Faith and Reason

The Possibility of a Christian Philosophy

Neil Ormerod, George Zachariah

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781506432649
• eBook ISBN:
  9781506405902
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The twentieth century witnessed considerable debate over the question of the possibility of a "Christian philosophy," particularly in light of the revival of Thomism initiated by the papal encyclical Aeterni Patris. Two major figures of that revival were Etienne Gilson and Bernard Lonergan, both of whom read Aquinas in quite different ways. Nonetheless, this work brings these two authors into conversation on the possibility of a Christian philosophy. Gilson was a great proponent of the term, and while Lonergan does not use it, he does speak of "Christian realism." Both display a lively interaction of faith and philosophical positions, while maintaining a clear distinction between philosophy and theology. Debates continue in the twenty-first century, but the context has shifted, with Radical Orthodoxy and new atheism standing at opposite ends of a spectrum of positions on the relationship between faith and reason. This work will demonstrate how the two thinkers, Gilson and Lonergan, may still contribute to a better understanding of this relationship and so shed light on contemporary issues.

3

Bernard Lonergan and the Possibility of a Christian Philosophy

Bernard Lonergan was one of the outstanding Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century. While his published outputs during his lifetime was relatively meagre, mainly his two major works, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding,^[1] and Method in Theology,^[2] these were of such depth and originality as to establish his standing among his peers. It is now only after his death, that the full range of his thinking is being made available through the publication of his Collected Works.^[3] There we can find his thought not only on philosophy and theology but on mathematics and logic, education and art, economics, as well as specialized theological studies on the Trinity, Christology, and grace. Given this range of outputs I cannot hope to cover all aspects of his work. In this chapter I shall focus on three aspects: Lonergan’s credentials as a Thomist; his understanding of the relationship between faith and reason, mainly as presented in his book, Insight and later writings; and finally how we can view Lonergan as a “Christian philosopher” as envisaged by both Gilson and Fides et ratio.

Years Reaching Up to the Mind of Aquinas

In the epilogue to his magnum opus, Insight, Lonergan speaks of “spending years reaching up to the mind of Aquinas.”^[4] The reference here is not just to the years of study of Thomist texts and their commentators during his training for the priesthood but more specifically to the period of his doctoral studies on the question of grace and freedom, published as a series of articles in Theological Studies, and his profound engagement with Thomas’s cognitional and epistemological theories, all undertaken in the context of the Trinitarian psychological analogy, also published as a series of articles in the journal, Theological Studies. Both were published as stand-alone volumes,^[5] and both have been republished in the Collected Works series published by the University of Toronto Press.^[6] The exegetical history of these various texts, which appeared in journal articles, book form, and in the final critical edition, is too complex to unravel here. For simplicity’s sake, I shall refer to the Collected Works editions as the definitive texts.^[7]

As Lonergan makes clear, this engagement was not just about gaining mastery of the works of a classic author. More significant than this “objective” achievement was the profound personal transformation that this engagement initiated: “On the one hand, that reaching had changed me profoundly. On the other hand, that change was the essential benefit.”^[8] Lonergan expresses that benefit in terms of “self-appropriation,” a sophisticated self-knowledge of one’s own cognitional operations. I shall return to this theme when we consider Insight in more detail below. For the time being I shall turn my attention to these two earlier projects and their contribution to understanding the “mind of Aquinas.”

Grace and Freedom

After undertaking undergraduate studies at Heythrop College in scholastic philosophy and teaching at Montreal, Lonergan was sent in 1933 by his superiors to study theology at the Gregorian University in Rome.^[9] After completing his ordination studies, he pursued doctoral work, also at the Gregorian, on the question of the relationship between grace and freedom. In undertaking this topic Lonergan was entering a long-standing debate between Jesuit and Dominican schools of Thomism that had promoted differing interpretations of Thomas on this question.^[10] The Jesuit (Molinist) school had stressed human freedom at the expense of divine sovereignty;^[11] while the Dominican (Banezian) school so stressed divine sovereignty as to threaten the reality of human freedom.^[12] Lonergan, a young Jesuit student, entered into this debate, with an open enough mind as to dismiss the Molinist approach within a few months of starting his study.^[13] His researches were also eventually to reject aspects of the Banezian position, but the road was not straightforward. Before exploring the nature of Lonergan’s resolution of this historical controversy, however, I would like to draw attention to the two distinct introductions of his project: one in the thesis version, the other in the later book version.^[14]

The thesis version begins with bemoaning the inability of theologians to find a suitable method that would resolve the long running debate between the Banezian and Molinist schools. Already at this early stage of his career Lonergan displays what becomes his life-long interest in theological method: “Unless a writer can assign a method that of itself tends to greater objectivity than those hitherto employed, his undertaking may well be regarded as superfluous.”^[15] To discover such a method he turns to consideration of the way in which speculative thought develops, proposing an “a priori scheme that is capable of synthesizing any possible set of historical data irrespective of their time and place,” drawn “solely from a consideration of the nature of human speculation on a given subject.”^[16] While the details of this a priori scheme need not detain us, they prefigure Lonergan’s interest in the turn to the subject, attending to the operations present within any process of “human speculation” in order to answer methodological questions.^[17] This approach allows him to view Aquinas’s contribution not only within an historical perspective, but within a personal process of Aquinas’s own speculative development.

The introduction to the book version takes a different tack. Rather than immediately raise issues of methodology, it begins with a recapitulation of the grace-nature debate. Beginning with Augustine’s debates with the Pelagians, and moving through Anselm and Peter Lombard, he identifies a pivotal moment in the contribution of Philip the Chancellor of the University of Paris, whose theoretical breakthrough of the formal distinction of grace and nature as two distinct orders paved the way for the systematic exposition of the question of grace and nature in the work of Thomas Aquinas.

While Augustine left a rich legacy of categories in relation to grace (operative, cooperative, actual, habitual, sufficient etc), his account of the grace-nature issue was marred by an empirical account of human nature. For Augustine, human nature was different before the fall, after the fall, and as redeemed in Christ. This referential fluidity creates a speculative problem. What does it mean, for example, to say that Christ took on our human nature? To which nature is it referring? And how do we conceive of the relationship between grace and freedom, when freedom would seem to mean something different in each variant of human nature? What the distinction of the two orders, grace and nature, made possible was the introduction of a more Aristotelian conception of human nature as a fixed metaphysical principle, constitutive of what it means to be human. It remains stable throughout the various states in which we might find ourselves, though the ability of this nature to express and realize its various potentialities may vary in each state. Lonergan refers to this theoretical breakthrough as the “theorem of the supernatural”:

It no more adds to the data of the problem than the Lorentz transformation puts a new constellation in the heavens. What Philip the Chancellor systematically posited was not the supernatural character of grace, for that was already known and acknowledged, but the validity of a line of reference termed nature. . . . But the whole problem lies in the abstract, in human thinking: the fallacy in early thought had been an unconscious confusion of the metaphysical abstraction “nature” with the concrete data which do...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Introduction
• The Debate over a “Christian Philosophy”
• Étienne Gilson and the Possibility of a Christian Philosophy
• Bernard Lonergan and the Possibility of a Christian Philosophy
• Lonergan and Gilson in Dialogue
• Contemporary Debates on Faith and Reason
• Bibliography
• Permissions Granted
• Index