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.