Before Truth: Lonergan, Aquinas, and the Problem of Wisdom by Jeremy D. Wilkins (review)

Noted Lonergan scholar Jeremy D. Wilkins, who teaches systematic theology at Boston College, has written an important book about the Canadian Jesuit Bernard Lonergan (1904-84), arguably one of the premier Catholic theologians and intellectuals of the twentieth century, indisputably so in the English-speaking world. Before Truth is the most important book on Lonergan in recent decades—a work that has all the characteristics of becoming the standard interpretation of Lonergan's thought for the next generation.

Written in an admirably lucid prose, Wilkins's book is both an engaging interpretation of Lonergan's complex, sprawling, and often daunting oeuvre and simultaneously a robust cumulative argument for Lonergan's ongoing and—as Wilkins argues—increasing relevance for contemporary Catholic theology. This makes it a "Lonerganian" book about Lonergan, but one commendably free of the technical terminology characteristic of much of Lonergan's own work and especially that of many of his disciples. What makes Before Truth interesting and indeed relevant for students of Thomas Aquinas in general and for Thomists in particular is the fact that the book—not unlike an ellipse—has two focal points, Lonergan and Aquinas. Lonergan understood himself to be in an eleven-year-apprenticeship to Aquinas, during which time he composed studies that later became known under the titles Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas. During this apprenticeship Lonergan's goal was, in his own words, "to reach up" to Aquinas's mind and grasp, not the conclusions of his teaching and the inferences that might be drawn from them, but rather his fundamental intuitions and deepest insights. Eventually, Lonergan would have these intuitions and insights undergo what he judged to be a congenial transposition into an approach that, according to his considered judgment, would best meet the contemporary challenges posed to Catholic theology by the modern natural sciences and by a modern historiography informed by the historical-critical methodology, and their ideological intensifications, evolutionary naturalism, and perspectivalist historicism.

The fundamental motivation of this program of transposition is captured in the title of Wilkins's book: Before Truth. For Aquinas truth came first, in the sense that the truth conveyed in revelation by the First Truth is contained in the articles of faith that articulate revelation and thus constitute the received first principles of sacra doctrina. However, because of an ever-deepening modern awareness of the active human participation in the ongoing doctrinal articulation and specification of the articles of faith—Wilkins calls this their fundamental contingency or historicity—Lonergan holds that, for contemporary Catholic theology, truth cannot be "first" anymore in an unproblematic and unquestioned way. Truth has to be, rather, understood as the achievement of theological judgments that are guided by fundamental ascetical practices of self-appropriation and self-understanding and reflected in methodological considerations—all of which come "before truth." Before truth can be attained by way of right judgment, the subject that judges must achieve an adequate self-appropriation and thereby become rightly ordered to reality. The subject will then be capable of judgments that comport with reality and are thus able to attain truth. What must come first is the acquisition of the wisdom that results from self-appropriation by gaining insight into insight as well as the reception of the infused wisdom that comes from self-surrender. Lonergan's "turn to the subject," celebrated by some and loathed by others, is, so Wilkins argues, motivated by and must be understood as a response to the modern crisis of normativity.

It is crucial to understand that for his program of recovering normativity by way of a hermeneutics of interiority, Lonergan does not take his cues from Descartes and Kant but rather, and significantly, from Augustine, Newman, and Aquinas. Lonergan's overarching goal, Wilkins argues, remains identical with Aquinas's...