The Quest for God and the Good Life

1. The Natural World

1 | The Natural World Deeply troubled by the Great Depression, two world wars, and modernity ’s challenges to religion, Bernard Lonergan attempted to do for our age what Thomas Aquinas did for his—that is, to integrate the best of secular and sacred teaching in order to further the ongoing Catholic tradition of using both faith and reason to promote the common good and to participate in God’s work of redemption. Echoing centuries of the Catholic tradition’s esteem for secular and sacred, or natural and supernatural, forms of learning, Lonergan affirms that “God becomes known to us in two ways: as the ground and end of the material universe; and as the one who speaks to us through Scripture and Tradition. The first manner might found a natural religion. The second adds revealed religion.”1 For Lonergan an important purpose of God’s self-communication , whether revealed through the material universe, scripture, or tradition, is to transform “the aims and purposes, the direction and development of human lives, human societies, human cultures , human history.”2 In light of this purpose, Lonergan views the task of theology as twofold: “to reflect on revelation” and “to mediate God’s meaning into the whole of human affairs.”3 This is no easy task—first, because of the tremendous difficulty of coming 1. Lonergan, “Theology in Its New Context,” in A Second Collection, 61. 2. Lonergan, “Theology in Its New Context,” 62. 3. Lonergan, “Theology in Its New Context,” 62. 3 4  Progress to understand revelation, even in part, and second, because human affairs take place within a multitude of changing cultures that also must be understood by theologians if they are to help mediate God’s message through them. Since divine revelation is primarily stable and human affairs are highly alterable, theologians must be comfortable with both continuity and change. Lonergan explains that while theology must grow and develop in response to changes in the world, “the novelty resides not in a new revelation or a new faith, but in a new cultural context.”4 Given the current cultural context, Lonergan warns and encourages faithful theologians that their work of reflection on and mediation of God’s word “is not a small task, but because it is not [small]—in a culture in which God is ignored and there are even theologians to proclaim that God is dead—it is all the more urgent.”5 The drafting of secular culture for service in promoting Christian revelation is at least as old as Paul’s speech at the Areopagus in Athens.6 But Lonergan’s primary role model was Thomas Aquinas , who adopted the best of then-contemporary secular learning, particularly the philosophy of Aristotle, in order to illuminate revealed teachings and teach them to the rest of society.7 Thomas’s influence on Lonergan can hardly be overstated. In fact, Lonergan wrote that he spent over ten years “reaching up to the mind of Aquinas” and then tried “to import his compelling genius to the problems of this later day.”8 Lonergan took seriously Pope Leo XIII’s call in the encyclical Aeterni Patris to revive and continue the work of Thomas Aquinas as a part of the larger project of “novis augere et perficere.”9 In following the pope’s call, Lonergan studied not only Thomas’s and Aristotle’s writings, but also modern advances in the natural sci4 . Lonergan, “Theology in Its New Context,” 58. 5. Lonergan, “Theology in Its New Context,” 62. 6. Acts 17:22–34. 7. Thomas discusses the use of other sciences for advancing theological understanding of revealed mysteries in his Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 1. 8. Lonergan, Insight, 769–70. 9. “To strengthen and complete the old by aid of the new”; Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris 24. The translation is from the Vatican website. Lonergan cites this phrase and the pope’s call in Insight , 768; cf. Lonergan, “Aquinas Today: Tradition and Innovation,” in A Third Collection, 35. ences, economics, history, and psychology. Because of the richness of Lonergan’s sources, his theological anthropology is complex. Let us begin with the fundamental category of nature as considered in two contexts: the classical worldview of Thomas and Aristotle and the historical worldview of more contemporary scholars, both of which are often misinterpreted. Two Views on Nature: Classical and Historical First, let us distinguish between something that is “classical” and something...