Philosophical Aspects of Bernard Lonergan’s

“Method in Theology”*

         Giovanni B. Sala, S.J.  

        (Translated by Donald Buzzelli)

In a previous review,[1] I described the origins of the essay on theological method recently published by Bernard Lonergan, S.J., and I indicated its structure and contents.  I would now like to return to this subject in order to examine some philosophical and theological aspects of this work and attempt a deeper examination and an initial evaluation.  I shall begin with the philosophical elements.

 The epistemology on which “Method in Theology” is based

 In a “Note” that appeared in the journal Gregorianum in 1970, Karl Rahner objected that the extremely generic theological method proposed by Lonergan is established “from a general theory of science, perhaps of an Anglo-Saxon type.”[2]  By characterizing Method in Theology as generic, Rahner means to say that such a method “in itself applies to any science; it therefore is not a theological method as such, but only a very general method of science illustrated with examples taken from theology.”[3]  I propose to return to the part of this objection that claims that Method does not take into account the proprium of Christian theology, when I deal with the theological aspects of the book.  Here I point out that according to Rahner the theory of knowledge that Lonergan works with in his Method is a general theory of science; more precisely, of natural science.  Indeed, according to Rahner the chapters in the first part of the book (The Human Good, Meaning, Religion) that follow Chap. 1 (Method) present “evidently only some comparisons with the sciences of nature and with prescientific cognitive operations.”[4]

 This interpretation of the theory of knowledge that Lonergan developed in Insight and took up again in his most recent book seems to be rather widespread.  It is responsible, at least in part, for the perplexity and resistance that Insight has met with in recent years.  It is understandable that a student of the human sciences, and in particular a theologian, is not prepared to recognize in the various and conflicting “philosophies of science” a decisive relevance for the methods of the human sciences and, in our case, for theology.  Even more so if one keeps in mind the thoroughly fluid state of the sciences of nature and the resulting provisional character of any philosophy of science.

 Now, it is true that the first five chapters of Insight examine from up close the procedures of natural science and mathematics, and so they contain not a few ideas for a theory of the sciences of nature.  But it is not from this specific epistemology that Lonergan worked out his theological method.  In fact, just because the cognitive activities involved in science are the most articulated, and thus the best suited for analysis, Insight can examine them and conclude that there is a basic invariant and normative structure that operates in all human knowledge of reality.  This is the structure of experiencing, understanding, and judging.  This same structure is then rediscovered and clarified in the following chapters that deal with common sense, philosophy, the human sciences, and our natural knowledge of God.  Hence we must say that the triadic structure on which Lonergan’s whole epistemology is centered does not represent his theory of scientific knowledge—much less some unspecified “Anglo-Saxon” theory of science—but simply his theory of human knowledge.

 Through a study of knowledge in natural science, which is articulated and well differentiated in its phases, Lonergan succeeded in showing that human knowledge is always empirical, intelligent and rational, however indistinct and compressed in time these phases may be in other types of knowledge.  He systematically brought out (1) the grounding role of sense experience, (2) the genesis and the many forms of the act of understanding that emerges as a result of an inquiry into the data, (3) the function of the concept as a moment that synthesizes experience and understanding, (4) the critical phase of verification that occurs in a certain kind of experiment where a scientist compares the predictions derived from the hypotheses formulated in the concept with presented data, (5) the judgment as an absolute positing that gathers in itself the preceding phases and secures the knowledge of reality.

 This conclusion is taken up again in Chap. 1 of Method.  There Lonergan states that he is seeking the basic scheme or structure of our cognitive operations.  These are operations that are at once intentional and conscious.  They are intentional in that they “intend,” “tend toward” objects, which thereby become present psychologically to the operating subject.  They are conscious in that through them the subject is present to itself, not as another object alongside the objects of the intentional operations, but as the subject of the operations, as the one that intends in those operations.

 Through the objectification of these conscious operations, whether they be cognitive or appetitive, there come to light four different levels of consciousness and intentionality.  There is the empirical level, on which we sense, perceive, imagine, desire, in a way that in itself is not different from what happens in the higher animals.  But, while in animals this level constitutes their whole psychic life, for us humans it is only a stage in which data are presented for the action of an intentionality that is not only sensible, but also intelligent, rational, and moral.  By virtue of this intentionality we enter the state of tension, of perplexity, of dissatisfaction with the pure datum, that finds its expression in questions.  Now questions display an immanent order and connection: first they aim at understanding, then at reflecting on whether the understanding reached is correct, and finally at promoting our dynamism from mere knowing into deciding and acting.  We thus have the intelligent level, the rational level, and the responsible or moral level of consciousness.  Each of these levels presupposes the preceding one and takes over the object that the preceding one arrived at.  But it also goes beyond that object, passing from the pure datum to the intelligible, from the intelligible to the true and through the true to the real, and finally from the real to the rational good or value.  To speak of four distinct levels is to speak of four essentially different dimensions or expansions of one and the same intentionality.  Their difference consists in the different kinds of operations that consciousness performs at the various levels.  The attention of the sensibility is one thing; another is the intelligence that looks for an intelligible organization in the data; another is the rationality that through verification of the intelligible in the data tends toward the absolute of the true and the real; another, finally, is the responsibility by virtue of which we act as persons, seeking and actualizing the good in ourselves and in society.  Lonergan calls this scheme of intentional and conscious operations transcendental method.  It is a method because it is a normative scheme.  By following it one reaches knowledge of reality, and by not following it one does not.  It is transcendental because it refers to the whole range of reality.  Any other method is only a specific instance of the transcendental method, varying according to the different fields in which the mind operates.  Method is understood not as a set of rules to be followed invariably and, so to speak, automatically, with a view to always identical results, but as a way of arriving at new discoveries and at ever more comprehensive syntheses.  In every case, a method is a normative pattern of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and progressive results.[5]  Transcendental method is therefore indispensable for establishing and formulating the various scientific methods, since it is the method immanent in the human mind.  Insight can fairly be considered the thematization of this transcendental method, through—in an affirmative but not exclusive sense—the analysis of the methods of natural science.   

 What is universally valid is valid also for the method of theology.  This is for two reasons.  First, because the object of theology is not outside the transcendental sphere marked out by human intentionality, which is the sphere of being.  Second, because the theologian operates in his field according to the basic relations that constitute the transcendental method.  Certainly pursuing one of the functional specializations requires further combinations of operations that are not predetermined by the transcendental method alone.  But in no case does the theologian’s particular way of paying attention, understanding, judging, and deciding in one of these specializations imply a transition “from attention to inattention, from intelligence to stupidity, from reasonableness to silliness, from responsibility to irresponsibility.”[6]  Theological method must therefore take these levels of consciousness into account.  It is true that theological method requires a religious component of its own, over and above transcendental method and the methods of the human sciences.  But this does not annul the essential role of transcendental method, and thus of the general theory of knowledge, in any discussion of theological method.

 Lonergan employs the basic structure of consciousness to divide theology systematically into eight functional specializations.  Without one’s own personal appropriation of that structure, the whole second part of the method can only seem artificial.  It continually appeals to the structure of our knowing to decide what operations characterize the exegete, what are the problems of history, what the possibility is of reconciling the absolute truth of the revealed word with development in the Church’s dogmas, and so on.  This cannot have the same persuasive force that it has for someone who has discovered in his own experience the dynamism of which we are speaking.  Without that appropriation, Lonergan warns, not only the first chapter where he presents in summary form the epistemological teaching of Insight, but the whole book will be found “about as illuminating as a blind man finds a lecture on color.”[7]  

 In my earlier general discussion of Method I cited Lonergan’s presentation to a theological congress held in Toronto in 1967.  There Lonergan asserted that theology has turned from being deductivist to today being in large measure an empirical science.  But even this expression cannot be considered a confirmation of Rahner’s interpretation or of the similar one by Prof. Langdon Gilkey of the University of Chicago.  According to Gilkey, Lonergan is proposing that theology be conceived on the model of natural science.[8]  In fact, this analogy is decisively rejected by Lonergan.[9]  No doubt the contribution of natural science has been of inestimable value for every methodology.  The scientific practice of considering the intelligible to be nothing other than the relations of things to each other—relations grasped with the help of heuristic mathematical structures—has made it possible to give a very precise and verifiable sense to the intelligible itself.  The human sciences also have moved in the same direction, but in their own way: heuristic mathematical structures here lose some of their importance, while it becomes indispensable to invoke intentionality in order to grasp the kind of intelligibility characteristic of human reality, which is meaning.  Finally, theology in its first phase searches for the intelligible and the factual according to procedures that are accessible to everyone and under methodological precepts that are valid for both believers and non-believers.  Here one finds empirical investigation (in a generalized sense that includes the data of consciousness) of the same kind as in any human science that endeavors to recover the past.  But even in this phase “in interpreting texts and in resolving historical problems, one’s results are a function, not only of the data and the procedures, but also of the whole previous development of one’s understanding.”[10]  And this is all the more true in the second phase of theology where Lonergan demands that development of the subject that is the supernatural Christian horizon produced by conversion.

 With a bit of simplification we can say that in Method Lonergan tried to answer this question: if the syllogism is no longer the instrument princeps for doing theology, if Aristotle’s deductivist logic is no longer enough, what should be the instrument or the procedures of a theology today?  The answer does not consist in pointing out one scientific practice or other among those that have had the most success, because the more faithfully the theologian imitates such a practice, the less the intelligence and personal participation that are required of him.  It consists, rather, in placing the concrete subject at the center of methodical theology.  A subject that through introspection has realized what his intentionality is, an intentionality configured according to the various differentiations of consciousness on the basis of individual, communitarian, and historical components.  A subject aware that his ability to recognize facts and values is not independent of what he is intellectually, morally, and religiously.  Therefore what Lonergan proposes is a shift from the abstract logic of classicism to the concreteness of method.  “The basic idea of the method we are trying to develop takes its stand on discovering what human authenticity is and showing how to appeal to it.” [11]    

“Method in Theology” and the possibility of discourse about God

 It has been said from many sides that in Method in Theology we have a new Lonergan, or that Insight has been surpassed by what its author says fifteen years later.  No doubt, subjects like feelings, intersubjectivity, religious experience, and conversion are new in comparison with Insight.  In the post-Insight Lonergan there is an obvious tendency to consider the most concrete aspects and the existential components of human reality.  Very realistically, but quite simply, this means that even after giving the printer a work destined to become a classic in philosophy, its author did not cease to think and thus to move forward.

 In Insight Lonergan had proposed only one task for himself: to enable the reader to come to grips with the dynamism and immanent laws of empirical, intelligent, rational, and moral consciousness through the analysis of knowledge in mathematics, in physics, in common sense, and in philosophy, and thereby to bring the reader to what he calls intellectual conversion.  This conversion consists in realizing that the real, what is true and solid, is nothing other than the intelligible, and that we reach knowledge of the real (or contact with the real, if one wishes to put it so) by nothing but the apparently impalpable act of rational assent.[12]  To this critical realist position on knowledge and reality there corresponds the position on free choice and its objective, which is the rational good or value.  According to the ethics of Insight, which integrates its epistemology with its metaphysics, value is the object of a rational choice.  And what rational means is the subject Lonergan has labored over for 800 pages.   

 In Insight, Lonergan clarified what human knowledge is in its basic structure, and what virtuous choice and thus authentic human life consist in; he thereby cleared the terrain of false assumptions and pseudo-problems.  This enabled him to move to a consideration of employments and features of this intentionality from which Insight had abstracted.    

 I would like to continue the examination of the philosophical elements in Method in Theology by showing how, precisely with the position worked out in Insight, one might develop a discourse about God that is objective and rational.  

An objective discourse about God

 First of all, then, a kind of knowledge is possible in which God is known as object.  In man there clearly exists a primordial intersubjective phase, prior to its objectification in thinking, judging, speaking, choosing, and acting.[13]  Without this primordial phase, our subsequent thinking, judging, speaking of the other and to the other, and our responsible behavior toward him, would not be possible.  But to think of the other, to tell him something, to act with him and on him, is to go beyond the phase of pure subjectivity with its corporeal, sensible, and affective component.  It is to understand and conceive, to reflect and judge, to deliberate and decide.  Here the other inevitably becomes object.  The undifferentiated unity of subjects previously expressed in a vital “we” is overcome, and these subjects are distinguished objectively.  Now this overcoming of intersubjectivity does not imply an objectification of the person in the damaging sense of “thingification,” unless one is imprisoned in the assumptions of naïve realism.

 The concept of the object that characterizes naïve realism is certainly inadequate for expressing the reality of the person, and a fortiori the reality we call God.  This is because that concept is inadequate even for subhuman reality.  As Lonergan explains, a being in the material world is not a “body.”  By “body” he means the focal point of extroverted biological anticipation and attention.  The body of naïve realism is an “already out there now real,” where these terms have their meaning fixed solely by elements within sense experience and so without the intervention of intelligent and reasonable questions and answers.  It is the object of the immediacy of sense, i.e., of a relation prior to and independent of questions and answers.[14]  Hence the world of naïve realism should be characterized as a-problematic.  In opposition to this conception of an object, Insight holds that a material being, like any being, is the objective of our intentionality.  It is what we know by posing questions about the data of sense and correctly answering those questions.  There is therefore another meaning of the word “object”: that which belongs to the world mediated by meaning, that which we reach to the extent that we transcend ourselves with true knowledge and honest love. 

 From this position it is possible to move to an objective discourse about the person whom I encounter and treat as a person.  If subhuman objects are not “bodies,” persons are much less so.  My objective encounter with persons happens to the extent that I am attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible.  Here data are presented to me in the intersubjective situation, and I understand them through a hermeneutic turning to the data of my own consciousness: the intelligibility of the other is revealed to me as an intelligent intelligibility, its groundedness is revealed as the groundedness of human consciousness in its ontological status as a reality open to the universe of being, its degree of goodness is revealed as that of a value that is an end in itself and never purely a means.  Far from debasing the person into a thing, objective knowledge recognizes the person’s dignity and value, and provides the indispensable basis for treating it as in fact a person, as a source of intelligibility and an autonomous center of decision.

 What is true of our encounter with the human person is no less true of our encounter with God.  The question of God, as we read in Chap. 4 of Method, arises from our conscious intentionality in its tending toward a total intelligibility, an unconditioned foundation, an ultimate holiness. 

 “Such is the question of God.  It is not a matter of image or feeling, of concept or judgment.  They pertain to answers.  It is a question.  It rises out of our conscious intentionality, out of the a priori structured drive that promotes us from experiencing to the effort to understand, from understanding to the effort to judge truly, from judging to the effort to choose rightly.  In the measure that we advert to our own questioning and proceed to question it, there arises the question of God.”[15]  To say that God can be an object for man is to assert “that God lies within the horizon of man’s knowing and doing, that religion represents a fundamental dimension in human living.”[16]

 Theological discourse presupposes this objective knowledge of God.  Without it, not only would there be an unbridgeable distance between the God of the philosophers and the God of Biblical revelation, but also a total irrelevance of the God of theology to the God of religious experience.

A rational discourse about God

 While Method in Theology implies the possibility of an objective discourse about God, it also presupposes the validity of a rational discourse about God.  In Insight Lonergan worked out a rational notion of reality: the real is the objective of our intelligent and rational intentionality, and therefore is intrinsically intelligible.  The move from proportionate being to transcendent being occurs when we ask the further question of what the conditions are that make possible the intelligibility of proportionate being.  Or, under a different aspect, when we ask how the answers that satisfy our intelligence and rationality go beyond purely subjective satisfaction and enable us to know the universe of being.[17]  Taking up again what he said in Chap. XIX of Insight, Lonergan asks:

 “Could the world be mediated by questions for intelligence if it did not have an intelligent ground?  Could the world’s facticity be reconciled with its intelligibility, if it did not have a necessary ground?  Is it with man that morality emerges in the universe so that the universe is amoral and alien to man, or is the ground of the universe a moral being?  Such questions invite answers and, as the questions intend, so too the answers can reveal an intelligent, necessary, moral ground of the universe.”[18] 

 This way of formulating the question of God occurs in a certain context.  We affirm that since the being proportionate to us is intrinsically intelligible, it is necessarily linked to a totally intelligible transcendent being.  This transcendent being explains both itself and the universe, a universe that by itself would not be intelligible and thus would not be.  The context in which we do this is the de jure context of Insight.  In that context Lonergan maintains that arguments exist that are objectively valid and in themselves accessible to the human mind, and that these arguments lead to the affirmation of the existence of God.  All that is required is a subject that has arrived at intellectual conversion, so that it can grasp reflectively the validity of the above demonstration—a demonstration to which one can reduce the various other rational ways that lead to God.

 But Method in Theology sees discourse about God in its de facto context.  Lonergan is not content with the de jure assertion that, because of the intrinsic intelligibility of the real, a rational and objectively valid path exists by which the human mind, by virtue of its immanent laws, can pass from proportionate being to transcendent being.  He also asks how and when man succeeds in following this path.[19]  In this de facto context, the conditions of inauthenticity in which man finds himself are kept in view.  The problem of evil, which had been sketched in a general way in the last chapter of Insight, here is seen specifically in connection with the knowability and acceptance of God on the part of man.  To affirm that God exists is not simply to recognize a reality over and above the world of experience.  It is to recognize the total and unquestionable meaning of all reality and, in the first place, of human existence.  It is to accept all reality as meaningful and good and to make a decision in which our very life is involved.  Hence man cannot seriously pose the question of God unless he is willing to submit to a difficult and prolonged effort of reflection.  He will not in fact arrive at evidence sufficient for the yes of rational judgment: Deus est, except through a free decision by which he adheres to the universe of value.

 Now, our ego bears in itself a problem of evil, in that it is spontaneously centered on itself and attached to itself.  Hence its unreserved adherence to value does not occur without the intervention of God.  In this connection Lonergan quotes a passage from Pascal: Console-toi, tu ne me chercherais pas, si tu ne m’avais trouvé.[20]  This letting himself be found even before we seek him is, on God’s side, love and grace.  On man’s side it is faith.  Grace places us in an interpersonal relationship with God as subject to subject, and gives us the primary and fundamental meaning of the mystery of God.[21]  The human spirit’s natural openness to the transcendent makes possible the gift of God’s love.  By virtue of that openness and that grace we are effectively able to develop a rational and objective knowledge of God.

 In the de facto context of Method, the order in which the various stages of conversion follow one another is therefore reversed.  There is no longer the logical order considered in Insight, according to which God is reached at the end of an expansion of our dynamism that moves from the true to the good, and from there to the infinitely true and holy reality of God.  Instead, there is the factual order: from God’s sovereign and merciful initiative in religious conversion to its realization in a corresponding moral life and, eventually, to the reordering of one’s reflective criterion of reality and objectivity in intellectual conversion.[22]  The epistemological position of Insight is therefore recognized as valid, but at the same time the conditions of its effective operation are kept in view.  Man’s conversion to God, which takes place through God’s initiative, is the cause of man’s seeking to know God. 

 From what has been said, we can explain why Lonergan apparently was so careless in Method about the preliminary question of whether discourse about God is meaningful and possible.  And this, be it noted, after the great blast of wind called “death of God theology” had passed over the field of theology.  It may be surprising that Lonergan set out to reflect on how one can develop a systematic discourse about God which he inserts into the present-day cultural context without, it seems, ever asking whether such a discourse is possible and makes sense.

 Lonergan has taken a position on “death of God theology” only once, in a 1967 review of Leslie Dewart’s book The Future of Belief.[23]  The interesting thing about this review is that it indicates where, according to Lonergan, the real problem lies, and it lets us understand his indifference to an earthquake that seemed to shake the edifice of theology to its foundations.  For Lonergan, the problem, in first instance, is not discourse about God, but discourse about man.  Therefore, to Dewart’s hypothesis of a faith of the future that is mature enough to assert “God does not exist,” Lonergan poses a counter-question not about God, but about Dewart: Has Dewart ever asked himself how he arrives at a rational judgment, any one at all, and what he operatively and unrenounceably intends as a human being when he makes a rational affirmation?

 In brief: Affirming goes beyond mere thinking, though it presupposes thinking.  It presupposes knowledge of something as possible because it is intelligible, i.e., an object of our intelligent conception.  But, in order for us to know whether this intelligible exists or not, affirming also requires that the intelligible expressed in the concept rise to the level of the virtually unconditioned, which is the conditioned whose conditions are satisfied.  Here being [i.e., verified intelligibility] and not being are the same as real and not real.  The question now arises: Is it possible for us to stop at the virtually unconditioned?  Or, instead, is our need to seek the virtually unconditioned before we can pronounce a judgment at its root a need for the formally unconditioned, for what is absolute not merely de facto, but essentially, i.e., without any conditions at all?  This argument for God rests on two foundations.  First, on the Parmenidean principle that the possible object of thought is identified with possible being.  Second, on rational judgment as the criterion of reality.  Now the first principle is denied by Dewart, while the second one seems to be terra ignota, judging from Dewart’s silence about it.  In place of rational judgment he has the reassuring sense of a “felt” reality.  On that basis, being turns out to be irrelevant to the real, while the judgment(!) that God does not exist, or exists beyond being, seems quite justified.   

 What for others are disturbing, unresolved, or even insoluble problems are, for Lonergan, resolvable and already resolved.  How?  Through the vast analysis, so closely fitted to our modern cultural context, of Insight.  For others, experience, knowledge, concept, affirmation, idea, and notion, indicate more or less the same thing, i.e., something confused from which anything might be derived, according to how it is taken.  For Lonergan, these and still other terms concerning knowledge have very precise meanings that are not at all interchangeable.  And this is not by virtue of a more or less conventional series of definitions, but through an introspective analysis that has brought out the multiple components of human knowledge and their interconnections.      

 This analysis leads to an exact determination of the end products and the objects of our conscious intentional operations.  But even more, it leads to an understanding of consciousness itself in its characteristic operations.  Discourse about God thus is presented not as a metábasis eis allo génos, but as seeking, conceiving, affirming, and adhering to the one toward whom our intentionality is essentially directed.  But since the question is natural while its adequate answer is supernatural, Lonergan has called this directedness a “paradox.”[24]  Discourse about God through philosophical reasoning is the search for the ultimate answer to a question that naturally arises for us.  It proceeds from the gift of God’s love that orients our spirit toward itself and thus provides a basis for the non-objective operative meaning that the transcendent mystery has for us.  In it is revealed the intelligible (which does not mean necessary) unity of the present historical order of nature and supernature, of sin and grace, of reason and faith.

 Lonergan recognizes the fundamental role of religious experience.  But through his intentionality analysis he also maintains the legitimacy and, for a differentiated consciousness, the necessity, of objectifying the state of other-worldly love of which God is the author.  We need to speak in a human way of the mystery that sustains us, to communicate our faith to others, to live it in a community, and thereby to choose the course of our life.  In this way, the God who through grace is at the center of our hearts can come to affect all the visible aspects of human life.  The philosophical analysis of Insight, taken up again in Method, is designed to disclose man’s condition as the hearer of an absolutely transcendent word.  As such, he is able, if God sees fit to reveal his mystery, to engage with God in a theological discourse whose fundamental meaning is no longer given by man’s natural question, but by God’s anticipatory answer.