I am trying, though it is a great trial to do so, to read Bernard Lonergan’s Method in Theology. (You may be even pleased to see that this is, as a consequence, perhaps one of my shortest posts!) A lot of Method in Theology, I am afraid, strikes me as just a matter of words tacked onto each other which effectively construct hyperbolic scenarios which, because of the nature of the hyperbole, signify nothing. I offer the following in evidence:

… religious conversion goes beyond moral. Questions for intelligence, for reflection, for deliberation reveal the eros of the human spirit, its capacity and its desire for self-transcendence. But that capacity meets fulfilment, that desire turns to joy, when religious conversion transforms the existential subject into a subject in love, a subject held, grasped, possessed, owned through a total and so an other-worldly love. [224]

There is simply no justification for taking the urge to understand as a capacity, let alone a desire, for self-transcendence, whatever that means. But then, when he builds on the intellectual drive to know, and goes on to speak of moral conversion, and suggests that religious conversion does not negate the fruits of moral conversion, as though we are building on assured results, there is no reason to take the words seriously. “In no way,” he affirms confidently, “are the fruits of intellectual or moral conversion negated or diminished [by religious conversion].” [224] But by yoking mind and morality with religion by using the word ‘conversion’, Lonergan is simply being misleading. For he then he goes on to speak of the fruits of religious conversion as something which vaults far beyond intellectual or moral conversion (leave aside what these may be reasonably thought to be, even if there is a reasonable explanation for them). We are not to think that religious conversion provides only “a more efficacious ground for the pursuit of intellectual and moral ends.” In other words, intellectual and moral conversion are diminished by religious conversion. Because it is at this point that we come to the hyperbole:

Religious loving is without conditions, qualifications, reservations: it is with all one’s heart, and all one’s soul and all one’s mind and all one’s strength. This lack of limitation, though it corresponds to the unrestricted character of of human questioning, does not pertain to this world. Holiness abounds in true and moral goodness, but it has a distinct dimension of its own. It is other-worldly fulfilment, joy, peace, bliss. In Christian experience these are the fruits of being in love with a mysterious, uncomprehended God. [224]

You didn’t know that so much hyperbole could be squeezed onto one page, although in his exuberance he spills over onto the next a line or too, but this time in a negative, Manichaean exaggeration, for, immediately after the preceding, he writes:

Sinfulness similarly is distinct from moral evil; it is the privation of total loving; it is a radical dimension of lovelessness.

And all this, without a bit of evidence at all, or any obvious reason why we should think that anything is being said.

What could Lonergan possibly mean by “being in love with a mysterious, uncomprehended God”? Or what can he mean by “a subject in love, a subject held, grasped, possessed, owned through a total and so an other-worldly love.” (my italics) I get the total and so other-worldly, since we are, after all, finite. But I do not understand what it means to be “grasped, possessed, [and] owned” (my italics again) by such a love. For is love possessive, domineering? Is it something which, given or received, is then to be interpreted in terms of ownership? Is it something which seeks to own and grasp? And what would such a love be like? To be possessed — the word immediately suggests itself — to be ravished by the object of one’s love? But then to speak of that object as mysterious, and not only as not fully known, but as uncomprehended? Are we not simply vaulting here into empty space, with the unwarranted conviction that something will keep us aloft?

And notice, because it is important that the options are absolute in this way, that if that love is rejected, the alternative is to be, not only unloved, but to be loveless, sequestered in a region of radical lovelessness.  Quite aside from being uncomprehended, and the love apparently possessive, why should the rejection of it, because uncomprehended and seeking to own, imply lovelessness, and not caution? Why not simply an epistemological caution in the face of something (acknowledged to be) unknown and uncomprehended? Notice how the language of religion here slips over into unintelligibility, but with a promise, it seems, of ultimate meaningfulness, but not yet, not here, in this finite realm, where everything is only finite and partial. We merely have to have faith, but the faith here is left implicit, unvoiced.

In the context of method, in particular, Lonergan is trying to describe or characterise a stepwise progression through intellectual and moral conversion, when, for example, taking intellectual conversion first, one goes through the movement from one horizon to another, from the myth, as Lonergan calls it, of thinking that

… knowing is like looking, that objectivity is seeing what is there to be seen and not seeing what is not there to be seen and not seeing what is not there, and that the real is what is out there now to be looked at. [238]

This he contrasts with the world “mediated by meaning.” Which, quite frankly doesn’t make a lot of sense, since seeing is, in fact, invested with meaning. But this leads to the apparently “profound” observation that

Knowing, accordingly is not just seeing; it is experiencing, understanding, judging and believing. [loc. cit.]

And then he goes on to expatiate on that theme:

The reality known is not just looked at; it is given in experience, organized and extrapolated by understanding, posited by judgement and belief.

He wants us to become aware of the different possibilities that exist within that looking, and how what is seen can be variously — shall we say? — “intellectualised” or “philosophised.” Take one of Lonergan’s examples:

What is a myth? There are psychological, anthropological, historical, and philosophic answers to the question. But there are also reductive answers: myth is a narrative about entities not to be found within an empiricist, an idealist, a historicist, an existentialist horizon. [239]

To be converted intellectually is to be disabused of the myth that knowing is like looking, which Lonergan calls a blunder, and that is why he singles out the “reductive answer” for special animadversion. But there is no reason why we should not call the historical, anthropological or psychological answers reductive. Indeed, that is just what they are. And this points to the problem that I find with Lonergan’s work. He seems to be talking about something, but then, suddenly, it is as though he doesn’t recognize what he is saying. Reductive analyses of myths would simply be explanations in terms of theology, or some explanation of the historical origin of such outlandish stories. As to philosophic[al] answers to the question of myth — well, what more could it be but a reduction in terms that are intelligibly related to the things which, as philosophers, we can consider to be real? And theologians don’t get to inject their transcendent beings into philosophy. That is theology, pure and simple, and, if it is to be justified at all, to be given a philosophical imprimatur, will have to be accounted as more than simply mysterious and uncomprehended.

I do not want to take this too far, because I don’t want, in the end, to read Lonergan too closely. To me, this sort of thing has become a trial simply to read. What I have read I have found turgid and irrelevant to what philosophers or scientists talk about when they are speaking about knowledge, about what it means to understand something as a part of the reality that, as finite knowers, we model in experience and language. But what we seem to have — and those who have read Lonergan more closely may be able to enlarge on this, or simply to correct me — is a reluctance to allow oneself to be pinned down by the limitations of the natural world. Knowing may not, in the end, be simply the product of looking, but looking is at least its point of departure. To jump from the natural world, and to speak of going beyond “intelligence, … reflection, [and] deliberation [to] reveal the eros of the human spirit, [with] its capacity and its desire for self-transcendence,” is jumping off into the unknown, as he himself acknowledges when he comes to the “mysterious, uncomprehended God.” And there is no reason, it seems to me, for going there, for what is it to encounter the “uncomprehended” but to reach the limits of reason? But if we have reached it, why speak of a god or gods? Why not simply stay with that ignorance, and acknowledge that we do not, and cannot know?