A Presentation of Lonergan's Method Related to Interpretation

1. Cognitive Theory

Lonergan's theology is a theology of the subject. The study of the subject's operation towards truth and value is Lonergan's lifelong project. He sees that an existential subject is a subject by degrees. It discerns different levels of consciousness. In a dreaming state, we are only potential subjects without freedom to think or act. However, we become experiential subjects able to perceive and feel about the sensible world when we are awake. When we follow our desire for intelligibility and go on to inquire about our experience, to understand its possible meanings and implications, we arise to be an intelligent subject. Then the rational subject sublates the experiential and rational when it desires to check if its understanding is correct, marshals the evidence pro and con and finally judges it to be or not to be. Finally, the responsible consciousness sublates the rational one when the former follows the intention of the good, the question of value to deliberate, decide and act on what is truly worthwhile. Therefore, there are four operations in our consciousness, which Lonergan subsumes in four transcendental precepts, namely, be attentive in experience, be intelligent in understanding, be reasonable in judging and be responsible in deliberation.(14) "Transcendental" has two meanings here. First, obedience to the four transcendental precepts is not an automatic process but one that is achieved by the subject's engaging in the process of self-transcendence. Second, every genuine knowing and acting, without exception, has to go through these operations in our consciousness. The self-appropriation of these transcendental precepts is what Lonergan means by method, whereby one approaches truth and value.

In his cognitive theory Lonergan affirms first that knowing is a compound of many operations, not a single uniform property. Objectivity in experiencing the immediate world is attained by sensing and intuition, yet it is not the only level of knowing. In the mediated world of meaning, objectivity is approached by questioning, which governs the exigencies of human intelligence to investigate and understand, and of human reasonableness to judge the virtually unconditioned. What is grasped in understanding or judging is not some further datum added on to the data of sense. In fact, it is unlike all data but consists in an intelligible or reasonable unity. Second, apart from being a thinker, the subject is also a doer who deliberates, chooses and acts as a free and responsible agent for making of the self. If knowing is for the sake of being, acting is for the sake of value. Value here not only refers to a particular good but also to ordering goods for the sake of the truly good. Being and value are both transcendental notions, i.e., their entirety is beyond the reach of the subject, yet always present in its activity of knowing and acting. They guide the person towards their greater fullness. Just as we can only have limited knowledge of being by knowing this and that and other beings, the actualization of value can only be found in this or that act of a good person.(15) Therefore, what is finally at stake is the subject who, by the effect of self-transcendence, attains objectivity in knowing and becomes the principle of goodness in decision and action.

Cognitive theory affirms that human knowing is a dynamic structure. Instead of just being a single part -- sensing, or understanding, or judging -- knowing consists of their combination as a dynamic structure, an immanent moving from one part to another for the whole. Moreover, these parts function differently, so they cannot be understood in an analogous sense. If knowing is like this, so knowing what knowing is follows the same structure. First, it is the experience of one's experience, understanding and judgment on our different levels of consciousness whenever we perform them. Second, through insight comes understanding the experience of these levels as an inevitable elevator if we want to know. Finally, by exigency comes judgment asking whether this understanding of human knowing is true. In order to doubt or reject this understanding, however, the knower has to go through the foregoing process of cognitive structure again, i.e., the denial is self-referentially inconsistent. So the judgment has to be true.

Lonergan succeeds in affirming the irrevocable structure of human knowing. This irrevocable structure of human knowing is important because, first, objectivity is thus granted on three different levels, namely experiential, normative and absolute, corresponding to the three components in the cognitive structure. Second, it refutes the mistaken notion of knowing as seeing, which cannot help but lead to naive realism or idealism. The former affirms reality by generalizing the simple experience of seeing, a naive affirmation often without genuine understanding, while the latter denies knowing reality at all. Third, it provides a critical analysis to situate our knowing on the level of being, namely, reality again, so that the Kantian wound between phenomenon and noumenon is healed. Fourth, it provides the basis for taking human knowing as a continuous and progressive enterprise, overcoming the classic or static approach. Finally, it provides also the justification for functional specialties in a complementary and dynamic whole for method in theology.

2. The Realms of Meaning and Differentiation of Consciousness

If cognitive theory discusses the operation of the human mind and heart, then realms of meaning represent how our mind and heart structure reality. Transcending the animals' life that is merely submerged into the world of immediacy, the human world is basically mediated by meaning. Meaning orients individuals, organizes groups and communities, and forms cultures. Corresponding to his differentiation of human consciousness, Lonergan names the realms of meaning as common sense, theory, interiority and transcendence, and to these four he later adds scholarship and art. This differentiation is another dimension of his anthropology, in addition to cognitive theory.

Common sense deals with persons and things that are related to us. It represents the visible universe that we encounter. By transcendental precepts we reach insight, judgment and decision to meet the exigency of the situation in an appropriate way. Theory, bracketing the usefulness and practicality of things to us, provides the systematic and explanatory view of things in their mutual relationships. Theory develops terms, definitions, formulas, and constructs models with special kinds of technical language, laws and universal principles. Interiority emerges by adverting to and heightening our conscious operations and the dynamic structure that relates them to one another. That is how the transcendental precepts are discovered. Transcendence absorbs the compartmentalized world of meaning into a silent and all-embracing self-surrender to God's love. Scholarship is the realm of language, exegesis, literature and history. By using the subject's common sense language, it aims at understanding the meanings of the words and deeds of other people in different places or times. Its interest is not in a universal explanation, but in the intentions inherent in particular events. Finally, art is the realm of beauty in expressing ideas into objects or movements by commanding form???.(16)

Culture is informed by meaning. Different realms of meaning represent the variety and fecundity of cultures. This analysis is a phenomenological rebuttal of the classic and single notion of culture. If theology is to fulfil its task of mediating between the matrix of cultures and the role of religion within that matrix, the theologian is required to be capable of dexterously shifting from one realm of meaning to another in his studying or communicating the religious message for different readers or audiences. But what is the condition of the possibility of accomplishing this task? It lies in going back to the transcendental precepts, namely being attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible.

3. The Notion of Conversion

Conversion is the about-face of one's horizon by renouncing the core characteristics in the old one, leading the subject into a greater depth and breadth in truth and value. There is a hermeneutic circle between transcendental precepts and conversion. It is by the grace and event of conversion that the subject becomes self-transcendent in attentiveness to experience, in the intelligence to reach insight and understanding, in the reasonableness to seek out the virtually unconditioned, and in the responsibility to make a decision. On the other hand, it is the cumulative operations of the transcendental precepts which engender the possibility of conversion.

There are three kinds of conversion, namely, religious, moral, and intellectual conversion. Religious conversion represents a person totally falling in love with God, a recognition or initiation of ultimate concern in one's life. It is a recognition or initiation because any intentionality flows from the eros of the human spirit. As Aristotle says, everyone desires to know. Also, Augustine sighs deeply that his heart is restless unless it rests in God. This eros rooted in us initiates and is prior to all human enterprises, knowing and acting, but we may perhaps not recognize it. We search for the intelligibility of the cosmos but are oblivious to its intelligible ground. In fact, any question about human beings is finally a question about God. When this love is recognized, it signifies a surrender and faith without limits or qualifications, without conditions or reservations. This love is not simply an act but rather a state of self-surrender, from which other acts flow. It gives us a new horizon that transvalues and transforms because it surpasses the old one where originating value is only human beings and terminal value is the good that human beings bring about. Now, the originating value is the divine light and love, while the terminal value is the whole universe. As a result, human concern reaches beyond the human world to God and God's world; and human development is not only in skills and virtues but also in holiness.(17)

On the one hand, this self-transcendence into God's domain represents reaching the utmost outpost. On the other hand, human self-transcendence is ever precarious. In our dialectical advancement we tend to lose balance and downgrade the reality of God. For example, we may overemphasize God's transcendence but neglect God's immanence so that God becomes remote and irrelevant. On the contrary, God's immanence may be so overemphasized and transcendence neglected that the religious symbol becomes idol, ritual becomes magic, and recital a myth, etc. Meanwhile, in religious conversion faith has to discern the value of believing the word of religion, of accepting the judgments of fact and the judgments of value that the religion proposes, because faith is not an isolated or individual affair but has roots in a religious community. This community inherits the tradition initiated by the divine entry of God into human history and calls for a response. This call is expressed in various forms, including imperative ones, such as the command of love of God and neighbour. It might be expressed in narrative, such as the story of the community's origin and development; or in the ascetical, such as the teaching of spirituality; or in theory, such as the teaching of wisdom, the goodness of God and the manifestation of God's intentions. The genuineness of all these expressions has to be under scrutiny.(18) While this kind of discernment in faith constitutes the whole of theology, it should simultaneously enhance the possibility of self-transcendence for the sake of deeper conversion, avoid pitfalls or downgrade God's reality. Here comes a point of methodology, of the "how" which keeps our balance in check.

Moral conversion involves the change of the criteria of one's decision and choices from mere satisfaction to values, opting for the truly good, to a point even against satisfaction if it conflicts with the value to be upheld. It is a time for one to exercise vertical freedom and to set up, or radically change, one's basic horizon. The drive to value rewards success in self-transcendence with a happy conscience and saddens failures with an unhappy one. Here, moral conversion presupposes the judgments of value that differ in content but not in structure from judgment of fact. They differ in content because what is judged to be real need not be approved. However, they share the same criterion, namely, the self-transcendence of the subject to reach what is independent of the subject. In fact, judgments of value are felt to be true or false in so far as they generate a peaceful or uneasy conscience. Of course, the purpose of judgments of value is not merely knowing but also doing. Sin lies in the very dichotomy between knowing and doing, i.e. one does not follow what one affirms to be truly good. Moral conversion implies a decision and choice to make knowing and doing congruent and consistent. Furthermore, judgments of value should occur in a context of growth, i.e., one advances the judgments from agreeable to vital, from vital to social, from social to cultural, from cultural to personal, and from personal to religious value, to being in love with God. In this sense, moral conversion aims unceasingly at following this Ordo Amoris to higher values, until one's love of God is complete. At this point values are whatever one loves, and evils are whatever one hates. At this stage one becomes a self-transcendent person or, in an Aristotelian sense, a virtuous one who represents the incarnated principle of benevolence and true loving. However, as mentioned above, conversion is not an automatically ever-advancing process. Deviation from the order and relapse often occur because of neurotic needs and attachments. Therefore, a normative pattern of recurrent and related operations is revealed to check our deviation.(19)

Intellectual conversion is "a radical clarification and, consequently, the elimination of an exceedingly stubborn and misleading myth concerning reality, objectivity, and human knowledge."(20) Lonergan illustrates the dialectic opposition between naive realism, empiricism, idealism and critical realism as an example of intellectual conversion. He contends strongly that it is necessary to distinguish the world of immediacy, which is reached by our senses, and the world mediated by meaning, which is reached by our consciousness or insight. Knowing the latter is not some kind of inner looking or sensing, as the naive realists believe, as if there were some inner images that we could see or touch. In fact, knowing is achieved by a structure of operations, namely experiencing, understanding, judging and deciding. The reality known is not just looked at; it is given in experience, organized and explained by understanding, posited by judgment and belief. Therefore, knowledge is not restricted to sense experience, as it is by the empiricist, who takes understanding, judging and believing as merely subjective activities, Nor is it as envisaged by the idealist who, includes understanding and sensing as knowing, yet thinks of the world mediated by meaning as not real but ideal. Only the critical realist acknowledges the facts of human knowing and insists that the world mediated by meaning is the real world. This demonstration sets up a paradigm to engender intellectual conversion and rebut intellectual myth. Objectivity in the world of meaning has its appeal to us. It is not reached just by our sensing or by a mental construct, but by a self-transcendent subject who is willing to go through the transcendental structure of operations inherent in our consciousness.

These three conversions occur in a single consciousness and one sublates the other. Sublation means that what sublates goes beyond what is sublated, bringing something new and distinct on a new basis, yet keeping the sublated intact, preserving all its characteristics and carrying them to a fuller realization within a richer context. In this sense, moral conversion sublates the intellectual because it sets the subject on a new, existential level of consciousness and establishes the person as an originating value. At the same time, it does anything but weaken the subject's devotion to truth. In fact, it needs the truth in accord with the exigency of the rational consciousness before the subject can deliberately respond to value. On the other hand, the search for truth now has a richer context and stimulation for the pursuit of all values.

Similarly, religious conversion sublates moral conversion because the subject finds its capacity and desire for self transcendence in fulfilment and joy in this other-worldly love, which provides a new basis for all values and doing good. The originating value goes beyond the human being and takes root in God, the ground of all intelligibility and commitment. This new basis in no way negates or diminishes the fruits attained by moral or intellectual conversion. On the contrary, now all human pursuit of truth and good is placed within a cosmic context and purpose, and this love even grants to the subject the power of accepting the inevitable suffering required to undo the effects of decline due to human inauthenticity towards truth and goodness.(21)

From a causal point of view, however, it is religious conversion, God's gift of divine love, which appears first so that the taste of this love reveals values in their splendour to the subject. The subject, in returning love out of a deep sense of gratitude, is then determined to give up the wrong doings and mere satisfaction of the old horizon, in order to do the genuine good and follow all the commandments which are rooted in this totally Other. Next, this deliberation, or moral conversion, leads the subject to discern the truths taught by the religious tradition, and in such a tradition and belief lie the seeds of intellectual conversion.(22)

14. Cf. Bernard Lonergan, "The Subject", A Second Collection: Papers by Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J., ed. By William F. J. Ryan, S.J. and Bernard J. Tyrell, S.J. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1974), 79-81.

15. According to Aristotle, "Virtue...is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which a man of practical wisdom would determine it." (Nicomachean Ethics, II, vi, 15; 1106b 36ff) There is, therefore, no definition of virtue without its embodiment in a virtuous person. This whole thrust leads Lonergan to situate personal conversion as the foundation of doing theology.

16. Cf. Bernard Lonergan, Method In Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971), 83-84, 273-274

17. Cf. Ibid, 116, 240.

18. Cf. Ibid, 110-111, 118. This attention originates from and corresponds to Ignatius' caution on the afterglow of consolation. The origin from God might not be doubted, but the thinking and acting after it should be checked by the transcendental precepts.

19. Cf. Ibid, 35-39, 240.

20. Cf. Ibid, 238.

21. Cf. Ibid, 242.

22. Cf. Ibid, 243.