Love, Commitment, Values

The scale of values moves from vital to social to cultural to personal to religious. Everything depends on vital values. More particularly, each level of values takes direction from the next higher level and depends immediately on the lower level; so social values are informed by cultural values and dependent on vital values.
Personal values then are informed by religious values and dependent on cultural values. If the culture is simply pragmatic and hedonistic basing itself on the already out there now real world given us by scientific discovery, then personal and religious values can hardly emerge. What one is and what one is to be is already told to one by a set of experts and their conclusions.
Without genuine personal values religious values cannot emerge, so it is helpful to recognise the danger to man posed by a sheerly scientific culture which guides politics and the mass media and leads to sex education for five year olds. I always think the best sex education for five year olds involves couples who fall in love and ‘live happily ever after’!
The situation is poor not only for five year olds but for Man and the Church in her post Vatican Two stance where she relies on modern culture. The question, how the culture is to be upgraded is therefore of great importance.
If we envisage the solution as arising from the scientific world, the way forward is to point out that the scientific spirit itself as exemplified by Galileo, Newton and countless others is not simply a matter of observations and experiments but a matter of curiosity driving the one who makes the observations and conducts the experiments. Here is something of importance which needs to be explained and which cannot be explained and explored by scientific method.
We have, in moving to the question about curiosity moved into the level of personal values and conscious states which involve more than curiosity alone. I recall a man going in for an operation who said ‘I realise I am a bundle of atoms and yet I still feel anxious.’ Alongside being curious about curiosity we can be curious about ‘anxiety’. We are moving into a world which, as well as being aware of the data of sense brought to a high point in observation and experiment, is also aware of the data of consciousness.
One person cannot be conscious for another and so coming to apprehend and understand the data of consciousness has to be an individual, personal affair, but books can be written and persons can become expert to help others. So, alongside scientific achievement, the achievements of ‘self appropriation’ can get themselves published and so enter the level of cultural values. So one can be greatly helped by purchasing Lonergan’s Third Collection and reading it. Just as the scientist or historian belongs to a community of others who are similarly minded, so there is a widespread community of those who are concerned for spiritual values and a somewhat smaller community of those who are prepared to be absolutely accurate about what they say. Lonergan suggests we might become as familiar with the attainment of knowing as we are with the attainment of seeing by opening our eyes in daylight and looking.
Of course we are conscious of sensation, and it is not without sensation that we are awake. It is not without sensation that we get curious or find ourselves in a position to reach a conclusion. So the task of self appropriation does not go on outside the world we have come to know, and if that world has an expertise one has the advantage of being able to refer to that. We are each though the expert in our own life with its achievements and follies, with communications and breakdowns, with loves and maybe hatreds, with its religious moments or maybe moment when God is quite out of the picture or we act to keep him out of the picture. Self appropriation is concerned with how we bring ourselves to bear on the world we gradually come to know and love, in which we decide and act.
When we consider the data of consciousness abstracted from the data of experience we are therefore being highly abstract. There are two streams in the data of consciousness to be distinguished, or let us be bold and say three. The three are emotions, images and intentionality. Emotions and images proceed from the psyche and at first play a subordinate role. Without emotion we would not be stirred to understand something or delighted when we succeeded. Our actions very often proceed from the emotion of sympathy or fellow feeling. We need the work of imagination to form the schematic image needed for understanding or to prepare a course of action. The psyche then, a source of images and emotions, escorts our intentionality. But at the highest level, the level of love, our emotions appear to take over, so that we have a new basis for intentionality, a new basis for our evaluations.
Intentionality – consciousness moving with a purpose – achieves self transcendence in coming to know. Knowledge is not a matter of looking beyond oneself but a matter of constructing within oneself that which corresponds with what is, whether what one comes to know lies beyond oneself or is part of ones own make up. The idea of self appropriation is in large part the idea that we can come to understand and understand correctly what has long been part of our experience. There is self transcendence in coming to know about oneself because in understanding human nature you also come to understand about others. They too have insights, they too reach firm conclusions.
Lonergan writes (2nd Collection, 1968, p.80) that human consciousness at its fullest emerges when ‘we deliberate, evaluate, decide, act . . . Then the existential subject exists and his character, his personal essence is at stake’. This is the place of merit or sin, where we may win the peace of a clear conscience or the disquiet of guilt. Decisions face the question, is our action worthwhile? They may be purely personal or arrived at together, when hearts entwine and a common action is agreed. A common policy can win the assent of others. I think we can see there is self transcendence in well thought out and well deliberated action, for such action affects the world around, other people, and shapes anew ones own character.
These words were penned about 1968 and it was about then that Lonergan started writing about the central importance of love. In 1977 (3rd Collection, p.174) he writes about questions for intelligibility, questions for factual truth, the question of the good, and then suggests that these questions moving to answers are ‘but aspects of a deeper and more comprehensive principle. . . that begins before consciousness, unfolds through sensitivity, intelligence, rational reflection, responsible deliberation. . . a dynamic state that sublates all that goes before, a principle of movement at once purgative and illuminative and a principle of rest in which union is fulfilled.’. He is writing of love by which we are ‘lifted above ourselves and carried along as parts within an ever more intimate yet ever more liberating dynamic whole’.
The fact that this movement ‘starts before consciousness’ indicates that it is our whole nature that is involved and so why it is that our emotional life is so thoroughly involved.
When he writes that love makes us ‘parts’ helps us realise the importance of ‘commitment’, of being willing to play our part, and throughout a whole future informed by love.
At the level of rationality we are able to place values in a hierarchy, but love makes certain values operative in a new way so one can write of a transvaluation of values. Hence we find celibacy, perpetual virginity, and a new context for reflection about contraception.
Love in the family and in the community witness to the love of God. ‘When you love look to the source of your love and you will find God’. (Augustine)
The person in self appropriation has to appropriate his own physical nature with its neural basis for psychic life, his sensitivity, his intelligence, his rational capacity to reach true conclusions, his responsibility for the use of freedom all in the context of the commitment that love has brought about, the demand that love makes.
When the love of God is acknowledged then the purification which is moral conversion gets under way and intellectual conversion at least makes a start for what is invisible is acknowledged as real. The orientation to love being prior to consciousness means that loving commitment is not just a matter of mind, or even mind and heart – flesh and blood too must be completely engaged.