Finding God in All Things: Celebrating Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner

14. Postscript: 1904 Was a Wonderful Year

14. Postscript: 1904 Was a Wonderful Year David Stagaman, S.J. It was a pleasure to collect and assemble with Mark Bosco these centenary essays on Bernard Lonergan, John Courtney Murray, and Karl Rahner. Reading through them, I was reminded how much these three Jesuit theologians influenced my young Jesuit life both intellectually and spiritually. In my own contribution, the reader will learn where this influence most deeply touched me, especially as someone fully engaged in teaching and research in theology over the last thirty years. To set the context for my remarks, I will begin by examining the contribution of the father of Transcendental Thomism, Joseph Maréchal, for it is his seminal work that connects all three of these theologians. At the end I will discuss briefly another significant Roman Catholic theologian born in 1904, Yves Congar of the Order of Preachers (the Dominicans). To understand Lonergan, Murray, and Rahner’s desire to develop a discourse with modern philosophy, one must appreciate that all of them were influenced by Joseph Maréchal, professor of philosophy at the University of Louvain in the early part of the twentieth century. His major scholarly contribution was the multivolume, Le point du depart de la metaphysique, whose fifth volume, Le thomisme devant la philosophie critique, confronted how Immanuel Kant’s first two Critiques might help us understand Thomas Aquinas for contemporary philosophical reflection.1 Maréchal was taken with two key similarities between the two thinkers; both of them argued that human thinking was Postscript: 1904 Was a Wonderful Year / 183 active in knowing the physical world, and each claimed that the human spirit was the key to our knowing reality. Maréchal understood that both Aquinas and Kant asserted that the physical universe was known through sense knowledge and that the mind played an active role in assessing sense data. While Aquinas affirmed that understanding and willing provided our first notion of Being and ultimately directed us to knowledge of God, Kant moved in a similar direction from the categorical imperative to immortality to existence of God. Here it might be helpful to consider an interpretation of Kant in continental philosophy that differs from the way Kant has often been taught in the United States. During my early Jesuit studies in philosophy, I was taught that Kant philosophized that we can’t know things in themselves but only in their appearances (phenomena); we can, however, know the reality of our souls, at least insofar as we are moral actors (the noumenon). During my doctoral studies in Paris, my teachers there presented a slightly different interpretation. Phenomena direct our attention to the fact that physical matter can only be known in its appearances to us (the senses); the noumenon is the realm of the spirit. The distinction is one that notes a difference in the nature of our knowledge of things and our own spiritual activities; the former is mediated knowledge , the latter is immediate. When Kant says we don’t know things in themselves, the emphasis is on ‘‘in themselves.’’ He is contrasting knowledge of our own spirit, where we penetrate to the depths of our spirits, to our knowledge of the physical world, where such penetration is not possible. If Maréchal knew this interpretation of Kant, then he would more easily have seen analogies between the Kantian Critiques and Aquinas’s analysis of understanding and acting. His major revision of Kant was his attempt to incorporate understanding as a factor in noumenal knowledge and our encounter with God not as a postulate of practical knowledge, but as the real existence of God as the driving force in our knowing and loving whose objects in sum are limitless. Maréchal was influenced by three other figures in making this claim. The first was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who argued that our intuition of our activities of knowing and loving is driven by an ‘‘infinite absolute’’ which attracts and energizes our mind and will in all its exercises. In other words, God is foundational for all human knowing and willing. The second influence was Maurice Blondel. For Blondel, the human person experiences an innate orientation to God in the concrete choices we make. Reason does play a role, but the will is primary. Finally, 184 / David Stagaman, S.J. Pierre Rousselot taught Maréchal that an infinite affirmed...