A Methodological Critique of Lonergan’s Theological Method

A METHODOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF LONERGAN'S THEOLOGICAL METHOD HE MOST EXPLICIT challenge to the enterprise of Christocentric Thomist ontology or metaphysics now n print is that of Bernard Lonergan's cognition theory, first worked out in his 1957 work, Insight,1 and applied to the task of theology in his Method in Theology,2 perhaps the most important piece of English theological writing since the Second Vatican Council. Certainly it is the most ambitious, for its method intends the restatement of the entire problematic of theology, which henceforth, if it is to be authentically developed , must conform to the pattern or structure which Lonergan has seen as the prius of all thought and whose inevitability is factual, a matter of experience.3 This pattern is discovered and its architecture established by cognitional analysis, out of which emerges, as known rather than merely as conscious, the process from data to results which is human intentionality, the norma normansof all knowledge.4 The transcendental method which applies this norm subsumes all special methods of human knowing, including the theological, and in so doing orders them to its own pattern and process, passing from the multiplicity of experience to its progressive unification on the levels of interpretation, narrative and dialectic, to the foundational unity of the intentional horizon, and thereafter descending to the diversities of doctrine , systematization and communications, these latter being i Bernard Lonergan, Insight, A Study of Human Understanding, Longmans , Green &Co., Ltd., London, 1958 (Revised student's edition); herein· after cited as Insight. 2 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, Herder and Herder, New York, 1973 2; hereinafter cited as Method. s Method, 15. 4 Ibid.; see all of first chapter, e.g., 4, 17, 19, 20. 28 LONERGAN 's THEOLOGICAL METHOD the specifically, or mediated, theological disciplines.5 This specialization according to distinct and separable stages of the intentional process rather than according to the more customary distinctions between fields of research or between areas of final results, the tractates of the older theology, avoids the exclusive focus upon the clinical which characterizes field specialization, and upon the confessional a priori which is proper to dogmatic theology, for the functional specialties are of their nature interdependent, unable to prescind from the totality of the intentional process in which they are integrated and integrating elements.6 Henceforth, theology must be a cooperative venture, for the splendid isolation of the specialist is foreign to this methodology.7 The bedrock of Lonergan's method, that by which it is transcendent, is his cognitional analysis, that turn to the subject first spelled out in his Verbum articles over thirty years ago,8 which has moved him away from the notion of objectivity found in Thomism and neo-Thomism to the critical realism which he considers his analysis alone to found.9 This realism is achieved by moving out of the world of naive realism of the extroverted consciousness in which transcendence and common sense interpenetrate, to pass on to the differentiations of theory, of interiority, and of transcendence. With the "discovery of mind " which began with the pre-Socratics, human intentionality as a dynamic of unrestricted questioning has moved away from the mythic and illusory realm of cosmic symbolism to force the discovery of the different realms of meaning which mediate the world to the critical intelligence, and which, by this differentiation, constitute the world as 5 Ibid., 23-25. a Ibid., 125 ff. 1 Ibid., 137. s Bernard Lonergan, "The Concept of the Verbum in the Writings of St. Thomas .Aquinas," i-v, Theological Studies, vol. 7, (1946) 349-392; vol. 8 (1947) 35-79, 404-444; vol. 10 (1949) 3-40, 359-393. Reprinted as Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, ed. David Burrell, C.S.C., Notre Dame University Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 1967; hereinafter cited as Verbum. 9 Method, 257 ff. DONALD .J. KEEFE, S..J. mediated by meaning, a world of critical realism, rather than the world constituted by the naive immediacy of the undifferentiated consciousness.10 Lonergan's critical realism is thus tied to his cognitional analysis; the objectivity of the real is thereby a.t once experiential (given by the data of sense, plus consciousness), normative (constituted by...