Human Knowledge of God’s Existence in the Theology of Bernard Lonergan

HUMAN KNOWLEDGE OF GOD'S EXISTENCE IN THE THEOLOGY OF BERNARD LONERGAN I GENERAL SITUATION OF his Approach. In contrast to Barth and his followers who deny to man any knowl- • edge of God apart from a direct and explicit divine revelation/ Bernard Lonergan is one who stands in an older Christian tradition which maintains that man cannot know who God is by natural knowledge but that he can know something of what he is. With a faith in the reasonableness of things, Lonergan asserts that our reason can tell us of God.2 In his version of Marechalian Thomism, "the proof for God's existence is somehow precontained in the orientation of the human intellect toward being...." 3 In this vision of man, knowledge of God is not something that may or may not come to man, but rather, by an eternal decree when he decided on the creation of this particular world order, God made a certain reflective knowledge of himself part and parcel of the human intellect's desire to know and affirm absolute truth.4 From this point of view the question is not whether or not man could ever know of God without explicit revelation but precisely how man of his very nature knows of God. II. The Transcendental Method. To understand Lonergan's approach to natural theology one must first begin with Kant. The Marechalian school depends on Kant primarily for the 1 E. g., Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), p. 23. 2 For one of the clearest formulations, see Augustine's Letter 120 in Hazelton's Selected Writings of St. Augustine (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1962), p. 130-138. 3 J. B. Lotz in "Immanuel Kant," in v. 8 of the New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York, 1967), p. 127. • Lonergan's "The Natural Desire to See God," in CoUection (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), p. 84-95. 2.59 260 PATRICIA WILSON transcendental method. For Kant " ... transcendental means practically the same as pure and a priori. By transcendental discourses Kant understands those which transcend experience and consider its a priori conditions." 5 The question is how human knowledge is possible; in what way does man know. For Kant, the answer can be found in going beyond the contents of knowledge to the a priori forms that make our knowledge possible, to the subjective conditions of experience. Man knows through and because of the a priori forms and thus is limited to and by them. For Kant, transcendental knowledge is an illusion, and all that can be known is the content of sense experience; things in themselves are unknowable. (Although Kant affirmed the existence of God, the basis of his argument was from the categorical imperative, not from rational knowledge .) The transcendental method might at first seem to exclude absolutely any natural knowledge of God. But in the twentieth century Joseph Marechal confronted Thomism and Kantian epistemology and emerged with a quite different result concerning man's knowledge of a transcendent being. Marechal found that the transcendental method, if properly applied, revealed an intellect which in its acts of knowing was striving to affirm being and not just knowing. This finalistic striving is the basic condition of the possibility of all human knowing. J. B. Lotz describes the Marechalian concept of Kant's method: The transcendental method can be carried through in a way that goes beyond Kant himself to arrive at being as the primary condition for the possibility for human knowledge, and even of human action. This basic idea has far-reaching consequences. The proof for God's existence is somehow precontained in the orientation of intellect toward being; thus does theoretical metaphysics become possible. Being, too, enables a priori knowledge to reveal rather than conceal, as it must do for Kant. Again, the formal objects for the soul's faculties correspond to Kant's forms; thus knowledge through categories is not restricted to that which is " for man," but opens up to that which is "in itself." Finally the absoluteness • Dr. Paul Carus, essay in Kant's Prolegomena (La Salle, ID.: Open Court Publishing Co., 1955), p. IS!t. HUMAN KNOWLEDGE OF GOD's...