Myth, Metaphysics, Mystery

Man is equipped with senses and imagination like the higher animals. He is equipped too, with intellect but does not always and everywhere go in for self-appropriation and so distinguish the operations of intellect from those of sense and imagination. Where the operations of intellect are compacted with those of sense and imagination, you get myth

One might distinguish metaphysics and mystery, for in metaphysics and mystery, the mind deals with proportionate being, and in mystery, he deals with transcendent being and also with the possibility or fact of revelation.

Let us deal first with how intellect works upon proportionate being, and can do so in such a way that intellect is appropriated.

When a matter is being successfully studied two things are going on. Knowledge of the object under investigation is increasing, even if one finds things are less certain than one had thought. The reason that knowledge is increasing is that a method is being applied. Without deliberate attention, intelligence and reasonableness applied in a way which is known to be fruitful knowledge, will not develop. The method itself may develop.

While the scientist or scholar must use a method, he is not bound to reflect on it and master it in the way of understanding why it works. Failing such reflection he is likely to explain his results in terms of imaginable entities. So the whole world is made up of tiny billiard balls which push each other around.

This fall back to imaginable entities is the source of myth, whereas if method is appreciated, a certain conclusion, perhaps a probability judgement, has been attained which is merely a correlation. So heat applied causes temperature to rise. Even in this utterance, I am into “cause and effect”.

Cause and effect belongs to our commonsense world of course, and also to Aristotle who thought when we know the cause we know why the effect must be what it is. He thought this applied to mathematics alone.

Myth is not satisfied with understanding one or two things, so everything gets lumped together in “mythopoesis”, so that a single image accounts for everything. I rather wonder whether the big bang theory might be an example of this. So far as I can gather, no one knows the extent of space which is surely relevant if one is imagining everything starting from one point. Mythopoesis stretches forward to the future - a black hole maybe, or a universe in which everything gets further away. Our faith that Christ will come again gets pressured by the power of cosmic myths.

The realisation that this universe which we know has very special design features, leads to the notion of an infinite number of parallel universes. William of Occam had the precept “entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate” – beings are not to be multiplied without reason – and I think Descartes’ systematic doubt was originally intended to deal with such crazy ideas. Is there any reason why design should not be accounted for by a designer?

The world proportionate to man’s mind is known by a method and if method is understood then the importance of judgement answering the question “Is it so?” comes to the fore. “We all complain about our memory. No one complains about his judgement”. In judgement, we, on the basis of sufficient evidence, recognise a truth, and with that recognition man himself is also thereby delimited.

So when La Place, following Newton, argued for a future completely determined by the present, he was excluding the possibility of human freedom changing the future. A completely materialistic world following mathematical laws implies a completely materialistic man for man is part of the world. If matter can be completely controlled then so, too, can man.

To follow La Place is to be under the influence of a mythic view and to rush to judgement without considering the whole issue. So is it irrational to apportion praise and blame? Commonsense and judges in law courts seem to think not. How do we account for the self-judgement of conscience? If it is an illusion, then perhaps everything, including La Place and Newton, are illusions? One needs to consider all the relevant evidence before making one’s judgement.

The judgement one makes is not necessarily imaginable, but it is subject to the law of non-contradiction and needs to be logically coherent. So we live in a world where some things are more or less predetermined by material circumstances and others are predetermined by mental processes. The question is, is this how it is? The question is not, is this all imaginable?

When it comes to human studies or the geisteswissenschaften one might be clear, and so myth will be at a discount. One of the strange propositions about this area is that our judgements emerge from the subconscious. So if you speak to certain historians, the judgement is already made, miracles cannot happen, so if they are reported, the witnesses must be self deceived or even group deceived.

I did come across a case of group deception. Near Great Billing, a whole family met an airman who had been shot down and killed during the war. The parish priest who dealt with the case found there had not been such an event. He had to deal with the situation of a mutually supporting group who were group deceived. St Thomas’s doubt saves the apostolic witness from this accusation.

There can be group deception about airmen, or about miracles, but similarly there can be group deception going on in groups of historians. A person who spouts forth confidently should have asked questions upon how his mind is made up. There is though, a Narcissistic reinforcement to any bias lying in the approval of colleagues. So for some, the Church based on miracles is negligible but the Muslims using force are part of the historical process. For the physicist the myth might be billiard board atoms and for the historian it might be the idea that force and explosions determine significant events. History is full of colour: there is plenty of scope for myth and mythopoesis.

We do not set out with a knowledge of being – we come to know being in the measure that we can affirm something to be true. So Lonergan leads us, echoing Descartes, I think therefore I am, to the self affirmation that we are sensitive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible, that we are knowers who should see to it that we are diligent in the three distinct operations that lead to knowledge, and then diligent in seeing what we should do about what we know.

There is then, a movement from myth to a careful statement on what we have verified. Knowledge of finite being, is stretched beyond its normal potentiality by an excess of intelligibility. Aristotle said that the situation is like an owl dealing with daylight: There is too much brightness. In that brightness though, we are not dealing with myth but with a reality which grants significance to life. Where God meets man, you get mystery. The medieval saw the accidental area of grace where God meets man as of infinitely greater importance than the substantial area of nature. The contemporary today would probably agree that it is love that gives life its overwhelming significance. The late Lonergan describes this area as “affective conversion” and distinguishes family love, civil love and grounding these, Divine love.

Such love maybe granted at any stage of history so mythic consciousness may reach up to express the matter in allegory. Metaphysical consciousness may express the matter in terms of the Supreme Being. The modern might insist that important as orthodoxy is, more important is orthopraxy. Voeglin sees this matter as expressed in myth, prophesy, philosophy and the Gospel, but is suspicious of doctrine for there is a danger here one is not speaking from the heart.

The one moved by love has found what is more important than myth. For Lonergan, doctrine is essential, for Divine love carries a message with it, so to comprehend Voeglin’s point, Lonergan distinguishes between notional and real assent, Newman’s distinction.

By such love, by philosophic attainment, one is freed from myth but we still have a psychic and emotional nature. Fr Lonergan sees devotion to Our Lady as helping us to refine our whole being in an appropriate way as we deal with mysteries which are to be affirmed – The Trinity, the Incarnation – but which are way beyond the power of imagination to adequately express.

Tradition

Human meanings develop in collaboration, practical, social, cultural and indeed, religious. Man considered as “a rational animal” is the same at every stage of his development but considered as belonging to a particular place and time finds he is shaped up by a set of symbols which are formed in him by effort, training, education, encouragement and support. So we might learn to read a musical score and play. It was Wittgenstein who pointed out that as a single musical lesson does not make a musician, so a single lecture does not make a philosopher.

Each individual assimilates his tradition in a particular way and I think it is true to say for most of us that we are more dragged up than brought up with appropriate care for our aptitudes. There is the public education system, which at present fails to see that students are capable of reading and writing. In this respect, electronic devices are a serious danger.

The proposition that where there is collaboration there is a tendency to development is substantially optimistic, though of course, thieves may have honour among themselves and find better ways of robbing the bank. Apart from breathing, almost all the things we use in a daily way have been discovered, shared and passed on to the next generation. How to grow wheat was a discovery and, so too, how to bake bread. The future tense was a discovery and, so too, how to measure time and meet at the next full moon to exchange bread for furs maybe.

A development may be complete or incomplete. By incomplete I mean that the problems arising from a development have not been thought through, so that problems, maybe outweighing the benefits, arise. So the pocket calculator leads to people who cannot add or multiply, and the computer leads to people who cannot write or spell. The TV is a great child minder but it may lead to young ones who fail to speak. The gaining of energy from fossil fuels is not complete as a development if it is building up ecological disaster.

A complete development which is worthy and good, therefore, requires a widespread and critical culture which can see and deal with dangers, with the new situation emergent from a development. So the Mandarins in China refused a match box factory for “we do not need so many matches”. The Mandarins in their critical decisions needed to realise that trade meant they could provide matches for other states than their own. One can see though how problematic progress is, for what about the matchmakers in the other states?

Progress through collaboration is social as well as practical. So the House of Commons places the leader of the opposition more than a sword away from the Prime Minister. Insecurity generated by the trade cycle has led to unemployment payments. Compassion for the bereft has allowed divorced couples to remarry. Compassion for young people has led to abortion nearly on demand. Genuine progress has to take account of the whole scale of values as apprehended, or one is on “the slippery slope”.

As well as living in integrity according to the whole scale of values, religious, personal, cultural, social and vital, one has to pass on the achievement to the next generation. Here one recalls that values are apprehended in feelings, the reason for them is firstly given in beliefs and beliefs are explainable in some degree, though “where God meets man you get mystery”.

When we think of God creating, forming and developing the world, we probably tend to think in terms of physical process, so evolution shows the finger of God producing new material forms. But God works too in the evolution of the world of meaning, so that man attains natural moral truths more swiftly but also attains to revealed truth: “A Virgin will conceive”. The production of the ten commandments as we find them may owe something to the code of Hammurabi; something to Egyptian law; something to different historical circumstances, but we recognise in the spirit of faith that God had an overriding impulse which we call divine inspiration. The Modernist movement of the nineteenth century thought the whole development of Israel and of Christianity must be put down to human development alone.

The world as we find it today is marked by developments of a huge sort which have about them dangerous aberrations. Though Aristotelianism made use of intentionality, it reduced the conscious process in man to a sort of causality. This put a block on the healthy development of theology, which in the scholastic age made use of Aristotle.

The scientific movement developing from Galileo made use of mathematics to analyse movements and accelerations of mass and as mathematics had but one answer so any movement had about it an absolute necessity. The world man lives in seems completely determined by scientific rules, so not only can there be no miracles, but man himself, since he is made of matter, must be completely determined. His sense of free will and responsibility must be an illusion. The twentieth century has seen the advance of new mathematics, of probability theory, of uncertainty but there is a broad tendency for the scientific movement towards agnosticism, towards atheism and towards the control of man for his own good, his “health” as conceived by experts.

The sense of history as a movement forward arose in Israel because the Lord made promises which were not yet fulfilled. As history has got wider in its scope (I think what Hubble was to stars and galaxies, Toynbee was to history, producing civilisation upon civilization) you find an empirical world with all its differences of meaning and value, and so, unless one is a man of strong faith there is a tendency to relativism. What one understands and cares about is just the chance of where you were born and when. Indeed, Toynbee’s huge spectrum makes me wonder if today’s Great Britain is the same country I grew up in.

Philosophy is seen as achieving its autonomy from theology with Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum, his res cogitans and his res extensa, his universal doubt and his clear and distinct ideas. One may claim that philosophies oscillated for a long time between empiricism –“philosophy the handmaiden of science” – and idealism, philosophy a realm of thought, which shows that man cannot know the real. The nineteenth and twentieth century have seen the assertion of praxis, of man in his freedom, in fideism, pragmatism, phenomenology and existentialism. Here the problem is that modern philosophy has very largely lost the idea of being, its structure, and its normal requirement. So Lonergan after lecturing huge classes in Rome could say “In Germany, France, Northern Italy, the Netherlands, being is dead” – part of that death of course is a widespread loss of interest in science. His observation came from teaching clerics, so what is a weakness in culture is also a weakness in the Church. For example, many young people are not married – they cannot see it as a matter of being but just a matter of being happy.

Lonergan thinks we all attain being – come to know being - as when the country bumpkin asks “Is that so?”. In a complex area, the judgement will depend on a heuristic structure. So the question might be what percentage of CO2 is produced by man burning fossil fuels? One has V1 (earthquakes) + V2 (Volcanoes) + V3 (living creatures breathing out) + V4 ..... Vn + M. One can then assert that the percentage is determined by

%
MT
=
VTotal - V1 - V2·····- Vn
X 100
VT
VT
One does research, adds in the figures and reaches a conclusion – maybe 5% or 10% or 50% - I have no idea. But if it was 5% and v/t varied by more than 5% a year, one might make the further judgement – the quantity is negligible. A heuristic structure carefully formulated and filled in after due research gives one the capacity to know what is going on, to make a judgment and so “attain being” – for as Aquinas said Ens et verum convertuntur – or the truth gives you access to being.

Lonergan claims to reach “metaphysics” through “Phenomenology”. When you have an area where your knowledge is growing you observe the different operations which go on attending to the date etc and so you can answer the question “What do I (we) do when I (we) know?”.

There is the further question “Why is that knowing?” which is epistemology.

There is then the question “What do I know when I do it?” which is metaphysics.

Lonergan sees metaphysics as flowing not from abstract principles but from the praxis of authentic scientists, philosophers, historians, people of commonsense, theologians and from an integration of the diverse heuristic structures. All structures, for example, attend to the data, produce theories, weigh up and conclude. We are all in the same universe and can accept the authentic judgements made by others in a normative way.

Values and Feelings

On a traditional view wisdom, dealing with what is certain, gives us the moral order, and prudence, dealing with the variability of contingent events, has to implement what is right, and among the contingent events would be feelings. At the same time devotion, surely a matter of feeling, was highly prized, but one should be prepared to cope with dryness – a lack of feeling. At the same time a continuous lack of feeling was seen as problematic.

Modern psychology recognises a complete lack of moral feeling as psychopathic, an illness of a sort, and so recognises a substrate of feelings as necessary to psychological health. At the same time it is recognised that feelings themselves can be disordered and Karl Rogers’ counselling method would bring about a situation where they are recognised, named, understood and appropriately dealt with.

Lonergan describes thought without feelings as Shakespeare’s “pale cast of thought” and describes feelings as the mass and momentum of our living. At the same time I think that modern life tends to occupy itself with a set of replaceable functions so that personality is largely irrelevant to function and feelings are in abeyance. In terms of mass and momentum perhaps many are half alive. Recognising the situation some may feel alienation and so set the ground for a different sort of future.

There is a development of feelings which may be crushed out or which may go too far and lead to sentimentality and the stars being God’s daisy chain. One may disparage what others already possess and so harm your own development. You may focus on personal attainment in one area so that you lose sympathy and the capacity to relate.

One may claim of feelings that they seek expression. The lover writes poems or does a tap dance. The soldier before battle tests his weapons once again. The penitent seeks absolution. The rapist awaits his chance. Those who love purely catch a glimpse of God and worship.

Lonergan claims that values are apprehended in feelings. At the basis of apprehending the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value is trust and belief. We have an empathy which sets our feelings in resonance with others. Believing others we ask why and if the others explain well we are set on a path of intelligent appropriation of values, of “things that matter”.

We are stirred too by the fine example of others, a leader or maybe a figure from the past like Lawrence of Arabia. I suspect though that the feelings that promote values also arise from within. Man is not under the immediate impulse of instinct like other animals but Oetinger the Swabian pietist thought instincts developed gradually to form an interpretative structure which he identified with Lord Shaftesbury’s “commonsense” – the sense that makes community. For Oetinger this was the sense that allowed a true interpretation of Scripture. Here we come upon a supernatural instinct which the Catholic Church recognises, “think with the Church” but equally, “feel with the Church” – “sentire cum ecclesia”.

The fact of feelings is to do with the fact of bodiliness, so at rest feelings are very basic, such as being cold, or tired or hungry, or comfortable, energetic and replete. We are made though for bodily self transcendence in family love, in love for our people (witnessed to by the soldier, but expressed in countless other ways: “love your neighbour as yourself”). Our relationship with our God in the Christian religion is also bodily, though not only bodily. So Simon Peter finds himself being directly quizzed “Do you love me?” His answer affects the heart of Christ as well as expressing his own. At the end game which lifts us to Heaven, we find our emotions totally involved in the self bestowal we call love.

Emotions then are not confined biological purpose but escort our living in its technical achievements, its social developments, its cultural developments and in its religious developments. St John of the Cross in his dark night of the soul has darkened the world around him but his heart, his emotions are totally involved with the unseen God who works within him.

Lonergan is sometimes seen as a dry as dust thinker, but actually he places the body with its neural systems at the base of all our conscious performance and our conscious performance involves the body and feeling all the way to the self surrender and discovery which is love.

Bodily neural life is organised by the psyche which as such is an unconscious organising power which shapes up what we deal with in consciousness in the way of images and feelings. As the psyche is higher than the neural system, so intentionality is higher than the psyche. As the psyche depends on the neural so intentionality depends on the psyche. In all that we do we are feeling about it. In all that we do we have imaginative equipment at work, particularly, I think one should point out, words. A damaged psyche will limit intentional performance so there is dramatic bias and dramatic conversion which might actually be rather a long and tedious affair dealing maybe with something long forgotten and deliberately forgotten. Actually as Neitsche who went mad pointed out for our sanity there are some things we should deliberately forget, I think in this sane utterance of a later madman, we gain the clue that though the psyche is unconscious and shapes our conscious potentialities as to images, words, feelings it is not immune to influence from our conscious performance. If our psyche is damaged some way, it is through our conscious performance that we might hope to heal it. It is healthy to see any conversion as a long term process, even life long, and this applies to psychic conversion too and perhaps above all.

Lonergan uses the “operators” to describe the movement from sense, to intelligence, to reasonableness, to value laden responsibility and he uses the term quasi-operators to describe the imaginative and verbal and emotional concomitance of facts which keep us interested when thinking about something, which keep us detached from making a conclusion when considering all the evidence, which give us energy and prudence when deciding and performing.

The neural system and the psyche remind us we are bodily and they, at the culmination of the process of development, show us that the goal of love is not some abstract definition but includes a bodily and emotional self donation. We have to keep coming down to the fact that psychically we are bodily and limited human beings capable of but one course of action. When it comes to love the quasi operators are often more important than the operators. This of course can be a cause of folly whether the love is divine, or familial, or for a people and mankind.

When there is a choice to be made, there is often a “wrenching” for part of our emotional love life has to die. You can only watch one programme on TV – or if you switch back and forth you miss something of each. I loved Economics but when the priesthood called, I had to get into a quite different realm of studies – I had, trusting in God, to let things go. A person is in love with two people but can only marry one – there has to be a letting go, and not quite as detached as that of St Thomas More who married the older sister because he did not want to upset her by marrying the younger. A middle aged man feels young again in the company of his secretary – he has to let the temptation die if he is to stay faithful to his wife. The fact that there are values to be upheld mean that there is wrenching to be borne. This is in large measure the meaning of the cross we have to bear if our life is to be an intelligible offering to the Lord (St Ignatius) “If you love Me, keep my commandments”.

So while values arise in feelings, genuine values also have the task of directing the emotional life in a way which is worthy. Fr Lonergan sees the Marian dogmas as helpful here. He sees the main body of dogmas as “The Church making an act of faith and so expressing her faith” when it is threatened as it was threatened by the Arian heresy in the early fourth century. He sees the Marian dogmas, the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption as guiding the devotional life of the Christian away from sin and to the hope of Heaven.
Feelings are the Mass and Momentum of our living whence may arise disvalues as well as values. The intellectual life under its own norms and with the help of faith is purified from error and moved to the truth including the truth of values. Feelings too are typically in need of purification if we are wholeheartedly to pursue the good.

Three Levels Involved in Knowing

Our consciousness is tied to dreaming, sensing, imagining, words, and affections. There is also valuing, deliberating, and deciding. The list is not exhaustive.

One theory might be that knowledge is simply the result of sense experience. I know this place exists because I can see it. I know Australia exists because other people have seen it. On this basic theory there is not only experiencing, but believing others who are trustworthy. People who are innocent of cognitional theory might construct their philosophy around this idea, familiar to them from several years spent in the nursery. So you get materialism, empiricism, sensism, phenomenalism, behaviourism, and pragmatism - but beyond that, an ever present way in which many people understand the human condition. So if you add the fact that some things are pleasurable and some are terrifying, you have a root understanding of much modern culture based on sex and violence: a sort of lowest common denominator which leads to maximum viewing and profits.

Suppose one thinks that the “id” with its censors and opennesses takes its shape beyond the family, the village, the school, the parish from the mass media, you find a powerful hedonistic shaping up going on towards greater pleasure as life’s meaning. Prayer, for example, is at the heart of life which seeks to love the Lord your God with all your mind and strength. It does not feature in our mass media. In a broad way it does not feature in the bringing up of our children and grandchildren. We can here contrast our modern mass media with biblical culture, which shows Moses praying, or David praying. Maybe we need to draw not just on our biblical culture but on our subsequent Christian culture to shape up a world where it is generally realised that it is “Prayer alone that conquers God” (Tertullian). We need to know and express the stories of our saints and martyrs and humble pastors. For example, what happened to the humble priest of Northampton who, in 1902, was given £5 by the Bishop of Northampton and told to set up a parish in Lowestoft? Here is a drama for the BBC!

Man is described as a rational animal, a symbolic animal, a self completing animal. I find helpful to understand the difference between man and animal, the story of some monkeys who were given some sticks they could join together to reach a banana. If both sticks were in front of them, they could empirically see the problem and achieve the solution. If one stick was in front and one behind them, they could not think, “We need another stick to join to this one”. St Thomas Aquinas, rather surprisingly, has a similar case with hounds chasing a fox. They sniff three ways he might have gone, and finding no result head off in the fourth way he must have gone. With monkeys and hounds and all creatures in their degrees, there is an empirically based intelligence which is wonderful in its result.

Animals have imagination of course, so one can see the dog chasing its prey in a dream, but man has control of his imagination, so that faced with the problem of the banana and one stick, he can think “What I need is another stick”, and look around and find it. This imagination upon which man’s mind can work is called phantasm by Aquinas and schematic image by Lonergan. The formation of the appropriate image may be by diagrams if it is a matter of geometry, or by essays if it is a matter of history. “Seek and you will find” said the Lord – the mental working out of things is a large part of man’s seeking, but the labour would not be engaged upon unless there was a real question and some prospect of finding a solution.

A question leads not at first to answers, but to possible answers. It leads to thought not to knowledge. Thought is a whole lot of maybes. So Newton’s theory is a maybe; Darwin’s theory is a maybe; that the universe is 16 thousand million years old is a maybe; that blood circulates the body carrying oxygen is a maybe; that William the Conqueror invaded Britain in 1066 is a maybe; that God made all things visible and invisible out of nothing is a maybe.

The technical term, the virtually unconditioned, indicates that when certain conditions are fulfilled, an object of thought which as such is a maybe becomes something as certain and real as the immediate world around us. So the battle of Hastings in 1066 is a point not just of imaginative thought, but something for which there is evidence, something which is understood in some degree and something which actually happened.

The fact that it actually happened does not mean I can transport myself back through time and become a sort of observer at this past event. Rather, I rely on certain evidences to know about what happened. When I was young, I learned that Harold had an arrow in his eye. I find myself now quite doubtful about this scene and suspect the poor man was in some way betrayed and murdered and the arrow is just an airbrush account to put the best story forward. One sees in this case how a known fact has the solidity of the table in front of me, a definite intelligibility and yet gives rise to further questions.

The difference then between just thinking and knowing is that with thinking one has evidence and a possible explanation; with knowing one has evidence and the only possible explanation. Evidence of one sort and another has so mounted up that instead of wondering about something, one knows about something. So I think most Christians will find themselves knowing that God exists but wondering about what He is like.
Experiencing, thinking, and knowing make three levels of consciousness which are cumulative. Without some sort of evidence, there is nothing to think about. Without something being thought about there is nothing to weigh up and judge: it is so. One can judge without realising one does so. It is one thing to know that there was a battle of Hastings in 1066. It is another to know that you know. Thought which thinks the sum of things to be thought about are sensations, is materialistic. Thought which goes in for theory but is unaware of judgement, is known as idealistic. Thought which is aware of judgement, is called critical realism.

The empiricist takes as data simply sense experience. The idealist takes as data sense experience but also a world of thought. The critical realist combines the data of sense with the data of consciousness to realise that sometimes a theory is simply true.

Lonergan has the thinker moving from the sensible, to the intelligible, to the true and real. I wonder whether the contrast Newman makes between notional assent and real assent indicates that it is possible not to realise that what is true is real. It may be possible to make a series of truth judgements, for example, God is; the Church is Holy; operative grace is radicated in the soul; there was a battle of Hastings, but once sense of reality is confined to the world of animal extroversion as found in the nursery, or to that world plus the world of thought, so that, while one makes truth judgements one does not realise that thereby one is attaining a limited knowledge of the real.

The question becomes, “What world do I live in?” Is it just the familiar world of things which do or do not work, or does my knowledge project me into a wider world of being; a world very largely unseen and in part unimaginable; a world which gives rise to further questions and which promises doom or bliss?

Raising the Viewpoint

There are three different viewpoints suggested by the three plateaus of history; the practical, the theoretical and the existential. The third Plataeu is not named, so I am using the term existential in an honourable way to name it.

Most men in all ages look out on the world from the practical viewpoint. We live so long because of practical achievements. The Yak must be followed. The city states grew up as a result of agricultural achievements. People worry about the GDP. Rich men assess other rich men by how much money they have got. Many argue we should stay in Europe because that way we can be a super power.

One can see that religion can combine with practicality but very often it is for the sake of a good or better practical outcome. Early Christian converts in the North Sea area still prayed to Thor for a safe journey, I suppose until some kindly monk composed for them a better prayer, addressed to the one true God. One prayed to the Ba’als in Israel for the sake of fertility, and the city state gods, Nannar was at Ur, looked after their cities and helped their armies.

Practicality, though it has an operative area which is efficient and reliable, has a penumbra of uncertainty, so that concern for outcomes gives concern with the gods, or god. The crops may fail, the sun grow cold (or hot!) and there can be few going into battle or danger who do not pray for protection. My grandfather experienced a ship going down and everyone was praying.

The religion of Israel though was not an escort for practicality. Abraham was called to be a nomad, a poor, perilous, virtuous way of life motivated by God’s promise of blessing, land and fertility. Religion is a way towards a new practical achievement, where above all, one is free to worship the one true God.

With Abraham, man’s viewpoint is lifted to the heavens and to others who share the faith, the people of God. The problem of being clannish gives rise to a universal purpose, being a light to enlighten the nations. The call of God with a purpose puts all events in an historical perspective. Man’s mortal life retains its significance even as it becomes just part of a wider significance. The viewpoint covers a past in which God has spoken to his people “in many and various ways”, the present full of promise from the past and a future, somewhat hazy, but God’s plan.

One might find today the majority of people with a practical viewpoint and a few saints in the pew, on the bishop’s bench or in monasteries with an Abraham-like viewpoint and one can envisage a deal of mutual incomprehension, so that the history of events shows up a clash of views.

The development of a theoretical viewpoint in Athens covered the areas which later became known as natural science, theology and metaphysics. Morals were included. St Thomas found himself able to use Aristotle’s metaphysics and his moral conclusions. He made use of his Posterior Analytics so that one science rested on another. The area of knowledge appeared most definite and mainly a matter of deduction.

For Abraham wisdom had been mainly about trusting God, with the scholastic achievement it came to include all that could be known from the universities. In time this led to the Renaissance idea; of the Uomo Universale so that an educated man could be expected to know everything about everything known. So when a member of St Philip Neri’s household of priests was getting a bit uppity, Philip told him to do the cooking and told the cook to do history. The cook, Baronius, became a Cardinal and a famous historian. Perhaps there is more to history than sheer deduction!

In Western Europe a massive development of culture got under way. With the fall of Constantinople, it became heir to the Byzantine achievement as well as the Roman Western achievement. There were new materials to be absorbed. But how one should deal with new materials was not clear to the heirs of scholasticism, even though scholasticism had found its “questions” from diverse and often seemingly contradictory materials.

The scholastic achievement had followed a method in assembling materials, noting contradictions and finding a resolution of the matter. But it had not noted its own method. Similarly, the natural sciences got going noting two key elements in method, observation and experiment, but not the whole of method. Again, historians got going, following a method, and describing elements of it, like “achieving understanding through research”, or “attending to the peculiarity of things”, but common agreement about method waits on the achievement of cognitional theory.

Still we find the Western world achieved a general theoretical viewpoint which included the sciences with scholasticism. The natural sciences freeing themselves from Aristotle’s definitions have used mathematics to correlate object to object. So you have a learned standpoint which may imagine that the sciences having become free from Aristotle man should be free from God too. In the horizon there is a clash between some scientists and religion.

Or, since historians may be tracing the development of some value, say music or democracy, we may find a clash between some historians and some scientists. For the scientist if the thing cannot be observed it does not exist. I came across an historian who, bowing to the empirical ideal, thought the only genuine history could be about population movements and technologies.

As a preliminary to talking about self appropriation and method, I would note that insights can coalesce to give a single world view, but that sometimes they need a further insight to do so. There is a tendency today to schizophrenia. There may of course be an organic basis to this. But the fact that we find different viewpoints in disarray and clash means that the individual, shaped a bit by this viewpoint and a bit by that, may find two modes of thinking within himself, both of which have a validity, but which, since they are in conflict tear the person involved asunder.

An example of viewpoints which clash: about 17 years old I know that F=MA and so a material movement has a material cause. At the same time I knew I was a material being in part and responsible for my actions. How does a spiritual influx affect the material? I have effected a resolution of things through Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, through the Neo Thomistic idea of form shaping up ‘matter’, and so to the reality that man in his intentional material movements is responsible. Several different insights, admittedly broad grey areas, allow me to be at once material and responsible and so free and worthy of blame or credit. Here at least, by integrating thought, by the coalescence of insights, I have avoided schizophrenia, Laus Deo.

In the mid nineteenth century and on, when geometers found Euclid a special case, philosophers turned to human action and choice. There was not a system which could predetermine man. Names are Newman, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and the tendency is carried on by pragmatists, Existentialists, Phenomenologists. Typically for this viewpoint, the sciences are not of importance or even the historians – each of us has a life to live and the important thing is to get it right. So Newman drinks to the Pope and conscience, but conscience first. Here he is only echoing the scholastics who taught that one should follow one’s conscience even it is misguided. Conscience is the voice of God. This general movement, comparable to the scientific movement and the historical movement has been termed “the turn to the subject”.

The trouble is that subject turned to has tended to be shallow – one thinks of Nietzsche’s ”will to power”. One has a whole set of further viewpoints, in which, as Lonergan claims of most of Western Europe, “Being is Lost”. His care which shows above all the importance of love whence values are mainly grounded but which shows also the value of truth and the realisation of being and man’s condition, and which shows further the quest for truth and the collaboration needed to attain it, allows us to envisage a universal standpoint which provides a horizon within which there are many dynamic movements, theological, scientific, historic, practical, persuasive, many of which at present clash.
A key point is that developments are collaborative even though the collaboration is across space and time. So Lonergan who died in 1984 helps me, and I never met him. A question is, how does “The universal viewpoint” relate to the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church? It is a divine blessing that each of us has a pastor to listen to us and to guide, and this is true of the age. I would say that the universal view point recognises the possibility of the supernatural and of revelation. Perhaps as Aristotle was to Aquinas, so the universal viewpoint is to the Magisterium. The universal viewpoint has the advantage that it commands the attention of all men of good will. The Magisterium finds in the exigencies it expresses, matters of concern and a standard which must be measured up to in expressing divinely revealed truth.

The Makeup of Man: Nature and Plateau

Man straddles the universe composed of body and soul matter and spirit and by grace sharing in the divine nature. Yet he knows himself in terms of the knowledge he has of his world, cosmological and historical. Typically, self-knowledge is limited to the practical plateau and so to a pragmatic and hedonistic schema. If he is kept on this plateau, he can be ruled easily by the stick and the carrot.

On the cultural plateau various terms have come in with psychology after the last 112 years. Relevant terms are “body”, neural system, psyche, id, ego, self, intentionality, self-transcendence, self completion, affective conversion, moral conversion and intellectual conversion, subject, subjectivity, personality.

The psyche oversees the transition from the neural to the conscious and intentional. It is the locus of feelings, of images, of words, of memories, of dreams which can occupy a night, or dreams which can occupy a lifetime of folly or wisdom. It is trained in taste and maybe averse to pasta or to any cruelty. Feelings can be trained up and passed on through empathy. A language is learned so the healthy psyche escorts intentionality by giving us the apt word at the apt time. Insight typically is into a schematic image which draws on sense experience but reshapes it so that an appropriate intelligibility emerges. The schematic image needed for understanding politics is different from that needed to give the precision appropriate to mathematics. Both come with the collaboration of the psyche.

The psyche is the locus of judgements which have been made, of principles which are adhered to, of personal values which express a lifelong commitment. It takes time for character to be so formed. Helpful to understand this is the idea that insights coalesce.

An example of insights coalescing would be that the addition of a number to itself, say N times, can be expressed by addition but more simply by multiplication. But if one’s insight is a verified insight which has been weighed by the question “Is it so?” and so affirmed as part of the concrete universe (so the alps are prone to snow), or part of the notional universe (so certain additions can be expressed as multiplications), or part of the moral universe (I had better avoid that temptation) or part of one’s set of personal, affectionate values (I had better do some history and say the rosary).

The task of the psyche is thus enormous. It is the ground of the entire universe as you have come to know it, the ground of questions no longer interesting for you know the answers and of those which will never be interesting for life is too short, and, importantly of those which are interesting, for perhaps some progress has been made and some remains to be made.

One’s horizon, emergent from the psyche, should be coherent, but if one has not attended to things duly, has rushed to judgement here, failed to judge here it may ground complexes which are inconsistent, to which extent one’s character is split. Drives have been admitted which are incompatible with the gospel. They are commanding. One is a wretched sinner and from one’s own resource there is nothing one can do about it. A grace is needed. There maybe something analogous about a human relationship. There is a rift, and it so affects one that one cannot just put it right. An event, something analogous to a grace, is needed – one may rescue a child from the fire and end up no longer disliked but a hero.

The psyche can grant interest, a feeling about some area, but of itself it does not raise a question. The business of questioning and finding answers belongs to our conscious performance going where it has never gone before. If we know an answer, we cannot, except as a rhetorical device, ask that question. A question goes beyond the present content of the psyche to what is not known. It engages the whole person in his conscious performance. I suspect that normally a question is not considered except out of a decision e.g. I ought to find out how much I have in the bank before I buy that new coat.

The psyche assists the questioning process. The process itself involves questions for intelligence (how often, why?); questions for reflection, is it so, is it not so?; and questions for decision – shall I do this or that? The psyche provides the feelings which help intentionality, so it provides a feeling of curiosity for questions for intelligence; it provides the serenity to answer the rational question “is it?” and to base one’s answer absolutely on the evidence; it provides the emotional concomitant to perform some noble or ignoble deed.

Without new questions and answers, without new deeds the psyche is caught up in a repetitive routine and the result is depression. Cardinal Newman’s statement “To live is to change, to be perfect is to have changed often” envisages a sort of newness belonging to a life well lived – new questions lead to new answers and decisions – and we find in Scripture the Lord making all things new. The German ideal of Bildung has the idea of moving to an ideal, whether the image of God or Herder’s “image of humanity”. The English C19th ideal of a gentleman perhaps expresses perfection attained which would confine the psyche and be depressive. Utterly repetitive jobs must confine the psyche.

Fr Doran though sees depression as coming about another way. The psyche as source of imagery and emotion is a finite resource, so if one gets hyperactive on some project the resource runs out of steam. So the character moves from a manic phase to a depressed phase so that the psyche can recuperate through having a rest. I think an awareness of this polarity in oneself- psyche as a principle of limitation and intentionality as a source of almost unlimited possibility – gives one a certain responsibility for psychic health – for oneself, for one’s family and perhaps for one’s people. Diocesan life or parish life could suffer from too much routine or too much activity.

It is not without the psyche providing feeling and image that man moves to the life of love – for family, for people, for God. Lonergan calls this affective conversion, a life of union “in which we are lifted above ourselves and carried along as parts within an ever more intimate yet evermore liberating dynamic whole.”

“Lifted above ourselves”: there is a new flood of meaning to the whole of our life, including its normative exigencies, be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible. Such love might be the love of God, or of spouse and family or of mankind, perhaps in some political process. Such love arises in the content of normal exigency, which already tests integrity: so the cobbler’s son falls for the milliner’s daughter. I see the raising up of love as somewhat like a stone being lifted up in a stream and washed clean as it is carried along. So love is purifying but the purification is a closer attention to the exigencies of what it is to be human, to the norms of intelligence (did I really understand?) of reasonableness (did I really weigh all the relevant evidence?) and of responsibility (do I respect all the values I have come to know of?) Such lifting up is repentance since what is unworthy of existence charged by love has to be dismissed. There is perhaps a wrenching of emotions. There is a movement from drift to commitment in which one is taking the ultimate flow of things (God’s love moves the stars, Dante) as one’s true direction.

In such lifting up, the psyche is no doubt busy and at full performance. The whole direction of life is being found, so rest will be found. But if one is into a succession of such affairs not carried through in commitment, then the psyche will be exhausted and maybe a cynical attitude escorts a permissive world.

Increasing intimacy .... our destiny is not solo performance and solo glory, it is part of a splendidly collaborative world stretching back in time, so the intimacy is with Isaiah and maybe Keats as well as with the Holy Father, one’s spouse and the Green movement. The whole world, as it achieves integrity (through being lifted up) and holiness (which lifts us up) finds itself as part of a single stream moving to a single point, from alpha to omega.

There is to love, rest, peace, achievement, security and indeed happiness. To this, the Sabbath points. There is the sharing of things human and things human, and the sharing also of things human and things divine.

The point of rest here is a point of activity but a point of activity in a way beyond question and so belonging to the psyche in its orientation to the world. The point of rest is not a matter of norms but a matter of normalcy where those fruits of the Spirit ”Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Fidelity, Gentleness and Self Control” have been taken over by the psyche on the process of accumulated wisdom and so rule conduct and irresistibly set in motion wider movements toward redemption.

If any love is intimate yet liberating, intimacy suggests rest and liberation, action. Here is a balance which needs to respect the psyche as needing rest yet escorting intentionality. So Christian life typically moves between contemplation and action.

The Gradualness of Intellectual Conversion

“Destroy a man’s illusions and you destroy his happiness” – so wrote Hubert van Zeller, a famous monk. It is a statement which makes me wonder. Is the real world so frightful we need illusions to make it bearable? Should one encourage a person in their illusions to make them happier yet? Our Lord’s words appear in a stark contrast: “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free”.

The first thing about van Zeller’s remarks is it would seem to mean, “go gently with your brother”. He has shaped up a world in which he has a place and the construction has been lifelong. About 30 years ago I recall talking to an Indian who had just arrived here. He had letters to English grandees and was sure that somehow they would sort him out. His attitude seemed to me feudal, but it was so much part of him that I suspected he was on his own in this country. Probably he had best make his way to the job centre!

Lonergan writes that we all live in our world since man’s life is being in the world, but it is far from true that we all live the world as it really is.

The Emperor Justinian accepted his wife’s explanation as to why she was naked with her lover. He loved Theodora so much he could think no ill of her. But here the illusion led to murder when Theodora chopped up her housekeeper’s body and dropped it in the Bosporus least she should spill the beans. Adolf Hitler’s “illusions” led to genocide. There comes a point where illusions need to be pointed out but the truth is that in some cases the pointing out will not destroy the illusion. Chesterton writes of a madman in a lunatic asylum who is rejected because he thinks he is Jesus Christ. The fact that he is rejected confirms his case since Christ was rejected.

Perhaps a way of understanding how illusion and truth can mingle in our apprehension of the world is to reflect in dreams, conscious dream and hope. Hope undergirds our activities but since we cannot see the future there is a dreamlike quality about our hopes. To express our dreams can galvanize others, so Martin Luther King’s famous speech set of: “I have a dream”. Ezekiel in exile dreamed about the future Temple. The more immediate the reality the less the power of the dream though. So I don’t think one can dream, about the future of the parish or one’s immediate family – rather plans are looked for. Maybe I am wrong here though, for a senator can dream that his son will be president.

Maybe a dream about the end can affect present conduct with a surreal and even immoral quality. So if you are an MP it is alright not to declare your mortgage is paid off because obviously in terms of wealth you make a mistake paying it off. An egoistic dream has led to egoistic conduct.

So Freud had it that what the id is, the ego is to be. As I understand it, the id is the subconscious source of images and feelings. Some things are censored subconsciously, some things are promoted subconsciously, and so the ego emerges. If one equates the id with dramatic bias, then the ego has much to do with individual bias. The sense of the self as one has a project of one’s existence into the future is thought to take shape interpersonally. The group you belong to helps you see what is possible and what is not. So the self, drawing from the group, easily becomes subject to group bias. There is then the spirit of the age which easily carries on general bias – so “progress” becomes simply technological advance and economic output.

A bias involves some sort of distortion of the truth. So a false philosophy such as pragmatism is likely to escort the biased world. The world we live in begins to tell us how to think so I think one can see that, alongside religious conversion, moral conversion and intellectual conversion can be hard to achieve and indeed pose a lifelong task.

What is intellectual conversion? Lonergan refers to Cardinal Newman and his distinction between notional assent and real assent. Notional assent allows one to give the right answers and pass one’s exams. Real assent changes the world you live in. So a state of religious apathy can lead to lapsation. One has all the answers but somehow they stop meaning anything very important. One does one’s homework rather than coming to church – or perhaps reads the Sunday papers. Lonergan associates real assent with a sort of enlightenment. One realises that one really does personally need help from God.

Intellectual conversion was shown by Aristotle when he said “Dear is Plato, but dearer still is truth”. Plato thought we understood because we had seen the archetypes. Aristotle realised that the world around us was directly intelligible and produced four causes which allowed us to answer “Why?” with “Because”. So you had material, formal, final and efficient causes.

St Augustine found himself having to struggle with heretics but also to grasp more perfectly the mystery of the Trinity. Man’s task was to seek the truth and with God’s help, find it. Close to Plato, he thought finding the truth was a divine illumination. By contrast, Vatican One has a theologian seek the truth diligently, piously, soberly but the mind itself has the criteria to recognise the truth.

St Thomas Aquinas seeks the truth alongside St Augustine but has the proposition that truth gives one access to reality. He refers to ens, to being, and is making the same point as Cardinal Newman. In 1215, the Lateran Council had declared that God made everything visible and invisible out of nothing, so I think Aquinas has God through creation causing existence as another sort of cause. A unicorn is a sort of being – it can be thought about – but it does not have existence.

Scholasticism had set off with questions – one recalls Abelard’s 157 propositions which were contradicted in his “Sic et Nom” but it ended up a matter of true propositions and logical deductions. In fact St John Fisher or Erasmus applied themselves diligently to Greek and Hebrew but Catholic culture as a whole was vulnerable to the Reformation appeal to a return to Scripture. The most learned of Catholics thought it sufficient to write commentaries on St Thomas Aquinas. Aristotle’s “Posterior Analytics” showed how one science was related to another with Metaphysics at the heart.

The natural sciences made their own way forward and Charles II’s establishment of the Royal College in 1660 made natural science a matter of observation or experiment. With the prestige of wonderful discoveries, philosophy became the handmaiden of natural science and lost its hitherto close touch with religion. The task of philosophy seemed to be to explain how scientific knowledge was possible. The spirit of the age moved to Enlightenment and the Church found herself unrecognised, at the edge of a culture where the dynamics appeared to be protestant and enlightened.

This culture lost its way. The certainties vanished. For Riemann, Euclid’s straight line geometry was a special case. For Heisenberg uncertainty and probability became part of the heuristic structure. The “iron law of Economics” dissolved with Lord Keynes in 1936. The Protestant “sola scriptura” which had provided so simple a way to save your soul has hit a revolution in historical studies, so that you cannot really expect to understand what a text means simply by reading it. Catholicism has become part of the shakeup of modern culture. In 1879, Leo XIII’s evangelical “Acteni Patris” had looked to St Thomas Aquinas as a solution to modern philosophical and ideological confusion. The Second Vatican Council though (1961 – 1965) quoted St Thomas Aquinas but once. Thomas died in 1274. He was ignorant of modern science, modern history, modern psychology, and modern philosophy. The Council saw that the Church had to live in this modern or post-modern world.

As an old fashioned Catholic, I find it reassuring that Lonergan is expert in Aquinas. He realises it takes lifelong dedication to be a top notch scientist, historian, philosopher, theologian and he uses the term “differentiation of consciousness” to describe the result of such long term application.

In each area, and also in the area of commonsense, alongside the causes of being there are the causes of knowing. These are different in each field. About each there is probability, certainty, and about some things a degree of certainty one can call infallibility where one is dealing simply with the truth. The realm of science and the realm of history are “moving forward”. Some things are known I think, but many positions are in development.

So with commonsense I may be certain about the winner of the Grand National, but realise my certainty is not utter. In natural science, I may be utterly certain about what needs doing to repair the Hubble Telescope or a leaky heart, but wondering about Einstein’s Special Relativity. In history I may be utterly sure about 1066 as the date of the Norman invasion, but have questions about William’s motivation or how Harold died. In the Christian faith I may be utterly sure about the Trinity or Papal infallibility but yet not sure about how the Holy Father should exercise his authority. In philosophy I may be quite sure about the norms of attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility, but not clear what to do about knowledge which is so clear. Questions keep life moving and make it interesting.

Foundations

Around 1230, Philip the Chancellor of Paris made a distinction between grace and nature, the highest thing in nature being reason, but man could be supernaturally informed, by faith, hope, love, and other virtues such as prudence.

Nature, of course, belongs to all mankind. Today, man finds himself chronically and dangerously divided not just by secular issues and ideologies, but also by religious divides, for example, between the Moslems and the Christians. The idea of nature though provides common ground, so most diseases have cures which are not based on religious differences.

Nature though for Philip included man’s rationality and so the precepts “be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible, be in love” express what Lonergan calls the transposition from faculty analysis to intentionality analysis.

The transposition is from terms and relations that are beyond man’s direct experience to terms and relations which are verifiable in experiences as part of experience.

So Aquinas has “agent intellect” and “passive intellect”, but we have all experienced what it is to be puzzled and what it is to be certain. Aquinas’ terms have a base in metaphysical theory. Lonergan would have us draw foundational terms from our concrete experience, and so bring us to use our own mind and heart with greater confidence. This goes on at the level of nature, but a nature which is opened to and influenced by super-nature. How this openness works in a Hindu, or Moslem, or Christian tradition is for the respective faithful to discern, and the respective theologians to expound.

The foundation we are proposing then is human nature known by human experience, and the experience we find is something dynamic not something static; something historically conditioned not something abstract; something potentially creative not something simply determined.

Of course medicine studies human nature, but here a theoretical knowledge develops which is common to all so that what is discovered conditions man, though it might liberate him from this or that disease. There are diseases to entrap the human spirit though, dramatic bias; egoistic bias; group bias and general bias. These biases work to prevent the unfolding of the human spirit towards the intelligible; the true; the real; the good; the loving and the lovable.

That which weighs most heavily on the human spirit and yet which elevates it above all is the loving and the lovable. Here is found the immeasurable meaning of a life. It may or may not include the religious dimension. Nothing is loved of course unless it is known, except love itself. Here is the dimension to which all religious traditions bear witness. The words of Pascal are helpful: “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know”.

Such love is a starting point not a conclusion of reason. It is experimental not theoretical. It could lead man astray into a sort of spiritual bias so that man undervalues his natural potentialities and perhaps a whole culture might become fatalistic and irresponsible. “What will be, will be”. I think one is discerning a further bias here – in addition to Lonergan’s dramatic, egoistic, group and general – namely a religious bias which so disvalues man’s natural capacities so that through regard for religion man’s normal capacities to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible become disregarded in their normal operation. It might be thought that such a malady could only occur with Eastern Religions but in his essay on ‘The Subject’ (2nd Collection) Lonergan lists Western culprits in the names of “phenomenology, existential self understanding, human encounter, salvation history”. There is the danger of a truncation of human subjectivity. Perhaps some aspects of the charismatic movement would come under criticism here.

Let us call this “religious bias”. It does not of course mean that nothing should be attended to, thought about, concluded upon but such a bias closes the door to genuine developments going on in science, history, art, philosophy and theology. A church or religion can in this way retain a visible unity but contain incompatible positions having lost the possibility of fruitful dialogue. I suggest such bias can go on in quite strange ways. There is a “Christian Bookshop” near here which as far as I can see does not have a single Catholic author. I recall a Catholic dismissing a book written in the 1960’s by a Fr Tyrell because a Fr Tyrell had been a Modernist in the 1890’s.

There is no doubt when a person is religiously converted, they are concerned to maintain what has become the most significant part of their life. I have come across people whose children have become Moonies and who will only read Mooney literature. So it is surely a healthy thing that, since the Council of Trent, the seminary training for the Roman Catholic priesthood has involved two years spent on philosophy alongside six years spent altogether.

However, what we are looking for is a development in philosophy which requires a shift to intentionality analysis, so the philosopher begins to recognise objective norms belonging to subjectivity. So, to be an artist one had best use one’s eyes; to be a scholar one had best read the texts. Beyond the texts though, the scholar must use his judgement. I find myself facing the question, might a certain portrait actually be of Mary Tudor; might it be by Holbein; might the date be 1537? A possibility might be overridden by a fact. A probability can be added to by another bit of evidence. If one is looking for certainty, I think it is good to recall Aristotle’s advice, that one seeks different sorts of evidence in different areas. One expects demonstration from a mathematician but not from a politician. Nevertheless it would be madness for a Holbein scholar to deny that he knew that any Holbeins were by Holbein, or to doubt the existence of Holbein.

It is the area of judgement which is most difficult for modern man to recognise, I think largely because modern science which occupies such a huge realm of modern thought is in many revisable. Einstein has gone ahead of Newton in general and special relativity, but I think in our small group we have seen that his special relativity needs revising. The constant in science is an empirical method. If one is to reach scientific conclusion, it needs to be on the basis of evidence, even if it can be revised and improved upon.

If the area of judgement is difficult for modern man, so that metaphysical principles, for example “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts”, seem as doubtful as Einstein’s special relativity, then intentionality analysis, attending to the data of consciousness as well as the data of sense, finds that judgement belongs to our human existence all the time. So there is the intimate and personal question of love. Do I know what it is to be loved and to love in return? Have I any notion of what it is to be loved by God? The answer here is a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. and for many, the truthful answer maybe ‘No’. If it is ‘Yes’, then from whatever religious tradition one is dealing with a process of conversion, for any love makes demands. “Lex est amor qui ligat et obligat” as Adam of Perseign put it.

Or, is it true that I am a subject of sense experience? One only becomes aware of the question through sense experience, so the judgement here has to be affirmative.

Have I ever understood anything? Here one might go into a panic. I had quite a wise aunt who was prepared to admit that she knew nothing! But if, in English culture, one became specific and asked “Do you know the meaning of the term ‘water’?”, the answer would be ‘Yes’. We have grown up learning to understand things, and in English water is tied up with that wet stuff. We have not only understood but can judge that our understanding is correct.

One might get into deconstructive, post modern mood and say water only means water for English people, but one can point out that terms and meanings develop in an age old collaboration, and that if a doctor dealing with a patient in emergency asks for a bowl of water, your response might be absolutely important, meaning life or death for a patient. The mass murderer might think life or death an unimportant matter anyway. So it is that the ground of significance is love, but love can be concerned about a glass of water given to the thirsty person.

I have been trying to show that concern for appropriate attentiveness, understanding, truth, reality and love belong to everyman be he Hindu, Moslem, Jew, Christian, or nothing in that way. We not only are human, have a human nature, but can confirm the fact through our experience – or be in some way subhuman.

Matter, Form, Potency and Act

I think it is an object of surprise to notice that matter is always formed. The form is intelligible, so certain rocks are where they are because of glaciers, and my car is where it is because I parked it. Many objects have man-made forms; cups, saucers, cookers, and motor cars. The matter has been shaped up according to engineering and contemporary ideas of elegance and perhaps economy. Historians deduce a lot about an age from artefacts which have survived; a flint, a coin or a stamp. Minerals, plants, and animals have natural forms, which speak of design as well as evolution. Each type of creature depends on a supporting environment, so perhaps evolution should be seen as one ecosystem following on another.

St Thomas said that the world around was matter and form, and more form than matter. How though should we think of matter? One could say matter is whatever one abstracts from when considering a question – one is hunting for the intelligible, for the form. On the other hand, wood is the matter you use in making a chair. Yet the wood itself has a form and willow differs from oak and oak from mahogany. With E = MC2 and energy being generated from radioactive matter, some people think of energy as being matter in its irreducible state, but in fact you find that energy always has a form, in heat or momentum, for example.

I suspect that it is out of naïve realism that we imagine we should be able to look at matter as if it were a lump of pure, unformed stuff. If one defines matter as transformability – which is an intelligible definition, then you have a universe in which some things which we call material can be transformed into other things, and some things, like persons, cannot.

The advantage of matter being defined as transformability is that one can see at once that the whole universe, including matter, is intelligible and so can proceed from the wisdom of God by a creative act; whereas if the universe has a non-intelligible component – matter – then it looks as if there is something which did not come about through God’s wisdom and creative decision.

I have quite a strong impression that it is this idea of matter as non-intelligible which lies at the root of much modern atheism. Intelligibility emerges from matter perhaps by random chance. Human consciousness is seen as an epiphenomenon of matter and for Marx that consciousness is caught up in the dialectical materialism of class war. Whereas Galileo had primary qualities which were intelligible, extension and mass but not colour, for Kant such primary qualities are thought up by the mind and what gives rise to the phenomena is not known. The unintelligibility of matter means that the intelligence of man, which is witnessed to by Galileo and Newton, tells us nothing about reality. I think one can see how existentialists reached the conclusion that existence precedes essence. We decide what to do in a universe which is free of moral norms. With such an attitude one can “understand” concentration camps and weapons of mass destruction. I suspect Shakespeare anticipated all this with his remark, “Nothing is but thinking makes it so”. With regard to all this, I find Descartes a little on the side of the angels, for his ‘principle of universal doubt’ did not extend to God, for he argues against indestructible atoms, for “if they had extension, God could divide them”.

Undoubtedly, Descartes has been used to dismiss the Church. Maybe his doubt was something like Occam’s razor: “Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate”. Certainly in Descartes’ day there were ladies who considered that a whole universe might fit into their earring. The First Vatican Council urged theologians to proceed “diligently, piously, and soberly” and maybe a “sober” approach to reality is what Descartes was urging. So it is not sober but fantastical to imagine that by chance unintelligible and unintelligent matter could produce an intelligible world order. It is true that a ‘sober’ approach to reality in Descartes’ day or our own, might pay not too much attention to this, or that theological argumentation or philosophical argumentation. One could spend one’s life getting to grips with Bultman or whomsoever.

The universe proceeding from Wisdom itself and being thoroughly intelligible manifests not just brilliant constructions but the mind of man, a created participation in what God is, wisdom and love, moving from potency – the tabula rasa – to act, in the process of which dramatic, egoistic, group and general bias, effects of the Fall, must be overcome, and recognised anew, and overcome again. “Forgive us our trespasses”, we need to say.

Because of the biases and their power, the good society is rarer than the good man. The one set on integrity finds himself typically swimming against the tide. The association and friendship of those moving to the self transcendence of truth and love is essential if a way forward is to be found for everyone.

One recalls Milton’s phrase: “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed”. The practical life of a business, a lawyer, a plumber and so forth, can be extremely demanding and rewarding, so that higher values get crowded out. “I have bought a farm and cannot come”. A strong established religion, as perhaps in Alsace in its heyday, with clergy and monks, Holy Days and Obligations, can perhaps remind everyone that even if they are building better barns, they have a soul to save. I suspect that today religion is on the fringe.

We are prone to blame secularisation, but actually if one considers Alsace, is not the problem more the decline of religion? The religious house needs to be put in order and grow strong so that everyone recognises the call to holiness and to charity. Not only is man called to be transformed by the love of God, but also to be transformed in his own operations so that he shows forth that love. Operative grace, God’s first gift, leads to co-operative grace where God helps man who has the initiative. There is then a realm of personal values where man responds to God and to himself and to the whole of creation, and so ceases to be simply preoccupied by his work. This is the area where St Peter discovered his weakness for we need God’s help to respond to values worthily even when we recognise them. In the achievement of values we recognise personally we often need to co-operate with others – for example, in getting our children educated, and so the area of personal values easily comes under the influence of group basis. St Peter wanted to be just part of the crowd.

One operates in the world as one knows it, but one lives within a horizon and from a viewpoint. The horizon can be broadened by judgements which are true. So there was a Battle of Hastings, 1066. The viewpoint can be raised by self-appropriation, so it is on the evidence, on the account, and on the generally held belief that I come to knowledge. Intellectual conversion which recognises self-transcendence in attaining knowledge takes one into the wide world of values and beliefs which are held, and so into the culture to which one belongs, from which one learns and to which one contributes. In this cultural world, in achieving a common yardstick for belief, one helps religion to become more generally credible. In this area one might hope to help others move from materialism and from idealism to the critical realism which holds the universe to be intelligible and knowable, which can recognise bunkum and false arguments. J K Chesterton operates in this area.

Culture validates and criticises a way of life with its families and firms, its lawyers and Parliaments, with its workaholics and drop-outs. The way of life knocks people into shape and hopefully allows a person to find a place, a niche, and here, while there is scope for egoism, it can be shamed out as perhaps we are seeing with Parliamentarians at present. Society is a give and take and most people learn to give as well as take.

Being shaped by society are the vital values of the ecology and human spontaneity. Here we find the possibility of psychic conversion but perhaps good social values; finding something to praise in everyone helps people to a more laudable spontaneity. When, at the age of five, Tony McHale our late Deacon, was put on a table to sing and clapped he opened up in a musical way for the rest of his life, even to inventing a tune for a psalm as he sung it at a funeral.

If all intelligibility emerges from matter by chance, then values must be restricted perhaps to health and income levels important as these are. We have found the highest value to be religious facing general bias. Individual values coming from religion or from conscience we found a prey to social bias since many individual concerns must be pursued with others. Cultural values, resting on personal but also generally held knowledge we find resting on (an implicit?) intellectual conversion and opposed by materialism and idealism. To follow the pattern one would identify individual bias as the problem, for an egoist will find it interferes with his life to admit wider values. Following the pattern, social values have to contend with dramatic bias, with the way people are shaped up to think or not to think. So the Cathedral in Constantinople was pulled down by the Reds and the Greens chariot racing fans in about 450AD.

We have a hierarchy of values, religious, personal, cultural, social and vital, and envisage trouble coming from below and healing from above. Fr Doran sees each level of value having to maintain equilibrium between limitation and transcendence. To give two examples, at the level of personal values, a person can be involved in too much. They exhaust the psyche and fall into depression. Or doing nothing, they get depressed. At the level of social values, there is a tension between practicality and inter-subjectivity. A people could get so fond of talking that they neglect work, or so fond of working that they grow dull. The bias from below distorts the balance, so chariot racing takes over from proper work.

First Principles

We all grew up under the influence of Aristotle so the first science is metaphysics and first principles are metaphysical. I recall being much influenced by the proposition “omne ens est bonum”, every being is good, a proposition very acceptable to a Christian, for God made everything out of nothing. I recall wondering a bit about the mosquito. I met a chap who was studying mosquitoes legs. I suppose in the Paradise to come there may be a swampy area where mosquitoes play a key role in the emergence of dragonflies. That there should be strange wild worlds which are not directly to man’s convenience, is somehow a relaxation to the human spirit with its areas of utilitarian convenience.

For Lonergan the first principles are not abstract propositions but concrete human persons in their authenticity which consists of religious, moral and intellectual conversion operating maturely in the areas of commonsense and religion and, in certain cases, operating creatively in an area where consciousness is differentiated, artistically, scientifically, in a scholarly way, in the way of self appropriation.

In looking for religious conversion as a starting point, Lonergan is rather similar to St Bernard who asked whether someone was seeking God when they wanted to be a monk. An earlier Egyptian abbot had a lot of young men who were avoiding military service. He accepted them on the basis that their motivation could be changed.

In our contemporary society many of us are more dragged up than brought up and so religious conversion is perhaps a minor theme in the polyphony and cacophony that makes up our human consciousness, pulled now this way and now that and largely unaware that conscious deliberation and decision has a role to play in shaping the sort of person we will be and the sort of consciousness we will live from.

Religious awareness of some sort, maybe perfunctory, precedes religious conversion. For example, when I had measles I was close to death but I was also aware of being close to God. I would suggest that religious conversion brings together these experiences, so that here there is something we should do something about. A religious tradition may help the wayward way consciousness freely flows to become aware of this most important dimension.

Religious love is, one might say, of the same stuff as family love and love of one’s people. In the sacrament of matrimony, human affection helps to a deeper love at a divine level. If one sees someone stirred by love for a whole people – one thinks of Fr Damien and his lepers, or those who visited the sick but were rewarded because, the Lord said “you did this to Me” – then you see love which comes from God and leads to Him.

We love all sorts of things from popcorn and pop music to ice cream and Georgian architecture maybe, but I think one can contrast such love with the deep loves which give meaning and concern to one’s living. To be without deep love is to have lost a sense of meaning to one’s life. Not in any way to adequately express deep love in at least some way is to feel personally inadequate. It is a feature that love which is deep seeks to express itself in words, symbols, deeds.

Religious conversion is a turning around from a situation where ceremonies and even religious experiences, or experiences of being loved, are taken for granted to a situation where one recognises deep love as giving the central meaning and direction to one’s life. With the idea that life has a direction one gets the idea that some things would be counterproductive, inappropriate and plain wrong. You get the ground for moral conversion.

Lonergan, in Insight, expounds the precepts “be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible” I think one can move from responsibility to action with the further precepts “deliberate, evaluate, decide, act”. It is an important question, where does love, or where does deep love, come in?

Our conscious life is grounded in the psyche which produces images and feelings in an appropriate way or, of course, maybe in an inappropriate way. Sense experience, intelligence, reasonableness, responsibility Lonergan calls “operators”, but the operators only work properly with an appropriate help from the psyche which provides the images needed for insight and the feelings which lead one from one level to another. So a person has a problem, but attends to it because he feels curious and is restless until he shapes up the glimmer of a solution. I think we can see love as the quasi operator emerging with the precept, “be reasonable”, and guiding the process through being responsible, deliberating, evaluating, deciding and acting.

The precept “be reasonable” finds God as the cause of all being and of our own being. I can recall being told how grateful I should be to God for sight and feeling and so forth, but though I could see I should be, and I believed, I did not feel grateful, therefore I suspect my emotional life was with some reason caught up in another direction. Prayer though around the basic position – God has been good and is – might allow the appropriate feelings to emerge. Better souls than mine have experienced dryness in prayer. They endure it seems for a time nothingness. I think what is going on is that the psyche is learning how to deal with the invisible in its affectivity. I always will remember the old gentleman who answered me “I praise Him for the wonder of my being”, when I asked how he was.

Rationality gives us a structure of reality and an affective response. God’s grace is beyond our affective response yet tied up with it. Bishop Grant used to say “When God meets man you get mystery”. Responsibility gives us an overarching goal and measure which our actions should promote: “The kingdom of God”. Deliberation divides up all the issues as they are known, with consequences of this action and that, and also as a factor, likelihood they will be carried through Evaluation has certain well known principles: “Innocent human life may never be directly taken” – “A man who divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery”. Evaluation is also where “the heart has its reasons which reason may not know” (Pascal). This may be to do with marrying Suzie even she has no fortune, or pouring out one’s life as a libation (St Paul). I am suggesting that some of the reasons which reason does not know may be profoundly theological and ecclesiological, such as celibacy. Evaluation presents options of high virtue, modest virtue and of course sin. Traditional moral theology has been to do with the avoidance of certain well know sins and the performance of essential duties. Through deliberation and evaluation, we come to the world as we know it and the positive actions which might belong to us, as well as the negative we should avoid.

There is then decision and performance which may be life-long. I think one is not normally bound to the highest option but to a good one. The difficulty of carrying out a course of action will be facilitated by recalling the process of deliberation, evaluation and decision which went on. We find man in his freedom can be influenced by God to make his life benign, benevolent, fruitful and even redemptive.

Religious conversion results from the gift of God’s grace. Moral conversion makes its way on the basis of religious conversion. Intellectual conversion may make its way on the basis of Religious and Moral Conversion. In the process of life one comes to know things and with religious conversion one comes to believe things which cannot be adequately imagined, like the Blessed Trinity. So with religious and moral conversion one may hope to make one’s way to Heaven, but one’s capacity to argue the case to others and to persuade is limited without intellectual conversion, whereby we become as familiar with the intellect and its knowing, as we are with the eye and its seeing.

We have seen that one mistake is to imagine that all knowing is a matter of animal extroversion (naïve realism) or that the life of the mind does not attain knowledge of reality (idealism). Critical realism notes that as well as understanding there is judgement of what we have understood. Understandings may be imaginary, or the best scientific theory so far; they may have a degree of certainty. Certain sorts of judgements may be infallible. So one may judge infallibly that this particular experience is one’s present experience. The intelligibility grasped in phantasm, is infallible. The sensus fidelium is infallible and a papal judgement under certain conditions is infallible. It is worth noticing I think, that many judgements we make with certainty have a degree of fallibility about them. So I have enough petrol to get home ..… but I did not know about this traffic jam.

For Lonergan the foundational principle for theology or metaphysics is not an abstract statement, but a concrete person, one who is converted religiously, morally and intellectually. Such conversion has ever to struggle with personal backsliding.

Differentiations and Conversions

There is the world of the nursery and the world of commonsense, and the world of commonsense is invited to conversion, to religious conversion, loving God and neighbour, to moral conversion, respecting values and to intellectual conversion, in the sense of thinking things out and not rushing to conclusions.

Differentiations are historical achievements. So one can recognise a general discovery of mind in Greece, but modern science with its modern dynamism dates to say 1660, the Foundation of the Royal College of Science, or to c1680 with Newton’s mechanics. The Periodic Table for Chemistry, Evolution for Biology, the Subconscious for Psychology have moved the scientific spirit into further areas of empirical method based on observation and experiment. It is part of the same movement to use probability theory or non-Euclidian geometry. The very small and the very large will probably be found to give empirical science an asymptotic limit.

This movement is massive in its demand and its achievement. By 1800 world population achieved one billion. At present it is nearly six billion, fed, medicated, clothed, housed, and educated, for the most part. Great organisations implement the latest technologies and require that their operatives be scientifically trained. Science comes to dominate the curriculum at schools. As one puts on the TV, gets into the car, wears specs, one is benefitting from an enormous theoretical and practical collaboration.

The whole scientific collaboration rests on a commonsense knowledge of causes but the heart of science deals with correlation and frequencies. Freed from metaphysics, it is also free to forget about the first cause and indeed, also about the spirit of man. As a consumer, there is a tendency to take man back into the nursery where pleasure and pain dominate and morality has not emerged. So long term decline manifests itself one way.

Before the revolution which created the modern scientific differentiation of consciousness, there was a similar revolution in the theological world running from say 1050 – 1274, the death of St Thomas Aquinas. This involved Philip the Chancellor’s distinction between grace and nature and Aquinas’ use of Aristotle on matter and form. Each sacrament was analysed as to its matter and form. The achievement came into being without too much realisation of the immense backdrop which led to it; Greek Philosophy monastic discipline, the writings of the fathers, the work of Canon Lawyers who collected judgements and tried to make sense of them. A decadent scholasticism which did not know how to renew itself and keep developing, made perhaps an easy target for the Protestant movement with its Sola Scriptura. Perhaps the fact of a scholastic expertise led to a resentment rather as the scientific movement led to a romantic backlash.

In the 1930s with Maritain, Gilson, Chesterton and others, a return to Thomism seemed the solution – but St Thomas knew nothing about the modern world and the scientific revolution which so largely informs it. The second Vatican Council (1962 – 1965) makes a sort of watershed wherein it was realised that Catholic thought had to get updated. Aggiornamento was one of the phrases. Easier said than done!

The next major differentiation of consciousness goes back to Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They worked hard at history and realised that what they were doing was in some way superior to the natural sciences. Their work went back to the sense of dignity belonging to man in God’s image. “Bildung” expressed the idea of “being in the image”. With Herder’s idea, Bildung was reaching up to humanity; you can see why this effort led to the Modernist crisis. Their aim was expressed as reconstructing the constructions of the human spirit. This might ignore the work of the Holy Spirit.

The final differentiation of consciousness could be described as the modern philosophic differentiation. Philosophy and Theology had worked in close conjunction and logic played a great role in the Scholastic achievement. The fact that nature was distinct from super-nature meant that philosophy had its autonomy from theology to discover. Descartes following Galileo distinguished between Res Cogitans and Res Extensa, man’s implementation of this depending on the pituitary gland. The empiricists, Locke, Hume and Freddy Ayer, focused on the Res Extensa, whereas Kant and Hegel focussed their efforts on the Res Cognitans. In fact I have said that Kant lost the physical universe (The Res Extensa) in his study, which is a bit careless!

Kant brought about a Copernican revolution focussing on the Thinker. The subject became the centre of knowledge. Hegel I think, went further. But there was a reaction as thinkers declared there was more to man than this thought. Kierkegaard, Newman, Marx, Neitsche, Blondel and others in various ways, stressed the importance of action. I think Bertrand Russell ends up in this camp which one can broadly label phenomenological and existential. These philosophers would be handmaidens, not of natural science but of humanity as it should be. Gadamer stresses that we know in art and history in a different sort of way. Lonergan has explored human subjectivity in a richer way than Kant and derived a great deal from St Thomas Aquinas. From him comes the phrase “differentiation of consciousness” creating in great historical movement, theological, scientific, historical, and modern philosophical stances.

These expert worlds easily pull apart, but man in his commonsense dimension (which even experts have to use) most the time has somehow to relate himself to these worlds of expertise.

Genuine conversion, affective, moral, and intellectual belongs in a commonsense sort of way to man – to man and woman – busy in many ways in the world. Affective conversion is a matter of learning to love positively and personally in family life, in civil affairs and in religion. Religious love, open to God, would implement all values. Thus it overrides pleasure and pain as the major principles governing conduct. A good humanist might think it the obvious thing to have an affair with his beautiful secretary but not the one who loves God.

Conversion which is affective and religious, thus grounds moral conversion which since we are not saints overnight may take time to implement. Moral conversion entails a universal concern for what is right, for goodness, and so understanding is challenged both to understand in some measure the gift of love, and to understand similarly right order, the order that reflects God’s love. So the intellect is brought into use. For Christians too, sense and intellect must be used to apprehend and take hold of the grace of Christ in the Paschal Mystery.

For those who are engaged in differentiations of consciousness in a contemporary way, intellect will help the scientist to recognise he deals with God’s creation and the moral order applies to methods of experimentation and how the results of science are used. The historian will find that intellect allows discernment of the mysterious ways of God with man, but for this intellect needs to be informed by faith and so capable of recognising values. The modern philosophic differentiation strangely often does not reflect on intellect sufficiently. For Lonergan the reflective judgement which asks “is it so?” of some theory attains to being when it answers affirmatively. Being presents man with an order in which he believes and by which he is in many ways bound. The lack of a sense of being might give a sense of unboundedness but must often lead to waywardness. Lonergan declared that in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Northern Italy “being is dead”. He knew the students. Existentialism reigns.

Conversions Needed; Differentiations optional

As we grow from the immediate world of infancy into the world mediated by meaning, we either find that world centrally charged by religion or not. The call is to conversion; it is not to be a theologian. It is to love the Lord our God with all our mind, our heart, our strength and our neighbour as ourselves. In other religions the demand may be differently put, but the result may be much the same. The Far East has a deep sense of prayer and spirituality, but the Zen Buddhist might describe God as “nothing”. What may be meant by this is that He is not something you can see, like a rabbit or an apple. For quite a few in the West though, the world of meaning might include scientific heroes, military heroes; and a set of theories to be mastered, physical, chemical, biological, psychological, sociological, economic; and a set of histories to be mastered; and perhaps a set of religions which once were thought important and which now are out of date.

The operative world around us is technological, and medicine is a sort of technology of the body and perhaps psychology a sort of technology of consciousness. Parents want their children to get on and get paid and so they conspire with the theoretical world represented incipiently by schools and more thoroughly by universities. The children accept the guidance of their parents and the parents are surprised to find that the children have lost their faith. At the same time we need modern technology to sustain our six thousand million people, and without people who are trained and understand this and that the system will break down.

I don’t think that mastering a technology with its theoretical component constitutes a differentiation which allows one to earn a living. Still it is a great achievement which enables one to keep systems going and be a good mechanic or doctor or whatever. The effort involved may cause one to forget about the call to conversion. I recall a mother who was much worried that her children were not working for their exams. She had not expressed any anxiety that they were not coming to church, even though she was.

What I am claiming though is that our scientifically and technologically differentiated culture places a very great demand and challenge upon young people so that it may seem to them the only thing that matters, so that they do not heed the call to love the Lord their God with all their heart.

The call to love God involves a call to love what He has created and so alongside religious conversion one may recognise a distinct moral conversion. We find precepts in religious tradition which are quite different from those normally abroad, for example, “do good to those who hate you”. The importance of human life is central here, but the surrounding ecology which supports human life is radically involved. If one poisons a lake to get rid of waste and humans thereby perish, this is a sort of murder. Human death is not directly intended but it is directly caused. I recall some chaps in Slough whose job it was to get id of several pounds of mercury. They did so by putting it into the Thames. They did their job but wondered at what mammoth destruction they had caused. Moral conversion was perhaps operative in their intellect - they understood – but not in their conduct.

The maxims of diplomacy may be quite different: “If you want peace, prepare for war”. At the same time history does indicate that withdrawing defences can be a signal of weakness to the enemy as witnessed by the decline of the Roman Empire, or the invasion of the Falkland Islands by the Argentineans.

Moral conversion involves a shift from egotism with the pleasure/pain rule of conduct to a question what is worthwhile, what is the good within our reach? Historically there can be moral progress or moral decline.

I would see Jeremy Bentham’s “Utilitarianism” as combining a point of moral progress with a principle of decline. The point of progress is that it cares for all: “The greatest good of the greatest number”. Each one counts as one. The more impoverished they are the greater the benefit, the greater the marginal utility. If the State is seen as the promoter of maximum utility, the rich must be impoverished till they are at the level of the poor unless a trickle down theory shows that the welfare of the rich overflows and trickles down to the poor. There is here a form of State absolution, I think. One recalls Lord Acton’s remark, “All power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

For Benthamism though there seem no absolute beyond pleasure. “Pushpin is as good as poetry, if it please as much”. We find here a ground of the moral relationism where it is perfectly acceptable for say, Members of Parliament to live with partners rather than spouses. Who is to judge? The economist, Alfred Marshall, by contrast sees family life as the main motive a man has to work, and in his time that work was often very unpleasant, down the mines for example. With Marshall’s view you get a sense of a particular good, the family, inspiring people to work for a wider good in return for an income, a sort of “trickle up” theory. On the basis of Marshall I found myself writing to Blair when he was PM arguing that policies which undermined the family would lead to greater poverty in the future.

Religious conversion typically expresses itself in practicing one’s religion. Moral conversion one might argue typically shows itself in the achievement of family life. Lonergan though, has a third conversion which typically grows from religious conversion and moral conversion, namely intellectual conversion.

As a matter of practice, intellectual conversion is a matter of realising that one can know things without seeing them. The very fact of worshipping an invisible God means something can be real and can matter without being seen. The very fact of being faithful to one’s spouse means recognising a value which cannot be seen. That one can talk about such matters shows that de facto one is using one’s intellect. In baptism but also the last rites, the Church does not ask do you love God, but do you believe? Are you using your mind so that you are living – and dying – in the world as it really is? Is your hope an illusion or is it founded on something real?

Fr Robert Doran SJ adds to the need for religious, moral and intellectual conversion the need for psychic conversion. I associate this with Lonergan’s “dramatic bias” which censors out needed images and feelings and perhaps censors in, or obsesses one with, unhelpful images and feelings. Since one’s understanding needs images such censorship can impede one’s understanding. An example of things being “censored out” would be racialism where one does not think people of a certain background are really human. An example of inappropriate “censoring in” would be a sexual imagery completely inappropriate and unhelpful to one’s actual sexual development.

The purpose of this paper is to say that everyone needs conversion, religious, moral, intellectual and psychic. Such conversion is ongoing and never complete in this life. By such conversion one becomes holy, good, truthful and open in an increasing measure, with a growing intensity and so becomes faultless and worthy to pass through the pearly gates.

Quite distinct are the differentiations of consciousness whereby one becomes a theologian, a scientist, an historian, an artist or a philosopher. Such expertises are in development and the community can and should develop from such advances. One can insist – according to the situation and culture – that everyone should know a bit about their religion, for example, for Christmas that they should know about Christmas, Easter, the Trinity, the Sacraments, but one cannot insist that they should all become theologians. There are different sorts of theologians and they are trained up in Research or Communications or – well there are six other specialisations. Admirable as it maybe, one is not a theologian by getting up on one’s hind legs and talking about God. Similarly, one is not obliged to be a scholar and learn Hebrew and become expert in Isaiah to be saved, but such scholars may help the preacher to convince the multitude. Again, one does not have to be a scientist to be a mechanic and mend the car, or to understand that modern science and technology are vital for modern man. Science is to do with the methodology which makes the unknown known. Again, one does not have to be an artist to be moved by a religious work of art, or to take part in a beautiful liturgy. One does not have to be a philosopher to realise that in one’s commonsense world, probably much preoccupied with making a living, one learns from scholars, one benefits from scientists, one is inspired by artists and one can learn from philosophers how the whole world in which we live can be comprehended as a unity in development.

But this positive passivity vis a vis the experts, whereby we allow them to inform us, delight us, stir us, does not mean we do not face our personal task which belongs to no one else of religious conversion whereby we love the Lord our God, moral conversion whereby we creatively and intelligently seek the limited good that is in our power, of intellectual conversion whereby what we have understood is in our lips and psychic conversion whereby we can recognise what is …….. going forward and so be new wineskins for new wine.