2015 UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

Transcription

1 AU THENTICIT Y AS SELF-TRANSCENDENCE

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3 AUTHENTICIT Y AS S ELF-T RA N S C EN D EN C E The Enduring Insights of Bernard Lonergan N N MICHAEL H. MC CARTHY University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

4 Copyright 2015 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCarthy, Michael H., 1942 Authenticity as self-transcendence : the enduring insights of Bernard Lonergan / Michael H. McCarthy. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Lonergan, Bernard J. F. I. Title. B995.L654M dc The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

5 C O N T E N T S N N Preface vii C H A P T E R O N E The Tangled Knot of Old and New: Lonergan s Project of Critical Appropriation 1 The Tangled Knot 5 Where Are We Now? 11 A Critical Cultural Center 24 The Vetera 51 The Nova 83 C H A P T E R T W O Objective Knowing and Authentic Living 107 The Defining Revolutions of Modernity 109 The Anthropological Turn: Human Nature and History 117 The Critique of Objectivity and Truth 130 The Polymorphic Subject 135 Cognitional Theory: From Logic to Method 142 The Centrality of Insight 149 Critical Realism 156 Objectivity Reconsidered 166 Authenticity as Self-Transcendence 171 Maturity Is Comprehensive 180

6 vi Contents C H A P T E R T H R E E Authentic Faith in a Secular Age 181 Our Secular Age 182 Rising to the Challenge of Our Time 207 Enlightenment, Science, and Faith 219 Exclusive and Religious Humanism 230 Religious Authenticity 248 C H A P T E R F O U R The Chill Winds of Modernity: The Profound Challenge of Catholic Renewal 259 Critical Christian Humanism 261 The Catholic Struggle with Modernity 265 Aggiornamento 271 The Second Vatican Council 275 Critical Aggiornamento 283 Critical Reason and Religious Truth 286 An Ethics of Authenticity: Personal and Communal 323 Realism, Repentance, Reform, and Renewal 351 Epilogue 353 Notes 359 Bibliography 373 Index 403

7 P R E F A C E N N Bernard Lonergan is one of the great, unheralded thinkers of the twentieth century. Ample evidence of his intellectual greatness can be found in his writing. But critical recognition of his philosophical and cultural importance has been remarkably limited. In secular academic circles he remains largely unknown. And even within Christian centers of learning, familiarity with his name far exceeds familiarity with his work. My own respect for Lonergan has only deepened since reading Insight as a doctoral student at Yale in the 1960s. After graduating from Yale, I continued to study Lonergan during several decades teaching philosophy at Vassar College. The more philosophers I read and taught, ancient, medi - eval, modern, and contemporary, the more impressed I became with the quality of Lonergan s mind and the great relevance of his methodo logical work in philosophy and theology. I had been interested in metaphilosophi - cal questions since writing my Yale dissertation. The more I compared Lonergan s distinctive conception of philosophy with that of several great contemporary metaphilosophers Frege, Cassirer, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Sellars, and Rorty the more impressed I became. This sustained intellectual engagement led me to write The Crisis of Philosophy, where I argued for the superiority of Lonergan s philosophical program to those of his analytic and phenomenological rivals. In the present volume, I develop and expand that earlier argument with four new essays, designed to show Lonergan s exceptional relevance to the cultural situation of late mo dernity. My purpose is not to gain belated recognition for the dead, but to exhibit the power and vitality of Lonergan s thought for the living. vii

8 viii Preface My hope is that these essays will serve as a bridge between Lonergan and a much broader contemporary audience, whose members stand only to benefit from a sustained encounter with a mind of such clarity, relevance, and depth. Lonergan was a foundational thinker committed to discovering the basic principles of knowledge, being, and value. He was also an integrative thinker committed to unifying the intellectual and moral achievements of the West. A genuinely learned man, he recognized the historical dangers of both foundational and integrative thought. But his critical knowledge of history did not deter him from embracing the cultural project that de - fined his personal life and career as a Christian humanist: raising Christian philosophy and theology to meet the challenges and standards of his time. In undertaking a project of this magnitude, Lonergan was explicitly attempting to do for the twentieth century what Thomas Aquinas had done for medieval philosophy and theology in thirteenth-century Paris. But Lonergan was acutely aware that the cultural challenges and critical standards of his time were markedly different from those of Aquinas, his traditional mentor and guide. My description of Lonergan as a critical Christian humanist corresponds closely to his own account of the three dynamic vectors operative in human history. Because Lonergan was a humanist, he believed in the native human aspiration to and capacity for self-transcendence. Because he was a critical humanist, he explicitly acknowledged the power of bias and sin to prevent or obstruct self-transcendence, as well as the repeated resort to ideology to justify that prevention or obstruction. And because he was a faithful Christian, he relied on the power of divine grace to sublate the personal quest for self-transcendence and to heal the destructive consequences of bias and sin. Lonergan s Christian humanism was interpreted and transmitted through the lens of a developed historical consciousness. He had a profound sense of the cultural challenges of his time and a clear strategy for meeting and overcoming them. He combined a synoptic vision of cultural history with a deep sense of historical responsibility, believing that the work of redeeming the world was part of the mission Christ entrusted to his apostles. But it was also part of Lonergan s mission as a Jesuit specifically called to meet the crises of his age (Second Collection, 183).

9 Preface ix Lonergan claimed that the cultural crisis of the late modern West had at least three interrelated dimensions. Intellectually, the great discoveries of modern science and scholarship have transformed our understanding of nature and history. These enduring epistemic achievements, however, have come at a price. Because modern learning is specialized and highly differentiated, we know vastly more than our classical and medieval prede - cessors, but we no longer know how the various parts of our knowledge fit together. The fragmentation of our knowledge is particularly striking with respect to our understanding of human existence, where it has generated a disabling paradox. Despite our highly specialized knowledge of human nature and history, we are no longer confident, as a society and culture, that our most important factual and evaluative judgments are objectively true. Our common moral situation is also paradoxical. Contemporary societies are far more ethically ambitious than the cities and empires of antiquity, and even than medieval Christendom. Inspired by the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, we seek liberty, equality, and justice for all people; and we accept personal and collective responsibility for advancing these utopian ideals. At the level of shared moral advocacy, our aspirations are unprecedented. At the same time, we conspicuously lack a unifying moral philosophy to clarify and justify these demanding moral ideals. This troubling gap between moral ontology and moral advocacy helps explain the instability of our culture, which vacillates uneasily between uncritical idealism and inordinate suspicion. Contemporary religious pluralism now extends from the three Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to the traditional religions of the East and the indigenous faiths of the Americas and Africa. In the midst of this unsettling pluralism, the masters of suspicion and their cultural allies have mounted a frontal assault on religious knowledge, mor - ality, and hope. In many sectors of our culture, particularly in the secular academy, ontological naturalists and exclusive humanists have rejected traditional religious allegiances and experimented in living without God. Though Lonergan firmly believes that the deepest currents of modernity are compatible with religious authenticity, the cultural challenges facing mature believers today are more formidable than ever before. All three of these crises epistemic, moral, and spiritual are particularly challenging for the Roman Catholic Church, to which Lonergan

10 x Preface dedicated his life. Intellectually, the church had struggled with the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin. Morally and politically, it had resisted the democratic revolutions in Europe and North America and belatedly responded to the historical projects of secular liberalism and Marxism. Because its philosophical and theological allegiances were closely tied to medieval models, the church remained critically aloof from the philosophical turn to human subjectivity and the transformation of dogmatic theology by biblical hermeneutics and critical historiography. While Lonergan never wavered in his loyalty to the church, he recognized that an important part of its cultural mission was no longer being credibly fulfilled. To address these several crises effectively, to respond to them persuasively at the exigent level of our time, Lonergan called for the creation of collaborative intercultural centers, composed of scientists, scholars, phi - losophers, theologians, and educated citizens, big enough to be at home in the old and the new, painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made, strong enough to refuse half measures and insist on complete solutions even though it has to wait (CWL, 4:245). Lonergan s personal contribution to this collaborative project was twofold. First, as a philosophical scholar, he offered masterful interpretations of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, as well as discerning critical commentary on Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Husserl, among others. Second, as a brilliant and exacting methodologist, he clarified the normative requirements on individual thinkers hoping to diagnose and remedy the cultural predicaments he had identified. These requirements include sustained personal development, comprehensive self-appropriation, and intellectual, moral, and religious conversion. The daunting realism of these requirements and the personal and cultural obstacles that impede their realization serve to confirm both the importance of Lonergan s project and the great difficulty of successfully advancing it. When Lonergan spoke of the old (the vetera), he meant primarily the philosophical culture of ancient Greece and the theological culture of medieval Christendom. When he spoke of the new (the nova), he meant primarily the scientific and scholarly cultures of the first and second Enlightenment and the postmodern culture of suspicion. The four long essays that compose this book are designed to reveal the strategic unfolding

11 Preface xi of Lonergan s cultural mission. Chapter 1, The Tangled Knot of Old and New, establishes the orienting framework for the entire project, for critical appropriation of the vetera and the nova is essential to understanding, appraising, and resolving the different cultural crises we share. Chapter 2, Objective Knowing and Authentic Living, locates Lonergan s philosophi - cal anthropology within the historical problematic created by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. Through his profound analysis of human subjectivity, Lonergan identified a striking paradox at the heart of modern culture and sought to unravel it by a forceful defense of the human capacity for self-transcendence. Chapter 3, Authentic Faith in a Secular Age, attempts to clarify the nature and origins of modern secu - larity and the unprecedented challenges it creates for religious faith. Two related questions emerge as this chapter unfolds: what are the merits and limitations of the atheistic project of exclusive humanism, and what are the intellectual, moral, and spiritual requirements of religious authenticity today? Chapter 4, The Chill Winds of Modernity, explains why Catholic Christianity has especially struggled with the demise of Latin Christendom, and appraises Lonergan s philosophical and theological contributions to the critical renewal of the Catholic Church. The challenge of criti - cal renewal, as he saw it, can be simply stated. How can the church rise to meet the cultural challenges of the modern age while remaining faithful to its historic message and mission? How can it be faithful to the vetera and critically responsive to the nova? Finally, in the epilogue, I draw the substantive conclusions of the four chapters together by identifying and intelligibly relating Lonergan s most important and enduring discoveries. My governing purpose in writing this book is to show that these discoveries are so basic in nature, so fertile in their implications, and so relevant to our cultural crises that they establish Bernard Lonergan as one of the truly great minds of the twentieth century. The organizational pattern of the four chapters tends to be similar. In each case it s essential to establish that there is a significant cultural challenge to be addressed. So the chapters begin with cultural diagnosis. Where are we now, culturally speaking, and what special predicaments intellectual, moral, spiritual, and religious do we commonly face? Diagnostic analysis is then followed by explanatory historical narrative. How did we gradually arrive at this tangled cultural impasse? Taken together,

12 xii Preface the diagnostic and genealogical accounts set the stage for Lonergan s remedial prescriptions. What dialectical strategies and philosophical and theological insights does Lonergan advance to clarify and unravel these unsettling cultural predicaments? The final stage involves critical appraisal. What enduring philosophical and theological contributions emerge from Lonergan s concerted attempt to meet the cultural challenges of our time at the exigent level of our time? It is reasonable to ask at the outset for whom these interrelated essays were written. Lonergan once said that his work was intended for every serious person who really wanted to think things through. My initial attraction to Lonergan when I was beginning to study philosophy was based on just such an appeal. Though I really wanted to think things through, I was very unclear about how to proceed. And I sensed, from an initial reading of Insight, that Lonergan would be a reliable guide on this interminable journey. Now, nearly fifty years later, let me respond to this straightforward query with a more complex and roundabout answer. Bernard Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit who studied and taught in Catholic institutions in North America and Europe. Deeply loyal to the church, he was openly critical of its intellectual stance toward modernity. By and large, the church had distanced itself from the momentous developments in modern science, philosophy, and scholarship. It had criticized their deviation from the classical and medieval models of inquiry developed in premodern culture. It had adhered to a traditional cosmology and anthropology that no longer commanded the assent of educated people. Lonergan s philosophical and theological project began as a belated effort to raise the thought and discourse of his church to the level of the time (CWL, 17:354 58, ). But Lonergan was also a genuine humanist who respected the relative autonomy of contemporary social and cultural practices. In his seminal philosophical work Insight and in many of his subsequent papers and lectures, he wrote as a humanist, addressing all of his educated contemporaries, not only his fellow Christians. He believed, I think correctly, that the cultural crises confronting the West are not confined to Christians, Catholics, or even educated persons of faith. The unprecedented challenges posed by our uneven cultural heritage, by the new understanding of science and culture, by the philosophical turn to the polymorphic subject,

13 Preface xiii by the critical standards of research, hermeneutics, and history, and by the awesome demands of existential and collective responsibility affect all edu cated men and women whatever their religious allegiance. These cultural crises are more acute for Catholics because of their prolonged disengagement from modernity. But the inescapable legacy of modernity, its tangled blending of achievement and aberration, has left every serious thinker confused and uncertain. Lonergan s ambitious cultural project, therefore, is relevant and accessible to both reflective humanists and Christians. Written in a similar ecumenical spirit, the four chapters comprising this work are deliberately intended for a comprehensive educated audience struggling, as most of us are, with our uneven cultural legacy. Chapter 1 has particular relevance for all undergraduate and graduate teachers who must sympathetically understand the past in order to make sense of the present and future. Chapter 2 makes a fundamental contribution to philosophical anthropology. By carefully exploring and articulating the foundations of human interiority, it attempts to establish the inseparable connection between intellectual and moral self-transcendence, between objective knowing and authentic living. The two concluding chapters are primarily, though not exclusively, addressed to the global community of religious believers, both Christian and non-christian, belatedly coming to terms with the singular complexity of the modern enterprise. The cross-pressures of our secular age make the question of religious authenticity a nearly universal concern, and the global presence of Catholic Christianity makes its continuing struggle for aggiornamento a topic of nearly comparable interest. I am grateful to everyone who helped me with this work but especially to my wife, Barbara, my closest friend and companion during the long years reaching up to the mind of Lonergan. Michael H. McCarthy Vassar College