Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas by Bernard Lonergan (review)

HUMANITIES 335 Bernard Lonergan. Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Volume 1 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan University of Toronto Press. xxiv, 514. $80.00, $24.95 The Reverend Bernard Lonergan, SJ, though a truly original philosopher, utilized various Thomistic terms and notions when developing his own cognitional theory. The Lonerganian theory of >intellectual insight= was intended to be a crushing response to the counter-positions embraced in positivist accounts of science, the anti-metaphysical scepticism of modern philosophy, and historicized and sometimes dogmatically relativized contemporary theologies. As with any putative Aufhebung of a previous philosopher, Lonergan=s subsumption of Aquinas remains controversial among would-be >authentic= Thomists. Those Thomists who argue that epistemology is a secondary B and not the prior or methodologically necessary B philosophical science certainly deny that Aquinas=s noetic realism is what actually sustains an epistemology that grounds cognitive objectivity in the >empirical, intellectual, and rational consciousness of the self-affirming subject.= Still, not even the most extrovertedly realist of his critics (those who remain convinced that Aquinas=s notion of objective knowledge is better understood as >taking a look= at the >already out there now= than a transcendental style turn to self-consciousness) can profitably ignore Lonergan=s brilliant exegesis of Aquinas=s texts. The power and subtlety of Lonergan=s Thomistic exegesis is evident in the present volume, which contains Lonergan=s doctoral thesis for the Gregorian University in Rome (1940) and a >condensed and abbreviated= redaction of the same, published as four articles in Theological Studies (1941B42). By 1940, historians of theology had already explored the detailed background (in St Augustine, St Anselm, Peter Lombard, and St Albert) to Aquinas=s theory of gratia operans. >Operative grace= is defined B in ST, I-II, q. 111, a. 2 B as: (a) the actual divine help that on occasion prompts the human will, in its internal act, to change from willing evil to willing good; or (b) the divinely infused, supernatural habit/form/quality that inclines the human will towards choosing, for the most part, the natural as well as the supernatural good. In reference to operative grace, whether actual or habitual, the human will is passive; in reference to those external acts wherein the will is active, grace is called co-operative, the latter also classified as being either actual or habitual. But these terms and the underlying conceptual complexities in Aquinas=s theory of grace underwent continuous development and clarification from his bachelor=s Commentary on the four books of Peter Lombard=s Sententia (1252B56) until the consummate statement of the doctrine in the Prima secundae of the Summa theologiae (1268). Lonergan shows how this development corresponds to Aquinas=s increasingly more successful efforts to synthesize the speculative theorems about grace discovered by his predecessors. 336 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Lonergan=s own study of Aquinas, however, was motivated by the conviction that only a >theory of the history of theological speculation= B that is, an a priori, generic conceptual scheme inductively drawn from the history of speculative theology but justified >solely from a [reflexive] consideration of the nature of human speculation= B would enable the interpreter of Aquinas to circumvent the notorious three-hundred-year impasse, maintained since the acrimonious sixteenth-century debates between the Molinists and Banezians, about the import for human freedom of the Thomistic doctrine of grace. Avoiding this long-standing theological impasse may seem of small interest to most secular philosophers. But this would be a mistake: theorems about the supernatural order can only be constructed by analogy with the natural order. Since >causation is the common feature of both operation and cooperation,= philosophers, in fact, will find Lonergan=s penetrating analysis of operative grace eminently worthy of their attention. Lonergan makes every effort to eliminate those >sixteenth-century problems= that still block our understanding of Aquinas=s >compatibilism= or how grace and human freedom can be reconciled by a God who transcends time. Nonetheless, contemporary philosophers can still ponder and perhaps deconstruct B Lonergan=s acute explanations notwithstanding B what might just remain antinomous arguments in a speculative theology...