Theology and the Dialectics of History by Robert M. Doran (review)

160 BOOK REVIEWS Theology and the Dialectics of History. By ROBERT M. DORAN. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. Pp. xvi + 732. Can. $95.00 (hardcover) ; Can. $45.00 (paper). This work aims to explain, extend, complement, and employ the philosophical and theological writings of Bernard Lonergan. The University of Toronto Press has recently begun publishing Lonergan's Collected Works, a series projected to 22 volumes; Doran's book is the first in a related series of monographs planned by the same publisher. The book consists of an introduction plus 21 chapters, with the chapters grouped into five main sections: (1) Basic Terms and Relations; (2) Personal Values and the Dialectic of the Subject; (3) Social Values and the Dialectic of Community; (4) Cultural Values and the Dialectic of Culture; and (5) Hermeneutics and the Ontology of Meaning. Doran's fundamental argument is that careful phenomenological analysis brings to light a series of utterly basic and pre-voluntary structural tensions in the concrete life processes of human individuals in community. These tensions may be characterized generically as the resultants of two contrasting human tendencies, the tendency toward limitation and the tendency toward transcendence. At the level of the individual person as such, at the level of the culture, and at the level of the society, these structural tensions constitute occasions of lifeshaping decision for human agents, occasions of unavoidable choice among what in fact are alternative basic personal, cultural, and social values. For at each level there is the " dialectical option" of living in such a way as to do justice to both poles of the tension, or of reinforcing only the tendency toward limitation, or of reinforcing only the tendency toward transcendence. Drawing upon Lonergan's studies of personal conversion in the intellectual , moral, and religious realms, and complementing them with his own extensive study of personal conversion in the psychic realm, Doran goes on to argue that the constructive option at every level is that of reinforcing both the tendency toward limitation and the tendency toward transcendence. To favor either tendency alone is ultimately at odds with individual, cultural, and/or social well-being. This conclusion, in turn, provides the basis from which Doran proceeds in elaborating anticipatory or " heuristic " categories for a normative theory of history-general categories for discriminating between progress and decline in the reciprocal relations among individual lives, cultural ideals, and social structures. Because at its most fundamental level it expressly addresses the issue of religious conversion, this heuristic theory of history is a heuristic theology of history. More- BOOK REVIEWS 161 over, because academic inquiry is one of the human activities it anticipates , this heuristic theology of history stands as the potential framework of fully integrated interdisciplinary studies, a foundational framework clearly distinguishing and relating theological studies, human scientific and scholarly studies, and the natural sciences. I see four main reasons why this hook is noteworthy. First, the significance of thoroughly and accurately explaining someone else's work is proportionate to the significance of that other person's work in the first place. But Lonergan's studies of human knowing, deciding, and loving, of bias and conversion, and of social progress, decline, and healing are coming to be widely recognized as the work of a seminal thinker. Doran's account of this work is lucid, detailed, and nuanced. Second, Doran extends Lonergan's work itself, making explicit certain important points that Lonergan merely implies and completing certain fundamental analyses that Lonergan does not bring fully to term. Especially significant in this regard are Doran's treatments of such themes as " the situation" as a theological source; the notion of dialectic ; the apprehension of value; the fivefold scale of values; understanding religious doctrines in terms of understanding historical process ; and the notion of cosmopolis. Third, the hook goes beyond Lonergan's own studies in many important respects, complementing Lonergan's findings with brilliant, profound, and far-reaching conclusions by Doran himself. Among the most notable of these original conclusions are those regarding the relationship of feelings, symbols, and values (a topic on which Doran's previous writings have already earned him an extensive following) ; psychic conversion; a:ffectivity, meaning, and praxis; the dialectic of...