What are we doing when we’re reading? Bernard Lonergan and Gordon Clark on “black marks on white paper”

While reading The Presbyterian Philosopher, Doug Douma’s authorized biography of Gordon Haddon Clark, I was struck by this 1962 lecture snippet:

. . . ink marks on a paper, or sounds in the air, the noise I’m  making, never teach anybody anything. This is good Augustinianism. And Protestantism is supposed to be Augustinian, at least it was in its initiation. And it was the most unfortunate event that Thomas Aquinas came in and replaced Augustinianism with Aristotelianism and empiricism which has been an affliction ever since. But the point is that ink marks on a paper, and the sound of a voice, never generates any idea at all. And Augustine’s solution of it is that the Magister is Christ. Christ is the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. This not a matter of regeneration. This is a matter of knowledge. And Christ enlightens the unregenerate in this sense just as well as the regenerate. If an unregenerate man learns anything at all, he learns it from Jesus Christ and not from ink marks on paper.[1]

Now, whom did these remarks put me in mind of? Why, Bernard Lonergan, S.J., the great transcendental Thomist, steeped in the Aristotelian tradition:

“Reading categories into” is a particular application of the great principle that you know by taking a look at what’s out there. Either it is out there or it is not; and the man who sees what is out there is right and the other fellow reads his own mind into what is out there. That is a fundamental error on what the exegete or interpreter does. What’s out there are black marks on white paper in a certain order. And if the exegete or interpreter gives you anything distinct, in any way different from those black marks on white paper in the same order, then it is due to his personal experience, his personal intelligence, and his personal judgment, or it is due to his belief in what someone else told him.[2]

On the title page of Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, Lonergan foregrounded these words from Aristotle’s De Anima.

τα μεν ουν ειδη το νοητικον εν τοις φαντασμασι νοει (III, 7, 431b 2)

That is, forms (ειδη, eide) are grasped (νοει, noei) by mind (νοητικον, noetikon) in images (φαντασμασι, phantasmasi).

Clark was fluent in French as well as English and could read Attic and Koine Greek as easily as either of those languages. But not Chinese. Therefore, if someone had put before him a Chinese translation of the Gospel of John, Jesus Christ could not, barring a miracle, have enlightened Clark as to the meaning of the propositions those verses express.

For those phantasms or images, those Chinese characters—ink marks on a paper, black marks on white paper in a certain order—could not for him occasion or trigger in his mind the propositions God inspired John to write. Why? Because he never learned the Chinese language. One wonders how Clark’s epistemology accounts for how one learns a language.

There was, of course, a time (however brief) when Gordon Clark was too young even to read English. Therefore, again apart from a miracle, Jesus could not then have used a certain arrangement of letters to occasion a proposition in his mind using a Bible, in whatever language. He developed as a reader of texts, bringing to them his experience of many things, including learning vocabulary, grammar, and syntax and working with dictionaries and concordances, trying out his grasp of what he learned, and by trial-and-error adjusting his performance to it.

What Lonergan sarcastically called “the great principle” he elsewhere mocked as the Principle (or Theory) of the Empty Head.  Like Clark, Lonergan denied that human knowing was essentially a matter of taking a good look at what is already out there now, of seeing what is there. He was no empiricist.[3]

Unlike Clark, however, Lonergan’s focus was on the act of understanding, which for us mortals consists in insight into the data of sense (judgment being verified insight). This event was bereft of cognitive significance for Clark, even though it occurred countless times a day and explains a great deal (not all) of his life of mind as a learned Christian. Unfortunately, that proposition from De Anima must have been for him just so much empiricism, the root of virtually all epistemological evil.

There is no evidence that Clark ever took notice of Lonergan’s Insight, which came out in 1958 when Clark was chairing Butler University’s philosophy department. His friendly Presbyterian rival Cornelius Van Til, by contrast, did feel Insight was worth critiquing, as did Van Til’s student Greg L. Bahnsen, Ph.D., another Presbyterian philosopher who, while strenuously rejecting Lonergan’s Catholicism, appreciated that

Lonergan might also be the formal jumping off point for genuinely Christian philosophers to explore the significance of that process of coming to understand which is designated “insight.” This notion should profitably be used for comparison and contrast with the noetic operations of the Holy Spirit in inspiration, inward testimony and illumination of the believer, and common grace operations whereby even the unbeliever is enabled to come to some fundamental understanding of his world. If the notion were purged of its mystical connotations and qualified with ethical considerations, insight might be a valuable didactic category for Christian philosophy.  But again, if it were to become so it would have to be reworked within the presuppositional viewpoint of Scriptural thinking.[4]

It was Clark’s distinctive position that only the propositions of the Bible conveyed by the Holy Spirit to a human mind counts as knowledge; all other beliefs, however justified and true they may be, are no more than opinions. Clark did not register an opinion as to whether English letters or Chinese characters played any role in that conveyance.

 

And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.” So Philip ran to [the Ethiopian eunuch] and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him (Acts 8:29-31. Italics mine.)

Did Philip need the Holy Spirit to recognize that certain auditory images were the Ethiopian eunuch’s vocal reading of Isaiah? The eunuch needed Philip’s guidance to understand Isaiah, but what the Ethiopian was desirous of understanding were the meanings conveyed to his contingently Hebrew-trained mind from the Hebrew letters formed in Iron Gall ink on parchment.

What were you doing when you read this blog post? Whose cognitional theory accounts for it better, Clark’s or Lonergan’s?

Notes

[1] Gordon Clark, “A Contemporary Defense of the Bible,” lecture, Believers Chapel Tape Ministry, Dallas, TX, 1977, minute 111-12, as cited in Douglas J. Douma, The Presbyterian Philosopher: The Authorized Biography of Gordon, 20-21. My italics.

[2] Bernard Lonergan, Regis College, Toronto, 1962, Discussion 5, Volume 1, page 351; Early Works on Theological Method. The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Volume 22. University of Toronto Press, 2010. Robert C. Croken and Robert M. Doran, eds. I can’t put my finger on the “black marks” phrase in Insight, which is where he first used it and I first saw it. I’d be grateful to anyone who can find it and let me know.

[3] “Thus [Lonergan’s] Method in Theology involves bringing to the light the level of our own intellectual conversion as we reflect on the processes of basic religious and moral conversion. For the level of our conversion can and does, often in a subtle and unacknowledged way, influence our reading of the Scriptures, Christian history, contemporary movements and the word we speak to the world in the midst of those movements. The frequent appeal to theologizing or interpreting without any presuppositions Lonergan labels “The theory of the empty head” which, if taken seriously, would make the ideal interpreter the person with the least knowledge of all, the least personal development. Rather, as it becomes clear in Method in Theology, the ideal interpreter of Paul is the person who has experienced and knows the reality of religious conversion Paul is talking about and can situate his interpretation in the context of contemporary intellectual discussion.” Richard M. Liddy, “Lonergan’s Method: An Alternative View.” I found this article online, but the PDF one receives when one clicks on the hit has no information about when or where it was published. All the articles it cites are from 1972, nothing later.

[4] Greg L. Bahnsen, “Modern Philosophy and Apologetics.” After returning home from a trip to New York (where I met him at a conference in the late 1980s), Bahnsen sent me at my request a photocopy of the article whose text resides on my other site.  This title appears in parentheses in the upper right corner of the first page. No date is given, but it was written no earlier than 1970, when the third edition of Lonergan’s Insight, which Bahnsen cites, was published; probably not later than 1972, when Lonergan’s Method in Theology was published, which Bahnsen does not cite, but almost certainly would have had it been available. He reviewed Method for the Westminster Theological Journal, XXXVI:1, Fall 1973.

Previous posts on Gordon H. Clark

• • Gordon H. Clark’s problematic rationalism
  • Gordon H. Clark’s scripturalism: Shawn Lazar’s revision

Previous posts on Bernard Lonergan

• • 1949: What were my influencers doing?
  • Bernard Lonergan had it backwards; August Hopkins Strong, about right.
  • Bernard Lonergan’s “Insight”: on becoming an intellectually fulfilled theist