Bernard Lonergan – Page 2 – Anthony G. Flood

What are we doing when we’re reading? Part 2: Gordon Clark’s occasionalism and Bernard Lonergan’s accumulation of insights converging on a viewpoint

This sequel to “What are we doing when we’re reading? Bernard Lonergan and Gordon Clark on ‘black marks on white paper’” is occasioned by Joseph K. Gordon‘s comment there. He is the author of Divine Scripture in Human Understanding: A Systematic Theology of the Christian Bible (Notre Dame Press, 2019). Another book firmly on my legenda.

Gordon supplied the (for me) elusive passage in Insight where Lonergan elaborates on the role of those marks in human knowing. The narrowing of my search to a half-dozen pages was a godsend, for I would have never made the time to comb the 748 pages of the Longmans edition I’ve used since 1978. In either edition the textual “address” of this portion of Insight is Chapter XVII, “Metaphysics as Dialectic,” Section 3, “The Truth of Interpretation,” Part 7 (or subsection 3.7) “Counterpositions.” In the original edition, it comprises pages 581-86.

Before dipping into that pregnant passage, let me review the problem the previous post touched on. It’s theological. Or rather, it’s a hermeneutical problem governed by theological commitments. My point of departure was Gordon H. Clark’s epistemology, which he believed his commitment to the Westminster Confession of Faith (WCF) logically demanded he adopt.

According to Clark, human knowledge is restricted to the propositions that one either reads in Holy Scripture or can validly infer therefrom. That was Clark’s axiom, his absolute, nondemonstrable starting point. All other beliefs, even if true, are at best opinion if not so stated in or deducible “by good and necessary consequence” (WCF I:VI) from Scripture.

My question continues to be: how did Gordon Clark access the propositions of Scripture? He was adamant that ink marks on a Bible’s white paper pages (or pixels on a computer screen) convey nothing to the mind. The Holy Spirit, however, uses those marks to “stimulate” or occasion the divinely intended proposition in the believer’s mind.

Clark was aware of the issue. As he formulated and rebutted a criticism:

Don’t you have to read the Bible? Well do I know the objections that this [ideal of axiomatization of Biblical propositions] immediately raises. Evidentialist apologists and secular philosophies alike exclaim, “But that assumes the point at issue; you are begging the question; you are arguing in a circle.” The reply to this objection should be obvious. The opponents, both secular and religious, assume the authority of experience, the inerrancy of sensation, the validity of induction. But this assumes the point at issue, this begs the question, and the one is as circular as the other.[1]

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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]

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1949: What were my influencers doing?

Last December 15th in Birdland, 1949-1965: Hard Bop Mecca, I marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of that legendary Jazz club on Manhattan’s Broadway off 52nd Street. Over the weekend I wondered what else was going on that year, but not the trivia one can learn from Wikipedia, such as:

- President Harry S. Truman’s inauguration in January
- Astronomer Fred Hoyle’s coining of “big bang” (a term of disparagement) in March
- Hamlet’s Best Picture Oscar win later that month
- The opening of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in February at the Morosco (six blocks south of Birdland’s near-future site)
- The Soviet Union’s successful A-bomb test in August and Truman’s sharing that news a month later
- Twin Communist victories: the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on the first of October and of the German Democratic Republic a week later.

World War Two was in the rearview mirror. but the Cold War with its threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction was straight ahead.

No, I was remembering what writers who influenced me over the past fifty years were doing in 1949. Most of the embedded links below will take you to posts that elaborate upon that influence. Continue reading “1949: What were my influencers doing?”

“Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days”: What do I mean?

Before launching this site in October 2018, I put a tagline under my name in the masthead. At first, it referred rather boringly to the half-century of retrospective I wanted to set down here. I eventually changed it to “Navigating this dispensation’s last days” and cited a couple of Biblical verses to justify the reference to “dispensation.”

Still boring, perhaps, but at least it suggested the unity of my interests.

My understanding of the current historical phase—the dispensation of the grace of God (Ephesians 3:2)—informs how I evaluate events, arguments, apologetics, liberty and threats thereto, and everything else, and therefore what I write on this blog. Every visitor here should know that. We’re living in this dispensation’s last days with its syndrome of 21 wicked symptoms (2 Timothy 3).

That unity hasn’t always been clear. The hundred-plus posts published so far have struck even me as an aggregate, not an organic whole, a “many” without an obvious “one.” Mixed messaging may have resulted.

Brand Blanshard (1892-1989)

Greg L. Bahnsen (1948-1995)

For example, if an essay on Brand Blanshard or C. E. M. Joad drew you in, you may have been put off by posts on the metapologetics of Greg Bahnsen (which he learned from Cornelius Van Til).

Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987)

Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995)

Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003)

Or perhaps you appreciated reading about the libertarian Murray Rothbard, but couldn’t care less about Stalinist Herbert Aptheker or Trotskyist George Novack.

(Or vice versa.)

Then there’s my goal, puzzling to some who know me, of producing a life-and-thought study of Otis Q. Sellers, the independent dispensationalist you’ve probably never heard of.

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992)

The manuscript is growing, but as I’m challenged to summarize his thought (already clearly expressed, but spread out over many publications and recordings), I’ll be blogging much of the rest of the book into existence. Continue reading ““Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days”: What do I mean?”

The spiritual preconditions of rational debate: Eric Voegelin’s diagnosis revisited

The “national conversation” Leftists urge us to have about social order is about as genuine as Mao Zedong’s Hundred Flowers Campaign and, for patriots tempted to participate, about as safe. Debate has spiritual conditions, and the Left-dominated academedia complex guarantees that they’re rarely, if ever, met (except perhaps among family, friends, and trusted associates, at least for now).

No one made that point with greater profundity and learning than Eric Voegelin. On November 2, 2018 I posted a vignette of my interaction with the great philosopher of consciousness, enriched by extensive quotes from his classic essay, “On Debate and Existence.” Our perilous times call for reposting it. Those who vaguely remember it should take another look; it’ll be new for those who don’t.—Anthony Flood

Eric Voegelin: no debate without accord on existential order

(First published November 2, 2018)

“What ‘banged’?”

That was the derisive reaction of Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) to someone’s mentioning the prevailing cosmology, the Big Bang theory (not to be confused with the television comedy whose theme song’s lyrics encapsulate the disordered cosmology Voegelin analyzed*).

He asked that rhetorical question on March 26, 1983 in Newton, Massachusetts during a Friday night-Saturday afternoon conference arranged by organizers of the annual Lonergan Workshops. (During that year’s meeting in June I’d meet Bernard J. F. Lonergan, SJ, whose mind I revered as much as Voegelin’s.)

Being a Rothbardian libertarian, I could hardly resist asking Voegelin about the seminars that Ludwig von Mises led in Vienna in the twenties. Smiling, Voegelin said he appreciated learning from Mises that inflation is not an increase in prices but rather the central bank’s increase in the money supply not commensurate with an increase in production of commodities. (A government may politically “freeze” prices, but then the economic effect of the inflation, that is, of the physical increase, is a shortage of the goods whose prices were frozen.)

At the cocktail hour I asked Voegelin (I paraphrase from memory) how he could communicate with scholars whose grasp of the historical material was far below his (among whom he did not number Father Lonergan, but I certainly include myself). “With a kind of controlled irony,” he deadpanned.

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Bernard Lonergan had it backwards; Augustus Hopkins Strong, about right.

This post develops the point of an earlier post on the Roman Catholic theologian Bernard J. F. Lonergan (1904-1984). Image result for bernard lonergan

“If the real is completely intelligible,” Lonergan argued, “God exists. But the real is completely intelligible. Therefore, God exists.” Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, New York: Philosophical Library, 1957, 672; Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Book 3, U Toronto Press, 5th ed, 1992.

Lonergan seems to have derived the minor premise (“But the real is completely intelligible”) from the alleged fact that the human desire to know, which (allegedly) by nature seeks complete intelligibility, therefore affirms (at least implicitly) the existence of a completely intelligent object (which satisfies that desire).

This affirmation in turn entails the existence of a completely intelligent “unrestricted act of understanding” that understands everything about everything and bears all the attributes of the God of Christian theism to boot.

Epistemologically self-conscious Christians know that Christ is the light of every human knower. (John 1:9; “In thy light shall we see light.” Psalm 36:9b) They not only know God exists, but know that they know God exists. (Romans 1:18-20)

And so they do not feel a need to prove God’s existence from things allegedly known better, any more than they feel the need to prove the existence of a world existing independently of their experience of it or the existence of persons like themselves. They reject any presumption of atheism.

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Bernard Lonergan’s “Insight”: on becoming an intellectually fulfilled theist

“Well, they’re deductivists. And you know what I think of deductivists.”

That’s how Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J. (1904-1984) answered when I asked him about the Austrian school of economics.

Yes, I did know what he thought of them. More on that presently.

On June 22, 1983 I was on the campus of Boston College, engrossed in an afternoon session on Lonergan’s then-unpublished “Essay in Circulation Analysis,” the economics section of that year’s Lonergan Workshop. (An unofficial edition circulated among Lonerganians.) My aunt, the late Anne T. Flood, Sister of Charity, Ph.D. (Catholic University of America; dissertation on Bishop Christopher Butler and Lonergan) beckoned me from the hallway.

Would I like to meet the great man?

I didn’t return to the classroom.

Patricia “Pat” Coonan, who had known Lonergan since 1945, drove us from Chestnut Hill to Weston, where he was convalescing at the Campion Center. When we arrived, it wasn’t certain that Lonergan was up to a visit. We might have to turn around.

But soon he was ready [my diary shows] and greeted us [from his hospital bed] with a smile. Pat introduced me to the master, and I managed to comport myself properly. I did not interview him, but I did tell him about myself, what his work has meant to me, and even raised the question [of] macroeconomics with him when Pat brought up her difficulties with the “Circulation Analysis.” Lonergan stressed his own macroeconomic approach, not seeming to be aware that [Ludwig von] Mises’ and [Murray N.] Rothbard’s “microeconomic” approach has addressed the “Depression” argument against the free market.

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, immersed in theological studies and spiritual formation between his profession of vows in 1924 and ordination in 1936, Lonergan produced that manuscript. In the ‘70s, after his methodological work was done, he returned to it.

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Eric Voegelin: no debate without accord on existential order

“What ‘banged’?”

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Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager

In the early 1970s, I was an acolyte of Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003). Known for his writings on African-American history he was also, during the Cold War, a theoretician of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

While many of my contemporaries became hooked on pharmaceuticals or alcohol, the apothecary for this teenage rebel was an apologist for the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev. Memories of the five years of my Stalinist sojourn are still a source of shame, even though more than eight times that interval has passed.

In November 1969 an ad in the Communist Party’s Daily World newspaper caught my eye. (Why I was reading that rag as a high school junior is a tale for another time.) Later that week Aptheker was scheduled to lecture on W.E.B. DuBois at the Center for Marxist Education (CME), then located on Manhattan’s West 15th Street, on the same block as my Jesuit military high school. (That building, now a co-op, abuts a 21st-century extension of my pre-Civil War alma mater.)

The evening arrived. Exiting the elevator on the fourth floor I made a right turn into the main room. CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall, who would welcome me into the Party in less than three years, addressed the group of about 75. Then he introduced Dr. Herbert Aptheker.

I remember nothing of the lecture’s content. (I hadn’t then even heard of Du Bois.) The lecturer’s command of his material, however, and the aplomb with which he delivered it impressed this most impressionable of young minds. (One can hear how he sounded then by listening to this February 18, 1968 Du Bois lecture.) Conservative in fashion and demeanor, Aptheker, then 54, had a military bearing and matching haircut. Appearing to me to be more learned than any five of my teachers or adult relatives combined, he held me spellbound for over an hour.

I bought Aptheker’s books and pamphlets by the bushel by heading east from my high school across Union Square and entering the CPUSA’s Jefferson Book Shop on 16th Street, just east of Union Square. I scooped up everything of his I could and made time to absorb every line. While I now recognize Aptheker’s political essays as essentially propaganda, they then modeled for me the finest prose. They made the power of rhetoric a topic for me. For the first time I thought, “I’d like to be a writer!”

As Director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS) Aptheker had an office on East 30th Street. Visiting it one day I introduced myself as a member of the Young Workers Liberation League, the latest edition of the Young Communist League. I took advantage of AIMS’s library of Marxism (mostly its Stalinist subdivision). Whenever school was out, I’d make my way to AIMS and get lost in its shelves. Taking a break from reading, I’d catch Aptheker typing with two fingers, the aroma of coffee and hamburger wafting into the reading room outside his office. With trepidation at first, I’d ask him a question.

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