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.
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Human Cognition and Experience (Erlebneis)
It is a great task for man to understand himself, for in our total reality we exceed what we can grasp. Our conscious operations have an objective but also a subjective component and we cannot turn back in on ourselves to directly understand the subjective component. We achieve understanding no doubt, but through the strange world of language and perhaps long formed concepts. We make use of sense experience not just for teleological and natural goals such as nourishment, but in order to develop our cultural and spiritual life. (If our conscious living is always sensible, it is also always emotionally charged.) To see our task of self appropriation it may be helpful to glance at angels and at God who have a different mode of cognition.
There are three modes of cognition which attain truth and so come to or possess knowledge of reality, the divine which knows all eternally, the angelic which knows by its own form and by the life of grace, and the human which comes to knowledge through sense experience and the life of grace. The angels share what they have with one another in the movement of aeritime, and may share with humans. Man’s intelligence is in a movement which is cumulative through time. He sleeps, senses, wonders, makes theories, reaches conclusions and with the material basis of the brain with its symbols and language, can retain what it has come to know, and by following a question come to know more. So man’s mind has been described as “potens omnia”. Angels have advantage over man in that they arrive in existence knowing. Man, though, arriving on the scene with a tabula rasa (a clean slate) is set to a development which can only be limited by his own folly. He can retain in memory what he has found. He can move on to further development. Here is a source of hubris or pride – pretending to a development which has not occurred.
In this life man is a contrast because all his natural operations are sense based, because he moves from question to answer and because his knowledge in his memory is not sensibly before him. In our moment by moment existence, we can be unaware of most of what is present within us and unaware of questions which belong to us. When St Paul says we shall know as we are known, he may mean we shall live with, have consciously before us, all that we know. May be this is part of what our Lord means when he says we shall be like the angels.
For man in the world, what he dwells upon is just a part of what he knows and loves. The soldier takes the photograph of his beloved from his wallet and is reminded of a contrasting world, perhaps of what he is fighting for. For many things it is memory itself which provides the material for thought. We are dependent here on emotionally charged phantasm making its way through our censor. Wanting to do something – to remember someone’s name, is not sufficient to guarantee the censor operating properly. We have the knowledge but the filing system is not operating properly.
Perhaps we should consider two censors, one for appropriate emotions and one for the images and words we seek. There may be an emotional block as well as a block on images. So there may be a block on happiness and beauty for this is a time of struggle and only feelings such as the importance of work are to be allowed. In Scotland, in Kirkcaldy, for example, Adam Smith’s birth place, we came across some modern architecture which would seem set there to depress the spirits of the occupants. Or someone might be set on jollity, frivolity and humour in such a way that a serious thought is not allowed to occupy the stage – Oscar Wilde would seem to have a consciousness in this vein much of the time. The censor can of course, be trained through comparisons and disciplines. Helm Holtz in 1862 referred to an artistic – instinctive intuition as making up the “tact” that belongs to the social scientist or historian. I think one applauds the spirit which can face the depths and the grimness of things, but somehow turn them round as perhaps Christ our Lord did when he found His spirit troubled by his imminent rejection but brought forth the image of a chicken gathering chicks under her wings, a homely image indeed. The scientist who turns to theology in a positive way may find that his emotional understanding of the mystery is restricted to the idea of design, of power, of force. The emotional requirement for science is excellent in its sphere but will find it needs to leave itself and become as a little child to speak with feeling and understanding of love, compassion, forgiveness and mercy. There is a divine wisdom about the rich texts of scripture which can help to train the inhumanly set censor.
The fact of two censors, one of emotions and one of images, allows one to understand the parable as a means of getting through to censored consciousness for what could be more ordinary than a vineyard with grapes which are bitter, or a little lamb whose owner was fond of it, or a sower who was careless in his sowing! The image is allowed through because it belongs to ordinary life. It becomes the unwanted instrument of instruction and cause of guilt to wayward consciousness.
I sense that catharsis, an emotional release from drama, may somehow break the emotional censor. There are feelings we have repressed because our concrete circumstances must fail to meet them. There is an ideal love we would like to have for children say – and they come to see us when they are short of cash or need the washing done! With repressed feelings life becomes a bit humdrum, we cough up the cash and do the washing. We recognise the same humdrum in a play – about aircraft and mechanics say – but it ends up with the father saying to the son: “My son. Live!” The emotional repression is overcome.
There is a repression of images which might tell us the truth we want to know; there is a repression of emotions born in upon us by circumstances. I think the illumination of the parable is distinct from the catharsis of the play. In the one case it is understanding that unblocked, in the other it is feelings.
In writing of censors and blocking, I am at the level of what Lonergan would call “faculty analysis”. We have a neural demand system of which we are unaware, a censor or two I have argued, an agent intellect, a passive intellect, a will, all of which are faculties of which we are not directly aware. Intentionality analysis draws on our actual experience. Do you ever try to recall something you know and fail? Do you ever feel life in its routine is flat and that you are not living life to the full?
Opposed to such experiences are the experiences which shape us so that they become part of our awareness of ourselves and the world we live in. Falling in love or experiencing a vocation would be such an event. The German word is erlebneis. Just as physics has its units of mass, force, acceleration so the Human Sciences see an experience of a defining sort as being a sort of unit of meaning. The units though are particular. Though of course, they may combine with one another in memory, since insights coalesce, they cannot be added in some arithmetical way. If insights and imagery can combine so too presumably can emotions, so one can conceive of the heart as being rich in emotional experience and so able to draw on that experience. One can see that the experiences of a life make its capacity and richness. Schliermacher speaks of an erlebneis being a unit of eternal life. Heaven is, in this way, as it were, under construction. It is, one might say, time to start living!
What needs to be noticed is that such experience has been expressed just in an individual way. In community and friendship we share each other as it were and come to live a life together. Thus great events carry a sort of public erlebneis. For example I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, so that it has become part of my identity, my understanding of the world, the values I hold. I share this reality with many others.
So the first preaching of the Gospel culminating in the paschal mystery is an erlebneis which is collective and communicable to the ends of the earth and time. The first thesis is not only personal and individual but Catholic and collective. “God has visited his people”.
The realisation that our shaping as persons is not just a matter of personal authenticity but is also public and historical raises the question of authenticity to a public and historical concern. The Church is Holy but the question of authenticity is a question about the more local traditions which have given our lives the shaping and meaning they have acquired, so we say with Pope John XX111 “Ecclesia simper reformanda”. In the lives of the saints – Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, “love in the heart of the Church”, and Fr Damien, love shown for the most neglected, show us anew the demand of authenticity. I recall on arriving at a Catholic boarding school the housemaster monk coming in saying, “I am looking for some boys to beat – you, you, and you”. He held a bit of a broken desk. A reign of terror was established!
Fr Geoffrey Holt SJ has just died. He was an historian who collected together the lives of all the Jesuits in recusant times. There was talk of him coming over to talk about Catholic Education in the C18th. I said could he conclude with a statement about Catholic education today. He said “No” so he did not come. That was my mistake, perhaps a costly one, because to understand how people acted well two or three centuries ago cannot fail to help us apply what we have learned to our contemporary situation.
If the object of historical study is seen as quite foreign to us then history can be left to historians. If we experience history as a sharing in the same erlebneis, then history provides vital nourishment for our living today. Our hearts can burn within us, set fire anew by what is old.
There are three modes of cognition which attain truth and so come to or possess knowledge of reality, the divine which knows all eternally, the angelic which knows by its own form and by the life of grace, and the human which comes to knowledge through sense experience and the life of grace. The angels share what they have with one another in the movement of aeritime, and may share with humans. Man’s intelligence is in a movement which is cumulative through time. He sleeps, senses, wonders, makes theories, reaches conclusions and with the material basis of the brain with its symbols and language, can retain what it has come to know, and by following a question come to know more. So man’s mind has been described as “potens omnia”. Angels have advantage over man in that they arrive in existence knowing. Man, though, arriving on the scene with a tabula rasa (a clean slate) is set to a development which can only be limited by his own folly. He can retain in memory what he has found. He can move on to further development. Here is a source of hubris or pride – pretending to a development which has not occurred.
In this life man is a contrast because all his natural operations are sense based, because he moves from question to answer and because his knowledge in his memory is not sensibly before him. In our moment by moment existence, we can be unaware of most of what is present within us and unaware of questions which belong to us. When St Paul says we shall know as we are known, he may mean we shall live with, have consciously before us, all that we know. May be this is part of what our Lord means when he says we shall be like the angels.
For man in the world, what he dwells upon is just a part of what he knows and loves. The soldier takes the photograph of his beloved from his wallet and is reminded of a contrasting world, perhaps of what he is fighting for. For many things it is memory itself which provides the material for thought. We are dependent here on emotionally charged phantasm making its way through our censor. Wanting to do something – to remember someone’s name, is not sufficient to guarantee the censor operating properly. We have the knowledge but the filing system is not operating properly.
Perhaps we should consider two censors, one for appropriate emotions and one for the images and words we seek. There may be an emotional block as well as a block on images. So there may be a block on happiness and beauty for this is a time of struggle and only feelings such as the importance of work are to be allowed. In Scotland, in Kirkcaldy, for example, Adam Smith’s birth place, we came across some modern architecture which would seem set there to depress the spirits of the occupants. Or someone might be set on jollity, frivolity and humour in such a way that a serious thought is not allowed to occupy the stage – Oscar Wilde would seem to have a consciousness in this vein much of the time. The censor can of course, be trained through comparisons and disciplines. Helm Holtz in 1862 referred to an artistic – instinctive intuition as making up the “tact” that belongs to the social scientist or historian. I think one applauds the spirit which can face the depths and the grimness of things, but somehow turn them round as perhaps Christ our Lord did when he found His spirit troubled by his imminent rejection but brought forth the image of a chicken gathering chicks under her wings, a homely image indeed. The scientist who turns to theology in a positive way may find that his emotional understanding of the mystery is restricted to the idea of design, of power, of force. The emotional requirement for science is excellent in its sphere but will find it needs to leave itself and become as a little child to speak with feeling and understanding of love, compassion, forgiveness and mercy. There is a divine wisdom about the rich texts of scripture which can help to train the inhumanly set censor.
The fact of two censors, one of emotions and one of images, allows one to understand the parable as a means of getting through to censored consciousness for what could be more ordinary than a vineyard with grapes which are bitter, or a little lamb whose owner was fond of it, or a sower who was careless in his sowing! The image is allowed through because it belongs to ordinary life. It becomes the unwanted instrument of instruction and cause of guilt to wayward consciousness.
I sense that catharsis, an emotional release from drama, may somehow break the emotional censor. There are feelings we have repressed because our concrete circumstances must fail to meet them. There is an ideal love we would like to have for children say – and they come to see us when they are short of cash or need the washing done! With repressed feelings life becomes a bit humdrum, we cough up the cash and do the washing. We recognise the same humdrum in a play – about aircraft and mechanics say – but it ends up with the father saying to the son: “My son. Live!” The emotional repression is overcome.
There is a repression of images which might tell us the truth we want to know; there is a repression of emotions born in upon us by circumstances. I think the illumination of the parable is distinct from the catharsis of the play. In the one case it is understanding that unblocked, in the other it is feelings.
In writing of censors and blocking, I am at the level of what Lonergan would call “faculty analysis”. We have a neural demand system of which we are unaware, a censor or two I have argued, an agent intellect, a passive intellect, a will, all of which are faculties of which we are not directly aware. Intentionality analysis draws on our actual experience. Do you ever try to recall something you know and fail? Do you ever feel life in its routine is flat and that you are not living life to the full?
Opposed to such experiences are the experiences which shape us so that they become part of our awareness of ourselves and the world we live in. Falling in love or experiencing a vocation would be such an event. The German word is erlebneis. Just as physics has its units of mass, force, acceleration so the Human Sciences see an experience of a defining sort as being a sort of unit of meaning. The units though are particular. Though of course, they may combine with one another in memory, since insights coalesce, they cannot be added in some arithmetical way. If insights and imagery can combine so too presumably can emotions, so one can conceive of the heart as being rich in emotional experience and so able to draw on that experience. One can see that the experiences of a life make its capacity and richness. Schliermacher speaks of an erlebneis being a unit of eternal life. Heaven is, in this way, as it were, under construction. It is, one might say, time to start living!
What needs to be noticed is that such experience has been expressed just in an individual way. In community and friendship we share each other as it were and come to live a life together. Thus great events carry a sort of public erlebneis. For example I grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, so that it has become part of my identity, my understanding of the world, the values I hold. I share this reality with many others.
So the first preaching of the Gospel culminating in the paschal mystery is an erlebneis which is collective and communicable to the ends of the earth and time. The first thesis is not only personal and individual but Catholic and collective. “God has visited his people”.
The realisation that our shaping as persons is not just a matter of personal authenticity but is also public and historical raises the question of authenticity to a public and historical concern. The Church is Holy but the question of authenticity is a question about the more local traditions which have given our lives the shaping and meaning they have acquired, so we say with Pope John XX111 “Ecclesia simper reformanda”. In the lives of the saints – Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, “love in the heart of the Church”, and Fr Damien, love shown for the most neglected, show us anew the demand of authenticity. I recall on arriving at a Catholic boarding school the housemaster monk coming in saying, “I am looking for some boys to beat – you, you, and you”. He held a bit of a broken desk. A reign of terror was established!
Fr Geoffrey Holt SJ has just died. He was an historian who collected together the lives of all the Jesuits in recusant times. There was talk of him coming over to talk about Catholic Education in the C18th. I said could he conclude with a statement about Catholic education today. He said “No” so he did not come. That was my mistake, perhaps a costly one, because to understand how people acted well two or three centuries ago cannot fail to help us apply what we have learned to our contemporary situation.
If the object of historical study is seen as quite foreign to us then history can be left to historians. If we experience history as a sharing in the same erlebneis, then history provides vital nourishment for our living today. Our hearts can burn within us, set fire anew by what is old.
History as a Science
As a memory is to a person, so history is to a people, but before the Greek discovery of mind and so critical control of meaning, history was an admixture of myth and fact relating the people to the Gods or God, to nature, to other peoples. Origins shape potentiality so the myth that Chinese people have that they are descended from maggots needs to be thoroughly dispelled before they can care for a democratic or a human rights ideal.
Plato though thought we should go gently with myths, because they contain some element of truth, and so maggots may express mortality or that the majority of people may be ruled by dictatorship. Also myths may be so important that they account for conduct, and help account for the fury of the Amazons or the Empire of the English. Pareto thought religion mythical but essential to express sentiments. Perhaps too, myth belongs to our thinking about large groups of people. In battle the enemy tend to be thought of as subhuman Huns say, or one might think all Americans subhuman and greedy, or all Middle Eastern people except the Jews as prone to oriental despotism. Sir Alex Douglas Hume when Foreign Secretary had all the countries of the world simply classified as pro or anticommunist.
It is a sort of mythical mentality that for each people history should be the history of their own country. The real story of things is more complex. If Newton was English, Galilee and Copernicus were not but they are part of the same emerging story. Naturalism is a powerful myth which can galvanise a people for independence or war.
Lonergan’s view of history is rather more abstract, or perhaps one should say concrete! He sees that there is a tendency to progress through man’s understanding, judgement, and application. The discovery of how to grow wheat or how to make bread is not confined to one tribe or one people. An insight normally is not tied to the first language in which it is expressed. The insight is pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic, even though it is normally through language and through concepts that we come to discover and share in the insights of others. There is then a progressive movement forward about history, for one discovery leads to a situation in which further discoveries can be made. Weeding I suppose was done by hand before the hoe was invented. Dating things is a matter of fact when it is possible – but it gives rise to a situation where there is an emergent probability of a further discovery. Such a history is not necessarily just about technical things – so people discovered the importance of the Sabbath for the spiritual life. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Progress then can be spiritual as well as technical. The implementation of the Sabbath might lead to such quotations as “What should we do about the children” and so reading, writing and storytelling take a leap forward. The fact that progress can be spiritual as well as technical gives God (and the demons) a chance to come in on the act. So we Christians have the idea of an epoch of Revelation, starting with Adam in one way and with Abraham in another way and culminating in the death of the last apostle who was St John and whose last recorded words were “My little children, love one another.
We find then a double dynamism of progress in history – man gets to know the natural world he lives in better and better and God Himself can come to be known and even reveal himself. Everything moves forward.
The complicating factor is sin. From the beginning man turned from God, experienced the distress of mortality, and was darkened in intellect and weakened in will. The distress of mortality is a huge factor setting a context of pessimism and scepticism. Man is deeply used to a hopeless situation. So, ensconced on the dung heap he makes the most of hopelessness, making something enjoyable or even noble from the ruination which is existence. Wit, pleasure, even absolute concern for justice, might occupy him. Voltaire and Malthus are bedfellows here, but so too I suspect, those many scientists who so support the global warming thesis that they are prepared to support measures which will support the impoverishment and the discomfort of the multitude. Air conditioning for Africa – certainly not!
I think this pessimism about human existence – I recall the title of Malraux’s book “Call No Man Happy” – is not expressed by Sartres rather brilliant “It is absurd to be born, it is absurd to live, it is absurd to die”. Sartre here is in no way in love and aware of the meaning, the non-absurdity of love, and of existence in love. The pessimism i write of draws from the pathos of doomed livingness. i recall the 1950s and ‘60s where it dawned on us rather drastically that the probability was we were to be destroyed in a nuclear war. Here was a factor in permissiveness for a long term future for man seemed pie in the sky.
The pessimistic humanist living in an absurd universe feels bound to save what he can by slowing down the exuberance and carelessness of human living. The reversal of the Resurrection places man’s meaning in a Providential and Eternal context but brings a wider and deeper sense of duty.
For Lonergan, the drive forward in history of attention, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility improving situations meets the fault in man from the Fall – his darkness of intellect, his weakness of will – in the four biases, dramatic, egoistic, group and general. A bias is not a total blindness, just a blindness to some aspect of things which may be relatively unimportant or extremely serious. So Caiaphas has it that one man should die for the people but is blind to the importance of this man or any man. He is blind to the sort of people you make if you do not defend each man. His blindness gives him more energy about the things he does see.
Let us run through the biases. Dramatic bias censors in and censors out certain sorts of images, feelings, insights. Egoistic bias prevents my share of the washing up. Group bias collaborates with one group but ignores or oppresses another. It sets up a cyclical motion whereby the oppressed get their chance. General bias ignores and disparages established values in order to solve practical problems – so the monasteries get dissolved and the army gets equipped.
History then is the scene of genuine progress where a people with their leaders act authentically and reading the situation carefully, deal with emerging problems constructively. It is the scene of decline and chaos, resentment and anger where issues are not faced squarely. Retributive justice adds to the spiral of violence. So the situation gives scope for healing, redemptive love which dissolves the frontiers, for hope which overrides determinisms and for faith which breaks down the arguments ideology has constructed. Love reveals values and shows what could be done and makes man capable of great efforts and even self sacrifice. Progress, decline and redemption from decline provide different areas of history.
Lonergan also writes of different plateaus of history, the practical giving rise to cities, the theoretical giving rise to science, history, art, and religion, and a third plateau in which through self-appropriation man becomes aware of the ways forward emerging from his or her own self. A first plateau situation can be taken forward by people from the second plateau. Second plateau people can be taken forward towards personal self appropriation and creative living – “we are God’s work of art” – by third plateau minds who realise that choice belongs to man in his freedom, overriding values express what he cares for and that divine love works to bring a new order on the face of the earth.
Choice belongs to man in a radical way for what he comes to know is not just a matter of scientific handing down but a matter of personal discovery. We might in post war Britain imagine that economic growth is the only sort of progress that matters, especially today (2009) when we face recession and slump, but progress in fact, undergirded by the economy as a matter of personal formation, personal maturity, personal output, a question of loving deeds as well as material output.
Growth today has got to face and appropriate anew the achievement of self appropriation, with a recognition of differentiations of consciousness in science, history, religion and art. It has to address decline in the practical plateau so that the economy is productive and frees itself from debt. It can prevent the theoretical plateau from being the mere mastery of past discoveries. It can open the third plateau against “blocks” – the insistence that all meaning can be expressed in ordinary language; the insistence that man’s only knowledge is through empirical science; the insistence that sociology and history should be “value free”; the insistence by humanists that while there may be the self transcendence of knowledge and human love, divine love is an illusion.
All development involves the purification of tradition by an appropriate revision. The appropriate revision may restore concern for what is good in the tradition. So there has been, in warfare, a development from wholesale slaughter to respect for innocent human life. Through, I think, the Red Cross, there was the abandonment of dum-dum bullets in the First War. There emerges a concern for humanity even in the heat of battle. I suspect chivalry anticipated this concern. Respect for the sanctity of innocent human life in war but also respect for combatant life both need to be restored. Here is a point where present culture is engaged at once in pragmatic decline but also elements in development.
Plato though thought we should go gently with myths, because they contain some element of truth, and so maggots may express mortality or that the majority of people may be ruled by dictatorship. Also myths may be so important that they account for conduct, and help account for the fury of the Amazons or the Empire of the English. Pareto thought religion mythical but essential to express sentiments. Perhaps too, myth belongs to our thinking about large groups of people. In battle the enemy tend to be thought of as subhuman Huns say, or one might think all Americans subhuman and greedy, or all Middle Eastern people except the Jews as prone to oriental despotism. Sir Alex Douglas Hume when Foreign Secretary had all the countries of the world simply classified as pro or anticommunist.
It is a sort of mythical mentality that for each people history should be the history of their own country. The real story of things is more complex. If Newton was English, Galilee and Copernicus were not but they are part of the same emerging story. Naturalism is a powerful myth which can galvanise a people for independence or war.
Lonergan’s view of history is rather more abstract, or perhaps one should say concrete! He sees that there is a tendency to progress through man’s understanding, judgement, and application. The discovery of how to grow wheat or how to make bread is not confined to one tribe or one people. An insight normally is not tied to the first language in which it is expressed. The insight is pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic, even though it is normally through language and through concepts that we come to discover and share in the insights of others. There is then a progressive movement forward about history, for one discovery leads to a situation in which further discoveries can be made. Weeding I suppose was done by hand before the hoe was invented. Dating things is a matter of fact when it is possible – but it gives rise to a situation where there is an emergent probability of a further discovery. Such a history is not necessarily just about technical things – so people discovered the importance of the Sabbath for the spiritual life. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Progress then can be spiritual as well as technical. The implementation of the Sabbath might lead to such quotations as “What should we do about the children” and so reading, writing and storytelling take a leap forward. The fact that progress can be spiritual as well as technical gives God (and the demons) a chance to come in on the act. So we Christians have the idea of an epoch of Revelation, starting with Adam in one way and with Abraham in another way and culminating in the death of the last apostle who was St John and whose last recorded words were “My little children, love one another.
We find then a double dynamism of progress in history – man gets to know the natural world he lives in better and better and God Himself can come to be known and even reveal himself. Everything moves forward.
The complicating factor is sin. From the beginning man turned from God, experienced the distress of mortality, and was darkened in intellect and weakened in will. The distress of mortality is a huge factor setting a context of pessimism and scepticism. Man is deeply used to a hopeless situation. So, ensconced on the dung heap he makes the most of hopelessness, making something enjoyable or even noble from the ruination which is existence. Wit, pleasure, even absolute concern for justice, might occupy him. Voltaire and Malthus are bedfellows here, but so too I suspect, those many scientists who so support the global warming thesis that they are prepared to support measures which will support the impoverishment and the discomfort of the multitude. Air conditioning for Africa – certainly not!
I think this pessimism about human existence – I recall the title of Malraux’s book “Call No Man Happy” – is not expressed by Sartres rather brilliant “It is absurd to be born, it is absurd to live, it is absurd to die”. Sartre here is in no way in love and aware of the meaning, the non-absurdity of love, and of existence in love. The pessimism i write of draws from the pathos of doomed livingness. i recall the 1950s and ‘60s where it dawned on us rather drastically that the probability was we were to be destroyed in a nuclear war. Here was a factor in permissiveness for a long term future for man seemed pie in the sky.
The pessimistic humanist living in an absurd universe feels bound to save what he can by slowing down the exuberance and carelessness of human living. The reversal of the Resurrection places man’s meaning in a Providential and Eternal context but brings a wider and deeper sense of duty.
For Lonergan, the drive forward in history of attention, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility improving situations meets the fault in man from the Fall – his darkness of intellect, his weakness of will – in the four biases, dramatic, egoistic, group and general. A bias is not a total blindness, just a blindness to some aspect of things which may be relatively unimportant or extremely serious. So Caiaphas has it that one man should die for the people but is blind to the importance of this man or any man. He is blind to the sort of people you make if you do not defend each man. His blindness gives him more energy about the things he does see.
Let us run through the biases. Dramatic bias censors in and censors out certain sorts of images, feelings, insights. Egoistic bias prevents my share of the washing up. Group bias collaborates with one group but ignores or oppresses another. It sets up a cyclical motion whereby the oppressed get their chance. General bias ignores and disparages established values in order to solve practical problems – so the monasteries get dissolved and the army gets equipped.
History then is the scene of genuine progress where a people with their leaders act authentically and reading the situation carefully, deal with emerging problems constructively. It is the scene of decline and chaos, resentment and anger where issues are not faced squarely. Retributive justice adds to the spiral of violence. So the situation gives scope for healing, redemptive love which dissolves the frontiers, for hope which overrides determinisms and for faith which breaks down the arguments ideology has constructed. Love reveals values and shows what could be done and makes man capable of great efforts and even self sacrifice. Progress, decline and redemption from decline provide different areas of history.
Lonergan also writes of different plateaus of history, the practical giving rise to cities, the theoretical giving rise to science, history, art, and religion, and a third plateau in which through self-appropriation man becomes aware of the ways forward emerging from his or her own self. A first plateau situation can be taken forward by people from the second plateau. Second plateau people can be taken forward towards personal self appropriation and creative living – “we are God’s work of art” – by third plateau minds who realise that choice belongs to man in his freedom, overriding values express what he cares for and that divine love works to bring a new order on the face of the earth.
Choice belongs to man in a radical way for what he comes to know is not just a matter of scientific handing down but a matter of personal discovery. We might in post war Britain imagine that economic growth is the only sort of progress that matters, especially today (2009) when we face recession and slump, but progress in fact, undergirded by the economy as a matter of personal formation, personal maturity, personal output, a question of loving deeds as well as material output.
Growth today has got to face and appropriate anew the achievement of self appropriation, with a recognition of differentiations of consciousness in science, history, religion and art. It has to address decline in the practical plateau so that the economy is productive and frees itself from debt. It can prevent the theoretical plateau from being the mere mastery of past discoveries. It can open the third plateau against “blocks” – the insistence that all meaning can be expressed in ordinary language; the insistence that man’s only knowledge is through empirical science; the insistence that sociology and history should be “value free”; the insistence by humanists that while there may be the self transcendence of knowledge and human love, divine love is an illusion.
All development involves the purification of tradition by an appropriate revision. The appropriate revision may restore concern for what is good in the tradition. So there has been, in warfare, a development from wholesale slaughter to respect for innocent human life. Through, I think, the Red Cross, there was the abandonment of dum-dum bullets in the First War. There emerges a concern for humanity even in the heat of battle. I suspect chivalry anticipated this concern. Respect for the sanctity of innocent human life in war but also respect for combatant life both need to be restored. Here is a point where present culture is engaged at once in pragmatic decline but also elements in development.
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