Personal Development

Undergirding our western world in its dynamism is the huge sacrifice and effort of countless monks for a thousand years after the time of St Benedict. Here was a way of life more than a profession: a vocation. At its heart was the gift of grace, the love of God poured into our hearts. The practical, the fraternal and the cultural achievement was immense. The life lived provided evangelisation in a vivid way for everyone. If the wayward ego was disciplined by denial and silence the self was set to grow serenely in the ways of faith, hope and love and, too, a practical prudence. St Anselm’s question, ‘Cur Deus Homo?’ flows from the highest truth and gave motion to the scholastic movement which methodically answered questions from the standpoint of faith. It has not been an achievement of modern man to place faith itself in question.
Transmitted from this epoch to the German people has been the word Bildung. It implies a direction for human development (Bild = image). It has to do with realising the image, for man is made in the image of God. Herder, much later, was to define Bildung as ‘reaching up to humanity’. In the late nineteenth century the notion of Bildung helped the German historians to gradually distance themselves from empirical science and from Hegelian philosophy and it gave them the confidence gradually to postulate the geisteswissenschaften alongside the naturwissenshaften.
It is worth noticing that Herder’s definition has lost the supernatural, whereby man is not only healed to attain the natural, but raised to be a son in the Son. So as this historical movement established itself, it set up a conflict with Revealed Religion and the Church, and so, around 1900, we had the modernist crisis.
In England we do not find the notion of Bildung. Shaftesbury translates it by ‘formation’, and in the nineteenth century the ideal would seem to be ‘the gentleman’. The idea of an individual in continual personal development seems to be lost.
Why should an idea filter through in Germanic but not in English culture? The origin in Germany of reformation culture was Luther, who won the support of small princes. In England Henry VIII shaped the State so that the State would shape the people from the beginning. Germany gradually made its way to an absolutist State in the mid-twentieth century. England had one from much earlier. In England movement was expected to be not so much personal as State led. When Kipling dreamed, his dream was ‘What of the Empire?’
The Church of course has the idea of a growth in holiness and the idea that grace builds on nature, but perhaps the nearest approach to bildung in the nineteenth century England is expressed by Newman’s ‘Idea of a University’. The idea is not to shape experts in this or that so much as people who are well formed in all that is going on so that passing through that environment you have, not the homo universale, but someone who can entertain ideas on all that is going forward. The humanist ideal of bildung is a sort of capacity to cope and not be fazed by anything.
Freud’s work on dreams began to be publicised in 1899. Geology and Biology in the mid nineteenth century had undermined the Bible as a literal text on how the world developed and so the context of Freud’s work, especially in areas where faith was based on ‘Scripture alone’ was one of increasing agnosticism and atheism. As with Marx, where the idea of something based apparently on Science won the total devotion of Marxists, so Freud hit the world as the originator not only of a new science but almost as the founder of a new atheist religion. Yet Freud’s study was not based on normal consciousness but neurotic consciousness. Educated consciousness had a new metaphysic, but with Adler and Jung the metaphysic changed. Then came Abraham Maslow who in the late twentieth century turned attention towards self actuating man, the dynamism of personality in movement. Bildung was movement towards humanity; originally it was movement towards divinity; but one gets the impression from Maslow that any consistent movement will do. Hitler or Robert Maxwell would qualify as self actuating.
Lonergan takes from the existentialists the word authentic. We don’t have to reach up to humanity for we are human and made in God’s image. But if we act in a sub human way we set up the unrest of a bad conscience in ourselves. We may experience moral impotence and so the need for a redeemer. The redemption may be socially mediated – so the crack-cocaine addict may need a team to help him – but ultimately it is a matter of a new heart, of God’s grace, a matter of the Purgative way, of overcoming sin in our lives. Two graces are involved here, Operative which changes the heart, and Cooperative which reaches through to new loving conduct. One learns to turn constantly to God for help.
Lonergan’s ‘Bildung’ then moves to the stage of Enlightenment. Overcoming all sins in the Purgative way, one faces the problem of tedium, of tepidity, of dropping away. Much lapsation begins this way, especially in our muddled modern culture where the Church appears as an optional extra. Here lies the importance of reaching through theory to the solidity of fact. Newman’s notional assent represents things not thought about, not concluded upon, bit somehow existing in the mental atmosphere. His real assent represents truths grasped as true with their reasons. Such truths give us Husserl’s ‘horizon’, Heiddeger’s ‘world’ and Lonergan’s virtually unconditioned, the enlightenment which is truth. An example might be Augustine’s battle with the Pelagians. The truth is we need God’s grace to be good, to be virtuous, to be authentic. We cannot just make our own way reliant upon our own natural virtue.
The unconditioned may be understood in terms of identity. The sensible in act is identical with the sense in act. The intelligible in act (in phantasm) is identical with understanding and also with its adequate expression in concept. When the evidence is in, the intelligible in act, the understanding of it, the expression of it corresponds with the real as it is. As with the branch giving first flower then fruit, so the movement to the truth is a subjective process full of maybes until the result is attained.
The self transcendence of knowing the truth (self transcendence since we know what lies beyond the self as simply experiencing) generates an horizon in which we may or must act. There is the norm of responsibility about how to live in the world we have come to know. We consider various courses of action, evaluate them, choose, persevere and perform. Through human action the world changes, demanding a new relationship and a new action.
The possibility of worthy action is normally conditioned by love, by divine grace moving man whether recognised or not. Love gives a new dimension of understanding and so a richer apprehension of choices, for example leading to a vocation.
Beyond enlightenment, there is union with God and with one another: the Unitive way. This leads to a new creation manifesting the fruits of the spirit, Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Fidelity, Gentleness and Self Control. Such is the direction of life to be found, Bildung restored to its Christian context.
Lonergan has three conversions which give direction and movement to life. He speaks laconically of religious conversion being God’s love poured into our hearts. He sees this love as grounding our faith, our loved assents, as we seek understanding of what is going on. He sees dogmas as acts of faith on the part of the Church when a crisis arises, save the Marian dogmas which expound our devotion.
The intellect is involved in an act of faith. Intellectual conversion is a becoming familiar with the different operations of intellect as we are familiar with using our eyes to see. This is not for everyone but is most helpful (essential?) to a theologian.
Moral conversion may be related to hope and hope for mankind. It is more than fulfilling the teleologies of nature for it means recognising what is happening and what needs doing, our historical conditionedness. Again a person may act well without too much theorising.
Fr Robert Doran SJ adds a further dimension of conversion. He is a major follower of Lonergan and adds in psychic conversion. Our psyche is shaped up, allowing and disallowing images and affects. So a young prince may easily imagine he is more important than a commoner and act accordingly. Lonergan quotes Freud, what the id is (the subconscious) the ego is to be (the person as manifold of demands). The id is not beyond our responsibility. So the monks we set off with would sing the Regina Caeli each night and so provide conscious and affective material to inform the id and thence the ego and thence the self. The broadening of the life of the id by deliberate efforts might help overcome shyness, exclusiveness, narcissism etc. etc. Contemporary Christian Bildung would involve religious, moral, intellectual and psychic conversion according to Fr Doran.

Towards Being Sensible

There is a strange way in which expertise becomes quite unhelpful if it sits in the saddle of practical judgement. Everything gets reduced to a theory which then gets applied. An example is perhaps the National Health Service which at the same time warns of the inevitability of a pandemic yet closes wards, or which was proposing to wait till both eyes were affected before treating a disease. The Russian bear has recently got prickly but NATO and the EC have been coming up to its back door perhaps following some impeccable logic of strategy. The United Nations plans to spend 45 Trillion (45 British GDPs) combating climate change. Local authorities in Great Britain propose vigilantes to deal with dog messes and rubbish bins. We witness a political class following political theories to solve practical problems, and losing common sense in the process.
It is somewhat surprising to learn that Aristotle thought moral judgement had a different basis from theory, so to know about morals one must study good men. Theoria was one thing; phronesis another. With our modern mind set we imagine it is perfectly OK for a politician to be hopeless in his personal morals so long as he is a good politician and does his job well. Good conduct, phronesis, depends on all the virtues being acquired, for Aristotle, for good practice depends upon dealing with everything. Plato sought a philosopher king. Aristotle thought a good king would need to know only so much about philosophy.
St Thomas Aquinas translates phronesis by ‘prudentia’ and man must combine worldly prudence with supernatural prudence. ‘Common sense’ is reduced to meaning a faculty which combines all the sense data into a grasp of the situation. If though one recalls that sense data can convey meaning St Thomas’ thought might support a richer understanding than at first appears. I have a sense that the Catholic moral tradition tends to inform prudence with certain conclusions: ‘thou shalt not . . .’, some based on natural law (contraception) some based on divinely revealed law (the indissolubility of marriage) but when it comes to how to be or what to do we have not theory but the example of Our Lord, Our Lady and the Saints. Our positive way forward is thus based very much on concrete examples.
Vico found himself dealing with the emergent mathematical certainty of the sciences and so emphasised probable arguments, images suitable for teaching the young, rhetoric and common sense. By ‘common sense’ he meant the virtue that makes community. Common sense led to knowledge as certain as the scientific axioms. It was a virtue formed by growing up in a people and valuing the traditions of public and social life. It has not been shown, one suspects, in the emasculation of the House of Lords from the time of Macmillan and in recent changes to the office of Lord Chancellor. Rather a political theory has come down from ‘above’.
In England ‘common sense’ became a remedy for the ‘moonsickness of metaphysics’ (which probably included Catholicism) but it was seen as a virtue, care for the common good and humour among friends (Shaftesbury). Hutchison, Hume, Reid – ‘The Rights of Man’ – and Adam Smith drew on the notion. The quest was for a moral philosophy that really does justice to the life of society. In this respect the movement was against metaphysics but also against scepticism.
In France the concept – le bon sens – was an uprightness of judgement which stemmed from right order in the soul. It is important to realise that the movement was against the inhuman consequences of a purely scientific attitude as well as an anti Catholic mentality building a post feudal world. The movement was on the side of the angels in that it was moralistic.
In Germany – not so politically developed – the notion was lost. Instead, with Kant, moral precepts arrived – never treat another person as a means – which lost the sense of ‘common sense’ or as we might put it today, a sense of ‘the common good’. There was though a pietist, Oetinger, who made use of the concept theologically, and interestingly identified common sense with the heart.
‘Common sense’ appears from time to time in political agendas. Perhaps the last time in England we experienced it was in the Second World War. Since then perhaps we have been spoken to by an increasingly expert political class. Alongside de facto top down power there is a presumed top down expertise. Who could object if in fact this were the case?
One of the motivations Lonergan had in working at Economics was to show what was wrong with Major Douglas (who thought every citizen should be paid a salary whether they worked or not) and to show what was wrong with John Maynard Keynes (who thought it belonged to experts and the government to achieve full employment). For Lonergan the world belonged to man and the world of economic progress lay in the free choices of consumers and producers. He aimed at a simple understanding of how the economy worked which would help everyone to play their part in freedom. He was thinking of a common sense of the good as well as personal self interest, but the common sense required a certain understanding.
One finds the experts incapable of understanding Lonergan’s thought, and so maybe the strategy should be to enlighten the multitude or maybe to enlighten neighbouring sciences. A great but painful cause of people thinking anew about macro-economics will be if our present recession proves to be a major slump – one cannot hope this will be the case because of the suffering involved and its relatively simple avoidability.
While Lonergan’s concern for Economics shows his ‘Common Sense’, ‘Le bon sens’, he actually uses the term common sense to describe the world we all enter when we leave the simple world of immediacy in the nursery and enter the world ‘mediated by meaning and motivated by value’, the world where words matter as much as things. That little verse is quite untrue ‘sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you’.
The values operative in this world may be mainly pleasure within the law or without it. The world of common sense does not mean ‘the sense of the common’ or ‘le bon sens’. He says somewhere ‘a good man is much less rare than a good people’. But ‘le bon sens’ is precisely a matter of operating and cooperating with others for the good which includes but goes beyond the personal good. As the Germans in the eighteenth century did not have the structure socially to take on board the idea, so it may be more dream than reality. We may touch it in a good cause, but it is about all good causes and a magnificent collaboration. Maybe ecclesiastical life is the last repository of ‘le bon sens’.
Lonergan who writes of three conversions, religious, moral and intellectual sometimes referred to religious conversion as affective conversion which has three dimensions, to God, to family and to mankind. One could there find le bon sens operating where religious conversion entails the love of mankind and practical policies to be adopted. Le Bon Sens involves immediate and world wide solidarity today.
In addition to common sense, Lonergan has several ‘differentiations of consciousness’ which may be attained, the scientific, the scholarly, the religious and the philosophic. As attained, these differentiations involve speculations but also judgements. Insights coalesce to form ones horizon. May one suggest that the word one hears moves one into the horizon one has attained? The dog hears the words ‘Come here’ and using ‘common sense’ obeys and moves. A man reads an article in the paper and the word read has to meld with the whole horizon attained, with its conversions and differentiations. Man full of sense is also full of intellectual attainment, which is activated by the word.
He responds to what he has read in an appropriate way, aware by common sense of who he is and who is listening and what the effect of his words is likely to be. The response made shows the depth of the human attainment. So Our Lord responds to the question about tax by calling for a coin, confirming that it has Caesar’s head on it, and saying ‘Render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s’. The answer that he gives opens one to his entire mind.
So by words man is immediately present to his entire achievement in the way of forming an horizon with its real assents in common sense and differentiated areas and affective conversions. There may be a pause as he gathers his being. This is Aquinas’ ‘Common Sense’ transformed into ‘le bon sens’. ‘Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaks’. or as Gadamer puts it: ‘Cultivated consciousness goes beyond each of the natural senses . . . It is a universal sense.

Lonergan - Gadamer

On holiday in Donegal, I took Gadamer’s work and ploughed through it. Like every first read of a philosopher there were long sections which went over my head. Lonergan read him, approved of him in certain respects, and takes a few phrases from him. I think though Lonergan must have read other works as well about the geisteswissenschaften.
Gadamer and Lonergan agree about ordinary language. For Gadamer, ordinary language carries intelligibility immediately and caries the notion of being an all embracing way, which includes the subject as well as the object. For Gadamer the notion of being is just there. For Lonergan the notion of being shows itself in reflective judgement. He distinguishes notional being, like a mathematical theorem, and real being which is normally based on sense experience.
Gadamer seems to me weak on insight and judgement whereas these are central to Lonergan but he and Lonergan agree that metaphysics must include subject and object as opposed to just the object.
Gadamer’s position on language echoes Socrates’ advice on dealing with a sceptic: ‘get them to talk’, for if you talk you cannot help making affirmations and denials and giving reasons. One of the problems of the Mass Media, Internet culture is I suspect that an interesting world can sweep in without eliciting a personal response beyond a further click on the mouse. One could though accuse reading of the same fault. The genius of conversation is that it ‘takes off’ so that the participants do not know where it is going, to what conclusions it might lead or to what disagreements indeed. Lonergan though is on the same point when he talks about the importance of the maiutic art. Parents might well ask what should they do if one of their children falls silent. If we are made to be through discussion, question, answer moving into a richer world made known by language then silence is a sort of death, a death of the spirit.
Gadamer will trace a word through the Greek, the Latin and the modern language and discern a nuance of change in the concept. A particular language carries the resonance of history into our consciousness. An example which occurs to me is the word ‘inquisition’ for the English. It carries the fear of Spain, the backward primitiveness of Catholicism and the cruelty of torture as a sort of resonance. The word ‘Renaissance’ has a more or less positive meaning for everyone, whereas the word Reformation has negative overtones for English Catholics. Lonergan writes of man leaving the world of the nursery and through language entering the world of meaning and value. He does not seem to notice language itself as spoken as a carrier of historically shaped values. Instead he automatically thinks of the philosophic background – Stoicism to understand Tertullian, Middle Platonism to understand Origen, Aristotle to understand Aquinas, the lack of a commonly accepted philosophy to understand the post Vatican Two Catholic Church.
I think this difference between Gadamer and Lonergan may be understood by the difference between Cardinal Newman’s notional assent and his real assent. So language leads us into a world of notional assent and established concepts and definitions. We can live at ease in such a world for nothing matters very much. If the situation changes we can readjust our thinking appropriately like the vicar of Bray. Language will carry into the future the decisions we have made. So for a few centuries, Catholic and Papist became terms of deep opprobrium. Isaac Newton could not think of Catholics as human.
Newman’s ‘real assent’ is not just a matter of learning a language and picking up its nuances. It is a matter of thinking a thing through and coming to certainty on a point. We may do this by a convergence of probabilities and through evidences which come and go. So a general knows it is vital to advance immediately, a currency speculator knows the dollar is to fall. There are degrees of certainty it seems. St Paul has ‘If it is certain that . . . it is even more certain’. If it is certain that we should reduce CO2 emissions it is even more certain that we should ‘feed the hungry’. An infallible judgement is an unusual form of certainty, then. There can though be infallible judgements about humble matters as well as matters of revelation, for example, ‘I am at the present moment the subject of sense experience’.
When we think things through and reach a conclusion we do so on the basis of a philosophic attainment which operates whether we acknowledge it or not. So Tertullian, under Stoic influence, thought what is real must be bodily and so could not avoid subordinationism in thinking about the Trinity. The Trinity is like the Sun, the Light and the Heat. The real must be imaginable. St Athanasius’ position on Nicaea (325AD) is different. Truth lies in the true proposition. ‘What is said of the Father must be said of the Son, except the Son is not the Father’.
Later than Nicaea, we find Augustine realising that the mind is made to follow truth wherever it leads. He is called ‘the father of the West’. He accepts propositions handed down but he is not tied to them. So he explores the Trinity in terms of the psychology of knowledge and love. With Athanasius and Augustine we find the mighty fact of revelation leads gradually to an appropriation of the powers of the mind, and so to a Catholic philosophy.
With Aquinas we find the realisation that ‘Ens et verum convertuntur’. As the mind comes to a true judgement, so it comes to know what is. What is, being in toto, includes the mind that puzzles and explores as well as the object that is thought about. With Aristotle though there was a relative neglect of the subjective side of things, a consequence of which might be that there are still some who think correctly of God as the supreme being, and as three persons in one God, but fail to advert to the fact that God is conscious and indeed conscious of being God in three different conscious ways.
Whereas the context of St Augustine’s thought was Platonic and coming to any truth involved the active participation of God in the process, for Aquinas there was a realisation that the human intellect was not only sense bound but autonomous. It could reach true conclusions or fail to do so. His famous remark that beside his mystical experience all he had written was straw has made me wonder whether the point of the analogy is that straw is combustible material. Did he glimpse that the autonomy of intellect as well as will could lead to a Godless world with man arranged against man with the cleverest weapons? Was his remark in this way prophetic?
This autonomy of intellect led with Descartes to the autonomy of philosophy. Philosophy subsequently has been hugely under the influence of the developing sciences or in a sort of conscious reaction with Phenomenology, Existentialism and Personalism. Man’s capacity to reach true conclusions has been lost. Lonergan wrote that in France, Germany, Northern Italy, the Netherlands ‘Being is lost’. One might add, ‘significant communication is lost’. It is hard for the Church to thrive in such a situation. Some have tried to make ‘presence’ substitute for ‘being’.
To his credit, for Gadamer being is not lost. It is entrapped in our ordinary linguistic experience which has not been grasped. For Newman it is attained in real assent. For Lonergan it is attained with certainty when the appropriate evidence is in – ‘the virtually unconditioned’ – and with infallibility in certain cases, dealing with the simplest matters as well as the highest. Speaking of the highest Aquinas said, ‘The argument from authority is the weakest argument except when the authority is divine’.

The Level of Consciousness

Certain drugs give one a strange conscious effect and when Lonergan speaks of raising the level of consciousness one may imagine he is calling for some strange mental contortion. He is merely asking one to replace consciousness as a mere experience, or set of experiences, by consciousness which has been raised by having a superstructure of terms with meanings and values. Instead of human subjectivity being just taken for granted, it becomes, through a process of question and answer, through a process of puzzlement and enlightenment, something one knows about alongside the other things one knows about.
When the Royal Society admitted only the results of observation and experiment as being scientific, human consciousness was as it were forced outward to consider only things outside man.
It is true the scholastics spoke about man having sense experience, agent intellect, possible intellect and free will and such terms allowed the scholar to talk about human nature in an objective way, but the knowledge so gained did not have to be verified in a personal way.
When with Freud psychology started to attend to human consciousness, the conclusion appeared to be that consciousness was a poor witness to ones real intentions. It is true that Karl Rogers got the patient to name and talk about his feelings which might be causing alarm and so bring about some sort of understanding and security, but I think it is true to say that no major psychologist has placed human intentionality in the foreground. Fr Robert Doran SJ has of course attempted to do so, but his work is not recognised as mainstream. Perhaps Fr Teilhard de Chardin SJ has the unique distinction of a Catholic cleric making that breakthrough.
Still, the case of Karl Rogers helps us understand what Lonergan means by ‘raising the level of consciousness’. Feelings which had been a cause of dismay, a part of the substructure of a life, are named and so brought into the superstructure of meaning and value – this way ‘the level of consciousness is raised’.
The following terms refer to areas of consciousness we can raise by naming them and gaining some understanding of their interconnections. Sense data (which includes words of course, whether spoken or written), a question, a schematic image, an insight, a conceptual expression of the insight, a consideration of the validity of the insight, a judgement, a development in one’s world view or horizon, consideration of a course of action, decisions, the realm of commitment and love. One might think all one needs is commitment and love, but if your beloved has appendicitis you badly need the expertise of the surgeon.
One might imagine that these operations go on just in the head of a solo thinker, illustrated by Rodin, but they also go on in the back of the Clapham omnibus, as people leaf through the newspaper.
So for good reasons or bad our European leaders including the Irish politicians think the Lisbon Treaty is a great thing. To come into effect the agreement is all nations must ratify it. The Irish people have not ratified it. Logically the Treaty is dead. The question arises, what sort of Europe are we building if small nations like Ireland do not count? Why then should any nation count? Are we back in a situation where what counts is the convenience of the rulers?
Lonergan posits the individual operating on sense data, but a group operating on a common field of experience. The individual has insights but the group has common and complementary ways of understanding. The individual gives assent when the evidence is in but the group attains common judgements and common aims. This happy picture is not easily attained. The scene in Zimbabwe, where the Presidential election has been cancelled, illustrates the problem. The achievement of a ‘common and complementary understanding’ is not so easy. So Lonergan writes ‘Ethical differences affect all evaluation. Philosophical differences affect the meaning of meaning. Religious differences modify the meaning and value of ones world.’
As well as the contemporary scene which amply illustrates the clash between authenticity and bias, there is the realm of history to be studied. Here one finds, in contrast with much psychological work, that the world is full of intentionality, with meanings lived and meanings expressed, with common aims and terrible clashes, even unto revolutions and armies marching. There is a world of events to be understood, even events which have shaped us, bringing about the tradition in which we were born and brought up.
The meanings and values passed down to us may have a great influence on our lives. So Fr Troy spoke to us about the founder of the Verona Fathers and then spoke in much the same way about his own vocation. Within the wider ambit of the Church, he has been living out a narrower tradition, extending a saintly story.
Each such tradition, while it has a very positive side also has its negative, most probably. So St Francis Xavier wanted all the scholars in Paris to leave their desks and get out on the mission in India. Possibly though, had they done their work properly we would find that Europe had more successfully kept and transmitted the faith. The scribe in the kingdom has an essential role bringing out from his treasure house what is old and what is new. He has the key of knowledge for all the people but can lock the door.
So alongside the fact of taking inspiration from a tradition, there is also the task of allowing the tradition to be corrected and so enriched. There was a Vatican astronomer who thought he ought to get out on the missions in Africa. When he got there he found people wanted to know about astronomy! So, after a while, he returned to the Vatican with a clear conscience.
In his writing or speaking a man may express himself clearly to his contemporaries but hundreds of years later there may be some problem abut interpreting what he meant. The context has changed. The language has developed. So there is the task of understanding. In the 19th Century Shliermacher described this task as avoiding misunderstanding. Hermeneutics is the fashionable word here. So the achievement of understanding belongs to the natural sciences but also to the human sciences. The sort of evidence is different of course, but both sorts of science move from evidence to hypothesis to firm conclusion, one about the nature of the world around, one about the achievement and meaning of an individual. Dilthey saw that the hermeneutic task belongs not just to one person’s product but to a whole way of life. So the Irish referendum is evidence of something going on which needs interpreting. There is an idea abroad, a set of ideas abroad that belongs to the Irish and might contribute to Europe. Those who rule have therefore a hermeneutic task – which, if they are open, they should welcome!

The Development of Meaning

Human meanings develop in human collaboration and become an almost unnoticed common possession. We spontaneously use the language we have acquired but I suppose every word of it was deliberately formed at some stage.
As meaning develops so too does self understanding. It is thought that in primitive tribes the individual thinks of himself as a tribal member. As practical tasks develop though and personal skills are acquired the individual comes to have more of a personal identity vis a vis the people he comes from. In trade one engages with other people, practical skills have to be learned, farming entails a struggle with the land. The set of meanings belonging to the whole people begins to exceed what an individual can acquire over a lifetime. Belief in what others reliably report becomes essential for communal functioning. There are meanings and values which everyone knows and specialised areas belonging to experts.
Lonergan distinguishes different plateaus of meaning, different overarching horizons. These can be seen as describing different ages or different personal outlooks. He distinguishes a plateau which is dominantly practical, a plateau which is dominantly theoretical and a plateau which is focussed upon self appropriation and authentic self transcendence.
If one is talking of ages one can see the practical plateau dominating the stage when great city states grew up on the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates. One can see a tremendous practical drive about the Romans with their roads and aqueducts and marching armies. But with the city states you get a theoretical component with the priesthoods and the protecting deity and of course you get the occasional flash of genius as with the pharaoh who suddenly decreed monotheism.
One can identify the theoretical plateau with the Greeks, with pre Socratic cosmology, with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and of course with Sophists who spread the wise word in such a way s to make it interesting and acceptable to ordinary mortals.
The Sophists had an important task, of course, to transmit a level of wisdom which had been attained, but there is an ever present tendency to readuce that wisdom in the process and to transmit merely a highly eloquent common sense, so people do not have to engage their minds deeply. I suspect a weakness in the Church throughout history comes similarly of the preacher does not engage profoundly with such matters as the Incarnation and the Trinity. Perhaps the malaise in modern philosophy comes from a similar reluctance to face central yet demanding problems, such as the nature of consciousness.
The theoretical plateau shows itself again in the medieval scholastic movement which evolved a way of dealing with questions, so that, with the help of Aristotelian philosophy, a coherent set of answers came forth. This was a great collaborative effort going on for two and a half centuries and providing man with a set of ideas still quite central to our contemporary thinking and administration, for example the notion of free will or the importance of following ones conscience. Around 1220, Philip the Chancellor made a clear line between nature and the supernatural (intellect being the highest thing in nature). Natural things could be naturally known but supernatural things could only be known by analogy from natural things. The method of talking about supernatural things became clear in a systematic way. Theology became a sort of science, but through reliance on Aristotle’s ideal of logic working on fixed premises got itself somewhat trapped for a deeper insight expresses itself in a richer premise.
All sorts of practical changes followed on the scholastic achievement for Philip’s line allowed nature to be investigated in a natural way, and with Galileo, Newton and Clerk Maxwell the natural sciences took off using mathematical techniques to anticipate the result of experiments. In Germany in the nineteenth century in the realm of human sciences (the posh word is geisteswissenschaften) the aim of history shifted from a record of facts which might be put in an encyclopaedia to ‘the reconstruction of the constructions of the human spirit’. This of course has immense implications for theology for revelation is historically mediated. There was, as a result, the modernist crisis in the earlier twentieth century but one may hope that over time a richer theology will emerge from better use of historical sources.
The theoretical plateau is reverent about the achievement of others but innocent about the spark in the mind of man which leads to further advance. This naivety leads to problems, for without the spark the motivation which would lead to further advance is lost. To illustrate the problem there is a young lady who has just taken a first in biochemistry. She does not want to work in a lab or to be poor so she is shifting to study law. The wonder which lies at the heart of philosophy, the curiosity which lies at the heart of science has not been sparked. It has long been noticed it is a sign of decline when the best minds – St Thomas More for example – go into Law.
If human meaning develops in human collaboration then the great need today is not primarily a need for collaboration around Science or collaboration around History or collaboration around even Theology but rather collaboration around the Human Spirit, how it is that it works, how it is that it gets gripped by a question, how it is that it moves systematically to an answer, how it is that, discerning courses of action, deliberation leads to responsible action and the peace of a clear conscience. The spark needs to burn brightly for the sake of Science, History and Theology.
More importantly, the spark needs to burn brightly for the realm of common sense for that is where most people live out their lives drawing on Science, History, Theology and Philosophy as best they can. Average man, even exceptional ordinary man lives out his life in the total realm of meaning as mediated by communicators, the modern day sophists. This task of communication is of immense importance for common sense, beyond the question ‘does it work?’ does not have a criteria to work by and so is vulnerable to false philosophies and ideologies as history attests. Man, not living by bread alone, looks to the realm of meaning, so that personal life may be as meaningful as possible. I recall just after Pope John Paul II was elected someone asking for his baby to be baptised John Paul. ‘After the Pope?’ I asked. ‘No’, they said, ‘Jean Paul Sartre’. The story perhaps indicates the muddle common sense consciousness can get into, and therefore the great importance of good communicators.
More important than a new scientific discovery, a theory which enlightens us about some past epoch, or some philosophic point is religion, the living of a good life, which is a life of love reaching up to God in dedication; a life of joy for existence is appreciated as a gift; a life peace making in a violent world for God made man to be brotherly. Authentic religion helps common sense man to grow in ways of genuine goodness and compassion and to meet new and difficult situations with a creative response.
The task of a culture which is working well on the third plateau is not to make philosophers, scientists, historians or theologians out of ordinary people but to help them grow in the sense of the meaning of the world we live in and what it is to be human and out of such meanings to help individuals, groups, nation states and empires and mankind as a whole to grow in the sense of what is possible, worthwhile and achievable, so that problems are faced and great things done. Bringing about an order of unmistakeable value makes a personal life very worthwhile.

The Third Plateau

When we grew up we found the perhaps pleasant character of our days somewhat harshly interrupted by being herded to school and seated behind a desk. Whereas the challenge of life had presented itself in tying shoelaces we have before us the immense task of learning to read, learning to speak, learning to write. We are challenged to develop. Not everyone succeeds here though it seems everyone learns to talk, unless they are handicapped in some way.
We are being introduced to a cultural achievement, and the handing over may be complete or incomplete. In my case reading came suddenly but spelling took years. I found, when I was typing a letter for the bishop to sign I cared and he cared that the spelling was right.
Alongside cultural achievements which are passed on there are developments which are made. For example the making of bread and wine must originally have been discoveries, but now they are passed on, but not to everyone. One acquires the knowledge appropriate to ones task. We do not all need a taxi driver’s knowledge of London streets.
Developments can go on in the three plateaus mentioned by Lonergan, the practical, the theoretical and the transcendental.
If development is not passed on in the practical sphere then the standard of life of a people begins to decline. The matter is evident and something can be done.
If development is not passed on in the theoretical sphere, then a cultural decline is underway but it will only be noticed by those who are not caught up in it. I was lucky enough to be taught the proof of Pythagoras’ theorem. I have noticed that many Maths text books just give the theorem but not the proof – a decline I think. If though ones concern was just practical it might seem that all one needs to know is that a 3,4,5 triangle gives one a right angle.
I think from the transcendental plateau one is interested in Pythagoras’ mind set, and what made him so interested in maths, and one comes across the connection between numbers and reality, perhaps for the first time. I think some of his followers jumped off cliffs when they discovered there could be irrational numbers!
In a particular cultural decline, there is likely to be a statistical aspect. Perhaps 70 years ago, 20% of young people reached an ‘O’ Level standard in Latin. Today perhaps 2% do so. More though are studying Japanese and other languages. One would point out that though there is a decline in Latin, there is not a general decline in culture therefore. In any such decline there is likely to be a remnant, a few who still achieve the former standard.
Achievement and the passing on of the culture to a new generation occurs in the sphere of values as well as of academic disciplines. In Greek antiquity there was an island where divorce was unknown, so wise and mutually supportive were the women of the island. We find our contemporary culture moving to a situation where for an increasing number of people, marriage would seem beyond their sociological and moral capacity, especially if a wedding is seen as automatically costing a huge sum of money.
With marriage we find ourselves on the third plateau, for marriage is to do with the mystery of love touching our lives and giving us the capacity to make a commitment. Still, here is an area where one can have a decline or recovery not to do with an academic discipline but to do with an institution vital to man’s life. It is a strange fact that our pagan ancestors in Europe were remarkably faithful in marriage. Indeed Gibbon puts the decline of the Roman Empire down to the purity of the morals of the Germanic tribes. Vico, writing from Naples in the early seventeenth century accounted for this by noticing the importance of the thunder god, Zeus, Thor, Jove and thought that early man had been more interested in hunting than family life and so had lived in a permissive state but, being struck by lightening which showed the gods’ displeasure, they took their women to caves and lived in the fear of the Lord. So villages and towns and tribes developed. He thought there was an opposite movement once civilisation was attained, whereby people said, ‘Do we have to be so strict?’, and so the discipline began to unravel. We find with Vico an anticipation of Durkheim the sociologist who, writing in the 1920s, thought religion had a key role in underpinning the institutions of society. Charles Grant, Bishop of Northampton, thought that to tackle our abortion problem we needed to convert people to God. Perhaps he was thinking conversion to God also leads to conversion to one another in marriage, and family life, resulting from marriage, is the immediate protector of life in the womb.
If ancient man learned the fear of the Lord from lightening strikes how may we hope that modern man may come to the same wisdom? We learn that God sends his rain on the just and unjust and is not vindictive. It is through history that he hammers out a law of consequences. We find Vico’s point about stable living leading to village and town life echoed by Alfred Marshall the Cambridge economist who thought the strongest motive for man’s work was family life. If the collapse of family life and the motive to work leads to poverty, then the misery of the situation could lead to a new appreciation of family values. We are used to the idea that the State can ameliorate poor situations but its power to do so depends on the wealth and the willingness of the people. Problems can get too big for the State to handle. If the State is finite, the Irish potato famine reminds us that it is not always competent either.
Lonergan sees the third plateau as concerned with three conversions which at the end of his life he described as affective, moral, and intellectual. Affective conversion is to do with God, with family and with community, moving to concern for all mankind. Moral conversion is to do with concern for values rather than pleasures. Intellectual conversion is to do with the ever present problem of distinguishing between the world of immediacy and the world mediated by meaning and motivated by values.
There comes a time when an institution has to reflect on its own reality, to express itself to itself, and so it is with the three loves at the heart of the third plateau. Of course there have always been major symbolic expressions, marriages, coronations and religious events. Such commitments though need daily expression for the love to grow deeper and to be handed over to a new generation. The Jews are good at family prayer at the Passover, when the youngest, by a question, is involved in the liturgy. Catholics have from St Dominic the resource of the Rosary, and today they have the divine office in the vernacular. How love for mankind should be expressed daily is a good question, each person putting a penny in a box for the missions, maybe. Family love is perhaps simply expressed by each person doing something for the others each day, so, helping with a meal maybe.
If one understands something at a particular moment, to retain the understanding one needs to express it. What is understood and expressed can be understood by another. At the heart of tradition there are the three loves which interweave, affection, devotion and loyalty. The heart of the education process has always been here, so one can see that the family is the first teacher of the heart in its self transcendence. We should live aware of our family identity, aware that we are children of God and as parts of contemporary humanity with its contemporary problems. These loves could be learned even if one is part of the 10% of the population which is illiterate. But I do not see how one can expect to transmit a love unless one has learned to express it.
Our education process seems skewed towards practicality – earning a living – and theory, perhaps for the sake of practicality or perhaps for its own sake. The education of the heart is not generally seen as being so important. We let our children lapse so long as they pass their exams. I recall a Downside abbot causing a bit of a shock saying to parents they taught the boys not to live but to die. Having passed through the system, I think this may have been wishful thinking.
If the heart is committed to threefold love then morals are accounted for one might think. The scriptures though attest that the heart is devious. There is a proneness to justify satisfactions as necessary for the attainment of values. Moral conversion is attentive to a yardstick criticising bad conduct and applauding good conduct. As an MP should I really have a free new kitchen? As a lawyer should I really charge £120 for that five minute phone call? As sexually active in sanctified marriage am I justified in distorting the teleology of nature which God made? As a priest can I dispense myself from saying the divine office because I have been so busy watching TV? So little ones should be taught, in addition to how to love, that there is a right and a wrong.
Without intellectual conversion, moral conversion will not have a content. Intellect is concerned with content, the idea expressed, and whether it is true. It is also concerned with a value expressed and whether it is binding. Intellect moves beyond the here and now into symbols, language which expresses truth and falsehood. The bank statement normally expresses what is true about one’s credit – something one cannot see. As well as indicating what should not be done, intellect may grant you the conclusion that something should be done and help you to wonder what.

Animal Extroversion and Human Extroversion

Sometimes reading Lonergan one gets the impression that one is being led into an abstract, idealistic and academic terrain and losing ones sense of the real. One can say humorously, but I think with accuracy, that Kant lost the universe in his study, a somewhat careless omission. That means though that one should approach philosophers with care, for their craziness might seep into ones personal system. Actually, it might seep into ones social system and cultural system and lead to such aberrations as concentration camps and Health Services which deal out death in the womb or to the aged.
One might hope that the absence of philosophy might leave humane instinctive complexes in place to govern human conduct. Would that it were so! I think doctors ceased taking the Hippocratic Oath because in an enlightened, civilized modern world there could be no question of using medical knowledge to kill people. There was a naïve optimism reposing upon sound human instincts and the sense of progress, of humanity marching forward under the banner of Science, Reason and Education. With universal education how could Democracy go wrong?
The realm of philosophy is problematic to most of us. We would like to sidestep the issue and rely on our immediate sense of the concrete and the good. We tend therefore to dismiss Lonergan for he would take us beyond our naivety and through idealism to critical realism. We feel ill equipped for the journey and put away the books!
I propose in this essay two objectives. The first is to show that Lonergan is not unfriendly or dismissive of our naïve world of extroversion and the second to show that the world of ‘critical realism’, lying beyond idealism or conceptualism or whatever is already the world we occupy in a de facto way. We are in the way of Chesterton’s traveller who voyaged a long way to come to a place which he discovered was his original home.
In his early work ‘Verbum’ Lonergan writes about animal extroversion, how a dog knows a bone and what to do with it, and, quoting Aquinas, how a pack of dogs, chasing a fox, discovering it did not go this way or that, will immediately rush along the only other option, demonstrating a sort of pragmatic grasp of the ‘excluded middle’ – a thing either is or is not – and so acting much as Sherlock Holmes would do.
So Lonergan, who describes the animals as ‘doing very well’, recognises in them a fringe of intelligence whereby they become well adapted to their habitat, with its sometimes exciting possibilities and the dangers to be avoided.
Lonergan sees man arriving in the world as cradled in an environment of love. He (or she!) is set not to live just in a habitat, with instinctive and intelligent responses but in the entire universe of being. Access to this wider world is very gradual. It does not ever deny the immediate world of animal extroversion and so like the animals man has a fringe of intelligence operating upon what is immediately present. This fringe though is radically interpersonal and charged with love and emotion. So it is that the hand which rocks the cradle rules the world.
The world we arrive in is filed with concrete intelligibility. I do not like spinach! I do not .like being abandoned. O dear, I have wet my pants and my mother will be annoyed. Very quickly as humans we start to use words which relate us not just to the here and now but to a wider world which expresses the achievement of our parents and the wider world into which we have been born. We learn, if we are so lucky, to read and to distinguish between the true and the imaginary – we come to recognise and know a wider real world, to take our part in it, and , in truth even to die for it. Indeed, if it should be our lamentable fate to die in our beds as opposed to the glory of martyrdom or legitimate military self sacrifice, then maybe the world of meaning we have discovered will allow all our living and dying to be to the glory of God and united with Christ in his Paschal Mystery. The world of meaning relates us to all that is and shows us the deep significance of an apparently trivial existence. Indeed all is to be revealed with eternal glory or eternal shame.
With such high themes running through our consciousness or with the constant effort to repress such high themes and reduce ourselves to a comfortable mediocrity if possible, it is hard for us to analyse and come to realise the importance of the world of immediacy to our intelligent, rational and responsible life. Lonergan gives the example of an eclipse. If we have lived long enough we are all aware of this phenomenon. We all know that light lights up the object on which it falls. If we had to explain so obvious a thing as that light can get blocked by a solid object such as the earth or the moon, we would have to go into an endless process of explanation. So our understanding of the world rests on things we know by experience. The world we live in has questions. When will the next eclipse occur? To answer the question satisfactorily we have to enter the world of expertise.
We find ourselves caught then between the word of animal extroversion, the world of immediacy, the out there, now, real world to which we must respond instinctively, immediately and vitally if we are to live and the wider world of meanings which we have come to know through our formation. ‘Critical realism’ is a matter of recognising the fact that alongside truth there can be lies, that history tends to be written by the victors, that there is reward for getting with it and forgetting ones deep instinct for personal integrity.
‘Critical realism’ seeks to help us recognise what is true. A big question now is climate change and global warming. Let us distinguish. Climate change goes on age after ice age. Global warming is man’s contribution. Because global warming is accepted by the Royal College of science and the governments of the world land is being used to make petrol rather than to make food. The drastic consequence is that people in poor parts cannot afford food, and they and their families go hungry. Of course we should love the world God has made. Of course we should care for the ecology down to the smallest butterfly. Of course we should be rational and avoid traffic jams. ‘Critical Realism’ would ask whether we are. Certain people must starve to prevent the immediate end of the world?
The issue here – shall the world end, shall the poor starve? – indicates that the realm of meaning also bring us into the realm of value, of deliberation, concern, choice, implementation. Inescapably it brings us into the realm of faith. Is the world grounded in a God so good that he has made a world where reasonable choices are possible? If that is so we must dismiss any option that means the poor must starve. We must dismiss too any option which shortens the life of the world. Like the hounds chasing the fox we must find the route that is possible, that makes a future possible. The dramatic thought is that this route might depend on personal self denial!

Philosophy and Culture

Alongside the natural sciences and historical scholarship philosophy too aspires to its own autonomy. One might see Descartes as the pioneer of modern philosophy with his quest for clear and distinct ideas, his Cognito ergo sum and his distinction between res extensa and res cognitans.
Hitherto religion and philosophy had grown together. There was not a conflict felt between being religious and being philosophic. The Greek Academy was in conflict with the Polis, but the first mover was an object of their thought, and thinking things through was an engagement with the divine.
The Library in Alexandria allowed Jewish scholars to absorb Greek philosophy and so to rank silver with mud, since all is earth, air, heat or water. The Christians found they had to use argument to defend the faith especially against the Gnostics who drew on Plato. St Justin Martyr is the pioneer here – he had got to know and love the Greeks before he was converted by an old man at Ephesus, presumably a disciple of St John.
The Greek philosophers, though they had ‘the first mover’ did not have Creation, God making everything out of nothing. St Augustine had the idea but it was defined at the Lateran Council 1215. ‘God made all things visible and invisible out of nothing’. The Greeks discovered the mind and the principle of the excluded middle, either a thing is or is not, there is no half way house between being and not being, but in 1215 you get this massive reason for being – if a thing is, it is because Almighty God made it.
The idea gives one a universe which is basically intelligible since God made it. It is a very powerful idea. I recall a ten year old shifting from the Genesis account of things to the big bang theory and saying, ‘Where did the big bang come from? If there was a big bang God must have made it.’ Who would want to argue with such clarity of thought? One catches a glimpse of Aristotle’s proposition that the intellect is potens omnia facere et fieri. If Descartes was looking for ideas which are clear and distinct, here is one which he believed but failed to notice and failed to doubt. Lonergan says something much more obscure when he says ‘if being is totally intelligible, then God must exist’. Before we explore Lonergan, I think in this context it is worth mentioning Plotinus, the realm of being, and dichotomies. The mind is made for the totality but it recognises radical distinctions, between for example, uncreated being and created being, between mineral being and vegetable being. At a glance the mind can hold in view a universe which is mineral, vegetative, animal, human, angelic and, if we call on the Lateran Council, made out of nothing by Almighty God. The dichotomies mark different levels of being and so different modes of study.
The ten year old was, I think, calling upon an archetypal mode of thinking which relates cause to effect. In the history of thought this is Aristotle, for when we understand the cause we understand what’s going on. The ten year old though was ignorant of Aristotle but had moved from infancy into the realm of meaning which is motivated by value. She had learned a language and had acquired a sense of right and wrong. I think one can recognise causality as part of this common sense realm. The cat knocks the precious porcelain off the shelf or she does. The disaster has a cause, and if she did it, it is truthfulness and right to own up.
Karl Jung noticed archetypes shaping man’s consciousness – I suspect sexuality is one for we all recognise that we are male or female and have to learn what we should do about the matter. Cardinal Newman, when a child, thought there had been a cosmic accident and he should have been an angel. We have the difficulty of dealing with a God who is not only more Heavenly minded than we are but also more Earthly minded. He made Heaven and Earth!
I suspect that the archetypes which shape us are enormously influenced by the culture into which we are born. An Indian child of three may already know how a little girl should dance. I suspect that Karl Jung’s archetypes were very symbolic and affective, so a horse represents death for some reason. I suspect our own consciousness moves spontaneously into archetypes which have a considerable intellectual content. So is it true that ‘water’ means the stuff which comes down from the sky and out of the tap? Without judgements of this sort it would be impossible to learn a language and everyone capable does so. As one enters the realms of story, the question ‘is it true?’ means ‘did it really happen?’ I suggest the idea of reality is archetypal, an expression of the eros of the mind. I suspect that for most of us there is an ‘adjustment to reality’ – as for the child Jesus when he realised he should be obedient, or Cardinal Newman when he realised he must cope with a cosmic accident. There are children of 11 years old in India who have no option but to spend the day weaving carpets. I think though that the idea of cause and effect is also archetypal. It would explain praise and blame. It is a huge jump in the mind of course to leap from explaining a tidy bedroom resulting from one’s personal efforts to an entire universe resulting from an act of divine will. The intellect though is set for these jumps for it is capax omnia and how should it proceed to invisible things except from visible things making use of analogy?
I am not really in a position to judge the usefulness of Lonergan’s remark, ‘if the real is totally intelligible, God must exist’. I think it has to do with potency and limited act. The young child had a structure to explain everything but actually knew very little. Lonergan perhaps is talking about a richer de facto situation where we have come to know and be sure about some things. Upon that basis questions can arise and other things come to be known, perhaps by future generations. If questions endlessly lead to intelligible answers, then there must be an intelligible ground to the universe which is, who is also intelligent. Lonergan works from the ground up – all knowledge rests on previous knowledge – whereas the ten year old works from the top down. Certain utterances from Lonergan also work from the top down. Perhaps what we are seeing instanced here is ‘methodology’, appropriate advance from what has been achieved in a field.
The modern philosophic movement from Descartes on has rightly asserted the autonomy of philosophy. It asserts intelligence but has lost the yardstick of truth. Lonergan thinks that the object of the mind can gradually move from the possible to the probable to the certain. There is a yardstick to be found, different in measure in different areas, yet leading to a certain judgement, so that we live in a world we in part know. Questions remain belonging to ones time. Abelard had his 157 propositions sic et non. Today in a global world we live with questions about global warming, climate change and ecological responsibility. We might have questions too about the economy and its problems. Each science, each area of scholarship, including theology, lives and develops by a gradual movement through question to answer to further questions. This is not a matter of faith but of fact.

Intelligibility and Bias

Lonergan’s remark ‘if being is intelligible then God must exist’ is quite obscure. I think though if you said to a natural scientist, ‘man can never know the causes of global warming’ the natural scientist would disagree. He would point out that we need much better computers. We need to understand the jet stream much better. We need measures to quantify the effects of local pollution as below the Himalayas destroying the ice. We need to understand rainfall and forests much better. Etc. Etc. But there is the sense that man’s intellect faced with a question which cannot yet be perfectly answered can move, in the course of time, by authentic scientific collaboration to an increasingly probable understanding until one has a de facto certainty.
So science has faith in an intelligibility waiting to be discovered. Is there an area where this does not apply? Could one say, outer Mongolian Chinese is unintelligible? So someone said we live in a Hermeneutic universe. As an apple is ready to be eaten so the universe is ready to be understood. Such a universe is only explicable if made by God.
Lonergan knows that man grows in knowledge by using schematic image upon schematic image, adding insight to insight and so deriving an idea which is true, knowledge of some area of being. The idea of all being belongs to God. We have some idea of this and that, and when we come to know something we are in a limited way sharing in the mind of God. The Hebrews taught us that we are in the image and likeness of God and the scholastics saw that because we can know and love we are a created participation in the divine nature, capable of knowing and loving, but of course far more in potency that in act. We might think, well God can create out of nothing and we can’t and therefore we are not a created participation in the divine nature – a sort of spark – but in fact we create ourselves by freely choosing how to be and what to be – to abound in goodness or to be evil. The possibility to be evil is to make ourselves the only god recognised in our universe. We see, in this high fashioning of man, the possibility of damnation.
The fact that man can understand, develop understanding and share it gives to human history a progressive movement. How should so many millions live upon the face of the earth without the invention of the water closet? Without agricultural skills how should we be fed? Without politics how should we live together in peace? Without religion how should we know what to believe and what we can hope for?
Unfortunately man’s story is not entirely one of progress and the fact of progress provides greater resources and means of evil. Lonergan writes of bias which somehow prevents the intellect attaining truth or the wicked person being conscious of their wickedness. He sees love as not only being an instrument of progress, providing motivation for family life, for building up a people and for religious practice but also as having the task of healing the objective distortion of things caused by bias.
Whereas in traditional Thomistic philosophy nothing can be loved unless it is known – knowledge has about it an emanation of love – Lonergan, writing from his perspective says nothing is truly known unless it is loved. Love provides the most profound perspective and so sees the potency for healing and redemption. Such a perspective gives us some insight into divine mercy or the patience at a human level Jesus had in dealing with sinners and sinful situations, including of course the crucifixion.
The scale of values ascends through vital, social, cultural and personal values to religious values. As values imply decisions so bias implies poor judgement and so poor performance at at least one or more levels. Poor judgement comes either from a rush to judgement under some sort of interest or pressure one assumes so that one has lost all serene detachment which belongs to weighing the evidence – or poor judgement comes from failing to judge when the evidence is in. So in a world where everything, by the infinite care with which it is wrought, tells of God, from the robin to the scale of the galaxies, we can meet with Bertrand Russell’s reason for unbelief: you should have produced more evidence. Maybe the ultra intelligent person, busy with schematic images and insights, easily looses a grip on the importance of conclusions – this is so, this is not so, this may be so. Correct conclusions are in the end more important than intelligent surmises. Everything God made is evidence for his existence.
When Lonergan says that in much of Europe ‘being’ is lost in personalist, existentialist and phenomenological thought, yet alone by Kant who may be said to have lost the universe in his study, he implies that our culture is widely unaware of the importance of judgement and so is prone to weakness in failing to judge or rushing to judgement. One may be helped to recognise the point by recalling that Augustine stresses the importance of truth for the mind, that Aquinas pointed out that where you have truth you know what is real, that Newman distinguishes between notional assent and real assent. Lonergan gives us a technical term, ‘the virtually unconditioned’ which means recognising when the evidence is in, and whether it is sufficient for the matter being considered. Failure to make judgements which are true is caught up in the term ‘bias’.
Dramatic bias affects the way a person or a people looks at the world. Their outlook, their neurosis. There are things they cannot, will not see.
Individual bias entails a loss of sympathy with others so one looks only to self interest in work and family and so does not share the burdens of ordinary life or seek the common good.
Group bias leads to a failure to appreciate others, to nationalism, class hatred, ignorance of science or philosophy, of scholarship or religion.
General bias entails the common sense solution to all problems and so leads to religious decline, cultural decline, social decline and a failure to address personal or group spontaneous disorder. General bias leads to a general decline which can accelerate surprisingly. Mass murder enters upon the scene in concentration camps, abortion wards, old peoples’ homes and with weapons of mass destruction.
The reverse of such decline rests with religion for every biassed action has its rationalisation. The grace and love that God gives are genuine and so grant a rock to the person who finds himself called, by himself or with others, to reverse general decline and promote a genuine progress. Religious conversion leads to a moral conversion which insists on loving neighbour as self; to an intellectual conversion which only gives assent where there is sufficient reason to assent, though one should note that the authority of God is an absolute reason to assent; and Fr Doran argues there is need too for psychic conversion to overcome dramatic bias and to grant one a sensorium of transcendence. Such conversions go on over a life time and provide a ground for Theology which thus does not have to found itself on abstract principles.
When I first came across the phrase ‘a sensorium of transcendence’ I found myself thinking of sacramental life and rosaries and so forth but I now think it means a familiarity with the different emotional states when one is resting in the senses, finding solutions to problems, assessing the truth of the insight or theory, deliberating what to do, acting in a committed way. Emmanuel Mounier said man is naturally artificial. Lonergan claims, and claims it is possible to verify personally, that we are oriented to self transcendence in knowledge and love. This orientation is natural, but it comes to have a supernatural goal. One could echo Mounier and go far beyond him by saying man is naturally supernatural.
Primitive mythology and the great world religions witness to this and to the fact that God gives all men sufficient grace for their salvation. At the same time, all traditions, including our own, stand in some need of reform, of purification. So Pope John XXIII taught us ‘Ecclesia semper reformanda’. One reform which is upon us as a Church is the Declaration on Religious Liberty. In fact, each development in doctrine leads to a reshaping of belief, conduct and mission and I think an example of this would flow from a general acceptance that the world religions flow in some substantive way from the grace won for man by Christ our Lord.

Where Does Beauty Fit In?

The world remains a beautiful place, a witness to the handiwork of God, and, while the things that man makes can be beautiful, it is as if we have lost the theory of beauty and can be led into harsh terrain therefore. Houses become machines for living in (Le Corbusier), music can become abstract and technical, or perhaps go into a diabolical beat, something similar can happen to painting and a permissive society loses the beauty of a wedding. Our present Pope, Benedict XVI is aware that this contemporary loss of beauty can enter into the Liturgy itself.
One might imagine that beauty was just to do with the sensible, but St Augustine frees us from that assumption by addressing God as ‘O beauty, ancient and new’, and God is not an object of sensation.
In traditional metaphysics beauty was one of the transcendentals, belonging to something in the measure that it had being, truth, and goodness. Even Homer nods, and Lonergan appears to drop beauty as an objective transcendental or for that matter as an intentional transcendental. He quotes Langer on ‘Feeling and Form’ allowing the aesthetic to allow an escape from the ready made world of responses to stimuli where red means ‘stop’ and green means ‘go’.
The scriptures, while they are beautiful and a huge inspiration to art, do not much expound beauty, though perhaps the term ‘glory’ while it belongs to God himself also belongs to the situation where man responds to God rightly and so, at first surprisingly to us, the crucifixion is seen as glory. Thank Heaven that is not the whole of the story. ‘Man fully alive is the glory of God’. (St Irenaeus)
We need a much more adequate theory of beauty for man responds to beauty for good or ill. David was quite taken by Bathsheba bathing and so led to murder. The moralists remind us that we choose evil under the aspect of good. We choose because we are attracted by beauty. Could we not say that insofar as we are free all our choices are governed by the aesthetic dimension? That the Nazis played Wagner and classical music in their concentration camps indicates that the aesthetic theory we need must not be trivial or partial – it must be to do with the motivation that makes a genuinely good man and expresses a genuinely good situation as we find in the liturgy of the Church but not only in the liturgy. The Benedictine saying ‘Laborare est orare’ – ‘to work is to pray’ – hints that beauty belongs to ordinary work and to manual work. To see beauty in manual labour does not belong to many parents as they dream and hope for their children, which suggests that the perception of genuine beauty is part of a rare moral attainment, part of authenticity and holiness. Where would our human being be without the work of human hands, without wine and bread and cleanliness? I found myself more taken than usual with a programme about fishermen off the East Coast of America having to deal with rough seas and engine failure. It is not without a periodic drama that fish and chips turn up in the local shop.
Can we use Lonergan to get into a theory of beauty which is at once physical and spiritual? The way is through the psyche which arrived on the stage with Freud in 1899 and which has contributed to the general malaise of twentieth century man.
The psyche is intermediary between our non-conscious bodily reality with its energies and needs and our conscious intentional reality which is sensitive, intelligent, rational, responsible and loving. The psyche precedes intentional reality with the images and feelings of dream life and escorts intentionality in a nuanced way with appropriate images and feelings, so that the wild passionateness of our being is guided by evidence, true understanding and deliberation. Our full blooded reality should bear winess not just to nature, as a lion, but to thought and reality and indeed to the divine.
Father Robert Doran SJ a gifted follower of Lonergan points out that awareness of the psyche and of its limited energy helps to make us responsible for our psychic welfare. Too little striving in our life and we collapse into the boredom of depression. Too much, and we wear ourselves out, and collapse back into a depression which is needed to allow psychic energy to recuperate and life to start anew.
Lonergan distinguishes different levels of intentional reality, the sensitive, the intelligent, the reasonable, the responsible and the loving, and we move up and down from one level to another. The fact of love may make us attend anew to the colour of Sarah-Jane’s eyes. Does not the aesthetic, the beautiful belong in some way to each level and involve the psyche at the level of feeling? ‘Feelings are the mass and momentum of our living’. Or where senses are not operative are we not engaged with words, their meanings or with persons, their values and the value they have for us? We respond to others and their expectations from an early age. As Lonergan writes ‘excellence in any walk of life is ever a matter of effort, training, education, encouragement and support.’ Is not the achievement of excellence a matter of personal, beauty and if such excellence has been prompted by a parent, a teacher is not the love shown a thing of beauty?
If we deliberately attend to the way the psyche assists the intentional scale, there is the pleasure of sensation, of sitting comfortably, of eating and drinking, of feeling the sun or the wind. Is not the psyche directly engaged here bringing the operations of the senses to consciousness and indeed helping us to select what we shall be conscious of?
There is ‘having a question’. I recall Elizabeth Anscombe saying the great thing is to find a good question and I recall wondering how you do that. You have to be up with others in a certain area but attending to something new, like Einstein knowing abut Newton but attending to the clock face from the back of a moving tram. Light must take time to tell the time. A question focuses the whole of attention, with the psyche providing appropriate images. Is ones whole horizon going to shift? The thinker goes over the matter again and again. Is there not beauty in the quest as well as in the dawning insight? Do we not call this beauty ‘wonder’? It is not only a genius who wonders. We all have to wonder what to do with our freedom, what to make of our lives.
There is an attainment in the sureness of knowing, a delight in the object known and a delight too in communicating a matter to others and getting a response. The French word for knowledge is ‘connaisance’, a being born together,
Life is thoroughly interpersonal. There is love in understanding another’s concerns and a glad willingness to help. This makes family life or parish life or community life and brings reciprocal benefit. A person finds personal meaning not just in being loved but in loving. There is beauty here which engages our freedom, our effort and even at times our sacrifice. There is a growth in unity making a family, a friendship, a tribe, a parish, a church, a nation. There is the beauty of the Gospel, the clarity of conscience and the peace of holiness.
The psyche too can be engaged in bias, dramatic, egotistic, group or general. Here the entrapment works by a sort of beauty too - hence the vital importance of intentional consciousness which reaches real knowledge of the situation.