Lonergan's Quest: A Study of Desire in the Authoring of Insight (review)

Mathews, a Jesuit philosopher at the Milltown Institute, Dublin, offers an intellectual biography of his Canadian fellow-Jesuit Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) through the publication in 1957 of the latter's Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. In Mathews' account the Kantian mind-reality problematic first grasped Lonergan's attention in the course of his philosophic training at Heythrop in 1926. Upon his return to Toronto to teach high school, however, the experience of the Depression diverted him to questions of economic theory that eventuated, fourteen years later, in a manuscript of which, Mathews remarks, "few, to date, have made sense" (p. 53) and to which Lonergan would return much later, in his declining years. Meanwhile Lonergan's arrival in Rome in 1933 to complete the seminary course in theology vividly impressed on him the need for a philosophy of history that could account for the collapse of European culture at the hands of Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. His superiors decided that Lonergan should stay on in Rome for doctoral studies in theology, not philosophy, in preparation for a teaching post at the Gregorianum, but events supervened to force Lonergan's abrupt return to Canada in 1940 with his thesis on St. Thomas' developing thought on grace undefended. That investigation had, however, awakened for him the question of method in theology. Once back in Canada a light teaching load allowed Lonergan to plunge into a six-year study of Aquinas with the Kantian problematic in mind, the results of which he further developed in preparing courses on "Thought and Reality" and then "Intelligence and Reality" for the Thomas More Institute in Toronto.

The reception of the latter moved Lonergan to begin writing Insight, and Mathews devotes the second half of his study to the composition and publication of this work, a process that, on his account, comprised four movements. Lonergan spent two years writing a protoversion of the work, which he then reworked into what would be the central section (chapters 9-13) of the final product, devoted to articulating the positions on cognitional structure, being, and objectivity with which he resolved the Kantian problematic. These constitute the horizon for the analysis of the subject-object relation in mathematics, the natural sciences, and common sense that he undertakes in chapters 1-8, and they underpin the considerations of metaphysics and its method, ethics, and religion with which Lonergan, with his long-delayed Roman assignment now impending, hastened to conclude the work. That conclusion, of course, would itself prove to be but a steppingstone, a way station toward the publication of Method in Theology after another decade and a half of arduous research and reflection.

Given the nature of his subject, the bulk of Mathews' narrative is perforce occupied by analytic summaries of what Lonergan wrote, books he read, courses he took, and courses he gave. In these Mathews proves himself an astute, not uncritical reader and a highly skilled pedagogue from whom no student of Lonergan's thought will fail to learn. At the same time these works-in-context provide the data for Mathews' chief interest, namely, the intellectual desire that evoked them, the course of its unfolding, and the term at which what he conceives as Lonergan's vision quest arrived. His narrative gives full recognition to the role of the contingent and fortuitous (fate/providence) in the development it traces. Still, focused austerely on an intellectual biography, and with invaluable result, Mathews leaves to others the further project of fleshing that venture out in the broader drama of Lonergan's life.