Evil, Suffering, and the Hope for Salvation
The nature of the preparation for the “Divine entrance into the world mediated by meaning.”
God prepares us for His messages
When we ask the question about how a person becomes prepared to receiving the message of the Incarnation and the message of a Trinitarian God and of the nature of eternal life, one finds the need for a natural preparation for the more complete reception of the Revelatory gifts. One reason for this is that things are received according to the mode of the receiver. An animal for example, does not “receive” or become present to a human being in a rational manner, but only an animal manner. The rational and volition element of a human person is beyond the presence of an animal. In a more radical manner, Divine reality is beyond human presence. Yet, there is a kind of presence that is possible both of the mind and of the will. Our will becomes capacitated by God’s gift of divine love flooding our hearts, and this love generates a supernaturalized heart of love that is capable of loving God as God wants us to love Him. Likewise, our minds in this life are awakened in a gift as well, the gift of faith via analogies. We know God as in a mirror. This happens naturally through the discovery of God from creation itself. But it also happens supernaturally through Divine Revelation. In the first case, we come to natural knowledge of God as an unconditioned Being, or an Unmoved mover, or an uncaused Agent. As an unrestricted Being, without conditions. As a Creator who is uncreated. As Goodness itself. In the second, God brings us to more: To God the Holy Trinity, to the Incarnation, to the Church and the Son as her head, to the sacramental order and to the history of salvation. And though with Revelation we do not reach beatification, we do come to a higher kind of presence to God.
The relationship between creation and Revelation is quite interesting. I think this is where Lonergan can shed a bit of light, and he provided some of that light in chapter 20 of Insight. Interestingly it bridges a revelatory statement with a historical fact. The revelatory statement is that the second person of the Holy Trinity came to us “to die for our sins.” The historical fact is that of the fall and of the problem of evil. Revelation requires that we have knowledge of creation in order to understand the message. God reveals not according to His own mode of existence, but according to ours. And we receive through the senses and phantasm. However, creation alone would not result in any anticipation of Revelation nor of such a use of creation as emerges in Revelatory analogies. But, with the fact of the Fall, which itself is revealed, though evil need not be, the human race finds itself in dire situations from which its cannot naturally save itself. Even without revelation, one can discover these situations. The anthropology that Lonergan establishes in Insight leads him to formulate the nature of the problem of evil and its solution. There are personal and communal dimensions to the problem, and in both dimensions there are privations that are unresolvable. Personally, one can become distorted in the relationship between our neural patterns and their representations in the imagination and in the passions, or in our relationship to the society at large in which we limited the use of our minds and wills to hedonistic pleasures or self-glorification and honor. Socially, the problem gets divided, but one of the more significant problems that the human race has never been able to overcome on its own powers is the “longer cycle of decline of a civilization.” All civilizations seem to die, almost inevitably. Lonergan explains. This death is caused by the general bias of common sense, which results in a kind of pragmatism that dominates the soul. The solution to the Longer Cycle would be a collaboration among human beings called “cosmopolis.” Cosmopolis however requires an adequate philosophy, and an adequate philosophy will not naturally gain the ability to mediate human civilization. This is a natural problem. The inertia of the general bias is simply too recurrent and too strong. Lonergan persuasively makes this point in Insight. In the end, there simply is no natural solution to the bias of common sense and the longer cycle of decline. There is a supernatural community that is lost and which cannot be humanly recovered either, and that really is the original grace and justice found in the Garden of Eden (Lonergan did not treat this in Insight, because he was working out a philosophy rooted upon nature).
Historical facts such as the longer cycles of decline articulates the best that reason can discern of the Fall. Of course, the human mind has become severely darkened by the Fall, and thus rarely, if ever begins to glimpse even the scope of the natural destruction caused by the Fall. Really, only those with a carefully differentiated use of reason and of faith will have the possibility of discover what nature can discover but frequently does not.
The Solution of Salvation
After Lonergan had worked out with precision and insight the meaning and existence of the Divine in chapter 19, he has set the stage for a solution. In light of such knowledge of God’s existence, Lonergan’s articulation of the nature of the human person though Insight, and in light of the problem of the longer cycle, Lonergan is to articulate the general features of the Divine solution. In short, it will need to be one that involves faith, hope, and love, as well as the ability to reorientiate human neurological manifolds and the psychic censor, along with a recasting of images and affects to become liberated within the higher orders of cognitive and volition existence. In short, Lonergan works out a natural anticipation of the incarnation, though no details beyond this general anticipatory characteristics can be known.
What the solution does not tell us
This is not to say that he argues to the requirement of an Incarnation. Nor does it prove that such an Incarnation is needed. It does not eliminate the entirely gratuitous character of such a divine gift. Rather, based on the sheer goodness of God, it anticipates it precisely as a gift. That is as far as nature can go in its hope for salvation.
However, this natural preparation does provide an interesting explanatory principle for the reception of Revelation within any historical and cultural context. We often hear it said that God has prepared someone’s heart for His reception. God prepared the Israelites for the messiah. God prepared the Greeks by anticipating Truth itself. I was listening to an interview the other day with Cardinal Arinze and he was describing how the nature religions found in Africa helped to prepared for the reception of the Catholic faith, especially with its incarnational and sacramental life.
Furthermore, even in cultures where the philosophical differentiations have not yet emerged, the same spiritual anticipations are operative, and hence in compact symbols one finds the discovery of the Divine, the recognition of ineptitude to deal with evil and vice socially, historically, and personally. These provide the preparatory stages for the reception of the Incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. People can be arrogant however, or blind to the ineptitude. They can think of themselves or their culture as sufficient. All of this has roots in a hard heart. But, God is gracious and with the growth of our evils and vice, comes suffering. This tends to weaken pride, the suffering at minimum makes one aware of one’s own inabilities and lack of real power and freedom. This becomes an opportunity for conversion from pride to humility.
Conclusion
Lonergan’s explanatory account of this preparatory element that sheds tremendous light upon the human person into which the Transcendent enters and redeems. His account provides one with the wisdom that guides evangelization more clearly. It provides the Church with an ability to guide more wisely one’s message of Christ. Without these kinds of insights, one will have a more difficult time in moving into new cultures and dealing with historical shifts in one’s own culture.