Theology, Philosophy, and History: The Challenge of Bernard Lonergan and Etienne Gilson for the

New EvangelizationBy

Hugh Williams

“Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” Luke24:39

“…For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christdied for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he

was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures …… so we proclaim and so we have come to believe.” 1Corinthians 15. 1-11

Introducing the Conflict

In this paper I will argue that the real conflict between Bernard Lonergan and Etienne Gilson of some years past is still central to Catholic-Christian thought in its present state and so an examination ofthe nature of this conflict is important.1 It is equally important at some point to also ask if these two thinkers are fundamentally at odds, or is there also a complementarity that can be shown? One of the obstacles for this latter possibility is that Lonergan makes claims of primacy in philosophical explanation for his cognitional theory that Gilson would say is due only to an older more fundamental realist tradition of metaphysics.

A major part of this paper will attempt to sort out the technical natureof this disagreement. It will especially focus on where Lonergan’s damaging characterization of Gilson’s position needs to be countered. I will also attempt to explore possible areas of complementarity especially relevant for moving forward in Catholic-Christian thought. The most basic problem in Lonergan, in the Gilsonian view, is that thereis insufficient attention paid to being as “the act of existence”2. This notion

1 That this tradition has a diversity in thought and practice that often involves serious areas of philosophical disagreement, is not always readily acknowledged especially among its hierarchy which is responsible for unity. Alasdair MacIntyre as a philosopher working within this tradition has shown the importance of these disagreements in the tradition’s development. He shows that such disagreement and conflict though painful is not necessarily distructive of the overarching unity but may very well come to serve it well in time. (See Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Toronto: Rowan and Littlefield Publishers, 2009)

2 It is the meaning of this elusive term ‘being’ that is the central issue between Lonerganand Gilson. It is a term that is often used without an article in an attempt to capture for thought all that is, or the totality of the real, or at other times with an article soas to capture more precisely that in a particular thing which makes it to be a being,

1

is quickly lost sight of, or more aptly, is lost touch with, as he pursues an often brilliant and illuminating examination of the structureand capacity of human cognition. And yet in this brilliance, according to the Gilsonian view, there is a tendency towards subjectivism.3

Often then this debate between Lonergan and Gilson is summed up as between Gilson’s apparent tendency towards dogmatism and Lonergan’s apparent tendency towards subjectivism.4 Though these concerns may seem painfully theoretical, I will argue that they have serious implications still permeating Catholic-Christian thinking in a manner that has both practical and pastoral implications and thus remain relevant for the challenges presented by the recent call for The New Evangelization by the Church hierarchy.5

e.g., “the being of a thing”. It is this mysterious question of being as both “One and Many” somehow referring both to this totality of that which is real and to all individual beings as real existents that the italicized term being denotes. See Norris Clarke’ The One And The Many (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), especially pp.25-41 for a relatively clear introduction to this notion of being at the heart of this conflict between Lonergan and Gilson.3

? This theoretical notion of subjectivism is illustrated in the account of its practical and pastoral effects given in the next section. Here it is shown to be very much present in the contemporary discussion of the Easter events, a central and recurring theme in thispaper, where the resurrection of Christ is no longer considered to be an objective event that actually happened to Jesus in history, but instead some sort of subjective religious experience, albeit powerful, that happened in the minds and hearts of the early Christians. However, the Gilsonian charge of subjectivism against Lonergan is a complex philosophical issue that much of this paper hopes to elucidate and defend. For Gilson, it is closely related to his longstanding concern regarding philosophical idealism as most fundamentally an understanding of being as first the essence of an existent apprehended inreflective thought, in contrast to his dogmatic realism, which held being to be first the act of existence of an existent apprehended immediately in sense perception and expressed in existential judgement. The Gilsonian distinction can be further understood as that between being held to be most fundamentally the act of existence of the existent in contrast to the essence of the existent. 4

? Though Lonergan, ten years Gilson’s junior, was certainly aware and wrote directly of his work, there is no evidence that Gilson was directly aware of Lonergan’s work. What Gilson does do is develop an extensive criticism in his Thomistic Realism of the critical realist and transcendental Thomist ‘school” with which Lonergan often has been associated. (See Gilson’s Thomistic Realism And The Critique Of Knowledge (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986)).5

? The Roman Catholic Church has undertaken an enquiry and discussion of a new evangelization among its Bishops and members. In the preparatory documents the problem of ineffectivenessin evangelization and catechesis is clearly recognized as an ecclesiological problem that concerns the Church’s actual capacity to become a real community, a true fraternity, a living body and not a mechanical thing or institution. This means that evangelization is facing new and profound challenges and accepted practices are now in question. This situation requires, it is said, that the Church consider in an entirely new way how she proclaims and transmits the faith. Church authorities are calling for something like a Courtyard of the Gentiles – a free space for respectful dialogue with those persons of goodwill with whom there may be significant differences in belief and understanding. The Church then, it is said, should be preparing for such a dialogue that is not only inter-religiousbut is with people of goodwill for whom religion may be foreign. This dialogue is regarded

2

As we seriously consider this call for The New Evangelization, becoming conscious of the secularizing influences in our culture is inescapable. This is a central issue for our life and thought as believers today and this creative tension between Lonergan and Gilson, in a significant and perhaps fruitful way, symbolizes an important intellectual dimension of this tension and conflict.

Many Lonerganians speak passionately now about ineffectual thinking and talking because these human efforts, at least among Lonerganians, are not functionally ordered to any serious project of implementation. From the Gilsonian side there is recognition of the problem of ineffectual implementation because of what he has called subjectivism in thinking. Iwill argue that Gilson’s charge of subjectivism does apply to Lonergan in certain respects. To show this conclusively is a monumental task thatexceeds the purposes of this paper.6 My taking up of this charge againstLonergan, who without doubt is a great contemporary thinker in the Catholic-Christian tradition, is more modest. It is not a global charge but is directed to certain tendencies in Lonergan’s corpus, especially in his treatment of the notion of being.

A Case Illustration of the Conflict as a Challenge for Evangelization Today

The Canadian Lonerganian, Philip McShane, has argued that the thinking in most universities, especially in those concerned with the liberal arts, has not realized how the scientific revolution outshines the renaissance and the protestant revolution and everything else culturallysince the rise of Christianity. Even on the surface level, this is a very provocative comparison that carries a profound ambiguity. The “scientific revolution” is presented as outshining everything since “therise of Christianity” but it leaves hanging the question of the relationship between the Christian revelation and modern science and indeed modernity itself. 7 The implicit question contained in this claim is one that Etienne Gilson was also very much concerned with - that of the relationship of faith and reason and especially the as also part of any first step in evangelization. (See The New Evangelization For The Transmission Of The Christian Faith: Lineamenta, Synod Of Bishops; XIII Ordinary General Assembly (Rome: Vatican Documents, February 2, 2011.)).

6 A thorough examination of this issue in Lonergan, for instance, would involve a close critical reading of his Verbum:Word and Idea in Aquinas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), which we are unable to undertake at this time, in which he works out an interpretation of Thomas that provides an important basis for his cognitional theory.7 See Philip McShane’s Lonergan’s Challenge To The University And The Economy (1980), http://www.philipmcshane.ca/lonerganschallenge.pdf

3

relationship of theology and philosophy and more specifically the facility with which theology and philosophy had become separated from one another in the second half of the 20th C. He worried that this separation carried with it the serious risk of leaving faith without reason and reason without faith, which he believed would have serious consequences for Christianity and culture.8

In a recent "Easter" edition of our local Catholic weekly one reads the topical news article - Dramatic Jesus Discovery Lacks Hard Evidence and in this otherwise very good article, one reads the following statement – “Catholicshave always known the resurrection does not refer to a resuscitated corpse. Jesus was resurrectedas a spiritual body, just as all of us will be resurrected at the end of history regardless of the decay of our flesh and bones.”9In subsequent discussions I undertook with the author as to the meaning intended, I was told “Jesus was human and more than human at the same time. If (and it's a big if) there were bones, which could be positively identified as the bones of Jesus, would it change your faith? Would it mean He wasn't resurrected? My answer in this short review of Simcha Jacobovici's film is no. The resurrection is a mystery that cannot be disproved by bones.”

The article was based upon a viewing of Simcha Jacobovici’s documentary The Jesus Discovery that provocatively asked “what if” a tomb now under an apartment complex in Jerusalem actually contains the bones of Jesus and his family. The Catholic author of the combined news article and opinionpiece acknowledged he was drawn in by a specific question – “though it may be impossible to prove any particular ancient bone buried 2,000 years ago belonged to any individual, would scientific proof of the existence of bones belonging to Jesus change our faith?” The author’s answer was “No!” Christian faith does not rely on scientificproofs but rather on revealed truths. The Gospels reveal Christ rose from the dead but do not explain how it happened. The question of faith has never been how, but why and this question of the documentary primarily asks about the how. The author conceded “in attempting, perhaps awkwardly, to shift the focus to the spiritual reality of resurrection many readers thought I was denying the physical reality.” He insists that he was not.

Pope Benedict XVI has recently written in his Apostolic Letter on The New Evangelization that though there are many people and communities who have acertain faith, many have an imperfect knowledge of that faith.10 Clearlyour author was making at best a confusing claim that needed serious

8 Kenneth Schmitz, What Has Clio to Do with Athena? Etienne Gilson: Historian and Philosopher (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1987) p5.

9 See Michael Swan “Dramatic Jesus Discovery Lacks Hard Evidence” in The New Freeman (Saint John, NB: April 6/12), p.12. See also Michael Swan, “Dramatic Jesus Discovery documentary lacks hard evidence” in The Catholic Register (Toronto: April 1, 2012) and his “The Register’sResurrection mea culpa” in The Catholic Register (Toronto: April 26, 2012). 10 Pope Benedict XVI, Apostolic Letter on The New Evangelization (Vatican: September 21, 2010).

4

clarification and that lends considerable credence to the Pope’s concern, and the concern of Gilson’s many years before him. The article concerning the central Christian revelation and communicated widely in the Canadian Catholic media during the Easter period, clearly could contribute to an "imperfect knowledge" at best, if not actual ignorance and error on a critical point of fundamental doctrine regarding the "resurrection of the body". The Catechism Of The Catholic Church has an extensive section on this doctrine and speaks very clearly and plainly, about the astounding belief by Christians in the resurrection in the flesh of the particular mortal body of Christ.11 This means that indeed we are speaking of the mysterious and miraculous resurrection in the flesh, and not just "spiritually", of what indeed had been a corpse.

In our short exchange on this question the author asked, “if … there were bones which could be positively identified as the bones of Jesus, would it change your faith?” I responded that the more important and fundamental question is whether itwould change the faith of the Church? ... for what I hold as true in this area of concern is intimately related to what the Church holds as true ... and at a minimum, I believe, it would mean revisiting the Arianposition and its sources which are ancient.12

At this point in our exchange, the author offered a perspective that is highly relevant for the discussion that follows in this paper concerningthe relationship of Lonergan and Gilson. He argued, somewhat in the spirit of many Lonerganians, that this controversy we were dwelling on simply no longer “grips our scientific, post-enlightenment mind. In our time we can believe the divine includes the human, that the divine would invite us into God's life, that God could and did intervene decisively in history. We can believe all this if only we can acknowledge that the divine exists in the first place. We are stuck with our immediate reality and cannot admit eschatological reality. (The position I was taking with him, he continued) is a narrow view of what it means to be human that I would argue lays a perfect platform for a dualistic and Jansenist faith.”13 And somewhat exasperated he complained – “I'm not at all sure why you believe I'm advocating an allegorical reading of the resurrection.” With a Gilsonian stubbornness, I retorted, “because simply put, if there are the bones of Jesus in the tomb, then there is not the resurrection the 11 Catechism Of The Catholic Church, (Toronto: Doubleday, 1995) 992-1004.12 The heresy, condemned by the council of Nicea (325), which made the Son of God the highest of creatures, greater than us but less than God. See Richard McBrien Catholicism (New York: Harper Collins, 1994) p.1234.13 It is important to indicate that in the philosophy of religion there have been important developments that challenge this established viewpoint and assumption that ‘we can believe in the orthodox Christian revelation if only we can acknowledge that the divine exists in the first place’. Admittedly it has been long held that philosophically at least Christian revelation cannot be considered seriously until theism has been established. There is new work challenging this assumption arguing instead that it is possible that divine revelation constitutes evidence for the reality of God. Gilson, I believe, would be jubilant over this development in analytic philosophy, which was anticipated in his own extensive corpus. (Sandra Menssen and Thomas Sullivan, The Agnostic Inquirer: Revelation from a Philosophical Standpoint (Cambridge: W. B. Eermans, 2007).

5

Church holds to and has preached as orthodox truth. What we have is something else - allegory, metaphor .... and so on. To say the resurrection of Jesus is as real as can be even though the body (bones) remain(s) is simply not the full and coherent view of "real" in the Catholic-Christian sense, and thus the doctrine of bodily resurrection would be profoundly altered by the discovery of the bones of Jesus.”

In a later explanatory note the author wrote publically – “I’m sorry. In writing about a controversial documentary earlier this month Dramatic Jesus Discovery documentary lacks hard evidence, I never should have brought up the Resurrection in such an offhand way. I should never have imagined the Resurrection could be explained in a single paragraph of a newspaper article.”

Nevertheless, we do have to face up to the Lonergarian question of meaning, and ask what does ‘Jesus was bodily raised from the dead’ mean?The eminent Anglican historian and scripture scholar N. T. Wright reminds us of a profoundly important distinction between what he calls the ‘referent’ and ‘meaning’ of this sentence and claim.14 ‘Referent’ inthis instance means that the sentence ‘Jesus was bodily raised from the dead’ refers, whether one believes it or not, to an historical event that happened bodily to Jesus and not to events in the hearts and minds of his followers. This “referent” always would be Gilson’s first concernas a “crass realist” as he once referred to himself and by which he distinguished his position from subjectivism, which would lead one to befirst, if not exclusively, concerned with ‘events in the hearts and minds of believers’.15

Wright’s conclusion is that though there is no mathematical style proof,it is this referent as an historical account that Jesus was actually raised from the dead in the body on the third day after his execution that provides the best explanation for all the data available for serious scholarly study. In contrast, the meaning of the sentence and ofthe event referred to, which was Lonergan’s first concern, asks about what larger context does this sentence belong to – what larger narrative, what wider world of understanding?16 Wright is here considering what words, sentences, and stories mean because of the placethey occupy within a larger context of meaning – words within sentences,sentences within stories, stories within worldviews. He asks “What are

14See N. T. Wright, The Resurrection Of The Son Of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) pp.719-738. 15 What Has Clio to Do with Athena? p.7.16 In fairness to Lonergan, he provides an extraordinary and necessary reflection on the meaning, in this sense distinguished by Wright, of this orthodox belief in the final pagesof his major work Insight (Bernard Lonergan Estate, 1992) pp.709-751. My Gilsonian concern is that the “referent” if not given sufficient attention leaves us with “meaning” that canonly be grounded in a subjectivism, authentic or otherwise.

6

the universes of discourse within which this sentence, and the event it refers to, settle down and make themselves at home – and which at the same time, they challenge and reshape from within?”

For both Gilson and Lonergan, the Christian Revelation in its central claim is stupendous; it is unique and unheard of.17 It differs profoundly from the Socratic claim at the beginning of philosophy of a human soul somehow living a better life elsewhere, or from the more common immortality of the great person in historical memory treasured byhis admirers or disciples. The Christian claim is that this Jesus in hisflesh, blood, and bones rose in a new form to the same life that death had just destroyed. In honesty we must admit, as my author above admits indirectly at least, that there is a powerful natural and persistent protest at the faith this claim calls for. Indeed without such protest, we are in grave danger of reducing this revelation to grand legend or a facile supernaturalism as Wright’s work exhaustively documents. Thus there have been and are recurring attempts to eliminate the truth of theResurrection from the Jesus story, reducing it to the pious trickery of his followers. Modern efforts at best reduce it to only a claim of subjective intensity among believers explained psychologically as the result of a religious shock or the product of a primitive community’s desire for a religious cult. In summary, it is received as either individual or mass deception and the sooner Christian thought can purifyor resolve this claim so the modern mind can again become comfortable with Christianity, the better for everyone. Gilson staked his career andhis life in resistance to this tendency; Lonergan’s approach admittedly is more sophisticated in its attunement to modern sensibilities, but my claim in what follows is that without a more constructive engagement with Gilson, it is at risk of what Gilson called subjectivism.

Returning to Lonergan’s Notion of Being: A Cognitional Version of the One and the Many

In Insight, Lonergan begins his discussion of the notion of being by asserting that being is the objective of our pure desire to know and then he quickly turns away from the object of this desire to what I am arguing is his foremost interest - an analysis of the subject’s desire to know.18 This desire to know, he says, is the dynamic orientation of our questioning that carries forward the cognitional process of the critical and enquiring spirit of man. It is an impalpable but

17 Here I’m drawing closely from Romano Guardini’s powerful summation in his The Lord (Washington: Regnery Publishing Inc., 1954, 2011) pp.471-478. 18 Bernard Lonergan, The Notion of Being, Ch.12 in Insight (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997) pp.372-398. What follows is a concerted summary of his discussion of the notion of being from this section of Insight.

7

nonetheless powerful urge in man.

Lonergan then returns briefly to consider the object of the subject’s desire, which he acknowledges is other than the cognitional acts themselves and their satisfaction. Instead, the object is the content ofthese acts of the knowing subject and it is being that names this objective. Lonergan confronts the question – what is this objective being? Is it limited or unlimited, one or many? He points out that our answering this question has one source – the very function of our pure desire to know. It is what is known by the totality of our true judgments both completely concrete and universal. Our thinking then has as its purpose determining if what is thought actually exists. Thus the notion of being naturally goes beyond the merely thought to the questionof its existence – this takes the notion of being to be something prior to our thinking. Nevertheless, Lonergan asks if this notion of being results from an act of understanding – is it a concept that grasps some essence? His answer is no, that it does not result from a grasp of an essence rather it is a notion that is incomplete. It is a notion that perplexingly seems to abstract from nothing whatsoever.

As his enquiry progresses and encounters the challenges of clarifying this notion of being, Lonergan turns to an examination of Aristotle’s famous treatment of the question of being. In Aristotle he finds a similar unresolved ambiguity. Aristotle’s supreme question is the question of existence, which also is expressed as - what is being? This question in Aristotle’s account calls for understanding and a knowledge of the cause of being. This cause is immanent form because being in Aristotle is constituted by a substantial form. Thus being in Aristotle,argues Lonergan, is a collection of existing substances with their changing properties, and this being denotes the factually existent. However, for Aristotle this amounts to the reality of the substantial forms. This raises for Lonergan the further question of how does this philosophy account for being’s unity? When Aristotle asks what being is, he is assuming some conceptual content says Lonergan. This raises the important but still perplexing question of what act of understanding occurs prior to the formulation of this content? But Aristotle, in Lonergan’s view, cannot assign any specific act of understanding that results in conceptual content for this notion of being. This is because being can only be defined indirectly. There are nonetheless, the insights and acts of understanding that grasp intelligible form emergentin sensible data, and it is for this reason that Aristotle assigns form as the ontological ground of being in existent things. Lonergan concludes that the concept of being is the concept with the least connotation for essential meaning and yet the most denotation for actualexistents. However, it always includes some conceptual content since being in act always involves some affirmative judgment which provides acts of understanding that grasp forms emergent in sensible

8

presentations. But this means disparate and multiple conceptual contents. Therefore, Lonergan interprets Aristotle’s strategy for answering the question of being as one of by-passing the assigning of any conceptual content to the notion of being itself and instead assigning the ground of being in the general object of understanding as form. And since forms are many, this ground of being is variable and so if there is to be unity in being, it must then be the unity of a function of variable contents. Lonergan asks - what then are the variables within this single function? He argues that if we say these are form and matter, then Aristotle’s immaterial substance is not of theuniverse of being. This means for Lonergan that the variable accompanying form becomes the virtually unconditioned grasped by reflective understanding and affirmed by judgment. This in the most general case also becomes in Lonergan’s account, existence, actuality, or fact that combines with pure form or the compound of form and matter to constitute a being in act.

Lonergan’s criticism of this account, as it now stands in this analysis,is that it does not tell us how that relation emerges in our knowledge as a single notion, and so it does not adequately account for being as being this or that, and as well being the totality of existent things, i.e. a universe. When Aristotle asks what being is, it is a question concerned with the ground of being and his answer is substantial form asthe immanent cause of every being. However, Lonergan argues this leaves the problem of the unity of the notion of being. What then is common to every conceptual content? Lonergan’s answer is that it is the pure desire’s intention towards an unrestrictive objective. To develop this more adequate account means turning to Thomas. For Thomas, it is in and through essence that being has existence, and so being apart from essence is being apart from the possibility of existence – it is nothing.

Lonergan says Scotus viewed knowing as constituted by looking at being in some sense as opposed to judging, though there was no look in which being was or could be seen as the common content, and yet there was a common content in the object of every intellectual intuition as being, which was considered the minimal aspect of the real object at which the intellect looks. Much of metaphysics from Scotus to Hegel, in Lonergan’sassessment, is devoted to working out the possibility of knowing consisting at its root in looking. Lonergan insistently denies this possibility and instead he works on a rehabilitation of human rational consciousness that shows the unconditioned as a constitutive part of ourhuman judgment and how this pure desire to know is then the notion of being spontaneously operative in cognitional process, and being itself is the to-be-known tendency of this process.

Lonergan’s Treatment of Gilson: The Concept of Being

9

To further assist us in grasping Lonergan’s understanding of the notion of being, we turn to his criticism of Gilson, which centers upon what would appear to be very different approaches to, and understandings of the question of being.19 Lonergan engages Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge, Gilson’s most concerted effort to explicate his realist philosophy.20 Here he says Gilson’s opening to real being is through perception and that this is the basis for the objectivity of our knowing. This position is an immediate realism of fact. He then asks pointedly - just what is this fact of Gilson’s, which this entire realist philosophy is based upon? Over and above sensitive perception and intellectual abstraction there exists for Gilson an intellectual vision of the concept of being in any sensible datum and it is this concept of being apprehended in sensible perception that is predicated in perceptual judgments of existence. This according to Lonergan is the fundamental position of Gilson’s realist epistemology. It is because of this position, that Gilson’s thought is so troubled by the problem of the bridge between abstraction and actual existence, where because the things of thought are not the things of actual existence there must be some common ground of contact between thinking and that which is thoughtabout, for this contact cannot be achieved by inference or deduction. But Gilson’s fact of perceived being is not evident to everyone nor is its sheer givenness a fact for every philosopher. Instead it is vague and its accessibility is restricted, and furthermore even if it was to be explicated more precisely and was more universally accessible, it could still be characterized, in Lonergan’s view, as mere phenomena. Therefore this immediate realism of Gilson, Lonergan asserts, is dogmatic and is in need of mediation. There is, he says, serious need for a transcendental method that better explicates the conditions of this realism’s possibility. Such a philosophical approach would involve a much fuller appreciation of the wisdom of Aristotle and Thomas, which according to Lonergan’s reading as we saw above, is deeply oriented to anotion of being as a whole that involves an unrestricted viewpoint that is both basic and ultimate. This viewpoint, says Lonergan, somehow encompasses a maximum field of vision from a determinate standpoint and is therefore inclusive of both the objective and subjective poles. The objective pole is an unrestricted view while the subjective pole is the practice of the transcendental method determining the ultimate and basicwhole. As Lonergan explains it, for Gilson, being or the concept of being is

19 See Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Frederick Crowe, Robert Doran, eds.(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988) pp.188-204. What follows is a close reading of this particular text, which contains Lonergan’s most incisive argument against Gilson’sexistentialist notion of being.

20 Etienne Gilson, Thomist Realism And The Critique Of Knowledge (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986).

10

“seen” in the sense data whereas being for Lonergan is more properly understood as what is asked about with respect to the data of sense. Being is more properly understood as present in the questions raised by the data. So rather than what is seen in the data, being is what is intended by going beyond the data in our very enquiry and questioning. This questioning leads beyond the already known to the unknown to be known. This deep and fundamental concern for questioning in Lonergan in contrast to Gilson’s concern for existential fact, forces us to conceivehuman intelligence not on the analogy of sense but more properly in terms of intelligence or intelligent enquiry itself. Lonergan even suggests that Gilson’s notion of being as an object of perception, is being in which essence and existence are only notionally distinct.

In Lonergan’s estimation, there is no real problem of the extra-mental or of the bridge, i.e., of getting outside the mind, for as soon as a question is raised being is naturally intended and this being somehow includes everything and so everything is already within the minds intention and it simply cannot be considered as only a modification of one’s own thinking mind as Gilson worries. Subjectivity in its authenticaction is somehow already outside in the realm of “being-in-itself” in general. 21

With Lonergan’s lead, many Lonerganian’s have tended to characterize Gilson’s position as follows - philosophy cannot begin with the subject and expect to connect with the real world of things. This problem of thebridge from “in here” to “out there” is solved by asserting dogmatically

21 See Richard Liddy, Startling Strangeness: Reading Lonergan’s Insight (Toronto: University Press of America, 2007), see especially pp.18-22; 141-148. Liddy’s own rendering of Lonergan’s argument for how objectivity is obtained through authentic subjectivity is that somehow there is objectivity if there are distinct beings some of which both know themselves and know others as others. A purification of our thinking about our own thinking is needed to properly conceive the objectivity of our knowing of which there are three aspects: 1) experiential objectivity provided by the given data (through attending); 2) normative objectivity rooted in the intrinsic demands of intelligence and reasonableness as formulated by logic and method and 3) absolute objectivity rooted in the grasp of the virtually unconditioned in the judgment as to what is so and as differentiated from what we feel, imagine, or desire as in what is so for us. In absolute judgment the content of judgment is absolute – that is, beyond the relativity to the subject making the claim and his/her context in its contingency. It is the affirmation of the truth of some thing or event and of its eternal unchangeable necessary validity. It is by this aspect of objectivity that knowledge becomes public beyond its relativity to its source and now is available to others and is governed by the principle of non-contradiction. According to Liddy, in Lonergan’s theory of objectivity there is no longer a problem of the bridge, of getting from “in here” to “out there”, because with judgments ruled by our cognitional structure as acts of knowing both objects and subjects, we are already on both sides of the ‘river’ and in no need of a bridge. Absolute objectivity is the connection of subject and object – it is the positing of the absolute realm in which real distinctions/differences occur between objects, one of which is also a subject. This knowing subject may have an experiential sense of oneself, but to know in truth there needs to be understanding and judgment. This means self-knowledge that is objectified because it is an authentic subjectivity – this is to know absolutely.

11

that there is an intuition of being that is an immediate perception of existing reality. It is usually claimed that Gilson asserts that there exists an intellectual vision of the concept of being in any sensible datum and that it is this concept that is predicated in perceptual judgments of existence. Philosophical realism is then only possible on the basis of this immediate perception of being. Gilson assumed that themind can only reach reality by taking a look at it. And in Gilson’s case, it is a view that in Thomism has tended to block learning even creating a Catholic ghetto alienating the Catholic community from the rest of the modern intellectual world.

At this point we can ask does Lonergan actually achieve what he claims to achieve - a successful resolution of Gilson’s problem of the “bridge”. Important Thomists such as Norris Clarke, while sympathetic toLonergan’s project, nevertheless prefer to pursue and develop the outer realist path as forged unrelentingly by Gilson. They do so because in effect the inner path of Lonergan remains, in their view, essentially phenomenological and only “surmounts” the restricted claim “it is so forme” for the ontological claim “it is so” by its own version of the dogmatism ascribed to Gilson. Clarke for one argues that the outer path of Gilson and his followers that begins with sense perception reaches towards the ontological source of all being as existential act and thus ultimately is more comprehensive, and yet, implicitly if not explicitly,leaves plenty of room for the incorporation of Lonergan’s inner path of cognitive reflection and rehabilitation. Though Lonergan’s transcendental Thomism may be seen as correcting Gilson’s excessively extroverted approach to the question of being, taken by itself, this inner path has its own dogmatism, one-sidedness, and incompleteness.22

The Gilsonian Rejoinder: An Existential Version of the One and the Many

Lonergan’s interpretation of Gilson’s notion of being above, is based largely on the following text extensively quoted below from Gilson’s

22 See Norris Clarke, The Philosophical Approach to God (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University, 1979) p. 33. Gilson, for instance, would never have subscribed to a settlement of an issueof self-deception by simply “looking”. This is a complete misunderstanding and even misrepresentation of his position by the Lonergan camp as we will see shortly. Instead, hewould insist as a matter of principle that the fact that such issues can be resolved is because there is knowledge of the real and of the truth of the thing whether this be a simple object or a more complex situation. There is the ultimate ground of knowledge in real being and it is an immediate and grounding evidence that is also the basis for our inferential and reflective knowing that Lonergan is most concerned with in his cognitionaltheory. We will show this to be an important difference in emphasis between these two thinkers that has implications for Catholic-Christian thought, and which can only be adequately illuminated through illustrative examples as we attempted to show in our introduction.

12

Thomist Realism.23 Gilson’s argument is difficult and even confused in places and has been a source of serious misunderstanding as we will see in what follows. It is, we argue, the basis of Lonergan’s misunderstanding where he portrays Gilson’s realism as founded naively and wrongly on the intellect’s immediate grasp of the concept of being, and that therefore knowing in its most fundamental ground is somehow the“seeing” of this concept in the sense data. The particular problematic passages quoted by Lonergan in his own extensive discussion of Gilson’s position are both bolded and underlined for reference purposes.24

As a matter of fact, St. Thomas approaches the problem in a different way. What he says about being is so clear, when his formulations are taken in their full meaning, that none may doubt for a single moment the manner in which, for him, the human intellect apprehends the most immediate of its objects. Most writers never tire of citing the formula Thomas borrowed from Avicenna in which he says that being is the first thing encountered by the intellect. But the terms St. Thomas uses to describe the apprehension of being are not sufficiently remarked upon. This first of all the objects of thought presents to the greatest degree the character of being apprehended immediately through contact with sensible things. We will have further occasion to remark upon this characteristic later. Now, we have just studied the nature of intellectual apprehensions ofthis sort. They form a class St. Thomas calls “sensible by accident”. This means that, although they are intelligible in themselves, the objects of these apprehensions are in a way seen, that is sensed, because no intellectual operation is interposed between their conception and the sensible perception in which the intellect apprehends them.This much is certain, then, from the beginning of this new enquiry: the apprehension of being by the intellect consists of directly seeing the concept of being in some sensible datum. For the moment, let us try to clarify the nature of what it is that the intellect apprehends when it conceives the first principle. To begin with we must distinguish two operations of the intellect. The first, which is simple, is the means by which the intellect conceives the essences of things; the other, which is complex, affirms or denies these essences of one another and is called judgment. Ineach of these two orders there is a first principle: being in the order of apprehension of essences, the principle of contradiction in the order of judgments. Moreover, these two orders are arranged hierarchically, for the principle of contradiction presupposes the understanding of being…Thus the principle which is first in the order of simple apprehension is also absolutely first, since it is presupposed by the principle of contradiction itself. In short, the first principle, in the fullest sense is being.(p197)

This is why, in the final analysis, realism is an all-or-nothing proposition. The touchstone of realism is it’s definition of man’s essence as “rational animal”, and our knowledge is established as real by the existential act, which makes the essence exist as what it is. It is not enough to give mere verbal assent to the proposition that truth is an adequation of understanding and being. To give this formula its full realist meaning, we must go beyond the schema in which a being is reduced to an essence, which is itself reduced to

23 Gilson, Thomist Realism, pp.197-205.24 Bernard Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Frederick Crowe, Robert Doran, eds. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988) pp.188-204.

13

the quiddity expressed in a definition. St. Thomas’ whole noetic invites us to go beyond that, and he himself said so in so many words, although it must have appeared self-evident to him: a being’s act of existence, not its essence, is the ultimate foundation of what we know to be true about it.(p.204)

…

We thus find ourselves led on to the question whose answer we are seeking, and it is now possible to see where the answer will be found. In order for man to perceive being with his intellect, an existent must be given to him, an existent perceptible to his sensibility. Therefore, it would be incorrect to pose the problem only from the point of view of the existential judgment, for before we can affirm existence it is necessary to apprehend it. It would be equally incorrect, however, to seek the cause of our knowledge of the existence of some object in a species intelligibilis of actual existence. Whatever intelligible species the intellect is provided with, it can only conceive universals. But the intellect is able to see being in the sensible objects we perceive. The continuity of sense and intellect in the knowing subject permits us to do this. Now, it is certain, and everyone can prove this for himself, that our idea of being is often accompanied only by vague images, sometimes only by verbal images alone, which do not direct the judgment to any concrete existent. At other times we think of objects as existents, but without doing more than applying the abstract concept of existence to images which represent the objects. However, when theconcept of being is abstracted from a concrete existent perceived with the senses, the judgment which predicates being of this existent attributes being to it according to the way it is conceived by the intellect, namely, as “seen” in the sensible datum from which it is abstracted.(pp.204-205)

Though we can agree with Lonergan, that Gilson’s account of realist knowing is in places unclear, misleading, and therefore in need of development, it nevertheless must be said that Lonergan underestimates the importance of grasping carefully being as most fundamentally the “act of existence” of the thing. Armand Maurer commenting on Etienne Gilson’s last written work, Three Quests in Philosophy, notes how Gilson can at times be read as saying that the basic matter of philosophical reflection is the concept and that such reflection always asks, “What isit?”25 This question becomes a complex problem of defining again and again the meaning of the concepts one is using – what each concept is initself and how it is distinct from other concepts. However, Maurer points out in his introduction that we would seriously misunderstand Gilson here in this late work and even in earlier works, if we were to interpret him as equating philosophy with a conceptualism that somehow abandons his life long dogmatic realism for which he was famous. Maurer remarks how Gilson later in Three Quests says clearly that philosophy onlybecomes really interesting when it comes to focus on reality – the real thing and the real knowledge of that thing. As a summary statement, Maurer takes this to be consistent with the Gilson he knew so well.

25 Etienne Gilson, Three Quests in Philosophy, (Toronto: Pontifical Institute Of Mediaeval Studies, 2008) pp. viii – ix.

14

Maurer as one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Gilson’s work has shownrepeatedly that for Gilson the intellect draws its data from sense perception and never thinks without images. Thus the elaboration of the notion of being involves a progressive effort of abstraction where the role of judgment is stressed in the apprehension of existence because heactually wants to avoid the reduction of existence to a form or essence which can be the object of simple apprehension. Esse as the act of existence is not a form but the actuality of form. This inevitably points to the radical otherness of esse in creatures from form or essence. Maurer points out how many of Gilson’s critics, and here we would include Lonergan, were not very understanding in their central criticism and so they proceed with serious misunderstandings of Gilson and even more seriously of the notion of being itself.26

For Gilson and his followers, there is a definite distinction between thing and its being, between what it is and that it is. 27 We then can askif this distinction is real in the sense of being a distinction in reality independent of the mind that thinks it? In Gilson and classical Christian metaphysics more generally this question needs careful consideration, because the importance of the object of metaphysical enquiry as understood by Gilson very much depends on the answer. In answering this question in the positive, Gilson holds that the proper understanding of being involves two major senses of being – being as existence in reality and being as existence in cognition. Lonergan in contrast though having realist sympathies and accepting the practical reality of things does not accept, as Gilson did, that there is a directand immediate perception of being as the act of existence, or that this perception of being as the act of existence also involves an immediate intellectual cognition.

Gilson attempted to explain, not always clearly, that to attain knowledge of the existence of another being involves simultaneously botha simple apprehension and an existential judgment. However, this existential judgment is not given in the concept of another being as an abstraction of simple apprehension because such judgment is not a simple

26 Lonergan was much more a speculative thinker and was perhaps more sensitive to modern intellectual concerns and controversies than perhaps Gilson was as a medievalist. But as Fergus Kerr has pointed out, Lonergan was never a scholar of medieval thought in the manner of Gilson, his influences were significantly different and thus as he came to focushis own project on human cognition, he may have been prone to overlook and miss some of the important subtleties in the extensive arguments on how best to understand being. Lonergan’s review of Gilson’s famous Being and Some Philosophers, (see Theological Studies 11 (1950), pp.122-125) before the publication of Insight, is sympathetic and favourable whereas his view of Gilson’s later Thomist Realism is in contrast highly critical. 27 In what follows there is a close reading of Joseph Owen’s An Elementary Christian Metaphysics (Houston: Center For Thomistic Studies, 1985) see especially pp.1-67. This careful work inone place presents a much clearer treatment and development of the more technical issues concerning the question of being that proved, in our view, to be the source of Lonergan’s serious misunderstanding of Gilson and of existential Thomism more generally.

15

but rather a complex apprehension involving a dynamic grasp of the existential composing of real being – a composing consisting of both causes and principles.28 Thus this being of sensible things is fully diverse and shares in both specific and generic traits but also involvesindividualizing characteristics. And yet there is a wider application ofdiversity, for being is not a common nature perceivable in a simple apprehension or abstraction, for being is a new composing in every instance and is not a common feature to be grasped immediately as a universal feature. Where simple apprehension can be understood as a passive viewing of a relatively fixed and abiding nature that supports the “look” Lonergan attributes to Gilson’s naïve immediate grasp or intuition of being, existential judgment is essentially active where itsapprehension of the being of the thing involves no such “snapshot” or “look”.29

Existential judgment involves the apprehension of the composing subject by the active mind expressed in a proposition and this involves the immediate grasp of the being of the thing. All judgment of course is notrestricted to this immediate grasp of the being of the thing, for there is also the judgment of the reasoning process involving the inferences of logic. Here judgment involves mediation and there is the possibility of error. But Gilson insisted that there is no error where judgment actively and immediately firstly apprehends the being of the thing. All subsequent mediated judgments are grounded in this original apprehensionof immediacy. There are serious philosophical difficulties, Gilson contended, in any failure to see being as the act of existence as more fundamental than 28 This distinction between causes and principles and their respective roles in metaphysics is made by Kenneth Schmitz’s in his paper “Metaphysics: Radical, Comprehensive, Determinate Discourse” in Paul O’Herron, ed., The Texture Of Being: Essays in First Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007, (1983)), pp.3-20. Schmitz argues that it is important to distinguish among principles those that are actuality-principles that in themselves are actual and the source or cause of actuality and serve as a power within achieved actuality because it is from these principles that other principles of intelligibility come about while carrying actuality tonew and different levels. There is an openness to new development either because of an original fund of actuality or because of the continuing influx of creativity from an actuality-principle. Thus Schmitz argues that these principles are existing agents and sources of actual determinations. They are contextualized individuals at work in shaping the order of orders. These principles of actuality as contextualized individuals are not to be reduced to the individualized individual so that the non-individual factors are under valued. For example in Aristotle’s metaphysics an individual as a primary substance is always an individual of some definite kind. This view of first principle takes us beyond a theory of meaning that divides or separates the particular and universal in such a way so that the universal is separated from the individual thereby suppressing the non-individual aspects of the individual. It is these non-individual aspects of the individualthat are the context in which the individual is actually real, in which it acts and exists, where it is of a kind, of a community, a culture, and a society.29 Here again we believe the work of Kenneth Schmitz that is examined closely below goes along way to showing how Lonergan and Gilson’s differences can be reconciled on this central issue of being and knowledge.

16

nature and as known originally or firstly through a much deeper act of cognition. Thus any effort to restrict the term evident to what only appears through the concepts of simple apprehension is unjustified and is its own form of dogmatism.30

Does this Gilsonian account begin to show us then how it is possible to have a concept for a thing and another concept for its being and that this distinction is much more than a mere verbal one? If there is to be a study of being insofar as things are beings, then there must be some object of study that is in some manner universal – being must be in some manner a universal notion. But how can being as the act of existence be one in this universal sense and yet be diversely many at the same time? There is then a profound difference between this notion of being and ourother concepts for it is not obtained through the normal abstraction of simple apprehension but rather through an active composing. It is apprehended instead through an active composing that is lost touch with in the conceptualization of being, for the concept of being does not showthat anything actually exists. This original meaning escapes being as a concept, even when it is conceived as infinite as in Lonergan, there areno grounds for saying it really exists. It is a notion that does not manifest its own actuality which is always other than itself and which can only be grasped through the act of existential judgment.

30 The most basic point at issue for Gilson’s realism is the epistemological question of what is the object of real knowledge? Gilson’s realism answers that we know things in themselves as external to our own minds, and that this knowing is simply and directly evident in our intelligible cognitive experience. This fundamental metaphysical principle of realism simply cannot be subject to much critical analysis beyond asking one’s interlocutor to call to mind their own experience and assumptions or perhaps clarifying that we are not debating the quality of one’s mental representations or their correctness.What is at issue is the more basic question of principle - what object is known? The realist answers that it is the thing itself as a real thing external to my own mind. This is not a claim of exhaustive knowledge or of infallibility even though we reject the (relativist) view that a plurality of viewpoints on the nature of the human being, for example, is in principle required to overcome an alleged inadequacy and distortion in our individual knowing perspectives. Indeed it is only because we are in knowing relation withthe truth of things that we can make sense of error and distortion and in turn develop better interpretations of things. So the realist who understands his position with the aidof this classical Thomistic metaphysical tradition has no need of an apologetic that wouldcontend with those who, it is believed, sell short the human capacity to know the truth ofthings. This Thomism and its philosophy of being and of the human person as a knowing beingas well as a reflective thinker, it is held by Gilson, simply gives us the best account ofour human experience that we actually live by, or can live by. It really is the best effort “to tell it like it is” or to say what we know, not in a foundational epistemic sensebut in a more fundamental noetic sense. (This distinction between the epistemic and noetic in knowing is elaborated upon in fn. 63 below.)See also Hugh Williams, “The Importance of Intermediate Thinking in Turning from Academic Specialization to Thought in the Service of One’s Community: A Catholic-Christian Perspective” in Science et Spirit: Revue de philosophie et de theologie (Ottawa: Dominican University College) Vol.62, May-Dec., 2010 pp.405-419.

17

This is why it is “act” and “perfection” that serve as the technical terms that designate this function of being apprehended in judgment. Beingis a perfection that makes a thing exist, and is the act, which a thing enjoys. Technically being is conceived as the act or perfection of a subject. It is universalized in the concept of act or perfection withoutadding any special conceptual content of its own and is distinguished only in reference to what is obtained or apprehended in the judgment that expresses this act or perfection that makes a thing be, whereas in itself without reference to judgment the concept does not express anything proper to being.

Thus the universality of this notion is what makes it different from nothing. It is a notion or concept that remains open to the real existence of something and it can be given that meaning only through a new judgment. This knowledge is not found in the concept detached from the sensible perception of its existence. Thus common being conceptualizes the being grasped in the act of judgment, but as a concept applied on its own strength to another thing it does not carry with it knowledge of that thing’s actual existence and yet it can represent any other act of being known through a new existential judgment. By a firm focus on this act, it can shine a light on its consequences and thus be used in reasoning so as to enable as its subject the development of a metaphysics of being. This science though being in a sense concerned with the highest level of generality and abstraction is also intimately concerned with that which is also most concrete in things.

Philosophy, History, and Theology

The philosophical differences between Lonergan and Gilson in their respective treatments of the question of being, we hope to show, have implications for the state of Catholic-Christian thought today. It is a challenge to characterize this difference simply – one way of doing so is by highlighting Lonergan’s preoccupation with the subjective in his cognitional theory and Gilson’s preoccupation with the objective throughhis existential understanding of being. There clearly is the risk of misleading oversimplification and even misrepresentation in this characterization. Nevertheless, we have attempted to illustrate concretely the important catechetical and pastoral implications in our discussion of a recent popular treatment of the doctrine of the resurrection and of the Easter story. Clearly much is at stake intellectually, morally, and religiously. I argue that a study of the work of Etienne Gilson and its comparison with a contemporary Catholic-Christian thinker like Bernard Lonergan who has contributed immensely tothe present concern for, and preoccupation with, the human subject, can assist us in sorting out this issue.

18

Another approach to the issue is to consider Gilson’s views on the inter-relationship of philosophy, history, and theology. Gilson held that Catholic-Christian philosophy was ultimately inseparable from theology. He believed the facile separation he was witnessing especiallyduring the second half of the 20th C would eventually result in a faith without reason and a reason without faith.31 This central concern arose from and was resolved in his study of history. Thus for Gilson’s own project, there was an integral interrelationship between philosophy, history, and theology with history and philosophy, in the Catholic-Christian tradition, ultimately ordered to serve theology.

How does Gilson understand history? Kenneth Schmitz has attempted to answer this somewhat circuitously by beginning with Gilson’s famous realism and its metaphysical restlessness, which Gilson himself acknowledged to be at times “crass”.32 This realism has strong Aristotelian roots and insists on the sensory origin and basis of human knowing. It places primary emphasis on the encounter with real individuals in our common sense experience. Despite this realism’s strong Aristotelian influences, it is transformed profoundly by Christian revelation, which according to Gilson, has objective historical import. This was a view of history as much more than a body of empirical facts, where divine intervention in history is regarded as both historical deed and revelation. For Gilson this meant recognizing these divine events as the most powerful transforming agency in the history of human thought, much more powerful than any philosophical idea. This means that the canon of scripture is as important as the canon of philosophical logic, that the testimony of apostolic witness isas important as the evidence of impersonal facts, and that the faith that provides the context for reasoned conclusions is as important as the reasoned conclusions themselves. This centrality given to Christian revelation in Gilson’s project remains a highly controversial, complicated, and sensitive issue of vital importance for understanding this conflict between Lonergan and Gilson and their respective followers.

Though Gilson acknowledged that strict philosophical claims must be based upon the methodical discourse of philosophical reason alone, he held firmly to the view that there were evidences that exceeded the capacity of human reason to illumine exhaustively. For example, all human beings upon achieving sufficient emotional maturity eventually realize that there are in our inter-subjective relations qualities of both affection and disaffection that simply are beyond any exhaustive 31 See Kenneth Schmitz, What Has Clio to Do with Athena? Etienne Gilson: Historian and Philosopher (Toronto:Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1987) pp 1-24.

32 Ibid, p.7.

19

analysis of their grounds. However, this does not disqualify these affections and moods from philosophical reflection, and their usage in philosophical discourse need not necessarily diminish the rationality ofthe reflections. The central Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body, though not in itself a doctrine based upon philosophical truth, is at least in its effects, as we will see below, rightly susceptible to both careful historical and philosophical reflection.

Gilson’s longstanding defense of our sensible experience as a basis for knowledge was not in the service of any strict empirical philosophy but instead in the service of the concrete understood as the ontological reality of individuals as members of a community of existents, some of which involve a spiritual dimension in their composition. Kenneth Schmitz as a contemporary interpreter of Gilson, has carefully observed that it has been the recovery of this opaque yet luminous concreteness that has been an imperative for much of recent modern philosophical thought. The issue, he says, is the opening up of the realm of space andtime for the fullness of the spirit in modern life. This involves a reopening of fundamental discourse or metaphysics to both the fully human and the fully divine. Schmitz’s important insight into the development of Gilson’s thought is that though his commitment to the concrete was expressed initially as a defense of the sensible in knowingand of the individual existent in reality, this understanding becomes eventually deepened in an appreciation for both the personal and the ontological. This deeper appreciation, for Gilson, came from his study of actual history and especially the history of philosophy as acted out in the working lives of real philosophers.33

It is then, I propose, the historical treatment of Christian revelation and of the resurrection in particular that can help us to see more clearly the pastoral implications of the work of these two Christian philosophers. Lonergan’s work is much more sensitive to the challenges of inter-religious dialogue and cultural pluralism than one finds anywhere in Gilson’s work. And Lonergan’s work has long been held to provide important and perhaps unprecedented guidance for the complexities in any effective transcultural mediation of meanings and values. Lonergarians have argued that the complexity of his approach neither compromises on the demands of truth nor neglects the very real claims of difference. His theology envisages different religions as different expressions of a common core experience that identifies them as religions. He appeals to an experience of mystery in a way that involves a generous acceptance of a heterogeneous array of experience, which clearly would challenge Gilson’s stubborn orthodoxy. Lonergan treats these experiences as very similar to that of sanctifying grace inthe Christian tradition, as first an experience of the gift of God’s love that is subsequently objectified in various theoretical categories.33 Ibid, pp. 13-14.

20

Lonergan has argued that before this experience enters the world of discourse mediated by language and meaning, religion as the prior word of God speaks to us by flooding our hearts with divine love. He writes, “This always prior word pertains to the unmediated experience of the mystery of love and awe – this always antecedent gift in its immediacy, withdraws one from the diversity of history, cultures, out of the world mediated by meaning and into a world of immediacy in which image and symbol, thought and word, lose their relevance and even disappear.”34 Ivo Coelho recently remarks on the looseness in Lonergan’s discussion ofGod’s love, and of being in love with God, and suggests that a universalist notion of religion eventually emerges in Lonergan’s theology. This was for Catholic-Christian theology quite new at the timeand is seen now by many to respond more appropriately and more adequately to the demanding pressures of cultural and religious pluralism than one can find room for in Gilson’s more traditional Christian philosophy.35

The concern from the Gilsonian perspective is that there is a subtle distancing of theology from history in Lonergan’s reflections that we will argue has serious consequences.36 This move may have good intentions because of the obvious differences in these disciplines and the fact that they should not and cannot be reduced to one another. However, if we are to confront the Christian revelation in its historical origins, we cannot avoid the interrelationship between history and theology. N. T. Wright argues convincingly that the avoidance or evasion of this interrelationship is itself a philosophicaland theological position of sorts, and to rely upon the notions of mystery and reflective transcendence to promote this position of separation is simply to restate, often implicitly, the Christian challenge of explicating the nature of this interrelationship. Wright clearly outlines the intellectual context that no doubt influenced Lonergan’s approach – the massive efforts of historical-critical scholarship to deconstruct the events surrounding the resurrection and the unavoidable pressure on any scholar desiring to be taken seriously, to reduce to the mundane what actually happened. Historical investigation was overwhelmingly to yield only skeptical results and thus was most likely to be damaging for the faith of Christians.

In this intellectual context, it was natural for most Christian theologians and scholars to despair of historical enquiry as an aide to Christian faith. Philosophically this has had the effect of moving many 34 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), p.112.35 Ivo Coelho, “In Some Sense Transcendent Or Supernatural” presented at the 39th Annual Lonergan Workshop at Boston College: The Promise of Vatican II After 50 Years, June 17-22 2012. Coelho dates this development in Lonergan’s public work around 1967.36 See N. T. Wright, The Resurrection Of The Son Of God (Mineapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) see especially pp.5-10. In this section we are following closely Wright’s important arguments insights and arguments on the interrelationship of history and theology.

21

theologians, albeit subtly and with considerable sophistication, as in Lonergan’s case, to concentrate on the subjective significance of revelation and the resurrection in particular rather than upon its objective historical significance. It is the Christ of religious experience that becomes most important for religion and not the historical Jesus. But orthodox Christians, such as Gilson and Maritain, have seen clearly that this move can lead to an abandonment of essentialChristianity with perilous pastoral consequences. Orthodox Christianity has fought and continues to fight to hold two things together – belief in the historical Jesus and belief in the continuing communion and encounter with his mystery. The historical and experiential are then to be held together as complementary aspects of orthodox Christian faith, because if the truth of the historical events and particularly of the Easter event, no longer matter then the experiential dimension becomes agroundless subjectivism.37

Jacques Maritain, a contemporary of Gilson’s and a Thomist who shared Gilson’s serious reservations about transcendental Thomism’s subjective preoccupations, also considered these tactics in relation to the philosophical challenges of modern day pluralism.38 Maritain cautioned that there is the risk of ignoring the demands of the speculative order of truth. The desire for practical accord brings with it the temptation to ignore or forget speculative convictions that may be in conflict, or to dilute and hide the differences for the sake of the appearance of accord. For example, the more we associate with non-Christians (or even Christians who hold differing or deviant interpretations of fundamental doctrines) the more we as Christians need to strengthen our distinct andcentral convictions when we find ourselves at the edges or margins of our tradition divided in the speculative order of truth and fundamental principle which, according to Maritain, must be adhered to and served.

Richard McBrien acknowledges that in the pre-Vatican II theological understanding, the resurrection is the strongest evidence of Jesus’ messianic claims.39 New Testament studies today, he says, still understand it as central to Christian faith but as a beginning and not the end of the story. For there are serious questions that challenge itsobjectivity. No one actually saw the resurrection – there were no eye witnesses to the resurrection as an event, thus we only know it through its effects. He then asks, is it then an historical event? “No”, he says, if by historical event one means an event that could have been photographed as it was occurring or that a disinterested person could have observed happening. And yet, he continues, to concede that the

37 Ninian Smart offers an excellent summary review of some of the central philosophical issues involved. See his Philosophers and Religious Truth (London: SCM Press, 1964) pp.25-49.38 Jacques Maritain, The Peasant of the Garonne (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), pp. 64-125.39 Richard McBrien, Catholicism (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994) pp.429-439.

22

resurrection was not a historical event (open to scientific investigation and verifiable by neutral witnesses) does not mean that the resurrection was not a real event for Jesus with historical implications for others. The disciples were convinced that they had indeed seen him so that for them the appearances are historical. And it would have been very difficult from a psychological point of view to synchronize such a wide range of individual experiences of the Risen Lord unless there was some basis in reality for them. The appearances are not to people in general but to particular individuals, in particular places, at particular times. It is better then to speak of the resurrection as trans-historical or meta-historical rather than unhistorical. It is not that it never happened at all but as trans-historical or meta-historical, it is understood to have taken place on the other side of death and therefore lies beyond the confines of space and time. According to McBrien, the reality of the Risen Lord is then a reality that transcends history as we know it. By the resurrection, Jesus enters a new universe of being, the end-time of history, beyond the control of history and the reach of the historian.

The question of the bodiliness of the resurrection therefore is a very important one, acknowledges McBrien. If it was a bodily resurrection then it did happen to Jesus and not just to his disciples – and it happened as a sovereign act of God the Father glorifying Jesus as His only Son and making Him a source of new life for us all. There is a unity between the Jesus of history and the Risen Lord. The resurrection is not to be spiritualized and yet there is something radically different about this bodiliness after the resurrection. But the resurrection was not the resuscitation of a corpse, he says firmly. And so we have to avoid two extreme interpretations – one which denies the bodily reality of the resurrection and makes of it something that happens to the disciples alone. And one that exaggerates the bodily character of the resurrection and makes of it an event that was equally available to the neutral observer and to the person of faith. The first extreme is subjectivist and the second is objectivist. If the resurrection is not something that really happened to Jesus, then what foundation do the principal doctrines of Christianity have? However, theobjectivist oversimplifies the New Testament and simply ignores the manner in which it was put together. This view ignores, argues McBrien, the metaphorical character of the New Testament language about the resurrection and the symbolic imagery used by St. Paul who describes therisen Jesus in terms of “a spiritual body” and “a life giving spirit” (1Cor.15:44-45). The objectivist cannot make sense of the fact that evenJesus’ closest disciples did not first recognize the risen Lord when he appeared to them. Why not – if the resurrection was essentially the resurrection of the corpse of Jesus?40 The evangelists are telling us, 40 N. T. Wright’s response in The Resurrection of The Son of God to this challenge from McBrien isto say Jesus body was raised in a trans-physical state (p.711). Nonetheless, as in all of

23

continues McBrien, that the witnesses enjoyed not only the sight of Jesusbut also and even primarily a powerful insight. They saw Jesus had been transformed, that he was now in the realm of God. The appearances involve a sight that was revelatory – an overwhelming experience of God within ordinary human experience.

The Philosophical Problem

There is a definite ambiguity in McBrien’s theological treatment and account that is reminiscent of Lonergan’s efforts to understand revelation primarily in terms of religious experience in contrast to understanding it in terms of objective historical events. McBrien is forthright about the tension surrounding this issue and frames it in terms of an objectivist versus subjectivist account, both of which are inadequate theologically he says.

Why can’t we make objective claims for the resurrection? McBrien’s argument against this has considerable subtlety that deserves highlighting again –

No one actually saw the resurrection – there were no eyewitnesses to the resurrection as an event.

It was not an event that could have been photographed as it was occurring or that a disinterested person could have observed happening.

The reality of the resurrection transcends history as we know it. It is an event that is beyond the reach of the historian.

The resurrection was not the resuscitation of a corpse for to makesuch a claim would be to exaggerate the bodily character of the resurrection and make of it an event that was equally available tothe neutral observer and to the person of faith.

Such an objectivist position would ignore the metaphorical character of the New Testament language about the resurrection andthe symbolic imagery used by St. Paul who describes the risen Jesus in terms of “a spiritual body” and “a life giving spirit” (1Cor.15:44-45).

The objectivist position simply cannot make sense of the fact thateven Jesus’ closest disciples did not first recognize the risen Lord when he appeared to them. Why not – if the resurrection was essentially the resurrection of the corpse of Jesus?

McBrien concludes that the evangelists are telling us that the witnesses enjoyed not only the sight of Jesus but also and even primarily insight. They saw Jesus had been transformed, that he wasnow in the realm of God. The appearances involve a sight that was

Wright’s argument it is carefully sifted in relation to both New Testament exegesis and historical scholarship.

24

revelatory – an overwhelming experience of God within ordinary human experience.

Clearly the weight of McBrien’s reflection leans in favor of Lonergan’s account of revelation in terms of a powerful religious experience ratherthan that of an objective historical event, and though he attempts to retain some semblance of a linkage with real history to which the early Christians held firmly, this linkage is exceedingly weak and tenuous.

There is a powerful modern philosophical presupposition about human rationality and truth that has made it very difficult for modern intellectuals to take the orthodox Christian view seriously. This fundamental assumption is that religious truth must in some manner become transcultural and for this to occur it, at a minimum, cannot be incompatible with established science. Lonergan seems also to acknowledge the importance of a similar principle in his assertion that any solution to the problem of evil, with which the resurrection has also to do, must be “a harmonious continuation of the actual order of the universe.”41

However, orthodox Christian belief means accepting the resurrection of Christ as held by the Church from its earliest beginnings. This orthodoxy’s acceptance of the objective reality of the resurrection involves one in an inevitable confrontation with scepticism now fuelled by the influence and epistemological power of modern science.42 Because of the persistence and pervasiveness of sceptical arguments and suspicions directed towards orthodox belief in our contemporary culture,Christians today are no longer inclined to see the resurrection as a secure guarantee of the truth of Christ’s revelation. And there are acknowledged risks associated with any view of the resurrection as somehow serving as a secure guarantee of the authenticity of Christ’s message and mission. For if such divine signs were intended to serve such a purpose in securing people’s belief, why were they not more convincing for all of us? And yet if the revelatory signs are the self-disclosure of the divine to man, then it may be important to remember that the resurrection is first to be understood as a central part of this self-disclosure and perhaps not primarily intended as an external guarantee of objective truth.43 41 Lonergan, Insight, p.718. See also See also Mortimer Adler’s Truth In Religion: The Plurality Of Religions And The Unity Of Truth (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., 1990). Adler’s little book is a condensed effort that articulates this presupposition and the good reasons for its hold on so much of modern thinking.42 See again Ninian Smart, Philosophers and Religious Truth (London: SCM Press, 1964) pp.25-49.

43 This is another version of an important theological distinction that reaches back into early Jewish discussions of theophany, between the power of God’s revelation and the expected guarantee of its objective truth among those who are witnesses. There has long been the paradox of God speaking with such power and affect that the hearer could not not

25

Nevertheless, we are still confronted by the actual historical events ofEaster and with this history we must face the sceptics argument that a rational and prudent man must carefully measure the evidence before assenting to such belief. And if experience always shows that certain events occur, or do not occur, then one has a definite and certain evidence and proof as to what will happen in the future. Perhaps with more experience and maturity one can be less categorical or dogmatic in one’s scepticism and consider that there are other cases supporting belief or non-belief as more a matter of probability. Thus if one finds more instances of an event under certain conditions than its non-occurrence, then one would conclude that it is probable that the event would occur under those conditions in the future. One must assess the pros and cons. It is a very similar situation when considering the testimony of people within an extended historical tradition and judging whether to assent in belief or not to their testimony.

Now, the resurrection is not merely extraordinary, it violates the common sense “law of nature” – that people do not physically rise from the dead. Experience uniformly shows this to be the case and when we always see that something is the case, we generally conclude that it always happens that way. And so the sceptic’s argument is that it then could never be prudent or reasonable to believe in the resurrection. Foragainst the testimony of the early Christians, is our immense experienceof the law of nature. It is much more likely or reasonable that people have been deceived or have deceived themselves than that something so contrary to the whole of our previous common sense experience of the world should actually occur. Even if we have testimony amounting to somesort of proof, there is also the proof of the contrary, and so we come down to a choice between two miracles – the miracle of the resurrection and the miracle of some mistake in the testimony of the early Church. The sceptic says that the proper service of rational doubt is to bid us to go with the less outrageous “miracle” – and this is that the early Church and subsequent believers have been involved in some illusion or deception of massive proportions.

But the great philosophical sceptic David Hume has argued that there is no necessity in causation and we have no basis in experience for arguingso. All we are entitled to say based upon experience is that that there is in nature the constant conjunction of events but no observation of necessary causes. But this sceptical understanding of the “causal” orderin nature has consequences for our view of the future or in what we can say with certainty about the future. This account leads us into the philosophical problem of induction, i.e. of arriving at conclusions

obey, and yet there is need at the same time to preserve the freedom of authentic human response. See Martin Buber’s treatment of this question in his I and Thou (New York: CharlesScribner’s Sons, 1970).

26

based upon experience. We can only establish the order of nature or its uniformity upon the basis of experience and observations that are themselves orderly in some manner. This involves the assumption that what has been will be. But this is to assume a priori what we are trying toestablish – that nature is orderly in some way.

This philosophical conundrum amounts to the conclusion that the resurrection remains at least a possibility and that it is not a contradiction to suppose the occurrence of an event that violates the constant succession of events that we have experienced. At the most we can say it is incredible but not impossible. Thus we can say that it is not impossible that something quite contrary to previous experience should occur. And yet still in most cases, we have proof that nothing contrary to our previous experience will occur. So we can say in particular that the best evidence is that there is no such thing as the resurrection of the dead, or of Jesus in particular, and yet it is stillconceivable that Jesus did actually rise from the dead. The orthodox assessment of this debate that has been in various forms soinfluential in shaping the modern world-view is that we have to be very careful not to be too restrictive or dogmatic in our definition of both evidence and proof. Clearly ordinary language recognizes evidence and proof as applying differently in different areas of enquiry and to different objects of enquiry. For example, the rationalist efforts to reduce all science and scientific proof to the mathematical model are now deemed to be misguided. It is to apply an inappropriate standard of truth and certainty to very different fields of enquiry. To make all enquiry a search for such mathematical certainty is to misunderstand theempirical nature of our experience of reality, where an empirical truth involves the risk of being false or mistaken. This means that it is reasonable to pursue that degree of certainty appropriate to the object under enquiry and in doing so it is still possible to achieve the best proof possible supported by good evidence. Thus we cannot rule out a priori the possibility of resurrection. And we certainly cannot and should not frame a rule about believing such a thing that denies the legitimacy of what we or others might very well have experienced with our ordinary senses.

Christian Memory and Knowledge of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ

There is another deeper orthodox argument that can be made at this pointon the basis of our present experience of and commitment to the Christian religious tradition. It is our contention explored in some detail in the next section that apart from an awareness of certain real events in the past, the notion of Jesus’ resurrection as an historical reality remains only supposition and not real knowledge. The image of events surrounding the resurrection and the awareness of it belonging to

27

our present consciousness do not in themselves bear the mark of the past. If we can and do link them with the historical past, it is becausewe are also aware of an experience from the past resembling these present images. This means that this act of individual and collective Christian memory needs to be explained.

In our ordinary knowledge of change, we can reflect upon our dependence on memory to help us in our account. The impression of change as movement involves a complex relation between sensation, perception, and memory. For example a melodic phrase in our common experience of music is not the hearing of notes one by one without relation to one another, rather all notes in some sense are at the same time – simultaneously present to consciousness, and yet there is an awareness of their succession and consequent temporal relations. Memory is involved for thepast notes continuity with the present phrase. There is in the origins of this experience no elaborate process of logical inference required. Here in our ordinary experience of change is a good sign of the existence of what we might call intuitive memory or intuition in memory.44

There are then common instances of intuitive memory. But we must ask what are the conditions for such intuitive memory – of there being some basis for an intuitive knowledge of Jesus’ actual historical resurrection? One condition relevant for present knowledge of Jesus’ resurrection is the presence in consciousness of factors resembling the historical events surrounding the resurrection. There is in some sense arevival in our present of the historical events of the resurrection in conjunction with our consciousness of the Church’s similar and resembling images, signs, and symbols that can only be explained throughan intuition of the being of these events through this collective or communal memory of the Church. What is crucial here is that factors causally determining the Church’s present signs and imagery are the actual historical events themselves that surround Jesus’ resurrection. This is not in its origins an inference from effect to cause but rather an intuitive awareness of the continuing presence of Jesus’ historical resurrection providing the basis for what we are calling resemblance or similarity in this present awareness called memory.

The complex phenomena of our ordinary memory are inexplicable without some fundamental intuition of the past because of a direct communicationof the past in our present caused by actual past events. It is then the actual and historical resurrection of Christ, which serves as the causaldeterminant of the present signs and images resembling it – such signs

44 See D. B. Hawkins, The Criticism of Experience (London: Sheed and Ward, 1945) see especially pp.97-106 for an incisive realist treatment of memory in more general terms that I am arguing has great relevance to this issue of Christian memory and the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ as an historical event.

28

and images being persons as members, sacred texts, sacraments, and symbols of the Christian Church, or more accurately being the body of the Church itself as sacrament and sign.

Also, without the notion of substance, memory alone becomes the source of my Christian identity rather than its consequent. But memory is not of events in the past but of the events in your or my past, and in the past of other persons with whom we are in relationship within the tradition. My personal identity is conceived as a continuing substance or subject of agency that is revealed phenomenologically by memory but in its actual identity is the ontological source and principle of actuality for the possibility of personal memory and not its result.

We can say then on the basis of this deeper account that there is an intuitive awareness of the historical resurrection of Jesus that is the cause of our present signs and symbols of remembrance as Church. There is the knowledge of this resemblance and similarity based upon the intuition of causal efficacy in remembrance. There is an intuitive awareness for the Church and its members of the historical event of Jesus’ resurrection as cause of our knowledge of it in and through present memory. This account also assumes that from the very beginning of Christianity there was always a primary external authority existing alongside the subjective authority of individual consciousnesses and consciences that in this matter of faith can serve only as secondary sources at best. This primary and foremost authority has always had an historical dimension in the person and paschal mystery of Jesus Christ and subsequently in the order of the Church’s deposit of faith, apostolic succession, and teaching authority.45

Attending To And Reconsidering The Historical Evidence

N. T. Wright’s recent monumental work in stark contrast to much of contemporary theology convincingly supports the orthodox view of realistChristian memory and it is a view Etienne Gilson would have taken delight in. Wright takes great pains to explain the massive undercurrents of a contemporary theology which says, at times explicitlyand at other times more implicitly, that the first Christians had a powerful religious experience, a conversion that had nothing to do with an empty tomb or actual encounters with the risen Jesus as historical facts. However, integrated into cultic Christian practice, stories of anempty tomb and the third day are meant to evoke through metaphor an awareness of divine presence and action, i.e. religious experience. Eventually this tradition, so the dominant modern account goes, began to

45 See Eric Voegelin in From Enlightenment To Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975) p.17; see also Yves Congar O.P., Tradition and Traditions: The Biblical, Historical, and Theological Evidence for Catholic Teaching on Tradition (San Diego, CA: Basilica Press, 1966).

29

include stories of encounters with Jesus where the sayings of the earthly Jesus were transposed to the risen Lord. Nonetheless, in its origins, this had nothing to do with people supposing that Jesus had actually been physically seen and touched for that would be to overlay acrude and naïve realism onto their stories because of their unfamiliarity with the distinctive character of the Jewish-biblical way of speaking. This interpretation, argues Wright, is a conscious inversion of what the New Testament writers actually say and it instead suggests that though some Jews may have thought of resurrection from thedead in a physical sense, in the full eschatological sense understood asboth meta-empirical and meta-historical and with considerable provisionsfor epistemological and hermeneutical maneuvering, one simply cannot continence that the resurrection actually has to do with bodily restoration albeit transformed in some way. This is why McBrien’s eschatological and transcendent interpretation of bodily resurrection insists that resurrection has nothing to do with a corpse. The Jesus experience is then not an object of neutral observation but rather a faith-motivated experience in response to an eschatological disclosure or powerful experience of religious transcendence. Wright’s argument opposes the arguments of McBrien and many others that he says in essencedeny that the resurrection gospel accounts offer us first hand historical evidence of concrete events manifesting divine grace and favor.46

These theologies, because of their philosophical presuppositions, as Gilson would argue, do not take the evidence seriously and replace it with a sophisticated reflection that ultimately cannot do the pastoral job it is intended to do. This mistaken approach to historical investigation inevitably results in the view that Jesus was a noble but disastrous failure, and his followers were challenged in a new way by the memory of what he did and said. And yet it is bravely granted that somehow God has the last word expressed in Christian creedal affirmations, which still are subject to criticism because they can leadto a crude and naïve realism, of the type Lonergan attributed to Gilson.This is the belief that something in an objective and historical sense actually happened at Easter. And actual historical investigation shows clearly, according to Wright, that it is in fact this very belief that the early Christian Church first held and it became the very center of their lives.

46 Wright’s primary targets are the theologies of R. Bultman and E. Scillebeeckx, though we assert that McBrien comes under the influence of essentially the same viewpoint and that this viewpoint is manifest in their respective treatments of the relationship betweentheology and history. The case of Lonergan is more complex. Our argument is that Lonergan’s philosophical presuppositions make him vulnerable to similar subjectivist views, however, Fr. Frederick Crowe S.J. has argued strenuously that Lonergan’s theology remains thoroughly orthodox and realist on this matter of Christ’s bodily resurrection (See Frederick Crowe, Christ and History:The Christology of Bernard Lonergan (Ottawa: St. Paul University, Novalis, 2005).

30

As Wright is deeply suspicious of a theologically mandated indifference to history, he is equally aware of how religious apologetics is capable of colonizing historical enquiry. Wright’s position is that history still does matter very much and can be investigated without prejudicing the theological question at the outset. It is very important to considercarefully what early Christian’s believed about themselves, Jesus, and God. This is the basis upon which he approaches the challenging questionas to what actually happened at Easter, which inevitably involves reflecting upon one’s own philosophical and theological presuppositions.To avoid this is simply to decide in favor of particular presuppositions– and most likely those of post-enlightenment skepticism.

Wright carefully and thoroughly considers historical evidence that leadsto what he argues is the best explanatory account of the events of Easter – that the tomb of Jesus was actually found empty, and that, contrary to McBrien’s contention above, several people including one andperhaps more who were not followers saw Jesus actually alive in a way that clearly defied the readily available language of ghosts and spirits, and for which their previous beliefs about life after death andthe resurrection had not prepared them in any way.

Wright’s fully developed argument is complex involving seven steps. 1) The world of second-Temple Judaism does provide for some conception of resurrection. However, the uniqueness of the Christian transformation ofthis conception rules out that belief in Jesus’ resurrection was generated entirely on its own from within this Jewish context. Wright argues that what actually generates this belief is the combination of the empty tomb stories and the stories of Jesus appearing alive to people again. 2) Neither story on its own could have generated this belief in Jesus bodily resurrection. 3) However, together they present apowerful reason for the emergence of this belief. 4) The meaning of resurrection within second-Temple Judaism makes it impossible to conceive of this transformed resurrection belief emerging without it being known that Jesus’ body had disappeared and that he was encounteredas alive again. 5) Other explanations simply do not possess the same explanatory power. 6) It is therefore highly probable that Jesus tomb was actually empty on the third day after the execution, and that the disciples did indeed encounter him giving the appearance of being alive and well. 7) The most important questions now are how do we explain these two things, and is there any better explanation than that given bythe early Christian Church?47

Wright’s argument proceeds by using the tools of necessary and sufficient conditions to order this extensive and intensive work of historical enquiry and argumentation. A necessary condition has to be 47 Wright, pp.685-712.

31

the case for the conclusion to follow, whereas a sufficient condition always brings about the conclusion. Wright argues that the combination of the empty tomb and the bodily appearances of Jesus constitute with some important qualifications, sufficient conditions for the rise of theearly Christian belief in the resurrection. When these sufficient conditions are combined and qualified by the claims that second-Temple Judaism could not on its own generate this Christian belief without the necessary conditions of the empty tomb and the appearances, and when there is no other explanation that possesses the same explanatory power,then the empty tomb and the appearances also become necessary conditions. Wright argues that the complex subtleties of these qualifications, which he ably shows can be reasonably managed by adequate historical scholarship, when combined with the empty tomb and the appearances, move the argument well beyond historical possibility tothat of high probability. This is because the combination of the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus, though not sufficient for the rise ofChristian belief in everyone who heard about it, do become sufficient conditions for such belief if those finding the empty tomb and seeing Jesus were second-Temple Jews and followers who had hoped he was the promised Messiah. It is in this context that the empty tomb and appearances work effectively as both necessary and sufficient conditionsfor most to conclude that Jesus actually had been bodily raised from thedead. It is in this sense that Wright argues that the empty tomb and appearances are necessary and sufficient conditions for Christian beliefin the resurrection of Jesus, not for everyone, but for this belief to arise within that community that began with Jesus followers and eventually spread out from there around the world.

According for Wright, the major opposing theory that takes various formsessentially says that the disciples were suffering from some form of self-deception because of a failure to come to terms with a tragic reality and failure. Instead they embraced what was essentially a compensating fantasy that supported their deepest longings and desires. Wright’s rejoinder to this position is that the historical evidence shows overwhelmingly that whatever the early Christians were hoping or longing for, was not what they said actually happened at Easter. The fact that these early Christians were second-Temple Jews, a necessary condition for the empty tomb and appearances to have the effect they did, does not mean that these effects can be reduced to the notions of resurrection attributable to second-Temple Judaism. The actual reason given by these early believers for their transformed expectations and hopes was that something radically unexpected happened, something that simply was not at all what they originally expected.

Wright admits that in saying the tomb was empty and that the meetings with Jesus actually happened because he has been bodily raised from the dead requires the suspension of our normal conceptuality and language

32

concerning how it is we know things about the past. He also admits that the body of Jesus was raised in what he calls a trans-physical state – both the same and yet mysteriously transformed and it is this extraordinary or miraculous occurrence that best explains the empty tomband the appearances. What we do not know, not because of the modern scientific world-view or its social imaginary but rather because all common sense and human history tells the same story – is that some one dead can become alive again. Thus his historical investigation and argument leads to claims about the occurrence of events that are neithernaturalizable nor mundane. Nevertheless, the early Christian Church persisted in saying that what actually happened to Jesus Christ was radically new; the beginning of an entirely new mode of existence, even a new creation. The fact there is nothing to compare it with is not an objection but instead is essential to the claim itself.48

This is not an argument in terms of some unobtainable neutral standpoint. It is part of a serious dialectic where effort is being madeto remove the intellectual obstacles for an open consideration of the historical evidence and thereby provide a more secure basis for inferences to a better explanatory account. It is indeed the best explanation available for the evidence, as Wright sees it, and it challenges directly the dominant and sophisticated modern naturalizing interpretations of the resurrection that have been fuelled by what he calls a pervasive post-enlightenment philosophical skepticism. It is a position that is clearly self-involving because it is a view that is bound to be life changing. Wright is very much aware of how belief in the resurrection of Christ has been used in the history of Christianity to legitimate a relatively comfortable and culturally conservative form of religion. But this is not the whole story by any means nor is it its most authentic appropriation, to borrow from Lonergan’s terminology. Theresurrection of Jesus Christ, unlike anything else, profoundly challenges the modern mind-set and its epistemological assumptions, and effectively turns doubt back upon itself in a profound manner. Wright’s historical argument confronts us with the possibility that the resurrection of Jesus Christ instead of being an escape from reality is both historically and theologically the most radical force imaginable for fully engaging, both subjectively and objectively, the reality of our situation as human beings.49

The Theological Challenge Jesus asks in the gospel "Who do you say I am?" (Matt 16:15) This is nota derivative question that leads to sophisticated evasiveness. The answer says as much about the one who answers as it does about the one 48 Wright, p.712.49 Infra fn. 61.

33

who asks. It is a question of fundamental and ultimate concern for the whole of reality, including oneself as subject. The early Christian church collectively faced this question.50 It was painful and controversial yet the church made a doctrinal and creedal decision. Today the question is often domesticated without much thought by often quickly reducing the question in terms of the distinction between the "literal" and "allegorical" interpretation of the Bible. Wright’s historical account helps us to see that this framing of the issue is notquite accurate and that instead the fundamental issue is between "realism" and "myth"; and ultimately "truth" and "falsehood", and that there is a historical as well as a philosophical and theological dimension to our Christian faith. This historical dimension is not simply reducible to mythological interpretations even though they may beedifying for us morally or spiritually. This appeal to history and reason does not at all mean that there is no longer an aspect of profound mystery in our faith, but that there is an aspect of reason andtruth at stake and that must be attended to, that says these teachings also open up for us, as human beings, a necessary way of approach into the very heart of reality in both its objective and subjective dimensions. This way of approach is not just through religious experience but as well it is through an experience of history that has been handed down to us through our Christian tradition. This remains highly controversial today and as we have seen many disputes surround this issue. Nonetheless, the Church has held firm in linking historical and religious experience in this doctrinal claim, as a guarantee for biblical faith and as the only truthful way to render in doctrinal language the Jesus event.51 Critics at the times of the early councils, 50 See Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Truth And Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), see especially pp.92-95.

51 See Dominus Jesus: On The Unicity And Salvific Universality Of Jesus Christ And The Church Congregation For The Doctrine Of The Faith (Vatican, 2000). The philosophical issueimplicit in this document is concerned to confront various intellectual and scholarly moves to treat revelation, and the resurrection in particular, as simply a sign having special significance for the followers of Christ and his church alone. This is a limiting subjective interpretation where the resurrection depends solely upon how it strikes us andnot upon any objective criterion. In this case the resurrection becomes perhaps subjectively meaningful but not evidence of anything objective. There is an important distinction here between the subjective meaning and the objective truth of the resurrection. From the orthodox Christian viewpoint there are serious problems when the doctrine of the resurrection is relegated solely to the domain of subjective meaning and deemed irrelevant as a matter of objective truth. This essentially is the point of this Vatican instruction. Nevertheless, it is still reasonable to expect that one should have very good evidence before accepting as objectively true such an unprecedented and extraordinary event as the resurrection of Christ. N. T. Wright’s important work is a major contribution towards a reconsideration of the historical evidence. There are two basic approaches to this question of history – there is the historical question of what actually occurred and that serves as the particular evidence we have before us, and there is the more general question of what the nature of this evidence might be. In pursuing this second approach, we must recognize that this question involves us in considering people’s particular personal and historical situation in which one must

34

and since then, have argued that this was an unfortunate result of the influence of Greek philosophy on some of the early Christian leaders where Greek philosophy, a product of a particular culture, was being canonized and elevated to the status of dogma.  It is worth asking incisively, what is at issue here? There has always been talk of sons of God and sons of the gods. The issue was whether Jesus was a son of God in this poetical and mythological sense even though such talk has nothing to do with objective reality as such. Instead it expresses our high regard for a leader who was loved deeply. Was this Christian claim simply imagery or was it a claim about reality itself, was it a claim of truth and realism as Gilson’s Christian philosophy holds? The answer to this question determines for oneself what Christianity as such is. Is Jesus to be numbered among the

ask whether or not there have been particular and powerful experiences that can be considered signs of God’s self-disclosure. This it seems does occur for believers in the context of a personal situation of special religious significance. Thus one does have to consider the religious context of the resurrection event and the presupposition of there being a God capable of causing such an event, though at the time what actually occurred was radically novel and unexpected, as Wright has shown. This is why the fact that the early Christians were second-Temple Jews was regarded by Wright as a necessary condition for the empty tomb and appearances to have the subjective effect they did. However, this does not mean that these effects can be simply reduced to the notions of resurrection attributable to second-Temple Judaism; and this is the crucially important objective dimension of the argument that often is missing in modern accounts. The actual reason given by these early believers for their transformed expectations and hopes was that something radically unexpected happened, something that simply was not at all what they originally expected. It is this conjunction of a seemingly random and inexplicable event or events from both the common sense and scientific perspective, and what we might call the preparatory religious context that constitutes the greatest wonder of all according tothe orthodox Christian tradition. It is the wonder and grace of this conjunction of these subjective and the objective dimensions that is constitutive of its unprecedented novelty and that is constitutive of its original claim. Thus to claim then that one’s faith in the resurrection is historical means one of two things. One may mean that it is based upon events which one believes occurred at a certainpoint in history; or one may mean that one’s belief can be validated by historical enquiry. There are two senses of history involved here – 1) there is the actual sequence of events and 2) there is the discipline of the historical enquiry itself. The first sensecan be simply recorded whereas the second sense can be entered into as a scholarly enquiry. The first can be strictly called history, while the second may be called meta-history. We can see how in the first sense Christian belief is said to be historical but its rational validation depends upon meta-history or what may also be called historical science. And it is one thing to say academically, or from a scholarly perspective, that the resurrection as an historical event cannot be ruled out as a logical possibility, and it is another very different thing to appropriate this belief existentially into one’s life as a central guiding principle. It is the latter that is the more profound and exciting issue but it takes us much deeper into the field of theology and historical-biblical scholarship along with considerable consciousness, as we have seen, of one’s metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions at work as well. Such an enquiry is beyond the scope of this paper, which is at best intended only to serve as a prolegomena for such an enquiry of this nature – hoping to show that our actual history confronted honestly in both its subjective and objective dimensions calls us towards this deeper enquiry.

35

"avatars", the many forms of manifestation of the divinity in the world;is Christianity just one variant of religion among many others or do we have here in the Church's answer a different type and degree of realism?The Trinitarian and homoousios doctrine tries to answer this question for theology realistically, with the aide of both serious historical study and philosophical principles, and not just poetically or mythologically.52 It asserts that Jesus is actually one in being with God (and yet is man). This is why Gilson always stressed the importance of ahistorical realism grounded in a solid philosophical doctrine of being that he argued was implicit at the core of Biblical faith. He believed that at this core of the Christian testament, we are confronting a literal and not just an allegorical truth. What Gilson, in keeping with many early Church leaders, recognized in Greek philosophy, especially the philosophy of Aristotle, was that it did not rest easy with traditional religions' mythology and it put forcefully before the human being the question of truth. And so in this sense Gilson regarded the meeting between historical events, Biblical faith, and Greek philosophy as providential for the Church’s theology. Philosophy in this sense has always aided us in giving expression to the reality at the core of the gospel teachings, experience, and practice. There has been a consistent regard for philosophy in Church teachings as an indispensable help for forming a deeper understanding of faith and for the effective communication of its truth to others.53

The Church has also tried at times to keep a paternal eye on the developments in philosophy when considered as an aide in the human search for ultimate truth, especially as these developments might affectthe formation of its own leaders, It has recently expressed concern overhuman reason’s one-sided tendency to become preoccupied with human subjectivity and to become forgetful of the importance of the pursuit ofa transcendent truth. In his important encyclical Fides Et Ratio, John Paul II has expressed his own concerns this way – “Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as a person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all. It has happened therefore that reason rather than voicing the humanorientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much

52 The Church has answered Jesus, question "Who do you say I am?" (Matt 16:15) doctrinally withthe phrase “God’s only begotten Son” who is “homoousios with the Father”, i.e., one in being with him. Lonergan also makes a brief reference to this Trinitarian doctrine in his discussion of special theological categories that help make explicit for Christians and the Christian tradition this movement in understanding from the religious experience of love to what he refers to as the loving source of our love. He writes “The Christian tradition makes explicit our implicit intending of God in all our intending by speaking ofthe Spirit that is given to us, of the Son who redeemed us, of the Father who sent the Sonand with the Son sends the Spirit, and of our future destiny when we shall know, not as ina glass darkly, but face to face.” (See Method in Theology, p. 291.)53 Pope John Paul II, Fides Et Ratio (Vatican Press, 1998) 5.

36

knowledge and little by little has lost its capacity to lift its gaze tothe heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned.”54 This has led to a crisis of faith and reason that is in part a crisis of philosophical foundations and has now extended into post-conciliar theology.55

The study of philosophy in Catholic-Christian thought is fundamental fortheological study for without the clarification of metaphysical and epistemological pre-suppositions, theology is in danger of losing its footing. In the Church’s view, reflected again in recent documents such as Fides Et Ratio, there is in theological study the formation of an intellectual habitus involving more than the accumulation of empirical data and information. It is also inter-connected with the study of the truths of the perennial tradition of philosophy, which is often in intimate dialogue with Divine Revelation. This is why the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, as Gilson has argued repeatedly, continues to play an exemplary role in helping us to consider carefully and wisely the relationship of faith and reason and more specifically the important intellectual move from “what seems to be” to “what is”. This is especially important for this vital inter-relationship of faith and reason as explored within the Christian tradition generally. It is also important for the ongoing and more technical inter-relationship of the disciplines of philosophy, theology, and history that Gilson has contributed so much towards, and for the more realistic and objective grounding he believed the philosophy of being could provide for both history and theology.

The Ancient Concern for Being and the Modern Concern for the Human Subject: Kenneth Schmitz’s Efforts at Reconciliation

Though I’ve raised serious questions regarding the subjectivist tendencies in Lonergan’s philosophy and especially in his treatment of the question of being, Frederick Crowe has shown somewhat convincingly, in my view, that Lonergan’s theology remains firmly rooted in Christian orthodoxy.56 However, in his own writings Lonergan does raise important

54 Ibid, 5.55 Congregation For Catholic Education, Decree On The Reform Of Ecclesiastical Studies Of Philosophy (Vatican Press, 2011) 9.56This section is based upon a close reading of Frederick Crowe’s, Christ and History: The Christology of Bernard Lonergan (Ottawa: Novalis, St. Paul University, 2005) see especially pp.212-221.

37

and unresolved questions for future theological investigation particularly in the area of the relationship between Christianity and world religions. It is only in recent times, according to Crowe, that the singular claims of Christianity have been seriously challenged. Formerly God was understood to have spoken through the prophets and now in what the New Testament calls the “end times”, He is seen to speak through His only Son. What meaning can this claim carry if the universalsalvific will of God is fulfilled through the gift of divine love to everyone – Christian and non-Christian both in reference to organized institutional religion or even independently of institutional religion? The absoluteness or uniqueness of Christianity and its finality as a wayof faith that is unsurpassable and normative as a criterion for judging other religions, is now called into question. It is within the context provided by this issue that new views on the relations of Christianity and world religions have been proposed and debated. Crowe points out that Lonergan’s active career was at an end before this question and itsassociated discussions and debates came into their own. He never engagedthis issue concertedly and yet his position can be speculated on based upon things he did say and that have some obvious relevance to this issue of this relationship of Christianity and world religions.

Lonergan does not view Christianity as standing for an original philosophy of life or for an original ethics. Its first commitment and function has always been to bear witness to an event – the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The distinctive nature of Christianity is not God’s grace, which He shares with others, but rather the mediation of God’s grace through Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. For the Christian, the gift of God’s love is the gift of His love that is in Christ Jesus and it is from this fact that the social, historical, and doctrinal aspects of Christianity flow. This does not mean that Christ is the mediator of grace for Christians alone. In the context of the Christian understanding of the Divine Missions where the Father has primacy and sends the Son, grace is given to all through the Son who is the Trinitarian mediator of Creation. But then again solely from the sociological context of world religions, Christ as the human founder of Christianity is the special mediator for that religion alone.

For Lonergan there is a common element to all the religions of humankindand there is a specific element proper to Christianity that involves notonly the subjective experience of being in love with God but also the objective experience of God’s love in Christ Jesus dying and rising again. It is in this historical objectivity of the Paschal Mystery that the love experienced subjectively is focused and inflamed so as to uniteChristians not only with Christ but with one another. This comes very close to N. T. Wright’s revisionist evangelical historical-theological argument that we have reviewed closely and approvingly above.

38

The ultimate expression of this differentiating element in Christianity is found in the ancient issue of the Arian heresy mentioned at the beginning of this paper. Lonergan believes Arianism still has currency for us as Christians. It is found in an earlier expression in the question faced directly by the Church Council of Nicea – whether Christ the mediator of our salvation is a creature only or also God Himself? Lonergan acknowledges that it is likely that most people today are simply unmoved by the significance of this formulation of the question. But both his orthodoxy and genius are revealed in how he theologically and Biblically persists in the meditation on this question, reformulating it as follows – did God reveal His love for us by having ahuman being die the death of scourging and crucifixion, or by having Hisown Son, a divine Person who became flesh to suffer and die, and therebytouch or break in upon our own hard heartedness somehow leading us toward eternal life? Lonergan comes to full theological clarity on this issue by focusing on God’s offering up for us of his only Son instead ofon Christ’s mediating role. It is Christ as God’s Isaac with God’s love the analogue for Abraham’s prefiguring sacrifice. And here in this Paschal mystery there is no higher intervention to save this divine Isaac. There is only total surrender, for nothing is withheld. There is the total surrender of the divine for us as proof of this Divine Love for us. It is in the ultimacy of this act of God that Lonergan comes to full clarity on what is distinctive in Christianity – this surrendering of the Son by the Father and the Son’s obedient acceptance of this Will.It is in this doctrine that he sees the essence of Christianity and the significance of the entry of the obedient Christ into our history and the exercising of historical causality through the medium of His life, death, and resurrection. Christ enters our history to give the means forour species to reach our proper end – an end of Supreme importance.

However, there are very practical pastoral questions that remain concerning how the Church is to carry out its mission today within a culturally pluralistic context. Though these reflections upon Lonergan’stheology reveal his orthodoxy, they do not reflect upon the most challenging question - that of God’s purpose and call for us as Christians in our own times. Lonergan’s theology clearly draws attentionto the divine economy of the gift of the Spirit and it’s being inseparable from the gift of God’s love. The Spirit is real and has beensent into the world and is present among us with a real mission on earthrelated to Christ and history, a mission that, for Lonergan, is as really distinct as the Person of the Spirit is distinct in the Godhead. Furthermore, a Christian sensitivity fully awakened to this Spirit in the World, in his view, is simply unable to believe that billions of people separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years from a gospel preacher are to be condemned for not believing in Christ. He would insist that through the Spirit they somehow belong already to God’s family.

39

Nevertheless, this does not eliminate the need for preaching the Gospel,for God in giving the Holy Spirit to the human race judged it necessary to send the Only-Begotten to be one of us. And yet if God gives the Spirit of Love and yet keeps with infinite patience the secret in silence for long ages, thus leaving millions without the gospel, then weseem to have two important clues for the working of divine providence and two associated directives for cooperating with God’s purpose within our secondary responsibilities as creatures today. There are then, in Lonergan’s view, two fundamental interrelated aspects of the divine economy in human history – the mission of the Spirit as inner subjectivegift and of the Son as outer objective Word.57 These two aspects now call for a third aspect – the working out of this divine economy in the whole of human history. There is not only the effort to understand this economy in the past, there is also the crucial question as to whether and how much we can carefully discern its workings in our personal and collective future, a future that at the same time is deeply marked by contingency?

It may seem like dangerous hubris to attempt to discern the future in these terms but this is, for Lonergan, the primary call of the Christiantheologian and towards this end, says Crowe, he has made a profound contribution. His central concern is not so much universal salvation northe claims of Christianity pitted against the rival claims of other religions. Instead his focus is on the question – what is God doing, past, present, and future, in the divine economy of this twofold missionthat involves both our inner subjectivity and the actual objective circumstances of real history? What can we discern of the possibilities the future holds and of the actualities God’s intentions may have already determined for us? Such a question calls for some total view of history, and it is here that Lonergan, as a theologian, does have something important to say in his familiar historical structure of progress, decline, and redemption. For him, history does have progress as its ultimate goal and yet there is another history that ends in permanent decline, which also has its structure. Crowe speaks of synchronic and diachronic structures. The structure of progress, decline, and redemption is synchronic and not sequential. We are always progressing while simultaneously declining, and yet being redeemed through all of this. There is fidelity to the leadings of the Spirit andthere is infidelity in all religions with each being led to the ultimateend of all creation – redemption. There is also progress and advance from meaning to higher levels of meaning and there is decline from bias

57 The divine economy refers to God’s plan of salvation in creating and governing the world and so is concerned with God’s revelation and communication to humankind in history. It isdistinguished from the mystery of the internal life of the Godhead as Trinity. It refers to God’s activity and presence in salvation history and involves the missions of Son and Spirit in redemption and deification.

40

to greater bias where a rich heritage can be squandered and lost. Thus there is as well a diachronic progressive movement in our history for good or evil.

It is in this light that the question of Christianity and world religions arises in a new way, says Crowe. God has allowed and promoted through the gift of the Spirit the simultaneous existence of many religions. Has God a plan for sequences in the various roles of the various religions? Are some transient and others meant to endure? What of the concrete and cumulative consequences of the acceptance or rejection of the message of the Gospel? How should we conceive the overarching order of the universe when we give equal attention to the objective presence of the Son and to the subjective presence of the Spirit? Crowe acknowledges the debate as to whether theology should be Christocentric or theocentric but the neglect of the Spirit’s role, he argues, leads to the overlooking of a primary question – is the view that centers on the Son to be modified by a view that gives the Son and Spirit equal centrality? This he argues, following Lonergan, is the onlypreparation for the theocentric question.

And then there is the interrelated question of contingency and freedom. For Christians the problem and question is this - was Mary’s acceptance done in freedom and truly contingent; and then what of Jesus’ acceptance? This problem and question is also ours personally now in thecontext of our secondary creaturely responsibility. What really is contingent in my day-to-day decisions? What is contingent for our species in the aggregate of our day-to-day decisions? If God has a plan in place for us and for Christianity that is in the “already” of our “now” then there is no real freedom. But what if God does not have this type of plan? Suppose God loves slow learning people enough to allow them long ages of learning what they have to learn? Suppose the destiny of the world religions is contingent on what we all learn to do authentically as Christians, Hindus, or as human beings trying to live lives of integrity and authenticity, then responsibility is returned to us with vengeance and the answer to the question of the final relationship of Christianity and the world religions, argues Crowe, is perhaps that there is no answer - at least not yet. The real uncertainty that surrounds this question, he believes, will stir up thoroughly and creatively the relation of Christianity to world religions. It is perhaps one of the most important questions for theology today and it was anticipated deeply by Lonergan though at the end of his career before the issue and the related discussions and debate had truly come into their own.

In stark contrast Gilson’s somewhat earlier diagnosis of modern and contemporary thought was developed within the context of a largely non-historical problematic that was for the most part innocent of the impact

41

of this emerging history upon metaphysics. He had real difficulty forcefully engaging the new problematic of contingency and freedom that contemporary philosophy engages in existentialism and hermeneutics. Kenneth Schmitz sees the problematic of contingency and freedom being profoundly reframed in the contemporary concerns for temporality, historicity, and pluralism along with the concerns for language and interpretation.58 For Gilson the major difference between ancient and modern philosophy turns primarily on the relation to the metaphysics implicit in the Christian revelation and the infusion of insight from this revelation and its tradition. Greek philosophy has come through theChristian medieval period transformed. The question posed by Gilson to contemporary thought, according to Schmitz, is how does one relate to this transformation? His particular insight drawn from his close study of medieval philosophy was centered upon the primacy of existential act and, for him, this transformation inthought always calls for the return of thought to its proper ground in the actuality of existence and perhaps paradoxically a renewed appreciation for history as we have pointed out above.

This he believed was the most general problematic for Christian philosophy, which began in the discussions of the existence and nature of God. He saw this concern coming to its apex in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas and it became central for his own philosophy. Much of hisproject becomes the development of this insight against the background of its absence in the thought of others whose thought he often characterized as various forms of idealism or “essentialism”. Schmitz iscritical of this strategy in Gilson because it at times could be used reductively as a substitute for serious consideration of the work of other philosophers resulting in a distorted understanding of their work.More seriously and even ironically this distorting reductionism could become a violation of Gilson’s own commitment to the concrete and its historical context.

From a more technical perspective Schmitz sees this important concern for existential act as most appropriately applied to philosophies that share with Thomism the problematic of being and the similar principles and presuppositions of ens, esse, and essentia (thing, act of existence, and essence). This has meant it is very difficult to address these contemporary philosophical perspectives in terms of a metaphysics of existential act. The connection with contemporary concerns seems quite tenuous and remote both rhetorically and analytically. Nevertheless, Gilson insisted upon a realism grounded in the primacy of existential act expressed best in existential Thomism. He vigorously opposed any critical position that argued that any serious attempt to bring the act 58 See Kenneth Schmitz, What Has Clio to Do with Athena? Etienne Gilson: Historian and Philosopher (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1987) pp 1-24.

42

of existence to thought would naturally result in its objectification and falsification thereby undermining human authenticity and freedom.

Schmitz has tried to show that to the extent contemporary philosophy canbe understood as an effort to move out of and away from a distorting anddisorienting type of abstraction, it has much in common with this Gilsonian criticism of thinking that was forgetful or devaluing of the act of existence. Schmitz believes these new efforts, in which we include Lonergan’s important work, though they may not adequately consider the existential order of act, they do share a concern for and orientation towards the concrete for they have grasped something beyond essence or concept – the impact of subjectivity, history, and hermeneutics upon the contemporary problematic. Schmitz now believes it is Gilson’s tenacious orientation towards the concrete that can assist us in seeing the relevance of the question of existential act for contemporary philosophies and their problematic. It can provide the genuinely historical concerns in Christian philosophies such as Lonergan’s with a metaphysics perhaps better able to ground it in the value and worth it implicitly knows to be its own. This is to resolve much more than a speculative problem for it truly requires a community of enquiry conscious of the history of thought out of which our present situation and it’s problematic has emerged. Both Lonergan and Gilson, intheir respective commitments as Christian thinkers, understood this well.

Schmitz’s own scholarship has shown how personalist philosophies have mounted an important and serious critique of the reduction of human agency to technical function and to a deadening conformity. They have instead developed alternative modes of thought that have promoted human life in community where personal integrity is respected and in turn respects what is unique about each person. Schmitz’s astounding suggestion is that these personalist philosophies, at least in the Christian tradition, have a much greater significance for the tradition than simply their efforts to protect traditional human values in the face of an unrelenting technological advance.59 There is in this kind of

59 Here we follow closely Kenneth Schmitz’s argument “The Solidarity Of Personalism And The Metaphysics Of Existential Act” in The Texture of Being (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007) pp.132–148.It also needs to be mentioned here that Fr. Norris Clarke, who was also greatly influencedby Etienne Gilson, has also contributed significantly to a relational ontology of the human person that is highly relevant for this effort of Thomism to engage contemporary developments in phenomenology and personalism (See especially his Person and Being (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998)). It is highly relevant to present an overview of Clarke’s argument for how the innate dynamism of substantial being overflowinginto self-communicative action is clearly and explicitly articulated in Thomist philosophy. The challenge is that the articulation of relationality as a primordial dimension of every real being is considerably more muted and even convoluted in traditional efforts to articulate it in classical Aristotelian terms.? According to Clarke, if finite being naturally flows over into self-communicating action towards others

43

philosophy an actual advance in the progressive unfolding of being and not only in our understanding of being. To be clear this is understood as an advance in the unfolding of being itself in its very history, according to Schmitz.60

As in personalist philosophies, Lonergan, as we have argued, also emphasizes the fundamental importance of human experience as consciousness.61 It is this very tension within the tradition of Christian thought, between this concern for the subjective and the demands of objectivity that we have focused upon in this debate between

and also receives action from them, then a network of relations is generated naturally. Itturns out, then, that relationality and substantiality go together as two distinct but inseparable modes of reality. Substance is the primary mode, in that all else, including relations, depend on it as their ground. But since “every substance exists for the sake ofits operations” as St. Thomas tells us, being as substance, as existing in itself, naturally flows over into being as relational, as turned towards others by its self-communicating action. To be fully is to be substance-in-relation. The act of existence by which a being is present in itself standing out from nothingness is the “first act” of thebeing and the action or operation proceeding from it and grounding its relationality is its “secondary act”. There is a priority of ontological dependence here that is fundamental for this tradition but this does not mean operations are of secondary importance as if the being could be real without expression in operations. The second act is the very goal and fulfillment in being of the first act. Relationality is therefore an equally primordial dimension of being as is its substantiality.Substantiality and relationality are equally primordial and necessary dimensions of being itself at its highest intensity and the ultimate reason in the Judaic-Christian tradition,argues Clarke, is that all lower beings are images of the Triune God as the ultimate Sourceand supreme synthesis of both. Thus all being is dyadic in nature with an “in itself” dimension as substance and a “towards others” dimension. There is in finite beings this inseparable complementarity of “in-itself” and “towards others”. To be is to be substance in relation.Nonetheless, there have been various distortions of this classical notion of substance in modern philosophy coming especially through the works of Descartes, Locke, and Hume, says Clarke. Modern philosophy and phenomenology have been greatly influenced by these distortions and thus have tended to reject the category of substance as an invalid mode ofbeing. This means dropping the in-itself pole of being. But if this is abandoned then the unique ontological interiority of the other person is abandoned and thus a deep capacity for caring, intimacy, and love between persons is lost. But this dichotomy and its consequences are unnecessary, in Clarke’s view, once substance in relation is properly understood. Clarke applies this understanding of being as dynamic and self-communicative to develop an understanding of human being as human person – that which is most perfect inall of nature. Human being as person is not some special mode of being added from the outside. It is the fullness of being itself – to be without restriction is to be personal,in Clarke’s philosophy. The distinction between human person and human nature takes on an ontological meaning as well as its traditional social and legal significance. To be a person it is not enough to possess an intellectual nature, to be a person in its own rightsuch a nature would have to possess its own act of existence. Person, according to Clarke,– is the answer to who am I. Nature - is the answer to what am I. Thus we have the beginning of a definition of a person – an intellectual nature possessing its own act of existence as the self-conscious responsible source of its own actions. But this definitiondoes not yet do justice to the full metaphysical richness and originality of the doctrine of existence as central act and core of all perfection in real being. Essence in some determinate, limited and thus finite caused being is best seen as a particular limiting mode of being participating in the all-embracing fullness of perfection that is existence itself. Thus a more adequate definition of person is – “an actual existence distinct from all others, possessing an intellectual nature, so that it can be the self-conscious

44

Gilson and Lonergan. It is especially their respective emphasis on external objectivity as in Gilson, and internal subjectivity as in Lonergan, both as they relate to the question of being that actually prepares the conditions in which this opposition and dichotomy brings about a more intensive and profound recognition of the human person and that can, according to Schmitz, actually transcend this distinction.62

Schmitz argues that in trying to understand this, it is helpful to reconsider the transcendentals of the older tradition of being such as being, truth, goodness, and unity, for these provide a perspective on

responsible source of its own actions.” Clarke argues that there is an advantage in emphasizing the act of existence as central rather than nature. Because if all the perfection of being a person comes from its act of existence proportioned to its nature wecan transfer all the attributes of being as existence itself to persons as such where theywill be found now at enhanced degrees of intensity. Clarke says there are clearly then these two important perspectives on the person – ontological and phenomenological. The ontological perspective is concerned with the metaphysical structure and principles of the being of the human person, the phenomenological is concerned with the manifestations of personhood in the activity of thehuman beings that we experience. Modern philosophy has tended to evacuate objects of theirsubstance and thus is in danger of losing sight of their intrinsic worth. There is also the idealist tendency or tact of reducing individual substance – the in-itselfness of the person, our very owness of being – to an all embracing oneness. There is then an evacuation of the ontological interiority of the many individual persons. Clarke concedes and cautions that the self-possession of the human person through self-consciousness and self-determination is never complete and perfect (in this life). There are many influencesthat lie outside the focus of the conscious awareness – familial, cultural, bodily and environmental influences. The unconscious and the biological can exert pressures beyond our control. Thus we are not fully masters of our own house. Nevertheless in general and for the most part, we can gradually learn to exercise enough self-mastery over the significant choices in our lives to become moral persons albeit imperfectly and incompletely. Self-possession in the order of action as in the order of knowledge is a journey, an ongoing and difficult project that can be approximated more and more by the discipline of responsible self-reflection and the development of virtue. This we can see clearly in the differences in self-possession, self-awareness, and self-mastery of the various persons we know and this has considerable relevance for our social systems and forthe formation and ongoing support of human persons both young and old as they are socialized into their respective communities. Clarke argues that the existential Thomist ontology he is espousing can be a source of direction and hope for our human journey. LikeSchmitz, he brings special attention to the rich dynamism in the metaphysics of existential being as expansive act. Being now understood through the act of existence as a first principle presents us with a dynamic expansive act at the root of being as self-possessive “first act” that naturally pours over into the second act as self-communicativeacting towards others. This is the basis of the generation of systems of relations both intheir outgoing and incoming dimensions. Because of this perfecting of being through acting, relationality is now established as equi-primordial with self-possessing substance. Clarke argues that the important element here is this new emphasis on the relational dimension of being, which he has argued has been inadequately developed and articulated within the classical expressions of this tradition. Clarke, in my view, in an example of a thinker who has gone a long way towards balancing between the traditional Thomistic concern for substance in being and modern phenomenology’s discovery of the fundamental importance of the subject and of inter-subjective relationships in our lived experience as human beings.Again, person according to this tradition as understood and presented by Clarke is not something that is added on to being but is instead being’s highest perfection and most intense expression. It is this dynamism of self-possessing and self-communicating being

45

realism that is unlike modern realism in its materialist, reductionist, and functionalist forms, nor is it opposed to this emergent modern senseof the importance of subjectivity. Instead this perspective possesses a generous embrace that situates the human subject within the community ofbeings. This is a perspective that provides the path to the subject’s owninteriority which is shared analogously with all other beings and that can open up a co-existent intimacy with other beings in the broadest actual community of beings.

raised to the level of self-consciousness and freedom in the human being. Thus in Clarke, we have the ontology of “substance in relation” becoming the more phenomenologically resonant “person in community”. This is explained in Clarke’s scheme again as caused ultimately by our being made in the image of the Supreme Being, the Source of all being, as revealed in the Judaic-Christian tradition to which both Clarke and Schmitz confess adherence and which the Thomist philosophical tradition, I would argue, remains its unsurpassed articulation. As Schmitz suggests there is considerable practical importance for the benefit of human self-interpretation and understanding in finding and developing amore adequate and deeper philosophical articulation of human being as person. 60 Aristotle wrote that “Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods…… for with friends men(human beings)are more able to think and act.” (Aristotle: Ethics, 1155a) This question of an advancein being is admittedly fraught with formidable intellectual challenges and we can only hope to introduce the issue here in a footnote. But let us consider whether our knowledge of our friendship might in some way add to the very reality of the friendship. (Or in more traditional terms - does my knowledge of relation add to the being of that relation inany way?) The Thomistic tradition that I am following closely holds quite firmly, as I understandit, that the truth of our friendship has two aspects. 1) In being a true relation (state of affairs) whether one knows it or not, the truth is in the fact that we are friends. 2) In being known by us that we are friends, there is truth. So simply put inthe traditional account the knowledge that we are friends does not first cause the friendship. We are not friends because we think we are friends but rather first because weare in fact friends. Therefore in answering the question - does the knowledge of our relationship add to the being of the relationship? I might tentatively answer that our knowledge of friendship does not violate the traditional principle that knowledge for creatures is ontologically first dependent upon being – and yet our being as persons is enhanced in knowing being and thus as participants in a relationship as enhanced beings (with actualized potential in knowledge) the relationship can be enhanced through our increased knowledge. Nevertheless, this reflection take us very deep into issues of first principle, as Schmitz suggests, and though one may be very firm in having something to say, one may not be very clear in the saying of it especially in these matters and mysteryof inter-subjective relations and reality. There is vast room for misunderstanding, debate, and ongoing discussion. This is the challenge on the speculative side. There is real need to develop and clarify a more adequate ontological-phenomenological argument on the metaphysical and epistemological implications of friendship and human nature and thereby show anew its implications for our understanding of the relationship between knowledge and being – a perennial question of first philosophy with profound ethical implications as well.61 Crowe, Christ and History p.71.62 In modern and contemporary terms our subjective experience of real objects is largely understood to depend upon our being a subject in the world. However, it is very difficult if not impossible to move from subjective experience to a solid objective claim – from experience to reality, so to speak. We simply are unable to describe an object in total abstraction from our experience as subject with any satisfactory certainty. So then how does one provide a better account of realism. The common modern strategy tends to be

46

Schmitz believes, however, that personalism is somewhat limited by beingshaped by its reaction to the truncated realism of modernity and so it remains enthralled by a subjectivism and an inability to give an adequate account of non-personal reality. This is seen, he argues, in Gabriel Marcel’s interpretation of the body in terms of personal existence without adequately acknowledging its place in a wider community of beings. So though there is an increasing recognition of the depth of being in the non-personal forms of nature, there is an inability to articulate this recognition adequately. Personalism rejectsthe functionalist claim to a primacy of an allegedly objective world andit equally rejects the idealist claim to the primacy of the self that recoils from the so-called objective world and attempts to save itself through a critical or transcendental method. This approach, argues Schmitz, places upon the subject the impossible burden of validating both knowledge and freedom.

Gabriel Marcel’s personalism, for example, tries to free the human person from an isolated autonomy and its pull towards the external formsof measurable institutional behaviour as its only means of expression. Schmitz’s enquiry seeks to root this brilliant critique of the human condition and its attractive call for human authenticity in a much deeper philosophical soil. Personalism’s renewed sense of the interiority of the human subject, he believes, can helps us to see the wisdom in the Church Fathers’ and the medieval scholastics’ treatment ofthe person as the most perfect being in the created world. A key for therenewal of this focus, according to Schmitz, is through the modern senseof transcendence as a movement of the human spirit.

In their sensitive reading of Christian scholasticism, Gilson and his followers, encounter a knowledge that is not the knowledge of “know how”nor is it a knowledge of a way out of our mortal situation. Instead it is considered knowledge of the way towards or into eternal life.63 We can try and ask what is this way? Or what is this knowledge of the way? For only in this knowledge do we have the freedom to pursue it. It is a phase of our freedom having to do with the use or exercise of our knowledge and it is the good knowledge of deciding well. This is the substance of eternal life for us. Advances in the sciences or arts may or may not advance for us the good of deciding well. This good of deciding well changes the necessary situation of our mortality, the various forms of showing that coherence in our experience and language depends upon knowledge of real objects and therefore because there is this coherence in our experience,we must have real knowledge of the world. This I have tried to show elsewhere, following Gilson and others, has been and remains an issue of what he calls first principle. See my Dialogical Practice and the Ontology of the Human Person (New York: Vantage Press, 2010).63Gerard Smith, The Truth That Frees (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1956) see especially pp. 36-51. See also Etienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Thomism New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1964).

47

situation in which we shall all die, into the situation where we begin eternal life. It is said to be the glimmer of light in the darkness.

But we must ask - what human evidence do we have for this knowledge? Andit is here that the medieval scholastic tradition draws from aspects of the ancient tradition of Greek philosophy but does so through the light of the Christian Gospel, where some exemplary Spirit filled individuals,such as Socrates, are recognized to have chosen death rather than choosewhat they knew to be a certain evil. It seems then that we as human beings are attracted to something that transcends nature – a good that stands above the goods of nature. This love possesses one in a way that ordinary knowledge does not possess the object known. Speculative knowledge enriches us with what already is in nature and which becomes ours by knowing it. It enables us to talk intelligently of nature and things and to act intelligently. This is scientific knowing but it is, in such instances as in Socrates’ example, surpassed by a different knowledge that knows the good use of knowledge by deciding in favour of it. We possess this object known only by desiring to possess it. This isrecognized in knowing as a type of friendship and though perhaps quite rare, it does not fall short of knowledge while it endows us with the riches of the befriended.

Speculative knowledge does not of itself do this, for it does not turn us into friends of the object known in this personal way. The relationship remains formal only. When we reflect upon our common human experience, we might say that in knowing one’s friend one knows much more than him or her. What more is this? Here we confront the truth, which if known by way of befriending or loving it, is the very height ofour freedom and of our triumph over death. It is for Christian scholasticism, because it is for Christianity more fundamentally, the way into Eternal Life. This truth for Christianity is a Divine Person and the way we come to know this truth is by way of this Divine Person’sfree bestowal of Himself Who is Eternal Life.

This involves a profound transformation of formal knowing into a deeply personal knowing. Now this Eternal One Who freely reveals Himself personally to us permits Himself also to be known in the more formal demonstration of His existence. This demonstration that for Christians also has a profoundly historical dimension as has been argued extensively, enriches the mind as a real advance in knowledge and most importantly, it can animate an expectancy of this very personal good at the heights of our freedom.64 The formalism of scientific knowledge 64 Etienne Gilson points out this inter-linkage between being and person in his Spirit of Of Mediaeval Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991 (1936)) pp.204-205. He says that in Christian philosophy personality is the mark or sign of being at the very summit its perfection because everything has its source in and thus is dependent uponthe creative act of a personal God. Revelation teaches us that all things were made by theWord and the Word is with God, and the Word is God; that is to say precisely this being

48

simply cannot provide this type of knowledge. This perhaps provides us with a richer context for seeing in a unique and somewhat novel manner this deeper linkage between the Thomistic proofs for the existence of God, which had been a central preoccupation of scholasticism, and this modern personalism that has caught the attention of Schmitz. It is something he believes to be of considerable significance for this dynamic tradition of Christian thought and practice.

This personal knowledge is truly a movement in being that obeys other laws than those of physical motion. It’s transcendent aspect thus has another sense than that of the progressive linear sense characteristic of the Enlightenment’s understanding of transcendence. There is a great intellectual challenge in bridging this Thomistic notion of being as theact of existence and the modern use of existence - the former serves asthe first principle of being and the latter serves as mere fact of “being there” in space and time. For Schmitz it is here in the transformal metaphysics of being as existential act that the depth and breadth, the root and branch for sucha reconciliation is provided without devaluing the crucial insights of personalism. Again, Schmitz argues that the truth of personalism concerning the interiority of the human person and his freedom cannot beintegrated with the ancients and medieval concern for being without at the same time recognizing an advance in our understanding of being. Thistransformation comes about in the consolidation of being and freedom. The metaphysics of being recognizes the person as a special being among the world of created beings. This is a view that sees everything above the world of matter, everything that transcends the physical as having the freedom in being of the spiritual. Freedom then is the transcendental character of being ingredient in the intellectual and spiritual factor in man and present throughout the hierarchy of created spiritual substances and perfectly actual at the very center of Divine Life.

Unlike Gilson, Schmitz would agree with Lonergan that the situation in which this deeper knowledge comes about has not been accounted for adequately.65 It has tended to be left implicit in narrow epistemological theories that focus solely on the relationship between knower and the determinate objects of knowledge characterized variously as ideas, impressions, or representations. Where there has been an effort to explicate this situation of knowledge, knowledge is understoodvery differently and involves a type of fundamental enquiry similar to

Who presents Himself as personal in virtue of the sole fact that He presents Himself as Being.65See Kenneth Schmitz, “Another Look At Objectivity” in Paul O’Herron, ed., The Texture Of Being: Essays in First Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), pp.74-87.(1974)

49

that undertaken in the older philosophy of being though perhaps differentterms and approaches are utilized. It is an enquiry like Gilson’s that involves a concern for first principle that is prior to all types and isregarded as an original and underived factor within knowledge helping tosupport the value of objectivity in its comprehensiveness, universality,and fundamentality.

For Schmitz the situation of knowledge he is trying to articulate anew, he believes, leads to a renewed appreciation of the notion of being as first principle. This situation of knowledge is what he calls the singular circumambient universal that is fundamental in that it is that out of which and into which knowledge moves as its ground, functioning as a principle of inclusion, and not as container or collectivity but more as a principle of affinity. Schmitz suggests that what is operativein this principle is the transcendental demand for mutuality and so the intimate connection with human discourse is not hard to imagine. It is and has been the task of metaphysics as first philosophy to help articulate our knowledge of this transcendental situation but, warns Schmitz, the comprehensiveness of this reach is risk laden. For Schmitz is speaking of comprehension and not of a comprehensible knowable object. Though the knower in knowing apprehends the situation necessarily, it is not known or knowable as an object. He refers to thisas an active noetic structure, sustained by the knower in knowing and though apprehended in actual determinate knowing is itself neither knowable nor actually known – it is neither determinate nor indeterminate and yet it is the transcendental constitutent of integritynecessary for objective knowledge – the ultimate and centering goal of all knowledge from which theoretical and practical modifications of knowledge take their form.66 66 There is an important distinction between noetic and epistemic knowing recently articulated by Schmitz, who has been very much influenced by Gilson’s approach to Thomism as well as by the traditions of Kant and Hegel. This is an important distinction that could prove to be very helpful for understanding those philosophers, such as Gilson, who have always insisted that there is an important sense in which the fundamental concerns ofmetaphysics and ontology have a primacy over epistemology. In brief, noetic knowing, according to Schmitz, is present in more or less open discourse arising within the ontological truth relation. It is saying what we know and so it is spontaneously receptivein the concrete situation and is the stuff of ordinary conversation both innocent and wise. Epistemic knowing is a special modification of noetic discourse and is the methodical description, explanation, or interpretation of the way matters stand. This theoretical use of a critical method is more than just a commitment to consistency and coherence. It involves a semantic context that involves a theory of knowledge, canons on valid argument, and preconceptions of what counts as evidence. Epistemic discourse is methodically assertive in that it is a conceptual, rational, and argumentative effort to state veridically or correctly just how things are. In contrast to the noetic “saying whatwe know”, it is focused much more on “knowing what we say.” According to Schmitz, noetic discourse is not opinion to be measured by epistemic discourse. It is the source of truth whereas epistemic discourse is not the source of truth. The noetic is the transcendental ontological relationship in which truth consists and out of which cognition arises. Epistemic discourse modifies discourse according to the presuppositions and restrictions of its founding project that is naturally selective and involves some degree of noetic

50

There is more to be said in this reflection upon objectivity and its important concern for transcendence. In the history of philosophy, Schmitz sees what perhaps Lonergan misses in his concern for constructing a systematic philosophy of philosophies that can overcome the polymorphic tendency in human consciousness. It is that the history of philosophy simply has not respected any attempt by any one thinker toestablish human knowledge with propositional certitude. It is a history that continually transcends philosophies. Yet within this history of thought, this metaphysics or what Schmitz is calling after Aristotle, first philosophy, is not discouraged in the least by this for this enquiry does not seek propositional systematization but instead was always intended to be the most radical and extensive questioning pushingto the borders of our ignorance. There is an imperative involved here that leads us on as questioning beings that was seen also by Lonergan. And it is an imperative based in the structure of knowledge itself and the fact that our human knowing needs most fundamentally an other for itscompletion much more than it needs systematization.67 This closure. There is an implicit preference for explicit epistemological decisions taken in favour of a project ordered towards methodically justified truth. Noetic discourse does not provide such foundations nor does it have them. Epistemic discourse requires its discipline, noetic discourse requires an asceticism, a self-disciplined openness to the other, an intellectus habitus . See Kenneth Schmitz’s important paper “Neither with or without Foundations”, Review of Metaphysics, 42 (September, 1988), pp. 3-25, see also his more extensive treatment of these issues in his The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005) and The Texture of Being: Essays in First Philosophy (The Catholic University of America, 2007).

67 We might elaborate on this issue in Lonergan by considering briefly his discussion of truth and reflective interpretation in Insight 17.3 which is a sophisticated and highly developed discussion yet to be fully appreciated let alone emulated in Catholic-Christian thought today, according to many Lonerganians. If we give some degree of Christian theological content to what is an abstract discussion , by Lonergan, of the need for a systematic approach to cognitive theory and methodology, we believe the importance of thisaspect of Lonergan’s project is evident along with its limitations as well. Lonergan argues that as we speak simply and directly of Christ as Lord, we will also inevitably interpret this speaking simply and directly. But there is also what he calls reflective interpretation because we should act in some way because of the truth of Christ to be spoken of as we grasp an expected audience’s capacity to receive, and as we grasp the deficiencies in insight to be overcome if this truth is to be told effectively. Now by simple interpreting, we mean a second order speaking often addressed to a different audience and yet as a speaking of speaking of Christ, it also must be guided by how we should act as such which depends upon the truth of speaking of speaking of Christ as Lord,which we also do upon the grasp of the expected audience’s capacity to receive and as we grasp the deficiencies in insight to be overcome if this second order truth is to be told effectively. This reflective interpreting gradually becomes a multi-layered complexity of the telling and retelling of the Christian story, interspersed with reflecting upon speaking upon speaking. Furthermore, this layered complexity comes to suffer from two additional irksome difficulties. First – reflective interpretation is relative to its anticipated audiences, and audiences change and differ culturally and historically. There are various schools, attitudes, and orientations and within these differences there are aswell differences in capacity for understanding. Second – there is the challenging questionof whether or not an investigation of this manifold of capacities for understanding is actually possible, and if so can one then communicate the fruits of one’s enquiry? In

51

intentionality, which is also crucial in Lonergan’s account of knowledgeand being, is important for first philosophy because it shows the character of consciousness as disclosure, this breaking open of consciousness towards possibilities. Knowledge says Schmitz takes definite cognitive form when this need for an other is changed into the disclosure of situation and object, field and figure, periphery and attention. However, knowledge completes itself in the act of knowing to the extent it can let the other be as other. This says Schmitz is not simply the knower becoming the other as in learning. And it is unlike the early modern conception of objectivity where methodic control by the knower over the object known was emphasized with its obvious practical and technical advantages. Instead, objectivity pursued by first philosophy to its deepest level ultimately must renounce any restrictionupon the object. This acknowledges that the thing known is not in itselfan other for this “othering” of the thing in knowledge is intimately relatedother words, is effective reflective interpretation really possible? And then we have the basic problem of interpretation – where a simple interpretation may be correct – for thereis such a thing as correct common sense that hits the target, as there is correct historical sense that hits the target and usually this is the fruit of a long familiarity with the data. But both these common senses are always subject to individual, group, and general bias. And so then the question is - can our interpretation be scientific so as to avoid such bias? And if it is to be so, it must discover some method for conceiving and determining the habitual development of all audiences, it has to invent some method by which its expression escapes relativity to particular and incidental audiences.Clearly Lonergan’s argument is rigorous and involved and to the extent one can grasp this argument one can see how his work becomes preoccupied with the human subject’s invariable cognitive structure. It is this cognitive structure of the human subject that somehow provides the methodological key for understanding this layered complexity in reflective interpretation. It is believed to provide important and perhaps unprecedented guidance forthe complexities in any effective transcultural mediation of meanings and values. As Lonergan might put it – in knowing what it is to know, one will know in general terms all there is to know. Furthermore, Lonerganians have argued that the complexity of his approach neither compromises on the demands of objective truth nor neglects the very real claims of cultural difference. Nevertheless even if we grant that Lonergan’s theory of cognition and methodology greatly aide in bringing one into engagement with multi-culturalcomplexities and issues of pluralism for our times, Gilson’s fundamental issue remains, inour view. It is the ontological dimension and objective truth of Christ’s being that is still missing for the most part. The transposition of this section from Insight, into a discussion of the various reflective layers of the theological "talk of Christ" shows, in our view, that the Church’s primary and direct encounter with the mysterious being of this“Christ” remains unaccounted for. The primary concern and focus moves quickly to the very complex secondary issues of reflection and interpretation and the appropriate and effective communication of such. My simple point, and it would be Gilson’s as well, is that this specialized and particular primary concern of the Church remains foundational and it must necessarily involve apprehending the object of a certain faith, otherwise the secondary complexities eventually can become unhelpful and complicating distractions subject to interminable debate, scepticism, and even despair. Again, for both Gilson, the Christian philosopher, and Lonergan, the Christian theologian, the Christian Revelation inits central claim is stupendous; it is unique and unheard of. It differs profoundly from the Socratic claim at the beginning of philosophy of a human soul somehow living a better life elsewhere, or from the more common immortality of the great person in historical memory treasured by his admirers or disciples. The Christian claim is that this Jesus in his flesh, blood, and bones rose in a new form to the same life that death had just destroyed.

52

to the “selving” of the knower. But still there is a further intimacy in this objectivity in knowing, in that knowledge is obtained and completedonly if it proceeds not on the desire to control the thing known but by a sort of friendship as benevolence concerned for the integrity of the thing within this new relationship. There is a wishing the other well and the providing an appropriate context where the other can be just as it is. This is the context of the comprehensive situation, for truth demands of knowing that it be a disclosure of the thing known in its being just as it is. This Schmitz insists is not Kant’s famous thing-in-itself. Rather knowing the thing as it is in itself means apprehending it as having a transcendental order of relations with the knower; knowing it as whole in its integrity as object within the whole which isthe comprehension of the situation in some determinate manner as the actual knowledge of it. Such knowing involves limits, which in recognizing these one apprehends the totality of one’s situation as indefinitely open to further disclosure. This at its most fundamental isto be free of perspectivity and sounds very similar to Lonergan’s universal viewpoint somehow appropriated by authentic human subjectivity. Such objectivity is no automatic achievement. It involves an existential relationship between knower and known in which the basis or situation for the relationship is provided by the knower but in accordance with respect for the thing known.

This is a brief explication of Schmitz’s concerted effort at a revival of an account of knowing and knowledge provided by first philosophy at the most fundamental level, which provides no criterial warrants to validate this or that determinate knowledge claim. Instead it sets out the pattern of disclosure in which such criterion as found in Lonergan’scognitional theory and its secondary reflections may be grounded for limited purposes. It instead grounds knowledge in a situation of meaningful disclosure that counteracts the subjectivism that Lonergan’s cognitional theory is clearly susceptible to without the fruitful work of first philosophy to which Gilson had tried to remain faithful. It provides a disclosure of meaning, the actualization of the intelligibility of the thing, and the self-actualization of the knowing subject in knowing. It is the offering of theoria by first philosophy. Itis contemplative of the total situation, conceding to the imperatives ofthe truth of the other, recognizing the limits of perspective. Schmitz says it can be a source of either joy or pain but it inescapably is a source of luminosity of our very being with others, both one and many. It is Christian philosophy at its best now engaged with both theology and history.

One of Schmitz’s somewhat unique insights as a Christian philosopher hasbeen his recurrent suggestion that a key for understanding and approaching this strategy of reconciliation of Gilson and Lonergan, and ultimately of thought and being, is to recognize the profound similarity

53

between cognition and friendship. He writes: “There is a striking similitude between cognition and the love of friendship, for both must let the other be in its appropriate being – the known in its, the friendin his – while sustaining that being in their own.”68 Schmitz’s claim is that in knowing and friendship there is an opening out and reaching towards the other that in its very act returns also into itself as subjectto become more itself and yet in this returning there is a sealing or establishment of a transcendental completeness that in classical terms has been known as the perfection of truth. The copula, stressed so adamantly in Gilson’s philosophy, is the energy of this mediation and the reconciling presence of a needed speculative reason albeit remarkably renewed and energized by both theology and history. However, Lonergan was correct in insisting that this copula must be understood through a process of concretion and fulfillment. Without this process offulfillment, theory leaves the copula as an immediate and merely assertedgroundless conjunction. It is left with the complacence of a lucky fit between judgment and being. Schmitz sees the copula as showing the unity of thought and being for which he attempts to articulate a theory for their reconciliation. It is at least an important beginning, in our view, that warrants a much more sympathetic interchange between philosophy and theology aided by a more realistic appraisal of our history as Christians and thereby of our future as well.

Conclusion

The philosophy of Bernard Lonergan is a monumental effort in recent Christian thought to engage the modern world meaningfully and effectively. We have tried to show how the ontological dimension and objective truth in Christian theology remains inadequately accounted forin Lonergan’s philosophy. Gilson’s philosophy, of which Lonergan was very critical, anticipated this problem and points to the philosophical presuppositions requiring re-examination for a more adequate account. Anexamination of this conflict between these two Christian philosophers, in our view, has helped us to illuminate important doctrinal and pastoral issues that confront the Church’s call for a new evangelization.69 Christian theology needs an updated philosophy if it 68 See Kenneth Schmitz, Enriching The Copula” in The Texture of Being: Essays in First Philosophy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007) p.91. 69 Again this call for the New Evangelization demands an honest engagement with our history in both its present events and past events, personally and collectively. This is witnessed to with specially poignancy in Archbishop Anthony Mancini’s theological reflection introducing Sr. Nuala Kenny’s important recent monograph Healing The Church: Diagnosing And Treating The Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis (Toronto: Novalis, 2012) pp.5-12. There are clear connections between Archbishop Mancini’s reflection and our own argument in this paper. Archbishop Mancini writes:

The challenge therefore, is to see how to reconnect the body of the Church, with the risen Christ really present in his disciples. This connection, which has been

54

is to speak to the world in an effective and meaningful manner, in this Lonergan was right, but philosophy needs theology if it is to avoid despairing of its own interminable dialectic, in this Gilson was right. However, our discovery in this paper is that of the vital role a proper approach to actual history plays in linking philosophy’s structure with theology’s freedom. The Church’s primary and direct encounter with the mysterious being of Christ remains inadequately accounted for in terms of the human subject and his religious experience alone. There is a historical dimension that needs to be confronted and considered honestlyand objectively. Some incomparable act of God has actually happened in our history as human beings in this world. However we have found, with

lost or forgotten, needs to be rediscovered. The many other actions and responses to sexual abuse, important and necessary as they may be – ensuring best practices and safe environments, returning to more orthodox teaching, or making more robust demands for ethical and moral living – are insufficient to stop deviant sexual behavior. The central issue in this crisis is not sexual misbehavior but understanding who we are as Christ’s body and what is proper behavior between and among the many members who make up the Body of Christ.Based on the principle that action follows being, it is the very nature of how to be Church, here and now, in a relevant and effective manner, that is the real concern and challenge deserving our attention and commitment. The other actions and whatever else needs to be done will follow and actually make more sense, if weface the real problem.(p.6)…..In the pastoral care of the Church, it’s the Person of Christ whom we must keep inmind and try to better understand and to model. Just as Christ never treated people as problems but as persons so too we must stay focused on the person of Jesus Christ and not just on the problems affecting the members of the Body of Christ. We do this by reconnecting with Christ, by rediscovering our love for him and our gratitude for his self-sacrifice. It is the person of Christ who transforms us. It is up to us to appreciate his ministry, receive his forgiveness and accept his mercy. This will allow us to experience the power of the resurrection, and nothing will ever be the same.(p.12)

On this last point of Archbishop Mancini’s reflection, we believe, our paper makes an important contribution by cautioning against a solely subjective interpretation of the resurrection which as we have argued in keeping with Gilson, has infected the Church’s theology since Vatican II and is referred to above as “a crisis of philosophical foundations that has extended into post-conciliar theology”. This too, we insist, must be honestly confronted. And so in an effort to amplify Archbishop Mancini’s important theological reflection, we would draw from Henri Bissonnier’s argument made prior to Vatican II in his The Pedagogy of Resurrection (New York: Paulist Press, 1979 (1959) pp.11-12:

To avoid misunderstanding let us point out certain deviations here: We have already pointed out those which stopped short at the mystery of physical and moralevil, even at the mystery of suffering. Some look with disdain at attitudes falsely dubbed Christian – self-punishment, sadism and masochism. Indeed we perceive a risk corrupting the Christian sense of suffering by such more or less psychopathological attitudes. We believe that it is certainly fostered by the mind-set which consists in stopping at the cross of Christ instead of going up to his glorious Resurrection. And we miss the consequences which for us as for him flow from it.”

My own efforts here in large part have been to show by virtue of comparison with the important philosophy of Bernard Lonergan, how the older but equally important philosophy of Etienne Gilson can aide us in avoiding this risk.

55

Etienne Gilson’s and Kenneth Schmitz’s assistance, that there have been philosophical presuppositions particularly active within modern intellectual culture that present serious obstacles for any honest encounter with this history. Lonergan’s treatment of the knowing subjectmoves deeply into the very complex issues of intelligent reflection and interpretation and towards appropriate and meaningful communication in our pluralistic culture. Our simple point, and it would be Gilson’s as well, is that the particular and concrete concern of the Church for thisprimordial and direct encounter with the mysterious being of “Christ” remains foundational and it must necessarily involve subjectively apprehending in some fundamental manner the object of a certain faith. It is the securing of the objective dimension of this apprehension, we have found, that clearly depends upon a theology aided by the proper philosophical principles and a realistic appropriation of our history. Otherwise, the secondary complexities of subjective reflection eventually become unhelpful and complicating distractions, subject to interminable debate, inevitably retreating into a subjectivism, scepticism, and even despair …and perhaps eventually a deadly indifference.

Debec, NBSeptember 24, 2013

56