Theology: Understanding Understanding

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Philosophers are seldom in the head lines, yet they are often the true revolutionaries of some succeeding age. Karl Marx blueprinted the political upheavals of the 20th century in the reading room of the British Museum; Soren Kierkegaard's fiery polemics, scorned by the sturdy burghers of Copenhagen, are the foundation of existentialism. Today, a number of Roman Catholic intellectuals believe that a little-known thinker of commensurate stature has been patiently laying some philosophical land mines for the future. He is Canadian Jesuit Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan, 60, whose followers assert that history may reckon him a mind to rank with Aquinas and Newman.

Some reasons for their enthusiasm are argued in the latest issue of Continuum, a lively, intellectual quarterly sponsored by Saint Xavier College in Chicago. The 244-page issue is devoted to analyses of Lonergan's work, including articles by English Jesuit Frederick Copleston, historian of philosophy, and by two of the nation's most theologically astute Catholic laymen: Continuum's Editor Justus George Lawler and Michael Novak of Harvard. Lonergan contributed a typically abstruse essay on "cognitional structure."

The Nature of Knowing. Lonergan is not an easy thinker to appreciate. His dense, elliptical prose, studded with references to Thomas Aquinas and modern physics, makes its points in a methodical and mind-wearying manner. One typical passage hammers home a conclusion with: "In the thirty-first place . . ." Another problem is Lonergan's disinterest in hurrying his ideas into print, or giving them wide circulation. Many of his most important lectures exist only in Latin mimeographed notes made by his students; like the late Ludwig Wittgenstein of Cambridge, his reputation rests on the memories and convictions of his peers, a scattering of essays and book reviews, and one authentically towering masterpiece: a study of human understanding, called Insight, published in 1957.

Lonergan has written or lectured on subjects as varied as economic ethics, the philosophy of education and the spiritual meaning of the family. But his primary intellectual task has been the analysis of two dry epistemological problems—the nature of knowing, and of intellectual method—that have a practical application in an age of verbal confusion, in which different disciplines find it frustrating to communicate with one another. Both problems, essentially, are philosophic ones that Theologian Lonergan undertook to solve partly out of pedagogical necessity. He found it impossible to teach theology correctly without first establishing a viable underlying philosophy, which led him in turn to consider the fundamental question: What does it mean to know?