Lonergan and the Theology of the Future

An Invitation

Hammond

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781498205160
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Today a variety of theological approaches offer fresh and enriching insights, yet much of contemporary religious thought can be disorienting for the beginning student of theology. This accessible introduction presents aspects of the thought of Fr. Bernard Lonergan SJ, (1904-1984) in a way that makes his vital contribution to contemporary theology accessible to the beginning student. The author minimizes technical terms and explains basic ideas with user-friendly examples. Rather than a survey of diverse contemporary theological opinions, or a thematic presentation of one topic, the book tries to clear away confusions by focusing on the theologian concerned with those topics. The book will thus encourage creative ways of overcoming some of the unnecessary obstacles for students who want to explore theology today.

1

Knowing, Knowing Yourself, and Doing Theology

In this chapter we will summarize and illustrate Bernard Lonergan’s groundbreaking thought on the basic structure of human thinking. The purpose here is not to learn what Lonergan said about thinking, but to use Lonergan’s work as he intended, as an invitation to discover our own cognitional operations; his most important contribution to the theological enterprise is not a teaching, or doctrine, or even a model that one might choose. Rather, it is a summons, a call, an invitation to grasp the operations within ourselves that, when assembled, produce knowledge. As important as Lonergan’s theological opinions are, what Lonergan himself thought matters much less than what we can discover about our own operations. Lonergan’s writing helps us to begin that journey of self-discovery so that our “self-appropriation” can serve as a sure foundation for our own theological work.

Knowing Is Not Like Looking

Our initial experience of the world is purely through our senses. An infant’s universe is the world of touch and taste, smells, noises, and blurred images. It wants merely to eat, sleep and cuddle. Soon, however, there develops the rudiments of language through which the child is introduced to a world of meaning that goes far beyond what can be received by the five senses. Eventually the child begins to ask questions: what is that? Why does that happen? Where does it go? How does it work? The world is now a wonderful and sometimes overwhelming surplus of meanings, seemingly made to order for the little engine of inquiry that not that long ago appeared simply as a wet, whining bundle of bodily needs.

Because the needs of the five senses come first in human development and continue as needs throughout life, it is a natural inclination to revert to what is given in the senses when we think about our own thinking. What’s that? Well, take a look—see what it is. But questions for meaning (what? why? how?) are not resolved by a return to sense perceptions. One can look but not understand what one sees, listen but not understand what one hears. Only gradually does language open us to a world that is mediated to us not merely by sight and touch and sound, but by meaning. Knowledge starts with perception but it is not the same as perception. Lonergan’s oft-repeated reminder is that knowing is not like looking. Vernon Gregson lists a few helpful examples of Lonergan’s point:

One does not really see a nation, or a city, or a university. One does not see a wife, or a president, or a criminal. Surely one sees land and buildings, but one only understands and judges that a particular expanse of land is under the jurisdiction of a particular group of people. Does a disputed plot of land really show you which nation it belongs to? The same group of buildings which you call a college or university can become a low-security prison with a change of ownership (a change of understanding and meaning) and look exactly the same. Surely one sees a woman but recognition of whether she is wife or president or criminal is a matter of understanding and judgment and not merely vision. No, knowing is not merely looking, it is experiencing and understanding and judging.14

We can add innumerable examples to verify this claim that knowing is not like looking. Language is an obvious example of the fact that getting the meaning is not reducible to the ocular gaze. If you study Spanish but have never learned any German, merely looking at a German sentence will not result in understanding its meaning. Looking gives sensory data to be understood; in this case, you can see mostly familiar letters, but not much more, because you cannot decode the meaning of the printed letters you are looking at. Looking at a page cannot substitute for understanding what the marks on the page mean. Or consider a climate: it is not sunshine or a storm or rain or temperature or any combination of these. A climate is a statistical construct; it cannot be looked at. And yet, who would want to claim that there is no such thing as a climate?

A good detective with bad eyesight is better at solving crime than someone with 20–20 vision but no police training. Many a good detective story hinges on a detail at the crime scene or elsewhere that, to untrained observers, can be seen yet means nothing, but the police officer “detects” something more than what meets the eye.15 All the lab data in the world does not substitute for an insightful police inspector.16 Good detection is in part the result of police training and not good eyesight. An aviator at that crime scene will not do much better police work than an electrician or a school teacher. That same aviator, however, might be helpful to the investigators at an airplane crash site. Similarly, the historian looking through a microscope in a science lab will be at a distinct disadvantage compared to the scientist.17

If you have ever visited an art museum with someone who knows how to interpret paintings, you know that you can both gaze at a portrait or an ancient sculpted torso, a still life or a reconstructed altar piece. Both of you will get the same visual data, the same stimuli on your retinas. Nothing is different for the two of you, except the two of you! A trained art historian will “see” more than an amateur; notice, however, that I have put the word “see” in quotation marks because there is the same visual data equally available to both of you. The difference is not in the painting’s impact on the other person’s eyeball; the difference is in the other person’s understanding.

There are many examples in the natural sciences that knowing is not like looking. The physicist John Polkinghorne notes that “[q]uantum entities do not have the properties of simultaneously possessing exact position and momentum, of being visualizable.”18 He puts the same principle in more ordinary language by noting the “counter-intuitive character of a world governed by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (which says that if we know where an electron is we don’t know what it is doing).”19 This “superposition principle” is a change from Newtonian theory, which required that a particle be either here or there; in quantum theory, a particle can be both here and there at once: “the particle will sometimes be found ‘here’ and sometimes be found ‘there.’ Thus, the superposition principle underlies the unpicturability and statistical character of the quantum world.”20

Our first contact with the world is through the immediacy of the senses; understanding modern physics, however, is not a matter of keen perception. Quantum physics seems odd when one first hears about it because our inclination is to fall back on our senses as the foundation for our knowledge. Physicists have found that light is a wave when measured one way and a particle when measured another. We can’t just look to see which one it really is; light turns out to be not picturable. The theory of light will make sense only if one does not insist that it be picturable.

Many of these examples deal with experts having particular kinds of insights. That’s because the more we know, the more informed and practiced we are before attempting any interpretation, the more likely we will understand the data we are considering. A New Yorker cartoon makes this point with humor.21 It pictures the interior of a renaissance school room; through its window one sees gondolas, a bridge, and a palace. A student standing at his desk says to the teacher, “The Doge ate my homework.” If you think this is funny (or, if you think it’s distinctly not funny but you still get the joke), it’s because you brought and successfully employed previously acquired knowledge of history, geography and popular culture. Getting the joke, in other words, is not the result of merely looking carefully at what the cartoonist has drawn. What knowledge do you need to bring to this cartoon to understand it? You need to know that gondolas are emblematic of Venice, that Venice during the renaissance was ruled by a “Doge” or leader, that the style of the dress in the picture is consonant with the halcyon days of Venice under the Doge and, finally, one must be familiar with the clichéd student excuse for not being prepared: “the dog ate my homework.” That’s quite a bit of knowledge that must be brought to bear in interpreting a little cartoon. Yet, if one considers what goes into any event of understanding, one realizes that, in most successful interpretations there is required a great deal of background knowledge.22 One should be careful, then, not to reach too quickly for another well-worn expression of scholastic exasperation: “This doesn’t make any sense!” The truth might be that the person trying to figure it out doesn’t understand it. As Lonergan reminds us, “only the man that understands everything already is in a position to demand that all meaning be simple and obvious to him.”23

Experiencing the Desire to Understand

You have perhaps noticed on occasion that you have a desire to understand by feeling the frustrating absence of understanding. Imagine a high school student being given an assignment to report, in one’s own words, on the ideas of a famous scientist. Now imagine reading about the scientist and his or her discovery but not having any understanding of that discovery. The celebrated idea is for the student simply words. How frustrating it would be to put into one’s own words an idea that is not understood. Getting the point is more than the mere manipulation of words; it is an intellectual event. The frustration that emerges when we can’t understand is, however, proof of our implicit grasp of the fact that we really do not understand. When we feel the difference between reading words and catching on to the meaning of those words we can notice that we want to understand, and that awareness is a significant indication of the natural desire to know.

The experience of wanting to understand is quite common. The human mind is always on the move, never static. We don’t merely gape, repeat or memorize; we puzzle and wonder and ask. We feel the dynamic “pull” of a desire to “get it,” and when we don’t, we feel tension and frustration. Of course, there are many things that any particular individual at any given time is simply not prepared to understand. Children ask about much more than they are capable of understanding. Their engine of inquiry, however, is open: it points toward greater understanding when it asks about any particular object of knowledge.

The importance of intelligence is nicely illustrated in the first chapter of Genesis in which the Creator transforms an undifferentiated chaos into an ordered cosmos. Creation is portrayed as a separation of the abysmal waters and a separation or differentiation of the earth and its inhabitants from the waters. In the cosmos coming i...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Knowing, Knowing Yourself, and Doing Theology
• Chapter 2: Conversion and Change
• Chapter 3: The Drama of Religion and the Theory of Theology
• Chapter 4: God and Creation
• Chapter 5: A Theology of Grace and Freedom
• Chapter 6: Redemption
• Chapter 7: God with Us: Incarnation and Divine Transcendence
• Chapter 8: The Trinity
• Chapter 9: The Church and Its Doctrines
• Bibliography