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.