then attended to signate in the state of the blessed. Thus again, a notion we can understand seems to offer a clue to the life of the blessed that we cannot understand. 35 Not that I sin again eternally (I neither ‘re-live’ my life in eternity nor ‘re-sin’ my sin in eternity), but that the ugly blank in my life that sin is remains as a surd in the universe of being, an ‘is not’ where there should be an ‘is.’ 36 The title of Method in Theology, chapter 8, section 2, is ‘Historical Experience and Historical Knowledge’ (see p. 181). 37 Ibid. 182 and note 6. 38 Ibid. 186.

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It is even possible that the analogy may be carried into some of the details of the process. For example, while uncritical history needs reliable witnesses and is helpless without them, ‘critical’ history is like the investigation of a crime where, even though all the clues are planted and all the witnesses are lying, the detective can come to an explanatory account of what happened.39 In a somewhat similar way, the vécu of my seventy years may be full of sin and deceit, but the whole can be sublated into a knowledge of mercy and forgiveness. In an analogy there is similarity and difference, and in our haste to find similarities we must not overlook differences. One difference between history and the conscious processes of the blessed is that history moves from experience to knowledge, whereas the blessed move from one type of knowledge to a higher type. 4 Concluding Remarks The guiding principle in these two essays on eternal life was taken from Lonergan’s comparison of temporal and eternal being in his unpublished notes De scientia atque voluntate Dei. This was seen to deepen our understanding of what it means to be, and what it means to be in eternity. We have long been used to phrases such as ‘praising God through all eternity.’ Hearing this, we spontaneously imagine (and cannot do otherwise) an ongoing and endless series of acts of praise. But it is also traditional to think of eternal life as tota simul, and as possessed by the blessed in its simultaneous totality. This aspect, I believe, is better understood with the help of Lonergan’s metaphysics of being. On that basis, and with the help also of his theology of Christ’s knowledge, I have tried to work out not a theology but a few cautious suggestions on certain aspects of eternal life. In particular, I have considered the problem that arises for the unity of human consciousness when we are conceived to ‘be’ before God in the totality of our earthly existence – knowing ourselves, and simultaneously (in the tota simul of the life of the blessed) enjoying immediate knowledge of God. The ‘few cautious suggestions’ leave many old questions unanswered and raise as many more new ones. There is the existential aspect, which

39 Lonergan often referred to R.G. Collingwood on this detective. See, for example, Pierrot Lambert, Charlotte Tansey, and Cathleen Going, eds, Caring about Meaning: Patterns in the Life of Bernard Lonergan (Montreal: Thomas More Institute, 1982) 130–31. Also see Lonergan, Understanding and Being (1990) 384.

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I touched on briefly at the end of the previous article: it needs now to be expanded through the addition of the religious dimension. There is the doctrinal aspect, and the need to relate the position taken here to Catholic tradition. The former may well be left to the reflections of individual readers, but on the latter I owe readers this reassurance about my position – that I intend it as an exercise in faith seeking understanding, and therefore as exploring the meaning rather than undermining the truth of our faith in eternal life. It can be accommodated, then, to traditional beliefs. For example, do we hold for an ‘interval’ between death and resurrection? If so, the soul will reanimate the totality of my four-dimensional existence ‘after’ that interval, and there will be three stages: life in the corruptible body, separation of soul and body, life in the glorified body.40 What of the communion of saints? Again, there is no difficulty: the life of mine that simply ‘is’ is the life led on earth with others; and just as the ‘sublation’ of my individual life gives me occasion to praise the divine mercy, so also the ‘sublation’ of my community life gives a new dimension to friendships, to the healing of differences, to sorrow for injustices I have committed, and so on. One could multiply such questions, and naturally every implication of the position taken must be checked and any necessary revisions be made. But to my mind the questions really in need of study are questions of consciousness, of cognitional theory, of metaphysics. These are the areas in which Lonergan’s contribution must be studied and assessed, and I have presented this pair of essays as a step in that study and as offering data for that assessment.41

40 One could work out a parallel here with the sublation of ordinary knowledge into the higher knowledge the blessed enjoy: namely, the ‘sublation’ (though I would search for a more appropriate idea) of the earthly body into the heavenly. 41 In this essay, as in the preceding one, I acknowledge my debt to Robert Croken, Robert Doran, and Michael Vertin, for their painstaking critiques of an earlier draft. This time their suggestions resulted in a radical rewriting of the whole article. I only hope that the rewriting corrected previous defects without adding too many new ones.

Chapter 25

Rethinking the Trinity: Taking Seriously the Homoousios1

To speak of a rethinking that takes the homoousios seriously is to imply that the term has not been taken with complete seriousness in the past. That position, asserted with some qualification for a large part of the church and with an important exception for a smaller part of it, is the starting point of this essay. A hard-won achievement of the early church, I will argue, has suffered considerable neglect in the course of later centuries. The achievement was indeed hard-won. The early church made a gigantic effort to reach the Nicene definition of the homoousios, that is, the doctrine that the Son is consubstantial with the Father:2 in the formula of G.L. Prestige, that the Son is God in the same sense as the Father is God;3 in the Athanasian argument exploited by Lonergan, that the same things are said of the Son as are said of the Father, with the exception of Fatherhood.4 Historically the term was applied first to the Son and Father, and that is still its usual context. But when after Nicea attention was turned to the Holy Spirit, it became applicable to the third person of the Trinity as well; and the neglect I speak of regards both Son and Spirit. One could argue that the neglect is twofold: one of commission on the part of those who abandon Nicea on this point; and one of omission

1 Previously published as ‘Rethinking the Trinity: Taking Seriously the “Homoousios,”’ Science et esprit 47/1 (1995) 13–31. 2 DS 125. 3 George L. Prestige, God in Patristic Thought (London: SPCK, 1952) 213. 4 Bernard Lonergan, De Deo Trino I: Pars dogmatica, 77, 85, referring to Athanasius, Oratio 3 contra Arianos, 4 (MG 26, 329 B) [The Triune God: Doctrines 175–77, 195–97].

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on the part of those who accept Nicea but fail to bring their thinking and practice into conformity with the Nicene belief that they profess. The latter group is my concern. Dialogue with the former would require a different approach and would be carried on in different terms in a context of greater complexity. But dialogue on the ‘neglect of omission’ is more simple. As my title implies, the issue is one of either taking the doctrine seriously or failing to take it seriously; and taking it seriously means, as is so often the case, not only keeping it alive but also moving beyond it in the development of theological understanding and doctrine. For the gigantic effort and signal achievement of the first four centuries was only one step in the never-ending process of advancing theology. There were indeed other long steps forward from the fourth century to the thirteenth, but they are in perpetual need of retrieval. Furthermore, not even the thirteenth century can claim to have finished the task. So we need not only to take our stand on Nicea and the achievement of the fourth century, and to recover what was achieved in Trinitarian thinking from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, but also to carry it forward another step in our own time. We still need to realize fully the implications of Nicea, to develop them, and to apply them in theology and church practice. God may rest on the seventh day from the labor of creation, but Christian theology did not reach its seventh day in the fourth century with the great Athanasius5 and the three great Cappadocians – Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa.6 It did not do so even in the following eight centuries and the great work of Thomas Aquinas. We are at best on the third or fourth day of theological creation in this matter. The proposal of this essay takes up the question on two fronts. One regards the traditional formulas for Trinitarian doctrine, and the other asks whether it is possible to develop another complementary way of conceiving the divine Three. In regard to the traditional formulas the 5 There is no need to refer to standard dictionary articles on Athanasius; but I note that, very conveniently, the publishers of the Outstanding Christian Thinkers Series (London: Geoffrey Chapman) have just announced the volume Athanasius, by Alvyn Pettersen. [More fully: Alvyn Pettersen, Athanasius (London: Geoffrey Chapman, and Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1995).] 6 The same publishers have just announced, again very conveniently for us, a volume in the same series: The Cappadocians, by Anthony Meredith. [More fully: Anthony Meredith, The Cappadocians (London: Geoffrey Chapman, and Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995.]

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essay raises two questions. First, it asks whether, in the common understanding of Trinitarian belief, we really maintain the homoousios (section 1). Then it examines a trajectory in Christian belief that does indeed take the homoousios seriously but needs to be retrieved and developed (section 2). My second main division strikes out on a new line to ask whether, besides the traditional order in which we think of the Three, it is not possible to develop alongside it another way of conceiving them (section 3). (Since there is a certain novelty in this other way, I should say at once what I will repeat later: it does not deny the traditional belief, nor is it a substitute for the traditional belief. It would simply add to the traditional belief in the hope of gaining further insight into the infinite mystery that God is.) Finally, I will reflect briefly on questions of method that are raised by this effort to rethink Christian belief (section 4). 1 Does Common Understanding Take Nicea Seriously? The question in this section is whether the everyday thinking and attitude of Christians really takes seriously the doctrine that the Son is God in the same sense as the Father is God, and that the Holy Spirit is God in the same sense as the Father and the Son are God. Specifically, it asks whether the common thinking and attitude in calling the Father the ‘first’ person of the Trinity does not, without explicitly intending to do so, endow the Father with a superiority that is in conflict with the homoousios doctrine. To that end I propose a simple but rather effective personal test which readers may carry out on their own. It is to try to make the sign of the cross ‘In the name of the Spirit, and of the Son, and of the Father.’ I invite those who accept Nicea to make the experiment and see whether they do not instinctively hesitate before such a prayer. Yet, if we accept with all its consequences that the Son is God in the same sense as the Father is God, that the Holy Spirit is God in the same sense as the Father is God, there should be no difficulty in making the sign of the cross in the way I suggest. Indeed, there should be no difficulty in constructing a creed along the same lines: ‘I believe in God, the Holy Spirit, the Almighty … I believe in the eternal Word revealed to us by the Spirit … I believe in the infinite Mystery of whom the Word speaks, to whom the Spirit leads us …’ Let us be clear first on the experiment I propose. For this new formula can be taken in two ways: as simply an order of naming the Three,

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or as an order that reflects the Trinitarian relations themselves. There is no difficulty about uttering the formula in the first sense, which is simply a matter of naming the Three backwards. But the saving word there is ‘backwards’: we think of the experiment as an inversion of the usual order of naming the Three. The experiment I propose departs from that mindset. It consists in naming Spirit, Son, and Father, not as going backwards but as going forwards – not just naming the Spirit first, therefore, but ‘thinking’ the Three in such a way that just as the Father is first in the usual order, so the Spirit is first in the new formula. What of my suggestion in regard to the factual state of mind among Christians and their reaction to this experiment? It would be good to have a wider survey, but the evidence so far, as found in my own instinctive reaction and that of others to whom I proposed my experiment, reveals considerable resistance to the new formula. Why that resistance? Partly it is a fear that we are abandoning the traditional formula and substituting a novel one. But even with the assurance that that is not the case, that the traditional formula remains as part – indeed a key legacy – of our Christian heritage, resistance continues. So once more, why? Obviously, it is deemed to clash with our customary way of thinking, but is that customary way beyond criticism? Are there unexamined elements in it that do not really belong in the genuine tradition? Is it those unexamined elements that are the real cause of the resistance? In my third section I will consider in its own right the possibility of ‘thinking’ the Spirit first, and I will sketch some of the doctrinal and theological questions involved; but that is not the present purpose. The point in this first section is to bring into sharper focus the question of the ‘firstness’ of the Father. Do we not regularly give the Father a precedence over Son and Spirit? Of what nature is that precedence? What do we really mean by ‘first’ in this context? To try to put the Spirit first is a way of forcing these questions to our attention. That there is something special in the Father is beyond doubt. But there is likewise something special in the Son and something special in the Spirit. Since the time of the Cappadocians, this something special is understood as personhood, or personal property, defined by relationship. All that is absolute in God, all that pertains to the divine nature and to the divine being, is held eternally by the Three in perfect equality. The question is whether, when we speak of what is special in the Father, we are speaking of something pertaining to the divine nature when in fact we should be speaking of something pertaining to the person and only to the person.

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We should be clear on the scope of our first question. Stated with all possible clarity, it asks the following: Do we include in our unexamined concept of the Father’s ‘firstness’ a character or trait or aspect or property (in the sense of an absolute property) or excellence or glory or quality or virtue or possession or rank or grade or role or distinction (in the sense of honor) – a ‘dignitas’ in Latin, an ‘axioma’ in Greek – that prevents the Son or Spirit from being God in the same sense as the Father is God? Is there some element in our theology that undermines the doctrine of the homoousios? Is there a real failure on our part to think through the implications of Nicea, so that we retain unacknowledged and perhaps invalid suppositions in conflict with that council? That these questions are not just quibbles will appear more clearly, I hope, when in my next section I draw attention to genuine developments from the doctrine of Nicea. 2 The Homoousios Accepted and Carried Forward Earlier, in stating my view that there has been rather widespread neglect of the homoousios, I made two reservations. I allowed that some qualification might be made in that judgment for a large part of the church: the qualification is that there is indeed formal acceptance of the homoousios, while in practice it is neglected. Further, I allowed that there is an important exception to the charge of neglect: the exception is found in the part of the church that has continued the line of development opened by the Council of Nicea and the fathers of the fourth century. Let me locate, more concretely and in history, the two attitudes in question. For the first, on the level of formal belief, acceptance of the homoousios is found a century or more after Nicea in the creed Quicumque, itself of course a genuine development of Nicea. For the second, on the level of theology, not only is there acceptance of Nicea, but also its doctrine is carried forward beyond the achievement of the Quicumque. I would locate this line of development in the trajectory established by Augustine and Aquinas. Following that path it is possible to achieve a new depth of understanding of what the divine nature is, and on that basis to ‘think’ the divine Three in perfect equality. This rough indication of two elements in the history of Trinitarian theology must now be spelled out in greater detail. First, on the charge that there has been neglect of the homoousios: my criticism applies not to the formally declared beliefs of the church – for

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the traditional church has continued through the centuries after Nicea to profess its faith in the doctrine of that council – but to the inconsistency between our profession of faith and what is actually operative in our thinking. A parallel will clarify the point. Congar once remarked that the church, while perfectly orthodox in professing the dogmas on Christ, is in fact monophysite in its practical attitude. That is to say, its piety and prayer and general practice are largely what they would be if Christ had only one nature, and that nature divine: the humanity has been marginalized. This was said many years ago,7 and I doubt that it is true today. Or perhaps one could say the praxis of many is again monophysite, but in a reversal of what Congar observed: the one nature now is the humanity. In any case, I adduce this example only to clarify my parallel remark about the homoousios: in most Catholics there is faithful acceptance of the creed on this point, but failure to live out the creed in piety and practice. Let us examine first the positive side of that judgment. The Quicumque remains a creed of the church – at least it is still printed in Denzinger! We might say that it continues to receive lip-service, were it not for the fact that it has been dropped from the liturgy and is hardly found on the lips of the church any longer. Perhaps it would be better to say that it receives in the church what Newman would call a notional assent. I note in passing the irony of invoking Newman’s notional assent to describe this attitude, because for Newman himself the Quicumque was par excellence a creed for real assent.8 Furthermore, this creed marks a genuine effort to spell out some implications of Nicea and is itself part of the trajectory of Trinitarian theology that I shall presently follow. 7 Yves M.-J. Congar, Christ, Our Lady and the Church: A Study in Eirenic Theology (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1957) 43–54 (original: Le Christ, Marie et l’Église [Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer] 54–67). 8 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, edited with introduction and notes by I.T. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) 90, on the Quicumque as an example of real assent: ‘It is not a mere collection of notions, however momentous. It is a psalm or hymn of praise, of confession, and of profound, self-prostrating homage, parallel to the canticles of the elect in the Apocalypse. It appeals to the imagination quite as much as to the intellect. It is the war-song of faith, with which we warn first ourselves, then each other, and then all those who are within its hearing, and the hearing of the Truth, who our God is, and how we must worship Him, and how vast our responsibility will be, if we know what to believe, and yet believe not.’ For the distinction between real and notional assent, see ibid. chapter 4 [pp. 36–68]. For the Quicumque itself, see DS 75–76.

400 Lonergan and the Level of Our Time: Essays The Father is uncreated, the Son is uncreated, the Holy Spirit is uncreated; the Father is limitless, the Son is limitless, the Holy Spirit is limitless; the Father is eternal, the Son is eternal, the Holy Spirit is eternal; and yet there are not three eternal ones, but one eternal one, as there are not three uncreated ones nor three limitless ones, but one uncreated one and one limitless one. Likewise the Father is omnipotent, the Son is omnipotent, the Holy Spirit is omnipotent; and yet there are not three omnipotent ones, but one omnipotent one. So too the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God; yet there are not three Gods, but one God.9

This, I would say, is to take seriously the homoousios. Even when the creed shifts to a somewhat higher gear, it does not lose contact with its guiding Nicene principle. The Father is made by no one, created by no one, begotten by no one; the Son is from the Father alone, not made or created, but begotten; the Holy Spirit is from the Father and the Son, not made, not created, not begotten, but proceeding … In this Trinity nothing is before or after, nothing is greater or lesser, but all three persons are coeternal with one another and coequal.10

Some eight centuries later, but in the thought pattern of this creed, Thomas Aquinas will add an important clarification: ‘Unde oportet ibi esse ordinem secundum originem, absque prioritate.11 With these statements the church has brought to term a great development from Athanasius and the Cappadocians. But just as the church of the Quicumque refused to enter its theological Sabbath at the Cappadocian stage, so the later church could not stop and rest at the Quicumque. Another great development was in the making.12 For further questions were bound to arise: How can we conceive the procession of Son from Father and of Spirit from Father and Son? How can the Father possess the divine nature by right, as it were, and thus be able to hand it on to Son and Spirit, who do not possess it except

9 DS 75 [translation by Crowe]. 10 Ibid. 11 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1, q. 42, a. 3 c. [‘Therefore there must order according to origin and without priority’]. 12 Not that the second great development waited till after the Quicumque. It is possible that the Augustinian line of thought was ahead of that creed and influenced it.

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through receiving it from the Father? What is this handing on in things divine, where the manner of human generation has no place? This is where the Thomist line of thought, with its origins in Augustine, carries on the development. I will not study it historically through the centuries; but taking advantage of the trajectory Augustine and Aquinas established, I will leap forward to our own time and outline the position of Bernard Lonergan.13 That position is found first in the fifth Verbum article, published in 1949, which envisages both a continuity and a break between the natural theology of a philosopher and a theology based on revelation. ‘Theology employs the Augustinian psychological analogy, just as philosophy employed the naturally known pure perfections.’ Both ask what God is. Philosophy is able to answer ‘that God is absolute being, absolute understanding, absolute truth, absolute love.’ But theology is able to advance beyond philosophy and add ‘that the divine Word is because of divine understanding as uttering, that divine Love as proceeding is because of divine goodness and understanding and Word as spirating.’ That is, ‘the Augustinian psychological analogy makes Trinitarian theology a prolongation of natural theology, a deeper insight into what God is.’14 By revelation, then, we achieve ‘the limited but most fruitful understanding that can be attained when reason operates in the light of faith.’15 We might say that revelation adds the dynamic view of divine being and of the divine attributes to the static view. Understanding, word, and love in God can be conceived in their eternal absolute perfection: God is infinite understanding, infinite word, infinite love. But one may think of these as if nothing were ‘happening’; so Trinitarian thought adds dynamic relations to the three operations. There is a Word ‘because of …’; there is proceeding Love ‘because of …’ The ‘cause’ in ‘because of’ is not the Aristotelian efficient cause but the very Thomist emanatio intelligibilis. The divine nature is such that there is this infinite eternal ‘activity’ intrinsic to the divine being, and this ‘activity’ is the foundation, in our mental construction, for the Trinity. The importance of this approach cannot be overestimated, and it must be underlined here; for the implications are far-reaching. We are not dealing now with the divine nature so conceived that we assume it to belong

13 See Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (1997), chapter 5, ‘Imago Dei,’ 191–227. See also the helpful ‘Introduction: Subject and Soul,’ ibid. 3–11. 14 Ibid. 215. 15 Ibid., with reference to Vatican I: DS 3016.

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with all its attributes to the Father, so that we must then find a way for the Father to communicate nature and attributes to Son and Spirit. Rather we are dealing with a new concept of the divine, a new notion in which the three persons along with the divine attributes all are potentially included in our one concept of the divine nature. The nature of God is conceived now as possessing an inner dynamism such that there will be processions as a ‘natural’ property, and these processions will ‘result’ in the possession – by all three persons in ‘natural’ equality – of the divine being. Consequently, the divine nature as conceived in Trinitarian theology is not the divine nature as conceived in an isolated treatise De Deo Uno, much less the divine nature as conceived in a philosophy of God. There is a truly new ‘insight’ into ‘what’ God is; and this new insight allows theology to ‘think’ the divine oneness, along with the divine threeness, on the single basis of that ‘whatness.’ Thus there is no artificial separation of the doctrine De Deo Uno from the doctrine De Deo Trino. Both result from the one new concept of the divine nature. One and the same divine nature is studied in the attributes of the divinity and in the internal activity that constitutes the three persons. In our thinking, then, processions, relations, and persons all ‘emerge’ from that divine nature as conceived on the basis of revelation. We must put ‘emerge’ in quotation marks; because although processions, relations, and persons are real in God, their ‘emergence’ from the divine nature is not real but only a way we have of conceiving as ‘fieri’ what is eternally ‘in facto esse’ in God.16 That is our preliminary step in conceiving this next great development of the homoousios doctrine: there is a divine nature such that there is eternal intrinsic activity; and that dynamism regards all three persons, constituting them as persons and giving priority to none of them. 16 Lonergan spoke of this newly conceived divine nature as ‘rationality.’ The word is to be understood in the context of his cognitional theory and the emanatio intelligibilis of Verbum, but we should try to find a word less open to misunderstanding. Later Lonergan would use ‘conscious intentionality’ for the human side, but ‘intentionality’ does not seem the best word for the dynamism of the Trinitarian processions. Perhaps ‘dynamism’ is itself as good a word as any to indicate that the divine nature is such that there will be, intrinsic to God, an eternal infinite Uttering and an eternal infinite Affirming and an eternal infinite Loving proceeding from the Affirmation. It is far more important to note that the two processions are to be understood in our poor analogous thinking as occurring per modum operati and not per modum operationis. The latter would be a procession from potency to act, which cannot be admitted in God, where the former is a procession of act from act, the Word-Act from the Utterer-Act, and the Love-Act from the Word-Act. See Bernard Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics, Assertion I, 144–81 (especially 144–51) and Assertion II (180–89).

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The crowning step in this development, however, is still to come. It is found in the doctrine of the Trinitarian relations, which we conceive as mutual, inclusive of one another, equally ‘productive’ of one another, and totally simultaneous. Divine Utterance is as ‘dependent’ on the divine Word as the divine Word is ‘dependent’ on the divine Utterance – neither more nor less. The Father–Son relationship, considered as relation, is no more due to the Father’s initiative and activity than it is to the Son’s: it emerges simultaneously and without priority in the two terms. Similarly, the relation, considered as relation, between the Spirit and the spirating Principle is conceived as mutual and simultaneous, without any one-sided initiative attributed to either term: as relation it emerges simultaneously and without priority in both terms at once. Furthermore, the relations ‘emerge’ from the processions, and the processions are intrinsic to the divine being. From that viewpoint there is no first person, no second person, no third person, but all Three are coeternal and coequal, as declared in the Quicumque; and all three together offer a new insight into what God is by nature. In the sequence, therefore, of Thomist Trinitarian theology, the question of persons is two steps removed from the starting point; and in neither of those two steps is it necessary to speak of priority in regard to first, second, and third persons. Not in the first step, processions, because in this basic phase of our thinking the new insight that revelation gives into the divine nature shows it to be ‘rational’ in the full sense of the Thomist emanatio intelligibilis – that is, such that there will be processions belonging to the nature in the same way that the divine attributes do; and this ‘property’ of the nature is prior to the processions, which follow all at once in an integral pattern. Nor need we speak of first, second, and third in the second step, relations; for the relations are mutual, ‘emerging’ simultaneously in the terms on either side. Some obvious cautionary remarks are part of the Christian tradition on these points and might in normal times be taken as understood here, but perhaps it is better to make them explicit. The first is that we are dealing with mystery. Hence we do not forget how limited our ‘insight’ is; rather, we remember that however much we can say about God there remains incomparably more that we cannot say.17 The faint and fleeting insight we achieve ‘stands upon analogy; it does not penetrate to the

17 As the Fourth Lateran Council declared, ‘… inter creatorem et creaturam non potest similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda’ [‘… between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying a greater dissimilitude’] (DS 806).

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very core, the essence of God, in which alone Trinitarian doctrine can be contemplated in its full intelligibility,’ and ‘once our concepts reach their term, the analogy is transcended and we are confronted with the mystery.’18 A second remark would generalize the caution we already introduced by putting terms such as ‘emerge’ and ‘dependent’ and ‘in facto esse’ in quotation marks. They are terms that pertain to our way of thinking, and our way of thinking starts with created analogues. But in conceiving the simultaneity of the divine, we have to exclude from our thought any elements of human relationship that do not belong in divinity. Among us there is a fatherhood ‘in fieri’ that is prior to fatherhood ‘in facto esse,’ and so we necessarily give the parent a priority over the child. But that is not the case in God: here there is no ‘fieri’ but only the eternal ‘in facto esse,’ though the word ‘facto’ is inappropriate. Consequently, as we apply our analogy to God and say that fatherhood is as dependent on filiation as filiation is dependent on fatherhood, ‘dependence’ has to be understood in us as a dependence of one concept on another, and in God as a mysterious order with equality and without priority. The thrust of this second section of my essay has been entirely along the trajectory established by Augustine, the Quicumque, and Thomas Aquinas, in which there is no priority, no precedence, no excellence of Father over Son, or of Father and Son over the Spirit: the Three are coeternal and coequal, homoousioi. And we reach the furthest point yet achieved in this trajectory with the Thomist doctrine of relations, which are mutual, simultaneous, and without priority on either side. 3 Spirit, Son, Father: Love, Word, Mystery I come now to my second main division and my second main question. Is the traditional formula ‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ exclusive of others? Or, by contrast, would it admit, side by side with it, the formula ‘In the name of the Spirit, and of the Son, and of the Father’? This is really the fundamental question. For however thorough we are in eliminating from the Father’s ‘firstness’ any element incompatible with the homoousios, it still remains that there is truly an order in the Christian doctrine of Father, Son, and Spirit, and that that order is a key part of traditional Christian belief. But does 18 Verbum 215.

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Christian belief make it the exclusive ordering of the Trinity? That is my question. Is this order to be interpreted in a sense that will effectively prevent us from giving an intra-Trinitarian meaning to the formula ‘In the name of the Spirit, and of the Son, and of the Father’? I trust that I have made it clear, but let me repeat that my intention is not to reject the traditional order and substitute another. Rather, it is to ask whether the traditional order represents just one way of ‘thinking’ the Three, just one possibility in our always infinitely inadequate thinking about God. It is to explore the possibility of other ways, equally inadequate but also valid. So we have to face the fundamental question. Are there are various orders in which we can ‘think’ the Trinity, all of them giving some understanding of the divine reality, all of them inadequate as the ultimate ‘explanation’ of the inner life of God? Is the ordering of the Three in which the Father is first the only possible ordering within the Trinity? Does the ‘firstness’ that in our thinking we attribute to the Father, while it corresponds to an aspect of the divine reality, exclude our thinking of the divine reality according to another aspect in which the Father is not first? If not, what particular thought-model serves us for thinking the ‘firstness’ of the Father, and what other thought-model might serve for thinking of a different order in which Son or Spirit is first? That is the question I wish to raise in this third section. It is a question to which I will suggest a tentative answer, namely, an approach to the Trinity in which we not only name the Three in the order Spirit-Son-Father but also conceive this as a real order – and thus, making the Spirit fully the equal of the Father, advance one more step in the task of taking seriously the homoousios. For believers the question I raise is twofold: whether such an approach is valid; and then, if it is, how we might develop a Trinitarian theology that would give us some glimmer of understanding of the mystery conceived in that order. The ‘whether’ question (the Thomist ‘Utrum’) is a question of validity. It impinges on the area of Christian belief; and if it is not ruled out of court from the beginning, it will need a long period of reflection in the church before it can be settled. At this stage I can do no more than present a prima facie case – not for determining a doctrine but for proposing an idea as one worth consideration. Meanwhile, it will be opportune to take up at the same time the ‘how’ question (the Thomist ‘Respondeo, dicendum quod’); for in the complex progress of theology the ‘how’ and the ‘whether’ are likely to be interwoven. We begin, then, by inquiring whether in the treasury of Christian tradition there is any suggestion of an order that starts with the Spirit

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and would be analogous to the ordinary order in which we start with the Father. In fact, the scriptures make such a suggestion in the multifaceted role they assign the Spirit: speaking through the prophets,19 enabling us to say ‘Lord,’20 directing Paul and his companions in their ministry21 and even the Lord Jesus22 – all of this in the general context of our return, through the Son and in the Spirit,23 to the God who made us. Further, what the scriptures suggest is taken up by Basil and formulated as follows: ‘Thus the way to the knowledge of God is from one Spirit, through the one Son, to the one Father.’24 These few soundings I leave for biblical and patristic theologians to develop further or to reject, as seems best to them. But I would note that my suggestion is supported from the side of theological systematics by a view that has attracted a respectable following, namely, the view that the Spirit is the nexus of Father and Son.25 Its adherents would locate

19 20 21 22 23 24

Acts 28:25. 1 Corinthians 12:3. Acts 16:7. Matthew 4:1; Mark 1:12; Luke 4:1–2, 14. Ephesians 2:18. Basil of Caesarea, De Spiritu sancto 47, as found in The Later Christian Fathers: A Selection from the Writings of the Fathers from St. Cyril of Jerusalem to St. Leo the Great, edited and translated by Henry Bettenson (London: Oxford University Press, 1970) 84. Notice that Basil has the two orders side by side. Immediately after the passage quoted in my text he has the following: ‘conversely, the natural goodness and the natural power to sanctify, and the royal dignity, pass from the Father through the Only-begotten, to reach the Spirit’ (ibid.). I owe these references to my late colleague John Egan. 25 This is found in Thomas Aquinas (for example, Summa theologiae 1, q. 37, a. 1, ad 3m, and 2-2, q. 1, a. 8, ad 3m), and it has spirited defenders. Among these special mention should be made of the late François Bourassa, who wrote frequently on this topic in the pages of Sciences ecclésiastiques, its successor, Science et esprit, and Gregorianum. See his Questions de théologie trinitaire (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1970; especially chapter 2) in which he collects a number of his articles. My own view has been that the nexus concept fits uneasily in the order Father, Son, Spirit, in which Father and Son have to be already united, in order to be one principle of the Spirit. But I believe it can be given a meaning in the order Spirit, Son, Father. Here the Spirit is first conceived in relation to Father and Son as they are one in the Spirit’s love, a love that as it were unites them in that one relation before they are distinguished. On the other hand, I do not find support for my suggestion in the ‘social analogy’ that many theologians favor. The name ‘social’ is promising, but the divine ‘society’ is conceived as Lover, Beloved, and Love – quite different from Love, Word, Mystery, which uses terms with the same thought content as the psychological analogy, but understands them in reverse order.

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this nexus in the order from Father and Son to Spirit, and so think of it as following upon the mutual relations of paternity and filiation, as well as upon the relations of active and passive spiration – in other words, as subsequent in our thought to the ‘constitution’ of the persons. But equally (and, I would say, more coherently) one can think of it in the other direction. As this section will try to show, the Spirit can be related to the Son and the Father not in terms of procession but in the intersubjective communion of love. In this conception, the infinite Love that is the Spirit finds its ‘object’ and ‘partner’ first in the Word and Mystery as one, as united in the nexus of the Spirit’s love, and then as distinguished from one another, as the ‘You’ of the Word and the ‘You’ of the Mystery of whom the Word is the expression. The two orders differ in this, that in the traditional order the nexus follows in our thought on the constitution of Father and Son as persons, whereas in the new order it has a role in the distinction of Father and Son, again of course in our thought process. The purpose of the preceding paragraph is not to establish the validity of an order that begins with the Spirit, but rather to initiate a necessary prior stage: to begin the process of conceiving such an order, and of clarifying what the question is when we ask whether there are grounds for affirming such an order in the Trinity. The remainder of this section will continue the process, specifying some of the questions that would have to be answered in such a conception of Father, Son, and Spirit, and sketching the intellectual equipment that might be useful to theology if reasons are found for thinking of the Three as Spirit, Son, and Father, now under the more appropriate names of Love, Word, Mystery. The questions that must be raised are basically two. The first: In this aspect of the tradition, are we dealing with a real relation that pertains to the person of the Spirit – that is, a Trinitarian relation to the Son and Father – or are we dealing only with a sequence of created events in our human return to God? The second question is conditional on the answer to the first: If there is some reason to maintain such a Trinitarian relation of the Spirit in the economy of salvation, what does this real relation reveal to us about the inner life of God? The first is a question on which exegesis and systematic theology must collaborate. For the data are first and foremost the data of scripture, but the question being asked introduces the language of systematic theology (‘real relation’). The situation is parallel to that of the New Testament and Nicea in regard to the Son. Then there was the

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wealth of biblical data on the Son, and there was the unscriptural word ‘homoousios’ by means of which Nicea determined the Son’s status vis-à-vis the Father. The Athanasian rule seems simple in the hindsight of our century – too simple, perhaps, from an exegetical viewpoint – but the three centuries the church needed to come to the Nicene and Athanasian position and the half century needed to get it accepted are witness enough to the difficulty we have in thinking human thoughts about the divine. We should not expect an easy road in regard to the present question. We are, however, in a somewhat better position now to reflect methodically on what we are doing. We recognize, in a way the fourthcentury theologians did not, the difference in the thought patterns of the New Testament and those of systematic theology. We do not expect to find the term ‘real relation’ in scripture, but neither do we regard that absence as a bar to theology’s use of the term to organize the data of scripture. The second question, what is revealed about the immanent Trinity by a real relation of the kind described in the economic Trinity, presents no fundamental difficulty that theology has not already encountered in regard to the Son. If the real relation of the Son to the Father in the Son’s presence and work among us is ground for concluding to an eternal relation in the inner life of God – and this I regard as an implication of Nicea – then a parallel conclusion in regard to the Spirit may be asserted without difficulty. There remains, however, the specific difficulty that goes beyond that fundamental one: how to conceive this relation in the inner life of God, which is the kind of question Thomas Aquinas would deal with in his ‘Respondeo, dicendum quod.’ The methodical rule remains the same: just as Thomas’s Trinitarian theology required him to think out his very sophisticated psychological analogy,26 so we will need our own sophisticated analogy for thinking out the order of Spirit, Son, and Father; and this may involve quite a different set of concepts from those that Thomas used.

26 On the human side the analogy seems adaptable to quite unsophisticated believers, who readily understand that there should be a reason for judgment and a rational source for enthusiasm – processions made easy! But philosophers and theologians must think the analogy through in a much more sophisticated fashion: see the complex set of questions studied in Lonergan’s Verbum. For the Trinitarian context of the whole book, see the four opening paragraphs on pp.12–13.

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The question now becomes one of intellectual equipment, a conceptual system, for thinking of an aspect of intra-Trinitarian life that starts with the Spirit. In method it will follow the Thomist way, but in content it will differ. The triad understanding-word-love is deeply founded in human experience, and it became available to Thomas for his Trinitarian theology; but it is not the only triad available, especially now, seven centuries later. I wish to suggest a parallel conceptual system that might be helpful for a new inquiry in our time. It may be introduced by what has been said of Hegel, that he moved philosophical thinking from substance to subject.27 That phrase indicates very concisely a major difference between Scholasticism and modernity: where the Scholastics thought in terms of being and substance, we think more naturally in terms of the subject and the nest of ideas relating to the subject. A prime candidate for a new ordering principle might therefore be found in the sphere of consciousness and subjectivity, and of intersubjective communication, where what is communicated is no longer described in categories of substance and being (though that approach remains in all its validity) but in categories pertaining to love in the context of intersubjectivity and conscious communion. Here again I take Lonergan’s work as guide. For categories appropriate to the new ordering, then, we consider consciousness at its highest level, the level of love, and most particularly of religious love. Religion, Lonergan would say, begins with religious conversion: a conversion, not to a denomination or a church or a religion, but to God. Further, the source of religious conversion is the Holy Spirit flooding our hearts with love.28 But now this gift is not taken as the end of a process (as is the procession of the Spirit in the usual order); it is taken rather as a beginning, as a first in our return to God. In full accord with the role the scriptures assign to the Spirit, Lonergan argues that it is God’s gift of love that leads us to seek knowledge of God. The gift ‘does not proceed from our knowledge of God. On the contrary … the gift occurs with indeed a determinate content but without an intellectually apprehended object.’ We are in love, but ‘what we are in love with, remains something that we have to find out. When we find it out in the context of a philosophy, there results a philosophy of God. When we find it out in the context of 27 See Kenneth L. Schmitz, ‘Substance Is Not Enough. Hegel’s Slogan: From Substance to Subject,’ American Catholic Philosophical Association Proceedings 61 (1987) 52–68. 28 Romans 5:5. See Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 105.

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a … theology, there results a … systematics. So it turns out that one and the same God has unknowingly been found and is differently being sought by both philosopher and theologian.’29 This set of concepts, which of course is directly concerned only with what happens in us, seems applicable to God in the following way. We start with the Holy Spirit as love: not as proceeding love – though, as I keep repeating, that concept retains its validity – but as love consciously oriented to a beloved, as love in intersubjective relationship, not simply love of infinite goodness, but love for which the other is a ‘you.’ But love has cognitional consequences. In the human analogate, love of God results in a philosophy of God and in a theology; and in God there ‘results’ the Word as determinate ‘object’ of the Spirit’s love, and as a conscious subject consciously returning that love in a mutual relationship. Hence the Spirit is a love for which the Word is not just an object but a ‘you,’ and a love that has the Word responding as to a ‘you.’ Further, love desires to know more and more about the beloved. Consequently, in human love of God, which ‘knows’ with the heart ‘that’ God is but does not know with the head ‘what’ God is, philosophy and theology keep on striving forever to penetrate more deeply into the ‘what.’ Analogously, the divine love the Spirit has for the Son reaches beyond the Son to the ultimate, the infinite Mystery of the One uttering the Word. (If we wish to retain the idea of the Spirit as nexus, we would introduce an intermediate step: the Spirit oriented to ‘what’ the Spirit loves, with ‘what’ the Spirit loves then being differentiated into the two persons who are Word and Mystery.) The similarity found in the analogy must not ignore the difference: on the human side ‘one and the same God has unknowingly been found and is differently being sought by both philosopher and theologian’; while on the divine side there is no stage of unknowing, no seeking, but eternally full and conscious intersubjective communion of Love, Word, and Mystery. But of course a parallel caution must be maintained in the order Father, Son, and Spirit: there is no stage of un-being, no priority of Communicator over those receiving the communication, when the Father communicates divine being to Son and Spirit. There is one more set of concepts in Lonergan that will, I believe, be of great significance in winning a hearing for my proposal. It is the 29 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Philosophy of God, and Theology: Lecture 3, The Relationship between Philosophy of God and the Functional Specialty “Systematics,”’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 199–219, at 204.

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twofold ordering that has come to be known as ‘the way up’ and ‘the way down,’ though the spatial metaphor is only a handy mnemonic. The two ways order the levels of consciousness, the way up following the order from experience through understanding and judgment to values and love, and the way down following the reverse order from love through values, judgment, and understanding to a more mature and perceptive experience. A representative quotation will make the point. Development may be described, if a spatial metaphor is permitted, as from ‘from below upwards’: it begins from experience, is enriched by full understanding, is accepted by sound judgment, is directed not to satisfactions but to values … [But] the handing on of development … works from above downwards: it begins in the affectivity of the infant, the child, the son, the pupil, the follower. On affectivity rests the apprehension of values. On the apprehension of values rests belief. On belief follows the growth in understanding of one who has found a genuine teacher and has been initiated into the study of the masters of the past. Then to confirm one’s growth in understanding comes experience made mature and perceptive by one’s developed understanding.30

Now, the relevance of this to the present question is that the traditional order of understanding, word, and love follows the upward course, while the order I propose follows the downward course; and since the two are equally part of ordinary life, they serve to support two ways of thinking of Trinitarian order. I conclude this sketch of new categories for thinking of the Three. No conceptual system is sufficient foundation for a doctrine of faith; but if the church agrees that real Trinitarian relations of the Spirit are involved in the Spirit’s task of revealing the Son, and agrees that such real relations in the economic Trinity lead us into the immanent Trinity, then perhaps the conceptual system Lonergan has provided will be of some use in understanding this new development.

30 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,’ in A Third Collection 169–83, at 180–81. See also, in the same volume, ‘Christology Today: Methodological Reflections,’ 74–99, at 76–77; ‘Healing and Creating in History,’ 100–109, at 106; and ‘Theology and Praxis,’ 184–201, at 196–97, and passim. From about the year 1974 this became a recurring theme in Lonergan.

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4 Concluding Reflections I have presented for evaluation the bare bones of ideas on two questions: how to conceive, in a way compatible with Nicea, the Father’s firstness; and how to conceive an order of Love, Word, Mystery that would be complementary to and coexist with the traditional order of Father, Son, and Spirit. Reflections on these ideas come crowding in from every side, and it may help the process of evaluation if we record a few of them. A first set of reflections regards what we are doing and what the legitimacy of our procedures is. The basic guiding principle is worth repeating: we are dealing with absolute mystery. There is nothing we can say about God from the analogy of creation, be it ever so profound, that does not leave infinitely more that remains unsaid: ‘… inter creatorem et creaturam non potest similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda.’31 No believer today will dispute that. A corollary of this is also repetitious: the steps in the thinking about God found in our third section are not steps in the divine intersubjective consciousness, any more than the steps in Thomist thinking were steps in the Father’s communication of the divine being. Just as there is no causation in God, and so no precedence of one person over another in being, so there is no event of encounter in God, and so no steps toward intersubjective communion. If we think of Understanding, Word, and Love as first, second, and third, the numbering is our feeble effort to pierce the mystery and give a human ordering to divine eternal simultaneity: it is an ordo absque prioritate. Similarly, if we think of Love, Word, and Mystery as first, second, and third, that is another feeble effort to pierce the mystery, and again an ordo absque prioritate. A corollary of the corollary regards the steps in any theological thinking and so also the steps to be followed in regard to the present contribution. Basically my article simply proposes a sketch of ideas; and to propose an idea – and especially to propose just a sketch of an idea – is not yet to make a judgment. Nevertheless every idea calls out for its conceptual elaboration and eventually for judgment for or against, yes or no; and in a matter so central to Christian belief, the need of a conceptual elaboration in preparation for judgment is all the more urgent. I have touched on some of the theological apparatus needed for eventual judgment, but the more basic question regards the methodology of 31 See note 17 above.

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judgment. In this area Lonergan’s views are so little understood that their application to any theological argument can hardly be discussed with profit. All I can do is set out the topics of what might eventually be a discussion. The topics, then, for discussion are mainly three: dogma, ‘is,’ and ‘insight into phantasm,’ in a sequence that goes in that order to the heart of the matter. Dogma cannot be understood without understanding how we use the word ‘is’; how we use ‘is’ cannot be understood without understanding insight into phantasm; and insight into phantasm is almost completely ignored by philosophers and theologians alike – even sympathetic reviewers of Insight give it only a hesitant acceptance.32 What, then, are the chances of a useful debate on dogma or even on theological judgment? Lonergan did notable work on the content of the Nicene homoousios, but far more important is the work he did on what was happening methodologically at that council: on the meaning of dogma, determined by our use of ‘is,’ determined in turn by the role of insight into phantasm. From the analogue of judgment in the world of proportionate being, we move with all due reservations to judgment in the world beyond proportionate being known to us only through revelation. But while we await further study of those basic categories of thought, perhaps some approximations to our location in the history of theological thinking are possible. A first point is that we are doing what Vincent of Lerins allowed (rather grudgingly) as a legitimate goal of Christian thinking: development of doctrine. Thus we see a development from the New Testament to Nicea, from Nicea to the Quicumque, from the Quicumque to Thomas Aquinas. A second step goes beyond what we may call linear development to recognize in it a dialectical factor, and that is the more important factor today. Lonergan gave his book The Way to Nicea the subtitle The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology, and he traced the dialectic through the key figures of three centuries, especially Tertullian, Origen, Arius, and Athanasius. To put the matter with extreme brevity, the

32 For example, the learned and courteous Frederick Copleston wrote, more positively but still without hearty endorsement, in regard to insight into phantasm: ‘… some philosophers would wish to apply Ockham’s razor to such “acts.” But it appears to me that the term “act of understanding” denotes a real psychological phenomenon’ (Frederick Copleston, ‘Review of Bernard J.F. Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,’ in The Journal of Theological Studies 9 [1958] 202–204, at 203).

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dialectical process starts with an objective contradiction, either explicit or implicit, in a theology – say, in Tertullian’s theology. There is a series of theologians, who are rational subjects, compelled by their rationality to get rid of the contradiction. There is the term of the dialectic which, where reason is illumined and strengthened by faith, is an advance in theology – such as is found, say, in Athanasius’ theology.33 Now the infinite mystery of God ensures the continuation of such advances in a never ending series – which is a way of saying that objective contradictions, or perhaps we should say objective tensions, will continue to emerge until the end of time. Is there such a tension today in the theology that affirms the three persons to be ‘homoousioi’ but treats the Son and Spirit as if they were somewhat less divine than the Father? I believe that this may be the case, and that the dialectical process finds its direction to a true advance in a theology that takes seriously not only the homoousios but also the Thomist view of Trinitarian relations, where we have ‘ordinem … absque prioritate.’ This essay is an effort to contribute to the expulsion of the contradiction: it is written without hope of doing any better than Tertullian or Origen, or even dimly copying their achievements, but with the fervent hope that it is on the path leading to an Athanasius rather than to an Arius.34 Dialectic follows history, or an account of what was going forward; and it may help to take another little excursus into history, namely, to contrast the Scholastic context with the present one. In Scholastic thinking the transcendental concept of being loomed large, and a chief concern was to ensure possession of the divine being to each person in the Trinity. They therefore began, as the fathers did, by reading the scriptures as revealing God the Father. Then, assuming the divine being of the Father, they could go on to think of the Father as communicating the divine being to Son and Spirit. But when being and the origin of being are not the topic, when intersubjective communion supplies new categories for our thinking about God, then those categories with their own proper ordering may become the created analogue for conceiving in a new way the order in the Trinity. 33 The Triune God: Doctrines 105–107. 34 This is not to attribute gender to God, but simply, since metaphors are necessary, to try to provide a balance. I need hardly state that, as in Christ there is neither male nor female (Galatians 3:28), much less is God male or female. I have been forced, in dealing with the tradition, to speak of ‘Father’ and ‘Son,’ but as it happens the Thomist Intelligere (Dicens), Verbum, Amor avoids all explicit reference to gender, as does the triad ‘Love, Word, and Mystery.’

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One final point of clarification: this essay moves within the traditional circle of ‘fides quaerens intellectum,’ or, in the terms of Lonergan’s Method in Theology, in the circle of the sixth and seventh functional specialties, doctrines and systematics.35 If the first is a matter of church doctrines, the second is a matter of following the pattern of Thomas Aquinas: he could open his treatise on God by stating ‘primo considerandum est an Deus sit.’36 In its descent to the most fundamental beliefs of our faith, and in its patronage by the most outstanding theologian in our history, that pattern offers us less competent mortals a precedent without peer for continuing to ask questions about the meaning of our doctrines.37

35 Method in Theology, chapters 12 and 13. 36 Summa theologiae 1, q. 2, introduction [‘First it must be considered whether God exists’]. 37 I owe thanks to Robert Doran and the late John Egan, of Regis College, Toronto, and to Michael Vertin, of St Michael’s College, Toronto, who read an earlier draft of this article and contributed from their areas of expertise to its final form. Which is not to say that they would agree with the final form; and in any case they are not responsible for the deficiencies that remain.

Chapter 26

The ‘World’ from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican II1

1 The Pattern of Human Thinking There is an old proverb, once thought to be scriptural, warning us that where there is no understanding the people perish. Scriptural or not, the proverb itself is sound enough, and I would apply it to the institution of religious life. On all sides the question is heard: Is religious life dying? I refuse to believe that the God who gave us Anthony of Egypt, Benedict, Francis, Dominic, Ignatius, and so many others down to Mother Theresa, is a God who intends religious life to perish. But I do believe in the need for understanding, so that through our input God’s operative grace may become cooperative. This study, then, is an essay in understanding; but it is much more modest in scope than the preceding paragraph would suggest. It does not attempt to study religious life in its essence, its properties, its various manifestations. It goes back rather to a preliminary question and takes one small point for study: the Christian attitude toward what we call ‘the world.’ It is my hope that if we gain some understanding on this background question, we will have a context for an eventual rethinking of religious life itself. My approach is historical rather than analytic. It examines the major transitions in the Christian attitude toward the world. It finds a dialectic running through history, a dialectic of to and fro that is not a mere alternation but instead a progressively unfolding pattern in which each alternation is a positive step forward. It concludes with the way the

1 Previously published in Review for Religious 58 (1999) 470–80.

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church is finding new meaning for her role in the world, and it proposes this as a new context in which religious too might find today the meaning of their consecrated life. The advantage of approaching history as a dialectic in the sense described is twofold. First, it may lift us out of the ‘crisis’ mood in which we think of our present situation as though it were a spiritual fever, as though we had reached a low point from which the patient would either die or recover and resume life as it was before the crisis. In a dialectical understanding, that is not the case; the ‘low point’ is an opening on a new high. Secondly, a dialectic follows an intelligible pattern with each step in natural, though not necessarily logical, sequence to its predecessor. This means that if we can plot the sequence up to the present, then we may be able to establish the direction of movement and discern the path we should take into the developing and unknown future. That ‘natural sequence’ is the pattern of human thinking in time – the way the human mind naturally works as it progresses toward fuller and fuller understanding. In itself the pattern is simple enough. Faced with a problem area of any complexity, the human mind will first find some specific factor of explanation and will tend to make that the whole explanation; but it will eventually see that it is insufficient as a total view. It will then discover a generic factor, and will in turn make that the full explanation, only to discover that this too is insufficient as a total view. Eventually in the dialectical oscillation of specific and generic the mind will arrive at a higher viewpoint and hold together the specific and the generic in the unity of a full understanding. 2 The Pattern Illustrated That is terribly abstract, so before applying it to the history of Christian thinking on ‘the world,’ let me offer two concrete illustrations that show the pattern as realized in actual history. First, the natural priority of the specific is easily illustrated in human language. ‘So in Homer there were words for such specific activities as glancing, peering, staring, but no generic word for seeing.’2 This is ‘both the strength and the weakness of early language’;3 it has the power of the concrete, but is unable to reason in abstract or generic terms. And so in learning to 2 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 87. 3 Ibid.

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write English we are told to search for the specific, for the concrete descriptive word; but in the strict reasoning of, say, a legal question we may have to resort to technical and abstract language. What is true of human language is true also of human thinking, and so my second illustration is taken from the theology of our need for divine grace. Here there was first the discovery of a specific explanation, namely, the fall of our first parents. This was largely the focus of St Augustine’s thinking, which centered on the difference between their state before the fall and ours after it. This idea ran its course for about seven centuries, culminating in the position of Peter Lombard, namely, that in the grace-history of our human race there are ‘four states of human liberty: the earthly paradise, fallen man, man redeemed, and heaven.’4 Our need for divine grace is understood in relation to those states. Meanwhile, however, the insufficiency of this specific step was gradually becoming apparent. There was difficulty in defining liberty; the doctrine of merit tended to hang in mid air; and even grace itself lacked a clear definition, for what is there that is not a free gift of God and therefore grace?5 The dialectic of ideas was preparing theologians for the next step, the discovery of the generic theorem of two orders with quite distinct status in the universe of being, the supernatural order and the natural: ‘not only was there the familiar series of grace, faith, charity and merit, but also nature, reason and the natural love of God.’6 This was largely the work of Philip the Chancellor, in Paris in the early 1200s. It was an epoch-making discovery, and it put the question of our need for divine grace on an entirely new basis, releasing a whole series of developments. But so intoxicating was Philip’s idea that theologians made a mistake exactly parallel to the one their predecessors made in the use of Augustine: the view that this was a complete and adequate explanation. Thomas Aquinas himself, in his early writings, shows hints of this one-sidedness, not giving sufficient attention to the moral impotence that is the result of Adam’s fall. Nevertheless, it was Thomas who finally brought the two factors, the specific and the generic, into

4 Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas (2000) 11. 5 Ibid. 15–17. 6 Ibid. 16–18. [The quote is found on p. 17.]

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unity. Peter Lombard’s four states remain in the Thomist synthesis, but  as applying to a specific question within the genus of the total divine plan.7 3 The Pattern Verified in the Specific Idea of ‘World’ I have illustrated the way the human mind naturally works in time as it advances in understanding: first, a specific idea; then, exaggeration of this idea; next, a generic idea; exaggeration of this in its turn; and eventually a synthesis. I believe the pattern is also discernible in the history of Christian thinking on the idea ‘the world.’ There too I find a specific and a generic factor, with the specific the first to be discovered and exploited beyond its potentiality, and the generic the next to be discovered and in its turn exploited beyond due measure. Again, let us turn from the abstract to the concrete. Concretely the first step may be located in, or at least represented by, Anthony of Egypt. Toward the end of the third century, ‘Antony gave away his possessions, and devoted himself to a life of asceticism, and c. 285 retired completely into the desert … Towards the end of his life, the number of those who turned to the solitary life of the desert increased as the result of the secularization of the Church …’8 It is possible to see this development in too simplistic a fashion, but at least one characteristic feature is clear: flight from the world. So it produced works with titles such as De contemptu mundi. It filled Europe with hermitages, convents, and monasteries. For twelve centuries the idea ran its course, with enormous impact on Christian values, Christian living, Christian institutions.9 But it suffered the handicap of being a specific idea attempting to provide a total view. For one example, the term ‘vocation’ was appropriated

7 Ibid. 182–84. 8 See the entry ‘Antony, St., of Egypt’ in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F.L. Cross (London: Oxford University Press, 1958) 65. 9 See, for an example, George J. Engelhardt, ‘The “De contemptu mundi” of Bernardus Morvalensis, Part One: A Study in Commonplace,’ Mediaeval Studies 22 (1960) 108–35; ‘The “De contemptu mundi” of Bernardus Morvalensis – Book Two: A Study in Commonplace,’ ibid. 26 (1964) 109–42; and ‘The “De contemptu mundi” of Bernardus Morvalensis – Book Three: A Study in Commonplace,’ ibid. 29 (1967) 243–72. On the same topic Robert Bultot published widely in books and periodicals of the 1960s under the title La doctrine du mépris du monde (Louvain: Éditions Nauwelaerts).

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to the religious life (as it very commonly still is). In this respect the laity of the church and even the diocesan clergy were deemed to belong to a lower class: they did not have a ‘vocation.’ A reaction was inevitable, but it was centuries taking shape. Many diverse influences were at work promoting it. Its history is a complex interweaving of those influences. There were subversive as well as legitimate movements. But what was positive and valid in the reaction, and quite natural and basic in the unfolding dialectic, was the emergence of the generic factor in the concept ‘the world.’ 4 The Pattern Verified in the Generic Idea of ‘World’ The quite basic event, then, in the emergence of the generic concept ‘the world’ was the discovery by Philip the Chancellor of the two orders: natural and supernatural. I used this earlier to illustrate the pattern of human thinking as it is found in theology (not only was there the familiar series of grace, faith, charity and merit, but also nature, reason and the natural love of God). I use it now as a basic explanatory factor for the new stage of our dialectic. That is no accident: it is an idea so fundamental that it is bound to appear in the history of any theological idea. It underpins all that I have to say in this section and the following. Every discovery makes its way against opposition from an establishment. The recognition of the natural order had to be followed by a recognition of its rightful autonomy, and that could not fail to be a traumatic experience for the church. The history of this struggle need not detain us here. In essence the point is that the human race was not only created divine: it was also created human, with a need for hunting, fishing, farming, for song and dance, for mathematics, science, philosophy, whatever lies within its potency for development. Using his favorite example, Thomas Aquinas would say that without grace we are able to cultivate our fields and build our houses. But the full extent of that principle means that without grace we can marry and be given in marriage, form guilds among artisans, establish universities, function as nations, join in a world union of peoples, explore the boundaries of space. Further, the natural has its own laws. Natures operate uniformly: we do not gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles.10 And those natural laws can be isolated in thought and allowed to develop and 10 Matthew 7:17.

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flourish according to their own potential. For to be human is to learn: to learn that there are human techniques for producing good crops, human means for controlling nature, human means of self-government, human means for gaining wisdom and educating upcoming generations, and so on and on. Consequently, if we take a broad view of the forest, not stopping to study individual trees, we can discern here the generic factor in the concept of the world, the needed complement to the specific factor provided by Anthony. This generic factor is the recognition of the world as good in its own right. God did not create an evil universe but made all things that they might have being and life.11 That means that we can no longer be satisfied with the negative connotation of ‘flight from the world.’ There is a positive side to Anthony’s strategy: its focus on the transcendent. The negative side is not repudiated, but it must be seen in relation to that focus and must be complemented by a generic view of the goodness of all creation. But the pattern of the dialectic suggests that this step too will be exaggerated, and that is exactly what happened. In the intoxication of this new idea there was a widespread repudiation of the age-old flight from the world. Convents and monasteries were emptied. Instead of contemptus mundi there was a glorification of the secular.12 And so secularism arose. What was legitimate in the discovery of the natural, what was legitimate in the declaration of its autonomy, was magnified to an ‘ism.’ What was a generic idea that should have been brought into union with the specific was instead paraded as the full explanation of the universe. A movement for the liberation of the secular became a secularism. 5 Uniting the Specific and the Generic: New Categories Christian thinking on ‘the world’ has gone through the two phases inherent in the dialectic of human learning: the discovery and undue 11 Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31; 1 Timothy 4:4. 12 The turn-around had an interesting development in the Lutheran idea. Lutheranism ‘does not consider the call of the pastor any more sacred than the call of each Christian to witness to the lordship of Christ in his life and work. The universal priesthood of believers … makes the vocation of every man a holy calling’: see the entry ‘Lutheranism’ by Conrad Bergendoff in A Handbook of Christian Theology (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1958) 221–22. Here too there is a valuable insight: the vocation of every Christian; but it is not integrated into the dialectical development on the ‘world.’

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exploitation of a specific factor, followed by a reaction, and the discovery and undue exploitation of a generic factor, followed in its turn by a reaction. The current need is for the integration of the two factors, and the categories that offer hope of that are ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular.’ This pair of terms has crept into our discussion as related to but not identical with the supernatural and the natural, and they need more careful definition. The natural and the supernatural provide the framework of creation: they are what philosophers would call the ontological constituents of the universe. But the secular and the sacred have to do with human thought and feeling and the human use of creation: they pertain to the cultural sphere rather than the ontological. The natural cannot be made supernatural. As Isaiah reports the word of the Lord, ‘my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.’13 God is the wholly other. Grace perfects nature but does not destroy it. The natural, then, maintains its identity within the unity of God’s creative plan: Catholic schools do not use a different mathematics to add and subtract, to divide and multiply. But while the natural remains what it was created to be, it can be invested with the aura of the supernatural; and in this sense the natural can be sacralized, become sacred. Lonergan provides a context in which to locate this cultural transformation: ‘The whole world of sense is to be … a token, a mystery, of God’; and again: ‘the world of sense is … a mystery that signifies God as we know him and symbolizes the further depths that lie beyond our comprehension.’14 This means that the secular, not only as a world but also in its various aspects, can in human thought and feeling be given the character of the sacred. Thus in primitive peoples there was a religious ritual for planting and harvesting, for coming to puberty and marrying, for reverent remembering of the dead, and the like. All these activities are given a sacred aspect, though their natural basis allows for their secular use. But they are only potentially ‘secular’: at first they are not recognized to have that aspect. For the human race is fundamentally religious, in the sense of being created with a religious consciousness; and it has remained religious despite all the protests of unbelievers. One may say that in the beginning was the sacred. That is, what later became distinguished as the two zones of the sacred and the secular was at first all one zone, and that one zone was sacred. 13 Isaiah 55:8 (NEB). 14 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 711, 714.

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Now just as in the ontological sphere the natural component of the universe had to be recognized for what it was, the natural, so too in the sphere of the cultural the legitimately secular aspect had to escape from the domination of the sacred and assume its independent role in the plan of creation. In the course of this development there was inevitably a conflict with the representatives of the sacred; and also inevitably the secular won its rightful independence. ‘For this sacralized construct of man and his universe was impugned, and impugned successfully, by Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, by Darwin and Freud, and by the swarm of philosophies and counter-philosophies that began at least with Descartes.’15 So the struggle between natural and supernatural was repeated here, with the same exaggerations. The extremists were not content to liberate the secular: they also were driven to desecrate the sacred. Concretely, we might think of the relation between a secular day of rest and the Lord’s Day. There has been a strong tendency in this matter for the sacral to dictate to the secular, imposing a religious observance so strict as to frustrate the secular purpose of a day of rest. But on the other side there is the desecration of the Lord’s Day represented in past history by the extremists in the French Revolution and, some would say, by the present Sunday shopping. 6 Uniting the Specific and the Generic: New Strategy Perhaps it is possible now to sketch the lines we might follow to achieve the desired integration of our specific and generic factors. Our question is how the church is to achieve the unity of Anthony and Aristotle, of Jerusalem and Athens, of the transcendent and the this-worldly, and now in particular of the sacred and the secular. Our suggestion is that what had been at first unwittingly sacralized was then wittingly secularized. But what was wittingly secularized can be wittingly re-sacralized for Christian purposes as the need arises. The pagans of Rome sacralized their meat by offering it to their gods, but the Christians could in effect desacralize these meats with a good conscience and, if they wished, re-sacralize them to their own purpose: ‘he who eats meat has the Lord in mind when he eats.’16 Again, a game of golf may be just 15 Bernard Lonergan, ‘Sacralization and Secularization,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1965–1980 259–81, at 273. My whole article relies heavily on this lecture. 16 Romans 14:6 (NEB).

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what workers need on their day of secular rest, and present discipline in the church allows them to keep holy the Sabbath and still go golfing. But the new sacralization will be different. There will be a new understanding and a new humility. The sacred will not dictate to the secular in the latter’s own sphere. It will be a sacralization through the intention of the believer, using the natural end of a natural entity to his or her religious purpose. They who eat meat have the Lord in mind when they eat; they who golf give thanks alike in the weekly Eucharist and in their outdoor exercise. A final point brings us back to larger issues: sacralization will not be merely extrinsic to the natural world. On this question Chenu has some helpful remarks. He envisions a purer presence of the church in the world as creating a new kind of Christian in the world, missionaries of the gospel and not the protectors of a civilization that they themselves have organized. The real vocation of laypersons will be to show that Christianity does not despise the world but lifts it up, consecrates it and fulfils it. And this new presence will unite intrinsically with the world and make it a true partner. Believers will read the signs of the times; and through them they will discern the elements in the world and human history that are, as it were, naturally open to the sacred, offering the possibility of a new praeparatio evangelica. They now look for a spirituality that will integrate their lives in a world that has become the main field where they must seek their sanctification.17 7 Religious Life in the Ongoing Dialectic The focus of my attention has been the new path for the church in the world today, along the lines of the Vatican document Gaudium et Spes. We must be clear on the church in the new age before venturing to discuss religious life in the new age; for religious are Christian before they are religious – that is the order of the Council in its document on the church, Lumen Gentium.18 But of course that means that the dialectic we

17 See Claude J. Geffré, ‘Desacralization and the Spiritual Life,’ in Concilium 19: Spirituality and the Secular City (New York, NY, and Glen Rock, NJ: Paulist Press, 1966) 111–31, at 114–15. I have paraphrased these two pages in Geffré’s article, with frequent verbatim quotations. 18 See the document on the church, Lumen Gentium, which has a special section on religious. [See chapter VI, §§ 43–47.]

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have discerned in history will also apply to the features of Christian living that religious have in common with all Christians. In that context we may anticipate the direction that application of the dialectic to religious life should take. We will understand how the religious state began as a ‘flight’ from ‘the world’; and we will realize that just as our conception and knowledge of that ‘world’ has changed enormously, so also must our notion of ‘flight’ from it. We have come a long way from St Anthony of Egypt. I trust, nevertheless, that we have not left him behind. With all reverence we may conceive an analogy with a hymn of Thomas Aquinas that the church uses in Holy Week: The word of God, proceeding forth / Yet leaving not his Father’s side.19 Our task is not to abandon Anthony, but rather – ‘proceeding forth’ – to retain his insight and transpose it into Vatican II’s vision of the church in the modern world and of religious life as it is to be lived in the coming millennium. That is to say, our task is to achieve in our own way the unity of the specific and the generic concepts of the world. Religious, then, will retain their vows; and the vows will have the meaning they had for Aquinas, a revocatio ab affectu temporalium, a withdrawal from affection for this world.20 They also will have the meaning that Anthony’s flight from the world had for him in his time of secularization. And that meaning will remain, even in the most sacred of times. A focus on the transcendent and the eschatological state will necessarily involve the re-evaluation of the world that the saints have always shown: not a contempt for the good of creation but a love for the better to which the good is open. Correspondingly, there will be far more attention to the positive aspects of the vows. This movement has already begun, but it should undergo an extensive development. Similarly for the positive counterpart of the ‘flight,’ namely, contemplation of the divine. The cloistered will redouble attention to their contemplative role, and the active will redouble attention to their role as contemplatives in action. As we follow the dialectic in its future course, we would do well to consider our starting point. The first word in the gospel message is

19 From the first two lines of Verbum Supernum: ‘Verbum supernum prodiens / Nec Patris linquens dexteram.’ It seems that the hymn was written by Aquinas in honor of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament at the request of Pope Urban IV on the occasion of the establishment of the feast of Corpus Christi in 1264. (Ed.) 20 On ‘revocatio ab affectu temporalium,’ see Thomas Aquinas, Liber de perfectione spiritualis vitae, c. 6.

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‘repent.’21 Our examination of conscience in this respect might ask in what degree, if any, we transferred to ourselves as perfection what belongs rather to the realm of the sacred. Medieval theologians argued at length about holiness and the more perfect state. But in our day is not the operative word not ‘holy’ in the sense of personal virtue but rather ‘sacred’ in the sense of ‘consecrated to God’?

21 Matthew 4:17. See the same in Mark 1:15, but with a preface, ‘The time has come …’

Chapter 27

The Dynamics of Spirit–Body Communication1

This essay explores the dynamics of human spirit as it follows a path from its own deepest reservoir of energy and need, through internal communication, to external expression. That is the viewpoint from which I will try to unify the various phenomena of human behavior that I bring together in the first part of the essay. The second part will note certain family resemblances that give grounds for a tentative grouping of phenomena that at first sight seem quite disparate. In a third part I will suggest some areas of exploration that might lead to a more systematic understanding of these phenomena and reinforce the hypothesis of their place in a common ‘family.’ 1 Eruptions of Spirit: Six Cases of Human Behavior Here I describe six cases of somewhat unusual human activity that I will group together and call ‘eruptions of spirit.’ Three of them have a more discernible kinship and could be called a subgroup. Two others are really just individual instances of another type of eruption, but they are worth individual attention and so may be considered a second subgroup of two members. The sixth and last case stands somewhat alone but nevertheless belongs to the ‘family’ as I understand it. 1.1 A Subgroup: Three Cases I begin with the simplest case in my list, the very homely phenomenon Augustine mentions of harvesters singing at their work. He observes 1 Previously published as ‘The Dynamics of Spirit–Body Communication: Some Case Studies,’ Josephinum Journal of Theology 9/1 (2002) 95–107.

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that they begin with some articulate song, but soon under the impulse of their happiness in harvesting, break into inarticulate musical sounds. He speaks of this in the context of the Psalmist’s ‘singing well to God.’2 But how is this done? You must first understand that words cannot express the things that are sung by the heart. Take the case of people singing while harvesting in the fields or in the vineyards or when any other strenuous work is in progress. Although they begin by giving expression to their happiness in sung words, yet shortly there is a change. As if so happy that words can no longer express what they feel, they discard the restricting syllables. They burst out into a simple sound of joy, of jubilation. Such a cry of joy is a sound signifying that the heart is bringing to birth what it cannot utter in words.3 Of course, the sounds so artlessly uttered can be heard, remembered, transposed to sheet music, and so become a pattern for others to follow; and perhaps in some such way phrases like ‘tooralooraloora’ came into our culture. My interest, however, is exclusively in the first spontaneous and unpatterned expression. Augustine’s context is religious, as is the context for the next case in my list: the New Testament phenomenon of speaking in tongues. Glossolalia … literally ‘speaking with tongues,’ refers to the type of ecstatic utterance of meaningless syllables under the excitement of powerful religious emotion. It has been (and is) a feature of religious (esp. revivalist) activities at many periods of Church history … St Paul … appears to think that the phenomenon is a genuine manifestation of the presence of the Holy Spirit … The investigation of the subject belongs primarily to the psychology of religion; in their evaluation of glossolalia theologians will bear in mind that it is a phenomenon to be found in other religions than the Christian.4

2 Psalm 32(33):3 (NRSV: ‘Sing to him a new song; play skillfully on the strings, with loud shouts’; NIV: ‘Sing to him a new song: play skillfully, and shout for joy’). 3 Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos I–L in Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina, vol. 38 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1956) 253–54. English translation quoted from The Liturgy of the Hours, vol. 4 (New York: Catholic Book Publishing Co., 1975) 1577, Office of Readings for November 22, Feast of St Cecilia. [In English, Augustine’s comment on the verse (p. 1577) reads: ‘See how he himself (God) provides you with a way of singing. Do not search for words, as if you could find a lyric which would give God pleasure. Sing to him “with songs of joy.” That is singing well to God, just singing with songs of joy.’] 4 See A Dictionary of Christian Theology, ed. Alan Richardson (London: SCM Press, 1969) 132, s.v. ‘Glossolalia.’ See also the work also edited by him, A Theological Word Book of

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Perhaps I may anticipate the second part of my essay to note at once the ‘family resemblance’ in these two cases: Augustine’s harvesters breaking into wordless song under the impulse of their happiness at their work, and Paul’s Christians breaking into meaningless ‘tongues’ under the impulse of their religious experience. My third instance is the phenomenon of the religious dance. This has a long history, from Old Testament times on, and not only in the Judeo-Christian tradition.5 But here again we have to distinguish, as indeed we must in my first two instances, between the controlled form and the spontaneous form of dance. Just as there are songs composed in a determinate form that can be indicated on music sheets, and besides these there are the wordless songs of which Augustine speaks, and just as there are King David’s written Psalms of praise, and besides these there is the wordless praise of those who speak in tongues, so there are choreographed dances that prescribe a pattern to follow, but besides these there are the spontaneous dances that are the simple outpouring of religious feeling. My interest lies in the latter, and Bertaud provides a beautiful example in St Teresa of Avila. Sometimes, he says, her sentiments of love were so strong that she could not suppress them, so she would take her tambourine, leave her cell, and – carried along by her growing fervor – break into a dance. Her daughters in the convent would accompany the rhythm of the dance with their castanets or clapping of hands; then, suddenly, their Mother would begin to improvise.6

the Bible (London: SCM, 1957) 242, s.v. ‘Spirit,’ VIII [e]: Paul ‘does not attempt to quench the Glossolalia (Speaking with tongues – a kind of inspired gibberish); they were too unpredictable, and besides they did give evidence of divine power in the inspired Christian.’ 5 As may be seen from Émile Bertaud’s article ‘Danse religieuse,’ Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, Tome 3 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1957) cols. 21–37. Relevant here are the phenomena associated with Pentecostalism. For a lucid account of this movement see Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995). 6 Bertaud, in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, Tome 3, s.v. ‘Danse religieuse,’ col. 35. My own perspective on the religious dance owes a good deal to a conversation with Susan Severino, who has studied ballet and performs sacred dances in the liturgy. She does not prepare a sacred dance as a choreographer might, but lets the religious need of the moment express itself spontaneously. One statement of hers speaks volumes for the point I am making: she cannot ‘repeat’ a previous sacred dance (as she is sometimes asked to do after a particularly successful one): her performance is too spontaneous for that. In other words, there is a sacred dance with an unplanned and

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1.2 Another Subgroup: Two Cases I move now to two instances of another type. My first three showed human spirit striving to express its deep-lying sentiments, especially the sentiment of joy, and most especially of religious joy. The two instances now to be considered show rather the opposite mood: human spirit protecting itself from exposure and resorting to expression that is designed to hide rather than to reveal. But I shall argue that the dynamics are, at least in part, the same. I begin with the passage in Schopenhauer that first suggested to me a study of these phenomena: ‘… all of us often seek, as it were mechanically, to drive away a painful thought that suddenly occurs to us by some loud exclamation or quick movement …’7 There is no need of further description to identify this phenomenon, if Schopenhauer is right in saying that it is a common experience. My other instance of this type is described by O’Faolain, as he found it in John Henry Newman. I quote the author as he quotes Newman’s diaries. ‘… the painful and ridiculous sense of shame I have on light occasions … is like a sword running through me.’ When he gave his first University sermon ‘I lay on the sofa writhing at the thought of what a fool I had made of myself.’ … Never is it more plain that the man was unfitted by his exquisitely sensitive nature to mingle with men, and that in learning how to do it he won a painful victory over himself.8

unformulated and quite spontaneous character, parallel to the unarticulated language in the singing of Augustine’s harvesters. A further remark of hers is also relevant here. She links this character of the religious dance with the culture of her homeland, the Philippines, and with the sounds of mourning, for example, that older women there utter at a death: ‘sounds,’ but not articulate language. The link with New Testament tongues is obvious. [The late Susan Severino was a member of the library staff at Regis College during the period in which this essay was being written. (Ed.)] 7 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vol. 1, book 3, in The Works of Schopenhauer, abridged edition, ed. Will Durant (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1928) 115. Schopenhauer used this only as an analogy for the point he was making about madness, but it has its independent value for him, since he makes the point again on 256 [‘… if there occurs to us some former humiliating incident, we shrink together, would like to sink out of sight, blush with shame, and after try forcibly to distract and divert our thoughts by some loud exclamation, as if to scare some evil spirit.’] See also 317–18. 8 See Sean O’Faolain, Newman’s Way: The Odyssey of John Henry Newman (New York: Devin-Adair, 1952) 108–109. [The text Crowe cites occurs on p. 108.]

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What O’Faolain describes and Newman’s diary reveals is, I believe, the Schopenhauer experience as found in a person afflicted with a special sensitivity in regard to the opinions others might have of him. These two instances are distinguished from one another, partly by the degrees of sensitivity and intensity of suffering that characterize the Newman experience, partly by the fact that Schopenhauer considers his experience explicitly as an attempt to drive away the painful memory, whereas Newman does not offer this interpretation of his experience, though it is easy to interpret his actions as having unwittingly the same purpose. More important is the reason for linking this second subgroup with the first. This will have to be considered in more detail later; but meanwhile, for better understanding of this second subgroup, we may note that two dynamics are at work in it. In one dynamic there is, say, the memory or the imagination of a humiliating experience, and the urgent need for suppressing the memory or imagination. But then there is a transfer of energy and attention to another dynamic that with the same urgency follows another path to emerge in a quite inappropriate expression: the ‘loud exclamation or quick movement.’ Psychiatric treatment might aim at a cure and recommend acceptance of reality; ascetic advice might suggest bowing one’s head in humble recognition of one’s finitude; but neither of these is our present interest, which is concerned simply with the dynamic correspondence of spirit, psyche, and bodily expression. From that viewpoint both subgroups belong here. 1.3 A Singular Case My last case-study is so distinct that it may seem at first sight not to belong in my list at all. It is the behavior I shall call ‘clowning.’ Here I mean to make the same distinction I made with regard to my first group of three. As there is the composer’s song and there is the song of Augustine’s harvesters, as there is the choreographed dance and there is the spontaneous dance of St Teresa, so there is the professional ‘clown’ but prior to him there is also the spontaneous behavior we observe in the person that I shall call, to maintain a distinction from the professional type, a ‘clowner.’ There was a comedy team that I saw on television, maybe thirty or more years ago, in which the one who played the ‘crazy’ part, being scolded at one point by his partner, replied in a mock pleading tone, ‘Aw, why can’t I act crazy?’ From the perspective of this essay, one can

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see here a parallel with the professional singer as contrasted with Augustine’s harvester. As one song is patterned and the other spontaneous, so the ‘clown’ has a pattern in mind: he is doing a comic imitation of some original ‘clowner,’ caricaturing some oddity of human behavior. As in all the other cases, it is that original spontaneous form that interests me. I would note that I am not just postulating it: rather, it is deducible from the circumstances. For the comic imitation is recognized as such by the audience. It is interpreted as an imitation – otherwise it would not be so funny – and so implies that original form. This suggests that, buried deep within some or perhaps all of us, there is some original bent for this oddity of behavior, an urge and need sometimes to act the clown, to be a ‘clowner.’9 2 A Family Resemblance I have been speaking of six ‘instances,’ assuming therefore a generic unity in all six; and I have pointed in passing to some family resemblances. Now I must take up the latter issue and study it across the board. A characteristic common to all six, and one that will be of basic importance in my third part, is the fact of some compulsion, some coercion operating from deep within us, some fierce need, some vehement urge, some keenly felt experience, some blind force coming up to the surface and either demanding expression or suffering repression. This lies behind all particular resemblances. We read in the Douai translation of Job 4:2 ‘who can withhold the words he hath conceived?’10 and we form a picture of someone bursting with a pent-up message or emotion and needing an outlet.

9 It is said that the clown is often of a melancholy character in his or her personal life – which brings out the distinction between spontaneous and structured performance: the comic imitator who is sad at heart is not acting spontaneously. Another point: the non-rational may enlist intelligence in a high degree. As Lonergan somewhere says: I may wish to play the buffoon, but I would want to do so intelligently. [Crowe may have in mind the following remark by Lonergan: ‘One may be willing to play the buffoon, but one wants to do it intelligently.’ Bernard Lonergan, ‘Philosophical Positions with Regard to Knowing,’ in Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958–1964 214–43, at 224. A similar comment appears in Bernard Lonergan, Understanding and Being (1990) 139–40. Also see Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1992) 356.] 10 Following the Vulgate: ‘conceptum sermonem tenere quis poterit?’

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This is quite clearly present in cases one to three. In cases four and five, however, there is a distortion that somewhat obscures the dynamic. The first spontaneous reaction is one of suppression, and I have distinguished my interest from that of the psychiatrist or spiritual adviser: I wish only to attend to the dynamic of that suppression as it is transferred to another path and works itself out in the inadequate form of some ‘loud exclamation or quick movement.’ As for the ‘clowner,’ we may again surmise some underlying compulsion denied expression in normal behavior; and so, as in subgroup two, we may find substitute expression in the antics imitated by the clown. However, it is also possible that the clowner is expressing more directly a legitimate dynamic of normal behavior and so might be linked to our first subgroup. I will focus on this underlying dynamic in part three of my essay, making it a key element in my attempt to see the unity in these phenomena. Meanwhile I merely note a certain family resemblance in this aspect of the six phenomena I have described: they all seem to involve a deep inner compulsion. Another family resemblance, a feature common to most of my instances, is the fact that words and ordinary expressions are hopelessly inadequate; and so one resorts to inarticulate sounds, to unrehearsed gestures, to comic antics, to any form of spontaneous expression that may lie at hand. Augustine’s singers are carried beyond the words they began with, finding them inadequate; similarly, there are no words for those who speak in tongues; and there are neither words nor accepted dance patterns for the religious dancer. The ‘interpreters’ we read of in the New Testament try to put the ‘tongues’ they hear into rational speech; but I suspect that their interpretations have little relation to the primary experience of those speaking, and I gather from the variety of specialist views on the matter that there is a shift away from interest in the New Testament function of ‘interpreting.’11 A third point of resemblance lies in the way forms of expression lie ready at hand to be seized upon. Though in their variety they are dissimilar, in their availability they have a common feature. Bertaud tells us that St Teresa would improvise, but readiness to improvise seems common to all forms. Special questions may arise with regard to each. For example, where those speaking in ‘tongues’ find their ‘sounds’ is a question of great interest that I will touch on later; but we may notice at 11 Cox, Fire from Heaven; see the several entries under ‘Speaking in tongues’ in the Index.

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once that improvisation is common to speaking in tongues and to the sacred dance, and thus we may discern a kinship there. Again, the availability of expressions may be curtailed by circumstances. It is easy, with song and dance forming a natural pair, to conceive of Augustine’s harvesters, were their limbs free, expressing their happiness in dance as well as in song; but dance and other movements of that kind are not compatible with their work. A fourth common feature is what we may with hesitation call the non-rational character of the various expressions. I would consider separately under this heading the first three cases I described. We must avoid the term ‘irrational’ in their regard and should speak rather of what is deeper than the rational, prior to the rational, creative in a way the rational cannot be. We may perhaps refine our language and speak of the non-rational in the sense of the unformulated, but that is not to be equated with the irrational. Augustine’s harvesters, singing at their work, are in no sense ‘irrational’ for being so spontaneous; and the same must be said both of King David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant and of those gifted with ‘tongues’ in the New Testament. Clearly we have to do here with the expression of an interior feeling and experience that is too deeply human to be called ‘irrational.’12 The other cases are not exactly parallel. Indeed, cases four and five often involve an aberration that might justly be called ‘irrational.’ For Schopenhauer there was no logical or ‘rational’ way to repel the painful memory, which erupts like a volcano: he had to resort to the ‘cunning’ of the psyche. I call it ‘cunning,’ but it is not rational: what rational connection is there between ‘some loud exclamation or quick movement’ and repelling a painful memory? Nonetheless the psyche gets relief from such actions, at least finding in them a distraction. Newman suffered in the same way, but his character would not allow him to drive away his memory by ‘some loud exclamation or quick movement.’ He could only writhe in a totally inadequate act of wrestling with the pain. The clowner has his or her own deep need, and no accepted rational way to express it. There is often therefore a negative factor in these three that is not found in my first subgroup, but they belong in the ‘family’ by reason of the deep compulsion that breaks out in aberrant use of the lines of 12 Wild and exaggerated manifestations may account for the hesitation of the church to allow dance into the liturgy (see Bertaud’s article mentioned in note 5 above) and for the suspicions widely entertained regarding Pentecostalism.

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communication from spirit to body. In all of them there is a deep need of spirit linked along some non-rational path to quite inappropriate expressions. As such they all come under my general heading. These are some of the more objective points one might make in arguing for the unity of my six cases. But in truth, if one had no more than these considerations, the argument for a unity would need strengthening. Still, I suggest that readers may strengthen it for themselves by turning from the logic of ideas to what they may observe in others or perhaps even in themselves. The real basis for my position, I believe, is likely to be found not so much in ‘objective’ argument as in personal and intersubjective experience. That experience as found in oneself or surmised from their conduct in others may bring to light in selfconsciousness the links or ‘family resemblance’ that I first tried to indicate more objectively. Is this approach through self-appropriation itself a valid procedure? At least it is not original with me. There is a close parallel in Lonergan’s invitation to his readers to undertake the task of self-appropriation of their insights,13 and there is an analogy and something of a precedent in the great Blondel, who surprised the examiners on his doctoral board by quoting his own diary in proof of a point he had made.14 Lesser authors are surely not debarred from using similar tactics. Consequently, without writing an autobiography or even imitating the vivid descriptive account that Newman left in his diary, I have to say that my experience, both personal and intersubjective, finds an unbroken line, with the connections transparently evident, running through all the six types I have listed. My collection of data began with the passage I quoted from Schopenhauer, for there I recognized at once in my own experience exactly what he describes. It developed in its negative feature into the Newman form, and on its positive side into the recognition of a kinship with Augustine’s singers. The next step in that further development was obvious: the New Testament phenomenon of speaking in tongues. It became clear that the 13 Insight 766. There is a caveat to be noted here: though I used Lonergan’s ‘invitation’ to his readers as a model for mine, there is a difference in that Lonergan appeals to experiences that he may reasonably expect readers to find in their interiority. I, on the other hand, appeal to experiences that, except for that elementary form regarded by Schopenhauer as common to our race, may be foreign to many readers – experiences that are in fact an affliction like Paul’s ‘thorn in the flesh,’ rather than a gift like New Testament tongues. 14 I have lost my reference to Blondel’s appeal to his diary.

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Newman and Schopenhauer way of coping was a kind of ‘speech’ that outwardly, though completely different in ‘content’ and in motivation, resembles quite exactly the type found in New Testament tongues. From that viewpoint one can understand perfectly the pressure early believers felt to articulate in some way their feelings, even though their inner dynamic had a source in religious experience, whereas Newman and Schopenhauer had theirs in a quite different experience. Again, the antics I observed in the TV comedian resonated so well with the compulsive aspect of the other five ‘cases’ that the phenomenon of the clown was added without discontinuity to the ‘family.’ 3 Some Explanatory Ideas This third part will suggest questions to raise and ideas to explore rather than provide systematic exposition. Now, it seems to me that the most important factor to explore, if we are to understand these diverse phenomena as a group, is the deep-seated reservoir of energy that I tried in various ways to name in the first of my ‘family resemblances.’ Can we identify and define it more accurately? First, I would link it most basically with the Thomist ‘pura potentia (in potentia tantum) in genere intelligibilium’: pure potency in the realm of intelligible things.15 A first approximation to conceiving this potency is to think of it as an infinite emptiness – the ‘pura potentia’ of Thomas. Next, we correct our approximation. It is indeed an infinite emptiness, but not a listless emptiness. Rather it is an emptiness ‘in genere intelligibilium’ that, like a vacuum, is also an infinite longing, calling out for fulfillment, a desire to know, to love, to be, without limitation. Thirdly, it is not just receptivity. It is also boundless energy, a juggernaut of activity, Newman’s ‘imperial intellect’16 in action, what Jesus felt and experienced as the Spirit drove him into the desert, Bergson’s ‘“vital impulses” that come “gushing out unceasingly … from an immense reservoir of life.”’17 It is dynamic vitality, Lonergan’s pure desire to know expanded to include all that comes under

15 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1-2, q. 50, a. 6 c.; 1, q. 87, a. 1 c.: ‘Intellectus autem humanus se habet in genere rerum intelligibilium ut ens in potentia tantum.’ See also ibid. q. 79, a. 2 c. 16 See the title of A. Dwight Culler’s book, The Imperial Intellect: A Study of Newman’s Educational Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). 17 Cox, Fire from Heaven 100.

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conscious intentionality, the infinite drive of spirit.18 That is the key factor in this whole exposition. A second area to explore is more complex. The force I have tried to describe is basically spiritual. But the human make-up is part spiritual, part material, and nevertheless is – or strives to become – an integrated unity. Therefore there is need for channels of what Lonergan calls ‘internal communication’: communication between the infinite center of spirit and the sounds, gestures, movements, and facial expressions that open our spirit to others and to ourselves. Of course there is a need too for communication in the opposite direction, from body to spirit. This need is for internal communication. Organic and psychic vitality have to reveal themselves to intentional consciousness and, inversely, intentional consciousness has to secure the collaboration of organism and psyche. Again, our apprehensions of values occur in intentional responses, in feelings. Here too it is necessary for feelings to reveal their objects and, inversely, for objects to awaken feelings. It is through symbols that mind and body, mind and heart, heart and body communicate.19 The context of Lonergan’s remark is not exactly the same as mine. For him it is the pure desire to know as … headed towards further knowledge, orientated into the known unknown. The principle of dynamic correspondence calls for a harmonious orientation on the psychic level, and from the nature of the case such an orientation would have to consist in some cosmic dimension, in some intimation of unplumbed depths, that accrued to man’s feelings, emotions, sentiments.20

By contrast, my context is movement in the other direction: not the psyche reaching inward up, but spirit reaching outward down. But the principle of dynamic correspondence holds in both directions, from psyche to spirit and from spirit to psyche. Further, and more to the point, just as there is dynamic correspondence between the intellectual and psychic levels, so there is, or should

18 The pure desire to know is characteristic of Lonergan’s approach in Insight (see the Index, s.v. ‘Desire to know’); later, he will speak of the all-embracing intentionality of consciousness. 19 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology 66–67. 20 Insight 555.

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be, dynamic correspondence between the psyche and external expression: the whole body becomes an organ of communication. The point here is the continuity of the three factors: the inner need of spirit, the psychic correspondence, and the bodily expression. Further still, there is dynamic alliance among the forms of expression: song and dance go naturally together. What I have said on the principle of dynamic correspondence applies most simply and directly to the properly functioning composite: to the positive expression of spirit, to the singing of Augustine’s harvesters, to the New Testament believers speaking in tongues, to St Teresa’s dance and music of the tambourine. But my other cases, most clearly those in my second group, contain a dysfunctional element. What, then, is the path from inner compulsion to Schopenhauer’s ‘loud exclamation or quick movement’? I observe again that for the negative group the first movement is one of suppression, of protection for some threatened domain of spirit. About that element of suppression we have much to learn from psychologists, but my interest lies only in what we might learn from them about the path the dynamic of suppression takes in order to come to bodily expression. The energy and urgency of the dynamic are transferred to a path where they do not belong. The ‘loud exclamation or quick movement’ that would be appropriate expressions for, say, disagreement with a speaker or annoyance at a fly buzzing around me, are enlisted inappropriately in the service of a quite different need. The dynamic is there, but it is flawed. We have to say, then, with all reverence to two great thinkers, that Schopenhauer and Newman were threatened by an imagined humiliation of a self that was internally divided, that had not yet succeeded in conquering the pride innate in humanity. Their bodily movements were not the genuine expression of spirit but a substitute, the inadequate means taken to prevent spirit from realizing a painful truth. We might say that in this case it is rather the flesh that is willing but the spirit that is weak. The ascetic reader would therefore recommend, not ‘loud exclamation or quick movement,’ but that humble bowing of the head and that courageous recognition of one’s finitude that I suggested above. In this perspective I see the clowner in the same light. The clowner too has an interiority that perhaps has been denied normal expression or perhaps needs protection, but in any case there is a compulsion for expression by inappropriate means along lines of communication that are non-rational.

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A third area needing exploration is the availability of expressions to meet the need of spirit. We tend to take it for granted, as needing no explanation, that Augustine’s harvesters and Teresa with her tambourine had ready at hand appropriate means of expression. So they did, but those means of expression were not at hand in the way a thesaurus of words is available to the choice of an eloquent speaker. They had some other readily available source that enabled them to improvise: what was that source, and how did it function? The need of explaining this source is especially clear in the case of those speaking in tongues. They utter sounds quite foreign to their maternal language: where do they find those sounds? There seems to be a storehouse of possible ‘expressions’ of this interior pent-up dynamism, an inexhaustible reservoir of sounds that the dynamism is able to draw upon – not to ‘choose,’ as a speaker chooses the right word, not spoken ‘at will,’ for that implies a rational process, but through some obscurely functioning and instinctive mechanism. Here the area of language studies and voiced sounds seems to provide clues for us. We read of extremely large ‘stores’ of potential phonemes, from which all languages draw their basic elements of sound. For the infant these are all in remote potency for his or her language-to-be, though I suppose that anatomical differences in the speech apparatus of different races would predispose the infant to favor some phonemes over others. But somehow it learns the relatively small percentage that it will need in using the mother tongue, and in this very process it tends to eliminate all others from the list of immediately available phonemes. But the larger storehouse remains; and under the dynamism, say, of a powerful religious experience, when the need is overwhelming to give expression to interior sentiments, and one’s native language is quite inadequate, then the dynamism seeks ‘relief’ in that huge untapped store of language elements, and utters sounds that are gibberish to the audience and cannot be put into words even by the ‘speaker.’ I do no more than refer to language studies as an area we might explore for an explanation of our phenomena. It is easy to think of other areas also in terms of ‘language,’ but we need to distinguish the ‘languages’ called into play: the ‘language’ of the wordless song of Augustine’s harvesters, the ‘language’ of the dance, and in continuity with that the whole area of ‘body language.’21 21 Merleau-Ponty is said to think of the whole body as intending: ‘… rather than distinguishing pure consciousness from the body one thinks of the body as intending. And

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In this context an interesting question arises: Is there a stock of elementary gestures at hand to the performers, parallel to the stock of phonemes available to them? If so, what relation has it to the ordinary everyday usage of gestures? The infant learns to use the phonemes peculiar to its family, and these become second nature. Does it ‘learn’ gestures in the same way? Is there a parallel between phonemes and Schopenhauer’s ‘quick gesture’? Is there a storehouse of basic gestures that are ‘natural’ to the human race, and do they become differentiated in different cultures in the way basic sounds do, and so develop into another ‘second nature’? Do those afflicted with the Schopenhauer ‘thorn in the flesh’ bring into use quite new and unheard of gestures? One hazards the guess that clowners do just that, at least in facial expressions.22 Although Schopenhauer thought his experience was universal, he described a condition that reaches a peculiar intensity in some – a happy intensity in Augustine’s singers but a painful intensity for those at the other end of the spectrum, and I am conscious of the relevance of this essay for the limited circle of those latter few among my readers.23 Conscious too of having written with a therapeutic purpose: it helps one endure the ‘thorn in the flesh’ if one can talk about it, share it with others, see it in a wider context. But the wider context, of course, includes also the human sciences; and I hope that this essay will not be simply therapeutic for the few but also of interest in academic discussion for the many.24

since this is the locus of all intensions it follows that all awareness is from some particular perspective and not universalizable’ (see Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 2nd ed., new and enlarged, 1996] s.v. ‘Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1908–1961’ 473.) One may also think of the whole body as expressive. 22 Coincidentally with my finishing this essay, an article by Jay Ingram in the Toronto Star (1 November 1998, F8) tells of research done the last two decades, by David McNeill at the University of Chicago, in the field of gestural research. 23 I think here in particular of those who have Tourette’s syndrome. This affliction came to my attention only after I had written the present essay, but it is clearly in close continuity with the phenomena I described in my first part. 24 I am grateful to the late Ronald Barnes, of Regis College, Toronto, for his careful reading of this essay in draft, and for raising questions that led me to revise considerably a number of passages.

Chapter 28

Is God Free to Create or Not Create?1

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!2

Readers will be familiar with the format Thomas Aquinas uses for the doctrines of his Summa theologiae. The stage is set by a ‘Whether’ question (Utrum): in the present case, whether God is free to create or not create. This is followed by arguments against the freedom in question: ‘It seems not’ (Videtur quod non) and by arguments for that freedom: ‘But on the other hand’ (Sed contra). Finally Thomas takes up the question on his own: ‘I reply as follows’ (Respondeo dicendum quod); and here he provides a fundamental understanding of the whole matter, one that enables him to deal with both of the two opposed arguments. I find it convenient to use this format, modified for my purpose, to put some order into what may otherwise seem like scattered reflections. ‘Modified’ indeed, but I hope recognizable; for I do present positions for and against the liberty of the Creator, and then I make my attempt at a more fundamental understanding of the whole question, my own Respondeo dicendum quod. 1 The Arguments For and Against Our question, then, is whether God is free to create or not create, and for the negative side I offer one seemingly simple argument, based on 1 Previously published in The Importance of Insight: Essays in Honour of Michael Vertin, ed. John J. Liptay, Jr, and David S. Liptay (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2007) 85–96. 2 Romans 11:33.

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the familiar Dionysian axiom ‘The good is self-diffusive.’ The Leonine Index to ‘bonum’ has several references to this self-diffusive aspect of the good, appealing regularly to the authority of Dionysius and using the references regularly against Thomas’s own position; but there is no doubt that Thomas accepts the principle itself and explains it in a way that is meant to protect the authority of Dionysius.3 On this basis one might argue that God is good par excellence, that God will wish to spread this goodness around, and having no one else with whom to share it – will be obliged to create a world to receive the divine self-diffusion. One may interpret Dionysius more metaphysically, as the medievals did, or invoke in our day the power of intersubjectivity; but whatever approach one takes, it seems obvious that there is in his slogan a doctrine that is complementary, if not opposed, to that of divine freedom in creation. For the opposite position there is one argument that is sufficient for a Catholic theologian: the doctrine of Vatican I, which declared that God is perfectly free to create or not create, according to the divine will. Since I write as a Catholic theologian, I accept the Vatican declaration: The one true God, out of goodness, not for an increase in beatitude or to acquire it, but to manifest the divine perfection, in a free decision, created out of nothing both spiritual and material worlds.4 This does not seem to leave much leeway for distinctions, or for watering down the argument, but we shall see what we can do with it. 2 Learning from Experience: The Trinity Facing the problem of reconciling two seemingly opposed positions, I look for clues in our history and ask whether the long experience of the church shows any similar problems – and, if so, just how they were handled, and whether our ancestral way of handling them provides any guidance for us today. At once there comes to mind the history of thought on the Trinity. Here the church found itself believing in a God who was one but who was also in some way three. The solution of this conflict involved elaboration of two concepts, ‘person’ and ‘nature,’ and their relationship to one another. The famous use of these two concepts was their 3 The Leonine index gives a number of occurrences, beginning with Summa theologiae 1, q. 5, a. 4, obj. 2. 4 DS 3002.

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application to Christ by the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451. The council declared that there was in Christ one person in two natures.5 The full Trinitarian doctrine soon followed. The road to this solution, however, had been a long and rocky one. The church is a slow thinker, and it was more by rejecting false theories than by formulating an acceptable one that the solution was found. Very soon after the resurrection the church was able to articulate its faith in God and the Lord, as expressed in the salutations of Paul’s letters: the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ.6 Not long afterward we find the baptismal rite conferred ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’7 The church reflected on the implications of this practice for at least two centuries, until finally theology came to terms with it. The first theological step in this direction was incredibly simple and incredibly difficult: namely, the use of the word ‘three.’ This took about a hundred and fifty years. The baptismal rite mentioned Father, Son, and Spirit, who when ‘counted’ do make three; but the ‘counting’ was the problem. To say ‘three’ would have enormous implications. It would presume a sameness in the Three, but a sameness of what? It would predicate that sameness of the Three, and call the Three not natures but persons. But what was a person? Theologians were reduced to descriptions at one remove from a definition. Thus Lonergan presents Augustine’s formulation as follows: a ‘person’ is what there are three of in God!8 The simple act of ‘counting’ Father, Son, and Spirit turns out to be far from simple. So it was only around the year 180 that the word ‘three’ began to be used, and only some centuries later that the formula ‘In God there is one nature and three persons’ became domiciled in the church. It was not my intention to write a history of Trinitarian doctrine, but only to seek clues there on the church’s way of thinking. One clue lies in the struggle to find two terms the church could use to designate what there are three of in the Trinity and what there is one of. The creative factor in this long pondering was finding the terms, giving them a fixed meaning, and having that meaning accepted for application to the Trinity.

5 6 7 8

DS 302. For example, Romans 1:7 and 1 Corinthians 1:3. Matthew 28:19. See Bernard Lonergan, ‘Philosophy and Theology,’ in A Second Collection 193–208, at 199.

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With that I return to my own proper question. I begin where a beginning is possible: analysis of human activity as basis of the analogy of God and the human. I will consider that analogy from the divine side and from the human. I will take up the arguments with which my study began, arguments for and against divine freedom in creation. I will conclude with reflections on the mystery that God is. The arguments spoke of necessity and freedom in God, so in our study of the human side we will look for two terms that might provide an analogue for their divine counterparts, one of them applying to what is necessary in the divine activity, another to what is free – two terms, moreover, that are related to one another and so able to shed light on the divine where the essence is unity. 3 Analysis of a Human Act: Free and Not Free The history of Trinitarian thought in a slow-thinking church led us to expect a similar history in our study of necessity and freedom in the divine activity. However, if we are to talk of divine liberty and divine necessity, our talk can be intelligible only on the analogy of the liberty and necessity we encounter as members of the human race; and that involves us in analysis of the act of human choice. We will find, in fact, that there are acts in our willing that are free and acts in our willing that are not free. The former will provide an analogy for God’s freedom, the latter an analogy for what is necessary in God’s activity. The term ‘necessary’ is an unfortunate one but we use it for lack of a better. In his analysis of a human choice Aquinas would use the simple example of being sick and calling in the doctor. There is an end that is desired: say, good health. There is some deliberation about means: Can I use home remedies or should I call in a doctor? My deliberations lead me to choose the second, and so I make my request. The case is rarely so cut and dried, however. For example, because of past and ongoing history, I may opt for calling in the doctor almost automatically and without deliberation. At the opposite extreme, we can a imagine the case of a democratic people holding an election in which there is a choice between two candidates. The choice may require long deliberation and perhaps even some investigation – say, of each candidate’s voting record in the previous parliament. In both these examples, however, the basic pattern of activities remains the same. But let us return to Thomas. On the bare bones of his illustration – sickness, purpose, deliberation, choice, decision, act – he builds a very

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thorough study of human activities. Two of these elements are especially pertinent to our question: the acts that are not free, namely, willing the end; and the acts that are free, namely, choosing the means. Choosing the means is more easily understood and has its importance in human living. However, it is less in need of explanation and may be set aside for the moment. Not so the willing of the end. What is this willing of the end that is not a free act? It has several characteristics. It is a habit, a general orientation. It is a given, a customary way of thinking and choosing that we did not create but received. It is a built-in set of values. It reflects a bias – perhaps for what is good, perhaps for what is evil. If for the good, it is a spontaneity, a readiness, a disposition to serve, a joy in self-sacrifice for the sake of the other, a peace in responsibility accepted. Perhaps it even reflects a conversion effected by grace. All these features apply, whether loosely or exactly, to our willing of the end. I grant that the traits I have described are not always so clear-cut, but generally they operate in the long run to ensure a continuity in my choices and to define my character. Now it is this pair, willing the end and choosing the means, that I suggest for an analogy to the necessity and freedom we find in God the Creator. Two scholia may be mentioned. First, although willing the end is not free per se, it may be free per accidens. Such a distinction allows for disruptions in one’s daily routine, when the easy continuity of a life without decisions may be broken. The example of a conversion effected by grace illustrates that. Before conversion life was simple, ends were part of the family ways, choices on important matters were rarely necessary, and on routine matters were not needed. (Do I ‘decide’ each morning to comb my hair?) A conversion, however, is a revolution in my way of life: it is a choice not of one means rather than another but rather of one end in life rather than another. After conversion I begin a new way of life; and after a difficult period of transition, choices once again become part of that way. So, even if the will is not free in regard to this present act of willing the end, it can be moved by God or external circumstances to conceive and to will another higher end, thus turning the present end into a new means that one freely chooses or rejects. For example, a person may make the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius and be confronted, in the Exercise on the Two Standards, with a new end. That end may be chosen or rejected, but once chosen it becomes a new orientation, a habit governing one’s life and its choices.

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Here, as a second scholion, I must insert a piece of history. In the early days of the Lonergan Workshop I encountered extraordinary resistance to the idea that there are acts of willing that are not free. Now in Thomas and Lonergan the act of choosing is a compound, consisting first of willing the end, then of deliberating on the means to that end, and finally of choosing the means.9 In that compound it is the third act that is free; but will of the end is not free unless, as just explained, that end is turned into a means and I am given by destiny or grace a higher end that becomes the governing factor in my deliberations and my choice of a new way of life. The sharp opposition I experienced to this doctrine resulted, I think, from failure to differentiate the three activities in the compound and to assign each its proper role. ‘Are they not all acts of willing?’ it may be asked. Surely they are. ‘Then will they not surely be free acts, all of them?’ Difficulty with the negative answer to that question is understandable. For after conversion the willing of the end is not so much an act of willing as a state of willing. It is an antecedent willingness, a habitual orientation, a way of living in which there are few if any decisions, only the hidden intervention of God acting often through circumstances. And we do not advert to God’s intervention: it is mediated to us by the home and family, by the atmosphere of the social order, the example of parents, the environment, the school in its primary grades, and so on. There is a parallel here with the difficulty many have in regard to Lonergan’s cognitional structure. They see rightly that experiencing, understanding, and judging all are cognitional acts, but they wrongly think of each as a complete instance of knowing. For Lonergan they are not complete instances of knowing. Only the compound is a complete instance of knowing, adding to our knowledge.10 In a somewhat similar way, three elements of willing combine to constitute a free decision. I have been prolix on the willing of the end in human decisions because it typically is not given due attention in studies of Aquinas or Lonergan. We focus more on decisions, choices, the challenges of life. That too is understandable; for it is in the repeated willing of the means that the willing of the end becomes more strongly entrenched, that our

9 I have not noticed in either Thomas or Lonergan this use of willing as a ‘compound,’ but it fits easily into their thinking. 10 See Bernard Lonergan, ‘Cognitional Structure,’ in Collection (1988) 205–21; see especially 207–208.

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character is formed, that day by day we freely and responsibly make ourselves in act what grace and environment have made us in outlook and readiness to act.11 That free activity is our human analogue for God’s free activity in our regard. But perhaps there is less need to develop a line of thought that is more generally familiar. The element of necessity, however, must be underlined. For the chief analogy for God’s self-diffusing in its interiority is the human willing of the end. And that at its base is not a free act: notwithstanding our cooperation at a second stage, the initial step is caused by God alone.12 I described it as a habit, a general orientation, a built-in set of values, perhaps a conversion effected by grace. These at their inception we receive as gift: they are there as a willing, but not as a willing we chose. We may choose to accept them, as people respond to grace, or to repudiate them, as people resist grace; but our role is to follow or to react, not to initiate. Here we are at the heart of understanding God’s freedom and necessity in creation. That understanding depends on the analogy we find in our human division of free and not free. And of course if the basis of the analogy is not clear, our whole effort is useless. We have followed the path suggested by analysis of the church’s thinking on the Trinity. Just as our ancestors used ‘person’ and ‘nature’ to enlighten them on their problem, so we use ‘human will of the end’ and ‘human will of the means’ for entry into the mystery of divine freedom and divine necessity. Let us turn then to that mystery. 4 The Analogy from God’s Side: Self-diffusion ad Intra The analogy that we have studied from the human side we now must study from the divine side, beginning with the divine interiority. The Three, Lonergan says, are both communicable and incommunicable, and the same reason accounts for both these claims. That is, they are distinguished from one another by real relations and so are incommunicable. For to be incommunicable means simply that they are themselves and not someone else; nor may they become someone else. But on the other hand it is through the same real relations that they

11 See Bernard Lonergan, ‘The Subject,’ in A Second Collection 69–86, at 79. 12 Bernard Lonergan, ‘On God and Secondary Causes,’ in Collection 53–65, at 63: ‘in later Thomist doctrine … the act of willing an end is not free.’ See a plethora of references on this in volume 1 of Lonergan’s Collected Works, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas, Index, under ‘Will.’

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communicate, for each relation includes the opposed relation in its ratio. Thus the Father is self-diffusive toward the Son, but equally the Son is self-diffusive toward the Father. Further, the real relations are identical with the divine processions by which the Father communicates the Father’s essence to the Son, and Father and Son together communicate their divine essence to the Holy Spirit.13 (If we speak of ‘self’ communication in this context, ‘self’ refers not to the person as person but to the person as possessing the divine essence.) God’s communication and self-diffusion ad extra is a freely chosen act, but God’s communication ad intra that I am sketching is another matter. This communication is eternally full and complete. We could say ‘God has no future’; but before that develops into heresy, we would add at once ‘God’s “future” is an already realized future, for it is always present.’ All that pertains to the Three ad intra is already in act. The divine ‘future’ is the divine ‘present.’ Or we could ask about the divine internal ‘history’ of the Three, understanding that it is a ‘history’ going forward without end or beginning: the Father is eternally begetting the Son. This general view of God’s interior life is analogous to our human willing of the end. In God it is not a free choice, nor is it in potency to a free choice. We must conceive as potency rather than act the ‘activity’ in God that corresponds to our free willing; but the ‘activity’ that corresponds to our willing of the end is not a potency. Instead it belongs to the divine essence and to the divine self-diffusing nature: it would remain as a divine characteristic even if there were no actual self-diffusion ad extra. But of course there is potency ad extra, and that potency has become act: there is actual self-diffusion. God did indeed become human, and ‘ab esse ad posse valet illatio.’ From this viewpoint, any assumption of the human by the divine illustrates the potential self-diffusion. Take sacrifice as an example. Did God not become a sacrifice for us, and ‘ab esse ad posse valet illatio’? Or, shall we speak of the humility of God? Or of the divine kenosis? All these illustrate the potential self-diffusion that belongs to the freedom of God. Whatever God actually did reveals what God is capable of doing and thus throws light on the divine nature. Whatever self-diffusing that has actually occurred contributes to a treatise on the meaning of the self-diffusing character of God.

13 Bernard Lonergan, The Triune God: Systematics, Question 17 [344–51].

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5 Divine Self-diffusion ad Extra: God and the Human We have studied our analogy from the human side and from the divine side. Now we must study the two together, and so we come to extrinsic denomination, an idea and way of speaking that applies whenever one predicates of God something that is contingent, attributes to God something that of itself might not have been. The basic point is threefold. First, there must be a correspondence of reality and predication – of what is and of what one says about what is. Second, there is no contingent reality intrinsic to God; hence, predicating of God something that is contingent must be by extrinsic denomination. Third, such predication does not imply an intrinsic change in God. To say, then, that God wills the created world requires a correspondence between the truth of that statement and the objective reality of the universe. There is no extrinsic denomination without the reality of the extrinsic denominator. But equally there is no extrinsic denomination without the truth that corresponds to that reality. Now, the reality is contingent; and nothing in God is contingent. The correspondence required for the truth to be true cannot be intrinsic to God: it has to be extrinsic.14 Hence the important category of ‘extrinsic denomination’ in such a statement as ‘God created heaven and earth.’ That God can create without any change in the divine reality is apt to be a stumbling-block for some, but it is not to be regarded as a singular case. There are many instances of the difficulty we have in a unitary thinking of what seem conflicting attributes predicated of God. The standard example is the unitary thinking of the justice and the mercy of God. For the most part, we don’t think the two together: we simply hold both without understanding their unity. 6 The Compulsion to Self-expression: On Argument One Thomas concluded each article in a question by taking account of the arguments: for one side, Videtur quod non; for the other, Sed contra. My aim in these concluding sections is to examine the arguments in the light of my preceding Respondeo dicendum quod. First I will treat the Scholastic axiom that the good is self-diffusing; second, the First Vatican Council on divine freedom in creating.

14 See, for example, Grace and Freedom 105–107.

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An easy start on self-diffusing is given in an almost daily occurrence: the simple case of expressing one’s knowledge. No doubt some of us have experienced the frustration of Job’s comforter: ‘If one ventures to speak with you, will you lose patience? For who could hold his tongue any longer?’15 The frustration expressed in ‘For who could hold his tongue any longer?’ reveals the power of the compulsion to speak one’s mind. Closer to ordinary experience is our bent for rumor-mongering: I have heard an exciting rumor, and I am bursting with the need to pass it on – not a very laudable desire, but a clear case of knowledge as diffusiva sui. Transfer this from the field of knowing to that of the good. Perhaps few of us can be said to be bursting with the need to communicate the good, but we recognize that experience in the zeal of the saints, especially in those whose apostolate is among the poor and down-trodden. How, they ask, can I share what I have with others, the have-nots? The two aspects may combine: I am bursting with the good news of the Gospel. It is news, so we are dealing with knowledge; and it is good news, so we are in the sphere of what is good for us. The New Testament, in its overall motif as well as in particular reminders, is full of this attitude. ‘Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee … He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.’16 He felt the compulsion to share with others the message that urged and pressed upon him: ‘Let us move on to the country towns in the neighborhood; I have to proclaim my message there also; that is what I came out to do.’17 What he would share was revolutionary: ‘I come to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled.’18 After his resurrection he communicated this urge to his followers: ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations …’19 In such outpourings we realize the experience of Eliphaz, Job’s ‘comforter,’ in a setting somewhat more edifying than his. When Jesus sent his disciples to preach and they obeyed, did they obey freely or under compulsion? Did the compulsion they experienced deprive them of their freedom? If we take Paul to the letter we

15 16 17 18 19

Job 4:2 (NEB). Luke 4:14–16. Mark 1:38 (NEB). Luke 12:49. Matthew 28:18–19.

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might say so: ‘Even if I preach the Gospel, I can claim no credit for it; I cannot help myself.’20 This refers to the main thrust of his ministry, for on details he surely had changes of plan and chose freely. On preaching Christ he could not help himself, but whether to go to Corinth or not was a decision he could debate. It is clear from Paul’s whole history that he continually made decisions affecting his ministry, though never to the point of giving up that ministry: compulsion on the main thing, then, but freedom on details. Perhaps in this very difference we have an analogue for the divine state: a divine necessity in regard to the ‘riches and wisdom and knowledge of God,’21 and a divine freedom to yield or not yield to an inner compulsion for self-diffusion in regard to all else. It is just here that we need a Thomas Aquinas with his Respondeo dicendum quod. It seems irreverent to speak of God ‘bursting’ with the good news; but we have to ask whether God, under some divine internal pressure for self-diffusion in the infinite measure proper to God, does not actually modify the divine freedom in that experience. Surely what is a good attribute in people is somehow to be predicated also of God. It is a necessity without violence; and if this is possible in the human world, surely it is even more so in the divine. So perhaps Paul’s case is instructive here. If he could combine freedom and necessity (‘I cannot help myself’) perhaps we have as clear a statement as we are likely to get of some such combination in the mystery that God is. At any rate, Paul’s example forces us to think in a different way about necessity. God is not compelled. God deciding to enter our universe is sovereignly free in that decision. To ask whether in some possible universe God would exist through all eternity without creation, capable of creating worlds to receive the divine diffusion yet withholding that diffusion – is this not a question we must abandon here while we make a plea of mystery? 7 The Freedom of the Creator: On Argument Two One experiences the same helpless state in trying to penetrate the divine mind in relation to the First Vatican Council. Authority answers the ‘utrum’ question for me as believer, an answer to which I obediently subscribe; but it leaves me dissatisfied as a theologian, 20 1 Corinthians 9:16 (NEB). 21 Romans 11:33.

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with a theologian’s need for understanding. It would not have satisfied Thomas, whose Respondeo dicendum quod would take him to deeper levels. But there in that reference to Thomas we gain a hint on how we may live with what God sees fit to give us. For the same council declared the possibility of some analogous understanding of the truths of faith. Lonergan, with all his respect for legitimate authority, loved to quote the Quodlibet in which Thomas insisted that authority is not enough: there must be understanding. Let us hear Thomas on this matter. Controversy, Thomas says, can have two purposes. One purpose is to remove doubt, and here authority rules. But it can also be pedagogic (‘magistralis’), not for removing error but for bringing hearers to an understanding of the truth. Here authority is not enough. It will bring students to the truth, but without science or understanding they will go away with empty heads, ignorant of the matter: ‘auditor … vacuus abscedet.’22 Are we guilty of hubris here? Are we violating our own refusal to ask about possible worlds? Vatican I encourages the effort to understand, and it promises the achievement of some limited understanding;23 but this is to be understood as applying to the actual universe, not some hypothetical one. Are we at the same impasse we encountered in regard to Argument One, so that the end of all our efforts is a stalemate in  which we realize the divine mystery and simply bow our heads in adoration? Not quite. At least, not yet. There is still that avenue of some imperfect understanding left open by Vatican I. We are encouraged to seek understanding, and there is no understanding without the questions that seek it. Let me conclude my essay with the question that keeps nagging me: Is it possible that our thinking about freedom and necessity is blocked by a too ready application of the ‘yes-or-no’ dichotomy? Philosophers study the famous question an Athenian might ask on the eve of the battle of Salamis: Is it true or is it false that such a battle will 22 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones quodlibetales IV, q. 9, a. 18. Note that different editors divide this short work in different ways. [The other reference commonly given is Quaestiones quodlibetales IV, q. 9, a. 3.] For one of Lonergan’s references to it, see his unpublished De ente supernaturali (Montreal: College of the Immaculate Conception, 1946) introduction. [For a more recent reference by Lonergan to this text from Aquinas, see his The Triune God: Systematics 8–9.] 23 Vatican I, DS 3016. In Lonergan’s time an earlier edition [DB] made this passage number 1796 – a number his students were often to hear.

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take place tomorrow? A two-valued logic will say it is true or false, one or the other; but a three-valued logic will give us three options: true, false, or indeterminate. Philosophers again, pondering the problem of alteration from being x to being y, developed a concept of fieri for the movement itself: not being-x and not being-y, but a becoming. These cases are far from our problem, but they raise the question whether our tertium is not just a dream but a possibility. Does the sharp division of ‘free’ and ‘necessary’ exclude a possible third option?

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The Writings of Frederick E. Crowe

1. ‘Conflict and Unification in Man: The Data in the Writings of St Thomas Aquinas.’ Doctoral dissertation. Rome: Gregorian University, 1953. Excerpts published by Gregorian University Press, 1953. 2. ‘Convention of the Catholic Theological Society of America.’ Sciences ecclésiastiques [later Science et esprit] 6 (1954) 262–65.’ 3. ‘Universal Norms and the Concrete Operabile in St Thomas Aquinas.’ Sciences ecclésiastiques 7 (1955) 115–49, 257–91. 3a. ‘Universal Norms and the Concrete Operabile in St Thomas Aquinas.’ In Frederick E. Crowe, Three Thomist Studies, ed. Michael Vertin. Boston: Lonergan Institute at Boston College, 2000, 1–69. (Reprint of no. 3, adding English translations of all Latin words.) 4. ‘Devotion to the Holy Eucharist.’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 66 (1956) 685–90. 5. ‘Index.’ In Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. London: Longmans, Green; New York: Philosophical Library, 1957, 749–81. 6. ‘The Origin and Scope of Bernard Lonergan’s Insight.’ Sciences ecclésiastiques 9 (1957) 203–95. 6a. ‘The Origin and Scope of Bernard Lonergan’s Insight.’ In Frederick E. Crowe, Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, ed. Michael Vertin. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1989, 13–30. (Reprint of 263–79 of no. 6.) 7. ‘Pastoral Care in Large Cities.’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 68 (1958) 277–83. 8. ‘Complacency and Concern in the Thought of St Thomas.’ Theological Studies 20 (1959) 1–39, 198–230, 343–95. 8a. ‘Complacency and Concern in the Thought of St Thomas.’ In Three Thomist Studies, 71–203. (Reprint of no. 8, adding English translations of all Latin words.)

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9. ‘Complacency and Concern.’ Cross and Crown 11 (1959) 180–90. 10. ‘Reign of the Sacred Heart.’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 69/6 (June 1959) 4–6, 43. 11. ‘Review: Experimental Knowledge of the Indwelling Trinity: An Historical Study of the Doctrine of St Thomas, by J. Dedek.’ Theological Studies 21 (1960) 687–88. 12. ‘St Thomas and the Isomorphism of Human Knowing and Its Proper Object.’ Sciences ecclésiastiques 13 (1961) 167–90. 12a. ‘St Thomas and the Isomorphism of Human Knowing and Its Proper Object.’ In Three Thomist Studies, 207–35. (Reprint of no. 12, adding English translations of all Latin quotations.) 13. ‘How Inflexible Is Catholic Dogma?’ Crosslight 2/4 (Summer 1961) 14–26. 13a. ‘Development of Doctrine and the Ecumenical Problem.’ Theological Studies 23 (1962) 27–46. (Reprint, with minor changes, of no. 13.) 14. ‘Review: Les missions divines selon saint Augustin, by J.-L. Maier.’ Theological Studies 22 (1961) 476–78. 15. The Most Holy Trinity. Mimeographed notes. Toronto: Loyola Institute of Sacred Studies, 1962. 15a. Il Dogma Trinitario. Trans. J. Navone. Rome: Gregorian University, n.d. (Italian translation of no. 15.) 16. ‘Review: Structures et méthode dans la somme théologique de saint Thomas d’Aquin, by G. Lafont.’ Theological Studies 23 (1962) 314–16. 17. ‘On the Method of Theology.’ Theological Studies 23 (1962) 637–42. 18. Editor. Spirit as Inquiry: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lonergan. Continuum 2 (1964) 301–552. 18a. Editor. Spirit as Inquiry: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lonergan. Chicago: St Xavier College, 1964. (Reprint of no. 18.) 19. ‘Introduction.’ In Spirit as Inquiry: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, 306–307. 20. ‘The Exigent Mind: Bernard Lonergan’s Intellectualism.’ In Spirit as Inquiry: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, 316–33. 21. ‘Bibiography of the Writings of Bernard Lonergan.’ In Spirit as Inquiry: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, 543–49. 22. ‘A Birthday to Notice.’ America 111 (July–December 1964) 804–805. 23. ‘Neither Jew nor Greek, but One Human Nature and Operation in All.’ Philippine Studies 13 (1965) 546–71. 23a. ‘Neither Jew nor Greek, but One Human Nature and Operation in All.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 31–50. (Reprint of no. 23.) 23b. ‘Neither Jew nor Greek, but One Human Nature and Operation in All.’ In Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup, eds, Communication and Lonergan:

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Common Ground for Forging the New Age. Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1993, 89–107. (Reprint of no. 23.) 24. The Doctrine of the Most Holy Trinity. Mimeographed notes. Toronto: Regis College, 1965. 25. ‘Development of Doctrine: Aid or Barrier to Christian Unity?’ Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings 21 (1966) 1–20. 25a. ‘Kyoogi no Hatten: Kirisuto kyoo Itchi no Tasuke to naru ka.’ Trans. M. Kooitchi. Shigaku Digesto, Natsu, 1968, 49–56. (Digest, in Japanese translation, of no. 25.) 25b. ‘Development of Doctrine: Aid or Barrier to Christian Unity?’ In Frederick E. Crowe, Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, ed. Michael Vertin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010, 209–27. (Reprint of no. 25.) 26. ‘Review: The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism, by G. Berkouwer.’ Canadian Journal of Theology 12 (1966) 142–43. 27. ‘Review: Salut et rédemption chez saint Thomas d’Aquin: L’Acte sauveur du Christ, by B. Catao.’ Theological Studies 27 (1966) 282–84. 28. ‘Full Communion with the Separated East.’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 76 (November 1966) 6, 8–9. 29. ‘Insight.’ New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (1967) 545. 30. ‘Intuition.’ New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (1967) 598–600. 31. ‘Theological Terminology.’ New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14 (1967) 37–38. 32. ‘Understanding.’ New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 14 (1967) 389–91. 33. With David Burrell. ‘Index.’ In Bernard Lonergan, Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967, 221–300. 34. Editor. Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan. S.J. New York: Herder and Herder; London: Darton Longman & Todd, 1967. 35. ‘Introduction.’ In Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan. S.J., vii–xxxv. 35a. ‘The Growing Idea.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 3–12. (Reprint, with minor changes, of viii–xix of no. 35.) 36. ‘Index.’ In Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, S.J., 269–80. 37. ‘Aggiornamento: Eternal Truth in a Changing World.’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 77/2 (February 1967) 8–12. 38. ‘Aggiornamento: Changing Forms of Life and Worship.’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 77/3 (March 1967) 10–14. 39. ‘Aggiornamento: Do Dogmas Change?’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 77/4 (April 1967) 18–22. 40. ‘Aggiornamento: Is There a New Morality?’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 77/5 (May 1967) 18–23. 41. ‘Aggiornamento: The Church in the Modern World.’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 77/6 (June 1967) 18–23.

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42. ‘Aggiornamento: The Wide World My Parish.’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 77/7–8 (July–August 1967) 8–11. 43. ‘Aggiornamento: The Church and the Churches.’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 77/9 (September 1967) 16–19. 44. ‘Your Questions.’ [Comments on questions submitted by readers of nos. 37–43.] The Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 77/10 (October 1967) 15; 77/11 (November 1967) 17; 78/1 (January 1968) 14–15; 78/4 (April 1968) 9; 78/5 (May 1968) 15; 78/7–8 (July–August 1968) 16; 78/9 (September 1968) 14; 78/10 (October 1968) 8. 45. ‘A Jesuit Makes a Pilgrimage to Martin Luther’s Shrine.’ Toronto Daily Star, 28 October 1967, 16. 46. ‘Bernard Lonergan.’ In Thomas E. Bird, ed., Modern Theologians, Christians and Jews. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967, 126–51. 47. ‘Christology and Contemporary Philosophy.’ Commonweal 87 (October 1967–March 1968) 242–47. 47a. ‘Christology and Contemporary Philosophy.’ In Daniel Callahan, ed., God, Jesus, and Spirit. New York: Herder and Herder, 1969, 137–52. (Reprint of no. 47.) 48. ‘Review: Newman on Tradition, by G. Biemer.’ Theological Studies 28 (1967) 590–92. 49. ‘Fear, Hate, and Sin at the German Wall.’ United Church Observer 29/22 (15 February 1968) 26–27. 50. ‘Sorrow and Hope at Bonhoeffer’s Death Camp.’ United Church Observer 30/3 (1 April 1968) 25–26. 51. A Time of Change: Guidelines for the Perplexed Catholic. Milwaukee: Bruce, 1968. (Chaps. 1–7 are reprints of nos. 37–43 respectively.) 52. ‘Christologies: How Up-to-Date Is Yours?’ Theological Studies 29 (1968) 87–101. 53. ‘Review: Bible et tradition chez Newman: Aux origines de la théorie du développement, by J. Stern.’ Theological Studies 29 (1968) 777–79. 54. ‘Development of Doctrine.’ American Ecclesiastical Review 159 (1968) 233–47. 54a. ‘Development of Doctrine.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 228–43. (Reprint of no. 54.) 55. ‘Review: Revelation and Theology, by E. Schillebeeckx.’ Theological Studies 29 (1968) 339–40. 56. ‘Salvation as Wholeness: Theological Background for an Ecumenical Programme.’ Canadian Journal of Theology 14 (1968) 228–37. 56a. ‘Salvation as Wholeness: Theological Background for an Ecumenical Programme.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 244–56. (Reprint of no. 56.)

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57. ‘Review: Revelation and Theology 2, by E. Schillebeeckx.’ Theological Studies 29 (1968) 779–81. 58. ‘Pull of the Future and Link with the Past: On the Need for Theological Method.’ Continuum 7 (1969) 39–49. 59. ‘What Can Join Us to the Love of Christ?’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 79/6 (June 1969) 1, 13–15. 60. ‘But Is There a Fault in the Very Foundations?’ Continuum 7 (1969) 323–31. 61. ‘Dogma versus the Self-Correcting Process of Learning.’ Theological Studies 31 (1970) 605–24. 61a. ‘Dogma versus the Self-Correcting Process of Learning.’ In Philip McShane, ed., Foundations of Theology: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971, 22–40. (Reprint of no. 61.) 61b. ‘Dogma versus the Self-Correcting Process of Learning.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 257–78. (Reprint of no. 61.) 62. ‘First International Lonergan Congress: A Report.’ America 122 (January– June 1970) 452–53. 63. ‘The Conscience of the Theologian with Reference to the Encyclical.’ In William C. Bier, ed., Conscience: Its Freedom and Limitations. New York: Fordham University Press, 1971, 312–32. 63a. ‘The Responsibility of the Theologian, and the Learning Church.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 172–92. (Reprint, with minor changes, of no. 63.) 64. ‘Introduction.’ In Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas. London: Darton Longman & Todd; New York: Herder and Herder, 1971, ix–xi. 65. ‘Jerusalem at the Heart of Athens: The Christian University.’ The Maroon & White 19/7 (June 1971) 1–3. 65a. ‘Jerusalem at the Heart of Athens: The Christian University.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 163–71. (Reprint of no. 65.) 66. ‘Early Jottings on Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology.’ Science et esprit 25 (1973) 121–38. 67. Editor, assisted by Conn O’Donovan and Giovanni Sala. The Early Latin Works of Bernard J.F. Lonergan. Typescript, Regis edition. 4 vols. Toronto: Regis College, 1973. 68. ‘General Introduction.’ In The Early Latin Works of Bernard J.F. Lonergan, each vol., ii–vii. 69. ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ In The Early Latin Works of Bernard J.F. Lonergan. Vol. 1: De notione sacrificii, ix–x. 70. ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ In The Early Latin Works of Bernard J.F. Lonergan. Vol. 2: De ente supernaturali, ix–xiii.

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71. ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ In The Early Latin Works of Bernard J.F. Lonergan. Vol. 3: De scientia atque voluntate dei, ix–xii. 72. ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ In The Early Latin Works of Bernard J.F. Lonergan. Vol. 4: Analysis fidei, ix–x. 73. ‘Dogmatic Theology.’ New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 16 (supplement, 1974) 132–33. 74. With Philip and Fiona McShane. ‘Index of Subjects.’ In A Second Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J. London: Darton Longman & Todd; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974, 284–300. 75. ‘Eschaton and Worldly Mission in the Mind and Heart of Jesus.’ In Joseph Papin, ed., The Eschaton: A Community of Love. Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1974 [c. 1971], 105–44. 75a. Escatologia e missione terrene in Gesù di Nazareth. Trans. G. Sala. Catania: Edizioni Paoline, 1976. (Italian translation of no. 75.) 75b. ‘Eschaton and Worldly Mission in the Mind and Heart of Jesus.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 193–204. (Reprint of no. 75.) 76. ‘The Mind of Jesus.’ Communio: International Catholic Review 1 (1974) 365–84. 76a. ‘The Mind of Jesus.’ In Richard Laflamme and Marcel Gervais, eds, Le Christ hier, aujourd’hui et demain. Quebec: Laval University Press, 1976, 143–56. (Reprint of no. 76.) 77. ‘The Power of the Scriptures: Attempt at Analysis.’ In Joseph Plevnik, ed., Word and Spirit: Essays in Honor of David Michael Stanley. Toronto: Regis College, 1975, 323–47. 77a. ‘The Power of the Scriptures.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 279–93. (Reprint of no. 77.) 78. ‘The Lonergan Center.’ The Jesuit Bulletin 1975, 3–6, 27. 79. ‘A People of Serene Joy: Memories of an African Congress.’ Annals of the Propagation of the Faith 33/1 (February–March 1976) 4–7. 80. ‘Doctrines and Historicity in the Context of Lonergan’s Method: A ReviewArticle.’ Theological Studies 38 (1977) 115–24. 80a. ‘Doctrines and Historicity in the Context of Lonergan’s Method in Theology.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 28–40. (Reprint of no. 80.) 81. ‘An Exploration of Lonergan’s New Notion of Value.’ Science et esprit 29 (1977) 123–43. 81a. ‘An Exploration of Lonergan’s New Notion of Value.’ Lonergan Workshop 3 (1982) 1–24. (Reprint of no. 81.) 81b. ‘An Exploration of Lonergan’s New Notion of Value.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 31–50. (Reprint of no. 81.) 82. Theology of the Christian Word: A Study in History. New York: Paulist Press, 1978.

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83. ‘Dialectic and the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.’ Science et esprit 30 (1978) 111–27. 83a. ‘Dialectic and the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.’ Lonergan Workshop 1 (1978), 1–26. (Reprint of no. 83.) 83b. ‘Dialectic and the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 235–51. (Reprint of no. 83.) 84. With Sara Butler, Anne Carr, Margaret Farley, and Edward Kilmartin. A Report on the Status of Women in Church and Society: Considered in Light of the Question of Women’s Ordination. New York: Catholic Theological Society of America, 1978. 85. ‘Review: Newman and His Theological Method: A Guide for the Theologian Today, by T. Norris.’ Doctrine and Life 29 (1978) 391–92. 86. ‘Foundational Theology.’ New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 17 (supplement, 1979) 235–37. 87. ‘Theology and the Past: Changing Views on the Sources.’ Science et esprit 31 (1979) 21–32. 87a. ‘Theology and the Past: Changing Views on the Sources.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 252–64. (Reprint of no. 87.) 88. ‘Theology and the Future: Responsible Innovation.’ Science et esprit 31 (1979) 147–57. 88a. ‘Theology and the Future: Responsible Innovation.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 265–76. (Reprint of no. 88.) 89. Method in Theology: An Organon for Our Time. The Pere Marquette Theology Lecture. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980. 90. The Lonergan Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: Cowley Press, 1980. (Chap. 1 is a reprint of no. 89.) 91. ‘Report on the Regis College Lonergan Center.’ Lonergan Studies Newsletter 1/2 (April 1980) 6–8. 92. ‘Birthday Celebrations.’ News Letter: Upper Canada Province 55/4 (May– June 1980) 5–6. 93. ‘“Interiority” Going Forward?’ In Cathleen M. Going, ed., Dialogues in Celebration. Montreal: Thomas More Institute, 1980, 260–85. 94. ‘Bernard Lonergan’s Thought on Ultimate Reality and Meaning.’ Ultimate Reality and Meaning 4 (1981) 58–89. 94a. ‘Bernard Lonergan’s Thought on Ultimate Reality and Meaning.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 71–105. (Reprint of no. 94.) 95. ‘Creativity and Method: Index to a Movement. A Review Article.’ Science et esprit 34 (1982) 107–13. 96. ‘The Present State of the Lonergan Movement.’ Lonergan Studies Newsletter 3 (1982) 9–10.

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97. ‘Lonergan’s Early Use of Analogy: A Research Note, with Reflections.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 1/1 (Spring 1983) 31–46. 97a. ‘Lonergan’s Early Use of Analogy.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 41–57. (Reprint of no. 97.) 98. ‘The Janus Problematic: Tradition versus Innovation.’ In Joseph B. Gavin, ed., Tradition and Innovation: Faith and Consent. Essays by Jesuits from a Canadian Perspective. Regina: Campion College Press, 1983, 13–36. 98a. ‘The Janus Problematic: Tradition versus Innovation.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 277–96. (Reprint of no. 98.) 99. ‘Son and Spirit: Tension in the Divine Missions?’ Science et esprit 35 (1983) 153–69. 99a. ‘Son and Spirit: Tension in the Divine Missions?’ Lonergan Workshop 5 (1985) 1–21. (Reprint of no. 99.) 99b. ‘Son and Spirit: Tension in the Divine Missions?’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 297–314. (Reprint of no. 99.) 100. ‘Lonergan’s Search for Foundations: The Early Years, 1940–1959.’ In Philip McShane, ed., Searching for Cultural Foundations. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984, 113–39. 100a. ‘Lonergan’s Search for Foundations: The Early Years, 1940–1959.’ In Frederick E. Crowe, Developing the Lonergan Legacy, ed. Michael Vertin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004, 164–93. (Reprint of no. 100.) 101. ‘The Human Mind and Ultimate Reality: A Lonerganian Comment on Dr. Leahy.’ Ultimate Reality and Meaning 7 (1984) 67–74. 101a. ‘The Human Mind and Ultimate Reality.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 106–15. (Reprint of no. 101.) 102. ‘Transcendental Deduction: A Lonerganian Meaning and Use.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 2/1 (March 1984) 21–40. 102a. ‘Transcendental Deduction: A Lonerganian Meaning and Use.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 58–76. (Reprint of no. 102.) 103. Editor. A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, S.J. New York: Paulist Press; London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1985. 104. ‘Editor’s Introduction.’ In A Third Collection, 1–2. 105. ‘Index.’ In A Third Collection, 251–56. 106. ‘Lonergan’s Last Year.’ Lonergan Studies Newsletter, special commemorative issue (February 1985) 5–6. 107. ‘Reflections on Fr. Lonergan’s Funeral and Burial.’ Lonergan Studies Newsletter, special commemorative issue (February 1985) 7. 108. Co-editor, with Robert M. Doran. Compass: A Jesuit Journal, special issue honouring Bernard Lonergan, SJ, 1904–1984 (March 1985).

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109. ‘Collège de l’Immaculée-Conception: Where It All Began.’ Compass: A Jesuit Journal, special issue honouring Bernard Lonergan, SJ, 1904–1984 (March 1985) 9. 109a. ‘Le Collège de l’Immaculée-Conception: Où tout a commencé.’ Trans. E. Richer. Nouvelles de la Province du Canada-français 4/4 (April 1985) no pagination. (French translation of no. 109.) 110. ‘Homily, Funeral of Father Bernard Lonergan, S.J.’ Compass: A Jesuit Journal, special issue honouring Bernard Lonergan, SJ, 1904–1984 (March 1985) 21–23. 110a. Homily, Funeral of Father Bernard Lonergan, S.J. Toronto: Regis College Press, 1985. (Reprint of no. 110.) 110b. ‘Homily at the Funeral of Bernard Lonergan.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 385–90. (Reprint of no. 110.) 111. Old Things and New: A Strategy for Education. Supplementary issue of Lonergan Workshop 5. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985. 111a. ‘School without Graduates: The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 197–212. (Reprint of Appendix of no. 111.) 112. ‘A Note on the Prefaces of Insight.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 3/1 (March 1985) 1–3. 113. Editor. ‘The Original Preface,’ by Bernard Lonergan. METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 3/1 (March 1985) 3–7. 114. ‘Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J., 1904–1984.’ Canadian Theological Society Newsletter 5/1 (March 1985) 6–8. 115. Son of God, Holy Spirit, and World Religions: The Contribution of Bernard Lonergan to the Wider Ecumenism. Toronto: Regis College Press, 1985. 115a. ‘Son of God, Holy Spirit, and World Religions.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 324–43. (Reprint of no. 115.) 116. ‘Father Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J.’ News Letter: Upper Canada Province 60/3 (May–June 1985) 15–18. 117. ‘A Note on Lonergan’s Dissertation and Its Introductory Pages.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 3/2 (October, 1985) 1–8. 118. Editor. ‘The Gratia operans Dissertation: Preface and Introduction,’ by Bernard Lonergan. METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 3/2 (October 1985) 9–49. 119. ‘Bernard Lonergan and Liberation Theology.’ In Walter Ysaac, ed., The Third World and Bernard Lonergan: A Tribute to a Concerned Thinker. Manila: Cardinal Bea Institute, 1986, 1–15. 119a. ‘Bernard Lonergan y la teologia de la liberación.’ Humanidades Anuario (Universidad Iberoamericana) 8 (1984–85) 11–23. (Spanish translation of no. 119.)

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119b. ‘Bernard Lonergan and Liberation Theology.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 116–26. (Reprint of no. 119.) 120. ‘A Threefold Kenôsis of the Son of God.’ In Joseph Armenti, ed., The Papin Gedenkschrift, Dimensions in the Human Religious Quest. Essays in Memory of Joseph Papin, Vol. 1: Theological Dimensions. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1986, 54–64. 120a. ‘A Threefold Kenôsis of the Son of God.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 315–23. (Reprint of no. 120.) 121. ‘Bernard Lonergan as Pastoral Theologian.’ Gregorianum 67 (1986) 451–70. 121a. ‘Bernard Lonergan as Pastoral Theologian.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 127–44. (Reprint of no. 121.) 122. ‘Graduation: End or Beginning?’ Christ the King Seminary News 50/3 (Summer 1986) 2–4. 123. ‘Lonergan, Bernard.’ In Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), vol. 9, 19–20. 124. ‘The Task of Interpreting Lonergan: A Preliminary to the Symposium.’ In Timothy Fallon and Philip Riley, eds, Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, S.J. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987, 3–16. 124a. ‘The Task of Interpreting Lonergan.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 145–60. (Reprint of no. 124.) 125. ‘“The Role of a Catholic University in the Modern World” – An Update.’ In Frederick Lawrence, ed., Communicating a Dangerous Memory. Soundings in Political Theology. Supplementary issue of Lonergan Workshop 6. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987, 1–16. 125a. ‘The Church as Learner: Two Crises: One Kairos.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 370–84. (Reprint, with revisions, of no. 125.) 126. ‘An Expansion of Lonergan’s Notion of Value.’ Lonergan Workshop 7 (1987) 35–57. 126a. ‘An Expansion of Lonergan’s Notion of Value.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 344–59. (Reprint of no. 126.) 127. ‘The Life of the Unborn: Notions from Bernard Lonergan.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, 360–69. 128. Co-editor, with Robert M. Doran. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. 25 vols. anticipated. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988–. 129. ‘Preface.’ In Appropriating the Lonergan Idea, xi–xii. 130. Appropriating the Lonergan Idea. Ed. Michael Vertin. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1989. (Collection comprising nos. 6a, 23a, 35a, 63a, 65a, 75b, 81b, 83b, 87a, 88a, 94a, 98a, 99b, 101a, 110b, 115a, 119b, 120a, 121a, 124a, 125a, 126a, 127, and 129.)

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130a. Appropriating the Lonergan Idea. Ed. Michael Vertin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. (Reprint of no. 130, with updates of Editor’s Introduction and Bibliography.) 131. ‘From Kerygma to Inculturation: The Odyssey of Gospel Meaning.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 21–31. 132. ‘Insight: Genesis and Ongoing Context.’ Lonergan Workshop 8 (1990) 61–83. 132a. ‘Insight: Genesis and Ongoing Context.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 32–52. (Reprint of no. 132.) 133. ‘Rethinking the Religious State: Categories from Lonergan.’ Science et esprit 40 (1988) 75–90. 133a. ‘Rethinking the Religious State.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 300–14. (Reprint of no. 133.) 134. ‘Rethinking Moral Judgments: Categories from Lonergan.’ Science et esprit 40 (1988) 137–52. 134a. ‘Rethinking Moral Judgments.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 315–31. (Reprint of no. 134.) 135. ‘Rethinking God-with-us: Categories from Lonergan.’ Science et esprit 41 (1989) 167–88. 135a. ‘Rethinking God-with-us.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 332–59. (Reprint of no. 135.) 136. ‘Lonergan Research Institute.’ News Letter Upper Canada Province, Supplement no. 23 (June–July–August 1990: Appendix to Supplement no. 22), p. 14ff. 137. ‘Newman: A Glory to Our Human Race.’ Compass: A Jesuit Journal 8/3 (July 1990) 36. 138. ‘Thomas Aquinas and the Will: A Note on Interpretations.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 8/2 (October 1990) 129–34. 139. With Robert M. Doran. ‘Editors’ Preface.’ Bernard Lonergan, ‘Pantôn Anakephalaiôsis (The Restoration of All Things).’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 9/2 (October 1991) 134–38. 140. Bernard Lonergan and the Community of Canadians: An Essay in Aid of Canadian Identity. Toronto: Lonergan Research Institute, and Canadian Institute of Jesuit Studies, 1992. (Pamphlet.) 141. ‘Lonergan’s Nottingham Lecture on Method.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 10 (Spring 1992) 1–2 (with Editorial Notes, 24–26). 142. ‘Introduction’ (27–28) and ‘Editorial Notes’ (29–30) to Lonergan’s article ‘Savings Certificates and Catholic Action.’ Lonergan Studies Newsletter 13 (1992). 143. Lonergan. London: Geoffrey Chapman, and Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. (In series Outstanding Christian Thinkers, ed. Brian Davies.)

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143a. Bernard J.F. Lonergan: Progresso e tappe del suo pensiero. Edited by Natalino Spaccapelo and Saturnino Muratore. Translated by Gabriele Bonetti, with revisions by L. Armando and N. Spaccapelo. Rome: Città Nuova, 1995. (Translation of no. 143, with presentation by the editors [7–8], and a preface for the Italian edition by the author [11–14].) 144. ‘Rethinking Eternal Life: Philosophical Notions from Lonergan.’ Science et esprit 45 (1993) 25–39. 144a. ‘Rethinking Eternal Life: Philosophical Notions.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 360–76. (Reprint of no. 144.) 145. ‘Rethinking Eternal Life: Theological Notions from Lonergan.’ Science et esprit 45 (1993) 145–59. (Sequel to no. 144.) 145a. ‘Rethinking Eternal Life: Theological Notions.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 377–93. (Reprint of no. 145.) 146. ‘The Spectrum of “Communication” in Lonergan.’ In Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup, eds, Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age. Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1993, 67–86. 146a. ‘The Spectrum of “Communication” in Lonergan.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 53–77. (Reprint of no. 146.) 147. ‘Fr Vincent J. MacKenzie, S.J. 1918–1993.’ Province Newsletter Jesuits of Upper Canada 69/2 (Spring 1994) 13–14. 148. ‘“All my work has been introducing history into Catholic theology” (Lonergan, March 28, 1980).’ Lonergan Workshop 10 (1994) 49–81. 148a. ‘“All my work has been introducing history into Catholic theology” (Lonergan, March 28, 1980).’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 78–110. (Reprint of no. 148.) 149. ‘The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and Jesuit Spirituality.’ Review for Religious 53 (1994) 524–33. 149a. ‘The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and Jesuit Spirituality.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 242–51. (Reprint of no. 149.) 150. ‘The Genus “Lonergan and …” and Feminism.’ In Lonergan and Feminism, ed. Cynthia Crysdale. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, 13–32. 150a. ‘The Genus “Lonergan and …” and Feminism.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 142–63. (Reprint of no. 150.) 151. ‘Linking the Splintered Disciplines: Ideas from Lonergan.’ Lonergan Review: A Multidisciplinary Journal 3 (1994) 131–43. (A public lecture at Lonergan University College, Montreal, celebrating the first fifteen years of the College [1978–93].) 151a. ‘Linking the Splintered Disciplines: Ideas from Lonergan.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 252–66. (Reprint of no. 151.)

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152. ‘Lonergan’s Universalist View of Religion.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 12 (1994) 147–79. 152a. ‘Lonergan’s Universalist View of Religion.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 111–41. (Reprint of no. 152.) 153. Translator of Giovanni B. Sala, ‘Kant and Lonergan on Insight into the Sensible.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 13 (1995) 89–97. 154. ‘Rethinking the Trinity: Taking Seriously the Homoousios.’ Science et esprit 47 (1995) 13–31. 154a. ‘Rethinking the Trinity: Taking Seriously the Homoousios.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 394–415. (Reprint of no. 154.) 155. ‘“A Bridge of Dialogue”: Foundations for the Bridge.’ LuCe: A quarterly publication of the Lonergan Communications Center, Manila (3, but unnumbered: Christmas 1995) 4–5. (Reflections on the metaphor used in the subtitle of the LuCe masthead.) 156. ‘Law and Insight.’ The Jurist 56 (1996) 25–40. (Issue dedicated to Ladislas Orsy, SJ, on his seventy-fifth birthday.) 156a. ‘Law and Insight.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 267–82. (Reprint of no. 156.) 157. ‘Christian Thinker: Fr. Bernard Lonergan, S.J.’ Company: A Magazine of the American Jesuits 13/3 (Spring 1996) 10–11. (Part of an issue devoted especially to the Jesuits of Mexico and Canada, neighbours to the south and north of the American Jesuits.) 158. ‘La Vocazione di Lonergan Quale Pensatore Cristiano.’ Rassegna di Teologia 37 (1996) 313–31. (Translation by Saturnino Muratore of the lecture given at the Lonergan conference in Milan, 28 January 1995.) 158a. ‘Lonergan’s Vocation as a Christian Thinker.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 3–20. (Original English of no. 158.) 159. ‘Lonergan’s “Moral Theology and the Human Sciences”: Editor’s Introduction.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 15 (1997) 1–3. 160. ‘Complacency and Concern in the Risen Life.’ Lonergan Workshop 13 (1997) 17–32. 161. ‘Now I Begin.’ Canadian Religious Conference Bulletin 38/3 (Fall 1998) 14–15. (An issue focused on transitions for religious.) 162. ‘The Date of “For a New Political Economy.”’ Appendix to Philip McShane, ed., For a New Political Economy, vol. 21 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998, 319–24. 163. ‘Rhyme and Reason: On Lonergan’s Foundations for Works of the Spirit.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 17 (1999) 27–45.

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163a. ‘Rhyme and Reason: On Lonergan’s Foundations for Works of the Spirit.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 314–31. (Reprint of no. 163.) 164. ‘The “World” from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican II.’ Review for Religious 58 (1999) 470–80. 164a. ‘The “World” from Anthony of Egypt to Vatican II.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 416–26. (Reprint of no. 164.) 165. ‘Interview.’ With Christine Jamieson, Peter Monette, and Paul Allen. Concordia Lonergan Website (http://lonergan.concordia.ca), 10 July 1999. 166. ‘For a Phenomenology of Rational Consciousness.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 18 (2000) 67–90. 166a. ‘For a Phenomenology of Rational Consciousness.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 77–101. (Reprint, with minor changes, of no. 166.) 167. ‘Putting Old Heads on Young Shoulders.’ Canadian Messenger of the Sacred Heart 110/9 (October 2000) 22–24. 167a. ‘Putting Old Heads on Young Shoulders.’ Pioneer (Dublin), March 2003, 10–11. (Reprint, with slight change, of no. 167.) 168. ‘Objectivity versus Projection in Lonergan.’ International Philosophical Quarterly 40 (2000) 327–38. 168a. ‘Objectivity versus Projection in Lonergan.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 102–18. (Reprint of no. 168.) 169. ‘Author’s Preface.’ In Three Thomist Studies, xvii–xix. 170. Three Thomist Studies. Ed. Michael Vertin. Supplementary issue of Lonergan Workshop, vol. 16. Boston: Lonergan Institute at Boston College, 2000. (Collection comprising nos. 3a, 8a, 12a, and 169.) 171. ‘For Inserting a New Question (26A) in the Pars prima.’ The Thomist 64 (2000) 565–80. 171a. ‘For Inserting a New Question (26A) in the Pars prima.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 332–46. (Reprint of no. 171.) 172. ‘Lonergan, Bernard Joseph Francis.’ Diccionario Històrico de la Compañia de Jesùs: Biogràfico-Temàtico (Rome: Institutum Historicum, S.I.: 2000), 2409–10. 173. ‘Analogy of Proportion: Note on a Favorite Lonergan Thought-Pattern.’ Theoforum 32 (2001) 419–25. 173a. ‘Analogy of Proportion: A Favorite Lonergan Thought-Pattern.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 119–25. (Reprint of no. 173.) 174. ‘“Stare at a triangle …”: A Note on How to Get an Insight, and How Not to.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 19 (2001) 173–80. 174a. ‘How to Get an Insight, and How Not to.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 126–32. (Reprint of no. 174.) 175. ‘The Dynamics of Spirit–Body Communication: Some Case Studies.’ Josephinum Journal of Theology 9 (2002) 95–107.

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175a. ‘The Dynamics of Spirit–Body Communication.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 427–40. (Reprint of no. 175.) 176. ‘The Future: Charting the Unknown with Lonergan.’ Lonergan Workshop 17 (2002) 1–21. 176a. ‘The Future: Charting the Unknown with Lonergan.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 347–68. (Reprint of no. 176.) 177. ‘Lonergan at the Edges of Understanding.’ METHOD: Journal of Lonergan Studies 20 (2002) 175–98. 177a. ‘Lonergan at the Edges of Understanding.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 133–54. (Reprint of no. 177.) 178. ‘History That Is Written: A Note on Patrick Brown’s “System and History.”’ Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis 2 (2002) 115–24. 179. ‘The Puzzle of the Subject as Subject in Lonergan.’ International Philosophical Quarterly 43 (2003) 187–205. 179a. ‘The Puzzle of the Subject as Subject in Lonergan.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 155–79. (Reprint of no. 179.) 180. ‘McShane’s Puzzles: Apologia for those Who Flunk Them.’ Journal of Macrodynamic Analysis 3 (2003) 186–93. 181. ‘The Relevance of Newman to Contemporary Theology.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 213–27. 182. ‘Lonergan and How to Live Our Lives.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 228–41. 183. ‘The Magisterium as Pupil: The Learning Teacher.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 283–93. 184. ‘“The Spirit and I” at Prayer.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 294–303. 185. ‘Why We Have to Die.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, 304–13. 186. ‘Author’s Preface.’ In Developing the Lonergan Legacy, xi–xiii. 187. Developing the Lonergan Legacy. Ed. Michael Vertin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. (Collection comprising nos. 100a, 111a, 131, 132a, 146a, 148a, 149a, 150a, 151a, 152a, 156a, 158a, 163a, 171a, 176a, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, and 186.) 188. ‘Images for Sin in the Ignatian Exercises.’ Spirituality Review: An Interactive Journal [semi-annual supplement to Review for Religious] (Lent/Easter 2004) 16–21. 189. Christ and History: The Christology of Bernard Lonergan from 1935 to 1982. Ottawa: Novalis, 2005. 190. ‘Aquinas, Pascal, Lonergan, and the Dynamic of the Spiritual Exercises.’ Review for Religious 64 (2006) 65–75. 191. ‘Some Background Notes to Lonergan’s Insight.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 16–27.

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192. ‘A Theology for Our Time.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 3–15. 193. ‘Some Thoughts on Dreams and the Ignatian Preludes to Prayer.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 294–99. 194. ‘Potentiality and the Real under Construction.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 180–95. 195. ‘Policy: Note on a Neglected Concept.’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 196–205. 196. ‘Is God Free to Create or Not Create?’ In John and David Liptay, eds, The Importance of Insight: Essays in Honour of Michael Vertin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, 85–96. 196a. ‘Is God Free to Create or Not Create?’ In Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, 441–53. (Reprint, with minor changes, of no. 196.) 197. Lonergan and the Level of Our Time. Ed. Michael Vertin. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. (Collection comprising nos. 25b, 54a, 56a, 61b, 77a, 80a, 97a, 102a, 133a, 134a, 135a, 144a, 145a, 154a, 164a, 166a, 168a, 173a, 174a, 175a, 177a, 179a, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, and 196a.) 198. ‘Son and Spirit in the Church.’ In a Festschrift for Frederick Lawrence, ed. Shawn Copeland and Jeremy Wilkins (to appear).

Index

agent intellect and spirit of inquiry, 12, 23, 44, 131, 383 Albert the Great, 328–29 Albertson, James, 106n11 analogy: a feature of scores of concepts, 56; foundations of, in dynamic human consciousness, 43–44; fundamentally based on an understanding of human understanding, 49, 53; in its strictest meaning, regards what cannot be properly and directly understood, 53; Lonergan’s use of, 41–57, 119–25, 136–37; Platonist, Aristotelian, and Thomist types of, 51; procedures of, as entering widely and deeply into great ranges of our cognitional activity, 56; and proportion, 43, 49, 53, 136–37; psychological, for the Trinity, 17–18, 43–44, 47–48, 337–40, 346–51, 404–15; systematic vs. metaphorical, 53; the word ‘analogy’ itself as analogous, 52 Anthony of Egypt, 416, 419–25 a priori: condition of any stream of consciousness, the subject as

subject, 164; deduction, 63, 74–75; in Kant and Lonergan, 30n11, 76; pattern in history, 59, 69–73; structures and methods, 66, 73– 74. See also euristic; transcendental Arians, 357–58 Aristotle, 12, 17–27, 42, 93, 103–105, 112, 118, 128, 134–39, 144–48, 177, 179, 181–85, 191, 198–99, 283, 307, 316, 322, 332–33, 361, 371, 378, 423 Arius, 226n38, 234–35, 413–14 Athanasius, 225, 232–35, 241–42, 301, 394–95, 400, 413–14 Augustine of Hippo, 12, 17–27, 44n13, 70, 104–105, 148–49, 156, 179, 197–205, 233, 253, 313, 332–33, 337–40, 387, 395–404, 418, 427–40, 443, 456 authenticity: of communal belief, 35–37, 249; as a matter of selftranscendence, 259–60; personal, 36, 313; of the subject, and the objectivity of her judgments, 29–30, 37–38, 115–16, 149–50, 313; of the theologian, 36–37; and unauthenticity, 36–37. See also

472 conversion; objectivity; selftranscendence Bacon, Francis, 179 Baius, Michael, 251 Barnes, Ronald, 440n24 Barth, Karl, 50n42, 219–20, 257–58, 293 Basil of Caesarea, 349, 395, 406 Bergson, Henri, 436 Bertaud, Émile, 429–30, 433–34 Beumer, Johannes, 45 Blondel, Maurice, 250–52, 257–58, 261, 272, 275, 277, 435 body–spirit communication, the dynamics of, 427–40 Boethius, 373 Boly, Craig, 74n53 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 239, 258 Boston College, 24n22, 38n46, 77, 84, 86, 94, 123n11, 158, 188n23 Brown, Robert McAfee, 255 Burns, J. Patout, xvi Burrell, David, ix, xviii, 457 Byrne, Patrick, xvi Cappadocians, 36, 395, 397, 400–401 Carruthers, Gregory, 332n2, 340n19 Chadwick, Owen, 235, 242 Chalcedon, Council of, 219, 224–25, 266–67, 341n21, 442–43 Chenu, Marie-Dominique, 424 Christian unity, 209–27, 228–43, 244–56; and the development of doctrine, 209–27, 228–43 church: admitting a truth not previously adverted to, 228–43, 257–78, 357–58; aspects of faith implicit in the practices of the, 232–36; the idea of perpetual

Index reform in the, 224–26; its role in defining truth, 218, 241, 264, 271, 342, 349, 357–58, 469; the theology needed by the present, 3–15, 342–43; today’s, vexed by the question of authority vs. freedom, 57; the visible, and beyond it, 353–56; as a whole, a learning, 267–71, 358, 469; in the world, 196, 416–26 Churchill, Winston, 6 classicism, transition from, to historical-mindedness, 11–12 Clement of Alexandria, 248 Clooney, Francis X., 332n2 Collingwood, Robin George, 392n39 communications, the functional specialty of, 67 conceptualism: and computers, 24–25; as maintained by Duns Scotus, 21–22; as maintained by Kant, 21–22; and modern logic, 24–25; vs. intellectualism, 19–27, 103–106, 321–24, 327–31 Congar, Yves, 248, 399 conscience, 13, 142, 179, 254–56, 268–69, 318–27, 423, 426, 459 consciousness: data of, 75, 95, 146, 168–72, 303–304, 342–43, 349–51; differentiations of, 51, 65, 67, 72–73, 140–41, 152–53, 290–91, 303–10, 385; as difficult to study, 26, 156–66; dynamism of, 23, 42–43, 67, 73–74, 323–26; heightening it, 115, 158–62; as internal experience rather than self-perception, 85–86, 156–62; levels of, 56, 65, 67, 110–11, 146, 149, 161, 320–24, 411; possible continuity of, from before birth to after death,

Index 124; as self-presence, 147–48, 157; structural and historical aspects of, 59–76; towards a phenomenology of rational, 77–101 conscious operations, no direct knowledge (in the strict sense) of, xi, 132n14, 155–79. See also insight into insight Constantinople, First Council of, 334, 349 consubstantiality (of Son and Spirit with Father), 14, 33–36, 232–35, 241–42, 270, 301, 394–415. See also Trinity conversion: intellectual, 16–27, 390– 91; moral, 325–26, 390–91, 445–47; religious, 390–91, 409–10, 445–47; as what makes us what we are, 144–45, 280, 290–91, 306, 445–47. See also authenticity; objectivity; self-transcendence Copernicus, 423 Copleston, Frederick, 25–26, 126–27, 130, 413n32 Croken, Robert, xvii, 376n16, 393n41 Crowe, Frederick: academic history, ix–xiii, 4–5; comprehensive list of his writings, 455–70; personal history, 4–5; some of his personal interactions with Lonergan, ix–x, 84–85, 121–22, 462, 463 Daly, Thomas, 76n61 Darwin, Charles, 423 data of consciousness, 75, 95, 146, 168–72, 303–304, 342–43, 349–51 data of sense, 23, 95, 146, 164, 172; theological implications of putting data of consciousness on an equal footing with them, 342–43, 349–51

473 dates, concepts have, 316; values have, 316 Dawson, Christopher, 8–9, 184 Denzinger, Henricus, xix, 45, 399 Descartes, René, 37, 119, 153n69, 164, 265–66, 423 Descartes’s advice for learning truly, by contrast with Newman’s, 37–38 development of doctrine, 35–36, 69–73, 209–27, 228–43, 258–61, 266–71, 300–302, 332–59, 394–415, 416–26; a crucial issue in ecumenism, 209–10; distinct from development of moral precepts, 230– 31; highlights the need for a theology of change as such, 227, 228; itself a doctrine that developed, 228, 233; the most obvious objection to it, 235–40; a real development presupposes a new question and new terms, 229, 235; subdivides into dogmatic and merely theological, 228–29 dialectic: the functional specialty of, 31–40, 67; the most crucial but difficult of the functional specialties, 38–40 Di Giovanni, Andrea, xii Dionysius [= Pseudo-Dionysius], 441–42 divine revelation, via historical events and via true statements, 211–16, 236–39 doctrines: the functional specialty of, 31–40, 67, 415; of the future, 32–34; and historicity, in the context of Method in Theology, 28–41; from the past, 32–34. See also development of doctrine

474 dogmas: analogous to laws in science, 270–71; foundations and perpetual revisions, 274–78; how they arose, 267–71; in scripture, 271–74; and the self-correcting process of learning, 257–78; their meaning for our time, 13–14; their permanence attaches to their meanings, not their expressions, 36; their permanence and their historicity, 29–30, 257–78. See also development of doctrine Doran, Robert, x, xii, xvi, xvii, xviii, 332n2, 376n16, 393n41, 415n37, 462, 464, 465 dreams: and the Ignatian preludes to prayer, 294–99; nothing is more mine than my, 295; six examples potentially useful for prayer, 297–99 Duns Scotus, John, 19–22 dynamism: of consciousness, 23, 42–43, 67, 73–74, 323–26; of finality, 186, 190–95; of human nature, 12–13; of incarnate spirit, 23, 42–43, 65, 110–13, 151–54, 176–79, 217–18, 319–27, 364, 436–37 ecumenism: Christian, 209–27, 228–43, 244–56; the wider, 353–54, 356 Egan, John, 406n24, 415n37 Eley, David, 205n21 emergent probability, 131, 186–90, 372. See also finality; potentiality Erasmus, Desiderius, 249 ‘eruptions of spirit’: six types of unusual human behavior, and their underlying commonalities, 427–36

Index eternal life, 356–59, 360–76, 377–93 eternal life, philosophical notions: the double aspect of ‘is,’ 362–64; the ‘is’ of the ‘after’ life, 370–76; ‘is’ and ‘being,’ 361–62; the ‘is’ in eternity of human being, 368–70; the ‘is’ in eternity of the things that are, 364–68 eternal life, theological notions: effable and ineffable knowledge in the blessed, 385–92; Jesus on earth and the blessed in heaven, 381–85; old and new questions, 392–93; the question of human living in eternity, 378–81 ethics, and policy, 197–205 Euclid, 20–21, 87, 110, 336 Father: experienced as absence rather than presence, 340–45, 353; his love for us manifested by giving up his son, 354–56; lack of categories for speaking of the Father’s presence, 342–45, 349; movement from ‘God’ to ‘the Father’ and ‘the Son’ and in the New Testament, 240–42; nonmission of the, 346; our eschatological hope of the, 352; selfdonation of the, 358. See also God; Trinity feelings: and dreams, 294–99; and the dynamics of spirit–body communication, 427–40; and knowledge, 141–43; on all four levels of conscious intentionality, 141–43. See also dreams Feuerbach, Ludwig, 102, 116–18, 169n38, 186–89 finality, 74, 117, 186–95; and emergent probability, 186–95; and

Index potentiality, 117, 186–95, 436–40; vertical, 74, 253–54. See also potentiality in the process of being realized foundations, the functional specialty of, 31–37, 67 Franks, Robert, 240 freedom: divine, in creating, 441–53; of imagination, 147; and knowledge, 143–46; and necessity, in human acts, 187, 444–47; from temporal limitations, in the afterlife, 373; unlimited on the level of ideas, 218 Freud, Sigmund, 116, 423 functional specialties, 31–40, 67–69; Lonergan worked them out through thirty-five years of wrestling with theological problems and theological history, 55–56 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 310 Galileo Galilei, 7, 271, 423 Galvin, John, 242 Geffré, Claude, 424n17 Gilson, Étienne, 22, 139, 345n30 God: dependence of creatures on, 42, 120–21; divine knowing, 47, 83–84, 94, 121; eternal, not temporal, 362–64; freedom of, in creating, 441–53; the human potentiality for, 186, 192, 194–95; as ipsum intelligere, 12; knowledge of, immediate, by the blessed, 377–93; knowledge of, Jesus’ immediate, 57, 275–78, 382–85; the mystic’s encounter with, 115, 139–40, 147, 276, 306–307, 312, 341, 384–85; objectivity of our statements about, 102, 111–18; our knowledge

475 of, analogical, 141; our knowledge of, via extrapolation from the universe of proportionate being, 101, 111–14, 137, 335–36; our knowledge of, via religious belief, 50, 115–16, 140, 336–37; our notion of, 44–46, 48n34, 117; the presence of all things to, 362–76; the question of, 114–16, 151–52, 344–45; the question of, and our experience of the absence of the Father, 344–45; unintelligible by us because of an excess of intelligibility, 49–50, 135. See also Father; Son; Spirit; Trinity God-with-us [= the economic Trinity], rethinking, 332–59 Going, Cathleen, 201n8, 392n39 Gonzaga University, 283–84 Greene, Graham, 6 Gregorian University, x, 85, 265n30, 266n32, 282n10, 378n4, 455 Gregory of Nazianzen, 233, 395 Gregory of Nyssa, 395 Günther, Anton, 231 Harvey, Van Austin, 257–75 Hefling, Charles, xvii, 367n56 Hefner, Philip, 264n28 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 85, 94, 99, 100, 153n69, 283 Heidegger, Martin, 113n28, 267–68, 345n30 heuristic: and a priori, 66; character of the formulation of dogmas, 267; concepts, 213–14n11; notions, 111n21, 190–91, 312; structures and methods, 45, 53, 57n72, 62–66, 73– 74, 136–37, 290–91, 325; transcendental, indeterminate, vs. ob-

476 jective, categorial, determinate, 324–25. See also a priori; transcendental historicity, 10–15, 28–40, 233; and permanence, of dogmas, 29–30, 257–78; and permanence, in human judgments, 28–40, 59–76, 239, 290–91; negative and positive senses of, 10–15; in the sources of Christian faith, 28–40. See also development of doctrine history: as God’s language, 211; as progress, decline, and redemption, 8–9, 71–73; as what happens and as what is written, 8; axial periods of, 4–7; critical, and religious belief, 257–78; divisions of, 4–5; existential, narrated, critical, and methodical, 265; the functional specialty of, 35–36, 67; philosophy and theology of, 330–31; pre-critical and critical, 9–10 Holy Spirit. See Spirit homoousios [= the doctrine that the Son and the Spirit are consubstantial with the Father]. See consubstantiality human thinking in time, the pattern of, 416–23 Hume, David, 319–20 Husserl, Edmund, 76, 77–79, 82, 122–25, 130–31 Ignatian preludes to prayer, and dreams, 294–99 Ignatius of Loyola, 280–81, 294–99, 416, 445 insight, 19–27, 77–101, 126–32; examples of, 20, 80–82, 96–101, 127–32; and imagination, 22–26;

Index inverse, 50–51, 71, 138, 171n40; as methodical ground of concepts, 21–26, 77–101, 126–32, 135–38; as a real psychological phenomenon, 25–26, 328; its role in morality, 327–31 insight into insight: we are able to have it, 53, 83–85, 413; we are unable to have it (immediately), xi, 80, 83–95, 132n14, 141, 166–72, 413. See also conscious operations, no direct knowledge (in the strict sense) of them intellectualism vs. conceptualism, 19–27, 103–106, 321–24, 327–31. See also conceptualism intentionality analysis, 56, 72, 76, 141–42, 288–92, 303, 318, 340–41 interiority, 48–49, 127, 132n14, 149–50, 159–60, 304, 307–308, 342–43, 348–49, 435, 438, 461; divine, 447–53; of Jesus, 57, 283, 287–88, 388; religious, 57, 342–43, 348–49. See also self-appropriation interpretation, the functional specialty of, 35–36, 67 Irenaeus of Lyons, 232 ‘is’: of the ‘after’ life, 370–76, 377–93; and ‘being,’ 361–62; its double aspect, 362–64; in eternity, 364–70, 377–93; has an absolute character, 102–18; has an analogous sense in questions for intelligence, reflection, and deliberation, 56, 274; as in judgment, susceptible only of an indirect phenomenology, 95–101, 138–41; inverse, 50–51, 71, 138, 171n40; and ‘ought,’ 319–24; validity of using it of God, 334–37

Index ‘is-ought’ controversy, and the dynamism of the incarnate spirit, 319– 24. See also conceptualism vs. intellectualism Jaspers, Karl, 4–6, 115, 159–61, 302– 303 Jesus: his divinity, the meaning of its role in our redemption, 14, 354–56; his immediate knowledge of God, 57, 275–78, 382–85; the historical, 257–58, 275–78, 287–92. See also Son; Trinity Joachim of Flora, 233 John the evangelist, citation of, 10, 214, 219–20, 234, 245–48, 274, 342 John XXIII, 13–14, 333, 360 Johnston, William, 350n38 Joint Declaration on Justification (1999), 225n35 Kanaris, Jim, 133n2 Kant, Immanuel, 21, 22, 30n11, 58–60, 76, 114, 467 Keating, Timothy, 118n45 Kelsey, T. Morton, 294n2 Kierkegaard, Søren, 7, 36, 144, 292, 312–14 knowledge: communal, and belief, 34–36, 140; conceptualist and intellectualist views of, 19–27, 103–106, 321–24, 327–31; its extrinsic limits, 141–46; and feelings, 141–43; and freedom, 143–46; of God, immediate, by the blessed, 377–93; of God, Jesus’ immediate, 57, 275–78, 382–85; of God, via extrapolation from the universe of proportionate being, 111–14, 137, 335–36; of God, via religious be-

477 lief, 115–16, 140, 264–65, 336– 37; invariant structures of, 54–55; its intrinsic limits, 137–41; its scope, 134–37; objectivity of, 29–30, 37–38, 104–105, 115–16, 149–50, 313; Platonist and Aristotelian views of, 103–106; the result of experience, understanding, and judgment, 43, 59–60, 106–11, 135– 36, 142–43, 147, 177–78, 321, 335, 446 Kohberg, Lawrence, 73n49 Komonchak, Joseph, 360n3 Küng, Hans, 29 Lamb, Matthew, 78n5 Lambert, Pierrot, 201n8, 392n39 language: Pauline, Nicene, presentday, 35 Lash, Nicholas, 243 Laurier, Wilfrid, 10 Lawrence, Frederick, xvi, 133n2, 464, 470 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 113, 151–54, 345n30 Leo XIII, 249, 300 Leopold, Ulrich, 244n2 Liptay, David S., 367n56, 441n1 Liptay, John J., 367n56, 441n1 logic: as secondary in Lonergan’s notion of the philosophical enterprise, 16. See also conceptualism; ‘is-ought’ controversy Lonergan’s Insight: its debt to Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, 17– 27; at its heart, the question of philosophical method, 16; its relation to the Verbum articles, 17–27; the years during which it was written, 3–4

478 Lonergan Workshop (Boston College), 38n46, 180, 182n8, 446 Longman, T. Michael, 84n21 love: the analogy of, 56; being in, without restriction, 60n10, 89, 115, 150–51, 170, 305–308, 350–51; as bestowed, as declared, and as consummated, 338–40, 404–15; as the culmination of self-transcendence, 148–51; divine, as consummated in our final union with the Father, 338–40, 404–15; divine, as flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit, 11, 150, 182, 291–92, 305–308, 338–40, 353–55, 404–15; divine, as manifested in Jesus, 14, 71, 150, 338–40, 353–55, 404–15; God-with-us as, 337–40; as involving presence of loved in lover, 147–50; its relationship with knowledge, 29, 348, 353–54; as mutual self-mediation, 284; natural and supernatural, 251, 418–26; self-justifying, the gifted basis of the theologian’s reasoning, 37–38 Loyola Marymount University, 125n12 Luke the evangelist, citation of, 10, 220, 245–48, 280, 287, 450 Luther, Martin, 249–50, 264, 289, 458 MacKinnon, Edward, 106n11 Maréchal, Joseph, 78n5 Maritain, Jacques, 251 Mark the evangelist, citation of, 10, 245–48, 425–26, 450 Marquette University, 31n12, 261n18, 461 Marsh, James, 133n2

Index Marx, Karl, 116, 145, 330–31 Matthew the evangelist, citation of, 10, 214, 219, 245–48, 255, 287, 291, 420, 425–26, 443, 450 McEvenue, Sean, 55n67 McGrath, Alister, 118n45 McShane, Philip, xv, xvii, 55n67, 68n30, 131n10, 189n31, 257n1, 459, 460, 462, 467, 469 meaning: of Christian marriage, 253; constitutive of human living, 252, 282; not reducible to the cognitional, 142–43; realms of, 51, 65, 153, 290–91, 304; seems to be equated with intentionality, 282; the world mediated by, 146, 185, 281–93, 306–12 mediation: 7, 11, 14–15, 21, 56, 67, 146–48, 185, 281–93, 306–12, 369, 446. See also love; self-mediation Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 439–40n21 Merton, Thomas, 309–10 Meyer, Ben, 55n76 Michelangelo, 134, 140, 153–54 Miles, Thomas Richard, 16–27, 16n1 Milltown Park (Dublin), 344n29 Modernism, 225, 258 Mohler, Johann Adam, 234, 242 Monophysite, 399 Monsour, Daniel, xii, xvii, xviii Moore, Sebastian, 316 morality: basic Thomist view of, 318–19; deriving determinate principles of, 324–27; role of insight in, 327–31 moral judgments: the foundations of, 318–24; rethinking them, 315–31 Morelli, Elizabeth Murray, xviii, 73n49, 133n2

Index Morelli, Mark, xviii, 125, 125n12 Morfin, Luis: his interview of Lonergan, 84, 87–90, 94–95, 98–99, 169– 70, 201n9, 201n11, 203 Morrison, Vincent, 124–25 mounting to the level of the times: the church and, xi–xii, 3–15, 196; Crowe and, xi–xii; Lonergan and, xi–xii, 3–7, 196 Murray, John Courtney, 343–44n27 Mysterium ecclesiae: first document of the Holy See to take express account of historicity in the sources of Christian faith, 28 natural and supernatural, 244–56, 308–14, 416–26; constituents of reality, not aspects of culture, 422–23. See also sacred and secular; world, one’s Newman, John Henry, 12, 37, 97–98, 150n65, 199–200, 217, 231–35, 242, 265–66, 270–72, 336–37, 399, 430– 38, 458, 461, 465, 469 Newman’s advice for learning truly, by contrast with Descartes’, 37–38 Newton, Isaac, 367, 423 Nicea, First Council of, 14, 33–35, 225, 229, 234–35, 266–67, 270, 332–34, 355–58, 394–415 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 116 objectivity: as the consequence of authentic subjectivity, 29–30, 37–38, 104–105, 115–16, 149–50, 313; vs. projection, in Lonergan, 102–18. See also authenticity; conversion; self-transcendence Ockham, William of, 25, 126n3, 413n32

479 O’Donovan, Conn, xviii, 225n36, 344n29, 363n8, 459 O’Faolain, Sean, 430–31 Origen, 35n34, 233, 413–14 Ortega y Gasset, José, xi, 3, 5, Palmer, Richard, 267 Pascal, Blaise, 144, 347–48, 469 Paul VI, 28 Paul of Tarsus, citation of, 34, 214–16, 219, 226, 231, 236–37, 245–48, 252– 53, 255, 272–73, 280, 282, 342–43, 421, 422, 441, 443, 450–51 Pelagius, 251 permanence and historicity: of dogmas, 29–30, 257–78; in human judgments, 28–40, 59–76, 239, 290–91; in human living, 13. See also development of doctrine Peter Lombard, 418–19 phenomenology, Lonergan’s definition of, 79–80 Philip the Chancellor, 250–51, 418–20 Piaget, Jean, 73n49, 183, 283 Pius IX, 353n43 Pius XI, 249 Planck, Max, 154n72 Plato, 7, 25–26, 46, 51, 103–104, 369n10 policy: as an academic subject, 196–97; and ethics, 197–205; note on a neglected concept, 196–205 potentiality: features of, 190–95; in the process of being realized, instances of, 181–89, 253–54, 436–40; and reality, 180–95. See also emergent probability; finality presence, various senses of the word, 147–48, 157. See also consciousness

480 Prestige, George L., 33–34n32, 270, 358, 394 projection vs. objectivity, in Lonergan, 102–18 purifying the Christian tradition, responsibility for, 35–36 question: the analogous character of the concept, 56; as given and as gift, 151–54; manifestation of the human capacity for learning, 216–17 Rahner, Karl, 213, 241, 243, 267, 350n38 Ranke, Leopold von, 7 realms of meaning, 51, 65, 153, 290– 91, 304–305. See also differentiations of consciousness Reformation, 225n35, 249–50, 254–55, 264–65, 279 Regis College (Toronto), x, 51n49, 85n25, 91n32, 122, 124–25, 135n8, 283, 317, 362–63, 415, 430n6, 440n24 relativism, 13–14, 331 religious: belief, and critical history, 257–78; consciousness, 303–14, 333; interiority, 57, 342–43, 348–49; life, the, 300–14, 416–17, 424–26 religious state: contemplative vs. active, 308–14; rethinking it, 300–14 research, the functional specialty of, 35–36, 67 resurrection: the meaning of, 356–59, 360–76, 377–93 rethinking: eternal life, philosophical notions of, 360–76; eternal life, theological notions of, 377–93; moral judgments, 351–31; the

Index religious state, 300–14; the Trinity, 332–59, 394–415. See also development of doctrine Richard, Robert, 242–43 Ritschl, Albrecht, 264n28 Rixon, Gordon, 133n2 Rondet, Henri, 242 Rose, Stephen, 254–55 Ruler, Arnold A.Van, 243 Ryan, William, xvii sacred and secular: 216–17, 244–56, 282–93, 308–14, 416–26; aspects of culture, not constituents of reality, 422–23. See also natural and supernatural; world, one’s St John Stevas, Norman, 204n20 Sala, Giovanni, 28–40, 58n3, 363n8, 459, 460, 467 salvation as wholeness, theological background for an ecumenical program, 244–56 Sanford, John A., 294n2 Santayana, George, 117–18 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 133–34 Savon, Hervé, 242 Schillebeeckx, Eduard, 213, 221, 241, 242, 458, 459 Schmitz, Kenneth L., 409n27 Scholasticism, 24, 60n7, 76, 78, 126, 131, 144, 159, 168, 176–79, 196, 233, 239, 251, 275–76, 371, 409, 414, 449; and modern logic, 24 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 430–31, 434–36, 438, 440 scriptures, an attempt at analysing their power, 279–93 self-appropriation, 38–40, 115, 159– 63, 304, 348–49, 377, 435. See also interiority

Index self-correcting process: of learning, 262; of religious learning, 257–78 self-mediation, 283–84; mutual, 283– 84. See also love self-transcendence: cognitional, moral, and religious, 148–49; as culminating in love, 148–51; as decentring, 148–50; as the measure of authenticity, 259–60; as the measure of progress by contrast with decline, 72n43; and the study of religions, 116–17. See also authenticity; conversion; objectivity sensus plenior, 213–14n11 Shields, Michael, xvii, xviii, 46n22, 47n26, 135n8, 205n21 Sidgwick, Henry, 319–20 Somfai, Bela, 317n4 Son: 14, 17, 33–36, 43–44, 57, 74, 210, 219–22, 236–43, 394–415. See also consubstantiality; God; Jesus; Nicea, First Council of; Trinity speaking in tongues, 428–29, 435–36 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 79, 82, 130–31 Spirit: continually being sent from the Father in the name of the Son, 221–22, 236–37; experienced as divine love flooding our hearts, 11, 150, 182, 291–92, 305–308, 338–40, 353–55, 404–15; lack of categories for speaking of the Spirit’s presence, 342–45, 349; role of, in world religions, 353–54, 356; sent to enable us to receive the Son, 219–20, 341–42. See also consubstantiality; God; Jesus; Trinity spirit, psyche, and bodily expression: their relationship, 427–40. See also feelings

481 spirit of inquiry: and agent intellect, 12, 23, 44, 131, 383; as reliable and unchanging, 12–13; as source of all science and philosophy, 134–37. See also dynamism of incarnate spirit Stanley, David Michael, 279n1, 292–93 subject: the logician’s repressed, 321– 24; Lonergan’s liberated, 321–24. See also conceptualism vs. intellectualism subject as subject, 115, 155–79. See also consciousness; presence sublation, 37–38, 93n33, 325–26, 390–93 Syllabus of Errors, 123–24 synderesis, 318–19, 326–27 systematics, the functional speciality of, 67, 137n16, 415 Tansey, Charlotte, 201n8, 392n39 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 219, 236, 331 Tekippe, Terry, 201, 201n8 Teresa of Avila, 312, 384–85, 429, 431, 433, 438–39 Tertullian, 35n34, 232, 413–14 Thales of Miletus, 322 theologian: her task, to complicate the clear and simple, 282 theology: a, for our time, 3–15; as facing the challenge of reconciling permanence and historicity in its judgments, 28–40, 239, 290–91; functional specialties of, 31–40, 67–69; as involved in the present axial shift, 7–15; as mediating between culture and religion, 7, 15; mediating vs. mediated, 32–33, 67–69, 217; now starts with data

482 rather than truths, 259–61; the role of analogy in, 42–58, 110–25. See also development of doctrine Thévenaz, Pierre, 179n51 Thomas Aquinas, ix–x, xvi, xviii, 7, 11–12, 17–27, 42–53, 69–70, 82, 93, 100–101, 103–18, 120–25, 142–52, 156–57, 177–79, 181–95, 196–205, 211–13, 227, 229–33, 238, 274–75, 300–12, 318–29, 333–49, 361–74, 378–89, 395–415, 418–26, 436, 441–53, 455, 456, 459, 465, 468, 469 Thomas More Institute (Montreal), 52, 201n8, 372n13, 392n39 Thurian, Max, 223n24 Tourette’s syndrome, 440n23 tradition and innovation, 300–302, 332–33, 360–61. See also development of doctrine transcendental: concepts, 76, 414; deduction, a Lonerganian meaning and use, 58–76; ego, 163n26; method, 55–56, 58, 61, 68, 76, 161, 330–31; notions, 38n46, 44, 76, 109– 11, 146–48, 190, 276–77, 324–25, 362, 383, 460, 464; precepts, 68, 324–27; Scholastic, Kantian, and Husserlian meanings of the term, 76. See also a priori; heuristic transcultural principles, 48–49 transposition, 11, 31–34, 44n13, 68, 104–105, 148–49, 164, 245, 300–302, 306–307, 334–38, 347, 355, 358, 383, 425, 428 Trent, Council of, 224–25 Trinity: and the common practical neglect of Nicea, 396–98; Godwith-us, 333–37; God-with-us as love, 337–40; God-with-us and our experience, 340–45; integrating

Index our rethinking of the traditional doctrine, 346–51; and one line of practical development of Nicea, 398–415; rethinking the, 332–59, 394–415; some liturgical and theological consequences of rethinking, 351–59. See also God; Father; Son; Spirit Trinity, some psychological analogies for: Father/Son/Spirit as Originating Love/Word/Proceeding Love [later Lonergan], 337–40, 346–47; Father/Son/Spirit as Understanding/Word/Love [Aquinas], 43–44, 401–404; Spirit/ Son/Father as Love/Word/ Mystery [Crowe], 346–51, 404–15 Troeltsch, Ernst, 258 Tyrrell, Bernard, xvii value, the notion of, compared with the notion of being, 324–25, 460, 464 values, their similarities to and differences from concepts, 316–17 Vatican Council, First, 32, 45, 48n34, 50n42, 219, 231–33, 380–82, 389, 401n15, 442, 449, 451–53 Vatican Council, Second, 219, 360, 424–26, 457 Vertin, Michael, ix–xiii, xviii, xix, 78n5, 179n51, 376n16, 393n41, 415n37, 441n1, 455, 457, 462, 464, 465, 468, 469, 470 Vincent of Lerins, 222, 231–32, 413 Vollert, Cyril, 242 Voss, Gustav, 242 Walgrave, Jan Hendrik, 242 Walsh, Terence, 205n21 Wiles, Maurice, 243

Index Word, as eternal and temporal, 17. See also Son words, outer and inner, 17–19, 57, 103–106, 118, 135–36 World Council of Churches, 256n25 world, one’s, 267–72, 282–93, 303–14, 416–26. See also sacred and secular

483 world religions: Christianity and, 332–33, 353–54, 356, 463; the role of the Spirit in, 60n10, 353–54, 356. See also religious consciousness; religious interiority