The Quest for God and the Good Life

Part 2. Decline: Nature as Fallen

99 Part 2 Decline N at u r e a s Fa ll e n The utopian idea that progress in human affairs is automatic and unbroken was perhaps the biggest mistake made by early modern proponents of progress, according to Bernard Lonergan.1 In his view these theorists failed to account for slowdowns and breakdowns , particularly those caused by sin and evil. Accompanying the many positive contributions of modernity to the natural and human sciences came an arrogance that believed that human intelligence at the service of personal egoism was the sufficient engine for progress, and human sin was what transforms an ordinary , unimportant person into a unique, free-thinking individual.2 Modern liberals thus were aware of sin, but they held the illusion that unfettered, competitive self-interest would fuel progress more than derail it.3 Progress, as one vector in the analysis of human history, is Lonergan ’s transposition of the classical category of “nature” into a more dynamic, historical context. In reality no person and no soci1 . Lonergan, Insight, 264, 710–11; Lonergan, Topics in Education, 47. 2. Lonergan, Existenz and Aggiornamento,” in Collection, 247. 3. “Modern” liberals are not the same as contemporary liberals, and in fact are in some ways their opposites, particularly on economic issues. The modern liberal prefers as little government control of the economy as possible, while contemporary liberals believe that government must intervene to keep businesses from harming the public. For more on modern liberalism, see note 5 in this book’s introduction. 100  Decline ety is ever in a pure state of nature, and so progress is never pure. Human beings are all affected by what Christian tradition calls “the Fall,”4 “original sin,”5 and the resultant “darkening of intellect and weakening of will.”6 The human person as concretely alive in this world is a composite, more or less affected by both the intrinsic goodness of nature and the inherent evil of sin. The result is that we are, as Pascal observes, both “wretched and great.”7 “Decline” is Lonergan’s term for sin’s cumulative effect on human history. It is why our world does not function in a rosy, continuous succession of improvement following improvement. Just as human persons and societies are always mixtures of nature and sin, so human history is always a combination of progress and decline . Because of decline we remain intelligent and free, rational and loving, but we are so in potential more than in truth.8 Decline flows from our repeated failures to observe the transcendental precepts and act authentically in our individual operations and social cooperation. As progress depends on our being attentive, intelligent , reasonable, and responsible, decline is the result of “inattention , obtuseness, unreasonableness, irresponsibility.” And as progress was a series of insights improving the human situation, so decline causes successive, “objectively absurd situations.”9 Decline is the result of a twisting or perversion of the natural, unrestricted desire for beauty, meaning, truth, value, goodness, and love—in other words, of the human longing for God. Sinful acts suppress and distort this desire. Over time they form multiple 4. Lonergan, “Openness and Religious Experience,” in Collection, 200. 5. Lonergan, “Healing and Creating in History,” in A Third Collection, 101–2. 6. “Healing and Creating in History,” 102; cf. Lonergan, Collected Works, vol. 1, Grace and Freedom, 16. On the universality of sin and its effects, Lonergan cites Rom. 1:18–3:20; 7:14–24; and Eph. 2:3 in his “Transition from a Classicist World-View to Historical-Mindedness,” in A Second Collection, 8. 7. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, translated by A.J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995). This is a recurrent theme in the Pensées, and it is the focus of I.7 Similarly, though with an understanding of goodness that was confined strictly to grace, Luther wrote the phrase “simultaneously justified and sinner” (simul justus et pecatur) in the margin of his Bible. The theme is expressed in his On Christian Liberty as “free lord” and “dutiful servant”; Martin Luther, On Christian Liberty, translated by W. A. Lambert (Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2003), 2. 8. Lonergan comments that because of sin, we are rational animals only in potency. In reality, he believes, we are more symbolic animals than rational animals, since symbols affect both saints and sinners; Topics in Education, 79–80. 9. Lonergan, Method, 54–55. Decline  101 biases that shrink a...