People who find Bernard Lonergan’s writing forbidding might benefit from this review of his magisterial Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, the subject of yesterday’s post, by Husserl and Hegel scholar Quentin Lauer, SJ (1917-1997).
It’s a short answer to the question: what was Lonergan up to in Insight as one of his scholarly contemporaries (and fellow Jesuit) interpreted that enterprise?
Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ (1904-1984). Late 1940s, early 1950s.
Last month I published an old (1978) paper of mine on the problem (scandal?) of philosophical diversity, “Philosophic Diversity and Skeptical Possibility: A Confrontation with Hegel”[1]—why is it that brilliant minds committed to discovering truth cannot agree?—but I forgot to mention that when I wrote it, my discovery of Bernard Lonergan and his proposed outline of a solution to the problem was still a few months in the future.
The first step in cornering it, he said, lies in grasping “the polymorphism of human consciousness.” Consciousness operates differently in different contexts, for example, commonsense understanding, theoretical reasoning, artistic expression, or moral deliberation, and so forth.
In his magnum opus, Insight: A Study in Human Understanding, Lonergan makes this bold pronouncement:
. . . the polymorphism of human consciousness is the one and only key to philosophy.[2]
I learned only today of the publication, in 2008, of a (prohibitively expensive) book that elaborates upon this proposition.[3]
“In order for God to remove kings and set up kings (Dan. 2:21), and to make nations great and destroy them (Job 12:23), he must orchestrate thousands upon thousands of human decisions, events of nature, and immeasurably vast webs of causes and effects. Don’t be naïve and affirm the fabric of God’s providence over kings and nations while doubting whether he holds all the threads and weaves with perfection.”
I originally posted this essay nearly 18 years ago, when I was influenced by the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) as “processed” by David Ray Griffin (1939-2022).
I was then also navigating (internally) my relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, wherein I was raised, educated, and married but which I had set aside, first in 1979 and again (and, I hope, finally) in 2017 for the dispensationalist eschatology and ecclesiology of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) buttressed by the Reformed apologetics of Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987).
Natural law libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics, as filtered mainly through the person and writings of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), added another layer of tension to this journey, one that is reflected in part in Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic.
I had not yet returned to the view of the Bible to which He had once led me and from which, for reasons inexplicable to me, He let me wander. Despite that detour, I articulated concerns about the roots of the secularizing forces that have polluted Western culture over the past three centuries.
This essay asks questions that, for all their verbose inelegance, merit being disinterred from my old site and displayed on this one. Light editing, restructured paragraphs, and linked reference notes have, I hope, lightened the prospective reader’s burden. At over 7,000 words, it’s hardly a quick read, but I hope its contents will repay the effort of the hardy few who undertake to read it.
[Here is the original prefatory paragraph]
Worth doing EVEN badly, I think he meant.
G. K. Chesterton once defended the amateur against the professional by aphorizing that “if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly” (What’s Wrong with the World[1910]; last sentence of Part Four, Chapter XIV). And so in the spirit of this site’s “workshop” character, I am posting my notes toward an investigation I unfortunately do not see myself returning to in the near future. The following is not an essay fit for a journal.
The scholarship cited in this unfinished piece suggests an affirmative answer to the title’s question. By displaying this yet unripe fruit, however, I acknowledge that I may have overlooked important sources or misinterpreted those I have used. I invite interested readers to show, if they can, that either of these potential failings of mine is more than a theoretical possibility. I hope the order of some of the paragraphs and the occasional repetition of points does not put any reader off.
Anthony Flood, October 13, 2006
Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? Notes on David Ray Griffin’s Implicit Counterpoint to Stanley L. Jaki
Thomas E. Woods has written a book that has an ostensibly Catholic apologetic purpose.[1] By locating the roots of the West’s choicest fruits (science, law, education, charitable institutions, economics, etc.) in the soil of Western Christianity, Woods offers an eloquent, if indirect, apologetic for the Catholic faith. By indirect I mean that his observations do not so much argue for the truth of what Catholics believe as challenge those who are so sure that what Catholics believe is false. Presupposing that it is irrational to malign one’s benefactor, Woods’ challenge trades on his reader’s being a beneficiary of the civilization that the Catholic Church built. In one chapter, however, he has unintentionally documented how the Catholic Church, while building Western civilization, planted, seeded, and watered the garden of that civilization’s weeds, namely, materialistic mechanism, upon which it is now in danger of choking.[2]
Woods never comments on this dialectical reversal, whose irony cuts much more deeply than does his correction of popular ignorance of, say, what really happened in the Galileo episode. In recent decades scholars have been paying increasing attention to extra-scientific influences in the rise of modern science.
What does not even surface as a question in Woods’ narrative is the possibility that an enterprise that we would recognize generically as science—sustained, experimental study of nature—not only might have developed other than the way it did, but that such an alternative was already incipient in Western Europe.
In fact, Catholic divines nipped that alternative in the bud ostensibly because they deemed it incompatible with revealed truth and more pragmatically because any loss on their spiritual monopoly was bad for business. That is, science as “a self-perpetuating field of endeavor” was “enabled by a Catholic milieu” (76) because Catholic divines prevented another milieu, equally Western and arguably on the way to establishing that field of endeavor, from flourishing. Continue reading “Modern Atheism: Catholicism’s Frankenstein Monster? A fresh look at an old essay.”
Seated left to right: Elon Musk; Donald Trump; Donald Trump, Jr.; Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Standing: Mike Johnson. Aboard Air Force One after UFC event at Madison Square Garden, November 16, 2024
Yes, Make America Healthy Again . . . tomorrow!
Where else would Bobby get a platform of this magnitude for this noble mission?
Who in Trumpworld was talking like that eight years ago?
I wish the table was large enough for Tulsi and Vivek and . . . no, I won’t list every nominee and appointee for Trump’s Dream Team. (I don’t even know who among them, besides those pictured above, was aboard Trump Force One last night.)
Many battles for peace through strength, free speech, bureaucracy busting, government downsizing, crime fighting, invasion repelling, and terrorism crushing lie ahead.
We don’t have four years to undo the dystopia of the last quarter century. Two years to the midterms. One to make a decisive difference.
Expect our enemies to live up to their enemy status, but they’ve been served notice. And expect “47” and his army to work on Trump Time, 24/7, to execute the planned reversal.
In the meantime, don’t miss (as I am temperamentally inclined to do) the many opportunities there will be enjoy the turning of the tide.
Donald Trump and family, West Palm Beach Convention Center, about 1:00 AM, November 6, 2024. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP)
Schadenfreude . . . on steroids. That’s the dominant emotion for me this morning.
Yes, I’ll look forward to learning exactly how Trump interred—Grover Clevelanded!—Sleepy Joe’s legacy and that of his feckless “insurance policy” (who will condescend to concede at the dinner hour).
To God all the glory.
The people who met defeat last night—the empty pantsuit and her equally hollow-headed Hollywood cheerleaders; the once-upon-a-time friends and admirers who disowned him; the political and judicial prostitutes who persecuted, prosecuted, indicted, impeached, and slandered him; the oh-so-ethically-sensitive “artists” who for a decade fantasized openly about how gruesomely he might be put to death—I’m gladthey’re miserable. I hope their misery induces them to expatriate, as they often dare to do when elections don’t go their way.
Nota bene: They haven’t gone anywhere. They’re already plotting his demise (again) and will stop at nothing. For they don’t hate Trump as much as they hate the people who love him, obstacles to their totalitarian designs, who number in the hundreds of millions and will carry on when his work in this life is done.
So, this morning Freude and Schadenfreude areappropriate emotions. But during the interregnum and the next four years, vigilanceis what’s required, coupled with an unquenchable thirst for justice.
People who find Bernard Lonergan’s writing forbidding might benefit from this review of his magisterial Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, the subject of yesterday’s post, by Husserl and Hegel scholar Quentin Lauer, SJ (1917-1997).
I originally posted this essay nearly 18 years ago, when I was influenced by the process theology of 
Thomas E. Woods has written a book that has an ostensibly Catholic apologetic purpose.
