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61 Chapter Three Religious Experience, Reflection, and Philosophy of God In chapter 1, we encountered a tension in Lonergan that would finally give way to a reorientation in his thinking about religious experience. The orientation is one regarding the fundamental role in philosophical questions about the existence of God. I developed the suggestion that the modernist crisis in Roman Catholicism is probably that which contributed to his late treatment of the topic. He does treat religious experience in his early writings, but his self-criticism about the underlying “objectivism” of his philosophy of God (i.e., his proof in chapter 19 of Insight) suggests that he was thinking about the notion differently at least as early as 1972. Casual reference was made to this in the first chapter, in my comparison of Insight and Philosophy of God, and Theology with certain aspects of question 2, article 3 of the Summa. Noted, too, was the different function of belief in special transcendent knowledge compared to that presupposed in general transcendent knowledge. The ruminations in chapter 2 have laid a basis for a more precise evaluation of this distinction, that is, what it is that distinguishes Lonergan’s early treatment of religious experience from that which emerged around the 1970s. RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN PRE-INSIGHT LITERATURE “One might claim that Insight leaves room for moral and religious conversion, but one is less likely to assert that the room is very well furnished” (PGT:12). Rephrasing this in line with our own concerns, Lonergan’s pre-Method thinking leaves room for religious experience, treats certain aspects of it even, but 62 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, REFLECTION, AND PHILOSOPHY OF GOD one is less likely to assert that it reveals a concern for religious experience qua religious experience. Lonergan’s early treatment of the notion is dominated by his discovery that “intellect is intelligence” (CWL 5:19) and that its primary function is to unearth the intelligible in the world and human experience. For him, even the nonsystemizable is intelligible, although its intelligibility is of a different kind from that conceived in classical investigation.1 There are grounds for continuing to account for this as the intellectualist period in Lonergan’s career, provided that we recognize that the affective is not excluded from it.2 The point is one of emphasis and orientation based on what is perceived to be a need in matters of (theological) inquiry. Unwarranted, then, both by the data and a sound process of reasoning, is the move to divide his career into early and late periods, where in the former he is viewed as closed off to the affective and in the latter, wanting to rectify this, as undercutting the intellectual. The intellectual is as present in Lonergan’s later work as is the point of view of the omniscient narrator in a novel. While it may not be as pronounced, it is nevertheless there, exercising considerable influence over the way things unfold. Various distinctions proposed in an article Lonergan published in the journal Gregorianum in 1954, “Theology and Understanding,” shed light on the preceding. Insight had been completed by this time, in which a basis had been laid for his discussion of the “two types of knowing” and “the patterns of human experience” in the article (CWL 4:127). The context of the passage below is the relation of speculative theology to the teaching authority of the church and “ordinary religious experience” or, as he also puts it, “religious feeling.” Knowledge is involved not only in defining compunction but also in feeling it, not only in discoursing upon the Blessed Trinity but also in pleasing it. Still, these two types of knowledge are quite distinct, and the methodological problem is to define the precise nature of each, the advantages and limitations of each, and above all the principles and rules that govern transpositions from one to the other. . . . Just as the equations of thermodynamics make no one feel warmer or cooler and, much less, evoke the sentiments associated with the drowsy heat of the summer sun or with the refreshing coolness of evening breezes, so also speculative theology is not immediately relevant to the stimulation of religious feeling. But unless this fact is acknowledged explicitly and systematically, there arises a constant pressure in favor of theological tendencies that mistakenly reinforce the light of faith and intelligence with the warmth of less austere modes of thought. Morever, such tendencies, pushed to the limit, give rise to the...

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