Nowhere in the current beautiful and insightful novellas about the contemplative life will we find their central characters turning the pages of Lonergan's Insight or carrying in their pilgrimage knapsacks a copy of his Method in Theology.[1]
Are we -- or the authors we are reading -- missing something? Is Lonergan's work suitable nourishment or accompaniment for a contemplative life?
As one of those called "first-generation" listeners to Bernard Lonergan's work, I hope to present what I think is especially useful in it for contemplatives.
The person whose work we are meeting is Father Bernard Lonergan. He was born in Buckingham, Quebec, Canada, in 1904. His high school and early college were at Loyola in Montreal. At seventeen he entered the Society of Jesus and was ordained priest in 1936. His graduate studies were chiefly at Heythrop in London and the Gregorian in Rome. His Gregorian University doctoral thesis was on "grace" in Aquinas. That work and his major articles on "word" in Aquinas were published in a U.S. theology journal in the forties. He taught first at the Jesuit Seminary in Montreal, then at the Gregorian in Rome. After lung surgery in 1965, his professorships were in North America: at Regis College in Toronto, at Harvard Divinity School, and then at Boston College for eight final teaching years in which he returned to an early interest, economic theory ("so that," as he said, "people will not starve"). For many years he was in constant contact with Thomas More Institute in Montreal, mainly by lecturing in courses there. He died in 1984 at the Jesuit Infirmary in Ontario where he had been resident for about a year.
It was in 1957 that Insight: a study of human understanding was published. It took some years for that rather large book to be read. [2] By 1964 a special edition of Continuum ("Spirit as Inquiry") was put together by some of those who had seen the relevance of his cognitional theory to diverse fields (theology, mathematics, literary interpretation, quantum mechanics[3]). A collection of his articles was published in 1967 [4] and David Tracy's book The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan in 1970.[5] Also in 1970 there was an International Congress devoted to his thought. [6] The book Method in Theology came out in 1972,[7] then several other books and collections of articles. From 1988 to the present, the University of Toronto Press has gone well along in the project of publishing the Collected Works ─ beautifully edited and annotated volumes. A full-length biography is still in process. His own "intellectual biography," Caring about Meaning,[8] was done in a week of interviews with him in 1981, concluding with one session the following year.
As someone suggested recently, a "movement" has started around an author's thought if: there has been a substantial output by the author; graduate students do research in the writings; there are workshops, a journal, research institutes in several countries, and international symposia devoted to the author's work. All of these are present in Lonergan's case. (The Boston College Workshop, for example, is counting towards its thirtieth year.) Rather than disciples, it was collaborators he wanted, and these he continues to have.
My suggestions are purposely few:
Beautiful articles on specifically theological themes await us in the three "Collections" whenever we can get to those which especially attract us; and, of course, there is Method in Theology when we become interested in method (perhaps through the specialty "history").
But with which needs of contemplatives might a meeting with Lonergan's work help? I select three:
I hope to suggest how Lonergan might help with each of these contemplative needs, then also hint at what we might get if we were really to study him. My suggestions will function as images or stories of possible help; actual help will depend, as Lonergan would say early and late, on personal appropriation of what is being said.
1.
AWARENESS OF THE POLYMORPHIC NATURE OF OUR OWN CONSCIOUSNESS
A need for awareness? What! That need re-visited?! Self-knowledge, again? We can bring to the fore all that we have been learning about ourselves for years, but this time we can specify our need as: awareness of the manifold-ness of our consciousness, of the many shapes it can take on, so rapidly. My first suggestion in this little introduction to Lonergan is that he speaks in striking ways to our need for awareness of that sort.
But first let us tell ourselves an old story (with the help of the Britannica if we need it): the story of Proteus, a son of the sea. By my suggestion that Proteus is the image to take from Lonergan for this section of our introduction to his thought, I do not mean that Lonergan explicitly evoked the story. But "protean" and "polymorphic" are everywhere in Insight and inevitably call up ol' Proteus for us as without a doubt they did for Lonergan.
Proteus: in Greek mythology, the prophetic old man of the sea and shepherd of the sea's flocks. He knew all things ─ past, present, and future ─ but disliked telling what he knew. Those who wished to consult him had first to surprise him and bind him during his noon-day slumber. Even when caught he would try to escape by assuming all sorts of shapes. But if his captor held him fast, the god at last returned to his proper shape, gave the wished-for answer, and plunged into the sea.[11]
We know quite a bit about ourselves. But we may miss a shape or two as Proteus does his flips.
We all experience the judgment we call "rash." But what step is it exactly that is missing?
We know the excitement of learning. But what exactly is it that moves us along?
We feel sure that really knowing something would come from taking a really good look at it. And yet that feeling
of ours does not check out with how we operate.
We're puzzled that the New Testament doesn't say some of the things our creeds and councils do, and vice versa. What
makes the difference?
If we live in community, we are upset that our newer community members speak more about meaning and less about truth
than we would have thought appropriate. What is the matter?
We feel strongly about being objective. Is there already a problem in that?
Even If we are committed to study as life-giving for our way of life, we sometimes speak of prayer-life in terms
that rabid anti-intellectuals might use. How do we want to be interpreted when we do that?
And so on.
Here is the situation as stated directly by Lonergan. He has been talking about antitheses, each of which has its ground in the "concrete unity-in-tension" that a human being is.
For human consciousness is polymorphic. The pattern in which it flows may be biological, aesthetic, artistic, dramatic, practical, intellectual, or mystical. These patterns alternate; they blend or mix; they can interfere, conflict, lose their way, break down (385). [12]
So, if there are shapes of our consciousness that we do not notice, that slip by us, we can identify not simply a need for self-knowledge but more closely a need for awareness of the polymorphic nature of our own consciousness. The recipe for coping with Proteus was: hold on until he answers. Can we do better, with Lonergan's help? Something more differentiated, perhaps?
From the numerous ways Lonergan might help with this first need of ours, I suggest his insights about the step beyond description to explanation, about the primacy of questioning, and about intellectual conversion. I offer some hints as to his thought on each of these points, and some of his own words.
going beyond
The step from description to explanation is a step beyond understanding things only as related to ourselves ─ beyond how we see, feel, imagine them; even beyond a first level of insight about them ─ toward understanding things "in themselves," that is, in their internal and contextual relations (291). Our common sense understanding is already a transcending of experience as that is just "lived through." But Lonergan makes clear the biases to which that common sense is subject ─ chiefly our inability, when in that pattern, to be interested in anything but the short view, or the view of "our group" (191, 218-232). (Knowing what is wanted, being able to name the needs, knowing what one is doing, is another kind of going-beyond, this time into the world of "interiority." But that is another story. [13]
Lonergan sets out in several ways what is at stake in regard to the move from description to explanation; for example:
[T]he absence of at least a virtual transposition from the descriptive to the explanatory commonly is accompanied by counter-positions on reality, knowledge, and objectivity. ...There is erected a pseudo-metaphysics whose elements stand in a happy, if ultimately incoherent, conjunction with sensitive presentations and imaginative representations. Then the real is the "already out there now," knowing it is taking a good look, and objectivity begins from the obviousness of extroversion to end in the despair of solipsism (505).
What is lacking is a critical awareness of the polymorphism of human consciousness, of the alternative formulations of discoveries as positions or as counter-positions, of the momentum of positions for development and of the goal of counter-positions in reversal. Most of all, what is lacking is knowledge of all that is lacking and only gradually is that knowledge acquired (536).
[Common sense is experimental. It deals with the familiar.] But if one would step beyond the narrow confines in which the procedures of common sense are successful, one has to drop the descriptive viewpoint and adopt a viewpoint that unashamedly is explanatory (540-1).
It will be no small part of the help Lonergan gives us if we cease thinking of understanding and knowing as an "impoverishment of reality."But to reassure us that there is "space" in his account for our feelings, in Insight we can find:
But explanation does not give man [sic] a home. ... explanatory self-knowledge can become effective in his concrete living only if the content of systematic insights, the direction of judgements, the dynamism of decisions can be embodied in images that release feeling and emotion and flow spontaneously into deeds no less than words (547).
questions
Thinking still of Lonergan's possible helpfulness: if we ask whether does he offers something simple that would get under way a healthful process of intellectual development, we can answer by turning our attention to the primacy of the question, and thence to having trust in our own questioning. The questions we let arise are primary human movers of our development.
[T]ranscendence ["going beyond"] is the elementary matter of raising further questions (635).
[After speaking of the joy of discovery Lonergan then speaks of the prior tension, drive, desire, to understand:] This primordial drive, then, is the pure question. It is prior to any insights, any concepts, any words, for insights, concepts, words, have to do with answers; and before we look for answers, we want them: such wanting is the pure question. ... It is the wonder which Aristotle claims to be the beginning of all science and philosophy (9).
intellectual conversion
Contemplatives live close to their own psyches. Light, differentiation, discernment among the variegated shapes of Proteus can be helpful. The Constitutions of cloistered Dominican nuns may be saying this (LCM 100,II) in its invitation to real intellectual work and in the warning that study is a form of asceticism. As Lonergan puts it, no one is born in the intellectual pattern of experience, and
no one reaches it easily; no one remains in it permanently; and when some other pattern is dominant, then the self of our self-affirmation seems quite different from one's actual self, the universe of being seems as unreal as Plato's noetic heaven, and objectivity spontaneously becomes a matter of meeting persons and dealing with things that are "really out there" [his phrase for naive extroversion] (385).
We distort what we know ...[and] we restrict what we might know; for we...justify to ourselves and to others the labor spent in learning ... by pointing to the palpable benefits it brings; and the demand satisfied by palpable benefits does not enjoy the unrestricted range of the detached and disinterested desire to know (559).
(We can add a little related practical advice from Lonergan: Better not to take decisions when we are not operating in the intellectual pattern of experience.)
By "intellectual conversion" Lonergan means conversion from "counter-positions" to basic and correct positions on the real, on knowing, and on objectivity. How heighten the probability of its occurrence? As heart does not want conversion of heart, so, similarly the block to intellectual conversion is that we do not see the point of it.
Conjoining two striking quotations from Lonergan will be as far as we can go here in showing how Lonergan helps with the first of the needs we identified:
The whole of man ...is malleable, polymorphic fact (630).
Genuine objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity (292; cf. 265).
2.
A ROCK TO STAND ON
Our consciousness is in flux.
And we have a further need: a place to stand as we relate to philosophies, religions, interpretations, warnings about relativism, etc. ─ and to our own variegated experience. How can we hold on while Proteus does the flips which so discourage our hope for understanding?
"Rock" and "horizon" can be correlative images, and both are explicit in Lonergan.
[T]here is a sense in which the objectification of the normative pattern of our conscious and intentional operations does not admit revision. ... There is then a rock on which one can build.
The rock...is the subject in his conscious, unobjectified attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, responsibility. The point to the labor of objectifying the subject and his conscious operations is that thereby one begins to learn what these are and that they are.[14]
And to pick up the "horizon" image:
[Horizon] is the limit of one's field of vision. As one moves about, it recedes in front and closes in behind so that, for different standpoints, there are different horizons. ... so too the scope of one's knowledge and the range of one's interests vary with the period in which one lives, one's social background and milieu, one's education and personal development. ... what lies beyond one's horizon is simply outside the range of one's knowledge and interests: one neither knows nor cares.[15]
Let us take time for just a few views from the rock, a few instances of "relating," where the effort meant in "relating" is not "standing firm against," but rather: trying for coherence.
philosophies
I have been impressed recently by the experience of two young men, one a parish priest, the other a Dominican friar, at the close of their formal studies. Each seemed to have a clear and poignant grasp of his personal need for a base from which to live and to understand ─ amidst varied viewpoints, philosophies, theologies, amidst exciting ideas and programs, amidst his own bright ideas and enthusiasms. We can appreciate the situation of those two young men. They were clear about their need, but they were not defensive, security-hunting, or discouraged.
Here is the place to note that the key of Lonergan's philosophical work (done in preparation for a renewed theology) was cognitional theory; i.e., his labor was to understand and present an adequate and correct account of what it is for human beings to say "I know" ─ with subsequent expansions into an ethics and into a metaphysics.
Further, the central moment within his account of the three-stranded event that is fully human knowing ─ the core often neglected ─ is the act of understanding, of insight. Not judging, for which one checks if there is sufficient evidence that an understanding is correct; not the mere flow of experience of whatever sort, but the unifying and enriching and transcending act of understanding. (We should notice in passing that my "view from the rock" is a hazardous image, conviction that knowing is taking a good look, is a "counter-position" on what knowing is.)
The history of philosophy can be done in a significant and illuminating way by assessing just where a given philosopher's attention has been put in relation to the pivotal act of insight. Lonergan gives us satisfying samples of such history (Insight, chap. XIV,4). His own contribution to cognitional theory is fully within the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition.
logic?
Although we may all wryly admit the usefulness of a bit more logic in our own thought and speech ─ in interpersonal discussion or in community Chapter, for example ─ still we do well to let ourselves be persuaded by Lonergan away from identifying logic with philosophy, or from mistaking the "rules of logic for the rules of thought" (573). Logic sets in order what we have already understood, and it is not likely ground for new understanding.[16]
relativism
An adequate cognitional theory helps also to grasp exactly what relativism is and what is the trouble with it. In Lonergan the pertinent study would be his analysis of judgment and the following insights: the relativist does not distinguish among the different ways that conditions are fulfilled for correct affirmations; s/he insists on complete explanation before judgment (591); the relativist clings to the descriptive viewpoint (540); a method (in ethics) which is based on positions rather than on counter-positions "can steer a sane course between the relativism of mere concreteness and the legalism of remote and static generalities" (604). Perspectivism is the real alternative.[17] Adequate cognitional theory also gives one a place to stand in regard to mistaken charges that a philosophical position or work is "relativist."
viewed from the rock, opens up, as in the famous "promise" in Insight:
Thoroughly understand what it is to understand and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base...opening upon all further developments of understanding (xxviii).
What else might we place on our short list of needs among contemplatives? What else, that is, besides our need to become aware of the polymorphic character of our consciousness (section 1 above) and besides our need for a firm base from which to related to difficult, controverted, or promising areas on our horizon (section 2 above).
I suggest that we could also use light on what it is to be in love with the universe. That we are, of course. But how might such love clarify, intensify, be brought to consciousness? And does B. Lonergan's work speak to such a development in us? Strongly it does, it seems to me. And it was chiefly because of the way he helps with this kind of need that I wanted to write this little introductory piece. The rest has been preparation.
What we are now talking about is the order of the universe, and it is our "attitude" (better, the tending of our whole being) within that world order. What is being talked about is, first of all, a worldview, a viewpoint on world process, a viewpoint "universal" by being potentially complete (566,567), i.e., no possible meaning or value is excluded a priori (578). What is also being talked about, in the same breath, is a willingness sufficient to match that worldview (634), a complete openness to reflection and reasonable persuasion, a "universal willingness" (623,624). What we are talking about is a love that brings us unexpectedly beyond our ken and even beyond our loves: our love for a universe which is God's free choice.
An image from Lonergan for our present consideration is "undertow." Or to offer an alternative ─ with its own range of suggestions and implications ─ a Scriptural image he often evoked: the "heart of stone become heart of flesh." That image we know well, so let us get from Lonergan the other, "undertow":
Ordinarily the experience of the mystery of love and awe is not objectified. It remains within subjectivity as a vector, an undertow, a fateful call to a dreaded holiness. Perhaps after years of sustained prayerfulness and self-denial, immersion in the world mediated by meaning will become less total and the experience of the mystery become clear and distinct enough to awaken attention, wonder, inquiry. Even then in the individual case there are not certain answers. All one can do is let be what is, let happen what in any case keeps recurring.[18]
But what sort of universe do we love? Reading that "every consistent choice is, at least implicitly, a choice of universal order" (605), what world order have we chosen by our loving, our valuing? And how are we being swept along?
World process is, in fact, emergent probability, says Lonergan. (Before we run away from that notion, let's think of those Nairobi seminarians who have learned about Lonergan's "emergent probability" from one of their professors.) Emergent probability is the immanent order of the world (128), and so emergent probability is basically what we have chosen in making our own, God's choice among all the possible universes. Probability: not chance; not determinism either. Emergent probability: an "upwardly but indeterminately directed dynamism" (633).[19] In all its stages, the process is open; it is a succession of probable realizations of possibilities (126).
"Emergent probability" is an explanatory idea (124) that has to do with "flexible circles of ranges of schemes of recurrence"(605), and with series of events and things within human history. As explanatory account it admits of breakdowns and blind alleys in world process (127); it understands development dialectically[20]; it comes up against the basic human problem of incapacity for sustained development; it reckons on inertia, refusals, failures, resistances (127); it knows both about human freedom and about the need for effective liberation (619-624). But the insight that "the essential logic of the distorted dialectic is a reversal"(233), partially formulates our hope for full flowering of what has been divinely, effectively, chosen.
more samplings
Since with this third section we are coming toward our conclusion, we can offer fuller clues to Lonergan's presentation.
The horizon seen from our rock is the universe.
"Emergent probability" is the worldview which, by way of generalizing the methods of contemporary science (493) in order to throw light on human affairs, is consequent upon insight into the dynamic structure of human consciousness (568).
"A series of emergent leaps" is the way Lonergan speaks of development (478): some new element organizes, on higher levels of integration, what was merely coincidence on lower levels. He speaks of emergent trends, of successions of operators that successively change the laws to which an individual is subject (479).
In a leisurely study of Lonergan's work we could use whatever we may know of contemporary math and science which, by recognizing the systematic and the non-systematic aspects of reality, make room for both classical and statistical laws; and we could also invoke whatever we know of the methods which are apt for dealing with the data of the human sciences. We would want to look at his presentation of physical, chemical, organic, and psychic manifolds (471) which science investigates, and of the higher integration which we call grace (632).
We would want to see his comparison of "emergent probability" with the world-views of Aristotle, Galileo, Darwin, and contemporary indeterminists (128-139). And we would be able to place ourselves critically in relation to the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle did not recognize either probability or emergence (483).[21] He did recognize that it is spirit which can embrace the whole universe.
But there are instances of emergent probability as world process which we can identify more easily; such instances as: the occurrence of an insight; a decision; the control we exercise over our own character and career; our experience and awareness of evil; positively, the education we pass on to others; even, the theology we do[22]; the responsibility we take for the future (227; 633). "To heighten the probabilities that good may emerge," as we might well say of our efforts. And of our prayers.
Generically, the course of human history is in accord with emergent probability....The specific difference of human history is that among the probable possibilities is a sequence of operative insights by which men grasp possible schemes of recurrence and take the initiative in bringing about the material and social conditions that make these schemes concretely possible, probable, and actual. In this fashion man becomes for man the executor of the emergent probability of human affairs (226-7).
In section 1, we saw the need of "going beyond." Now we can see in Lonergan's "emergent probability" a challenge to go beyond "common sense" to the long view. Correspondingly, we can see the possibility of going beyond satisfactions to values. Further, what matches the detachment of inquiry and reflection is a "universal willingness" which is the genuine person's complete openness to reflection and to persuasion (624). We come also to the boundary problem which Lonergan states effectively in this way: How can we be persuaded to such complete openness if we are not yet open to persuasion? The heart of stone does not want to be heart of flesh, as he often recalled. And yet, and yet: "the experience of the mystery of love and awe remains within subjectivity as an undertow...."
It is a serious matter to suggest to contemplatives how they might spend some of the little time they have for study. I am reminded of a conversation about Insight reported by Ben Meyer: Said one party: "It's a good book." "A good one!" exclaimed the other. "If it's not a great book, it's nothing."Who would wish to recommend anything less than great work? The claim is not that all is best or all is original with Lonergan. Rather, it is that so much is there and with a blessed coherence. Geniuses, he said, are people who live at the level of their own time.
By concentrating on the most difficult Lonergan writing, Insight, I have kept us chiefly in the philosophical work he saw was needed as preparatory for a renewed Catholic theology. The later Method in Theology begins with what he elsewhere called the minimum philosophy needed for doing theology, namely, basic positions: on human knowing and responsibility (with consequences for an eightfold method); on the human good; on meaning; and on religion. If we find ourselves asking: "Well, was Lonergan philosopher or theologian?"[23] and "Aren't most of the considerations offered to our attention in this article, philosophical ones?" we might say in reply:
We need not make a complicated defense for paying attention to philosophical insights. With, perhaps, special consciousness of doing so, we live in the one actual world God has chosen. (That has been a presupposition of mine in identifying some of our needs and interests.) In Lonergan's case suffice it to say that most of his professional work in theology was done on central doctrines: grace, the Trinity, and Christology.
The religious import of Lonergan's work is clear from the help he can offer to the three needs we have been considering. I add the following points:
Lonergan's presentation of human development as dialectical (e.g., our many ways of self-transcendence, of going beyond, and yet our incapacity for sustained development; the cycles of decline with various biases at their root) is so strong that the need for a Savior stands out with corresponding power. For example,
Unfortunately, as insight and oversight commonly are mated, so also are progress and decline. We reinforce our love of truth with a practicality that is equivalent to an obscurantism. We correct old evils with a passion that mars the new good. We are not pure. We compromise. We hope to muddle through (xiv).
I have always been struck by the conversion-like effect which seems to occur among those who have become acquainted with Lonergan's work. It is clear that it is life which has been touched. Learning from Lonergan that religious conversion is frequently the first to occur[24] – and presuming that we ourselves have experienced a first religious and moral conversion -- it seems that with intellectual conversion (i.e., with a shift to basic positions on what is real, on what it is to know, and on objectivity), the cycle could be re-initiated, with more profound religious and moral conversions resulting. [25]
The "question of God" becomes our question; we become aware that a grasp of the existence of God is available to us in the questions we ask, in the questioning we can do. [26] The "primacy of the question" has its effect in a temperateness of spirit which is suitable for all aspects of personal and communal religious life. Even more significantly, the religious correlate of "the question" is Mystery profoundly recognized.
Reflection on the consciousness of Christ emerges from reflection on human consciousness, and this analogy for divine consciousness continues to orient us, as it has since the days of Augustine's devout introspection.
In the midst of the passion of individuals and of societies over which we agonize, in the midst of whatever is going on in the lives of those who have in prayer become "our People," generalized emergent probability becomes, without distortion, the "law of the Cross" which Lonergan presents eloquently in both his method and christology texts.
Love of the order of the universe ─ an order we can now identify, with Lonergan, as emergent probability ─ takes us into mystery and into the whole rich field of imagination and symbol. We can pause to note that Lonergan speaks of the "rites and ceremonies" that "vent [a community's] psychic awareness of cosmic significance and express its incipient grasp of universal order"(536); and in these, he says, we know ourselves. Then we can go on to a Lonergan insight especially relevant to our understanding of Sacrament:
Just as our understanding can be held open to mystery, and our willingness to matching openness, so, Lonergan points out, our sensitive psyche is correspondingly "held open" to match and to support the openness and the new integrations occurring on other levels of our being (546, 624). Lived with for a while, that insight throws light, partial but inviting, on the role in human development of our sacramental life (in both precise and extended senses of "sacrament").[27]
[T]his unrestricted openness of our intelligence and reasonableness not only is the concrete operator of our intellectual development but also is accompanied by a corresponding operator that deeply and powerfully holds our sensitive integrations open to transforming change. Man by nature is orientated into mystery....(546).
There is a related warning for us in that Lonergan ascribes to the absence of self-knowledge in us, that "mix of mystery and myth" which we rather commonly achieve [592]. Here too we may hope for "reversals" [500, 543] in the unraveling of constricting myth, in the halting of the cycles of decline.[28]
Further Lonergan study would lead us into relating more carefully the "knowledge that is proportionate to human intelligence" and "transcendent knowledge" (chapters XIX and XX), and toward understanding better the "higher integration" which is in fact the divine solution to the problem of evil, and is the depths into which we are being swept by the undertow of Love Given. In a note in Method[29], Lonergan says that in his chapter on "Religion" it will become evident "that the most important part of the rock has not yet been uncovered."
I have been pointing out some of the religious import of Lonergan's work. We can stop now simply to name other contemplative interests which find support in his thought.
With the theme of awareness of our own polymorphic consciousness, and the possibility of steps beyond our commonsense reactions, we join current critiques of such religiosity as may be flourishing nowadays without benefit of much intellectual life.
Given our preoccupation with hearing the word of God, considerations about adequate expression and correct interpretation (562-594) are probably the sharpest ways that the question of truth can arise for us in Lonergan's work and that we may deepen the level of our passion for truth. And it is in a context of advertence to adequacy of expression, intellectual conversion, and polymorphic human consciousness that our handling of "women's issues" belongs.
There are plentiful insights in Lonergan on the constituents of community, perhaps the most useful being: "not all opposition is contradictory."
A more satisfactory account of the integration of contemplative prayer and social concern we can see being worked out in profound conversations on the theme of "complacency and concern in Lonergan and Aquinas" by Lonergan collaborators R. Doran and F. Crowe.[30]
If we have a preference for the prayer of petition (said to be the prayer of most "ordinary" people) as the key of a contemplative life, in contrast with what some of us call "fancy prayer" ("stages of the interior life," "ways of perfection," "centering techniques," etc.), such a preference would accord well with the view of world process as emergent probability. And the general understanding of world process as the succession of probable realizations of possibilities suits our Gospel concern with sowing the seed of the Word on good ground, with the probable and varied yields of a hundred-, sixty-, and thirty-fold, and the concomitant stories of resistant soil and careless sowing. We notice the Matthean Jesus' wonder at the surprising way the Father has heightened the probabilities: "I thank you, Father, lord of heaven and earth, because you have... revealed these things to little ones" (11:25-26).
In the Consecratory Prayer at the Solemn Profession of contemplative nuns, all the faithful in attendance pray for the professed. They say that in her, and hence in her world, are being realized some of the probabilities set up by the exodus of a people from Egypt and by the exodus of Jesus in Jerusalem. And they go on to pray:
that she...may look upon the world
and see it ruled by your loving wisdom
That might remind us of John Chrysostom's idea about monks:
They give thanks for the whole universe[31]
as if they were Fathers of all humanity.
I was asked several years ago by a missionary friar in Central America, well disposed toward learning about Lonergan, whether there were not some writings of his on prayer, or some collection of his prayers, like those which had helped introduce people to the high hard work of reading Karl Rahner. The generally correct answer was no, but there are many passages to guide prayer. The following one can serve as a final comment on our polymorphic consciousness, our many conversions, and our love for the universe:
Experience of grace, then, is as large as the Christian experience of life. It is the experience of man's capacity for self-transcendence, of his unrestricted openness to the intelligible, the true, the good. It is experience of a twofold frustration of that capacity: the objective frustration of life in a world distorted by sin; the subjective frustration of one's incapacity to break with one's own evil ways. It is experience of a transformation one did not bring about but rather underwent, as divine providence let evil take its course and vertical finality be heightened, as it let one's circumstances shift, one's dispositions change, new encounters occur, and ─ gently and so quietly ─ one's heart be touched. It is the experience of a new community, in which faith and hope and charity dissolve rationalizations, break determinisms, and reconcile the estranged and the alienated, and there is reaped the harvest of the Spirit that is "...love, joy. peace, patience. kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control" (Gal. 5:22).[32]
As for the three images selected for this introduction to Lonergan, they can flow together as sea images: Proteus slipping through his many transformations; the rock (sea-washed?) where we sit looking out at a large horizon; the undertow of a Love already given.
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1. I am thinking first of the fictional Lying Awake by Mark Salzman (New York: Knopf, 2000) and then of Virgin Time: in search of the contemplative life by Patricia Hampl (NY: Ballantine, 1992). It has been a different matter in treatises on spirituality; cf. the awareness of Lonergan in such authors as William Johnston, S.J., David Granfield, O.S.B., Louis Roy, O.P. A recent remark by Cardinal Carlo Montini is pertinent: "...the thought of Lonergan permits one to reconstruct [sic] ever new syntheses....that permit a contemplative view of reality...."
2. Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., Insight: a study of human understanding
(N.Y.: Philosophical Library, 1957).
I remember watching the entrance of reference to Lonergan into books by Catholic
authors: after a long time, a footnote or two; then he made his way up into the
text; then into the substantial components of the thought (e.g., in E. Braxton
on community, W. Johnston on prayer, C. Davis on the renewal of theology); next
were major works based on his thought or collaborating with it in an explicit
way from another field, e.g.: from education, R.E. O'Connor, Charlotte Tansey,
and the annual university programs of Thomas More Institute of Montreal; Robert
Doran in psychology; Ben Meyer on Scripture interpretation; David Granfield on
law, then on mysticism. Nowadays a paragraph referring to Lonergan seems de
rigeur in many books and articles. Philip McShane, Charles Davis, David
Tracy, and some Protestant authors (e.g., Langdon Gilkey), were a bit ahead of
the general Catholic pace at first.
3. Now women's studies, world religions, and communications are among the additions to the list of collaborations.
4. Collection (N.Y.: Herder and Herder, 1967), ed. F. Crowe; now Collected Works 4 (Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 1988), ed. F. Crowe, R. Doran.
5. N.Y.: Herder and Herder, 1970.
6. There was a Time article covering this International Lonergan Congress of 1970. About five years earlier, Lonergan's work had been introduced along with that of Tillich and Rahner in the giant World Religions class at a Canadian University. When the closed-circuit TV cameras were shut off after the first session, a student made his way to the podium to ask: "Tillich and Rahner I've heard of. But this Loggernan [sic]: who's he?" It helped at the moment to have on hand an earlier Time article about the obscure author.
7. N.Y.: Herder and Herder, 1972. Cf. Collected Works.
I have not completed my references here because I do not have available to me all the CW volumes which have been
published thus far (about six of some twenty projected).
8. Caring about Meaning (Montreal: Thomas More Institute, 1982), eds. P. Lambert, C. Tansey, C. Going.
9. In "Spirit as Inquiry," Continuum (1964): 230-242.
10. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1992.
Outstanding Christian Thinkers series, ed. Brian Davies, o.p.
My own preferences as to which other authors to read (i.e., more
"secondary sources" after Crowe's Lonergan) are the names
already mentioned ─ with the notable addition of F. Lawrence and M. Lamb, not named in the presentation until now because their early
"Lonergan" work was incorporated into study of a single author
(Gadamer and Dilthey respectively). Fine new work is being done by others also.
Ongoing collaboration, the dream of the 1970 International Lonergan Congress,
is a reality.
11. The New Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1989;
15th. ed.), vol. 9: 741.
The shifting states of the computer screen before us may be a more effective contemporary image than Proteus,
and one by now well rooted in our sensitivity. It is important also to ask what image would be more significant for women than
Proteus or computer screen.
12. Numbers in the text are page references to the most frequently cited work, that is, to
B. Lonergan's Insight. (Cf. Collected Works.) Other references will be made in the Endnotes.
Insight is predominant in this brief "Introduction" for two reasons: it has
been my project for the last five years (at a nun's slow pace) to re-study Insight;
and an a fortiori is being used, namely, if it is possible to profit
from Lonergan's help in his most difficult work, it is all the more possible in
his other ones.
13. This step is more a preoccupation of Method.
14. Method: 19, 20.
15. Ibid., 235-236.
16. Ibid., 6. Cf. also 637: "...logically unrelated sciences are related intelligently by a succession of higher viewpoints."
17. Ibid., 217-220.
18. Ibid., 113.
In the forthcoming book concerning her experience at Thomas More Institute
(where Lonergan often lectured), Dr. Charlotte Tansey uses the
"undertow" image, in its Lonergan context, to great effect.
19. Lonergan says that this is what can be understood about world process within the limits of empirical method (128), and according to a "metaphysics restricted to proportionate being"(633). It is a dynamism that a metaphysics transformed by knowledge of transcendent being knows to be a detailed and personalist design (665), incorporating the actual solution to the problem of evil (chaps. xix and xx of Insight).
20. For example, the "generic" account notes: "Schemes with high probabilities of survival tend to imprison materials in their own routines. They provide a highly stable base for later schemes, but they also tend to prevent later schemes from emerging"(123). (That insight surely accords with our experience of development in our communities.)
21. As Lonergan says: Aristotle's physics would place us in a "compromising orbit."
22. I can still recreate for myself the shock of realization that, in an early Lonergan Workshop (Boston College), in answer to a question of mine, Lonergan was actually using the doing of theology as an instance of "movers" within world process. This suggestion I expect is amply illustrated by and in Robert Doran's Theology and the Dialectics of History (Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 1990).
23. We could add: "Or was he an
economist?", considering his early and late work in economic theory.
"Or political theologian?" This latter role began to be assigned to
him at the very end of his life and I was suspicious of it as
trying too hard to convince people of his "relevance." Ten years
later I re-read in a Latin American context the Insight Preface and was
overwhelmed by the exact analysis it gave of the situation around me as this is
perceived by citizens. See especially p. xiv and the passage quoted above.
As to teaching on mysticism: I was struck at my first study of Insight by what I thought of as an
"agnostic" approach to it. ("What a mystic experiences, I do not
know" [324]; that experience is dealt with elsewhere in the book.) But
when Method came out after the first uncertain years following lung
cancer surgery, I wondered about the fuller presentation of mystical experience
in it (the "mediated return to immediacy"; the "undertow";
etc.). I thought I had found an impersonal and theoretical way of asking him
about the difference and did so in an after-lecture conversation (not
private). But he smoked out my meaning and boomed: "Do you mean: has my
religious experience changed?" "Yes," I squeaked.
"No," was the answer.
24. Method, 243.
25. I was interested to see this same point made by a Dominican nun of my community in her argument in favor of study in contemplative religious life. (Essay on study and contemplation, Theological Formation Program, U..S. Dominican Nuns.)
26. Cf. B. Lonergan, The Question of
God and Philosophy (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1973).
In the last dozen years I have noticed among the early students and collaborators of Lonergan a greater prominence of
the doctrine of the Trinity (in their writing about the "inner" and
"outer" word, for example) ─ with notable ecumenical relevance.
27. This idea throws light also on the choice we made of a monastic environment, and on the importance of our careful tinkering to improve it. And it is in this factual sense that nuns can be said to be among those who have chosen an environment of "God-talk," that is, as cultural fact rather than as preference somehow denigrating other environments.
28. There were insights about myth early in Eric Voegelin's Order and History (Baton Rouge, La.: U. of Louisiana Press, five volumes) that seemed needed to fill out Lonergan's presentation in Insight. (Since Lonergan was a reader of Voegelin, it was a fine moment when they came together for the symposium The Question as Commitment [ed. E. Cahn, Montreal: Thomas More Institute, 1979].) Although Lonergan developed his treatment of "myth" in later work, it is by no means only pejorative in Insight. Explicitly not so.
29. Note 5 (p.19).
30. Cf. recent Lonergan Workshop papers (Boston College), usually published.
31. In Matt. 55,5; PG 58, 547, quoted by A. Louf in Cistercian Studies VII, 1 (1972): 74.
32. B. Lonergan, "Mission and the Spirit," in A Third Collection, ed. F. Crowe (N.Y.: Paulist Press, 1985), 32-33.