More than twenty years after his death, the Canadian thinker Bernard Lonergan refuses to be categorised: priest, Jesuit, theologian, philosopher, medievalist, methodologist, dogmatician, Thomist, teacher, essayist – all are fair but variously partial descriptions. At first sight, then, it might be regretted that Lonergan's work has attracted so devoted but so particular a following. The sheer breadth of his work is one reason – there is a lifetime's study in his output, as Frederick Crowe's collection makes clear. Another might be Lonergan's emphasis on the way things are done – the ways in which human beings come to know and understand things, the ways in which they apply those understandings to religious and philosophical discourse, and Christian theology specifically. Those who find persuasive the epistemological and metaphysical arguments of Insight and/or are attracted by the bold programme of Method in Theology find in Lonergan a map which enables them at least to be able to trace a path through the endless developments in theological, philosophical and theoretical thinking. Any such school will always be more adept on its home turf than when engaging with other schools and other grounds. Lonergan himself, though far from being a writer one would call easily accessible, was nevertheless appropriately concerned with the need for theologies and philosophies to speak both beyond their particular adherents and beyond the academy itself.
These two books testify to nothing if not the enduring interest of Lonergan's work. In the case of In Deference to the Other: Lonergan and Contemporary Continental Thought, that testimony comes in the form of a collection of dense but highly readable essays which set Lonergan's work alongside that of some of the giants of recent thinking in the Continental tradition. In his neat Foreword, John Caputo describes that thinking as a ‘philosophical scene with which Lonergan's conception intelligence as a dynamism toward God, of the mind's relentless work of questioning, and of God as the totality of answers to the totality of questions… can undertake serious dialogue.’ That dialogue is the substance of the book.
The editors are to be congratulated for assembling a nicely varied collection both in terms of subject matter – the list of thinkers considered in one hundred and sixty pages is almost intimidating: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, Kristeva, Eco, Charles Taylor to name some – and in terms of style; the essayists complement one another, James L. Marsh's discussion of his own engagement with Lonergan, and the latter's ‘invitation to self-appropriation’, has a refreshing honesty and provides something a little different from most philosophical papers. The editors also deserve praise for managing so notoriously difficult a series of subjects with general clarity and a welcome concern for explanation. Their introduction sets out in a measured and non-dogmatic way different approaches to philosophical questions, shows understanding of, and no hostility towards, analytical philosophy, and claims (unsurprisingly given its content) no final authority for the book's chosen approach tradition.
Questions of subjectivity, of knowing and understanding, of interiority and the self are repeated themes, but the range of literature discussed maintains attention throughout. Nicholas Plants's essay ‘Decentering Inwardness’ finds Lonergan's emphasis on transcendence to be a protection against accusations of subjectivism, and explores interesting affinities with Charles Taylor's ideas concerning authenticity. Contrasting in style and content, Ronald McKinney's sparky piece discusses postmodern attitudes to laughter, taking Eco's opposing protagonists, Jorge and William of Baskerville as his way into Aristotle, and finds Lonergan congenial to the latter and to Kierkegaard's ideas concerning irony: laughter can ‘put a positive spin’ on the problems of the dramatic subject, because our ability to learn from failures and to develop is achieved ‘not by argument, but by laughter’.
All the contributors are robust in their refusal to take critiques of traditional thought as excuses for abandoning intellectual projects. Jim Kanaris quotes Lonergan articulating that refusal even more robustly. Discussing ‘cognitional theory, epistemology, metaphysics’, Lonergan argued that although ‘the old answers are defective … to reject the question as well is to refuse to know what one is doing when one is knowing; it is to refuse to know why doing that is knowing; it is to refuse to set up a basic semantics but concluding what one knows when one does it.’
Needless to say, such words (these from Lonergan's 1968 Aquinas Lecture, The Subject) are not without difficulties, and it is unsurprising that as early as the mid-1970s these and similar ideas were described as being ‘fishy, to a Wittgensteinian nose’ (by Fergus Kerr in this journal). For the reader who stands outside the tradition of Lonergan devotion and scholarship, looking into it is inevitably a strange process. Frederick Crowe's collection of papers, edited by Michael Vertin, both presents that strangeness and eases it. Crowe is as authoritative as any reader of Lonergan, and his comfortable control of the enormous Lonergan corpus, both published and unpublished, is the most obviously striking characteristic of this book. It offers two sections, ‘studies’ and ‘essays’. In the former, historical and biographical details are provided in plenty as part of a helpful process of tracing the origins and development of Lonergan's major ideas, which in turn aids the exposition of those ideas themselves and of their application to other works and contexts. Themes are traced repeatedly to Lonergan's own doctoral research (which became his book on operative grace) and early study of Aquinas. (We are reminded that Lonergan's Verbum was described by Anthony Kenny as the best book in English on Aquinas's philosophy of mind.)
The essays are more general in style and more theological in tone, and perhaps as a consequence are more readable. A full appreciation of this book would probably require the reader to have copies of Insight, Method in Theology and Crowe's own introduction to Lonergan immediately to hand. Overall, the ground covered is huge, but it is the personal and ecclesial aspects of Lonergan studies which make this book significant. Crowe presents us with a teacher and priest as passionate about communication as understanding, a thinker with a strong sense of vocation, with a thorough command of the whole Christian tradition and a strong concern for a scripture as the basis of theology, but also with someone whose early forward thinking on issues we now take for granted was brave and expansive. There are times when wider theological discussion might help, such as in the study on universalism: ideas of all religious people being oriented towards the transcendent infinite are, rightly or wrongly, very likely to be more familiar to Christian readers in their use by Karl Rahner than by Lonergan – a comparison and contrast might then have followed. But Crowe's papers are gathered from a range of particular contexts, and such specific criticism might be unfair. The excellent essay on Lonergan and Newman also sees a light touch nicely at work: ‘I am going to conclude … by pointing to what I think are some very pertinent suggestions in the work of Newman. If they turn out to anticipate what Bernard Lonergan has implemented, well, that will not surprise you.’
Lonergan's interest in processes and development, the journeys of history, of knowing, understanding and meaning, are inescapable in any engagement with his work. The dialogue between Lonergan and postmodern thought leaves a clear impression of Lonergan the anti-relativist Christian theologian whose work is always travelling. Crowe's most valuable efforts in this book contain his stress on the place of history in Lonergan's work, and his insistence on the necessity of a theology of the Spirit. To develop, change and move might be to be led. To learn is to be a disciple.
