Lonergan and Gilson on the Problem of Critical Realism

The Thomist 69 (2005): 557-92 LONERGAN AND GILSON ON THE PROBLEM OF CRITICAL REALISM PAUL ST. AMOUR Saint Joseph's University Philadelphia, Pennsylvania WHEN THOMISTS have occasion to enumerate the many assets of the Thomistic tradition, especially vis-a-vis perceived skeptical and constructivist extremes of modern and postmodern thought, one attribute inevitably extolled is realism. Although generally parsimonious in circumscribing the limitations of human reason, Aquinas did affirm the capacity of the embodied human knower to know corporeal things beneath itself, to acquire self-knowledge, to affirm rationally the existence of God, and to speak some truth about the nature of God by way of negative and analogical predication. With the proviso that the proportionate object of the intellect in this life remains the quiddity of a material thing, Aquinas deemed the human intellect capable of knowing what really is, albeit partially and imperfectly . 1 Aquinas was always mindful of the fact that understanding and being are perfectly identified only in God, yet he affirmed that human inquiry could successfully attain a limited but veridical familiarity with being. While a commitment to realism is, and must remain, an indispensable feature of Thomism, establishing theoretical underpinnings for such a commitment has proven problematic in the modern philosophical context. To specify what justifies a commitment to Thomistic realism, or even to clarify precisely what realism entails, is to become involved in epistemological 1 Aquinas, Summa Theologica I, q. 84, a. 7; I, q. 85, a. 8; I, q. 87, a. 2, ad 2; I, q. 88, a. 3. 557 558 PAUL ST. AMOUR controversy. Bernard Lonergan once hinted that the doctrine of Thomistic realism is not as straightforward as it seems by making the somewhat unsettling observation that"Georg van Riet needed over six hundred pages [in L'epistemologie Thomiste (1946)] to outline the various types of Thomist epistemology that have been put forward in the last century and a half."2 Such an overview, if brought up to date, would of course be even more scandalously voluminous today. There are both philosophical and historical reasons for lack of a consensus regarding Thomistic realism. Lonergan has suggested that the issue is philosophically problematic because it is not possible adequately to determine the precise meaning and rational justification of realism without first resolving certain prior and more fundamental issues: What constitutes human knowing?3 What is being?4 How is being objectively known?5 It is a fact, however, that realists, even those sincere in their commitment to the realism of Aquinas, continue to differ on questions of cognition, being, and objectivity. The basic historical reason for a lack of doctrinal unanimity stems from the stubborn fact that Thomism has moved beyond the thirteenth century, not as some neatly arranged set of immutable propositions, but rather as a living philosophical tradition. The Thomistic tradition subsists and is mediated by the understandings and priorities of thinkers who are intellectually indebted to Aquinas, but who also happen to philosophize in cultural and intellectual contexts quite different from that of Aquinas himself. With regard to the issue of realism, some contemporary Thomists considered it worthwhile to bring Thomism into vital contact with the methods and difficulties of modern philosophy. While acknowledging the value of an historical retrieval of Aquinas's metaphysics of knowledge, they found it difficult simply 2 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study ofHuman Understanding, vol. 3 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1992), 433. 3 Ibid., 27-371. 4 Ibid., 372-78; 410-617. 5 Ibid., 399-409. LONERGAN, GILSON, AND CRITICAL REALISM 559 to ignore the modern inversion of the medieval priority of metaphysics to epistemology, or to dismiss as mere subjectivism the modern turn to the conscious subject. They were bothered by the fact that the Cartesian methodic doubt and the Kantian critique of knowledge tended to render precritical Thomistic realism vulnerable to the charge of na!ve realism. They took seriously the objection that it may be inadequate and dogmatic simply to present a Scholastic metaphysics of knowledge and posit its validity as realism in the absence of any further critical justification. Hence the renaissance of Thomism...