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9 “Transcendence from Within” Benedict XVI, Habermas, and Lonergan on Reason and Faith  .  [A] time of confusion . . . calls beliefs into question and, because they are just beliefs, because they are not personally generated knowledge, answers are hard to come by. So to confusion there are easily added disorientation, disillusionment, crisis, surrender, unbelief. But . . . from the present situation Catholics are suffering more keenly than others, not indeed because their plight is worse, but because up to Vatican II they were sheltered against the modern world and since Vatican II they have been exposed more and more to the chill winds of modernity. —Bernard Lonergan,“Belief: Today’s Issue” BENEDICT XVI’S REGENSBURG ACCOUNT OF THE NARROWING OF REASON IN THE WEST In his open letter to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (February 10, 2007),1 Jürgen Habermas comments on Benedict XVI’s speech at Regensburg , saying that the pope’s notion of rationality presupposes a“meta physical ”synthesis between reason and faith that held sway from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. This is partially true. Benedict has consistently emphasized the gravamen of one of the clearest patristic statements by 239 Tertullian, one that recalls the Platonic Socrates:“Christ called himself the Truth,not opinion.”2 Benedict has long stressed that the Septuagint’s translation of the Tetragrammaton in Exodus 3:14 as “I Am” providentially initiated“a profound encounter between faith and reason,”and that the Johannine phrase “In the beginning was the logos” is evidence that “the encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance.”The Johannine passage, like Paul’s Areopagus speech, was emblematic of an encounter between“genuine enlightenment and religion” and generated a “synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit.” Indeed, in 1983 then Cardinal Ratzinger stated, “Christianity is . . . the synthesis mediated in Jesus Christ between the faith of Israel and the Greek spirit.”3 Yet Benedict has never been a devotee of scholastic metaphysics, however much he was sympathetic to its main goals.4 This ambivalence was reflected in the Regensburg speech when Benedict described the synthesis between faith and reason in terms, not of the metaphysics , but of the “so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas.” Benedict uses the expression “so-called” because he does not wish to suggest any rationalist subordination of faith to reason; and the term “intellectualism” is drawn from medieval philosophical faculty psychology ’s convention of contrasting intellect (intellectus) and will (voluntas ). Hence, the intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas is opposed to the voluntarism of Duns Scotus. According to Benedict, Scotus initiated a tradition, radicalized by William of Ockham, in which “God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and the good,are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his decisions.” Bernard Lonergan’s reading of Thomas Aquinas clarifies another nuance of the term intellectualism, although not in connection with the contrast between human intellect and human will. In Aquinas’s gnoseology one may contrast within the exercise of intelligence itself the act of understanding (intelligere) and the inner word (verbum intus prolatum ). The inner word may be either the concept proceeding from a direct insight into a phantasm or the judgment proceeding from the indirect or reflective act of understanding that grasps the sufficiency of the evidence for the truth of an affirmation. 240 Frederick G. Lawrence In a January 1935 letter Lonergan noted“that Augustine talked a lot about intelligere and that Thomas didn’t talk about universals—though knowledge of universals was supposed [by then dominant Thomistic interpreters] to be the be-all and end-all of science.”5 In Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas Lonergan later retrieved Aquinas’s understanding of understanding and broke with both the closed and static conceptualism and the mistaken notion of judgment as a rubber-stamping synthesis upon which the pejorative and rationalist sense of the term “intellectualism ” is based. The belief (1) that concepts, as impoverished replicas of what is presented by the senses and the imagination, precede acts of understanding and (2) that we know the existence or occurrence of things not by rational judgment but through sense perception , prevailed within Scholasticism from Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus through Francisco Suárez to the post–Aeterni Patris Thomistic schools. Lonergan’s close study of Thomas on the relationship between understanding and formulation/judgment in relation to the natural analogy...

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