Religion: The Quotable Lonergan

FATHER LONERGAN is known for dense, often excruciatingly abstruse prose. Yet somehow he can turn a masterly phrase when the right insight inspires him and on occasion be not only aphoristic but almost poetic. A sampling, beginning with a passage from the preface to Insight that seems prophetic in describing some of the ailments of contemporary society:

"The flight from understanding blocks the insights that concrete situations demand. There follow unintelligent policies and inept courses of action. The situation deteriorates to demand still further insights, and, as they are blocked, policies become more unintelligent and action more inept. What is worse, the deteriorating situation seems to provide the uncritical, biased mind with factual evidence in which the bias is claimed to be verified. So in ever-increasing measure intelligence comes to be regarded as irrelevant to practical living. Human activity settles down to a decadent routine, and initiative becomes the privilege of violence."

"In the main it is not by introspection but by reflecting on our living in common with others that we come to know ourselves. What is revealed? It is an original creation. Freely the subject makes himself what he is; never in this life is the making finished; always it is in process, always it is a precarious achievement that can slip and fall and shatter."

—Gregorianum, 1963

"The Church always arrives on the scene a little breathless and a little late."

"Feeling is the mass and momentum of human living. Experience, understanding and judgment without feeling are paper-thin."

"A philosophy is an individual becoming himself."

—Lonergan Congress, 1970