Summary

    Voegelin’s important distinction between Israel’s paradigmatic and pragmatic history returns in full force under the Deuteronomic Torah. We are reminded again that when the people of Israel were constituted as the Chosen People under the Sinaitic Covenant in Exodus a “leap in being” occurred. As such, Israel was differentiated from the compactness of the cosmological civilizations, and under this paradigmatic experience, God became divinely transcendent. This “inner form of existence” under God experienced as a leap in being survives and carries Israel through the recession and despair of its own idolatry, rebellion, and disobedience. Despite the deep level of corruption and idolatry under Manasseh, King of Judah, recorded in 2 Kings 21, the discovery of the Deuteronomic Torah by Manasseh’s 2nd successor Josiah and his immediate and complete repentance and institutionalized reform held hope of restoration of true order in Israel’s pragmatic history.

But, the compactness of Israel’s identity as a collective people under God in history prevented openness to the spiritual universalism that Yahweh was the one God of mankind, and that the history of Israel was world history. A further differentiation of the individual soul under God did not occur for Israel as it did in Hellenic philosophy.  An explanation why is the Deuteronomic Torah.

According to Voegelin, the Deuteronomic Torah is the symbol in which the spirit of the prophets blended with the Judaite will of collective existence. The universal monotheistic God of Israel was contained by the words of Moses. Apparently written during the late 7th century B.C., Deuteronomy was the new Torah found and made public by Josiah in 622 B.C. Instead of the words of Yahweh spoken to Moses at Sinai, the book of the covenant, or Deuteronomy, were the words of Moses recounting what happened at Sinai and Israel’s subsequent history before entering the promised land. Moses’ authorship of Deuteronomy is a myth of political order, because, of course, Moses could not write a book about his own death. While Exodus is about the paradigmatic event of Moses and the people being spoken to directly by Yahweh creating the “inner form” of existence, Deuteronomy contains the words of Moses telling the people about their own history of the Exodus, covenant, and desert experience. Voegelin does not see this as a relapse in being into cosmological myth, but he interprets the Deuteronomic Torah as mythical in the sense that the immediate existence under God is broken by the mediation of a fictitious author of the Torah. This Torah of Moses is not the living constitution of Israel, but a myth by which Moses attempts to reconstitute Judah who is falling into Sheol. The depth of the fall from true order is such that the people have the capacity to respond to only an artifice, not the real source of being in the Sinaitic covenant.

The effect of this myth is twofold. First, Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy was not discredited until the 20th century, and second, holding onto the myth of Moses supported the bible as the “word of God.” In actuality, then, the problem with the Deuteronomic Torah was ignored for centuries, but now it has come to light. That problem is that the Deuteronomic Torah changed the inner form of existence under God qua the Sinaitic Covenant to existence under God in the form of written law. The Deuteronomic Torah transformed the “word of God’ into the words of Moses. Voegelin earlier observed that: “The “nature of Israelite compactness can be summarized, therefore, as a perpetual mortgage of the world-immanent, concrete event on the transcendent truth that on its occasion was revealed.” (164) This mortgage occurs when the historical circumstances of revelation are given the authority of the word itself, and made permanent because the concrete events become the content of revelation, rather than its context. The instructions of Yahweh become permanent regulations suppressing the inner form of existence to a life of law.

In other words, the historical context of God’s revelation to Israel has become the content of revelation ending the narrative history of Israel. This added content is both the Book of the Covenant of Deuteronomy 5 and 12 consisting of Yahweh’s words and the ordinances spoken by the prophets in 9th century B.C., and the later regulations applicable to kings, priests, and prophets of the Kingdom of Judah in 7th century B.C.  As such, Deuteronomy is a symbol of the border between the original order of Israel as the inner form of existence and the Jewish community. Despite the flattening of the life of the spirit by the instantiation of the leap of being into a written law book, the living order of Israel endured, and Deuteronomy became the symbol of Jewish communal existence and preservation of the Sinaitic tradition. However, that tradition is Law and Prophets for a particular ethnic-religious community, a contraction of the universal potential of the Sinaitic revelation to all mankind. Still, the survival of the Sinaitic tradition and the “positive communal consciousness” the Jews experienced from the negative aspects of religious warfare and the end of the Israel’s worldly existence, gave rise to the Old Testament and the “spirit” of Christianity.

One of the most provocative claims by Voegelin is the dating of Deuteronomy in 7th century B.C., and that Moses is not its author.

To understand a bit better what could be meant by saying that acts of understanding, by their very nature, always transcend material variables and conditions, one can verify the meaning of such a claim or, on the other hand, one can discover the meaning of such a claim, if, for instance, as a thought experiment, one moves into the theology of St. Augustine and one carefully reads and studies it in order to locate and identify some of St. Augustine's principal insights (insights as one finds these in the understanding which he evinces in his theology). For instance, if one takes St. Augustine's understanding of moral evil and sin, an understanding is offered which refers to moral evil and sin as the absence of any meaning or significance. Sin, evil is the absence of any kind of intelligibility. Sin, evil exists as a privation, as an absence of being. It is that which should not be. At times, in his texts, Bernard Lonergan refers to moral evil as a “false fact.” Hence, as one encounters understandings of this kind which cut across historical and cultural barriers, one realizes that, by their very nature, acts of understanding possess a degree of ahistoricity. Yes, they are conditioned by their circumstances of origin and emergence but, no, they are not determined by the influence of these same circumstances. An act of understanding is one thing. A proffered conceptualization is another. Acts of understanding exist in a self-transcending kind of manner and this self-transcendence explains why they can be enjoyed by any person who experiences degrees of self-transcendence in one's own life through the acts of understanding which one may happen to have.

In looking back into the theological tradition, it can be admitted that an insight or an act of understanding can be expressed in the words and the language of an inadequate philosophy. The conceptuality which is employed might not be too sound or accurate. Misleading connotations can be suggested. Witness, for example, how St. Augustine speaks about human judgment in a manner which relies on Platonic cognitional conceptions. One knows a truth by contemplating or by looking at a set of higher eternal reasons which, in some way, one sees or beholds from a distance. From the context of a lower viewpoint, one ascends or looks upwards toward some kind of higher viewpoint that is given or beheld by a seeing which now occurs within one's mind. Cf. Lonergan, Verbum, p. 85. In the kind of language which Augustine uses, in our human knowing one does not simply believe or hold to what one's bodily eyes may see since “what is not so seen is more truly seen, for what is [physically] seen belongs to time, but what is seen with the mind and soul belongs to eternity.” Cf. Augustine, Tractatus de Mysteriis, nos. 8-16, as cited by Matthew Lamb, Eternity, Time, and the Life of Wisdom (Naples, Florida: Sapientia Press, 2007), pp. 32-33.

When speaking about his own analysis, Augustine refers to a process of self-reflection which leads him to speak about a cognitional movement which he finds within the depths of his soul (a cognitional movement that takes him from instances of sensible experience to instances of intelligible experience as this is given to him through lightning flashes or quick glimpses that suddenly and unexpectedly reveal the presence and workings of a higher “intelligible and intelligent light.” Cf. Lamb, p. 32. As Augustine had noted in his Confessions: although the mind “generates all images,” it is not itself an image. It possesses a “totally different nature.” It exists as a “spiritual presence or light” which is able to know that what is real is not to be identified with what exists as a body. Cf. Confessions, 7, 1, as cited by Lamb, p. 32; 7, 1-13, as cited by Lamb, n. 16, p. 35. The human mind exercises a specific causality of its own and in a manner which verifies a traditional maxim (in the words which Leibniz uses to express this maxim): “there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself.” Cf. Loemker, G. W. Leibniz 556, as cited and quoted by Tim Lynch, “Human Knowledge: Passivity, Experience, and Structural Actuation: An Approach to the Problem of the A Priori,” Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 17 (Spring 1999): 77.

In the words of Augustine's conceptuality, in the human knowledge of any truth, a “changing mind” is contrasted with what never changes. It is changed by “unchanging, eternal truth.” Tentative acts of understanding, to the degree that they exist as true acts of understanding, are all grounded in eternal reasons which, in Augustine, are to be regarded as first principles although, in the conceptuality of his language, Augustine does not speak about first principles, “first principles” being a designation which Aquinas uses in order to speak (in a more differentiated manner) about grounding acts of sense and intellect (acts of sense and intellect which function as the first principles of one's human cognition in all its subsequent acts). Acts of human reason are normed by fundamental laws of thought that govern how one's mind can rationally move from one proposition or thought to another proposition or thought without risk of contradiction. Through this kind of approach, however, which moves from Augustine to Aquinas, a transposition is effected which allows one to move from the philosophy of mind present in Augustine to the philosophy of mind present in Aquinas (in a manner which transcends what differences may exist). The context is a prolongation or a continuity which is to be adverted to and which exists more profoundly and more deeply than the existence of any difference.

By way of the understanding which Aquinas brings to his discussion, the eternal reasons of Augustine undergo a kind of shift because of how they are being interpreted. In Aquinas, they come to exist as a set of cognitive first principles that one normally observes as fundamental precepts whenever one is engaged in good cognitive praxis in one's human cognition. By an analysis that speaks about first principles and different kinds of first principles, the eternal reasons of St. Augustine receive an articulation which adds to what is known about them as one thinks about how they were understood by St. Augustine. Or, if one wants to speak in another way about the kind of change that is occurring here, one can say that Aquinas's analysis unpacks a meaning for eternal reasons which, perhaps, Augustine had been attempting in vain to identify and to spell out in the context of his theology. He could not do certain tasks too well with the kind of cognitional philosophy which he had inherited and which he was borrowing from the Platonic tradition in philosophy that was then prevalent in his day.

In Augustine's philosophy of mind, one finds that human knowing does not exist as some kind of simple, single act which is to be equated with a philosophy of mind which thinks about knowing in terms of a simple act of intuition. Augustine's distinctions with respect, for instance, to the difference between “understanding and judging, conception and truth” all point to a philosophy of cognition which realizes that human knowing exists as an ordered structure of different kinds of acts which are all necessarily related to each other. Cf. Lamb, n. 12, p. 34. Not only, on the one hand, does the human mind have a nature which differs from that which belongs to acts of sense but, on the other hand, it has to be said that the human mind has a nature which points to a number of different operations that cannot all be reduced to each other. If, for instance, one looks at how, in the De Trinitate 15, 11, n. 20, Augustine distinguishes an inner or mental word (a word which exists as a concept) from words which exist as audible sounds and from words which exist as remembered, imagined audible sounds (an “inner word” is other; it exists as the term of rational or mental operations), then one finds evidence which indicates that, in Augustine, beyond sensible activities and operations, one can find operations that point to a higher level of cognitive activity which is specifically mental, rational, or intellectual. One kind of operation accounts for images; another, for concepts. Cf. Crowe, “Some Background Notes to Lonergan's Insight,” Lonergan and the Level of Our Time, p. 18; p. 25.

In conclusion then, as these examples may well thus illustrate and perhaps demonstrate, acts of understanding function as privileged points of access for anyone who is interested in moving into the understanding and wisdom which has come down to us from earlier developments in philosophy and theology. The intellectuality or the spiritual character which belongs to acts of understanding explains why, through later acts of understanding which other persons can have, a person in one age and time can begin to enter the mind and soul of other human beings who have lived in earlier ages and times and who have yet also truly enjoyed acts of understanding which have united them to a world of real objects – a world which exists whether or not it is known by any given human being through human acts of understanding and judgment.

Summary by Joanne Tetlow

Ambiguity exists in the symbols of Israelite history. According to Voegelin, the compactness of the cosmological myth holding together Israel’s community prevented a “leap in being” prompted by the Yahwist prophetic experience. Particularist beliefs as a Chosen People always thwarted the universal impulse inspired by the Prophets. The tension between the particular and universal is part of Israelite history as a symbol of revelation.

The trail of symbols begins with Yahweh’s covenant with Abram in Genesis 15 preceded by the battle between Mesopotamian and Canaanite kings in which Abram rescues his nephew Lot from Sodom. The blessing of Abram by Melchizedek, the priest analogized to Christ in the book of Hebrews, is interpreted by Voegelin as a priest-king, or El Elyon, representing Baal. By later rejecting the loot offered by the King of Sodom, Abram shows his belief in Yahweh. Politically, Abram is subject to the political compacts of the Canaanite system; however, this changed by God’s covenant with Abram. Referring to the covenant, Voegelin states that, “The symbol of bondage has become the symbol of freedom.”  A “leap in being” occurs within Abram; he is now called Abraham. The Abrahamic covenant stands in contrast to the cosmological compactness of Canaanite civilization. Covenant, not kingdom, predominates the biblical narrative as the former is permanent while the latter is temporary vanishing during the 8^th century B.C. when kingdom is destroyed by the Assyrians.

In further tracing Israel’s development prior to the Davidic kingdom, Voegelin identifies three events whose symbols represented a movement away from compactness toward differentiation: (1) the Deborah Song; (2) Gideon as a form of kingship; and (3) the Samuel-Saul relation.

After the conquests of Joshua, pockets of the promised land remained unconquered. This fact and the constant threat of foreign enemies put the Israelite confederacy under serious pressure. Since the Israelite Confederacy was not a political organization with a military, Yahweh did not have the resources to fight holy wars.  Deborah’s Song in Judges is a symbol of Yahweh’s power to deliver the Jews from Canaanite attack, and shows a break with the cosmological myth. Yahweh revealed himself as the source of true order, since there was no human mediator to “transform the cosmic into social order.” Yahweh fought holy wars in defense of his people against aggressors, not against other gods. Voegelin notes that Israel’s history follows a double course: God comes to the aid of his people waiting in passivity for his intervention, while Israel at certain times also engages as a politically organized people acting under the guidance of God. Throughout Israelite history, the people do not trust until after Yahweh has gained victory. The cycle of disobedience, idolatry, and bondage requiring Yahweh’s divine rescue from pagan domination is ongoing. Unfortunately, success in Canaan meant syncretism with foreign gods. By 1100 B.C., Israelites and Canaanites had formed a people in the same country. As a result, polygamy was adopted and became prevalent.

Following Deborah, Gideon served as a bridge figure who acted as the political form of a king setting the stage for national monarchy under Saul. The clan society was moving towards kingship. Voegelin notes especially Gideon’s institution of a “temple” as a new symbol of political order. It served as a cult center for the kingdom and the people. The problem, though, was that God became politicized. But, Yahweh was no Baal. According to Voegelin, “it was the Yahweh of Israel who, as a political god, put the first imperial stamp on Syriac civilization.” Yet, the theopolity created during the Israeli kings to keep the nation alive changed under the prophets, who became the representatives of true spiritual order. Under the Prophets, Yahweh was represented as the universal, nonpolitical, god who could create order in the soul moving the focus away from monarchy back to covenant.

Voegelin outlines two views of the rise of Saul, Israel’s first king: (1) royalist; and (2) antiroyalist. The royalist position holds that Yahweh instituted Saul’s monarchy, not the people or Saul himself. Yahweh anointed Saul, not Samuel, the priest. Yet, the prophets referred to were part of orgiastic cults revealing the influence of Baalic ecstatism into Yahwism—more evidence of Israelite syncretism. Later prophets opposed the monarchy and its support for a democratic spiritual experience, which adulterated a pure relation with God. Saul’s direct violation of his own ordinance not to consult other spirits by calling upon the witch of Endor to give him guidance on the eve of the battle of Gilboa represents a disordered soul. Unlike the Greek belief in various spirits working in the afterlife, Israel believed in a transcendent God who had imposed death. For the Greeks, immortality could perfect mortality, but for the Jews, only in life could the soul be ordered and perfected.

Thus, the state of the soul and salvation remained ambiguous for Israel. Voegelin analyzes two symbols representing the difference between the Hellenic and Israelite civilizations: (1) historical realism; and (2) development of philosophy. Despite Israel’s syncretism, it was predisposed against other cosmic spirits. That is why it developed the symbolic form of the History of the Patriarchs—real people as important figures who functioned in a similar manner as the cosmic spirits of Hellas. In fact, Isaiah writes that no man can help Israel, except Yahweh himself who will return into history and redeem his people. As the prophets spoke, the divide between God and man, and the secular nature of the world and suffering of life could only be resolved by the return of God into history. There were no cosmic-divine spirits to help.

Israel gained historical realism, but not philosophy. Voegelin attributes this to Israel’s compact experience of the soul through clans and tribes, not as individuals. The spirit of God is present in Israel’s community, “but it is not present as the ordering force in the soul of every man, as the Nous of the mystic-philosophers or the Logos of Christ is present in every member of the Mystical Body, creating by its presence the homonoia, the likemindedness of the community.” (240)  The spiritual relation of the individual soul to God self-interpreted is philosophy, and this was not possible for the Hebrews and the intramundane compactness of the tribe. Still, even though there was not philosophy, an Israelite humanism developed from the reality of a people formed under the existence of God providing a sensitivity and awareness to the importance of individuals in humanity.

Under the royalist version of Saul’s monarchy, theopolity is supported despite all of Israel’s problems with it, including the kings. Apparently, theopolity does not guarantee obedience to the covenant.

The second antiroyalist view of Saul’s monarchy is interpreted as the people’s rejection of Yahweh and his rule over them as a king in a theopolity. It was the people, not Yahweh, who instituted kingship. Voegelin notes the paradigmatic symbol of Samuel and Saul, or the spiritual and temporal control over politics. Samuel warns the people of changing from judges to a king, one that replaces the divine King. Obedient to God’s command, Samuel as priest anoints Saul as king. Now that Israel has a king apparently blessed by God, is theopolity undermined by a royal institution? Does the antiroyalist position resolve the theocratic problem? Is a temporal polity (national monarchy) indirectly under Yahweh an advance toward differentiation and spiritual order? Is politics spiritual or temporal, or both? Israel’s pragmatic history reveals that monarchy did not last. Voegelin points to the individual experience of the transcendent God as a differentiating event. No institution, church or state, mediates this experience of the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenants. If that is the case, a direct relation to Yahweh is the objective. Thus, Israel’s monarchy, while politically necessary, was not paradigmatic.  It is the covenant that is eternal and universal as spoken by the Prophets, and as revealed in Scripture. God is the direct ruler and king in a theopolity over Israel; the differentiation, or leap in being, occurs when God becomes the universal, nonpolitical God to the individual soul.

In the De Trinitate, 10, 3, 12, St. Augustine distinguishes between two kinds of presence (which have been interpreted as two kinds of object). A first kind refers to something which exists as the terminus or term of a cognitional act (whether one speaks about an act of sense or an act of reason). As Augustine notes, this is the kind of presence which exists if one sees one's face in a mirror. One's face, as seen in a mirror, is experienced as an object, an external object. It exists cognitionally as an other. It is other than one's act of cognition although it also exists as the term of one's cognitive act. A second kind of presence or object, however, refers to an experience of self-presence. As Lonergan translates the wording of Augustine’s discussion as he cites Augustine's text in The Incarnate Word, p. 182: “But when it is said to the mind: ‘Know yourself,’ then it knows itself in the very act in which it understands the word ‘yourself’; and it knows itself for no other reason than that it is present to itself.” In his Summa Contra Gentiles 3, 46, 8, Aquinas refers to this insight of St. Augustine: “And so, according to Augustine’s meaning, our mind knows itself through itself, in so far as it knows concerning itself, that it is. Indeed, from the fact that it perceives that it acts it perceives that it is. Of course, it acts through itself, and so, through itself, it knows concerning itself that it is.” On the basis of the kind of wording used, Augustine and Aquinas do not speak directly about consciousness although, if one refers to how Lonergan talks about these two kinds of presence as they were known by Augustine and Aquinas, he refers to presence by way of a transposition which speaks about consciousness and the existence of different theories about consciousness. Presence, the presence of something suggests a metaphysics; consciousness, an understanding of cognition.

Before venturing into a more specific explanation that one might allude to in the context of Lonergan's work and interests, an historical note helps us understand why, for instance, Augustine and Aquinas did not explicitly speak about consciousness and self-consciousness (as we directly speak of these things and as Lonergan also speaks of them). Owen Barfield’s History in English Words (Inner Traditions International, April 1986), pp. 169-171, looks at the vocabulary of the “self” and notes how developments in our concept of the human self (especially since the 16^th Century) have had fructifying consequences for developments in language so that we can now speak more precisely about the interior life of the human self in a manner which can distinguish between different parts and elements and which can also speak about the relations which also exist between different parts and elements. Citing one summary that speaks about this development (Fr. John Eudes Bamburger, “Retreat conference given at St. Anselm’s Abbey, Washington, DC,” August 22, 2009, unpublished):

Plato and other Greek philosophers had but a partial grasp of the concept of the self as we know it. Although the first glimmerings of the modern self appear in the High Middle Ages under the form of such words as the individual and the person yet it functions under many occult influences. It is only after the Reformation and especially at the end of the 16^th Century that such a series of words as self-consciousness, self-conceit, self-love, self-liking, self-command, self-esteem, self-knowledge, and other hyphenated forms of self appear. Descartes, in 1664, made the thinking self the source of knowledge and most philosophers since his time have assumed the same stance. It was shortly before this date that Locke…adopted the new word “consciousness” and defined it as “perception of what passes in a man’s own mind.” Coleridge was the first to use the term “self-conscious.”

In turning then to proximate reasons which can be identified in Lonergan's thought, because consciousness exists as a human experience which all persons can relate to and identify, it can be regarded as a fundamental point of departure for discussions which would want to move through consciousness to whatever can be known about a human subject. But, if Augustine and Aquinas speak about two kinds of presence or two kinds of object, they are referring to a metaphysical difference which translates into a cognitional difference that distinguishes between two notions of consciousness. The experience of one kind of object suggests a particular species of consciousness and the experience of another kind of object, another species of consciousness. But, without a clear understanding of differences, one will not understand how these two notions or two kinds of consciousness are ordered to each other and how one species of consciousness conditions another. One will not understand why one cannot have one species of consciousness without also having the other. Difficulties in this area create problems for theology if an inappropriate notion of consciousness is employed as an analogy to find deeper meanings than that what is initially given through the proclamation of a revealed truth. The unity of God's being is not well understood if the unity of God's consciousness is not adequately fathomed, if its unity finds no echo in how we, as human beings, experience and find unity within the orientations that we find in our own consciousness. In Christology, Christ's incarnation and suffering death cannot be too well understood if it is not possible to argue that Christ's consciousness of self should be regarded as a precondition for a consciousness which refers to a consciousness of objects that is other than a consciousness of self as this is given in Christ's acts. Without this prior consciousness of self as this occurs through specific acts or by reason of specific, no consciousness of objects can be properly attributed to Christ's consciousness. On the cross, it cannot be said that Christ truly knew pain, that he truly suffered from any pains that were inflicted on him by the kind of death he suffered. Without a good understanding of consciousness that we each have as human beings, we cannot so easily join ourselves to Christ's consciousness in a manner which more fully joins us to the life of a divine being. The availability of our consciousness coupled with its malleability or changeability reveals a point of access which encourages forms of self-examination. We ask about the kind of person which we have become through our acts and we also ask about the kind of person which we can become through our acts. Through changes of consciousness, we can draw closer to God. We become more conscious about the depths of our interiority.

Theological Aspects of Bernard Lonergan’s “Method in Theology”* Giovanni B. Sala, S.J. Translated from Italian by Donald E. Buzzelli of Washington, D.C.

The Concept of the Transcendental in Kant and Lonergan. Delivered in Naples, Italy, March 8, 2008. Translated by Dr. Donald Buzzelli of Washington, D.C.

Philosophical Aspects of Bernard Lonergan’s “Method in Theology.” Originally published in Italian as “Aspetti filosofici del ‘Metodo in teologia’ di B. Lonergan,” in La civiltà cattolica, February 17, 1973, pp. 329-341. Giovanni B. Sala, S.J.  Translated by Dr. Donald Buzzelli of Washington, D.C.

Bernard Lonergan’s “Method in Theology.” Originally published in Italian as “`Il metodo in teologia’ di Bernard Lonergan,” in La civiltà cattolica, December 2, 1972, pp. 468-477. Translated by Dr. Donald Buzzelli of Washington, D.C.

The Metaphor of the Judge in the "Critique of Pure Reason" (B xiii f): A Key for Interpreting the Kantian Theory of Knowledge. Originally published in Universitas Monthly Review of Philosophy And Culture, n. 357 (vol. 31, n. 2) February 2004, pp. 13-35, and now published as an Internet edition with the author’s permission.  Donald E. Buzzelli of Washington, D.C. translated the original Italian into English to prepare it for publication.

The Experience of Being and the Horizon of Being. Originally published as Seinserfahrung und Seinshorizont nach E. Coreth und B. Lonergan, in Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 89 (1967) pp. 294-338. Translated from German into English by Mr. Roland Krismer of Innsbruck, Austria and Br. Dunstan Robidoux OSB of St. Anselm’s Abbey, Washington, DC.

The Drama of the Separation of Faith and Reason (Fides et Ratio). , Originally published as “Il dramma della separazione tra fede e ragione” in Per una lettura dell’Enciclica Fides et Ratio (Vatican City, Quaderni de “L’Osservatore Romano”: 1999), pp. 103-111. Translated by Donald E. Buzzelli.

Lonergan on the Virtually Unconditioned as the Ground of Judgment. (2001). Translated by Donald E. Buzzelli.

From Thomas Aquinas to Bernard Lonergan: Continuity and Novelty. Originally published in Italian as Da Tommasso d'Aquino a Bernard Lonergan: continuitá e novitá in Rivista di Teologia (Napoli) 36 (1995) 407-425.(This text has been translated by Donald Buzzelli).

Immediacy and Mediation in Our Knowledge of Being: Some Reflections on the Epistemologies of Emerich Coreth and Bernard Lonergan. (1972)  For a translator's introduction, click here. Originally published as Immediatezza e mediazione della conoscenza dell’essere: Riflessioni sull’epistemologia di E. Coreth e B. Lonergan, in Gregorianum 53 (1972) pp. 45-87. (This text has been translated by Donald Buzzelli).

Bernard J.F. Lonergan (1904-1984).  Originally published in Italian in G. Mura and G. Penzo (eds.), La Filosofia Cristiana nei Secoli XIX e XX, II: Ritorno all’Eredità Scolastica  (Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 1994), pp. 843-863. (This text has been translated by Donald E. Buzzelli).