|
preface
|| intro || 1
|| 2
|| 3
|| 4
|| 5 || 6 ||
7 || 8 || 9 ||
10 || 11 || 12
|| Conclusion
Transforming Light
INTRODUCTION
I met Bernard Lonergan for the first time in the fall of
1960 soon after I arrived in Rome to study for the priesthood. At
that time Lonergan was fifty-six years old, a Jesuit professor of
theology at the Gregorian University. The first time I caught a
glimpse of him was in one of the Roman restaurants, Il Buco,
where some of the older American students had invited him for a
meal. He seemed to enjoy it, but he also seemed to be a quiet
retiring man.
But my major exposure came in the classroom. There I
listened for two years as Lonergan's pronounced English-Canadian
twang combined with a classical Latin in an effort to bring some
light to the Christian mysteries of the Trinity and the
Incarnation. To this day some graduates of the North American
College in Rome bring howls of laughter to their confreres by
imitating Lonergan's sing-song Latin cadences.
There were about six hundred of us from all over the world
in the great aula of the Gregorian, and so - by tradition and
necessity - the only pedagogical method was the lecture. Years
later Lonergan referred to those teaching conditions as
"impossible:" so many people from many different countries
listening to a professor lecturing in Latin about the mystery of
the Trinity! (1)
And it was obvious that Lonergan was definitely over the
heads of most of us. Only the bravest students - and there were
a few - approached the brilliant professor outside the classroom
to quiz him on his exact meaning. Those who did so, and followed
out his thought, seemed to be "caught" by something.
But the rest of us were not sure what that "something" was.
The name of his 785-page philosophical work, Insight: A Study of
Human Understanding, was on our horizon and many of us at least
owned our own copy. But in the midst of the many classroom and
seminary demands, few of us had broached it. I remember at one
point getting lost in the introduction!
It was the early 1960's and Rome was an exciting place. Many
Catholic theologians were making the headlines in the world's
newspapers and new subjects and topics were in vogue. Historical
studies, especially Scripture and patristics, liturgical studies,
various types of psychology, were all becoming the focus of
interest. And of course, it was the time for "involvement," the
American Peace Corps, and (welcome relief!) pastoral work
outside of the seminary. "The Church in the world," with a
concern for issues of social justice, was just beginning to
emerge into our consciousness.
During the summer of 1964, after my ordination in Rome and
my return to the United States, I was asked by my bishop to
return to Rome in the fall to study philosophy in preparation for
teaching in the local seminary. At the time I wondered whether I
might not be compromising my "activist" principles in agreeing to
this use of my time. And indeed, I wondered whether there was
anything to philosophy at all. The neo-scholastic philosophy
that we had been taught in our early seminary days seemed quite
discredited and its vocabulary not just significantly absent from
the documents of Vatican II, but rapidly disappearing from the
horizon of most Catholics. In its place, personalist categories
had entered into our vocabulary. The documents of Vatican II
were purposely couched in the non-scholastic and interpersonal
language of the Bible. (2)
Nevertheless, in spite of misgivings, I agreed to the study
of philosophy. As a graduate student, I had much more time to
follow out my own interests, and the encouragement of the people
I trusted pointed me in the direction of Lonergan. One was a
classmate from seminary days, David Tracy, now a well known
teacher and writer at the University of Chicago. But there were
others as well intently studying Lonergan's thought.
I spent a good part of one whole year working through
Insight. In a little room at the back of the library of the Casa
Santa Maria, the graduate house of the American College, I spent
day after day poring over that book. I often remember studying
as the lights dimmed in the early evening when Rome's electric
power was especially taxed - a fitting symbol, I thought, of the
search for enlightenment.
I was reminded of the pain and effort in reading Insight
when I read the story George Huntston Williams recounts of the
young seminarian, Karol Wojtyla, as he worked nights in the
Solvay Iron Works during the Nazi occupation of Poland. He too
struggled with one book, a philosophical work influenced by the
school of Louvain.
Wojtyla ...remembers that the most difficult book for
the future Pope, and perhaps the one that started him
out on a career in philosophy, was one given him to
study by Father Klosaka. It was entitled Ontology or
Metaphysics and was written by Rev. Prof. Kazimierz
Wais (1865-1934) of Lwow....Workers saw Wojtyla
puzzling over it while he awaited the periodic
purification of water used in the boiler room he tended
in Solvay. Fellow seminarian Mieczyslaw Malinski
remembers Wojtyla, in his blue-grey overalls and clogs
without socks, carrying the book on his way to the
Solvay chemical factory and responding to an enquiry
about the Metaphysics of Wais thus: "Yes, it's hard
going. I sit by the boiler and try to understand it -
I feel it ought to be very important to me." That was
in September 1942...Years later, in his pontifical
garb, he would say to his priestly friend of so many
years something more: "For a long time I couldn't cope
with the book and I actually wept over it. It was not
until two months later, in December and January
(1942/43), that I began to make something of it, but in
the end it opened up a whole new world to me. It
showed me a new approach to reality, and made me aware
of questions I had only dimly perceived... (3)
That was the way I felt about Insight. Though I do not
remember crying over it, I have a vivid memory of struggling and
paining over it. Pages would go by with hardly a glimmer of
understanding. Then, slowly, connections began to be made.
Flipping pages, I would compare later sections with earlier
ones. I would spend hours going over just one short passage.
I spent time consulting books on mathematics, physics,
relativity theory, etc., to check out some of the scientific
examples Lonergan was using. To the extent that I read and
searched, I came to realize that he was penetrating into the
fundamental questions of the sciences.
In fact, the very fact that I did not understand and was
seeking to understand was the key to the whole thing. For
Lonergan's main point was the centrality of the human act of
understanding.
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, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further
developments of understanding. (4)
The promise was extraordinary, but the basic issue was
eminently experiential and personal. Just prior to embarking on
Insight I had been reading some works of contemporary psychology
and I was particularly intrigued by Carl Rogers' On Becoming A
Person. I was especially impressed by Rogers' insistence on
being "experiential" in one's efforts at self-knowledge: letting
one's words flow from one's feelings. Rogers aimed at refining
the ability to identify levels of present feelings and at helping
people to find the words that express those feelings. Rogers
called appropriated truths "significant learnings." (5) There was a
truth here I wanted to maintain and I remember saying to myself
something like:
Lonergan can't contradict any of the truths I know or
I'll know he's wrong. Anything he says will have to
take into account and develop the truths I've already
experientially appropriated or he won't be worth my
while.
And I doubted he could do it. His work appeared so patently
intellectual and all my leanings - and the leanings of the
culture around me - were "experiential." By that term I
understood chiefly the in's and out's of human feelings.
Lonergan's work seemed too "cold," too intellectual, to
acknowledge all those levels of feelings. And besides, anything
that seemed "scholastic" had, for the most part, been omitted by
the Second Vatican Council then taking place in Rome.
But strangely, there was an experiential aspect to Insight.
In fact, it began to appear that the whole aim of the work was
the appropriation of human experience: not just the experience of
one's feelings, but also the experience of the subtle acts of
understanding.
The crucial issue is an experimental issue, and the
experiment will be performed not publicly but
privately. It will consist in one's own rational
self-consciousness clearly and distinctly taking
possession of itself as rational self-consciousness.
Up to that decisive achievement, all leads. From it,
all follows. No one else, no matter what his knowledge
or his eloquence, no matter what his logical rigor or
his persuasiveness, can do it for you. (6)
Fortunately, at the time there were others in Rome, mostly
at the North American College, who were wrestling with the same
book. This community acted as a check on the adequacy and
accuracy of my own understanding. And indeed, that community
continues as there is a Lonergan journal, newsletter, workshops,
Lonergan Centers in numerous countries, etc..
Gradually, I moved from an adversarial relationship to to the
conviction that there was indeed "something there." What is
there is the subject of this book.
In 1965 I began work on a doctoral dissertation on an
American philosopher of art, Susanne K. Langer. Lonergan had
highly praised Langer's early work on aesthetic and artistic
consciousness, but her later work, especially her Mind: An Essay
on Human Feeling, consisted in the reduction of all "higher"
human activities to feelings and feelings to electro-chemical
events. (7) Langer represented the whole empiricist tradition in
philosophy. As I studied her work, I gradually discovered that
there was an unbridgeable gulf separating what Langer was saying
about science and human consciousness and what Lonergan was
saying. As Lonergan once wrote of the various major schools of
philosophy:
Empiricism, idealism, and realism name three totally
different horizons with no common identical objects.
An idealist never means what an empiricist means, and a
realist never means what either of them means. (8)
Of course, the issue between these basic schools of
philosophy had real implications. On a strictly logical level,
the empiricist horizon has no room either for the existence of
God or for an immortal dimension of the human person. As Langer
once wrote, spelling our the implications of her view of the
human mind and spirit:
That man is an animal I certainly believe; and also
that he has no supernatural essence, "soul" or "mind-stuff," enclosed in his skin. He is an organism, his
substance is chemical, and what he does, suffers, or
knows, is just what this sort of chemical structure may
do, suffer, or know. When the structure goes to
pieces, it never does, suffers, or knows anything
again. (9)
This conflict in underlying philosophies became a conflict
in myself. I remember one evening in particular. I was studying
in my room in Rome in the mid-1960's as twilight spread over the
city. I remember saying to myself quite clearly:
Who's right here - Lonergan or the empiricists? Both
can't be right - between them there's a basic conflict
about the human person, the human mind, indeed about
reality.
I questioned my own motivation:
If you come down on Lonergan's side of this issue, is
that because he's religious, a Jesuit priest and you
yourself are a life-long Catholic and a priest as well?
I could admit all the underlying motivations that might
incline me toward a more religiously amenable answer; but the
question itself was not directly a religious one. In the first
instance it was a question about the meaning of the whole modern
development of the natural sciences. But it was also a question
about the meaning of human consciousness in general and the
meaning of my own self. It was a question about what I was doing
then and there. It was a question whose adequate answer I could
find only within my own self. As Newman once wrote: "in these
provinces of inquiry egotism is true modesty." (10)
Previously, in various philosophy courses, I had learned
many things about what the great philosophers had said about the
mind. But those facts had tended to pass through my own mind and
on to test papers without connecting with my own basic self-knowledge. I could repeat from memory the various positions on
knowledge and the various schools of philosophy. But my
convictions were not clear. They were vulnerable to the many
challenges coming from the contemporary sciences and
philosophies. The challenge I faced at the moment was the
challenge of modern empiricism that invoked science in its own
defense.
In some ways the latter was easy to understand - or at least
imagine. The empiricist emphasis on feeling, imagination and
electro-chemical events was rather obvious. What was not so easy
to understand was Lonergan's position. I sensed there really was
something to his emphasis on the centrality of understanding -
for how else explain all that transcends the merely biological:
all of human culture and civilization?
Still, Lonergan seemed to imply that there was a residual
materialism, or "naive realism," even in someone like myself who
had studied six years of Catholic philosophy and theology.
Moreover, such naive realism could be found even in the
scholastic philosophy I had been taught. It was that residual
materialism that was at the basis of much conflict and division
in the Church as well as in the world at large. (11)
What Insight called for was a radical change of mind about
mind. Later he would write of that radical change as an
intellectual conversion:
Intellectual conversion is a radical clarification and,
consequently, the elimination of an exceedingly
stubborn and misleading myth concerning reality,
objectivity, and knowledge. The myth is that knowing
is like looking, that objectivity is seeing what is
there to be seen and not seeing what is not there, and
that the real is out there now to be looked at. (12)
As I wrestled with Lonergan's writings, I found this myth in
myself. The myth is rooted in the world of immediate experience,
"the world of immediacy," and it confuses that immediate world
with the far larger world, the world Lonergan calls "the world
mediated by meaning." This latter world is the world we grow
into as we grow up: it is the "real world" that is far larger
world than the world of immediacy and it is brought to us through
the language and memories of other people, the pages of
literature, the labors of scholars and scientists, the
reflections of saints, the meditations of philosophers. It is
the world filled with meaning.
This larger world, mediated through meaning, does not
lie within anyone's immediate experience. It is not
even the sum, the integral, of the totality of all
worlds of immediate experience. For meaning is an act
that does not merely repeat but goes beyond
experiencing. What is meant is not only experienced
but also somehow understood and, commonly, also
affirmed. It is this addition of understanding and
judgment that makes possible the larger world mediated
by meaning, that gives it its structure and its unity,
that arranges it in an orderly whole of almost endless
differences; partly known and familiar, partly in a
surrounding penumbra of things we know about but have
never examined or explored, partly in an unmeasured
region of what we do not know at all. It is this larger
world mediated by meaning that we refer to when we
speak of the real world, and in it we live out our
lives. It is this larger world, mediated by meaning,
that we know to be insecure, since besides truth there
is error, besides fact there is fiction, besides
honesty there is deceit, besides science there is
myth. (13)
The myth of naive realism overlooks the fact that the "real
world," is not known by childish procedures. Our human tendency
is to think that we get at the real world just by "taking a good
look." On the other hand, intellectual conversion takes place
when we understand that reality is attained, not just by
experiencing, but by the addition and development of the properly
human activities of understanding, judging and believing. (14)
The myth of knowing as looking is at the core of
philosophical issues. (15) In Insight Lonergan speaks of the
"startling strangeness" one experiences as one makes the
breakthrough from the residual materialism of naive realism, to
the "critical realism" of thinking about our minds on their own
terms. It is a breakthrough to a whole new world. It is a
discovery that one has not yet made "if one has no clear memory
of its startling strangeness." (16) Compared to the rest of life
this "startling" breakthrough is as distinctive an experience as
the difference between winter twilight and the summer noonday
sun. (17) One has not yet experienced it if one has not yet made the
discovery
that there are two quite different realisms, that there
is an incoherent realism half animal and half human,
that poses as a halfway house between materialism and
idealism, and on the other hand that there is an
intelligent and reasonable realism between which and
materialism the half-way house is idealism. (18)
I never realized the autobiographical character of
Lonergan's above statement until I did this study. As a student
in England in the late 1920's, Lonergan rejected a version of
scholastic realism and, under the influence of English empirical
thought, he identified himself as a "nominalist." Later, after
reading Plato and Augustine, he came to a "theory of intellect as
immanent act" and, as he later confessed, experienced the fear of
becoming an idealist. Finally, under the influence of the Jesuit
writers, Joseph Maréchal and Bernard Leeming, he came to realize
the meaning of the scholastic teaching on the "real distinction
between essence and existence," and that was the key to what he
later called his own intellectual conversion to a "critical
realism."
At the conclusion of this work I will describe one very
vivid moment in my own intellectual biography as I wrestled with
Lonergan's work. Let me just now mention that in the 1960's,
after reading through Insight, I went back and read Lonergan's
previous major work on Saint Thomas Aquinas, Verbum: Word and
Idea in Saint Thomas. There I discovered that what Lonergan was
calling for in Insight did not hang in mid-air. It came out of a
dialogue with Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. I have since
discovered that Lonergan's roots in Aquinas' thought have their
own roots in his early philosophical development: in an interest
in modern logic and mathematics, in the writings of John Henry
Newman, in the early dialogues of Plato and Augustine, in his own
encounter with some Thomistic writers while studying in Rome. It
was through his encounter with all these influences that he came
to the major breakthrough in his own intellectual development and
his invitation for others to share in that breakthrough in
Insight.
And that is what this book is about: Lonergan's early
development leading to his own intellectual conversion in the
mid-1930's and the expression of that conversion in his writings
up to the completion of Insight in 1953. It is about his
intellectual life during the twenty-eight years he mentions in
the Preface to Insight.
Now I have to make a brief acknowledgement of my
manifold indebtedness, and naturally I am led to think
in the first place of the teachers and writers who have
left their mark upon me in the course of the twenty-eight years that have elapsed since I was introduced to
philosophy. (19)
There he mentions his "more palpable benefactors," mostly
brother Jesuits, who encouraged him in his work. Here we tell
the story of his "less palpable benefactors," mostly the classic
writers who influenced him on the way to his own intellectual
conversion. My aim has not been to write a Lonergan biography.
Others are working on and will work on that great project. (20) My
aim has been to ask specifically about the sources of that great
"change of mind" that took place in Lonergan in the mid-1930's
and to show how that conversion found expression in his writings
up to Insight.
Lonergan was aware of the possibility of interpretative
biographies that attribute mysterious and fictitious motivations
to historical figures. And yet he left a record of his own early
days: some early articles and letters as well as later
testimonies to the teachers and writers who profoundly influenced
his thought: his mathematics teacher at Heythrop, Fr. Joseph
O'Hara, S.J., H. W. B. Joseph's Introduction to Logic, John
Henry Newman's Grammar of Assent, J. A. Stewart's Plato's
Doctrine of Ideas, Augustine's early dialogues written at
Cassiciacum in northern Italy, the Jesuit scholastic writers,
Peter Hoenen, Joseph Maréchal and Bernard Leeming. All of these
writers contributed to "the great change of mind" that was
Lonergan's intellectual conversion in 1935-1936. All contributed
pieces to the puzzle of human knowledge until the whole picture
fell into "a unique explanatory perspective." (21)
The first part of this book chronicles Lonergan's early
intellectual journey. Regarding the writers who influenced him,
I have concentrated on the sections of their writings that
obviously became an integral part of Lonergan's own future
thought. My question has been:
What did Lonergan understand in the works that made
such a great impression on him - Newman's Grammar of
Assent, Stewart's book on Plato, Augustine's
Cassiciacum dialogues, etc.? What is the key to the
influence each of these writings had on his thought?
It has often occurred to me that reading these works through
the eyes of Lonergan's later writings is a liberal education in
itself. For one can repeat all the words of the great thinkers -
as so many "survey" courses in school do; but unless one means
what those great writers meant, then "one will not be raising
oneself up to their level but cutting them down to one's own
size." (22)
The second part of the book chronicles the early expressions
of Lonergan's intellectual conversion in his unpublished writings
on the philosophy of history and, especially, in his writings on
Thomas Aquinas. There is no doubt that his years of study of
Aquinas represented a tremendous deepening of his own personal
intellectual conversion.
After years reaching up to the mind of Aquinas, I came
to a two-fold conclusion. On the one hand, that
reaching had changed me profoundly. On the other hand,
that change was the essential benefit. (23)
The third part of the book brings the story up to 1953, the
publication of Insight. No adequate account of what happened in
Lonergan's own mind in the 1930's could omit this developing
expression of the meaning of intellectual conversion. It
culminates in the fullest expression of his position in Insight.
This period is marked by Lonergan's growing focus on the nature
of scientific method. It is also marked by a growing concern to
invite others to share in the same intellectual breakthrough he
himself had experienced.
Since Lonergan's Insight can be quite daunting, I have
thought that one way to introduce people to some glimmer of its
meaning is to point out the course of Lonergan's own development.
At the same time it is important to remember a caution he gave
when he summarized his view on human knowing in the beginning of
Method in Theology.
Please observe that I am offering only a summary, that
the summary can do no more than present a general idea,
that the process of self-appropriation occurs only
slowly, and usually, only through a struggle with some
such book as Insight. (24)
The present writer has undertaken this work in the hope of
setting out the historical context in which intellectual
conversion took place in Lonergan's own life in the context of
some classic philosophical texts. It is, in a way, a "Companion
to Insight."
I could think of no more profound benefit from "reaching up"
to the mind of Bernard Lonergan than a change in the reader's
knowledge of his or her own mind. And I can think of no greater
tribute to Bernard Lonergan than to say that he helped me to know
myself. As Peter Brown wrote of the influence of Platonic
thought on Saint Augustine:
For the Neo-Platonists provided him with the one,
essential tool for any serious autobiography: they had
given him a theory of the dynamics of the soul that
made sense of his experiences. (25)
Presently the University of Toronto is publishing the
twenty-two volumes of The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan.
Hopefully that will address, to some degree, the relative neglect
of Lonergan in the academic community. As Hugo Meynell wrote of
him:
Of all the contemporary philosophers of the very first
rank, Bernard Lonergan has been up to now the most
neglected. (26)
My own experience of the immense value of wrestling with
Lonergan's work has been confirmed by the women and men from many
countries and from many walks of life whose lives have been
significantly enriched through the effort of appropriating his
thought. My experience has been that this has opened them up to
understanding the true meaning of their own lives. In their
lives the philosophy of knowledge has come to have an
"existential" import.
1. Lonergan felt the challenge. Years later he would say: "They
were about six hundred and fifty strong and between them, not
individually but distributively, they seemed to read everything.
It was quite a challenge." Second Collection, 276.
2. The most graphic example of this transition took place in the
context of the Council's debate over the document on divine
revelation. A highly scholastic schema prepared by a preparatory
commission was scrapped entirely to make way for a text that the
Council fathers felt was more biblical, more personal, more
pastoral.
3. George Huntston Williams, The Mind of John Paul II (New York:
Seabury Press, 1981) 86-87.
4. Insight, 22 (xxviii).
5. Lonergan later adverted to the parallel between Rogers'
appropriation of feelings and his own appropriation of
understanding. Cf. Second Collection, 269.
6. Insight, 13 (xviii - xix).
7. Cf. Richard M. Liddy, Art and Feeling: An Analysis and
Critique of the Philosophy of Art of Susanne K. Langer (Ann
Arbor: University Microfilms, 1970). Also my review of Susanne K.
Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol I, in International
Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 10,n.3 (1970) 481-484.
8. Method in Theology, 239.
9. Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (New York: New
American Library, 1948) 44.
10. John Henry Newman, A Grammar of Assent (London: Longmans,
Green, & Co., 1913) 384. In spite of oppositions and conflicts
among people on matters philosophical, ethical and religious,
still a serious inquirer: "brings together his reasons and
relies on them, because they are his own, and this is his primary
evidence; and he has a second ground of evidence, in the
testimony of those who agree with him. But his best evidence is
the former, which is derived from his own thoughts; and it is
that which the world has a right to demand of him; and therefore
his true sobriety and modesty consists, not in claiming for his
conclusions an acceptance or scientific approval which is not to
be found anywhere, but in stating what are personally his
grounds..."
11. Lonergan often recommended E. I. Watkin's The Catholic Centre
(New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939) for its analysis of the implicit
materialism in much Church life and thought.
12. Method in Theology, 238.
13. Collection, 233.
14. Method in Theology, 238.
15. Ibid., 238-239.
16. Insight, 22 (xxviii).
17. Insight, 13 (xix).
18. Ibid., 22 (xxviii).
19. Insight, 9 (xv).
20. Cf. the works of Crowe, Mathews and Rice in our
bibliography.
21. Insight, 3 (ix). In many ways the present work is a
commentary on Lonergan's article of 1971, "Insight Revisited,"
Second Collection, 263-278. There he outlines the intellectual
influences that went into the writing of Insight and the new
context that emerged in his writing of Method in Theology. The
reader is advised to read "Insight Revisited" as a succinct
statement of what is spelled out in detail in this book.
22. "Method in Catholic Theology," Method: Journal of Lonergan
Studies, vol. 10, n. 1 (Spring 1992), 10-11.
23. Insight, 769 (748).
24. Method in Theology, 7.
25. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1969) 168.
26. Hugo Meynell, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Bernard
Lonergan, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, second edition,
1991, 1.
|
