Conversion as Transformation

Lonergan, Mentors, and Cinema

Dominic Arcamone

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532678929, 9781532678936
• eBook ISBN: 9781532678943
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The process of human transformation is complex and ongoing. This book presents a framework for understanding human transformation through the insights of Bernard Lonergan. The reader will be introduced to terms such as the turn to the subject, consciousness, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. It will explore terms such as horizon, feelings, values, self-esteem, sublation, conversion, dialectic, and religious experience. The book explores transformation through the way mentors have authored their own lives, told their own stories, and taken possession of their interiority. Transformation is illustrated through the lives of saints and ordinary men and women who did extraordinary things, such as St. Augustine, Dag Hammarskjold, Vaclav Havel, Franz Jaggerstatter, St. Therese of Lisieux, Fredrich Nietzsche, Katherine Ann Power, and Marie Cardinal. Transformation is also illustrated through the medium of cinema: Babette's Feast, The Mission, As It is in Heaven, Romero, Dead Poets Society, Ordinary People, The Godfather trilogy, Three Color trilogy, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Dial M for Murder, and Twelve Angry Men. While the book treats religious, moral, affective, intellectual, and psychic conversion as moments of transformation, it argues that ecological conversion requires all of these so as to meet the most serious moral challenge of our time.

1

Authoring Our Life, Telling Our Story

The task of this book is to help the reader appreciate a possible framework for understanding human transformation. This framework will give some understanding as to how we might better attune ourselves to our feelings, questions, and understandings of truth and reality. By yoking ourselves to the truth, we will be better able to evaluate what is worthwhile, choose responsibly, and be in love. The long-term goal is to author the drama of our lives more profoundly. The first step to authoring our drama is to know ourselves and the person we are becoming. To know ourselves requires that we often ask and answer questions truthfully: Who do we think we are? To whom or to what do the parts of our life belong? Where is our life going? What kind of spontaneous concerns and cares are vital to us and can these widen? What place does critical thinking have in our lives? What do we value and how do we contribute to the human good? To what and to whom are we committed? Why do we do what we do? Do we believe in God or is God merely an idea that does not impact personally? What must we do to transform so as to become a better person?

Authoring Our Life

Lonergan is keenly aware that authoring our own lives is a crucial task. Lonergan is convinced that life is a drama and our first work of art is our living.1 We are to form ourselves into the most splendid and beautiful work that we can be. However, unlike a work of art, our lives are subject to the limitations of embodiment, death, time, and place. We discover that the human drama is never about memorizing some role by merely imitating others. It is not just developing skills handed on to us by someone else in order to cope. The human drama implies that “each of us is burdened with the task of deciding what kind of person we wish to be in the context of the drama of our life.”2 To author our lives authentically into a work of art, we need a new paradigm by which to grasp reality and our place in it. A paradigm offers a framework for getting to what is real and valuable for human living. A new paradigm usually arises when the old one no longer works. Lonergan’s paradigm begins with the turn to the subject.3 This shift means that new terms arise to understand the making of ourselves: subjectivity and self-constitution, authenticity and self-transcendence, intersubjectivity and consciousness.

First, there is the complexity and richness of subjectivity. Tony Kelly states that the desire to understand reality needs to be firmly connected to an inward journey through an exploration of the dimensions of human consciousness and its “endless differentiation.”4 Some of these dimensions include the “objectivity of the scientist, the creativity of the artist, the unutterable experience of the mystic, and in everyday communication and action that makes up the ordinary human world.”5 The turn to the subject indicates a significant shift in the way we express our identity and subjectivity. When questions arise concerning personal identity, values, and commitments, the conscious subject couches their answer in the language of “I am.” This language expresses our self-understanding in terms of our successes and failures, our hopes and fears, our sufferings and joys, our awareness of ourselves as a knower and doer, our freedom and responsibility. By contrast, a previous language would have answered questions about identity by stating “man is a rational animal,” thus focusing on our common potential to be rational whether we are asleep or awake, children or adults, men or women, people with no learning or people who have attained a doctorate.6

Second, there is self-constitution. The transition to being a subject shifts our focus from the objects we make to the way that our discoveries, deeds, and decisions make us. By our decisions and actions, we change as subjects. This transition is a shift to subjectivity, from the object that we desire to know to the subject who acts. There is a shift from outcomes to process. Lonergan states:

There are from the very nature of the case two periods in human life. In the first period, one is concerned with objects, with coming to do things for oneself, to decide for oneself, to find out for oneself. This is all about objects. But this process of dealing with objects makes one what one is. One develops habits, becomes a certain kind of man or woman by one’s actions. But there is that reflective moment in which one discovers that one is not merely dealing with objects but also making oneself. There arises the question of finding out for oneself what one is to make of oneself, of deciding for oneself what one is to be, and of living in fidelity to one’s decisions. Such existential commitment is a disposal of oneself.7

Third, authoring one’s life as a subject will be more or less challenging depending on what may be required for authenticity to come about. There exists the simple person who lives a good and upright life in love with God, neighbor, and the land, aided by a close-knit community who follow the same path. He has pursued a way of life handed down from generation to generation and this way has worked for him. His authenticity is an unreflective imitation of a moral upbringing and religious obedience to the doctrines of faith which are touchstones for his love of God.

Alternatively, authenticity can be a hard-fought struggle to win back one’s life free of illusion, pretense, self-deception, false pride and arrogance, surrounded by a community that does not support an authentic life.8 Moreover, any form of emotional disturbance can prevent or slow down the desire for understanding, assured judgments, and good decisions. Anxiety, grief, fear, and threat can curtail the smooth flowing of our operations. All of these contexts bring enormous challenges, require courage, and invite hope in God. For this reason, Lonergan contrasts between becoming an authentic subject and the life of the drifter. The drifter goes along with the status quo and so “is content to think and say what everyone else is thinking or saying.”9 The individual as drifter has not developed. He has not yet chosen a path of self-discovery and not asked questions that search for the motivations of his action. He has not established a mind of his own and not yet cultivated the inward skills to critique factual and moral errors or prejudices. He has not yet found a will of his own. The drifter exists in a community that is more or less a light of integrity in its meanings and values. The community can maintain the drifter in his inauthenticity, preferring that he goes on performing the outworking of some distorted tradition just like everyone else does. In this case, both individuals and communities must transform.

Fourth, Lonergan succinctly states that self-transcendence moves us toward an authentic authoring of our lives.10 Self-transcendence is the process of going beyond the self that one is to the self that one may become. Through self-transcendence, we go beyond myths and illusions about reality and values and reach up for what is real and truly good. Self-transcendence happens when the innate operations or acts within human consciousness form the basis of all intelligent and responsible living. Lonergan points to degrees of self-tr...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Authoring Our Life, Telling Our Story
• Chapter 2: Signposts of the Interior Terrain
• Chapter 3: Religious Experience and Religious Conversion
• Chapter 4: Religious Conversion, Mentors, and Cinema
• Chapter 5: Religious Conversion and Christian Discipleship
• Chapter 6: Moral Conversion and Living for Values
• Chapter 7: Moral Conversion, Mentors, and Cinema
• Chapter 8: Affective Conversion and Feelings of Love and Commitment
• Chapter 9: Intellectual Conversion, Knowledge, and Reality
• Chapter 10: Psychological Conversion and Transformation
• Chapter 11: The Sickness of the Psyche, the Sickness of the Spirit, and Healing
• Chapter 12: The Interplay of Conversion and Ecology
• Chapter 13: Ecological Conversion and The Lord of the Rings
• Chapter 14: Touchstones of Ongoing Transformation
• Bibliography