God and the Desire of Understanding

GOD AND THE DESIRE OF UNDERSTANDING T WO PROBLEMS engage man in his quest for God: the existence and the nature of God. Put in the form of questions, they are: What is God and whether God is. Bernard Lonergan deals with these in the final pages of his work, Insight. He approaches them after a long and detailed investigation of the act of understanding and a careful analysis of "the personal appropriation of one's rational self-consciousness " wherein he lays bare the structure of human cognitional activity in its three levels of experience, understanding and judging. Advance from the lower to the higher levels takes place through inquiry. ]'or man seeks to know. Such seeking leads to questions, questions demand answers, answers arise through insight. If insights are to yield truth, they must be correct. Their correctness needs verification. So step by step Lonergan leads to his doctrine of being and of the human means of reaching the absolute in being.1 We should also note, in order to avoid any error, that he considers himself to possess, in the appropriation of cognitional structure, a basis for methodical cognitional activity. It is not just the proof of God's existence which primarily interests him, rather it is the methodical proof. "So to advance from proportionate to transcendent being that the universal viewpoint , attained in earlier stages of the argument, might be preserved as well as expanded." 2 Such is the method. It is more fully outlined in the following passage: " Being is whatever can be grasped intelligently and affirmed reasonably. Being is proportionate or transcendent according as it lies within 1 F. E. Crowe, S. J., " The Exigent Mind: B. Lonergan's Intellectualism," Continuum ~ (1964), p. 3~3. • B. J. F. Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (London: Longmans, Green & Company, 1957), p. 68~. 667 668 MICHAEL J. LAPIERRE or without the domain of man's outer and inner experience. The possibility of transcendent knowledge, then, is the possibility of grasping intelligently and affirming reasonably a transcendent being. And the proof of the possibility lies in the fact that such intelligible grasp and reasonable affirmation occur." 3 Four themes shall engage our attention. They are: the notion of being, the idea of being, the notion of God, and the idea of God. There is, in addition, the transitus from proportionate to transcendent being. Proportionate being yields proportionate knowledge, and transcendent being yields transcendent knowledge. Each knowledge as knowledge is connatural to man. Knowledge given by divine revelation is supernatural. We note this latter to set it aside, for the conditions of the possibility of supernatural knowledge are not the same as those for the possibility of transcendent knowledge. The notion of being. Being is the objective of the pure desire to know. The desire to know is the innate inclination of man to inquire and to judge. It is pure, for in its nakedness, in its detachedness, it drives for what is to be known through cognitional activity. It is also pure when unimpeded, unmixed, unbiased by the many other desires of the human agent. Its objective is the content of the knowing rather than the act. At first this orientation is toward the totally unknown. As knowledge grows, this unknown becomes less and less unknown, more and more known. At any given moment, then, the objective includes both the known and what remains to be known. This desire is unrestricted in its range. As such it manifests being to be the anything and everything that constitutes its proper objective. Being as notion is simply the immanent, dynamic orientation of cognitional process, something prior to thinking and judging, something going beyond them. The notion arises from the fact that this orientation is discerned in cognitional process, is understood through it, and is an element of this • Ibid., p. 640. GOD AND THE DESIRE OF UNDERSTANDING 669 same process. The orientation is intelligent and rational, not unconscious, not merely empirical, and not consequent to understanding . The notion of being is the totality to be known through all answers as well as the totality known through all answers; it is then all pervasive and all inclusive. This is the...