Transcendent Knowledge in Insight: A Closer Look

TRANSCENDENT KNOWLEDGE IN INSIGHT: A CLOSER LOOK THE ISSUE OF NATURAL knowledge of God in the thought of Bernard Lonergan is not new to these pages. Patricia Wilson 1 has already given us a helpful survey of Lonergan's work which compelled her to be brief in dealing with Lonergan's argument for the existence of God as it appears in Insight. Further illumination of this issue is needed if we are to adequately grasp what Lonergan is saying and demandmg . In Chapter 19 of Insight, "General Transcendent Knowledge ," the move is made from knowledge of proportionate being to knowledge and affirmation of transcendent being. There Lonergan attempts to show that the affirmation "God exists" is a true judgment. Thus the specific concern of this essay is to show how the move is made from one sphere of knowledge to another and to evaluate the legitimacy of the move. Analyzing this move will be our way of seeing what it means for Lonergan to say " God exists." The first step then is to trace the argument of Chapter 19, emphasizing its crucial points and adding comments where they will be most illuminating. TRANSCENDENT KNOWLEDGE: ITs NoTION, SoURCE, AND PossiBILITY Lonergan's description of transcendent knowledge is deceptively simple: " Clearly, despite the imposing name, transcendence is the elementary matter of raising further questions." (635) 2 "Transcendence, then, at the present juncture, means a 1 The Thomist, April, 1971. 2 Unless otherwise noted, the numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Insight. 366 TRANSCENDENT KNOWLEDGE IN "INSIGHT " 867 development in man's knowledge relevant to a development in man's being." (686) But this description would be misleading if it were not seen in the context of what is the source of transcendence in man. " The immanent source of transcendence in man is his detached , disinterested, unrestricted desire to know. As it is the origin of all his questions, it is the origin of the radical, further questions that take him beyond the defined limits of particular issues." (686) The nature of this unrestricted desire needs some comment here for it will soon achieve focal importance in Lonergan's argument. First, it is not just the "operator" in man's intellectual development, but it also presents a challenge to his will. As man is a single being, he will not tolerate the duality that would arise if his knowing and doing were not consistent with each other. Already we can see that if a man does not live on the level of his insight, he will not be dominated by the unrestricted desire and thus the immanent source of transcendence in him is choked off. Further, he must exercise great vigilance for " the unrestricted desire to understand is the opposite of any and every partial obscurantism, no matter how slight." (638) Lonergan makes some further clarifications on the nature of this desire; that the unrestricted desire to understand does not mean that the understanding will be unrestricted (637) and that since the desire and the understanding are two quite different things, att2-inment of understanding requires the fulfillment of certain conditions. 'Vhat these conditions are and how they are fulfilled is the concern of philosophy. (637) Fulfillment of the conditions is, of course, Lonergan's way of characterizing the process of verification, and this occurs only in the judgment in which the intelligent grasp of the virtually unconditioned is reasonably affirmed. Lonergan is so beautifully blunt when he directly confronts the question of whether or not transcendent knowledge is possible . Its possibility is equivalent to the possibility of grasping 368 JON NILSON intelligently and affirming reasonably a transcendent being. The proof of the possibility lies in the fact that such intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation exist. The question then is narrowed further to: will the grasp and affirmation of a transcendent being be the inevitable outcome of his account of understanding and judgment? He goes further than this when he hints that, if his attempt is not successful, then no attempts can be. For he feels that all the arguments for the existence of God can be summed up in his own. (672) Thus he raises the stakes of the game. If...