Why Lonergan Still Matters

1/ Why Lonergan Still Matters Jeremy D. Wilkins Knowledge of method becomes a necessity when false notions of method are current and more or less disastrous.1 I t is now fifty years since Vatican II; almost sixty since the publication of Insight; over forty since Method in Theology. Lonergan, and the world that defined him, seem like yesterday’s news. Although Lonergan exercised considerable influence over a generation of his students, theology today seems to be passing him by. His work is difficult, obscure, and increasingly relegated to marginal notes on the history of twentieth-century theology. Coming to terms with it is a major investment; he is not well-suited as a casual interlocutor. It is not immediately clear to many why that investment is worthwhile. I would like to begin, therefore, by speaking to his contemporary relevance for theology. A theology mediates between religion and culture, and, as there are many different cultures, theology’s ‘today’ is not the same everywhere. In what follows, I have in mind mainly the challenges presented by the North American cultural situation most familiar to me. I suspect this situation has many parallels in Europe, but I must leave it to readers to judge the extent to which what I have to say is relevant to their contexts. My thesis, in brief, is this: Lonergan is important today because the central issue in theology is the adequacy of theologians to their vocation. We are facing a cultural crisis of normativity. We have discovered the radical contingency of our traditions. Many leap gaily to the conclusion that what is not normative is merely arbitrary; there results a wholesale demolition of tradition.2 Others labor vainly to put the genie back in the bottle and reconstruct a bygone world. The broader culture, too, bifurcates into opposed camps, each confirming the suspicions and thereby reinforcing the errors of its opponents. Christians, meanwhile, bereft of a native language, understand themselves in terms they learn from a culture itself in crisis. They are easily trapped in its oppositions. A new foundation is needed, both for a new inculturation of the Gospel and for effective healing and creating in our civilization. But that foundation is the concrete reality of the theologian, in her attentiveness, her intelligence, her rationality, her freedom, her loving self-surrender to Christ. What Lonergan proposes is to make these explicit topics. His strategy is not so much a theory as a set of practices grounding theory: practices of self-knowledge and self-appropriation, of methodical collaboration, of promoting conversion by making its dimensions an explicit topic. Self-knowledge means disciplined attention and discovery in oneself of what it means to be a created participation of uncreated light, an incarnation of intelligence, reason, responsibility. It means discovering in oneself how truth is normative for intelligence and value is normative for freedom. Self-appropriation means taking hold of that reality in oneself and deciding to stand by it faithfully come what may. Methodical collaboration means working out the implications of that reality for doing theology in a collaborative and ongoing process. Promoting conversion starts with recognizing that the highest wisdom is not 1 learned but “…something given / And taken, in a lifetime's death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.”3 ‘Know thyself’ has been easy to affirm and difficult to achieve ever since the Delphic Oracle. Lonergan himself, I think, let us off too lightly. He once observed that it is easy to prove the existence of God, but difficult to meet all the objections of a determined skeptic. To put the matter differently, what really is difficult is to get oneself into the position to verify and accept the suppositions of the proof: to know just what is meant by affirming that being is completely intelligible, true, and valuable, and to know why one’s intelligence, rationality, and responsibility obliges these affirmations.4 Short of that luminosity, it is not only possible but in fact easy to throw up roadblocks, to regard the only adequate position as nothing more than “a dogmatic rationalist leap.”5 That is just one way of saying that self-appropriation is a hard therapy for which there is no easier substitute. Let me contextualize these points in four steps. I begin with a brief characterization of some salient features of the contemporary situation. I then propose three particular aspects of Lonergan’s achievement developed around the theme of wisdom: (1) wisdom as self-knowledge and selfappropriation, (2) wisdom as ordering theological operations, and (3) wisdom as self-surrender. 1 The Contemporary Situation “There is no doubt,” wrote Walter Kasper, “that the outstanding event in the Catholic theology of our [twentieth] century is the surmounting of neo-scholasticism.” Neo-Scholasticism he describes as “the attempt to solve the modern crisis... [with] a timeless, unified theology that would provide a norm for the universal church.”6 Almost in the twinkling of an eye, the whole effort was swept away, and with it, many older and more admirable achievements. So complete and abrupt was the sea change that most theologians of my generation know almost nothing of neo-Scholasticism except as a bugbear, a cipher for the ‘bad old days’. To my students, Lonergan’s descriptions of its shortcomings seem stilted. But even if they are not, his ‘today’ is not ours. Theology today has little need of prophets to call it to historical seriousness, dialogue with natural science, engagement with existential, hermeneutical, postmodern philosophy. Lonergan, like many others of his generation,7 was critical of aspects of the new situation – notably the fragmentation of theology,8 a neglect of doctrinal issues,9 a loss of connection to important questions and content10 – just as he had been of the old. His place in the story, however, is contested, both by those who embrace the change and those who lament it. To some he is simply among the villains who brought the house down.11 More nuanced is R.R. Reno’s depiction of a tragic Lonergan who unwittingly helped destroy the context in which his achievements could be understood.12 For others he did not go far enough.13 Charles Davis accused him of hanging on to retrograde Catholicism despite his own better instincts: Lonergan’s excellent analysis of the transition from classical to modern culture, when read without his [Catholic, dogmatic] presuppositions, urges, I suggest, the opposite conclusion to his own: namely, that the Roman Catholic insistence on unchanging dogmas, an infallible 2 magisterium and a hierarchically constituted church belongs to the classical culture and will have to be given up.14 Less bitter but of similar mind was George Lindbeck, who deemed Lonergan’s efforts to marry ‘cognitivist’ and ‘experiential-expressivist’ accounts of doctrine a failed routine of “complicated intellectual gymnastics.”15 My distinct impression is that many, who do not share Davis’s hostility to dogmatic religion, nevertheless suspect with him that Lonergan is corrosive.16 If there is an emerging consensus, it is that time has passed him by.17 I read the situation differently. The crisis in theology and in the church is part of a broader cultural crisis. The longer tradition of Scholasticism had held the field in Catholic thought for some eight centuries. It developed an impressive synergy with ecclesiastical doctrine. It was embedded in a culture, a system of education, and rank upon rank of institutional arrangements. It provided theology a set of common questions and a standard framework for articulating results. Neo-Scholasticism, unfortunately, incarnated some of Scholasticism’s weakest tendencies: ahistorical immobility, abstractness, antiquated science, a predilection for logic over discovery, proof over understanding. It went hand and glove with a set of cultural assumptions and an educational system oriented to the ‘permanent things’, the eternal, the unchanging. Classicist culture, with its pretense to normativity and universality, was resistant to innovation, blind to meaningful difference and the positivity of pluralism. As a style, classicist culture was not limited to the West; remarkable parallels exist, for instance, in late imperial China.18 It seems to be a cultural form appropriate to what Lonergan calls ‘the second stage of meaning’, the stage in which meaning is controlled primarily by logic.19 Neo-Scholasticism was the intellectual arm of a culture, and its disappearance was not only the failure of an intellectual project but also the destruction of a cultural form. Their collapse left a many educated Catholics in a “state of almost complete disorientation,” feeling “confronted with an endless relativism,” and unequipped “to deal effectively and successfully with the premises set forth by relativists.”20 The disorientation is with us still. It is, in fact, inseparable from a wider cultural crisis in the West, a crisis of meaning and values, of authority and tradition, of “our working relation to the past.”21 The crisis is fallout from a momentous transformation in our self-understanding in the wake of paradigm shifts in natural science and in historical knowledge. Catholic leaders responded to this transformation in a remarkably uncreative and flatfooted manner, hobbled by their involvement in classicist culture and a failure to grasp how radically modern science changed our knowledge of nature, and modern scholarship our knowledge of history. In short, what really was “a single momentous event demanding an equally momentous development” in Catholic thought and education was badly mistaken for “a series of regrettable aberrations that unfortunately were widely accepted.”22 For too long, Catholic leaders and intellectuals thought to fend off the crisis with dogmatic proofs and an authoritarian crouch.23 That strategy never was tenable. When, inevitably, it was abandoned for lost, the storm was all the fiercer for the wait. Catholicism is still struggling to inculturate in the resulting (modern/postmodern) situation. In the absence of a native language of their own, Christians in the West seem to have inherited possessive individualism (‘getting and spending’), expressive individualism (‘to thine own self be true’), and 3 relative perspectivism (‘works for me’) as their first languages.24 These cultural idioms are inept vehicles for the Gospel and almost as a rule result in its devaluation. The challenge for theology in this context is to help Christians re-create a native language. This cannot be a matter merely of recovering a language that has been lost; it must be a new inculturation. The challenge is all the more difficult because we are not exempt from the derailments of our culture. As Frederick Lawrence points out, these languages have ‘invaded’ us.25 If we would learn Christ, we start not with a blank slate but with conversion, repentance, a new asceticism. We are turning away from the ways our culture offers us to interpret our desires and needs, conflicts and struggles. We are dissenting from the scale of values implied by and embedded in our social practices and institutional arrangements. We must become like children and learn a new, a Christian language. But we must be adults in working out what that may mean here and now. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor compares our situation to Matteo Ricci’s.26 We are missioned, not to a culture strange to us, but to a culture strange to the Gospel, a culture itself in crisis, a culture to which we belong and which we have, inevitably, interiorized. Our challenge today is not only noetic, but it has a noetic dimension. For what has been lost and can never be regained is the normativity that once was presumed to reside in cultural forms, institutions, and universal propositions. It is not merely that one set of meanings has passed away and another has taken its place. It is that the very foundations of meaning are called into question. For we have learned that cultures are our products and our products are not normative. A new basis for dialectical critique of cultures is essential. Without it, we cannot find our footing as Christians and cannot render a service urgently needed by our culture and our church. Leo Strauss argues in his classic Natural Right and History that “natural right in its classic form is connected with a teleological view of the universe... [which] would seem to have been destroyed by modern science.”27 In Strauss’s reading, modern political philosophy originates with an open-eyed break from the abstract teleological commitments that structured the older tradition; it is a tradition unified in this explicit breach.28 Where once our forebears understood themselves as part of an order they did not originate and to which they were bound to conform, we now apprehend ourselves as the originators of order.29 “Modern man is fully aware that he has made his modern world.”30 What is known as contingent is also perceived as arbitrary and therefore violable. The old story line was obedience to the norm; the new story line is creativity and invention. At the same time, the break from teleology had the effect of undercutting the epistemological foundations upon which any solution to the problem of living might claim to be objectively adequate.31 Consequently, in one sense we might say that our culture cannot acknowledge a problem of spiritual order, because a problem of order arises only in relation to some objective criteria for ordering. That is, there can be a problem of order only if there exists, independently of our choosing, a normative order to which we are meant to correspond. The crisis of natural right arises because the possibility of a normative order – or at least the possibility of knowing it – is called into question and commonly denied. From another vantage point, however, it might be said that we have discovered a more radical problem. As Strauss puts it, “‘man is the measure of all things’ is the very opposite of 4 ‘man is the master of all things’”32 – the former involves us with an independent standard, but the latter might mean the only standard is arbitrary choice. The most radical question is whether it is even possible to determine a course except by a completely arbitrary choice – including the choice to stick with the bearings one happens to inherit. The contemporary crisis of culture is, then, a crisis of normativity, a crisis attendant upon a transition to a new stage of meaning. Classicism assumed its traditions were normative. Neoscholasticism assumed that universal norms meant universal propositions. Natural science and historical-mindedness have shown them false. This is not a situation that can be adequately faced simply by reasserting the normativity of some lost, sacrosanct cultural form. The result is a dialectical feedback loop. There is bound to be formed a solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists. There is bound to be formed a scattered left, captivated by now this, now that new development... But what will count is a perhaps not numerous center, big enough to be at home in both the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half-measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait.33 The need for norms is felt. Until it is met in a satisfactory manner, there are bound to be many who perceive the rejection of classicism as a rejection of all norms. Not a few rejoice at the liberation. They furnish abundant evidence to confirm suspicions on the solid right, where the revival of something very like neo-Scholasticism in thought and classicism in culture cannot but seem the appropriate remedy. The scattered left will resist what is seen as revanchism. But the real solution is to lay the axe to the root of the tree, to acknowledge relativity without becoming relativist, to be responsible to history without becoming historicist. Lonergan remains timely, I submit, because his asceticism of self-discovery can meet the issues of our day. He was not tempted to passing controversy; he “saw that there were genuine intellectual problems forced on Christian thinkers and set about solving them rather than attacking the enemy.”34 Today he is a reproach to both houses: to a solid right unequal to the tradition’s best questions, and to a scattered left that has no use for them. In the name of phenomenology, of existential self-understanding, of human encounter, of salvation history, there are those that resentfully and disdainfully brush aside the old questions of cognitional theory, epistemology, metaphysics. I have no doubt, I never did doubt, that the old answers were defective. But to reject the question as well is to refuse to know what one is doing when one is knowing; it is to refuse to know why doing that is knowing; it is to refuse to set up a basic semantics by concluding what one knows when one does it. That threefold refusal is worse than the mere neglect of the subject, and it generates a far more radical truncation. It is that truncation that we experience today not only without but within the church, when we find that the conditions of the possibility of significant dialogue are not grasped, when the distinction between revealed religion and myth is blurred, when the possibility of objective knowledge of God’s existence and his goodness is denied.35 5 It is not enough to name what is not normative, to cast down the idol of misplaced normativity. We have to name and to know in ourselves what is normative. There is no other way we as theologians can be adequate to our tradition and calling. What Lonergan offers is a difficult remedy, easily mistaken as license to name the vices of the old regime while putting little in its place. 2 Wisdom as Self-Knowledge and Self-Appropriation Wisdom is not just any knowledge, but knowledge that is basic and comprehensive. As Lonergan’s project developed, he parsed this out in terms of the poles of self-knowledge (cognitional theory, self-appropriation) and metaphysics, where self-knowledge is knowledge of what is basic, and metaphysics formulates what is comprehensive. Epistemology which explicitly works out the link between cognitive performance and objective knowledge. He conceived these in relation to three basic questions: What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when I do it? Later, he added a fourth, in effect: What must I do, if I would stand by the exigences entailed by the answers to the first three? Thus, Lonergan’s basic and total science became (1) cognitional structure, (2) epistemology – articulating the pivot from performance to knowledge, (3) metaphysics, and (4) existential ethics. The story of how this program developed will occupy us in the next chapter, but it may be useful to observe its roots in his own ressourcement, apprenticeship to Thomas Aquinas. In Verbum, Lonergan discerned a ‘duality’ in wisdom “between our immanent intellectual light and the uncreated Light that is the object of its groping and straining.”36 The duality, in other words, is between wisdom as subject – ourselves as created to the image and likeness of God – and wisdom as object – God as creating us to the likeness of divine intelligence. This duality is “the basic instance” of the opposition between the first-for-us and the first-in-itself: “ontologically the uncreated Light is first; epistemologically our own immanent light is first, for it is known not by some species but per se ipsum as the actuating element in all intelligible species.”37 We know the light of our minds, not by grasping an intelligible form in matter, but by coming to know what it means to be intelligent and rational; and it is by coming to know ourselves that we are able to conceive God as infinite intelligence in act.38 Normative knowledge has to rest upon the eternal reasons. But this resting, Aquinas explained, is not a vision of God but a participation and similitude of him by which we grasp first principles and judge all things by examining them in the light of principles.39 Self-knowledge as normative is the knowledge of oneself as a created participation in uncreated light, a knowledge of the pure, innate exigencies of intelligence. Thus, Lonergan spoke of a “wisdom through self-knowledge” attained by the discovery of the soul as the “dynamic norm.” Fundamentally, Lonergan’s program is to make methodical the “wisdom through selfknowledge,” the discovery of the soul as the “dynamic norm” of inquiry and action, that he discerned in Aquinas.40 What he calls ‘cognitional theory’ is basic, not as an articulated theory, but as a performative reality. What is foundationally normative for us, what requires no critical justification, is the light of wonder that manifests itself in our questions for understanding, our rational demand for 6 evidence, our conscientious concern for responsibility. It needs no critical justification because it is the very demand for critical justification. Lonergan’s proposal is not normative as an argument in a book. It is normative as a structure in each of us. It is not normative as formulated, as a theory, as a set of propositions, “a basic abstract scheme.”41 It is normative as operative, as a set of normative practices. The normativity of questions means the normativity of the criteria immanent in questioning. The normativity of the criteria means, correlatively, the performative normativity of truth for intelligence, and of value for decision. That basic normativity is not lodged in the objects of our judgment or choice. It is lodged in the immanent, spontaneously operative criteria of judgment and choice. What is easy is repeating and notionally affirming what Lonergan says. What is also easy is finding reasons to disagree with him. What is difficult is following the asceticism he presents: gnôthi seauton, wisdom as self-knowledge and selfappropriation. The modern crisis of natural right rests on a critique of the possibility of transcultural objectivity.42 Claims to the contrary are regarded as ‘dogmatic’ in the pejorative sense that they are held to rest upon an arbitrary premise – the identification of being with the intelligible. According to the historicist critique (as represented by Strauss), this presupposition has “its root in the dogmatic identification of ‘to be’ in the highest sense with ‘to be always’... The dogmatic character of the basic premise is said to have been revealed by the discovery of history or of the ‘historicity’ of human life.”43 What the relativists in fact ‘discovered’ is that “whatever may be hymned about eternal truths, human judgments always involve a specification of time.”44 Statements are relative to a context, contexts change, and future contexts cannot be predicted. It follows, however, only that judgments are relative to a context, not that they are only relatively true. Contexts can be discovered, and “there are many true statements whose context is easily ascertained.”45 Again, because contexts change, statements true in their original context may be inadequate to later, more differentiated contexts. But investigation can reconstruct the original context and thereby recover the original truth to bring it forward into the new context. No doubt truth claims are conditional; but one does not have to know everything to know something; many claims can be affirmed “on the fulfillment of a manageable number of conditions.”46 No doubt, finally, future changes in context cannot be predicted. “But one can predict, for example, that the contexts of descriptive statements are less subject to change than the contexts of explanatory statements,” and that radical revisions in theory will account for all that current theory explains, as well as much current theory cannot yet explain.47 Truth may be relative to contexts but it is not only relatively true. There is also an important ethical point at stake. The virtually unconditioned of rational judgment – that is, the demand for evidence and the possibility of getting it – is the sine qua non for authentic conversation. If there is no possibility of attaining the virtually unconditioned and so of rational judgment, contingent, perspectival, but nevertheless absolutely true as far as it goes, then also there is no possibility of drawing the historicist conclusion – or terminating any line of inquiry – in a manner that is not ‘dogmatic’ in the pejorative sense, that is, arbitrary. And, by the same token, there is 7 no possibility for a conversation that makes progress by some means other than by some variety of coercion or group-think.48 The possibility of the virtually unconditioned is the possibility of significant dialogue. The eros of the mind is the immanent ground of questions, inquiry, wonder. Inquiry has its own dynamic criterion, without which conversation must degenerate into power games. Lonergan acknowledges perspective because he recognizes that there is a conversational situation; not everyone has the same questions; and judgment is relative to contexts; but he also recognizes the possibility of achieving (or more commonly approaching) the virtually unconditioned, and therefore of arriving at judgments that are true in the intended sense and cannot be truthfully denied.49 His is an absolute perspectivism, in contrast to the relative perspectivism (or simply relativism) seemingly typical of postmodern thought. At least in its darker, nihilist tendencies, the language of ‘relative perspectivism’ is also a language of tragic alienation. In effect, Nietzsche – and he speaks for many – is in the profoundly alienated position of enunciating as true the claim that truth is what we make of it.50 (“Historicism,” says Strauss, “thrives on the fact that it inconsistently exempts itself from its own verdict about all human thought.”51) “Although Nietzsche is the turning point into postmodernism in philosophy, Heidegger has been the catalyst of the transition to postmodernity in the 20th century.”52 That transition has been taken to mean the end of metaphysics as the end of the possibility of attaining any “truth beyond the cave,” that is, beyond history.53 Both Nietzsche and Heidegger finally end up in arbitrariness. On the one side, “man is the measure arbitrarily,” while on the other, “man is measured arbitrarily by he knows not what.” For both, “the reality of the subject necessarily lies beyond the horizon of the subject in such a way that human projects must rest ultimately on unilluminated, and so irrational, decisions.”54 My sense is the real bearing of Heidegger’s critique of the ‘forgetfulness of being’ is a critique of the forgetfulness of the subject. But in order to go all the way with a recovery of the subject as subject, it is necessary to arrive at an adequate account of the normative structures of consciousness, and particularly the normative orientation of intelligence to the truth. Thus, where Heidegger and the postmoderns generally hail the end of metaphysics, what is ‘over’ is the attempt “to fulfill the abstractdeductivist ideal of a complete system,”55 to contain history in a logical system, or to embody normativity in a permanent cultural form. Lonergan does not fall under this stricture of historicism insofar as he offers a path to selfknowledge that yields a non-dogmatic (i.e., in the pejorative sense of ‘dogmatic’ as arbitrary) appropriation of the transcultural norms of attention, intelligence, reasonableness, responsibility, and self-surrender in love. Lonergan takes relativity seriously without succumbing to relativism, and “takes the absurdity and apparently random and chaotic dimensions of our world experience fully seriously without capitulating to nihilism in any form.”56 He thus represents the possibility of an ‘integral’ postmodernity, a recognition of the fragility, the situatedness, the historicity of human becoming without surrendering the normativity of truth for intelligence and value for decision.57 Or, to put it differently, he represents the possibility of a ‘fourth wave’ of modernity beyond the utilitarianindividualist, romantic-expressivist, and alienated-nihilist waves.58 Having swept away the dream of 8 cultural normativity, modernity and postmodernity are calling for a new form of human self-possession, what Lonergan calls a new stage in the control of meaning through self-knowledge and not only through the objectified controls of theory and logic.59 Lonergan reminded his students that to be of service to others, it was necessary that they first exist authentically themselves – lest the blind lead the blind – and that they help to convert rather than being content only to controvert.60 This was one way he had of putting “the eminently practical question” about the right way to live.61 It turns out that the problem of understanding is intimately bound up with the problem of living, since “science, scholarship, philosophy, and theology can only be genuine in the measure that they ‘head one into being authentically human.’”62 In the end, knowing, like loving, is a kind of self-surrender, where the quality of the surrender cannot be disengaged from the quality of the self. For a post-classicist philosophy, Lonergan averred, first principles are no longer “verbal propositions but [rather] the de facto invariants of human conscious intentionality,”63 the invariants involved in the structure of question and answer, formulation and testing, reflection and judgment, evaluation and decision. What was called ‘speculative intellect’ names, in fact, a specific pattern of operations of attention, inquiry, and rational reflection. But this performance itself is existential; it results from a moral deliberation, evaluation, and decision about the right way to proceed, and a commitment to sticking to it. “The primacy now belongs to practical intellect, and, perforce, philosophy becomes a philosophy of action.”64 3 Theology and/as ‘Conversational’ It pertains to wisdom to order. A foundational task for a wisdom of the concrete is to order operations, which Lonergan usually called ‘method’. In what he called a ‘methodical context,’ “emphasis shifts from objects to operations and operators.”65 Theology is specified, not in terms of formal and material objects, but as a mediation of faith into culture. It is a functional unity to which properly belongs each function in the process from data to results. It moves in an arc, beginning from the concrete to ascend to the level of principle through a series of universalizing functions, only to return to the concrete. There results a transposition of the classical functions of wisdom and prudence into a new wisdom that is neither purely speculative, in the ancient sense of dealing with the universal and necessary, nor purely practical as a matter of what is to be said and done, but also a matter of judging what is contingently true about ourselves and about the world of our involvement, which is also the world of God’s involvement.66 This entails, not a breakdown of the distinction-in-relation of faith and reason, but at least of the distinction in practice between philosophy and theology. “Once philosophy becomes existential and historical, once it asks about man, not in the abstract, not as he would be in some state of pure nature, but as in fact he is here and now in all the concreteness of his living and dying, the very possibility of the old distinction between philosophy and theology vanishes.”67 9 Lonergan understood his program of self-appropriation to represent a new paradigm for philosophy, and he sought to ground by it a new paradigm for theology. At its best, Scholasticism was a set of common questions and a shared conceptuality for formulating answers. A conspicuous feature of contemporary theology is its fragmentation into specialties, without common questions, common sources, a unified conceptuality. Lonergan proposed a way forward. Its widespread adoption seemed unlikely at the time and now seems less likely than ever. It seems to me his proposal is valuable even if it is not widely adopted, for those who understand it will enjoy unusual clarity about what they are doing, and it will help them figure out how to integrate what others are doing. Still, one may wonder how he thought a unified method in theology could ever be more than just a dream. The answer, it seems to me, is that he took his stand on the normative, functional unity of consciousness as grounding a normative, functional unity, not in theological content, but in theological operations. To the extent that his proposal for method in theology rests on self-appropriation, one has to re-enact the asceticism of self-discovery that is its basis. No more than the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius can it be learned simply by reading a book. Lonergan’s conception of a functionally specialized theology is a framework for orderly collaboration, a framework that assumes theology to be an ongoing process of retrieval and creativity, ressourcement and aggiornamento. Theology, like faith itself, starts with receiving an address, with conversion from hearing. Lonergan was hardly unique in conceiving theology as conversational, that is, as a matter of ‘hearing’ and ‘saying’, as he put it in his original formulation of functional specialties in theology.68 Lonergan’s proposal is distinctive because the differentiation is through functional specialization and the differentiation of functions is grounded in the normative operational structure of consciousness. That is, if the operational structure of consciousness unfolds normatively through attention to data, intelligible organization, rational judgment, and responsible decision, then theology will be a functional unity differentiated functions ordered to the different ends of the different levels. Hence the following schematic organization: Intention Listening Speaking 4. Evaluation Dialectic Foundations 3. Judgment History Doctrines 2. Insight Interpretation Systematics 1. Presentations Research Communications First, then, the column on the left denotes the ascending structure of operations apprehending (1) data, (2) intelligibility in data, (3) the relative sufficiency of evidence for prospective truth claims, (4) the adequacy of value motivations for decision. Next, the bottom row indicates functions with a finality on the level of data, either to ascertain the data from the past (e.g., the text of the New Testament) or to present the Gospel to some particular audience. The second row (from the bottom) indicates functions with a finality to intelligence, either understanding the meaning of another, or understanding one’s own claims. The third row indicates functions with a finality to truth claims, regarding, one the one hand, historical judgment about what really happened, or, on the other hand, doctrinal truth claims (which 10 may coincide with historical truth claims, e.g., the resurrection). The fourth row, finally, indicates functions with a finality to evaluation: of others as more or less adequately attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, differentiated, converted; and the articulation of the radical grounds for one’s own commitments. In Method, Lonergan called the two phases of theology not Listening and Saying but Mediating and Mediated.69 What he meant by this is simply that, in its listening phase, theology is mediating knowledge of the tradition. It is, so to say, measuring up. In the second phase, theology is a mediated knowledge of Christ, head and members. It is a knowledge mediated through the foundational, doctrinal, systematic, and pastoral articulations of the theologian. The structure of theology as a functional unity is a conversational structure grounded in a prior functional unity of consciousness itself as a conversational structure.70 Perhaps I may develop this point by contrasting the reality of knowing as ‘learning’ with the widespread myth of knowing as ‘looking’. By ‘learning’ I mean the gradual development of understanding through inquiry and reflection. Its operator is the question, and questions usually arise, and are refined and explored in conversation. ‘Looking’, on the other hand, means a kind of spiritual inspection, some mythical intuition of being prior to inquiry; it is well suited to the solitary. ‘Learning’ follows a spiral ascent; ‘looking’ walks a straight line. The spiral of learning involves attention, wonder, discovery, formulation, construal and appraisal of evidence, revision and correction and iteration.71 Coming to know reality is a matter of gradually arriving at correct answers to our questions; and the answers are known to be correct, not through an intuition of being but through a grasp of the evidence on a question. The whole process is conversational; it is in conversation that questions arise and are refined, data is brought to our attention, tests are devised and evidence produced or uncovered. By contrast, knowledge as looking is a matter of comparing concepts and deducing true conclusions implicitly contained in true premises. Unless one is a deficient logician, conversation is just a distraction. Knowing as looking begins and ends with the animal sense of reality ‘out there’. Lonergan considered this position to overlook intelligence almost entirely. Computation – the mere application of rules – can be safely delegated to a machine; posing questions, discovering rules, achieving synthesis, appraising evidence, these belong to intelligence alone. The distinction of functions in theology is the distinction of interrelated goals in a collaborative, conversational process of learning. When he placed the material ‘starting point’ of theology not in truths but in data, Lonergan was signaling the priority of listening to saying and of questions to answers. Frederick Lawrence has suggested an affinity between Lonergan’s uneasiness at the lack of probity he found in the ahistorical orthodoxy of neo-scholasticism, and Heidegger’s reaction to what he called ‘The System’ – except that Lonergan distinguished ‘The System’ from Catholicism itself.72 Lonergan’s was a critique of a conversation that had gotten ‘stuck’ in certain ways, and was investing tremendous energy in controlling the kinds of questions that would be allowed to come up and be permitted a serious hearing. It is an attitude of alienated or perhaps disingenuous obscurantism that calls to mind Dostoyevksy’s Grand Inquisitor. By affirming the priority of data, Lonergan affirms the priority of questions, and refuses to predetermine what questions may be regarded as theological.73 11 Because it aims to get a handle on the conversational structure of historical existence, Lonergan’s differentiation of functions in theology addresses how unprepared we may really be for collective responsibility, for listening and saying in a way that is historically serious – responsible to the history that has made us and responsible to the history we are making. In Lonergan’s analogical structure of hearing and saying, ‘hearing’ is cumulative involvement with the given, with meaning, with truth, with others and Another. The consummation of ‘hearing’, in theology as in life, is personal encounter, cor ad cor loquente, as Newman has it. As ‘hearing’ culminates in personal encounter, so one’s ‘saying’ emerges from and discloses one’s stance in the world, one’s ‘readiness’ (“God called to Abraham. ‘Ready,’ he replied.” Gen 22:1): what one is ready to do, approve, or censure; believe, affirm or deny; understand, ask, or even notice. Thus, in Lonergan’s proposal, the function of Foundations follows upon the function of Dialectic because the coming to light of one’s deepest commitments is one with the personal encounter. One ‘finds oneself’ admiring others. “The being of the subject is becoming,”74 and the becoming is conversational. Lonergan recognized that the central issue in theology is the equality of the theologian to her task – to hearing the demands of her tradition and to meeting the challenges of her culture. That adequacy is not, in itself, a theological operation, but the result of the momentous personal transformations he named religious, moral, and intellectual conversion, and further measuring up through the achievements of differentiated consciousness. Subsequent chapters will illustrate the meaning of these terms of art through examples from Lonergan’s own theology. For the moment, let it suffice to mention that, by conversion, Lonergan means a shift or reversal from criteria spontaneously operative in us as animals, to adhere to criteria spontaneously operative in us as incarnate spirits and, at least in the case of religious conversion, living out of otherworldly (supernatural) love. Thus, intellectual conversion is an explicit (and rare) shift from the criteria of sense – spontaneously operative in us inasmuch as we are animals – to the criteria of rational judgment, intelligible truth. Moral conversion is a shift from the animal criteria of pleasure and pain to the criteria of moral evaluation. Religious conversion is a shift from the value of this world – the terrestrial city – to the infinite value of God as the object of supreme love. Functional specialization makes the problem of internal controls explicit by recognizing the priority of questioners. It recognizes that the control cannot be deductive. There are transitions in theology – for instance, from the largely narrative order of the Scriptures to the propositional order of the dogmas, or again, from Augustine’s initial discovery of operative grace to Aquinas’s reformulation in a fully theoretical context – that are not deductions but what Lonergan called transpositions. Such transitions raise questions of validity. Apart from self-appropriation and the concomitant grasp of the possibility of differentiations of consciousness, there is no adequate resolution of the questions of validity, criteria, and preference endemic to theology; nor could there be a way to meet – not to say surmount – the permanent problem of disagreement.75 That control is explicitly applied in the functions of Dialectic and Foundations. Lonergan fixes the relation of the positive parts of theology – Research, Interpretation, and History – to the Doctrinal, speculative (Systematics), and pastoral (Communications) functions, through the explicit control of Dialectic and Foundations. It is not a silver 12 bullet to solve all problems and resolve all conflicts; it is a strategy for bringing them into the full light of day where they can be faced squarely. Lonergan’s sensitivity to the hermeneutical problem led him to recognize that doctrines, as appropriated, were already proper to the ‘speaking’ phase of theology. On the one side, doctrines have a historical context and that context has to be reconstructed if their meaning is to be retrieved. On the other side, doctrines are not only meanings retrieved by theologians operating in more or less adequate horizons; they are also affirmations of truth and value made in light of personal commitment, actively related to a subsequent history of doctrinal development and situated in a more or less coherent whole.76 For better and worse, truth, as the correspondence of mind to reality, is not “so objective as to get along without minds.”77 The normativity of doctrine, then, is derivative; what is basic is putting on the mind of Christ, as Vatican I implicitly acknowledged by noting that doctrines are to be understood in the context in which the church understands them (“in eodem sensu, eademque sententia”).78 Distinguishing and ordering functional specialties respects the autonomy of different kinds of inquiry and resists the intrusion of alien criteria. Determining what Paul wrote, determining what Paul meant, determining how Paul fits into an historical process, are all different, if functionally interrelated questions. Theology is not one activity, one kind of question related to one kind of answer, but an interrelated set of activities each with its own relatively autonomous questions, procedures, criteria. Note that an autonomous exegesis is not the same as a secularist exegesis, unless one is a secularist. More generally, Lonergan’s return to the concrete does not entail a positivism, sensism, pragmatism.79 Part of the control of method is to scrutinize, in Dialectic, the relative adequacy and influence of such presuppositions as a secularist, a positivist, a reductionist might bring to the table.80 Again, an autonomous exegesis does not disregard revelation or eliminate what God really did reveal; rather, it takes seriously the historicity of a revelation through human and historical agents.81 It has been objected that the structure of functional specialization is not, in itself, specifically theological.82 Lonergan agreed that the structure would be relevant to any discipline confronting the future out of the past.83 What makes it theological is its use to mediate religious meanings and values into a cultural matrix. What makes it authentically theological is the adequacy of the theologian to her task. The method refuses to predetermine which questions or sources may count as theological. It foresees that theologians may fail to measure up to the tradition. It assigns to Dialectic the task of sifting through the variable contributions. It assigns to Foundations the task of taking sides and articulating the principles for taking sides. It does not assume a doctrine of grace as such, but it does assume a reality of grace, a reality of conversion. It is this reality that makes religion ‘religious’ and theology theological. The wider relevance of functional specialization should not be too surprising. Science and scholarship are specialized types of inquiry into data, verification on the basis of evidence. What are the relevant data, how the relevant data are acquired, what counts as evidence, and so forth depend on the questions at hand. Just as Aquinas conceived theology as a subalternated science on the model set forth in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, so Lonergan’s greatly enlarged conception presents theology, not as a single kind of task but as a functional assembly of tasks. Each of those tasks, and the assembly 13 as a functional whole, implements the general structure of inquiry he called ‘transcendental’ or ‘generalized empirical’ method. A functionally specialized theology is concrete. It moves in an arc from the concreteness of data, to the concreteness of operations, and terminates in the concreteness of the situations addressed by theology. It thus mediates from the concreteness of the past situations to the concreteness of present situations, not by way of abstract principles, but by way of explicit attention to the concrete performance of theologians. Lonergan’s functionally integrated theology transposes the classical notions of a ‘speculative’ and a ‘practical’ science: theology is contemplative, as an increasingly determined heuristic for the beatific vision; and it is practical, as a wisdom of the concrete with an ordered finality to communications, to shaping lives, communities, history.84 It is not speculative, however, in the sense of being concerned only with the universal and necessary; it is concerned with the mysterious contingency, the incomprehensible givenness, of the communication of divine friendship to us who had made ourselves God’s enemies. 4 Wisdom as Self-Surrender Returning to the concrete is also returning to oneself, to the imperfect wisdom of the theologian. If materially the ‘starting point’ of theology is data, existentially, the ‘starting point’ of a theology is the theologian. Her horizon determines what questions even can arise. Lonergan was not naive about the fundamental problem for theology. The one thing necessary is the one thing God alone can give. There is a higher wisdom than the wisdom of learning that knows the order of things in the mirror of the soul; it is a wisdom of listening, of docility to the Spirit who is divine personal Listening.85 The wisdom of listening, of transparency to God, of suffering divine things does not need to be justified; it is normative. It is not normative as a theory about grace. It is not normative as named, objectified, formulated, affirmed. It is normative as a reality in persons, in Christians, in theologians. The normativity of otherworldly love is correlative to the beloved: the normativity of God in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. By asserting that the existential foundation of theology is the conversion, more or less adequate, of the theologian, Lonergan transposed Aquinas’s notion of sacra doctrina as a wisdom inasmuch as it is faith in contact with reason. For Lonergan, theology is authentically theological when it is faith in contact with reason, when it is the work of an authentically converted theologian mediating between religion and culture.86 The transposition was also a transformation, inasmuch as it also displaced into the system of functional specialties the Thomist subalternation of theology to the truths of faith as a result of “a greatly enlarged notion of theology” defined now, not in terms of its material and formal objects, but as a mediation of a faith into a culture.87 All the mediating operations, that once were regarded as merely adjunct to theology, are now explicitly conceived as pertaining to a single process from data to results, parts of a functional whole. He was also transposing, however, Aquinas’s notion of a twofold wisdom, a wisdom from study and a wisdom by connaturality. Thus, theology is a supernatural wisdom as reason informed by faith, 14 reason about the things of faith. But there is a higher, supernatural wisdom, a wisdom of listening. Lonergan explains that, for Aquinas, Wisdom through self-knowledge is not limited to the progress from empirical through scientific to normative knowledge [of ourselves]. Beyond the wisdom we may attain by that natural light of our intellects, there is a further wisdom attained through the supernatural light of faith, when the humble surrender of our own light to the self-revealing uncreated Light makes the latter the loved law of all our assents. Rooted in this faith, supernatural wisdom has a twofold expansion. In its contact with human reason, it is the science of theology, which orders the data of revelation and passes judgment on all other science. But faith, besides involving a contact with reason, also involves a contact with God. On that side wisdom is a gift of the Holy Spirit, making us docile to his movements, in which, even perceptibly, one may be ‘non solum discens sed et patiens divina’.88 Both the wisdom that is theology and the wisdom that is docility are supernatural: both are involved with matters too high for us, and both are grounded in a single, otherworldly love that is for us the basis for our listening, our assent, and the questions that follow upon it. For Aquinas, as Lonergan reads him, God is always the transcendent author of our freedom. By granting us to desire, God opens up a ‘space’ for us to deliberate and choose. That is, prior to the wanting, there are no prospective objects of deliberation; it is only when once we begin to desire that we are presented the possibility of a choice. Conversion is the special case of a radical reorientation of desire. Not only external performance but also internal decisions – to believe, to hope, to revere God – are cooperative responses made possible by God plucking the heart of stone.89 Apart from conversion, these are not only impossible choices but also unwanted or unknown possibilities. Under the tutelage of Aquinas, Lonergan initially conceived conversion in terms of the will of the end. But as he brought this perspective into conversation with the problems brought to light by hermeneutical philosophy, more radical dimensions opened up for him.90 The problem of conversion is not just a problem of willing in a conventional sense; it is a problem of horizon, of what could even be noticed, appreciated as a possibility, summon forth effort.91 Conversion is a special case of the transition from one horizon to another. Falling in love is the beginning of another world and another self. It dismantles the previous horizon and establishes a new one, in an exercise of freedom Lonergan’s Gregorian colleague Joseph de Finance taught him to call ‘vertical liberty’.92 The heuristic structure of development Lonergan formulated in Insight anticipated that human development might be initiated by internal or external factors within any of its three-plus-one genera.93 Internal biological impulses and necessities, the psychic and emotional pressures of getting along with others, personal discoveries and decisions, changes in the material and cultural environment brought about by others, their feelings, perceptions, discoveries, and choices: all these call for adjustments. What came less clearly into focus, in Insight, was the priority of love in motivating and directing one’s entry into the world constituted by meaning and value. In his later work, Lonergan began speaking of development ‘from above’ to get at the priority of love and tradition in the process of human development.94 15 Lonergan’s struggle for a clear articulation of development ‘from above’ is related to the break with faculty psychology we will consider more closely in the next chapter. Most often when Lonergan mentions development from above he brings up the scholastic dictum that nothing is loved unless it is first known. On this basis Aquinas had argued that faith must precede charity, because charity orients the will to a supernatural end (friendship with God), but no end can be willed unless it is first known, and a supernatural end can be affirmed only by supernatural faith. Hence, though the first operation of grace is conversion, a radical change in the will, it must be for Aquinas an actual grace prior to the infusion of habitual charity.95 After his shift to intentionality analysis, Lonergan found a more adequate instrument for thematizing the priority of love. Conversion is a transformation of the subject and of the world of her involvement. She is a new self involved with a world made new to her, and her involvement is itself a principle of further change. As a reality in the theologian, religious conversion in its first moment is prior to decision. In itself, love has the character of a ‘yes’ prior to concrete decisions and particular questions; it constitutes a horizon within which decisions and questions emerge and to which they bear witness. Apart from this first moment, there is no decision to be made. However, it is also the basis for a decision and demands free and full commitment.96 There is no transformation of subjects that is not mediated in and through an involvement in the world. It is not that we first have some immanent experience called ‘religious’ and subsequently decide to attach it to a tradition. It is rather that we experience ourselves as addressed, as summoned “to hearken and to hammer day and night.”97 And if we ‘hearken’ it is because we have hearts to hearken, ears to hear. Such an involvement is nothing if it is not concrete. As concretely Christian, it involves us in an explicit mutual self-mediation with Jesus Christ. Christians acknowledge Christ as the object of faith and the definitive articulation of the meaning of the gift of the Spirit. Holding to him in faith and hope and love, we make him the explicit focal point of our lives. As he lived his life in relation to us, so we work out our lives in relation to him and to all those who belong to him. In Christ we learn the touchstone of religious authenticity is God’s purpose to bring good out of evil through love.98 It is the efficacious way of our redemption because a divine person made it his own with a wholly gratuitous solidarity. For Lonergan, the touchstone of religious authenticity is what he called the ‘Law of the Cross,’ bringing good from evil through love.99 For Christians, this foundational claim is attached to a doctrine: Christ alone adequately determines the meaning of conversion.100 Conclusion I have been endeavoring to characterize Lonergan’s basic project in relation to the contemporary situation. I have done so through the device of wisdom. Although Lonergan never said so explicitly, my contention is that he understood himself to be working toward a transposition of wisdom in its several meanings he learned from Aquinas: a wisdom of the concrete. 16 The contemporary situation in the West is one of cultural crisis, a crisis of normativity. The dream of classicism is over. The new fact is pluralism in culture, theology, and the church. The ongoing challenge for us is to make sense of pluralism, to judge wisely different kinds of difference, to acknowledge relativity without relativism and historical contingency without historicism. Theology today is an ongoing, collaborative process of mediating the one Gospel into different cultures. This does not mean it has no permanently valid achievements, in the form of dogmatic judgments and theoretical triumphs.101 It does mean that these are normative only derivatively, only inasmuch as they are authentically retrieved and enter into an ongoing mediation of faith into culture. I have been suggesting three aspects of Lonergan’s relevance to this context: his foundational practice of self-knowledge, his articulation of a new paradigm for order, unity, and collaboration in theology, and his reminder that the highest wisdom is self-surrender and the highest self-surrender is to Christ in love. Lonergan is relevant because it is still the case that the theologian is relevant, and the adequacy of the theologian to her task is the perennial problem in theology. Hannah Arendt writes of the political significance of Socratic thinking in a way that seems relevant to the present cultural crisis, to Lonergan’s proposal, and to his reception: ...non-thinking, which seems so recommendable a state for political and moral affairs, has its perils. By shielding people from the dangers of self-examination, it teaches them to hold fast to whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time in a given society. What people then get used to is less the content of the rules, a close examination of which would always lead them into perplexity, than the possession of rules under which to subsume particulars.102 It does not seem farfetched to think that the anxiety crisis that gripped so many in the Catholic world before and after Vatican II is related to the kind of disarticulation of the prevailing rules which, on Arendt’s analysis, is precipitated by Socratic thinking. Lonergan’s program is a wisdom of the concrete, a wisdom of self-attention and self-discovery, a wisdom of attention to data and openness to questions, a wisdom of self-surrender in love. Lonergan’s program means back to the questions and back to the questioners; it is bound to be unsettling, but it is a way forward. 17 1 ”Questionnaire,” CWL 17, 374. 2 See Lonergan’s sharp review of Leslie Dewart’s The Future of Belief, “The Dehellenization of Dogma,” Second Collection zzz. 3 T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages, V, 203-205, in idem, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 44. 4 See Lonergan’s 1967 retrospective on his ‘Natural Theology’ in “The General Character of the Natural Theology of Insight,” CWL 17, 3-9. See too Method 101-3, on the question of God. In a 1979 course on Method in Theology, Lonergan formulated an argument to the effect that: “If the universe is intelligible, moral, and a field for personal relations, then God exists. But the universe is intelligible, moral, and a field for personal relations.” Asked why the minor should be granted, he wrote: “One grants the minor premiss [sic] without difficulty if one has arrived at selfappropriation. Human understanding is an essential component in human knowledge; but one cannot positively understand what is unintelligible. Moral obligation is an essential component in the mature human being. But it is a nullified obligation if the universe (apart from man) has no part in morality. Human community is human through mature persons; and mature persons in human community have interpersonal relations; if intelligence has no intelligible object and moral obligation no objective basis, personal relations are destined to founder.” Method in Theology seminar, 9/20/1979, archival document 29610DTE070. See too n. 91 below. 5 Oliva Blanchette, Philosophy of Being: A Reconstructive Essay in Metaphysics (Washington, DC: Catholic University, 2003), 315. Compare William Richardson, “Being for Lonergan: a Heiddegerian view,” in Language, Truth, and Meaning. Papers from The International Lonergan Congress 1970, ed. P. McShane (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1972), 272-83, at 277 (“...when one begins the discussion of being by simply declaring that it is the ‘objective of the pure desire to know’, it does not take a very subtle analysis to infer that being is intelligible”). Sed contra: When one begins the discussion of being by discovering in oneself the criteria immanent in all one’s questions (“in lumine intellectus agentis nobis est quodammodo omnis scientia originaliter indita,” Thomas Aquinas, De veritate 10.6c), only an involvement in obscurantism enables one to deny that being is intelligible. 6 Walter Kasper, Theology and Church (London: SCM, 1989), 1; quoted in Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Chenu to Ratzinger (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), vii. 7 See Lonergan, “The Scope of Renewal,” CWL 17, 282-98; and see the book of interviews Lonergan discusses there. 8 Fragmentation concern zzz 9 See Lonergan, “Horizons and Transpositions,” zzz. 10 See Lonergan, Caring About Meaning, zzz 11 ZZZ Knasas, Steven A. Long, etc. See, e.g., John F.X. Knasas, “Aquinas’s Metaphysics and Descartes’s Methodic Doubt,” Thomist 64 (2000) 449–72; idem, The Preface to Thomistic Metaphysics: a contribution to the neo-Thomist debate on the start of metaphysics (New York: Peter Lang, 1990). 12 R.R. Reno, “Theology After the Revolution,” First Things May 2007, reviewing Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Chenu to Ratzinger (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007). 13 (Mackinnon, adjectivally transcendental; the fellow who reviewed Verbum; Dewart; Davis). 14 Charles Davis, “Lonergan and the Teaching Church,” in Foundations of Theology: Papers from the International Lonergan Congress 1970, ed. Philip McShane (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1971), 60-75, at 74. See Davis’s review of Method in Theology zzz. 15 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 17. See Mike Higton, “Reconstructing The Nature of Doctrine,” Modern Theology 30 (2014) zzzz. 16 Someone, for instance, has created a Guia Bibliografica [zzz] (effectively, an Index, whether official, quasi-official, or unofficial) for members of Opus Dei. Books are graded from one to six in ascending order of peril. Two of Lonergan’s books – Verbum, heaven knows why, and also Method in Theology – are featured. Method is graded a six, which the grading key describes as “Lectura prohibida. Para leerlos se necesita permiso del Padre (Prelado),” prohibited except by permission from the Prelate of Opus Dei. Verbum is graded 3-4; grade three designates books that may have inappropriate scenes or commentary (“escenas o comentarios ‘inconvenientes’”) and may only be read by those with appropriate formation and permission of their spiritual director; grade four adds that they may be read only if necessary. See http://www.opuslibros.org/Index_libros/guia_general.htm, accessed 1 December 2015 (in Spanish); also http://www.odan.org/index_forbidden_books_new.htm, accessed 1 December 2015 (in English). The latter has a brief contextualization of the list. N.b., these are not official Opus Dei sites, but sites operated by opponents of Opus Dei. 17 This is suggested by several indices, including declining attention to his work and the marginalization of the Lonergan ‘school’. Gerald Bonner’s tart quip about Augustine might become true of Lonergan, if only he were talked about at all: “More than most authors, Augustine has been the object of unjustified denunciation by those who have not read him.” Quoted (without attribution) by John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994), 1. 18 See Frederic Wakeman, Jr., The Fall of Imperial China (New York: Macmillan/Free, 1975), 23-4, 212-13. Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths, trans. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1977), 21-30, describes a similar tendency in the Renaissance, here contradistinguishing itself explicitly from the Christian medieval culture. 19 On stages of meaning, see Lonergan, Method in Theology, 85-96. The idea is not that logic becomes irrelevant; it retains its uses for clarifying positions at any given stage of development; but the successful application of logic presupposes the attainment of univocal propositions. Moreover, logic is not the instrument of discovery, because, logically, nothing is in the conclusion that is not already in the premises. The prior and more basic issue is the discovery and validation of the premises. 20 Lonergan, “Doctrinal Pluralism,” 75-76. 21 Michael McCarthy, describing what he calls a crisis of philosophy in the Anglo-Analytic tradition, puts it this way: “This crisis concerns the common meanings and values by which we live together, our working relation to the past, and our understanding of what it is to be human. This crisis has come about because our inherited religious and moral traditions have lost their authority... Since the beginning of the scientific revolution modernity has struggled with the fact of tradition. It could no longer accept tradition’s authority as the great medieval theologians once did. The most influential modern thinkers viewed tradition as an inherited burden, as something from which to be liberated. But, in the course of the next two centuries, they gradually created an alternative tradition that Harold Rosenberg has called the tradition of the new.” Michael H. McCarthy, The Crisis of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY, 1990), p. xx, citing Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon, 1959). 22 “Questionnaire,” 354. 23 See Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, 1-16. 24 See Frederick G. Lawrence, “The Human Good and Christian Conversation,” zzz; Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart zzz. 25 Frederick G. Lawrence, “The Human Good and Christian Conversation,” (REF NEEDED ZZZ) 261. (“My own sense is that conversion and repentance are crucial to the process of learning Lonergan’s foundational language precisely because the languages of liberalism or nihilism are so dominant in our culture. They do not just exist ‘out there’ or ‘in them.’ If my own experience is not unique, these languages have invaded us. They affect our day-to-day life-choices and our overall way of life both in the manner in which we individually and collectively interpret our desires and needs and in the ordering of the values incorporated in the already understood and agreed upon solutions to the problem of living together that make up our institutions. These languages are the symptom of our implicatedness in what today is commonly called ‘structural sin’.”) 26 See Charles Taylor, “A Catholic Modernity?” in Catholic Modernity: Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, ed. James L. Heft (New York: Oxford University, 1999), 13-37. 27 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965), 7-8. 28 See Leo Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays, ed. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1989), 81-98. 29 Strauss, “Three Waves,” 85. 30 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “The Transition from a Classicist World-view to Historical Mindedness,” in idem, A Second Collection (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), 1-9, at 4. 31 See Strauss, Natural Right, 12. 32 Strauss, “Three Waves,” 85. 33 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “Dimensions of Meaning,” Collection, CWL 1 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1988), 232-45 at 245. 34 William M. Shea, “A Vote of Thanks to Voltaire,” in A Catholic Modernity: Charles Taylor’s Marianist Award Lecture, ed. James L. Heft (New York: Oxford, 1990), 39-64 at 50. 35 Lonergan, “The Subject,” A Second Collection, 86. 36 Verbum, CWL 2, 100. 37 Verbum, CWL 2, 100. 38 See Matthew L. Lamb, Eternity, Time, and the Life of Wisdom, ch. 3, “Eternity and Time” (Naples, Florida: Sapientia, 2007), 29-53. 39 Verbum, CWL 2, 101, citing Aquinas, De veritate 10.8c. 40 Verbum, CWL 2, 101.zzz doubloe check 41 Charles Davis, “Lonergan and the Teaching Church,” in Foundations of Theology, 72. Davis claims to discover a fallacy in Lonergan’s retorsion argument, his claim, that is, that anyone who would refute his cognitional theory would have to invoke experience, understanding, and judgment. “[Lonergan’s] fallacy is to suppose that to discover a basic abstract scheme into which all cognitional activities will fit is to have discovered and formulated all the elements of determining importance in human knowledge in the concrete” (ibid., 72). On the contrary, the fallacy in Davis’s rebuttal is to have missed the point: it is not an abstract scheme that is unrevisable; it is the fact of questioning, its relationship to data and evidence on the one hand and its relationship to understanding and judgment on the other. To put the point differently: anyone who wishes to say that knowing is not a matter of understanding the data correctly, will have to point to some data that have been overlooked or misunderstood. 42 See Strauss, Natural Right, passim. 43 Natural Right, 30-31. 44 Lonergan, Verbum, 75-76. See Matthew L. Lamb, “Bernard Lonergan, S.J.: The Gregorian Years,” in Lonergan’s Anthropology Revisited, at 66-68. 45 Lonergan, “Doctrinal Pluralism,” 75. See 75-6. 46 Insight, CWL 3, 380. 47 “Doctrinal Pluralism,” 76. 48 Frederick G. Lawrence, “Lonergan’s Foundations for Constitutive Communication,” Lonergan Workshop 10 (1994) 229-77 at 245. 49 See Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, CWL 3, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1992), 296-303; idem, Method in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1972), 214-24, 320-26. 50 See Lawrence, “Horizon of Political Theology,” 58-61. 51 Strauss, Natural Right, 25. 52 Lawrence, “Fragility,” 181; see 180-82. 53 See Strauss, Natural Right, 11-12. 54 Lawrence, “Horizon of Political Theology,” 61-63. 55 Lawrence, “Horizon of Political Theology,” 55-56. 56 “Fragility,” 174. 57 Frederick G. Lawrence, “Lonergan, the Integral Postmodern?” in Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 18 (2000), 95122; see idem, “Lonergan’s Postmodern Subject: Neither Neoscholastic Substance nor Cartesian Ego,” in In Deference to the Other: Lonergan and Contemporary Continental Thought, ed. Jim Kanaris and Mark J. Doorley (Albany, New York: State University of New York, 2004), 107-120; idem, “Martin Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Revolution,” “Hans-Georg Gadamer and the Hermeneutic Revolution,” “The Hermeneutic Revolution and Bernard Lonergan: Gadamer and Lonergan on Augustine's Verbum Cordis - the Heart of Postmodern Hermeneutics,” “The Unknown 20th Century Hermeneutic Revolution: Jerusalem and Athens in Lonergan's Integral Hermeneutics,” in Divyadaan 19 (2008), 7-30, 31-54, 55-86, 87-118. The possibility of an integral postmodernism has been questioned by John Caputo, for whom “a certain measure of disintegration is integral to the postmodern scene.” Caputo, “Foreword,” In In Deference to the Other, vii – xiii at vii. 58 See Frederick Lawrence, zzzzzzz. 59 See Method, 85-99. 60 “Quae cum ita sint, si quis aliis subvenire voluerit, et (1) ipse ex-sistat necesse est ne caecus caecum ducat et (2) in aliis magis convertendis quam convincendis incumbat.” Bernard J.F. Lonergan, The Ontological and Psychological Constitution of Christ, CWL 7, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, trans. Michael G. Shields (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2002), 22. 61 Frederick G. Lawrence, “The Fragility of Consciousness: Lonergan and the Postmodern Concern for the Other,” in Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age, ed. Thomas J. Farrell and Paul A. Soukup (Kansas City, Mo.: Sheed & Ward, 1993), 173-211 at 175. Compare idem, “The Horizon of Political Theology,” in Trinification of the World: A Festschrift in Honour of Frederick E. Crowe, ed. Thomas A. Dunne and Jean-Marc Laporte (Toronto: Regis College, 1978), 46-70 at 50. 62 Frederick G. Lawrence, “Martin Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Revolution,” in Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education 19 (2008), 7-30 at 14; quoting Bernard Lonergan, “Method: Trend and Variations,” A Third Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan, SJ, ed. F.E. Crowe (Mahwah, NJ; Paulist 1985), 13-22 at 21: “Being a scientist is just an aspect of being human, nor has any method been found that makes one authentically scientific without heading one into being authentically human.” 63 Lonergan, “Doctrinal Pluralism,” CWL 17, 85. 64 Lonergan, “Doctrinal Pluralism,” CWL 17, 85. 65 “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” Shorter Papers, CWL 20, 265 = Foundations of Theology, 224. 66 See Lonergan, Early Works I, CWL 22, 107-8. 67 Lonergan, “Dimensions of Meaning,” Collection, CWL 1, 245. 68 See the so-called ‘Discovery Page,’ Lonergan’s handwritten notes, from 1964, outlining the original conception of functional specialties in theology (47200D0E060). 69 Zzzz. 70 See Frederick G. Lawrence, “Lonergan’s Quest for a Hermeneutics of Authenticity,” MS 8-9 zzz. 71 This process is mainly discursive, but not exclusively so, for reasoning begins from understood principles and is punctuated by insights into phantasm and into the sufficiency of evidence. See Verbum CWL 2, 44-45. 72 FL, “Lonergan’s Search” zzz 73 Compare Sarah Coakley’s notion of ‘theologie totale’: idem, God, zzzzz 74 Lonergan, “Existenz and Aggiornamento,” in Collection, CWL 4, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1993), 222-231 at 223. See Insight CWL 3, 649. 75 zzzzz 76 Method, zzz on ongoing contexts 77 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “The Subject,” in A Second Collection, ed. William F.J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), 69-86 at 71-72. Note that ‘truth’ in its ontological aspect is convertible with being; but in its cognitional aspect is a relation of knowing to being: see Insight, CWL 3, 575-76. 78 Fuller discussion in chapters ZZ and ZZ below. See 1 Cor 1:10 (Vulgate). 79 In the Epilogue to Insight, Lonergan laments that “we live in the midst of a sensate culture, in which very many men, insofar as they acknowledge any hegemony of truth, give their allegiance not to a divine revelation, nor to a theology, nor to a philosophy, nor even to an intellectualist science, but to science interpreted in a positivistic and pragmatic fashion.” (Insight, CWL 3, 766) 80 Lonergan on Bultmann, Barth zzzzz. 81 Lonergan “anything God really did reveal” zzzz 82 Rahner, etc. 83 “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” zzz 84 See Lonergan’s discussion of the relationship between religious studies and theology: theology adds to religious studies the direct-discourse functions of an ‘applied’ science. Third Collection ….zzz. 85 Lonergan conceived the Spirit as divine personal Listening: See Triune God: Doctrines, CWL 11, 638/9-84/5; compare Caring About Meaning, 20-1, 61-2. 86 See Lonergan, “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” in Shorter Papers, CWL 20, 265 = Foundations of Theology, 223-34, at 224. 87 “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” Shorter Papers, CWL 20, 265 = Foundations of Theology 224. 88 Verbum, CWL 2, 101, internal citations to Aquinas omitted. 89 Grace and Freedom, CWL 1, 141-2; see 128 on conversion; also 138-40 on the difficulties of interpreting Aquinas regarding the exterior act, and the grounds for Lonergan’s interpretation that the actus exterior must include even internal acts of the will. 90 Compare Insight, 451-58, on “major flexibility is the selection of a new goal,” to Method, 40-41 on ‘vertical liberty’. 91 It was in this context that he began to reconsider the significance of the apologetic campaign he had mounted in the last two chapters of Insight. Here are two soundings from the early 1970s: “The trouble with chapter 19 in Insight was that it... treated God’s existence and attributes in a purely objective fashion. It made no effort to deal with the subject’s religious horizon” (Lonergan, “Philosophy of God, and Theology,” CWL 17, 172). Again, “in Method... our basic awareness of God comes to us not through arguments or choices but primarily through God’s gift of his love” (Lonergan, “Insight Revisited,” Second Collection, 277). Compare Method, 338: (1) the normal expectation is that religious conversion precedes the effort to work out a rigorous proof, but (2) it may happen, “by way of exception,” that the proofs precede and facilitate the conversion, and (3) in any case the knowledge attained through proof is natural in the sense of proportionate to human reason. On the development of Lonergan’s thought on these points, see Charles C. Hefling, Jr., “Philosophy, Theology, and God,” in The Desires of the Human Heart: An Introduction to the Theology of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Vernon Gregson (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 121. See too Paul St. Amour, “Bernard Lonergan on Affirmation of the Existence of God,” Analecta Hermeneutica International Institute for Hermeneutics 2 (2010): 1–9; Bernard Tyrrell, Bernard Lonergan’s Philosophy of God (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 1974). Jeffrey A. Allen (in an unpublished paper to the Lonergan Research Institute Graduate Seminar) points out that Lonergan’s shift in emphasis is mirrored by the shift from Vatican I to Vatican II. The former had treated first natural, then revealed knowledge of God; the latter reversed the order. On this point, see Avery Dulles, The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 140; idem, “Faith and Reason: From Vatican I to John Paul II,” in The Two Wings of Catholic Thought: Essays on “Fides et Ratio”, ed. David Ruel Foster and Joseph W. Koterski (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), 193–208; George H. Tavard, “Commentary on De Revelatione,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 3 (1966) 1-35 at 12–13. 92 Method in Theology 40-41. 93 “The initiative of development may be organic, psychic, intellectual, or external, but the development remains fragmentary until the principle of correspondence between different levels is satisfied” (Insight 496; see 495–97). I am grateful to Patrick Byrne for pointing out to me the significance of this passage. 94 See, e.g., Lonergan, “Human Good” 332–51, at 340; “Healing and Creating in History,” in Third Collection 100–109, at 106–8. 95 See Lonergan, Grace and Freedom 127–28. The first operation of grace is the radical reorientation of the will (ST 1–2, q. 111, a. 2; 3, q. 85, a. 5). It is a precondition for hearing, learning, drawing near to God (see ST 1, q. 112, a. 2, esp. ad 2; and De virtutibus q. 1, a. 9, ad 16). But it cannot be the infused virtue of charity, for the supernatural love of God depends on an apprehension of God, by supernatural faith, as the object of beatitude (Summa theologiae 2–2 q. 4 a. 7). 96 See “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” 226. 97 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet and The Letter from the Young Worker, ed. and trans. Charlie Louth (New York: Penguin, 2011), 43; possibly he is quoting back his correspondent, Kappus. 98 Compare Robert M. Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1990), 108-35. 99 Zzz DVI thesis 17. 100 See chapter ZZZZ below. 101 See Method (on permanence of dogma) and (on permanently valid achievements in systematics) zzz. 102 Hannah Arendt, Thinking, vol. 1, Life of the Mind (zzz), 177; see 166-179. I am grateful to Murray Johnston for bringing this text to my attention.