The Necessity of Raising the Question of God: Aquinas and Lonergan on the Quest After Complete Intelligibility

The Thomist 71 (2007): 221-67 THE NECESSITY OF RAISING THE QUESTION OF GOD: AQUINAS AND LONERGAN ON THE QUEST AFTER COMPLETE INTELLIGIBILITY ALICIA JARAMILLO Saint Michael's College Colchester, Vermont ''ONECANNOT CONFINE human knowledge within the domain of proportionate being without condemning it to mere matters of fact without explanation and so stripping it of knowledge not only of transcendent but also of proportionate being."1 Those who take their inspiration from Bernard Lonergan's philosophical method for its ability to shed light on the problems of human knowing and living are as it were obligated to come to terms with this statement from Insight. What Lonergan is in effect saying is that, sooner or later, one must raise the question of God. At least in the speculative domain, the inquiry into human understanding terminates in the affirmation of an unrestricted act of understanding that no human knower can identify with her own developing understanding, but that she must affirm in order to make sense of her own limited acts of understanding. Because this unrestricted act of understanding would have to be the understanding of everything about everything, Lonergan identifies it with the idea of being, for an idea is the content of an act of understanding.2 Such an idea and its corresponding act of understanding, because it would be 1 Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study ofHuman Understanding, S'h edition, vol. 3 of CollectedWorks ofBernard Lonergan, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto and Buffalo: Published for Lonergan Research Institute of Regis College, Toronto, by University of Toronto Press, 1992), 676. 2 Ibid., 667. 221 222 ALICIA JARAMILLO the understanding of being in all its universality and concreteness, would have to be absolutely unconditioned and unlimited. Such an intelligence could only be what men in all ages have called 'God'.3 Lonergan aligns his approach to the problem of God (at least in Insight) with the five ways of Thomas Aquinas. He identifies the unrestricted act of understanding with Aquinas's ipsum intelligere, one of the primary attributes of the First Uncaused Cause who is affirmed at the end of Aquinas's demonstrations for the existence of God. Lonergan acknowledges the Thomist debate over whether being or intelligence is logically prior in Aquinas's conception of God and firmly places his interpretation on the side of the primacy of the act of intelligence.4 I do not intend here to enter into this debate. However, I shall attempt to show that Aquinas's method of arriving at the affirmation of God is guided every step of the way by the demands of intelligence in such a way that the final product of the affirmation must be thought to be the intelligent ground of all finite intelligence and intelligibility in the same way that Lonergan's unrestricted act of understanding grounds the intelligibility of the real. In effect I shall be challenging the usual distinction made between the Aristotelian/Thomistic physical or cosmological affirmation of a first cause and Lonergan's own method of delving deeper and deeper into the demands of intelligence in order to arrive at what he calls 'general transcendent knowledge'.5 3 Such is the general argument, drastically abbreviated, of the penultimate chapter of Insight, entitled "GeneralTranscendentKnowledge." The final chapter, "SpecialTranscendent Knowledge," lays out the heuristic structure of a possible supernatural revelation. 4 Bernard J. F. Lonergan et al., Understanding and Being: The Halifax Lectures on Insight, 2d edition, vol. 5 of Collected Works ofBernard Lonergan (Toronto and Buffalo: Published for Lonergan Research Institute of Regis College, Toronto, by University of Toronto Press, 1990), 240-41. 5 Lonergan himself claims that the "two processes are equivalent" (ibid., 240). Frederick Crowe, one of Lonergan's foremost interpreters, distinguishes Lonergan's approach as 'transcendental' in contrast to the traditional 'cosmological' approach of Aquinas. See Frederick E. Crowe, "Lonergan's Thoughts on Ultimate Reality and Meaning," in idem, Appropriating the Lonergan Idea (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989), 71-105. I will argue that Lonergan's approach simply makes explicit what is implicit in Aquinas's five ways. THE NECESSITY OF RAISING THE QUESTION OF GOD 223 This paper...