Bernard Lonergan · Lablypedia

Lonergan's works include Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957) and Method in Theology (1972), as well as two studies of Thomas Aquinas, several theological textbooks, and numerous essays, including two posthumously published essays on macroeconomics. Lonergan held appointments at the Pontifical Gregorian University; Regis College, Toronto, as distinguished visiting professor at Boston College, and as Stillman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University.

Aims

By his own account, Lonergan set out to do for human thought in our time what Thomas Aquinas had done for his own time. Aquinas had successfully applied Aristotelian thought to the service of a Christian understanding of the universe. Lonergan's program was to come to terms with modern scientific, historical, and hermeneutical thinking in a comparable way. He pursued this program in his two most fundamental works, Insight and Method in Theology.

One key to Lonergan's project is self-appropriation, that is, the personal discovery and personal embrace of the dynamic structure of inquiry, insight, judgment, and decision. By self-appropriation, one finds in one's own intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility the foundation of every kind of inquiry and the basic pattern of operations undergirding methodical investigation in every field.

A second key, one which subsumes the first, is a global "turn to the idea" of functionally specialized collaboration. Lonergan's hope was that his discovery and articulation of eight dynamically-related but distinct tasks would, in good time, subsume, if not replace, the splintered and oftentimes isolated results of what he called "field specialization" and "subject specialization" that prevail in the modern university. Along the same lines, in the 1969 essay "The Future of Christianity," he wrote that the transition from "classicist culture" to "modern culture" would require "a complete restructuring of Catholic theology." The needed restructuring applies to all academic disciplines and all creeds.

Lonergan is often associated—with his fellow Jesuits Karl Rahner and Joseph Maréchal—with "transcendental Thomism", i.e., a philosophy which attempts to combine Thomism with certain views or methods commonly associated with Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism. However, Lonergan did not regard this label as particularly helpful for understanding his intentions.

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Life

Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan was born on 17 December 1904 in Buckingham, Quebec, Canada. After four years at Loyola College (Montreal), he entered the Upper Canada (English) province of the Society of Jesus in 1922 and made his profession of vows on the Feast of St Ignatius of Loyola, 31 July 1924. After two further years of formation and education, he was assigned to study scholastic philosophy at Heythrop College, then in Oxfordshire, in 1926. Lonergan respected the competence and honesty of his professors at Heythrop, but was deeply dissatisfied with their Suarezian philosophy. While at Heythrop, Lonergan also took external degrees in mathematics and classics at the University of London. In 1930 he returned to Canada, where he taught for three years at Loyola College, Montreal.

In 1933, Lonergan was sent for theological studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1936. After a year of Jesuit formation ("tertianship") in Amiens, Lonergan returned to the Gregorian University in 1937 to pursue doctoral studies in theology. Due to the Second World War, he returned to Canada in May 1940, just two days before the scheduled defence of his doctoral dissertation. He began teaching theology at College de l'Immaculee Conception, the Jesuit theology faculty in Montreal in 1940, as well as the Thomas More Institute in 1945–46. In the event, he would not formally defend his dissertation and receive his doctorate until a special board of examiners from the Immaculee Conception was convened in Montreal on 23 December 1946.

Lonergan taught theology at Regis College (a theological school attached to the University of Toronto) from 1947 to 1953, and at the Gregorian University from 1953 to 1964. At the Gregorian, Lonergan taught Trinity and Christology in alternate years, and produced substantial textbooks on these topics. In 1964, he made another hasty return to North America, this time to be treated for lung cancer. He was appointed again to Regis College from 1965 to 1975, was Stillman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University in 1971–72, and distinguished visiting professor at Boston College from 1975 until 1983. He died at the Jesuit infirmary in Pickering, Ontario, on 26 November 1984.

Influences

Lonergan described the genesis of his thought up to the mid-1950s in an interview. Augustine and John Henry Newman were major influences upon his early thinking. J. A. Stewart's study of Plato's doctrine of ideas was also influential.

In the epilogue to Insight, Lonergan mentions the important personal transformation wrought in him by a decade's apprenticeship to the thought of Thomas Aquinas. He produced two major exegetical studies of Thomas Aquinas: Grace and Freedom, and Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas.

Philosophy: generalized empirical method

Lonergan described his philosophical program as a generalization of empirical method (GEM) to investigate not only data given through exterior sensation, but also the internal data of consciousness. More specifically, objects are known while considering the corresponding operations of the subject and vice versa, experiencing and the subsequent operations of the intellect being components of both knowing and reality. Method, for Lonergan, is not a technique but a concrete pattern of operations. Lonergan broke down his empirical method into four stages, which he phrased as "precepts": "Be attentive, be intelligent, be reasonable, be responsible." A fifth precept, "be loving," connected the philosophical framing of the first four to Lonergan's work as a theologian, and the five together he called "transcendental precepts".

Lonergan maintained what he called critical realism. By realism, he affirmed that we make true judgments of fact and of value, and by critical, he based knowing and valuing in a critique of consciousness. GEM traces to their roots in consciousness the sources of all the meanings and values that make up personality, social orders, and historical developments. A more thorough overview of Lonergan's work is available at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Lonergan's ideas include radical unintelligibility, theological critical realism, and functional specialization. Given the fact that no science can today be mastered by a single individual, Lonergan advocated sub-division of the scientific process in all fields. One of the leading voices in the effort to implement functional specialization was Philip McShane.

Hermeneutics

Frederick G. Lawrence has made the claim that Lonergan's work may be seen as the culmination of the postmodern hermeneutic revolution begun by Martin Heidegger. Heidegger replaced Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of pure perception with his own linguistic phenomenology. Hans-Georg Gadamer worked out this seminal insight into his philosophical hermeneutics. According to Lawrence, however, Heidegger, and in a lesser way, Gadamer, remained under the influence of Kant when they refused to take seriously the possibility of grace and redemption. Lawrence makes the observation that Heidegger—influenced also by Augustine's inability to work out a theoretical distinction between grace and freedom—conflated finitude and fallenness in his account of the human being. "Sin" is therefore absorbed into "fallenness," and fallenness is simply part of the human condition. Lonergan builds on the "theorem of the supernatural" achieved in medieval times, as well as on the distinction between grace and freedom worked out by Thomas Aquinas, and so is able to remove all the brackets and return to the truly concrete with a unique synthesis of "Jerusalem and Athens."

Honours

In 1970, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.

In 1971, Loyola College, one of Concordia University's founding institutions, awarded him the Loyola Medal. Concordia also awarded Lonergan an honorary doctorate in 1977.

Conferences and journals

An annual Lonergan Workshop is held at Boston College, under the leadership of Frederick G. Lawrence. The proceedings of the Workshop are published under the same name, Lonergan Workshop, edited by Frederick G. Lawrence. The Workshop began in Lonergan's lifetime and continued after his death. The West Coast Methods Institute sponsors the annual Fallon Memorial Lonergan Symposium at Loyola Marymount University. The Lonergan Symposium has been meeting for 32 years.

Boston College has a Lonergan Institute, and also publishes the bi-annual Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies. The journal was founded, and edited until 2013, by Mark D. Morelli. The Lonergan Studies Newsletter is put out four times a year by the Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto; it provides the most up-to-date bibliographical information on the Lonergan movement. Recently, Seton Hall University has put out The Lonergan Review.

Lonergan Centres have been set up in various places (see below, External links). The Lonergan Research Institute at Toronto holds the Lonergan archives as well as a good collection of secondary material, including a complete collection of dissertations on Lonergan's work. Much of the primary archival material is available online at the Bernard Lonergan Archive (see below, External links), and a site for secondary material has also been set up, thanks to the work of Robert M. Doran.