Lonergan and the Level of Our Time by Frederick E. Crowe (review)

Bernard Lonergan may be Canada’s most original and profound philosopher; he is certainly the only Canadian regularly making shortlists of the most important twentieth-century Catholic thinkers. Crowe was an early adopter and by his passing last year (at the age of 97) had long been regarded the dean of Lonergan scholarship. He established the repository, in Toronto, of Lonergan’s archives, co-edited his Collected Works, and authored half a dozen manuscripts and dozens of articles on his thought.

The present volume contains a judicious and meticulously edited selection from forty-four years of scholarly activity (1961 to 2004), divided into studies of Lonergan and creative essays developing his ideas. Lonergan’s legacy, Crowe remarks, is less like an orchard in which one plucks fruit ready to eat and ‘more like a deep vein of ore that has to be mined … my studies may be seen as drilling operations to take samples from the vein.’ Crowe’s astonishing familiarity with Lonergan’s body of work – including not only unpublished papers and lectures but also drafts, course notes, correspondence, incidental statements – is readily apparent, complemented by acuity, sobriety, and the penetration of one who spent his long life pondering Lonergan’s ideas.

In his opening essay, Crowe ruminates on Ortega y Gasset’s remark that ‘one has to strive to mount to the level of one’s time,’ which Lonergan had invoked in a discarded preface to his book, Insight. Our time, Crowe suggests, may be axial in the sense suggested by Karl Jaspers: ‘the history of scores of centuries … drawing to a close.’ Among the salient features of that momentous shift is the emergence of historical consciousness and its attendant question, whether we might begin to exercise collective responsibility in a deliberate mode. These issues are revisited in a series of creative essays on the historicity, permanence, and development of Christian doctrine. Crowe grounds the objective possibility of development in the inevitable surplus of meaning in history, including the history of Jesus and the apostolic witness, because ‘the meaning of history is God’s alone.’ He grounds the subjective possibility of development in the dynamics of learning, of asking and answering questions. He dispenses the canard that opposes ‘history’ to ‘propositions’ by showing how propositional judgments emerge from the process of questioning. Through it all, there courses a sober and irenic hope that a more serious understanding of development might help divided Christian communions appraise the real grounds of their differences and then realize the conditions for their reconciliation.

Two fascinating articles explore related problems in Lonergan’s thought: insight into insight, and insight into the psychological subject-as-subject. ‘Insight into insight’ was the explicit basis of Lonergan’s program in Insight, but subsequently he opined that we can have no understanding of insight as such. We can, however, notice and name the events in our conscious intentionality and thereby construct a schematic image in which we can grasp the function and place of insight in the structure of consciousness. A similar problem arises with respect to the subject-as-subject, since inquiry about the subject perforce makes the subject an object. Crowe shows how Lonergan worked out a solution to these problems in the practical order of his pedagogy and, through subsequent reflection, enriched his theoretical articulations.

Some of Crowe’s most original contributions are developed in six ventures in ‘rethinking … ’: religious life, moral judgments, God-with-us, eternal life in philosophical perspective, eternal life in theological perspective, and the triune God. They are replete with wonderful insights. For instance, he prods Christian sensibilities about the ‘order without priority’ in the Trinity by the brilliant device of reversing the customary order of names: Spirit, Son, Father, or Love, Word, Mystery. Again, have we thought seriously enough, he wonders, about the ‘divine absence of the Father’ which may find its experiential and philosophical expression in the question of God. Perhaps, he suggests, a philosophy...