The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan by David Tracy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan. By DAVID TRAcY. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970. Pp. 317. $9.50. Since the publication of Insight Lonergan's later developments in theology and philosophy have generally been available only in the form of theology textbooks written in Latin or in privately circulated tapes and mimeographed notes stemming from seminars. Tracy's book, the first systematic overview of Lonergan's intellectual development, does much to fill an effective communication gap in making Lonergan's thought more accessible to a general public. It is based on a few years of study under and association with Lonergan, a thorough familiarity with all his works, and a strongly felt conviction that a general acceptance of Lonergan's views could provide a viable basis for a much-needed integration in theology and philosophy. The result is a work more concerned with exposing and defending Lonerganism than in analyzing or criticizing it. Since Lonerganism represents, at least for the fervent few, a major intellectual renaissance and since Tracy's book is already well on the way to becoming the guiding text for this new tradition, a critical discussion of the book and the tradition it represents would seem to be desirable. The first three chapters play an unu~ual and potentially misleading role in the overall structure. They seem to couple an introductory survey of Lonergan's method of horizon analysis with an exposition of his earlier works. But this is not quite what Tracy intends. Rather, he exposes Lonergan's later views on the nature of knowledge and the process of intellectual development and then uses this as a framework and source of standards for interpreting Lonergan's own intellectual development. Thus, his discussion of Lonergan's early articles, the " Gratia" and " Verbum " series, is not really concerned with the theological problems treated, the interpretations considered, and the positions defended but with the contribution these analyses made to Lonergan's intellectual formation as interpreted in the light of criteria Lonergan himself supplies. Tracy's initial survey introduces " horizon " in a descriptive-historical way by a sketchy outline of periods and problems in which horizon-shifts have occurred, e. g., Aristotelian to Newtonian physics. This leads to a definition of "horizon " as a maximum field of vision from a determinate viewpoint. Its subjective pole refers to the intentionality-meaning possibilities of the subject's stage of development, while the objective pole refers to the worlds of meaning achieved by or open to the subject at the center of this horizon. 654 BOOK REVIEWS 655 The problem being treated here is certainly a basic one in contemporary epistemology. Individual acts of knowledge depend on a general framework or horizon which is conditioned by the intellectual development of the individual, the culture in which he functions, and the specialties he pursues. Such a Weltanschauung is difficult to get at noetically. From within one finds it difficult to determine the boundaries; from withoutto whatever degree one can be without--one easily misinterprets the significance of what transpires within. In recent years differing philosophical traditions have advanced various interpretative tools to treat this problem: analysis of conceptual frameworks considered as quasi-public objects; the hermeneutic circle; an interpretation of paradigm shifts; and the structuralist analysis of cultural covariance. Tracy, following Lonergan, simply presents horizon-analysis as the method of coming to grips with the problem. Since this plays a crucial role in Tracy's own interpretation and evaluation as well as in Lonergan's thought, a more critical treatment considering the difficulties and alternatives would have been desirable. Lonergan's first substantial achievement was the series of four articles he wrote on the problem of grace and freedom. Here his primary concern was to distinguish the authentic position of St. Thomas from the later problematic of the " de auxiliis " controversy and the still later ncoscholastic interpretation of St. Thomas. In doing this Lonergan recovered the idea, developed but never really ~xplic~ted by the medieval theologians, of a world of theory mediating the meaning of faith. This recovery, rather than the theological problem treated, is the focus of Tracy's concern. The type of interpretation Lonergan attempted involved not only a...