Commitment

While no one wishes to be a drifter most of the troubles in the world come from people who are committed, but there is something wrong with their commitment. There are those who make a fortune but lack honesty, those who advance in politics but lack humanity. There are norms which are disregarded or only partially regarded – attentiveness, intelligence, reasonableness, responsibility – and authenticity is demanding for it is a cumulative product. A block of some sort, a bias provides an emerging problem which is consistently ignored.
A community is defined not so much by a boundary as by a common consent to a common policy. So Lonergan having explored individual authenticity explores how this can be widened to understand community. A community requires a common field of experience or people get out of touch. The common field of experience is not just looking at the same landscape with its sunrise and sunset, or all looking at a hole in the road. It includes too the products that previous intelligence has formed which stock the libraries and the internet. It means access to the achievements of the past as well as the instrumentality for contemporary communication. Without education a new generation is like a barbarian host invading.
A community is marked by common and complimentary ways of understanding people and things. A community depends on a common sense to understand the same language or to understand the problems it faces. The plumber has a complimentary and needed understanding but I think one can recognise in the term ‘complimentary’ also those differentiations of consciousness that have arisen through the use of intelligence in the course of history, the theological (the scholastic achievement), the scientific, meaning the empirical sciences in their on-going achievement, the historical, with its reconstruction of the achievement of the human spirit in the way of meanings and values and the modern philosophical differentiation of consciousness.
Plato, horrified that the Polis could have put to death Socrates, thought the solution was a philosopher king. Meantime the Academy was a refuge for virtue. In the idea that community needs complimentary understanding one gains anew the vital importance of philosophy to help such understanding to operate in humble mode with regard to ‘the community’.
This applies to theologians of course. There is the humorous remark to the effect that one can negotiate with a terrorist but not a liturgist. There is though the Reformation which certainly divided the community of Europe and which could be seen as a reaction to the expertise of scholasticism with regard to things natural and divine. There seemed no room for new questions. Communication of discovery got reduced to authoritative utterances from on high. There was a crude protest.
The scientific world with Galileo and Newton and, it was thought, the discovery of the mathematical rules which governed material movement, has created and is creating a new sort of divsion in society between those who are guided by natural and religious values and those who are guided by natural values alone. We face anew abortion, euthanasia, and logically the systematic destruction of the unfit. I realise I have a chance of martyrdom.
The historical differentiation of consciousness which gives us a far greater access to the past has led, is leading, will lead to a new ground of atheism and division under that clam that everything produced by man is human, and since it is human it cannot be divine. The inspiration of the Scriptures, the divine guidance of the Church, though they can be recognised as beliefs affecting and explaining conduct must be dismissed. History must not only be value free but obviously free from influence from God. I merely counter with the wise words of Bishop Grant of Northampton: ‘Where the divine meets the human you get mystery’. An assertion without reason can be met by an assertion.
In the making of community where there is meeting of complementary and common understandings the task of philosophy is huge and vital. Following Vatican II, theology must concern itself also with communications and learn from their results. Modern science must move forward but realise its method does not deal with God. Modern history cannot fail to deal with beliefs in God but can shift from being ‘value free’ to being simply objective about such beliefs. They are operative and account for conduct foul and fair. Lonergan presents the needed stance: we need ‘such self awareness, such self understanding, such self knowledge as to grasp the similarities and differences of common sense, science and history, to grasp the foundations of these three in interiority which also founds natural right, and beyond all knowledge of knowledge to give also knowledge of affectivity in its threefold manifestation of love in the family, loyalty in the community and faith in God.’ (3rd Collection, 179)
Lonergan, in discussing community, moves from common understanding to common judgements, and if we do not possess these, we live in different worlds. Lonergan writes: ‘Philosophical differences affect the very meaning of meaning. Ethical differences effect all evaluations. Religious differences affect the meaning and value of ones world.’ (3rd Collection, 156) We find ourselves living in a world where the only common ground would appear to be the Gross Domestic Product –and of course, the weather. If we are speaking of our national community there has been a slippage, from one religion to several, from several to tolerance, to an enlightenment which asserts reason and denies tradition and so religion, to the rule of interests and the triumph of the democratic interest. If it were always true that ‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ then all would be well of course. The people need to be raised up by wonderful pastoral work for such to be the case. Such a prospect, while it is far from attained, at least presents a way forward, even if initially it must be an ecumenical and multi-faith way forward. Who cannot be touched by the fact that owing to an alliance between the Catholics and Presbyterians in Northern Ireland it is not possible for Westminster to promote abortion in that province? They may dislike each other and from time to time slaughter each other but to their everlasting credit they agree on this most important point, and around it ‘they live in the same world’.
To live in the same world allows support for the same policy and a common consent, a common commitment. The basis of such common consent could be ‘the scale of values’, religious, personal, cultural, social and vital but there is a tendency to a general decline as common sense deals with problems. It is obvious for example that chaos and rioting should be prevented.
With a general decline presenting the easy option one sees why Lonergan claims that it is easier to finds a good man than a good society. If a person can overcome inauthenticity in the tradition which has nurtured him and in himself then such an achievement is an invitation to others.
There are degrees of self transcendence. There is a sensitive self transcendence in enjoying a cup of coffee. Intellectual self transcendence moves to being, to understanding and stating what is, even if, in the natural sciences, such a statement might be, ’This is the best theory we have so far’. Moral self transcendence moves to decision which affects self, others and the world around. There is then self transcendence in love, for God, for neighbour and for intimacy in friendship and family life. Such love brings engagement with the whole scale of values.
The remarkable feature of such loving engagement is that it arrests decline, not in a general sense but in a milieu which is personal and may be more. For example, there were several great monks at Downside when I know it, including such as Hubert van Zeller whose writings reached many. The monasteries were dissolved unworthily, the fact is recorded. They had no mechanism to deal with excessive accumulation of land. Nothing though can deny that today, with wise and faithful monks, the tradition is as alive as it can be. The hermeneutic of retrieval follows the hermeneutic of suspicion, and the achievement belongs to greater matters, even unto the Paschal Mystery.
We find in spiritual matters the story is one of achievement, decline, redemption through authentic self transcendence. Redemption does not take us back to the same starting point but a new starting point maybe surrounded by the consequences of decline, and therefore with new creative and healing work to be done. The fields have been blown by the storms of history but they are still white for the harvest. The temple can never equate in glory to the physical structure put up by Solomon but is one thereby impoverished to have the stone rejected by the builders which is the cornerstone of something much more marvellous and reaching to the ends of the earth?