Meanings and Values

Someone was speaking about ‘Catholic values’ and I felt I might be in the realm of pious platitudes. Could one say, from a personal stance, values are dearly held commitments? So that a Catholic value would be the dearly held commitment to get myself to Mass on a Sunday, if possible, even when one is on holiday?
The valuing, the personal commitment, does not make the value. The value is valuable in its own right. I recall at university in the 1960s coming across some paper about the likely effect of a nuclear war. Whole territories would be wiped out. I found myself desolated at such a prospect, and committed if possible to find another way. I was recognising the value of human life and agreeing with the teaching of the Church which condemned the mass destruction of cities. The same value can be expressed as a principle and deeply held as a conviction, as a commitment. As an insight leads to conceptualisation, commitment may lead to expression in principles. It seems to me though that commitment may bind one without it being expressed in abstract principles. A parent might be committed to his daughter’s education without abstracting about the matter.
Values are expressed in commitments and lived. Good people are not all ethicists or moral theologians. A good person though might confront a dilemma and be helped to reach a decision by someone who has studied the matter. We meet here the idea of substructure and superstructure. One person has the substructure of a good will in operation. The expert though is able to help by having a reflective superstructure, rather as human life is lived with meanings and values by one group and thematised by historians. One concludes that though we don’t all have to be experts in morals it is helpful to all if there are some such experts around in the community in a vital and interactive way.
There needs to be ‘a teaching’ if those who are living in a substructural way, without too much analysis, are to be guided, and the ‘good will’ of the good person needs to move confidently to the advice and instruction of those who are expert. There is a submissiveness here but it is for the sake of life, excellence and achievement of some sort.
I have the sense that there needs to be some restoration of confidence in this area. I me someone recently who was talking about a person who was a good Christian as well as a Catholic, as if Catholicism was a sort of drag, contained a bias, against being a good Christian.
Fr Lonergan in his Third Collection writes about authenticity, about self transcendence and about norms belonging to attentiveness, intelligence, rationality and conduct so that we live with truth, reality and the excellence of goodness, the happiness of a clear conscience.
The values we have to recognise are not simply deontological but also, to coin a term, dehistorical. We need to recognise that we have a body which is alive and that life is always a divine gift, so we should not bump people off, ourselves or other people (deontological values). We need to recognise that we are historically conditioned and that issues have emerged which it is a duty to address, racialism for example or the way through the present ‘credit crunch’. Current permissiveness and abortion might seem to be simply ‘deontological’ issues, but the issue seems to stand with historical ideas, like the woman’s right to choose, or the way ‘a civilised society’ deals with private sexual morality or ‘human rights’. Civilised values, to be truly civilised, need the realism to recognise their deontological base.
By authenticity, Lonergan means something cumulative over time. So Newman at one stage thought he ought to be an angel and there had been a mistake, that he ought to be an evangelist, that he ought to be a Catholic (but not a Roman Catholic) and then that he ought to be a Roman Catholic. These are changes of position (should we call them ‘conversions’?) whereby he moves from thinking he is an angel entrapped in flesh to accepting that he has the down to earth dignity of a human being combined with the baptismal grace which made him a child of God. A secular example of authenticity is that of Eddington who before the First War got interested in Einstein, who during the war stayed loyal to that interest despite strong pressure against because Einstein was German, and who after the war, verified his theory at some expense. (I have seen it said that the cloud cover on the occasion of the eclipse was so great that Eddington could not have verified the theory. If so that would be inauthenticity, showing that the cumulative product can be rare.)
Authenticity issues in self transcendence. Perhaps self transcendence is not a perfect term for it rather implies that the self is left behind, whereas the point is that the life of the self requires going beyond the self but in a way which involves the self with another of some sort.
There is a problem here for we cannot avoid being the central figure in our flesh and blood experiences. The problem was solved by the Greeks in that we choose what is more excellent and we do choose what is most excellent, wisdom, by which we recognise another.
Lonergan has us oriented to self transcendence by the dreams of the morning in which, though as victims, we are in symbolic mood facing the challenge of the day and of life. He has us waking to a world of sensible stimuli, like toothpaste and cups of coffee, and I recognise here the world of animal extroversion which stays with us all the time since we are animals, set to jump if there is a big bang. As shaped up by our parents, by human history, by our personal splash we find ourselves living beyond animal extroversion in a world mediated by meaning and motivated by values.
Between the dream and consciousness symbols have the difference that they can become utterly precise and demanding. At Downside the bell rang and though still half asleep we had to get up and go through our hygienic ablutions in preparation for Holy Mass. By symbol we are oriented to action and so to the mighty stage of history. If the bell is a symbol mediating meaning and value, life thereafter included systems of symbols coming at one to be mastered, the language, mathematics, physics, chemistry, the game of rugby. In Easter and Summer terms I found relief in catching trout which I suppose was a near return to the world of animal extroversion. Nothing was ever more surprising and exciting.
Still by work and signs and examples one came to know the world one lived in and how one should conduct oneself, meanings and values. Truth to tell, meanings and disvalues as well. There was the public school world and the rest of the world and was not Downside the Eton of the Catholic Schools? About growing in wisdom there is a lot of unlearning the tradition one has received, so that coming to live in the real world is a continuous conversion helped by symbolic structures and also by other people in the richness and also the poverty of their living.
Undergirding authenticity and self transcendence Lonergan has the term normative. ‘Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible.’ There are norms at each level, so if there is cloud cover one should not pretend to astronomical observations. The norms around the precept ‘be responsible’ are different from the others, for ‘be responsible’ requires that there be options. The precept is concerned with how one should use one’s freedom. The self transcendence of knowing brings the self into knowledge of the world. How one should act though, except in extraordinary circumstances, gives one a set of options and so you get deliberation and choice. By free choice one changes the world, other people and above all ones own self.
There is a dreaming self transcendence of a sort, a sensitive self transcendence, a cognitive self transcendence and a performative self transcendence but these all occur in the context of an affective self transcendence which may be more in potency than act. Our living finds its meaning in love, at the heart of which is or is not the love of God. In a world of distractions and biases, of cares and worries, the awareness of the centrality of God’s love needs to be reflected upon, understood and assiduously cared about. You get the world of religion with morning prayer and night prayer. You get intimacy with the sacrament and sacramentality of marriage. You get a relevant loyalty with sincere and effective love of neighbour even across the sea, even in the distant future.