A 'Wisdom of the Concrete'

1/ A Wisdom of the Concrete Jeremy D. Wilkins Knowledge of method becomes a necessity when false notions of method are current and more or less disastrous.1 Lonergan, and the world that defined him, seem like yesterday’s news. Over four decades have passed since the publication of Method in Theology, and almost six since Insight appeared. 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 (and often omitted entirely from histories of twentieth-century philosophy). He seems to be widely suspected of a discredited Cartesianism, of what George Lindbeck calls “individualistic foundational rationalism,”2 of a transcendental, subjectivist turn “wedded to outmoded interests and conceptions,” as J.A. DiNoia remarked about Karl Rahner.3 Neither those who, like Nehemiah, would rebuild the walls of the city, nor those who would dance, like David before the Ark, in postmodern exultation, can have much use for such a project. Philosophically and theologically an outlier, relentlessly demanding on his readers, in style often elliptical, sometimes awkward and confusing, his thought almost a world unto itself, Lonergan makes a poor casual interlocutor. Coming to grips with him is a major investment few, it seems, are prepared to make. With a sidelong bow to the Queen of Hearts and her six impossible thoughts before breakfast, I would like to begin, therefore, by attempting to fulfill two impossible offices at once: to suggest what I take to be the gravamen of Lonergan’s achievement and, at the same time, to indicate why it matters for theology today. 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, at least, 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 that Lonergan is important today because the contemporary situation puts in stark relief the perennial problem for theology: the wisdom of theologians. The solution is not in the appropriation of any external ‘system’ but in the practices of self-appropriation by which the 1 “Questionnaire,” CWL 17, 374. 2 George A. Lindbeck, The Church in a Postliberal Age (Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans, 2002) 7. 3 J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., “Karl Rahner,” in The Modern Theologians: An introduction to Christian theology in the twentieth century, 2nd ed., ed. David F. Ford (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1997) 118-33 at 131 (“It was Rahner’s contention that Catholic theology must appropriate the transcendental, anthropological and subjective turns characteristic of modern thought. Thus, in an intellectual climate in which philosophers and theologians are increasingly critical of precisely these elements of modern thought, Rahner’s theological program will seem to be wedded to outmoded interests and conceptions.”) 1 dimensions of the problem of measuring up to our tradition become explicit. The classic office of wisdom is to order, which means knowing what problems are the first problems. In theology, what is existentially first is the concrete reality of theologians in their attention, intelligence, and honesty, their freedom and loving self-surrender to Christ. The adequacy of the theologian is, concretely, theology’s first problem. Hence, I speak of Lonergan’s program as a ‘wisdom of the concrete’. It is a wisdom, for it deals with first principles; but it is of the concrete, a wisdom not through the appropriation of a system but through self-appropriation. It is a wisdom of praxis, of promoting religious, moral, and intellectual order in the soul. 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.4 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. The principal service theologians are called to render both church and society today is a new inculturation of the Gospel, finding an authentically Christian way of being in our culture. They can meet this challenge only in the measure that they are themselves transformed by the renewal of their minds. Lonergan’s strategy is not a theory, a permanent, normative system, but a set of practices of self-knowledge and self-appropriation, of methodical collaboration, of promoting conversion by bringing its dimensions into focus. 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 learned but “…something given / And taken, in a lifetime's death in love, / Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.”5 ‘Know thyself’ has been easy to affirm and difficult to achieve ever since the Delphic Oracle. I suspect Lonergan’s later willingness to settle for quick summaries of his results may have been a bad bargain, undercutting his ascetical program, his “invitation to a personal, decisive act.”6 Insight is not primarily a cumulation of arguments but a workbook for self-discovery and self-appropriation. Selfappropriation is a hard therapy for which there is no easier substitute. Let me be clear that I do not propose Lonergan as the ‘complete theologian’. He is not all that is needed in theology today. I do, however, find that he has addressed, in a uniquely satisfactory manner, 4 See Lonergan’s sharp review of Leslie Dewart’s The Future of Belief, “The Dehellenization of Dogma,” Second Collection zzz. 5 T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages, V, 203-205, in idem, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971), 44. 6 Insight CWL 3, 13; see 766. 2 very basic problems that have lost nothing of their urgency for us. Here, I contextualize this claim in four steps. I begin with a brief characterization of some salient features of the contemporary crisis of normativity. I then propose three particular aspects of Lonergan’s achievement developed around the theme of wisdom: (1) wisdom as self-surrender, (2) wisdom through self-knowledge and selfappropriation, and (3) wisdom as method in theology. 1 A Crisis of Normativity “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—the intellectual program arising out of Leo XII’s 1879 call for a confrontation of modernity with the philosophy of Aquinas7—is described by Kasper as “the attempt to solve the modern crisis... [with] a timeless, unified theology that would provide a norm for the universal church.”8 Almost in the twinkling of an eye, the whole effort was swept away by the tidal event of Vatican II, 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’s place in this turn of events is contested. To some he is simply among the villains who brought the house down.9 R.R. Reno portrays a tragic Lonergan who unwittingly helped destroy the context in which his achievements could be understood.10 For others he did not go far enough.11 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 magisterium and a hierarchically constituted church belongs to the classical culture and will have to be given up.12 7 Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Aeterni Patris, August 4, 1879. 8 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. 9 See, e.g., Charles James, “Falling into Subjectivism,” New Oxford Review, September 2003; 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). 10 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). 11 ZZZ (Mackinnon, adjectivally transcendental; the fellow who reviewed Verbum; Dewart; Davis). 12 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. 3 Less disenchanted, 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.”13 My distinct impression is that many, who may not share Davis’s hostility to dogmatic religion, suspect all the same that Lonergan is somehow corrosive.14 If there is an emerging consensus, it seems to be that time has passed Lonergan by.15 I read the situation differently. The longer tradition of Scholasticism had held the field in Catholic thought for some eight centuries. It provided theology a set of common questions and a standard framework for articulating results. 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.16 Neo-Scholasticism, unfortunately, incarnated some of Scholasticism’s weakest tendencies: a penchant for ahistorical orthodoxy, abstractness, antiquated science, a predilection for logic over discovery, proof over understanding, unmethodical metaphysical obfuscation. It went hand in glove with a ‘classicist’ culture pretending to normativity and universality, resistant to innovation, 13 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 17. See Mike Higton, “Reconstructing The Nature of Doctrine,” Modern Theology 30 (2014) zzzz. 14 Someone, for instance, has created a Guia Bibliografica [zzz diacriticals] (in effect, an Index of indeterminate status) 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 avowed opponents. My point is merely to illustrate the cloud of suspicion over Lonergan, not to suggest or endorse a general critique of Opus Dei. 15 This is suggested by several indices, including declining attention to his work and the ghettoization of the Lonergan ‘school’. Zzz Brotherton on Supernatural; neglect of Lonergan in Emery, etc. 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. 16 Lonergan knew this world intimately; “Classicism was the way I was raised; it was something I had to move out of” (“Interview,” Second Collection, zzz). Despite his strictures on the limitations of classicism, Lonergan appreciated the perspective it opened up for him. See Caring About Meaning: Patterns in the Life of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Pierrot Lambert, Charlotte Tansey, and Cathleen Going (Montreal: Thomas More Institute, 1982), 11-12; Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Topics in Education, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan [=CWL] 10, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1993), 205-207. 4 blind to meaningful difference and the positivity of pluralism.17 Some version of classicism seems to be the typical cultural form of the second stage of meaning, in which the primarily controls are logical.18 The demise of this world was a long time coming. Imagine the shocks to Christian bearings, public and personal, from the voyages of a Columbus, the discoveries of a Copernicus, Reimarus’s criticism of the Gospels, and Darwin’s assault on fixed and immutable species, including the human kind.19 No rearguard action could prevent a profound reorientation of traditional apprehensions of space and time, history, culture, and human identity. Moving in and through these descriptive displacements was a momentous paradigm shift in the very notions of science, of history, and of culture. Natural science lost its de facto subalternation to metaphysics and became an autonomous set of inquiries with no reference to end, agent, matter, form, substance, or the categories. It abandoned the ideal of certitude formulated in the Posterior Analysics (‘certa per causas cognitio’) to settle for a succession of ever closer approximations. It abandoned absolute space and time to acknowledge reference frames and relativity. Its basic concepts were no longer fixed and immutable but subject to constant revision. Such a science could not be a habitus in a single mind but only an ongoing, openended collaboration distributed across a community of scientists. Its foundation is not in basic concepts but in its method. A parallel transformation befell understandings of history and culture. History ceased to be the report of credible testimonies to become the hypothetical reconstruction of the past on the basis of critically sifted evidence. Hypothetical reconstructions are subject to revision, and both the reconstructions and the revision depend not only on the availability of evidence—itself a sliding scale —but also on the kinds of questions posed. There arises ineluctably a problem of perspective. Furthermore, both historical knowledge and world discovery pressured the classical conception of culture as normative, as civilization in contrast to barbarism. Culture came to be conceived empirically as the set of meanings and values informing a way of life, there are many different cultures, and none of them is normative. There arises a question whether there are any valid criteria for criticizing cultures 17 As a style, classicist culture was not limited to the West; remarkable parallels exist, for instance, in late imperial China. 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. Classicism seems to be the typical cultural form of the second stage of meaning, the stage in which 18 Lonergan distinguishes three stages of meaning: the linguistic and literary, the logical, and a third stage, which we are now entering, in which control is not primarily logical but rather methodical. See Lonergan, Method in Theology, 8596; Horizons and Transpositions, zzz. 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 in a static state. 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. 19 See, for example, Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching: Applying Christian Doctrine to Daily Life, trans. Michael J. Miller and Matthew J. O’Connell, ed. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2011) 131-2, 172-6; N.T. Wright, New Testament and the People of God, zzz (periodization of biblical criticism and historiography); etc. 5 and preferring one way of life to another. There arose, too, a ferocious backlash against the Christian sacralization of particular cultural forms. In short, modernity presented a momentous transformation in human self-understanding, demanding an equally momentous transformation in Christian thought and education. Unfortunately, Catholic leaders, hobbled by their involvement in classicist culture, responded in a remarkably uncreative and flatfooted manner. The moment of the challenge was badly mistaken for “a series of regrettable aberrations that unfortunately were widely accepted.”20 For too long, Catholic leaders and intellectuals thought to fend off the aberrations with dogmatic proofs and an authoritarian crouch.21 That strategy never was tenable, and its proclivity to sacralize ignorant opinions and oppressive institutions scandalized faith and empowered secularists.22 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. 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. The collapse of that world left 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.”23 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.”24 20 “Questionnaire,” 354. 21 See Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians, 1-16; Lonergan, “Theology in Its New Context,” zzz. 22 This is a point Augustine emphasized in his Confessions, zzz. Bruce Marshall has recently opined that “for the Catholic Church, the basic fact about modernity, the event with an impact that exceeded any other, was not the rise of modern science or the emergence of historical criticism, but the French revolution” which “establish[ed] secularism... as a basic feature of European politics and culture” (“Reckoning with Modernity,” First Things [December 2015] 23-30 at 26, 27). He goes on to advance a thesis about the timeliness of Vatican II, “the Church’s decisive reckoning with modernity,” which came neither “too soon” nor “too late” (28). I would distinguish Marshall’s thesis on three points. First, the cultural conditions for aggressive secularism were prepared in part by a sacralized cosmology and, later, a defensive sacralization of scholarship, “the extension of the mantle of religion over the opinions of ignorant men” that led to an outright rejection of the church as “the futile champion of a dead and unlamented past” (Lonergan, “Sacralization and Secularization,” CWL 17, at 259-81 at 274; compare Charles Taylor, A Secular Age [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard University, 2007], esp. 90-9, 159-71. See too Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism [New Haven: Yale University, 1987]). The revolution may have been decisive as a trauma, but it was a symptom, not a cause, of cultural transformation. Next, the Council may not have come “too late” in the sense that it occurred when it realistically could occur (see Marshall, 28-29), but it certainly came too late in the sense that a more creative response was long overdue. Third, it seems to me the council can be called a “decisive reckoning with modernity” in the sense that it acknowledged problems and meant to face them squarely, but not in the sense that it solved them; the reorientation of theology to its real problems, and the needed revision of methods to meet them, is still fragmentary. 23 Lonergan, “Doctrinal Pluralism,” 75-76. 24 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 6 In the vacuum, Christians in the West, bereft of a native tongue, have inherited foreign ones: possessive individualism (‘getting and spending’), expressive individualism (‘to thine own self be true’), and relative perspectivism (‘works for me’) have become our first languages.25 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, a new mediation of the faith into our culture. The problem 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.”26 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 likens us to Matteo Ricci,27 missioned to a culture strange not to us but to the Gospel, a culture itself in crisis. The problem 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 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). 25 See Frederick G. Lawrence, “The Human Good and Christian Conversation,” zzz; Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart zzz. 26 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’.”) Compare Joseph Ratzinger: “the world exists in [Christians] too … and thus the dialogue with the world is always to some extent dialogue of Christians with themselves.... What is Christian never exists in an entirely wordless way.” (Dogma and Preaching 168-9). 27 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. Note that Lonergan’s meaning of authenticity is not the same as Taylor’s; see Brian J. Braman, Meaning and Authenticity: Bernard Lonergan and Charles Taylor on the Drama of Authentic Human Existence (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2008). 7 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.”28 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.29 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, makers of our own world.30 What is known as contingent is also readily perceived as arbitrary and therefore violable; as Richard Rorty sums it up, the new norm is there are no norms, “no criterion that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience of our own conventions.”31 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.32 Consequently, in one sense it is as if our culture cannot even acknowledge a problem of spiritual order, but in another sense, it is as if we have rediscovered it more radically than ever. A problem of order arises only in relation to some objective criteria for ordering. 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 stumbled onto new depths of the problem by uncovering our responsibility for order. As Strauss puts it, “‘man is the measure of all things’ is the very opposite of ‘man is the master of all things’”33—the former involves us with an independent standard, but the latter might mean the only standard is arbitrary choice. The most basic question about the right way to live is whether it is even possible to determine a course except by a completely arbitrary azimuth— including the bearings one happens to inherit. 28 Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965), 7-8. 29 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. 30 Strauss, “Three Waves,” 85; See Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “The Transition from a Classicist World-view to Historical Mindedness,” in idem, A Second Collection (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), 1-9, especially at 4. 31 Richard Rorty, “The Fate of Philosophy,” The New Republic, October 18, 1982, 28-34 at 32, quoted in Frederick G. Lawrence, “Language as Horizon?” in The Beginning and the Beyond: Papers from the Gadamer and Voegelin Conferences, ed. Fred Lawrence (Chico, California: Scholars, 1984) 13-34 at 16. 32 See Strauss, Natural Right, 12. 33 Strauss, “Three Waves,” 85. 8 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 and logical rules of inference. Paradigm changes in the natural sciences and history have steadily eroded these suppositions. An adequate solution cannot consist in bluntly reasserting the normativity of some lost, sacrosanct cultural form.34 The result is a dialectical feedback loop.35 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. A scattered left will resist what is seen as revanchism. The way forward 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, to find a cultural norm above every cultural form. 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.”36 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 34 Joseph Ratzinger, commenting on the inescapability of Christian self-mediation in the ‘world’, underscores the risks of internecine warfare—playing off one historical form of Christian existence against another—out of a failure to discern the requirements of one’s age. “What is Christian never exists in an entirely wordless way.... This interweaving of what is Christian with the world can easily lead to the situation of an apparent conflict between faith and the world, while in reality what is Christian is not being defended against the world but, rather, just one particular historical form of Christian involvement in the world against another.” Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching: Applying Christian Doctrine to Daily Life, trans. Michael J. Miller and Matthew J. O’Connell, ed. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2011) 169. 35 “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.” Bernard J.F. Lonergan, “Dimensions of Meaning,” Collection, CWL 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1988), 232-45 at 245. 36 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. 9 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.37 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-Surrender If the fundamental problem for theology is the adequacy of theologians to their vocation, the one thing most necessary is the one thing God alone can give. The central purpose of Lonergan’s pedagogy of self-discovery, his turn to the subject, was to decenter the subject from biases and bring into focus the radical dimensions of the question about the right way to live. He was well aware of the fact that the wisdom of the theologian is an imperfect wisdom and no human effort will make it perfect. He acknowledged 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.38 Thus, for Lonergan, what above all is normative in us is the wisdom of listening, of transparency to God, of suffering divine things. 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, not as windowless monads but as the way of their relation to the world. Thus the normativity of otherworldly love is correlative to the beloved, to the normativity of God in Christ, reconciling the world. In underscoring the existential normativity of conversion, Lonergan was transposing Aquinas’s notion of an infused wisdom transforming reason and feeling alike. Thus, there is a wisdom acquired through study, and it is metaphysics and self-knowledge. There is a higher wisdom, theology, reason ordered by faith. Its supreme rule, the wisdom highest in us, is a wisdom of listening, an infused wisdom. 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, 37 Lonergan, “The Subject,” A Second Collection, 86. 38 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. 10 making us docile to his movements, in which, even perceptibly, one may be ‘non solum discens sed et patiens divina’.39 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, the loved law our assent, the source and measure of 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 the will. 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.40 Under the tutelage of Aquinas, Lonergan initially conceived religious conversion in terms of the reorientation of desire, a change in antecedent willingness.41 As he brought this perspective into conversation with the problems brought to light by hermeneutical philosophy, further dimensions opened up for him.42 The problem of conversion is not just a problem of desire but also a problem of horizon, of what might even be noticed, appreciated as a possibility, summon forth effort. Apart from conversion, these are not only impossible choices but also unwanted or unknown possibilities. Religious 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’.43 Linking conversion to the problem of horizon as brought into focus by hermeneutical philosophy means relating conversion to conversation; we are back to the problem of a Christian native language. For most of us, language is the primary carrier of meaning. It is therefore normally essential to a sustained flow of thought. As Lonergan puts it, “Prizing names is prizing the human achievement of bringing conscious intentionality into sharp focus and, thereby, setting about the double task of both ordering one’s world and orientating oneself within it... listening and speaking are a major part in the achievement” of conscious presence to the world.44 Lonergan continues, So it is that conscious intentionality develops and is moulded by its mother tongue. It is not merely that we learn the names of what we see but also that we can attend to and talk about the 39 Verbum, CWL 2, 101, internal citations to Aquinas omitted. 40 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. 41 Insight zzz antecedent willingness 42 Compare Insight, 451-58, on “major flexibility is the selection of a new goal,” to Method, 40-41 on ‘vertical liberty’. 43 Method in Theology 40-41. 44 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 70. 11 things we can name. The available language, then, takes the lead. It picks out the aspects of things that are pushed into the foreground, the relations between things that are stressed, the movements and changes that demand attention... The action is reciprocal. Not only does language mould developing consciousness but also it structures the world about the subject.45 Conversation is the link between the transcendental structures of conscious intentionality and their concrete unfolding in the world mediated by meaning. Its reciprocal action shapes our readiness and structures our world. In relation to that world, each of us is presented a fundamental problem of self-understanding to which an answer must be given. An answer is, in fact, already begun before ever we bring the question into the light of deliberate, adult freedom.46 One’s first, native language—not as the abstract set of possibilities represented in dictionaries and grammars, but as a set of concrete resources for selfunderstanding and expression in ongoing conversations—is never a matter of deliberation and choice. For us, being is becoming, the becoming is conversational, and we are involved from the beginning. There are no atomic individuals and no pure perception; there are conversational subjects coming into being in a world overwhelmingly mediated by linguistic meaning, and with greater or less readiness to ask and answer and follow through on the most important questions.47 The most important question, the one question none of us can evade, is the question about the right way to live. At least obliquely it involves us with God, because there is no waymaking in this life that does not involve us trying to understand, yielding to evidence, pursuing what seems worthwhile, asking what we should love. As Lonergan wrote in the Epilogue to Insight, our first eighteen chapters were written solely in the light of human intelligence and reasonableness, without any appeal to the authority of the church and without any explicit deference to the genius of St Thomas Aquinas. At the same time, our first eighteen chapters were followed by a nineteenth and twentieth that revealed the inevitability with which the affirmation of God and the search of intellect for faith arise out of a sincere acceptance of scientific presuppositions and precepts.48 If we ask for explanation, we suppose the objective intelligibility of the universe. If we bow to evidence, we implicitly acknowledge a ground of being. If we pursue value and prize rectitude, we presume an objective right and good. If we yield ourselves in love, tacitly we raise the possibility of total self-surrender to a supreme loveliness whom we may love with all our hearts, without conditions, restrictions, or qualifications. The question of God arises, and its answer is cumulatively implied, by 45 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 71. 46 See Lonergan, two periods of the temporal subject, zzz. 47 See Lawrence, “Human Good and Christian Conversation,” 249. 48 Insight, CWL 3, 765. 12 the demand for complete explanation, the force of sufficient reason, the obligation of moral rectitude, the yearning for a love beyond restrictions.49 In Insight, Lonergan worked out explicitly the argument from complete explanation: If being is completely intelligible, God exists.50 Intelligence demands complete explanation, but finite being is not self-explanatory. The five ways of Aquinas he interpreted as so many illustrations of the incomplete intelligibility of finite being;51 and “there are as many other proofs of the existence of God as there are aspects of the incomplete intelligibility in the universe of proportionate being”52 (proportionate, that is, to our manner of coming to know, through inquiry into data). The question of God arises for us and can be answered, because the answer is in some way already contained in our intelligent, rational, moral honesty.53 Consider, however, how large a stipulation that honesty really is. It supposes that one is intellectually curious, that one regards this as an important question, that one has the ability, formation, and leisure necessary to address it; it supposes one is unwilling to flinch from uncomfortable answers, answers that may call one’s concrete solution to the problem of living into question, complicate one’s every relationship, go against the grain of settled preferences and feelings; it supposes the inquiry is not derailed early and often by some fatal mistake. Practically it seems to suppose, too, an environment, a culture, a community of friends and interlocutors prepared to exercise a constructive rather than a distracting or even harmful influence. So numerous, so weighty indeed are such stipulations that, were God’s existence not revealed, we might well conclude with Thomas Aquinas that it would be known with certainty only to very few, after a vast labor, with admixture of error.54 The question of God arises for us and can be answered by us; but both the asking and the answering have their existential context. Even an elementary reflection on the concrete factors reveals that the difficulty is not so much with the proof as with its existential suppositions. It is not too difficult to formulate a valid syllogism, but it is something else to show its soundness. That requires what really is both difficult and rare: the prior sustained effort required to verify and accept the suppositions of the proof, to know just what is meant by affirming that being is completely intelligible, grounded, and valuable, to know and accept 49 See Lonergan, “Philosophy of God, and Theology,” CWL 17, 206-7. 50 Insight, CWL 3, 695. On the context and internal development of Lonergan’s philosophy of God, see Bernard Tyrrell, SJ, Bernard Lonergan’s Philosophy of God (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1974). Interpreations in Alicia Jaramillo, “The Necessity of Raising the Question of God: Aquinas and Lonergan on the Quest after Complete Intelligibility,” Thomist 71 (2007) 221-67; Patrick H. Byrne, “God and the Statistical Universe,” Zygon 16 (1981) 34563. For a recent development of Lonergan’s argument, see Robert J. Spitzer, “A Lonerganian Proof for God’s Existence,” in New Proofs for the Existence of God: Contributions of Contemporary Physics and Philosophy (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010), 144-76. 51 Insight, CWL 3, 700. 52 Insight, CWL 3, 701. 53 See Method, 101-5. 54 See ScG 1.4; ST 1.1.1. 13 that one’s very intelligence, rationality, and responsibility bind one ineluctably to these affirmations.55 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.”56 What Lonergan meant by self-appropriation, then, has a double implication for the question of God. On the one hand, it makes the question unavoidable and, indeed, points inexorably to the one correct answer. On the other, it also brings into light how rarely the conditions for a successful answer may be concretely fulfilled. Lonergan came to the opinion that those conditions normally are not fulfilled except in the throe of otherworldly love, and never are fulfilled apart from some influence of 55 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. below. 56 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”). Further discussion in chapter two. 14 divine grace.57 It is the moral, the existential subject, the subject given over to love or at least moved by love, who apprehends the value of pursuing the question about God. It may seem that such qualifications reduce the prospect of natural knowledge of God to “merely the faintest whiff of remote possibility” derided by Steven A. Long.58 In Long’s view, what Vatican I’s affirmation in Dei Filius59 plainly means is “not merely ... real possibility but indeed ... real proximate potency ... for a human being hic et nunc can by the natural light of human reason know the one true God ...”60 These statements, however, abstract both from the existential subject and from the historical context of the constitution Dei Filius. They are abstracted from the existential subject, for unless hic et nunc refer to someone’s concrete situation, the meaning of ‘proximate potency’ remains vague. Normally, as St Thomas observes, a subject is brought into proximate potency (potentia propinqua) to some last step by the orderly fulfillment of prior conditions.61 Infants can learn to speak and normally do, but not in the hic 57 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. 58 Steven A. Long, Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace (New York: Fordham University, 2010), 102. 59 Vatican I, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith Dei Filius, chapter two: “Eadem sancta mater Ecclesia tenet et docet, Deum, rerum omnium principium et finem, naturali humanae rationis lumine e rebus creatis certo cognosci posse...” (DS 3004), with a corresponding canon: “Si quis dixerit, Deum unum et verum, creatorem et Dominum nostrum, per ea, quae facta sunt, naturali rationis humanae lumine certo cognosci non posse, anathama sit.” (DS 3026) ZZZ TANNER 60 Long, Natura Pura, 102-3; internal emphasis omitted. 61 ScG 3.102.6 (“Eiusdem rationis esse videtur quod aliquid operetur ex subiecto; et quod operetur id ad quod est in potentia subiectum; et quod ordinate operetur per determinata media. Nam subiectum non fit in potentia propinqua ad ultimum nisi cum fuerit actu in media ... Omnis autem creatura necesse habet subiecto ad hoc quod aliquid faciat: nec potest facere nisi ad quod subiectum est in potentia, ut ostensum est. Ergo non potest facere aliquid nisi subiectum 15 et nunc of the delivery room. Quantum mechanics, too, lie within the proportion of human intelligence, but presuppose a tensor calculus difficult to master and only recently discovered. Thus it happens that, in the actual order of things, quantum mechanics are understood with clarity and certitude by very few, after long and arduous investigation from the perch of other shoulders, and not without some admixture of error; indeed, if such knowledge were vital for salvation, it seems it would almost have to be revealed. Yet, greater still is the moral and intellectual probity required to prove the existence of God. The doctrine of Dei Filius also has a context, and, in fact, the conciliar acta raise questions Long did not face.62 For instance, the third draft asserted explicitly that certain knowledge of God is possible, not only to human beings but to fallen human beings (ab homine lapso); the final constitution, however, declined to specify this condition.63 The same draft likewise asserted that knowledge of God could be reached without the help of a tradition, but many Fathers wished to say only that it could be reached without a positive, supernatural revelation, and in the event, the final text simply omitted the assertion.64 If, then, Long’s ‘real proximate potency’ is enjoyed ‘hic et nunc’ by anyone whatever, even morally depraved and without proportionate formation, it is not the doctrine of Vatican I but a determination of questions the Council evidently preferred to leave open. The Council seems to have been content to settle a question of principle: it lies within our natural powers to truly conceive and certainly affirm the existence of God, without the light of revelation or faith—but not, perhaps, without intellectual formation, rare natural ability, long and diligent inquiry; and not, perhaps, without repentance from sin, radical moral honesty, humble pursuit of the light: conditions that, as a matter of fact, are not fulfilled in us apart from grace, unless someone believes that we, the fallen, can so order our own loves aright as to be capable of sustained moral effort and honesty without the help of grace— a supposition contrary to faith.65 reducat in actum per determinata media.”) 62 The history and meaning of the text are discussed by Lonergan, “Natural Knowledge of God,” Second Collection 117133 at 117-9. Lonergan provides some extracts from the acta and relies on Hermann D. Pottmeyer, Der Glaube vor dem Anspruch der Wissenschaft. Die Konstitution ‘Dei Filius’ des 1. Vatikanischen Konzils (Freiburg: Herder, 1968), 168204. 63 J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, vol. 53 (Arnhem: Hubert Welter, 1927), 164-9 at 168, canon 1 De revelatione (“Si quis negaverit, Deum unum et verum … per ea, quae facta sunt, naturali ratione ab homine lapso certo cognosci et demonstrari posse: anathema sit.”) Minutes of the discussion at 53:186-9; it was agreed to omit “lapso” and “demonstrari” from the canon. The final version reads, “Si quis dixerit, Deum unum et verum … naturali rationis humanæ lumine certo cognosci non posse: anathema sit.” ZZZ Tanner ref. 64 Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum, 53:165, ch. 2 De revelatione (“...ecclesia Deum, rerum omnium principium et finem, docet naturali humanae rationis lumine e rebus creatis certo cognosci posse, neque ad hoc traditam de Deo doctrinam omnino necessariam esse ...”) The discussion and context suggests what the Fathers wished to specify was that revelation was unnecessary and simply a mercy of God to us (53:184-5). The final version reads, “...ecclesia tenet et docet, Deum, rerum omnium principium et finem, naturali humanæ rationis lumine e rebus creatis certo cognosci posse.” Both the draft and the final version introduce the possibility of natural knowledge to underscore the gratuity of revelation. ZZZ Tanner 65 Hence Lonergan’s conclusion: natural knowledge of God “is not attained without moral judgments and existential decisions” which “do not occur without God’s grace” (“Natural Knowledge of God,” Second Collection 117-133 at 133). In this connection, note that the doctrine regarding the possibility of natural knowledge of God is not a 16 My purpose, however, is not to dispute about the meaning of Dei Filius but to underscore a foundational issue. We are not deracinated Enlightenment rationalists but conversational subjects receiving and carrying forward a tradition. Our authenticity in conversation is radically conditioned by the presence or absence of conversion, in ourselves and in others. In this life everyone is affected by internal disorder reinforced by what Augustine called the “infernal river of human custom”66 and Lonergan “the social surd.”67 Everyone is also involved—prior to any decision and as a necessary condition for the most important decision—with the pull of divine love. Pure nature is a valid line of reference, but not a condition in which anyone has ever lived: neither before the Fall nor after, neither under the Law nor under the Gospel.68 If we are not dealing with historicity, sin, and grace, we are dealing in abstractions. What is basic, then, is not proof, but authenticity in conversation.69 That authenticity means standing by the light of our intelligence, reason, and responsibility. But concretely, it leads beyond our freestanding doctrine but is also related to other doctrines which bear on the possibility of sustained moral effort apart from grace. Note the following [zzz add Trent]: (1) The Fall results in two consequences for all Adam’s descendants: (a) loss of innocence, (b) loss of power for good (=moral impotence). No one is capable of remedying these defects by free will, apart from grace. (ND 503, DS 239, Indiculus ca. 435-442). Grace is strength for good performance, and not merely the remission of sins (ND 1901, DS 225, XVI Council of Carthage, a.d. 418); grace is not only instruction (ND 1902, DS 226, XVI Council of Carthage, a.d. 418). (2) Without grace, fulfillment of the commandments is not merely difficult, but impossible (ND 1903, DS 227, XVI Council of Carthage, a.d. 418). (3) All have truly sinned (ND 1904, DS 228, XVI Council of Carthage, a.d. 418) and stand in need of forgiveness (ND 1905, DS 229, XVI Council of Carthage, a.d. 418), even the saints (ND 1906, DS 230, XVI Council of Carthage, a.d. 418). No one is good without Christ (ND 1908, DS 240, Indiculus ca. 435-442). (4) Even the baptized need God's help to persevere (ND 1909, DS 241, Indiculus ca. 435-442). (5) Grace is prior to merit and prior to good will: The merits of the saints are more from God than from themselves (ND 1910, DS 243, Indiculus ca. 435-442). Every good inspiration is from God more than from us (ND 1911, DS 244, Indiculus ca. 435-442). All merits are preceded by grace, which liberates the will; God operates in us both to desire and to will (ND 1914, DS 248, Indiculus ca. 435-442). Grace is prior to all human desire, will, or effort. Grace precedes good will; grace is the cause of good will (ND 1915, DS 373, Council of Orange a.d. 529). Even the desire to be cleansed is from the operation of grace (“the infusion and action of the Holy Spirit”) (ND 1916, DS 375, Council of Orange a.d. 529). Not only the beginning but also the increase of faith is from the inspiration of the Spirit, and not merely from our natural desire (ND 1917, DS 375, Council of Orange a.d. 529). Grace makes us humble and obedient; humility and obedience are not the beginning of grace, but grace is the beginning of humility and obedience (ND 1918, DS 376, Council of Orange a.d. 529). No one can believe the Gospel without grace (ND 1919, DS 377, Council of Orange a.d. 529). (6) Everyone, without exception, stands in need of grace, because of the wound of original sin (ND 1920, DS 378, Council of Orange a.d. 529). (7) “Free will has been so distorted and weakened by the sin of the first parent, that thereafter no one could love God as was required, or believe in God, or perform for the sake of God what is good, unless first reached by the grace of divine mercy.” (ND 1921, DS 396, Council of Orange a.d. 529). These points do not, of course, negate the possibility of natural knowledge of God; they merely affirm the antecedent improbability of the requisite moral honesty occurring apart from some divine and supernatural assistance. 66 Augustine, Confessions zzz. 67 Lonergan, Insight, CWL 3, 254-63, 653-6, 710-15, 721-2, 748-50. 68 See Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, CWL 1, 17. 69 Method in Theology, 337-39. 17 humanity by involving us also with grace; in the real world, “to be just a man is what man cannot be.”70 Such authenticity is not sustained in a vacuum but through friendships, in conversation. Lonergan reminded his students that to be of service to others, it is necessary that they first exist authentically themselves—lest the blind lead the blind—and that they seek to convert rather than settling to controvert.71 This was one way he had of putting “the eminently practical question” about the right way to live.72 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.’”73 In the end, knowing, like loving, is a kind of selfsurrender, where the quality of the surrender cannot be disengaged from the quality of the self. Consequently, Lonergan recognized that the central issue in theology is the equality of the theologian to hearing the demands of the tradition and to meeting the challenges of one’s 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 differentiations of consciousness by which one becomes at home in prayer, in the rarefied world of theory, in discerning structural components of one’s interior life, in the common sense of another time and place. Lonergan called these, respectively, the religious, theoretical, interior, and scholarly differentiations of consciousness.74 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 offer a brief note on Lonergan’s notion of a threefold conversion. The notion of a threefold conversion is related to Lonergan’s conception of conversion as a transformation of horizon. By conversion, Lonergan means a reversal, rather startling when objectified, in one’s operational criteria for assent, decision, and self-surrender.75 The reversal is also a decentering from the givenness of one’s animal sensorium to a properly human orientation in the strange and far vaster universe of being, or from the ultimacy of human projects to a collaboration with God. By moral 70 Lonergan, Insight, CWL 3, 750. 71 “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. 72 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. 73 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.” 74 See Method zzz; Third Collection 245-7zzz? 18 conversion is effected an evaluative shift from motives of pleasure and pain—spontaneously operative inasmuch we are animals—toward properly human motives of intelligible value. It is exemplified in Socrates’s fantastic contention that it is far better to suffer than to do wrong, or again by Augustine’s flat dismissal of the evil we suffer as a trivial problem compared to the evil we do.76 By intellectual conversion is effected a cognitive break from the criteria of sensitive extroversion—again, spontaneously operative in us as animals—into the properly human criteria of rational judgment, intelligible truth, sufficient evidence. It is exemplified in Socrates’s push for explanatory concepts, or again by Augustine’s realization that God is not the name of an imaginable extension and duration but the intelligible eternity that creates time and space.77 Religious conversion, finally, is a displacement away from the human-centered loves of the earthly city into a theocentric friendship with God above all, and with all in God and for God. It is exemplified by Augustine’s love of God even to the contempt of self, or again by that supreme friendship with God that, for Aquinas, is above even the friendly love of creature for Creator.78 Conversion, then, is a transformation not only of the subject but also of the world of her involvement. The converted subject is a new self involved with a strange new world, and her involvement is itself a principle of further change. Although intellectual and moral conversion, like knowledge of God’s existence, lie within the human horizon, in the actual conditions of this life they 75 There are many relevant, and largely parallel, discussions in Lonergan’s corpus; see Method zzz; Third Collection, 24748. My formulation here draws proximately from Lonergan, “Reality, Myth, Symbol,” in Papers 1965-1980, CWL 17, 384-90, at 389-90 (“Insofar as one is inauthentic there is needed an about-turn, a conversion—indeed, a threefold conversion: an intellectual conversion by which without reserves one enters the world mediated by meaning; a moral conversion by which one comes to live in a world motivated by values; and a religious conversion when one accepts God’s gift of his love bestowed by the Holy Spirit,” [ibid., 389-90]). These conversions are distinct but not separate. Religious conversion implies moral conversion, but holiness is a distinct dimension of life and it is always possible to destroy one’s moral being without losing one’s faith (just as the Scholastics distinguished acquired from infused virtues and acknowledged the possibility of a fides informata) (see Brian Shanley, “Aquinas on Pagan Virtue,” zzz). Both religious and moral conversions imply intellectual conversion, because adherence to revealed mystery and discernment about the concrete human good involve us inextricably with intelligible truth irreducible to sense; but as an explicit achievement of the kind Augustine narrates in Confessions – his discovery that he had been imagining God – it seems to be exceedingly rare. An introduction to Lonergan’s account of conversion in Mark T. Miller, The Quest for God and the Good Life (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University, 2013) 143-74. See too Walter E. Conn “Bernard Lonergan and Authenticity: The Search for a Valid Criterion of the Moral Life,” American Benedictine Review 30 (1979) 301-21; André Gilbert and Louis Roy, “La structure éthique de la conversion religieuse d'après B. Lonergan,” Science et Esprit 32 (1980) 347-60; Michael L. Rende, “The Development and the Unity of Lonergan's Notion of Conversion,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 1 (1983) 158-73. Finally, Robert M. Doran has proposed a fourth, ‘psychic’ conversion, which however lies beyond the purview of this book. For a relatively recent and compendious account, see idem, “Reception and Elemental Meaning: An Expansion of the Notion of Psychic Conversion,” Toronto Journal of Theology 20 (2004) 133-57. 76 Plato, Gorgias...zzz; Augustine, De libero arbitrio 1, zzz. 77 Plato, Euthyphro, zzz; Augustine, Confessions zzz. See Matthew L. Lamb zzz [eternity and time] 78 Augustine, De civ. Dei, zzz; Aquinas, zzz. There will be more to said about the character of religious conversion in chapter zzz, below. 19 are almost certainly never achieved without involvement with divine grace. As a reality in the theologian, conversion in its first moment is the illumination preceding and grounding 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. Love is at once the basis for a decision and the demand for free and full commitment.79 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.”80 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, who articulates definitively the full meaning of conversion. 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 wisdom of the cross as the touchstone of religious authenticity: God’s purpose to overcome the malice of sin, not by power, but by love.81 This foundational claim is also a personal adherence to Christ, who says to each of us, without exception: Take up your cross and follow me. 3 Wisdom through 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, selfappropriation) and metaphysics, where self-knowledge takes hold of what is basic, metaphysics formulates what is comprehensive, and epistemology articulates 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) 79 See “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” 226. 80 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. 81 Zzz DVI thesis 17. Compare Robert M. Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1990), 108-35. ETC 20 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 Lonergan’s 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.”82 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 the eternal Exemplar.83 This duality is “the basic instance” of the opposition between the firstfor-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.”84 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.85 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.86 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. Fundamentally, Lonergan’s aim is to make programmatic the “wisdom through selfknowledge,” the discovery of the soul as the “dynamic norm” of inquiry and action, that he discerned in Aquinas.87 What he calls ‘cognitional theory’ is basic, not as an articulated theory, but as a performative reality. What Lonergan points to as normative is not an argument in a book, a system, a set of propositions, “a basic abstract scheme.”88 It is normative as operative, as a basic pattern of 82 Verbum, CWL 2, 100. 83 See Triune God: Systematics, zzzz From the image to the eternal exemplar. 84 Verbum, CWL 2, 100. 85 See Matthew L. Lamb, Eternity, Time, and the Life of Wisdom, ch. 3, “Eternity and Time” (Naples, Florida: Sapientia, 2007), 29-53. 86 Verbum, CWL 2, 101, citing Aquinas, De veritate 10.8c. 87 Verbum, CWL 2, 101.zzz double check 88 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. 21 normative performance. 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 evidence, our conscientious concern for responsibility. It needs no critical justification because it is the very demand for critical justification. 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, rational criteria of inquiry, judgment, and choice. Through self-appropriation, Lonergan worked out an account of knowing that, he claimed, was transcultural and not subject to radical revision. The modern crisis of natural right rests on a critique of the possibility of transcultural objectivity.89 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. As William Richardson once objected to Lonergan, “...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.”90 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”—only an involvement in obscurantism allows one to deny that being—what is to be known by answering questions—is intelligible.91 According to the historicist critique (as portrayed by Leo Strauss), the presupposition of the intelligibility 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.”92 What the relativists in fact (re-)discovered is that “whatever may be hymned about eternal truths, human judgments always involve a specification of time.”93 Statements are answers to questions; questions arise within a context, and answers are formulated within a context; contexts change, and future contexts cannot be predicted. Such are the unimpeachable premises of relativism. From them it follows, however, only that judgments are relative to a context of questions, data, insights, evidence; not that they are only relatively true. Contexts can be discovered, and “there are many true statements whose context is easily ascertained.”94 Again, because contexts change, a later context may demand further differentiations without negating the truths rightly affirmed in an earlier 89 See Strauss, Natural Right, passim. 90 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. 91 Thomas Aquinas, De veritate 10.6c 92 Natural Right, 30-31. 93 Lonergan, Verbum, 75-76. See Matthew L. Lamb, “Bernard Lonergan, S.J.: The Gregorian Years,” in Lonergan’s Anthropology Revisited, at 66-68. 94 Lonergan, “Doctrinal Pluralism,” 75. See 75-6. 22 context (as illustrated above in relation to the doctrine of Dei Filius on the possibility natural knowledge of God). 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.”95 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.”96 Perhaps an illustration will help clarify relativity to context without relativity to truth, as well as the distinction between descriptive and explanatory contexts. ‘The sun is a disc of light that rises and sets over the earth,’ is absolutely true as a descriptive statement about the relation of the sun to us and our senses, and as long as we are living on this earth with these senses, the context of that statement is unlikely to vary significantly. On the other hand, there are statements about the sun within the explanatory context of contemporary physics; they are formulated in terms of what physicists currently regard as the fundamental concepts of their science; and as those concepts are revised or displaced, physicists’ statements about the sun will be revised accordingly. However, such revision need not be a matter of falsifying what now is regarded as true; it may and in all likelihood will be a matter of more adequate explanation that accounts for all that current theory explains, as well as much that current theory cannot yet explain. Similar shifts occur through paradigm transformations in theology. So, for instance, Cyril’s affirmation of the one nature of the incarnate Word is not false in its intended sense, but is also not adequate to the questions of a later, more differentiated context.97 Again, Augustine’s doctrine of divine sovereignty and the prevenience of grace was substantially transposed, not negated, in the context of Scholastic theorems regarding the supernatural, divine operation, habits and acts—a set of fundamental categories quite different to Augustine’s.98 Note, then, first, that truth claims, formulated in a less 95 Insight, CWL 3, 380. 96 “Doctrinal Pluralism,” 76. 97 DVI zzz. Further discussion in chapter XXX below. 98 See Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, CWL 1, 17 (“We have already suggested that the best commentary on Augustine’s speculation lies in the subsequent speculative movement. Now the twelfth-century theologians were steeped in Augustine, yet their unceasing efforts with a material which must have seemed hopelessly refractory terminated in the idea of the supernatural. The anachronistic thinkers of a much later age attempted to reverse that decision, but it is difficult to esteem them without being completely ignorant of the evolution of medieval thought. Especially is this so when one succeeds in grasping that the idea of the supernatural is a theorem, that it no more adds to the data of the problem than the Lorentz transformation puts a new constellation in the heavens. What Philip the Chancellor systematically posited was not the supernatural character of grace, for that was already known and acknowledged, but the validity of a line of reference termed nature. In the long term and in the concrete the real alternatives remain charity and cupidity, the elect and the massa damnata. But the whole problem lies in the abstract, in human thinking: the fallacy in early thought had been an unconscious confusion of the metaphysical abstraction ‘nature’ with concrete data which do not quite correspond; … [the] achievement was the creation of a mental perspective, the introduction of a set of coordinates, that eliminated the basic fallacy and its attendant host of anomalies.”) Further discussion in chapter four below. 23 differentiated context can be related to those of a later context; next, that this relating involves determining the initial context and the relevant differences in the later context; third, that it does not involve negating the truth of the earlier claims; and finally, that the later context, if it is more adequate, is so because it has greater explanatory power than the earlier. Behind the hermeneutical point lies an important ethical point. 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 of 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 no possibility for a conversation that makes progress by some means other than by some variety of coercion or group-think.99 The possibility of the virtually unconditioned, then, 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 or effete aestheticism. Lonergan acknowledges perspective because he recognizes that there is a conversational situation, not everyone has the same questions, and judgments are 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.100 His is an absolute perspectivism, in contrast to the relative perspectivism (or simply relativism) seemingly typical of postmodern culture. At least in its darker, nihilist tendencies, the language of ‘relative perspectivism’ is also a language of tragic alienation. In effect, the relative perspectivist is in the profoundly alienated position of enunciating as true the claim that truth is what we make of it.101 (“Historicism,” says Strauss, “thrives on the fact that it inconsistently exempts itself from its own verdict about all human thought.”102) The transition to postmodernity 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.103 If the reality of the subject is beyond the horizon and cannot be illuminated, we are bound to end up in one form or another of arbitrariness: either measuring by our own arbitrary preference, or being measured by a standard 99 Frederick G. Lawrence, “Lonergan’s Foundations for Constitutive Communication,” Lonergan Workshop 10 (1994) 229-77 at 245. 100 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, zzz also pages on objectivity, absolute objcetivity; idem, Method in Theology (New York: Seabury, 1972), 214-24, 320-26. 101 See Lawrence, “Horizon of Political Theology,” 58-61. 102 Strauss, Natural Right, 25. 103 See Strauss, Natural Right, 11-12. 24 which, because we cannot know it, is arbitrary to us. All human projects must rest, finally, on “unilluminated, and so irrational, decisions.”104 My sense is the real bearing of postmodern critique of the ‘forgetfulness of being’ is the forgetfulness of the subject—forgetfulness, that is, of the priority of the truth of existence to propositional truth and especially to adequate self-knowledge. Thus we arrive at the prevailing cultural forms of the truncated consumer, the immanentized romantic feeler, the alienated relativist bound to measure or be measured arbitrarily.105 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 and of responsibility to the good. Thus, where postmoderns generally hail the end of metaphysics, what is really ‘over’ is the Hegelian attempt “to fulfill the abstract-deductivist ideal of a complete system,”106 to contain history in a logical system, or to link normativity to a permanent form of thought or culture.107 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.”108 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.109 Or, to put it differently, he represents the possibility of a ‘fourth wave’ of modernity beyond the utilitarianindividualist, romantic-expressivist, and alienated-nihilist waves.110 Having swept away the dream of 104 Lawrence, “Horizon of Political Theology,” 61-63. 105 This is how I understand Frederick Lawrence’s analysis; see my “‘Our Conversation is in Heaven’: Conversion and/as Conversation in the Thought of Frederick Lawrence,” in Grace and Friendship: Theological Essays in Honor of Frederick Lawrence, ed. M. Shawn Copeland and Jeremy D. Wilkins (Milwaukee: Marquette University, 2016) zzz. 106 Lawrence, “Horizon of Political Theology,” 55-56. 107 See Lonergan, “Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,” zzz. 108 “Fragility,” 174. 109 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. 110 See Frederick Lawrence, zzzzzzz. 25 cultural normativity, modernity and postmodernity cry out for a new form of human self-possession, what Lonergan calls a new stage of meaning governed by self-knowledge and not primarily through the objectified controls of theory and logic.111 For a post-classicist philosophy, Lonergan averred, first principles are no longer “verbal propositions but [rather] the de facto invariants of human conscious intentionality,”112 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.”113 It is all too easy to repeat Lonergan with merely notional assent, and just as easy to brush him aside with merely notional dissent. Much more difficult than either is to accept and follow through with the ascetical program he presents: gnōthi seauton, wisdom as self-knowledge and self-appropriation. Lonergan’s program is, as Frederick Lawrence puts it, fundamentally a ‘praxis issue’: Personally asking and answering the question about what I am doing when I am knowing in any and all areas of my living—which can only be done if one returns to the Sache as an empirically verifiable matter of psychological fact—also gets one into asking and answering for oneself the practical and political question about the most choiceworthy way to live. This is why Lonergan says in the Introduction to Insight that “more than all else, the aim of the book is to issue an invitation to a personal, decisive act.” Hence, he proposed the personal appropriation of one’s rational self-consciousness not as an idealist construction but as a practical and concrete program. And in what Lonergan, like Metz, has called “the end of the age of innocence,” a consciousness cultured enough to execute that program needs to be morally and religiously converted.114 111 See Method, 85-99. 112 Lonergan, “Doctrinal Pluralism,” CWL 17, 85. 113 Lonergan, “Doctrinal Pluralism,” CWL 17, 85. In the Preface to Insight, Lonergan describes his purpose as “a campaign against the flight from understanding” (7) that is eminently practical, for “insight into insight... will reveal what activity is intelligent, and insight into oversight will reveal what activity is unintelligent. But to be practical is to do the intelligent thing, and to be unpractical is to keep blundering about. It follows that insight into both insight and oversight is the very key to practicality” (8). See too Richard Liddy, Transforming Light, 84-90; Matthew L. Lamb, Eternity, Time, and the Life of Wisdom, 125-52; Frederick G. Lawrence, “Dangerous Memory.” 114 Frederick G. Lawrence, “Dangerous Memory and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” in Communicating Dangerous Memory: Soundings in Political Theology, ed, Fred Lawrence (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987) 17-33 at 33, original emphasis. Internal quotation of Insight CWL 3, 13 (‘a personal, decisive act’); references to Insight CWL 3, 766 (invitation to personal self-appropriation), Third Collection, 147 (‘age of innocence’) (Insight references updated to CWL edition). 26 The exercise of self-appropriation is not bloodless theorizing; its existential presuppositions are severe, for at stake is one’s own performance. 4 Wisdom as Method in Theology Thomas Joseph White illustrates the contemporary problem of theological wisdom by contrasting the historicism of Chenu with the anachronism of Garrigou-Lagrange. As White reads him, Chenu tends toward a kind of historicism, the reduction of doctrine and faith to the expression of a spiritual experience so defined by its context as to have seemingly little transhistorical and transcultural relevance. Garrigou, by contrast, gives us an indistinguishable fusion of different epochs and strata of material, historical complexity unacknowledged and unexplained, “both idiosyncratic and methodologically arbitrary.”115 What is needed, White urges, is a theological wisdom able to deal with both the historical contingencies of the tradition and its permanent truth claims. Lonergan, too, was concerned to find a way forward beyond the oppositions of historicism and anachronism. His criticisms of classicism and the limits of neo-Scholasticism are well known, but, like many others who lived through the sea change of Vatican II,116 he was dismayed by the derailments of the new theology as he had been by the inadequacies of the old. He decried a tendency to disregard doctrinal issues117 or even to reject received doctrine outright,118 to reject even the very possibility of doctrine.119 He lamented a loss of theological connection to important questions and content,120 theological fragmentation and love of novelty for its own sake.121 He insisted that what was needed was not a new faith but a new mediation of the faith into a changed cultural situation.122 For him, the function of method was twofold, to transcend the limits of inadequate procedures, but also to discern and resist “the exaggerations or deficiencies to which the new age itself is exposed.”123 Functional specialties in theology is Lonergan’s attempt to put some order into the problem of development and contingency, normativity and permanence. It is not a ‘system’ but a kind of practical 115 Thomas Joseph White, OP, “The Precarity of Wisdom: Modern Dominican Theology, Perspectivalism, and the Tasks of Reconstruction,” Ressourcement Thomism: Sacred Doctrine, the Sacraments, and the Moral Life. Essays in Honor of Romanus Cessario, OP, ed. Reinhard Hutter and Matthew Levering (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University, 2010) 92123 at 93-97, quotes from 96. 116 See Lonergan, “The Scope of Renewal,” CWL 17, 282-98; and see the book of interviews Lonergan discusses there. Also, Joseph Ratzinger, Dogma and Preaching, 175-6. 117 See Lonergan, “Horizons and Transpositions,” zzz. 118 Christology today zzz 119 Dewart review: “The De-hellenization of Dogma” zzz. 120 See Lonergan, Caring About Meaning, zzz 121 Fragmentation concern zzz Scattered left fascinated... zzz 122 “no new revelation from on highj....” zzz 123 “Christology Today,” 74. 27 toolkit for dealing with theological problems. Subsequent chapters will illustrate something of its genesis and implications by examining cases from Lonergan’s theological practice. Here, let me offer a few preliminary remarks regarding the nature of the proposal, its relationship to the methodological achievement of Aquinas, and some of its more notable implications. First, the distinction of functions is based, not on differences of theological contents, either on the side of the data or on the side of the results, but, rather, on the different kinds of operations theologians perform.124 In this conception, theology is unified as a set of activities, a functional or operational whole. At its best, Scholasticism was united as a set of common questions and a shared conceptuality for formulating answers. It was unable, nevertheless, to realize the unification of all theological contents or prevent the eruption of irresolvable conflicts (as attested by, for instance, the controversy de auxiliis). Its scientific ideals were necessity, certitude, universality, permanence, and the displacement of these ideals by contingency and possibility, concreteness and development has brought about the fragmentation of theology into specialized and often mutually incomprehensible discourses with few common questions and no overarching conceptuality. The reconciliation of all theological claims and contents seems a distant goal unattainable within the compass of a single mind. The way forward is not the abolition of new questions or a return to the scientific ideal of the Posterior Analytics. It is a unification on the side of theological operations, an overarching framework for relating and ordering operations in theology, where theology is conceived as an ongoing process in need of methodical control. There results a basic clarification of the tasks of theology. Distinguishing functions makes it possible to work out the methods and procedures proper to each function, respecting their autonomy without isolating them from one another. Relating functions grounds a unification of theology on the side of the operations rather than on the side of the variable contents that answer theological questions, just as we might conceive the unity of mathematics, not through the unity of all mathematical contents —a potential infinity—but by relating all mathematical operations. Functional specialization, then, is a framework for orderly collaboration toward the goal of unifying theological contents. The basis of transhistorical and transcultural normativity is not in permanent formulations but in the measure to which theologians actually are adequate to their vocations, that is, are more or less thoroughly converted, responsive to the Gospel, at home in prayer, in theory, in interiority. Controls are explicit inasmuch as methods and procedures, sources and results, and theologians themselves are all subject to dialectical critique. 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.125 If the operational structure of consciousness unfolds normatively through attention to data, intelligible organization, rational judgment, and responsible decision, then theology as an activity will be a unity of differentiated functions, where each function is ordered to the objective of a distinct level of operations. Theology as 124 Method, zzz. 125 See Frederick G. Lawrence, “Lonergan’s Quest for a Hermeneutics of Authenticity,” MS 8-9 zzz. 28 a body of knowledge will be the communal, structured resultant from the more or less deliberate performance of the functions. 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 intentional operations apprehending (1) data, (2) intelligibility (in data or in truths), (3) the relative sufficiency of evidence for prospective truth claims, (4) the adequacy of value motivations for decision. Next, the two columns to the right indicate a sequence of theological functions ordered in an arc from Research up through Dialectic and Foundations and descending to Communications. The sequence of functions follows an arc ascending from maximal particularity (Research) through a series of universalizing operations, descending again to maximal particularity (Communications). The bottom row indicates functions with an objective 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. Moving up, the second row indicates functions with a finality to understanding, either the meaning of another or of one’s own claims. The functions of the third row are ordered to truth claims, regarding, one the one hand, historical judgment about what really happened, or, on the other hand, doctrinal truth claims (which may coincide with historical truth claims, e.g., the resurrection). The fourth row, finally, indicates the evaluative functions: Dialectical evaluation of sources, results, methods, and theologians as more or less adequately attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible, differentiated, converted; and the Foundational articulation and evaluation of the grounds for one’s own commitments. At first blush this may seem rather needlessly complex, and it may help to relate it to the methodological achievement of Lonergan’s model, Thomas Aquinas. Despite his involvement with the conception of science presented in the Posterior Analytics, Aquinas’s articulation of theology as a science subalternate to the knowledge of God and the blessed and received by us in faith marked a permanent step forward. It implemented in theology two fundamental breakthroughs: the distinction of judgment from understanding, and the theorematic differentiation of grace as entitatively disproportionate to nature.126 By distinguishing judgment from understanding, Aquinas distinguished the level of truth (quia, an sit) from the level of understanding (quomodo, quid sit). Futhermore, the theorem of the supernatural provided a technical instrument for expressing the superiority of the light of faith to the light of human intelligence. Aquinas was thus able to elucidate the speculative function of theology as an imperfect, analogical intelligentia fidei. The way was opened to a formulation of the different kinds of procedures to be used in relation to different kinds of questions. 126 A theorem is not new data but the introduction of a set of intellectual coordinates for organizing the known data. See Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, CWL 1, 14-20. 29 This achievement is embedded in the architecture of the Summa contra Gentiles. A twofold mode of truth distinguishes mysteries too high for us from truths proportionate to our reason. With regard to the latter, we give demonstrative reasons even if we can understand the realities only analogically (for instance, the existence and attributes of God). With regard to the supernatural mysteries, however, we hold the truths themselves in faith; to establish them, we rely on authorities; to understand them, we offer obscure, imperfect, but nevertheless illuminating reasons.127 These are either analogical manifestations of mysteries necessary in themselves (as, for instance, the Trinity), or fitting reasons for the contingent mysteries of salvation history.128 Thus, Aquinas was able to work out refined procedures for establishing philosophical and theological truth claims (demonstratio quia, determinatio fidei) and for giving an intelligent account of them. Lonergan’s functional theology transposes these achievements in various manners. Where Aquinas conceived sacra doctrina as a subalternated science on the model set forth in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, Lonergan conceives theology, not as a single kind of task but as a functional assembly of tasks severally and cumulatively implementing the general structure of inquiry he called ‘transcendental’ or ‘generalized empirical’ method.129 The functional assembly as a whole is subalternated, not to doctrines, but to conversion and faith. Note, therefore, that the functional subalternation of Systematics to Doctrines is not the only or even the most important manner in which Lonergan’s method transposes Aquinas’s conception of sacra doctrina as a subalternated wisdom. He effects, we might say, a twofold transposition, functionally in the subalternation of Systematics to Doctrines, and existentially in the subalternation (as it were) of all of theology to conversion. By asserting that the existential foundation of theology is the wisdom, 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 only in the measure that the theologian truly is wise both by the infused wisdom of self-surrender and by the achieved wisdom of self-knowledge.130 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 the Gospel into a culture.131 All the mediating operations, that 127 See Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibet 4.9.3; also Lonergan, Method, 337. 128 See Thomas Aquinas, ScG 1, zzz. The relationship between the doctrinal and speculative or systematic functions of theology will be treated more fully in chapter zzz below. 129 The method is ‘transcendental’ both in the sense of not being restricted to some genera of inquiry, and also in the sense of articulating the conditions—necessary though not sufficient—for the possibility of inquiry. It is ‘generalized’, as expanded to attend to data given in consciousness as well as the data of senses. 130 See Lonergan, “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” in Shorter Papers, CWL 20, 265 = Foundations of Theology, 223-34, at 224. 131 “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” Shorter Papers, CWL 20, 265 = Foundations of Theology 224. 30 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. Lonergan is more explicit than Aquinas in basing the differentiation of theological functions on the finality of cognitional operations, just as Lonergan’s philosophy is more explicit than Aquinas’s in articulating the recurrent structures of conscious intentionality. Lonergan takes his stand on the fact that “theologies are produced by theologians, that theologians have minds and use them, that their doing so should not be ignored or passed over but explicitly acknowledged in itself and in its implications.”132 Thus, he is not inventing procedures ex nihilo but ordering and methodically prosecuting tasks that, on examination, turn out to bear a marked family resemblance to successful procedures of the past. Where Aquinas distinguishes the determinatio fidei (a doctrinal function) from intelligentia fidei (a speculative or systematic function), Lonergan adds, below, a data function, and above, a decision function. He also, however, reduplicates the structure in terms of receiving the tradition and taking responsibility for it. Thus there is an ascending movement from data to decision, and a descending movement from decision to presentation. The functional priority he assigns to activities such as establishing texts (Research), exegesis (Interpretation), and determining what happened (History) correspond, approximately, to the positive tasks of lectio in the Scholastic context. The classification and analysis of conflicts (Dialectic) and working out the fundamental principles for deciding them (Foundations) correspond, approximately, to the tasks of Scholastic disputation. The function of Communications generalizes preaching and pastoral theology. Accordingly, 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.133 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.134 In this context, theology is specified, not in terms of formal and material objects, but as a mediation of the Gospel into a 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.135 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 132 Method in Theology, 24. 133 See Lonergan’s discussion of the relationship between religious studies and theology: theology adds to religious studies direct-discourse functions. Third Collection ….zzz. 134 See Lonergan, “Isomorphism of Thomist and Scientific Thought,” zzz. 135 Method, 142. 31 true about ourselves and about the world of our involvement, which is also the world of God’s involvement.136 This entails, not a breakdown of the distinction-in-relation of faith and reason, but of the separation in practice of 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.”137 The result is not a logical unification; it is not a negation of the difference between the natural and and supernatural orders; it is the recovery of the unity of inquiry and of wisdom we encounter in an Aquinas.138 Lonergan conceives theology as an ongoing process of retrieval and creativity, ressourcement and aggiornamento. Theology, like faith itself, starts with receiving an address, with conversion from hearing. Lonergan originally formulated the two phases of theology as ‘hearing’ and ‘saying’,139 which in Method he describes as ‘mediating’ and ‘mediated’.140 In its prior, listening phase, theology is mediating knowledge of the tradition. It is both a measuring up and a being measured. In the second phase, theology is a mediated knowledge of Christ, head and members, through the foundational, doctrinal, systematic, and pastoral articulations of the theologian. While preserving the functional subalternation of the systematic or speculative function of theology—theology as faith seeking understanding—to the truths held in faith, Lonergan also recognized that doctrines, as appropriated, were proper to the ‘speaking’ (and not just the hearing/reporting) phase of theology: ‘I believe’. 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 within an analogy of faith.141 For better and worse, truth, as the correspondence of mind to reality, is not “so objective as to get along without minds.”142 The problem is not eliminated by deference, however laudable, to the participated wisdom of 136 See Lonergan, Early Works I, CWL 22, 107-8. 137 Lonergan, “Dimensions of Meaning,” Collection, CWL 4, 245. 138 See Lonergan, CWL 17, 195. 139 See the so-called ‘Discovery Page,’ Lonergan’s handwritten notes, from 1964, outlining the original conception of functional specialties in theology (47200D0E060). 140 Zzzz. 141 See Method, 312-4. 142 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. 32 the magisterium,143 for, as nothing is received except in the manner of the recipient,144 only wisdom receives aright what the church proposes. The normativity of doctrine, then, is derivative; what is basic is putting on the mind of Christ, so that doctrines are received and handed on with the church’s authentic meaning (“in eodem sensu, eademque sententia”).145 The object of theology is not a set of propositions but a reality, God and God’s involvement in history.146 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, corde ad cor loquente. 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, Foundations follows functionally upon 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,”147 and the becoming is conversational. 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.148 Coming to know reality is a matter of hitting upon fruitful questions and gradually working out correct answers to them. 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, the implications of ideas are worked out, tests are devised and evidence produced or uncovered. By contrast, knowledge as looking is a matter of comparing concepts and deducing the true conclusions contained in true premises. Unless 143 See Lonergan, Early Works I, CWL 22, 105-6; Triune God: Systematics, CWL 12, 58; compare Method in Theology, 320-6. See too his 1977 “Questionnaire on Philosophy,” CWL 17, 374, on the ‘disastrous’ implications of philosophical approaches that cannot adequately account for revealed dogma. In Insight Lonergan argued that an infallible Church was antecedently probable on philosophical grounds: CWL 3, 744. 144 Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur. Basically a metaphysical axiom for Aquinas (see, e.g., ST 1.75.5; compare 1.12.4c; 1.14.1 ad 3; ScG 2.79.7; De Veritate 2.3c.), for Lonergan it has an existential significance (see, e.g., Triune God: Systematics, CWL 12, 25). 145 Fuller discussion in chapters ZZ and ZZ below. See 1 Cor 1:10 (Vulgate). 146 See Lonergan, “Theology and Understanding,” Collection, CWL 4, 117. 147 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. 148 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. 33 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 application of rules—can be safely delegated to a machine; but 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 discovery and learning. In a deductive process, controls may be objectified as rules for validity. In a process of learning, however, the basic event is not deduction but discovery. 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 transpositions. Such non-logical transitions raise questions of a different kind of validity. There arises a problem of internal control which cannot be met automatically. Functional specialization faces this problem explicitly by recognizing that the real control is a result of theologians measuring up as hearers and doers of the word, thoroughly converted and at home in prayer and theory, scholarship and self-attention. 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.149 That control is explicitly applied in the functions of Dialectic and Foundations. Lonergan fixes the relation of the positive functions— 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 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. Functional specialization is a distinction of functions, not a distinction of specialists.150 Lonergan’s idea was not to lock theologians into boxes; it was to help them clarify the different, interrelated kinds of operations they are in fact performing. Again, the point is to bring the functional interrelationships into the light; it is not that we must move in some linear sequence in which ‘conversion occurs’ at step five. Functional specialization also surmounts the kind of impossible individualism that imagines theology as a single habit tucked away in someone’s mind, rather than an ongoing, ecclesial collaboration involving many different, interrelated skill and knowledge sets, not all possessed by the same theologians. 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. 149 “Less differentiated consciousness finds more differentiated consciousness beyond its horizon and, in self-defence, may tend to regard the more differentiated with … ressentiment.” (Method 273) 150 Method 136-8, 141-2. 34 Note that autonomy of functions does not mean their isolation, because the interrelation of functions is as important as their distinction. Still less does autonomy mean secularization, as if the theologian were not religiously concerned from the outset or should pretend, in the name of autonomy, that a Paul or a Perpetua were not motivated by religious concerns. Autonomous exegesis is only secularist exegesis if one’s presuppositions are secularist.151 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. 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.152 It has been pointed out that the structure of functional specialization is not, in itself, specifically theological.153 Lonergan concurred that his structure would be relevant to any discipline confronting the future out of the past.154 What makes it theological is its use to mediate religious meanings and values into a cultural matrix. What makes it authentically theological is the wisdom, the adequacy of the theologian. The method declines 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 basis 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. Finally, in the functional subalternation of Systematics to Doctrines, it preserves the traditional conception of speculative theology as intelligentia fidei, without determining, at the methodological level, the content of faith or of theology. Which authorities are to be accepted or what doctrines are to be believed are theological questions.155 The wider relevance of functional 151 See Method 317-8. 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) 152 Lonergan “anything God really did reveal” zzzz 153 Rahner, etc. 154 “Bernard Lonergan Responds,” zzz 155 De facto, Lonergan’s own practice in the Doctrinal function reflects the influence of Melchior Cano’s De locis theologicis and commonly accepted Scholastic conventions about theological arguments. But these practices are internal to Doctrines, and, indeed, to Doctrines within a particular articulation of a Catholic horizon; hence, to Doctrines as itself subalternated to Foundations which explicates the implications of conversion. Thus Lonergan’s method transcends the kind of difficulties reflected in Paul J. Griffiths’s plenary address to the Catholic Theological Society of America, June, 2014: “Theological Disagreement: What it is, and how to do it” (http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/08/26/4074627.htm, accessed 10 December 2016). In my opinion Griffiths is working with an insufficiently differentiated conception of theology in terms of three functional specialties, Discovery, Interpretation, and Speculation; the critical functions of Dialectic and Foundations get short shrift, and the solution is provided by proposing some claims as metatheological, foundations in the sense of first propositions. These first propositions, however, are theologically specific truth claims about the meaning of conversion; they are properly internal to theology as a topic for theological investigation and dispute. By contrast, Lonergan’s method, precisely because it settles, not the content of theology, but the procedures by which the content is to be handled, anticipates 35 specialization should not be too surprising. Method is a framework for handling questions; it does not predetermine which questions may arise and be permitted a serious hearing. Conclusion The contemporary situation in the West is one of cultural crisis, a crisis of normativity. The dream of classicism, of timeless and unchanging liturgy, theology, institutional forms, is over. The 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 succumbing to relativism, to integrate natural science without falling for scientism, to deal with historical contingency without bogging down in historicism, to reaffirm the possibility of progressive and cumulative results despite the contingency of our every achievement. To meet these challenges, theology today must be an ongoing, collaborative process of mediating the one Gospel into many different cultures. This does not mean a constant re-setting. No doubt, the history of theology is dialectical, a history of inadequacy and faithlessness as much as of fidelity and progress. Yet there is a genuine development of methods, of dogma, of theory, in the classification and ordering of materials, in the analysis of conflicts.156 There are permanently valid achievements in theology, and they may be authentically retrieved to enter into an ongoing mediation of the Gospel into cultures. The present crisis brings into fresh focus the perennial problem for theology: the adequacy of theologians to their vocation and tasks. Therein lies the relevance of Lonergan’s practical program, his ‘wisdom of the concrete’. As Aristotle would not speak of virtue apart from the measure embodied in the spoudaios, the morally serious person,157 so Lonergan does not speak of theological wisdom apart from the measure incarnated in the wise theologian, converted with a threefold conversion, at home in prayer, in theory and scholarship, and in the asceticism of self-knowledge. His program is to promote, not a system, but conversion and personal development at every turn. His method would mediate the Gospel into a culture, not by way of abstract principles, but by way of explicit attention to the performance of theologians. His return to the concrete is a return to the imperfect wisdom of the theologian, whose horizon determines what questions even can arise and whose reality, as a created participation in uncreated light suffused with the love of God surpassing all understanding, is the concrete foundation for theology. Lonergan’s wisdom is a wisdom of self-knowledge in acceptance of a higher wisdom of self-surrender. His widespread reception surely seemed unlikely at the time and now seems less likely than ever. My experience has been that his proposal is valuable even if it is not widely adopted, for those theological disagreements and provides for them to be handled through processes internal to theology. The p 156 See Method (on permanence of dogma) and (on permanently valid achievements in systematics) zzz. In subsequent chapters we will examine particular cases. 157 See Lonergan, “The Subject,” Second Collection, 82; also Frederick G. Lawrence, Frederick G. Lawrence, “Finnis on Lonergan: A Reflection,” Villanova Law Review 57 (2012) 849-71 at 851-9. 36 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. To the extent that his proposals rest, not on a set of arguments but on a set of practices, one has not only to be persuaded to believe but also to re-enact the asceticism of self-discovery. No more than the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius can it be learned simply by reading a book. Hannah Arendt writes of the political significance of Socratic thinking in a way that seems relevant both to the present crisis and to Lonergan’s contested place in it: ...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.158 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. It means back to the questions and back to the questioners; it is bound to be unsettling. It is not all that is needed, but it is, I submit, a key to the way forward. 158 Hannah Arendt, Thinking, vol. 1, Life of the Mind (zzz), 177; see 166-179. 37