The Universe Desacralised; Human Living Secularised

Man makes use of symbols, words, to express the meanings and values that inform his way of life, his self understanding and his understanding of the world.
Since man is intelligent his understanding of things and the symbolism that expresses it is in development. New words enter our vocabulary – the human genome project – and empower our conduct – the motor car. To drive carefully becomes a new moral requirement. One could be too scrupulous about tyre pressures or too careless. To keep the car regularly serviced helps ensure safety. Our integrity is at stake, our authenticity, but in a secular environment.
Unless one is very technically minded the requirement ‘Drive Safely’ throws one into the hands of other people who know what they are doing, to check the brakes for example. A new ‘symbolism’, a new understanding, brings a new dimension to brotherhood, as people with complementary understanding help each other.
Lonergan has brought about a new understanding about the human subject and with that a new symbolism usually in the sense that a familiar word comes to be used in a very precise way. So ‘deliberation’ is a word known by everyone but it gets used very precisely about weighing up different courses of action.
So do we have here a further instance of secularisation owing to an advance in understanding and symbolism? I think not for Lonergan draws our attention to ‘religious experience’ as an element in our human make up, a substructural element capable of becoming superstructural.
Let me refresh our memory on this distinction between substructure and superstructure. A substructure is an element of our experience which can become understood, and the understanding can then be expressed in concepts and words and come to be valued appropriately in relation to other elements of the substructure or of the world we live in.
A good example is judgement whereby we affirm that some understanding is true. Everyone of course is making judgements all the time. For example last week I mentioned a physicist called Eddington and all of us would accept that in the early twentieth century there was a physicist called Eddington. It is a true statement, a metaphysical statement, an ontological statement. ‘Ens et verum convertuntur’. By some true statements, man ceases to live just in his animal habitat and comes to live in the real world just as it is, not just a physical world but also an historical world, and not just a physical and historical world, but a world called and blessed by God the redeemer from all evil.
Still, not all in the world judge that God is our Saviour, but I think everyone would agree that Eddington existed. The most acute philosopher in the world makes judgements about his bank balance and his current expenditure. Judgement is seen by Gadamer as the conclusion following from a more general principle. So, in Aristotelian fashion one could make a general utterance and then subsume a particular happening and make a judgement. Lonergan though would have us review everything before we come to a judgement, for by a judgement we are posing actuality, something that binds or liberates us, something which sets a context for deliberation and action. Judgement rests on experiential evidence, though in addition to the evidence of sense data, we have the evidence of conscious data.
Someone said, ‘everyone complains about their memory, but no one complains about their judgement’ for to complain about judgement is to admit a sort of madness. The madness might be reaching conclusions when the evidence is not in or it might be failing to reach conclusions when the evidence is in.
We can claim that ‘judgement’ is part of everyone’s experiential infrastructure but it is adverted to in a superstructural way by very few. Once accurately adverted to, since truth converts onto being, we have also a metaphysics of a sort, an ontology. A great deal follows upon building up an accurate superstructure with an awareness of responsibility about this key area of human being – namely that we make judgements.
Lonergan suggests that religious experience is part of our experiential infrastructure. he sees this flowing because God gives all men sufficient grace for salvation. He admits though that religious experience may in some cases vanish completely. It may clash with other elements of consciousness. In some it becomes quite central; and continuous. In this context he speaks of the purgative way, where what is contrary to religion is overcome, and the illuminative way in which ‘the significance and implications of religious commitment are more fully apprehended and understood’ (3rd Collection: 125), and the unitive way where in mortal beings can be seen the fruits of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness and self control.
Religious experience, if it is like other elements of consciousness, may be a feeling which is a cause of dismay or disorientation. Client centred therapy following Karl Rogers would help by naming the feeling, relating it to life and other feelings, understanding its occasions and significance. Such a therapy is surely working towards the building up of a suitable superstructure.
Karen Horney has several thoughts operative at the same time including repressed thoughts which the person knows about. One wonders whether the repression of the thought of God gives energy to the keenness of the atheists. Wilhelm Stekel has several thoughts in a polyphony which crowds out certain thoughts. I wonder if what makes for the dominance of a thought is not only its intelligible content but also feeling? Feeling is a major component in certain apprehensions, for example the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Maslow writes about Peak Experiences. There may be a strong religious component here as in a wedding service.
Lonergan discusses these psychologists in his chapter on religious experience, so one may presume he thinks they may be helpful. It is strange to reflect that we may have areas of ‘thought’ which we do not think about, so that they lack the appropriate ‘superstructure’.
In Method in Theology, without using the term superstructure he suggests that the appropriate structure is ‘faith’. ‘Faith is further knowledge when the love is God’s love flooding our hearts’ (Method: 115). A faculty psychology, dealing with intellect (truth) and will (love) confines love to what is known. ‘What the eye does not see the heart can’t grieve over’. Following a faculty psychology then the path to God is first faith, believing his revelation, and then love. So we work away, practising our faith, and if we are very diligent God might give us a hint of his love. Such mystic experience must be rare, so while we praise the saints, it would seem somewhat boastful to claim any personal knowledge or experience of what they were on about.
Lonergan replaced faculty psychology (sense experience, intellect, will) with intentionality analysis, which he later described as cognitional theory, and later as a form of phenomenology. This was not a deliberate ploy or an attempt to be clever or awkward. He found as he wrote Insight, that he was doing intentionality analysis. As he went on, he found that man’s life of love was so important that, as with sense experience, it was a source of intelligibility. He quotes with approval Pascal: ‘the heart has its reasons which reason does not know’. The reasons of the heart he calls values, or since right reason can give rise to values (vital, social, cultural, personal) he speaks of a transvaluation of values in the light of love. One is reminded of the phrase ‘post conventional morality’ when one hears of a transvaluation of values. So in Our Lord’s day conventional religious values would attend to the Sabbath in a strict way.
So attending to the data of consciousness in a phenomenological way one finds sense data, schematic images, duties and so forth and then one comes across this area of love which deals with family and mankind as well as God, and this area is so significant that it is a further ground for judgement, deliberation and decision.
The world religions witness to this area in the mythological ages where time and space were dominated by collective religious ideas. So Ayer’s Cliff was a sort of omphalos. So you get religious traditions and leaders and follies. Alongside Pope John XXIII’s teaching that the Church is always in need of reform one might posit that ‘all religious traditions are in need of reform’. The devoted and cruel suicide bomber reminds us how great that reform may need to be, but to be persuasive that reform will normally need to come from the tradition itself.
The daring suggestion, always tentative I think in Lonergan, is that religious experience in any tradition is from the grace of God and so an effect of the redemption wrought in Christ, that all traditions may need reform, do need reform, poses an endless historical task on man, historical in the way of understanding things past, but historical too in releasing a better future.