The Quest for God and the Good Life

4. The Cooperating Human Community

73 4 |  The Cooperating Human Community In the preceding chapter we considered the larger picture of Lonergan ’s account of anthropology—his transcendental method. We discussed how an unrestricted desire for ultimate truth and goodness drives the human person through multiple operations on four levels of conscious intentionality. This larger picture remains incomplete, however, for progress is driven not by the operations of isolated individuals, but by the cooperation of persons in community . Ideally these cooperating persons are bound together by mutual love and shared meaning into a dynamic communal matrix that Lonergan calls “the human good.” Love Authenticity in experience, understanding, judgment, and decision leads to intellectual and moral self-transcendence. But there is a higher authenticity caused by a third transcendence that Lonergan sometimes calls “affective.” It transcends intellectual and moral self-transcendence, advancing beyond their limits: [W]e noted that the human subject was self-transcendent intellectually by the achievement of knowledge, that he was self-transcendent morally inasmuch as he sought what was worth while, what was truly good, and thereby became a principle of benevolence and beneficence, that he was self-transcendent af- fectively when he fell in love, when the isolation of the individual was broken and he spontaneously functioned not just for himself but for others as well. Further we distinguished different kinds of love: the love of intimacy, of husband and wife, of parents and children; the love of mankind devoted to the pursuit of human welfare locally or nationally or globally; and the love that was other-worldly because it admitted no conditions or qualifications or restrictions or reservations.1 Affective self-transcendence and moral self-transcendence are intimately linked. The peak of moral self-transcendence reaches to the base of affective self-transcendence. Thus, as quoted earlier, Lonergan wrote that it is through morally self-transcendent, responsible decision that people “can be principles of benevolence and beneficence, capable of genuine collaboration and of true love.”2 Moral self-transcendence does not seem in itself to attain the affective self-transcendence that is an effective love: willing the good (benevolence), doing the good (beneficence), and collaborating with others in this. Rather, moral self-transcendence is the condition for the possibility of these things. As Lonergan states in a very similar passage later in Method, “moral self-transcendence is the possibility of benevolence and beneficence, of honest collaboration and true love, of swinging completely out of the habitat of an animal and becoming a person in human society.”3 Love is the key component of affective self-transcendence—falling in love, staying in love, and growing in love.4 There is, however, 1. Lonergan, Method, 289, emphasis added. 2. Method, 35; cf. 289. This passage was quoted at the end of chapter 3 of this volume. 3. Method, 104, emphasis added. It is important to note, however, that in concrete reality love actually precedes moral deeds, as we shall see in “The Way From Above Downwards” in this chapter and in chapter 9 of this volume, “Religious, Moral, and Intellectual Conversion.” 4. Some scholars believe Lonergan’s affective self-transcendence and affective conversion to be the same as eminent Lonergan scholar Fr. Robert Doran’s psychic conversion. I would disagree, however. Fr. Doran’s psychic conversion, which Lonergan endorsed, seems to involve a specific type of feeling—namely, Insight’s precognitive spontaneous sensitivity and intersubjectivity or Method’s nonintentional states and trends. And while it is clear that affective self-transcendence, affective conversion, and affective development pertain to feelings, it seems that only affective development (Method, 65–66) pertains to the precognitive feelings involved in psychic conversion, while affective self-transcendence and affective conversion both deal with higher feelings—the postcognitive, intentional responses to value and love that pertain to moral and religious conversions. As quoted above from page 289 of Method, Lonergan seems to identify affective self-transcendence with religious selftranscendence when he says that affective self-transcendence involves falling in love, and he lists affective self-transcendence in a trio with intellectual and moral self-transcendence. Furthermore, in “Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,” in A Third Collection, 179, Lonergan mentions affective conversion in a trio with intellectual and moral conversions, thereby seeming at least to identify af74   Progress The Cooperating Human Community   75 a great complexity to love. First of all, love is of many types, as Lonergan mentions in a quote similar to the one above: “There...