I have been invited not only to comment on the essays published in this collection, but also to try to ‘place’ Bernard Lonergan and his work. The first task is not easy, the second is virtually impossible. In saying this, I am not denying that it is reasonable to ask questions such as: cWhat is Lonergan up to?’, ‘Where does he stand in contemporary debates?’. The list of contents alone would invite such questions. What is the common factor, beyond the mere fact of common authorship, in sixteen essays, originally published between 1943 and 1965, on such disparate topics as: ‘Finality, Love, Marriage’, ‘A Note on Geometrical Possibility’, ‘The Assumption and Theology’, and ‘Cognitional Structure’? Another reason for wanting to have Lonergan ‘placed’ is that, while the sheer difficulty of most of his work renders him inaccessible to many people, he has profoundly influenced such very different spirits as David Burrell, Bishop Butler, Charles Davis, Sebastian Moore, John Courtney Murray and Michael Novak. Yet, while I believe that Lonergan is one of the most profoundly original and creative Catholic thinkers of our time, it is his very originality that makes it almost impossible to place him. It may seem paradoxical to describe as ‘original’ a man much of whose writing bears the terminological hallmark of neo-scholastic theology and metaphysics. But then, the originality of Beethoven did not consist in the notes of the scale which he employed, but in the conception and structure with which they were ordered.

Frederick Crowe’s editorial introduction to the collection is an excellent biographical and interpretative summary of Lonergan’s work.