Results by title

It’s frequently said that we live in a “post-truth” age. That obviously can’t be true, but it does name a real problem on our hands. Getting things right is hard, especially if they’re complicated. It takes preparation, diligence, and honesty. Wisdom, according to Thomas Aquinas, is the quality of right judgment. This book is about the problem of becoming wise, the problem “before truth.” It is about that problem particularly as it comes up for religious, philosophical, and theological truth claims. Before Truth: Lonergan, Aquinas, and the Problem of Wisdom proposes that Bernard Lonergan’s approach to these problems can help us become wise. One of the special problems facing Christian believers today is our awareness of how much our tradition has developed. This development has occurred along a path shot through with contingencies. Theologians have to be able to articulate how and why doctrines, institutions, and practices that have developed—and are still developing—should nevertheless be worthy of our assent and devotion.

How is our fundamental vision of the world rooted in our own self-knowledge? Excellent answers to this question can be found in these two great writers – John Henry Newman (1801-1890) and Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984). To a great extent Lonergan found the answer to his question in Newman’s 1870 Grammar of Assent – the most philosophical and psychologically oriented of Newman’s writings. He went on from Newman to subsequently study Plato, Augustine and especially Aquinas, and then the modern sciences in preparation for his 1957 Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. He subsequently went on to study modern historical consciousness in preparation his 1971 Method in Theology. Through it all, he called Newman “my fundamental mentor and guide.” Incarnate Meaning traces Newman’s influence throughout Lonergan’s life and suggests how that influence can be discerned in the general orientation of Lonergan’s thought as well as in specific areas. Lonergan’s concern for the basic structure of our knowing as well as its historical unfolding mirrored Newman’s interests in his Grammar of Assent and in his other writings. Lonergan’s concern for concrete history as distinct from abstract classsicist tendencies mirrored Newman’s interest in the concrete history of early Christianity. Eventually Lonergan would root the various concerns of the Second Vatican Council in Newman’s thought: a concern for preaching the Good News to the poor, a willingness to dialogue with all peoples and religions and even with atheism. In all of this he repeatedly calls attention to Newman’s brilliance in communication. He called him “a terrific rhetorician” and would often repeat Newman’s motto when made a Cardinal, cor ad cor loquitur – “heart speaks to heart.” All this provided much of the background for Lonergan’s own methodological and theological achievements in the twentieth century. Both writers together constitute a wonderful background for Christian and Catholic thought facing the future. In a world in which humanity is tempted to seek answers in AI, Newman and Lonergan represent humanity’s openness to the divine and what Lonergan called “the spark in our clod, our native orientation to the divine.”

The debate in Catholic theology over the relationship between the natural and the supernatural has only occasionally engaged with Bernard Lonergan’s philosophical and theological contributions on the topic. The Ambiguity of Being argues that more detailed engagement with Lonergan’s work implies an oversight in both the 20th- and 21st-century debates. The Ambiguity of Being argues the controversy has failed to notice how the problem of the natural and the supernatural is, in fact, two problems. The Ambiguity of Being takes both problems in their widest sense to be about action—both divine and human. The first problem asks how God can act in human action. A question for Christians at least since St. Augustine faced the Pelagian controversy, Lonergan retrieved what he understood to be St. Thomas Aquinas’ mature solution. It is a solution gathering together a whole series of theological and philosophical developments into a subtle metaphysical theory of divine and human cooperation. But the recent debates have resituated this problem (and various interpretations of St. Thomas’s solution to it) in a modern world with modern concerns about culture and politics for the sake of answering a second, intrinsically related, but really distinct question: what is God doing in human action? Ambiguity finds that the recent controversy almost always finds participants attempting to deduce an answer to the second, modern problem from the medieval, metaphysical Thomist solution to the first. By contrast, The Ambiguity of Being argues at length the modern problem cannot be reduced to, nor an answer deduced from its medieval, metaphysical partner because the modern problem of the supernatural—what is God doing in human action?—is a hermeneutical problem that calls out for a hermeneutical answer. The Ambiguity of Being sketches a heuristic for what a fully adequate answer to this question would require, suggesting a radical re-conception of modern theology’s scope.