Personal Responsibility and Tradition

It is not without effort that we achieve something – we need the help and encouragement of others who have themselves been trained. We learn to drive from those who drive, but a more significant example comes from the Irish. The monks there spoke and wrote better Latin in 700AD than was found in Rome – the Irish, a people who had never even been part of the Roman Empire!
I recall at Oscott in the 1960s a sense of relief that we did not have to deal with Latin. Was not everything translated these days? I recall too a slight sense of surprise and disappointment about the matter. Was I witnessing a sort of decline? Or was it progress for I was training to be a priest in England in the late twentieth century? I would need to be in the same world as the people I was ministering to. The result though is I find myself dealing with a scriptural tradition with just a smattering of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. My Latin has gradually picked up a bit and a few Greek and Hebrew words somehow enter our contemporary Catholic culture. I am somehow aware my formation in the area of languages could be better.
It is worth recalling Lonergan’s words: ‘Excellence in any walk of life is ever a matter of effort, training, education, encouragement, support.’ (3rd Collection, p. 119) Encouragement and support normally come from the older generation though of course they might come as special grace from Heaven. One catches a glimpse here of the fact that teaching is a vocation not a job and that it is the sharing with another of a personal achievement. Where education is going on genuinely there is therefore a special union between teacher and pupil.
Lonergan sees the ground, the starting point of education as affectivity. I rather suspect that often the teacher approaches a difficult situation with a multitude in half rebellion with the idea he must show who is in control! Affectivity is the last thing one demonstrates in an age full of fear about child abuse. Affectivity when the world is starved of it is likely to be misinterpreted. There are those in psychological damage for whom affectivity leads to compulsive conduct. So perhaps the idea needs restoration. Surely it does!
First, parents and mothers particularly are supremely rich in affection to their children. I recall a religious sister, Mother Rosario, at the age of 80 kicking a football with some little children – she had obviously won their hearts. Our Lord, when he first deals with the fishermen invites them to ‘come and see’ where he lived. Did he who after his resurrection cooked them breakfast by the Sea of Galilee take them to some remote cell where he made them some mint tea? He was known as a glutton and a wine bibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners and about this wining and dining way of life he claims ‘wisdom is justified by her children’. When risen and dumbfounding, he asks for a bit of fish, I think we may envisage he was asking for a meal, and in the course of it he might have asked Peter how his mother’s health was. The art of winning affection and so setting a context for further things to go on would obviously be vital for those in communications, for example those who preach or teach. St Paul urges us to ‘let all people feel your warmth of heart’.
Lonergan has the realm of ‘values’ rising from the world of affection. So the Irish novices learned from older monks the value of Latin, and the children playing football with Sister Rosario picked up in a way the value of being a nun. I was blessing a couple of 3 year olds. One kept attending to her teddy bear. It was explained to me later that she was trying to get the bear to make the Sign of the Cross. She had picked up directly my concern to bless another.
I think we often think that values arise from abstract principles. Kant apparently disparaged emotions when it came to moral principles. There is a difference between those who think that abstract principles are self evident and those who argue that an abstraction flows from an insight, and an insight has emotion about it (Archimedes) as well as a schematic image of some sort.
Lonergan then has beliefs arising on values, including of course the value of believing other people who are creditworthy. Belief allows a division of labour with regard to knowing and so expands enormously the scale of what may be known, whether the matter is secular or religious. While Lonergan has beliefs arising from values one should note that one appropriates many values through belief. Knowledge comes at us in the form of propositions which may be true and certain or which may be opinions or which may be genuine fiction or even a lie, an attempt to deceive. May one see this general making use of belief to communicate all sorts of things as founding Cardinal Newman’s idea of notional assent? So many matters have to be known that not everything can be known with very great clarity and sureness.
It may be thought that what one wants to encourage is individual giftedness even unto genius and that the world of belief is somehow an impediment to this. One wants a historian with bright ideas, but to be a good historian does one not need to apply oneself to the relevant data? Perhaps some educational ideas today derive from the Enlightenment’s stress on Reason and its disparagement of Tradition. Once one realises that most knowledge is transmitted by belief one cannot avoid realising that a belief system is a tradition of some sort, and so even in scientific or historical matters, the Enlightenment position gets radically developed and genius becomes an infinite capacity for taking pains. So Newton thoroughly understood Galileo’s work on falling bodies and Clerk-Maxwell thoroughly understood Newton when he developed new equations to deal with the electro-magnetic world. You have a position achieved, a development, the transmission of a development (just 200 copies of Newton’s book were sold by1700) and new questions arising, because the development achieved does not answer everything.
Lonergan has understanding arising on the basis of belief. The teacher needs to understand if he is to achieve the transmission of some subject. Much of our knowing, based as it is on widespread belief, is notional. For teaching, though, insight is needed. It is worth noting that insight is into phantasm which has been formed into a schematic image which yields the appropriate understanding – which may then be expressed one way or another, in a simple way to children for example. A true insight can yield a general proposition for similars are similarly understood.
A teacher with insight not only successfully appropriates past achievement but is in a position to pass it on. Such ‘tradition’ goes on in many different areas, in Science, History, Philosophy, Theology and the practice of religion. Advance in one are can go with weakness in another. Bishop Grant used to say, ‘if we knew how to pass on our religion to the next generation, England would be Catholic by now’. A careerist culture is bad not only for religion – ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’ – but also for marriage and having children. I have spoken to women in their 40s who never noticed they were missing a family. A sheerly scientific emphasis informs technology wonderfully but focussing on the already out there now real fails to discern the human spirit in its curiosity as the prime mover. Historians may eliminate the finger of God. Perhaps this analysis shows up the importance of genuine love and genuine insights in the transmission of religious tradition. The philosopher can avoid entrapment in error and point up the polymorphic consciousness of man.