Theology and the Dialectics of History 9781442682603

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Theology and the Dialectics of History

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R O B E R T M. D O R A N

Theology and the Dialectics of History

U N I V E R S I T Y OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com ) University of Toronto Press 1990 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted 2001 ISBN 0-8020-2713-x (cloth) ISBN 08020-6777-8

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Doran, Robert M., 1939— Theology and the dialectics of history ISBN o-8o2O-27i3-x (bound) ISBN 0-8020-6777-8 (pbk.) i. Catholic Church - Doctrines. 2. Theology, Doctrinal. 3. Dialectical theology, i. Title. 8x75.2.067 1989

230'.042

089-095065-2

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

To the memory of Joseph J. Labaj, sj 'Personal value is the person in his self-transcendence, as loving and being loved, as originator of values in himself and in his milieu, as an inspiration and invitation to others to do likewise.' BERNARD LONERGAN

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Contents

Acknowledgments / xv Introduction / 3 1 Theology and Praxis / 3 2 Systematic Theology as a Theory of History / 5 3 Interdisciplinary Collaboration / 6 4 Foundations and Systematics / 7 5 Complements to Lonergan / 8 5.7 The Question of the Situation / 8 5.2 Psychic Conversion 18 5.3 Dialectic I 9 5.4 The Scale of Values I 10 5.5 The Dialectic of Culture I 11 5.6 The Ontology of Meaning I 11 5.7 Praxis I n 6 The Situation as Theological Source / i a

PART ONE: BASIC TERMS AND RELATIONS i

Bernard Lonergan's Notion of the Subject / 1 9 1 The Position on Knowing / 20 2 Existential and Historical Agency / 26 3 The Position on Love / 30 4 Healing and Creating / 31 5 Bias and Conversion / 33 6 Initial Application / 37

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Contents

a The Notion of Psychic Conversion / 49 1 Self-appropriation / 43 2 The Duality of Consciousness / 46 3 The Finality of the Psyche / 47 4 Affective Self-transcendence / 49 5 Ordered and Disordered Affections / 53 6 Feelings and Values / 55 7 Feelings and Symbols / 58 8 Psychic Conversion Defined / 59 3 The Notion of Dialectic / 64 1 Dialectic as Heuristic / 65 2 Consciousness and Knowledge / 68 3 Dialectic as Pure Form / 89 4 The Basic Dialectic of the Subject / 71 5 Foundations / 77 6 Applications / 82 6.1 Genuineness I $$ 6.2 Psychic Conversion and Philosophy 185 6.3 Values and Feelings 188 6.4 Discernment 187 6.5 The Scale of Values 188 6.6 Systematic Theohgy / go 6.7 Higher Synthesis and C&ntradictories f gi 7 Conclusion / g i 4 The Integral Scale of Values / 93 1 The Basic Structure / 94 2 Expansion of the Basic Structure / 97 3 Conclusion / 106 5 The Community of the Servant of God /108 1 Christian Authenticity and Fidelity to the Scale of Values /108 2 Two Forms of Suffering /114 3 General and Special Categories /115 4 The Church as Servant /119 5 The Servant of God in the World /127 PART TWO: PERSONAL VALUES AMD THE DIALECTIC OF THE SUBJECT 6 Theological Foundations and Psychic Self-appropriation /139 i Preliminary Remarks /139

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Contents

2 3 4 5 6 7

Foundations and the Analogy of Dialectic / 144 Conversion and the Academy / 150 Lonergan and the Postmodern Context / 153 The Crucial Experiment / 159 Depth Psychology and the Beautiful / 161 Transition / 169

7 The Dialectic of the Subject / 177 1 The General Form of the Argument / 177 2 The Dialectic of the Subject / 179 3 Universal Willingness / 185 4 Universal Willingness and the Law of the Cross / 198 5 Universal Willingness and Existential Consciousness / 206 8 The Psyche and Integral Interiority / 211 1 Spirit and Psyche / 211 2 Creativity/ 221 3 Complexes and Affective Self-transcendence / 226 4 Disordered Complexes and the Dialectic of Community / 231 5 Affectivity and Moral Impotence / 239 6 The Healing Vector / 242 9 Reorienting Depth Psychology / 254 1 Theology and Depth Psychology / 254 2 The Sensitive Psyche and Existential Consciousness / 258 3 Second Immediacy / 263 4 Dreams / 266 5 The Notion of the Spiritual Unconscious / 276 6 Integrator and Operator / 280

7 8 9 10 11

Pneumopathology and a Psychology of Orientations / 281 The Anagogic Context of Psychological Experience / 284 Symbols / 286 Transcendence and Limitation / 288 Discernment / 291

10 A Clarification by Contrast / 295 1 Jung and the Dialectic of Culture / 295 2 Jung and Paul Ricoeur's Dialectic with Freudian Psychoanalysis / 298 3 Psychic Conversion and Jungian Psychology / 304 3.7 Complexes I 305 3.1.1 Jung's Position / 305 3.1.2 Comments / 309

s

Contents 3.2 Psychic Wholeness / 31 o 3.2.1 Jung's Position / 310 3.2.2 Comments/316 3.3 Archetypes I 316 3.3.1 Jung's Position / 316 3.3.2 Comments / 325 3.4 The Transcendental Structure of the Psyche I 326 3.4.1 Jung's Position / 326 3.4.2 Comments/331 3.5 The Problem of Evil I 332 3-5-! Jung's Position / 332 3.5.2 Comments / 334 3.6 The Self I ^yj 3.6.1 Jung's Position / 337 3.6.2 Comments / 345 4 Conclusion / 349

PART THREE: SOCIAL VALUES AND THE DIALECTIC OF COMMUNITY 11 Cosmopolis and the Dialectic of Community / 355 1 Theology as Cosmopolis / 355 2 Dramatic Artistry and the Search for Direction / 358 3 The Elements of Society / 359 4 Dramatic Artistry and the Structure of Society / 362 5 Cosmopolis and the Dialectic of Community / 364 6 Culture and Praxis / 367 7 General Bias / 371 8 The Reorientation of Human Science / 377 9 Ecclesial and Intellectual Contexts / 383 iz Infrastructure and Superstructure / 387 1 Marx and Theology: The Problem / 387 2 Authenticity and Culture/391 3 The Infrastructure and Reductionism / 395 4 Elements of Marxist Analysis / 398 4.1 Human Nature I 399 4.2 Basic Categories I 404 5 Elements of a Critique / 409 5. i Facts and Norms I 411 5.2 Praxis and Technique I 415 5.3 From Below and From Above I 416

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Contents

13 Theology, the Church, and Liberation / 418 1 Theology, the Church, and Culture / 418 2 World-cultural Theology and the Theology of Liberation / 421 2. i The Scale of Values and the Preferential Option for the Poor / 421 2.2 Dialogue with a Theologian of Liberation I 424 14 Theology as Praxis / 440 1 Psychic Conversion and Dialectic / 440 2 The Question of Praxis / 444 3 Meaning and Praxis / 446 4 Praxis and the Integration of Categories / 451 5 Continuity and Innovation / 457 6 The Postmodern Option / 459 7 Praxis Mediation / 467 8 Clarification by Contrast / 469

PART FOUR: CULTURAL VALUES AND THE DIALECTIC OF CULTURE 15 Transforming the Anthropological Principle / 473 1 Political Philosophy and Culture / 473 2 The Anthropological Principle / 478 3 Objections from Classical Political Philosophy / 479 4 Transforming the Anthropological Principle / 485 4.1 From Eros to Agape I 486 4.2 From Classicism to Historical Mindedness I 489 4.3 From Aristocracy to Universalism I 491 5 Transposing the Transformed Anthropological Principle / 492 6 Conclusion / 497 16 Theology and the Dialectic of Culture / 500 1 Theology and the Transformation of Culture / 500 2 The Search for Direction in the Movement of Life / 506 3 Sets of Constitutive Meaning / 507 4 Anxiety and the Search for Direction / 513 5 The Partner/ 518 6 The Fear of Death / 519 7 Sin and Grace / 521 8 Theology and Grace / 524 17 World-cultural Consciousness / 527 i Subject and Culture / 527

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Contents 2 Differentiations of Consciousness / 529

3 4 5 6 7 8

Differentiations and Culture / 536 Differentiations and Constitutive Meaning / 540 Conversion and Culture / 548 Foundations of World-cultural Consciousness / 550 Cultural Progress and Decline / 551 Culture and the Situation / 552

PART FIVE: HERMENEUTICS AND THE ONTOLOGY OF MEANING 18 Elements of Lonergan's Hermeneutics / 561 1 Consciousness as Transcendental Notion / 563 2 Utterances / 564 3 The Duality of Consciousness / 566 4 Interpreting Philosophical Texts / 568 4.1 General Considerations I 568 4.2 Self-knowledge I 569 4.3 The Universal Viewpoint I 570 4.3. i The Sources of Meaning / 572 4.3.2 Acts of Meaning / 573 4.3.3 Terms of Meaning / 575 4.3.4 The Core of Meaning / 575 4.4 Levels and Sequences of Expression / 576 4.4. i The Position of Insight / 576 4.4.2 Language as a Carrier of Meaning / 578 4.4.3 Realms and Stages of Meaning / 581 ^.5 The Objective of Scientific Hermeneutics I 584 5 The Canons of Methodical Hermeneutics / 589 19 The Ontology of Meaning / 592 1 The Notion of an Ontology of Meaning / 592 2 The Notion of Being / 598 3 The Method of Metaphysics / 60 a 4 Elements of Metaphysics / 609 5 Metaphysics as Dialectic / 615 j./ Metaphysics and the Foundations of Scientific Hermeneutics I 615 5.2 Correspondence and Finality 1620 5.3 Potency, Form, and Act 1622 5.4 Hermeneutics 1627 6 Conclusion / 628

xiii 20

Contents Psychic Conversion and Hermeneutics / 630 1 The Basic Position / 630 2 Psychic Conversion and Foundations of Hermeneutics / 633 2.1 The Basic Position on the Subject I 633 2.1.1 Lonergan's Position / 633 2.1.2 The Psychic Component of the Basic Position / 634 2.2 Theological Foundations I 635 2.2.1 Lonergan's Position / 635 2.2.2 Psychic Conversion and Theological Foundations / 636 2.3 Foundations Twofold I 637 2.3. i Lonergan's Position / 637 2.3.2 Psychic Self-appropriation and the Twofold Constitution of Foundations / 638 2.4 The Generative Power of Foundations I 647 1.4.i Lonergan's Position / 647 2.4.2 The Psyche and the Generation of Categories / 647 3 Psychic Conversion as Hermeneutical / 653 4 Metaphysics and Elemental Meaning / 657 4.1 The Potential Complementarity ofLonergan and Jung I 658 4.2 Intentionality and Energy I 663 4.3 Intentionality Analysis and Depth Psychology I 664 4.4 Elemental Symbols and Self-appropriation I 669 4.5 The Dimensions of Elemental Symbols I 674 4.6 The Politics of Meaning I 678 Notes/681 Index / 721

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Acknowledgments

This book has taken many years to write, and the writing has entailed personal sacrifices that at times were very difficult. In the course of these years I have been in conversation with many friends whose encouragement has kept me going and whose ideas have entered into my own understanding of what I was about. I have tried to acknowledge in the notes at least some of the friends who have helped me understand things better or provided terms with which I could express my understanding more adequately. The many friends who have simply put up with me while I was working on this book remain for the most part unnamed, but I trust that at least some of them will recognize themselves in this description. The most significant source of encouragement remains Bernard Lonergan. I will never forget the help he gave me by assuring me that my notion of psychic conversion was a welcome complement to his own work. J. Eduardo Perez Valera, professor of philosophy at Sophia University in Tokyo, continues to amaze me with his belief in what I am doing and with the gentle challenges he occasionally offers to let myself be stretched to the quality of personhood capable of sustaining this work. Frederick Crowe, my colleague at the Lonergan Research Institute in Toronto, read a much earlier version of some of this material and offered valuable suggestions that I have tried to incorporate here. He has displayed consummate patience with me as I labored on this book while continuing to collaborate with him in the tasks we share at the Institute. My students at Regis College and in the Toronto School of Theology have not only offered encouragement but also challenged me at many points to express myself more clearly.

xvi

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank in a special way John St James, the copy editor who worked on the manuscript of this book for University of Toronto Press. His many suggestions proved most helpful, and his careful eye caught previously unnoticed typographical errors. In the course of the final year of writing this book I met new friends whose company and conversation influenced the final nuancing of a number of points and whose perspective on certain issues will continue to affect the formulation of my thought. Their companionship has been a major factor in my own experience of the type of healing journey that I speak of in part two of this book. I must give special mention to Brian Morrell, faithful and true, responsible and kind friend. Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur. I wish to acknowledge the help in publishing this book offered by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In addition the publication of a paperback edition was made possible by donations from the Wisconsin Province of the Society of Jesus, the Upper Canada Province of the Society of Jesus, and three donors who asked to remain anonymous. Finally, Joseph Labaj was the Provincial superior of the Wisconsin Province of the Society of Jesus during the years when I did the bulk of the research for this book. He was willing to take a chance on releasing me for a time from other responsibilities and to risk that the work might result in something worthwhile. This research time was graciously extended by his successor, Reverend Patrick J. Burns. Neither of these men put pressure on me to produce instant results, and each insisted I not put such pressure on myself. Early in 1983 Fr Labaj was discovered to have an inoperable malignant tumor, and he died on i January 1985, little more than a month after the death of Bernard Lonergan. I am happy that I had a chance to tell him that this book would be dedicated to him. Perhaps the clearest way I can express to present readers the kind of person he was, and even endear him to other students of Lonergan, is to relate that, during the last year of both of their lives, he consistently asked after Bernard Lonergan and expressed his own concern for Lonergan's health. It is appropriate that I dedicate to the memory of this greatly loved and respected friend this study of integrity in the subject, which he incarnated as genuinely as anyone I have ever met, and of integrity in the culture and the community, which he promoted throughout his adult life.

Theology and the Dialectics of History

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Introduction

i

Theology and Praxis

Bernard Lonergan never tired of repeating in his late methodological writings that we live in a new age of theology.! It is an age that requires a fairly wholesale transposition and reorientation of the entire discipline, both for reasons internal to theology and because of the ecclesial, academic, and sociocultural dimensions of the situation that a contemporary theology must address and of the situation that such a theology must evoke,2 If we live in a new age of theology, it is because something new is happening, must happen, in these dimensions of the human world, because this novum is precarious, and because a living theology is called to take part in what is afoot. Among the elements of such a reconstructed theology will be its interdisciplinary involvement, its ability to collaborate with other disciplines, and especially with the human sciences, in elaborating an evaluative hermeneutic of culture. This hermeneutic must be not only empirical, but also sufficiently critical, dialectical, and normative to guide a transition from the human world as it is to a closer approximation to the human world as it ought to be. The notion of a theological mediation from the present to the future that, while intellectual, is not only conceptually rigorous but also existential, interpersonal, historical, and practical, may seem to be something of an anomaly, especially if one's dominant ideological persuasion tends to be either classicist, on the one hand, or pragmaticutilitarian or Marxist, on the other hand. For then, and of course in a different manner in each instance, one's views of the transformation of

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Theology and the Dialectics of History

situations will tend to be expressed in terms of too narrow a notion of praxis. Situations are constituted by meaning, and a change in constitutive meaning is in the long run the most effective form of praxis. Such a view is not simply a remnant of a Hegelian idealism that is to be overcome by placing the dialectic of history on its real, materialistic, feet. The disparagement of the world-constitutive function of meaning is among the primary reasons for the chaos that characterizes the global cultural situation of humankind in our day. To change the meaning constitutive of that situation is to proceed very far indeed toward changing that situation itself. And such is the responsibility incumbent on intellectual praxis in our time, including the praxis of theological reflection. When Bernard Lonergan was engaged in formulating his views on the questions of the method, structure, and foundations of an empirical, critical, dialectical, and normatively guided theology, one of his principal concerns was to effect a transposition of Roman Catholic theology from the classicist framework that for several centuries had minimized its achievements, crippled its creativity, and dominated its ecclesiastical guardians. The transposition envisioned the framework imposed by historical consciousness and the milieu constituted by modern science. Lonergan effected this transposition, in principle at least, by carrying to a fulfilment the 'turn to the subject' begun but never finished in modern Western, and especially European, philosophy, and by bringing this philosophic achievement to bear on an elaboration of the method, structure, and foundations of theology. It may be lamented, of course, that some recent Roman Catholic theology seems determined to live in a world that no longer exists.3 But rather than simply engaging in a counteroffensive against 'the shabby shell of Catholicism,'4 it seems more fruitful, and surely more healthy, to get on with the business of developing and implementing a positive achievement within the Catholic tradition in our time. As a systematic theologian I am concerned not, as David Tracy would have it, with an interpretation of classic works — such labor belongs to a distinct and earlier phase in the theological enterprise - but with the constructive labor of creating for our situation, albeit partly on the foundations of such interpretation, a coherent and grounded systematic statement of the meanings and values affirmed by Christian faith. But I understand this task as one that, by evoking a change in the meaning constitutive of the situation, will mediate a transition from this situation to an alternative situation more closely approximating the reign of God in human affairs. Our situation, moreover, is somewhat different from that which Lonergan confronted just two decades ago. What for him was the specter

5

Introduction

of nihilism looming on the horizon and calling for a foundation of thought at once empirical, critical, dialectical, and normative, is for us an increasingly dominant characteristic of our situation. In other words, while the threat of nihilism could, in Lonergan's view, be met by transposing rigorous theological discourse, such as is found in the writings of Aquinas, from its original metaphysical framework into a fully historical mind set grounded in the originating activity of the authentic theologian, for us the task is one of meeting the reality of nihilism by elaborating a new systematic theology. That task entails moving on from the methodological reflections that have made possible a transposition from a classicist mentality to historical consciousness - moving on to the theological considerations that elaborate in this new context the meanings constitutive of that praxis of the reign of God through which the human world itself is changed. The world to be changed is one constituted by that nihilism of meaning and value that for Lonergan would be the final upshot of a longer cycle of decline.' But through a substantive change in constitutive meaning, that world can become one constituted by the meanings and values informative of integrity in the dialectical realms of the subject, culture, and the social order of the community. One of my purposes is to establish that such integrity is indeed dialectical, and that it can be effected only by means of a pervasive transformation of the scale of values according to which entire communities, nations, even blocks of nations, live. Such is the massive transformative and world-constitutive function and responsibility of a contemporary Christian systematic theology. 2

Systematic Theology as a Theory of History

The purpose just stated can be realized only incrementally. The first step is to generate the categories that will enable systematic theology to be a theory of history: categories that will allow a systematic understanding of the positions one espouses as a Christian theologian to be expressed in terms of a heuristic structure of historical process. The derivation of such categories is the principal burden of this book. The crucial challenge set for systematic theologians in our day, I believe, is to formulate a theological theory of history, a theory that will understand confessional and theological doctrines in categories expressive of the structure of history. I will argue in some detail that culture, the meaning constitutive of the worlds in which we live, is today confronted with a postmodern option, an option whose only serious alternatives are (i) deconstructive normlessness, (2) an educated and sincere but misguided return to classicism and

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Theology and the Dialectics of History

dogmatism, and (3) the discovery of norms of human genuineness that fully respect modern insights into historicity. My option will be for the third of these alternatives. I hope it is an option I can follow through on consistently. In its foundations theology must establish precisely these norms of social, cultural, personal, and religious authenticity in history, and it can do so most persuasively if in the very derivation of the categories of its systematic discourse it generates a theory of history. 3

Interdisciplinary Collaboration

By explicit decision I write primarily for other theologians. But this is not an exclusive choice, since I would hope to promote through theology a program of organized and collaborative interdisciplinary research directed to the reorientation and integration of that dimension of society that variously is named the cultural superstructure, critical objectification, even explicit dialectic. Such collaboration by definition requires the contributions of specialists other than theologians. I would hope to promote as well an educative process at the everyday level of culture, a formation and transformation that meets people as they are in the world as it is, and encourages them to become catalysts of what ought to be. Thus I am writing also for all who are concerned with the questions of how we are to understand the particular juncture of history at which we stand, and how we might envision and begin to realize an alternative set of ecclesial, personal, cultural, and social schemes. In true education the dialectic that would reorient and integrate the superstructure promotes and indeed becomes the dialogue that challenges and enables all participants, including the critical dialecticians, to change and to grow.5 A rounded viewpoint on the matters here discussed, then, would be more than theological. I do not think that theology offers more than one element in a cumulative and asymptotic advance of understanding toward the comprehensive view that is wisdom. But I do think that theology is an essential constitutive moment in such an advance, and at every step of the way. Indeed, I go so far as to hold that the very foundations of such an advance contain a theological component. This statement means more than the assertion that the structure of history cannot be understood correctly if one prescinds from the realities affirmed in the Christian doctrines of grace and sin, in the theological doctrines of the natural and the supernatural, and in the religious doctrines of radical evil and gratuitous redemption. For even the philosophic component of the explicit foundations of the various disciplines that would make single contributions to an understanding of history is not self-grounding. If philosophy is, as it was for Plato, the

7

Introduction

articulate utterance of the eros for the world-transcendent measure of the good, then moments of genuine philosophy, so rare in history and even in the lives of those gifted with them, may themselves be a function of the grace of a revelation. Certainly such an eros, while natural to the human spirit, cannot be sustained or incrementally realized without what Christian theology has called grace; and so theology, by objectifying as best it can the ever elusive mystery of divine grace, functions foundationally in the understanding of the human.6 4

Foundations and Systematics

My efforts are in continuity with Lonergan's interpretation of what the first Vatican Council of the Catholic church had to say about theological understanding.7 But one of that council's statements was the expression of a wish and a prayer: 'Let, then, understanding, knowledge, and wisdom advance mightily and strongly in individuals as well as in all, in one person as well as in the whole church, according to the degree proper to each age and each time.' Our age calls for an ordering of theological understanding in such a way that Christian doctrine will be illuminated with the help of an understanding of history. The present volume, however, offers only the heuristic structure of a theory of history, and so it is not yet systematic theology properly so-called. Systematics is an effort to understand those specifically theological affirmations that the theologian holds to be true and so regards as doctrines. With Lonergan I understand Systematics to be that specialization of theological intelligence concerned to state in direct discourse one's understanding of what one holds to be true. Direct discourse is distinguished, of course, from indirect speech, in which one purports to interpret what others have said or to narrate what others have done. In direct discourse one states one's own judgments of fact and of value, and attempts to offer an intelligent account of their meaning. Theology embraces both indirect and direct speech, but systematics is an instance of the latter. The present work is preparatory to the task of systematics so conceived. It is an attempt to derive some of the categories in which these affirmations and a systematic understanding of them would be expressed, and in that sense it is a work more of foundations than of systematics.8 Thus I offer here only a beginning. The construction of a systematic theology on the level of our times is a vast and long overdue undertaking. The first step is to establish the context and derive the principal categories. The present book attempts no more than this, and the reason is at least in part that the context and categories demand the rethinking of absolutely everything else. But while I hope to follow this work with a

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series of essays in systematics properly so-called, this book can stand on its own, as a statement of the situations that a contemporary systematics would address and evoke, and as a contribution to the foundations of that reflective praxis. 5

Complements to Lonergan

Already it is clear that I understand my work to lie within the horizon of consciousness and understanding cleared by the writings of Bernard Lonergan.9 The exigence that has driven me to write this book is at least in part the need to prepare to implement Lonergan's work in the area of systematic theology. But there are dimensions in which the present book, while not out of harmony with Lonergan's thought, reflects certain emphases and even clarifications that either add to what he has said or draw out implications of his work in ways that he did not stress. 5.1 The Question of the Situation The most obvious of these emphases lies in the assertion that the situation which a theology addresses is as much a source of theology as are the data provided by the Christian tradition. Lonergan's theological method is governed by an explicit concern, first, to mediate conflicts that have arisen in the tradition and that emerge as well today in the interpretations and histories that study the tradition; and, second, to contribute to the ongoing tradition by assuming personal responsibility for transposing and handing on, at the level of one's time, what one holds to be true. In the final chapter of Method in Theology, though, there appear clues and hints that would enable us to apply an analogous method to the situation itself. These hints are exploited here. In fact, I think, such work on the situation is an essential prerequisite if one is to be able even to hand on and develop what one believes to be authentic in the tradition. But it also provides a new source for theology, one that perhaps will demand a profound rethinking and reorientation of much of the tradition itself. The other developments to which I must call attention at this point are discussed at length in the body of the work, but the issue of the situation as theological source demands explicit consideration from the outset. Let me, then, simply indicate in passing the other essential but independent emphases that will appear here, and then return to discuss in some detail the question of the situation as theological source. 5.2 Psychic Conversion The first and most basic of these other emphases has to do with what I

9

Introduction

have called psychic conversion. Psychic conversion is a transformation of the subject, a change both illuminated and often mediated by modern depth psychology. It is a reorientation of the specifically psychic dimension of the censorship exercised over images and affects by our habitual orientations, a conversion of that dimension of the censorship from exercising a repressive function to acting constructively in one's shaping of one's own development. Chapter 2 and chapter 7 state at some length what I mean by psychic conversion, and indicate why it presents an essential complement to Lonergan's formulation of theological foundations.10 According to Lonergan, derivation of the categories is the second task of theological foundations. Prior to it and grounding it is an objectification of the constitution of a basic horizon of integrity. Lonergan calls that prior task the objectification of conversion, and conversion for Lonergan is religious, moral, intellectual, and affective. Lonergan's references to affective conversion appear late in his writings, but even with his recognition of affective conversion, what I am calling psychic conversion should be included as a distinct dimension of what in fact is a single and prolonged process of personal transformation. For, as will be clear by the end of chapter 2, what I mean by psychic conversion is not what Lonergan means by affective conversion; and, as will be clear by the end of chapter 3, psychic conversion is required if theology is to take its stand, as I believe it must, on the explicit self-appropriation of the immanent unity in duality of human consciousness. That unity in tension is the ground of all else in theology as in human life; for theology is reflection on religion, and the unity in tension that is human consciousness is the reason that grace is needed, the reason that grace is given, the reality that grace alone can hold together in relative integrity. Psychic conversion releases from repression the underlying neural manifold oriented to images for insight. Lonergan's affective conversion is the fruit in part of psychic conversion, since psychic conversion makes available materials that need to be transformed if one is to be in love in an unqualified fashion. These underlying materials, which achieve conscious representation in images, ground one pole in each of the three dialectical processes that, I will argue, constitute a heuristic structure for understanding history.11 5.5 Dialectic

Next, essential to my work is an interpretation of Lonergan according to which the word dialectic has in his writings a more refined, differentiated, and nuanced meaning than is frequently attributed to it by interpreters of his work. I have attempted to draw out the implications of this

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Theology and the Dialectics of History

interpretation by speaking of two forms of the realization of a single but complex notion of dialectic. Each of these realizations has to do with the concrete, the dynamic, and the opposed, but the difference hinges on two kinds of opposition. I call them contraries and contradictories. Contraries are reconcilable in a higher synthesis, while contradictories exclude one another. What Lonergan calls the dialectics of the subject and of community are dialectics of contraries, but the dialectic of position and counterposition in philosophy, which begins to govern Lonergan's use of the term dialectic in his discussion of things and 'bodies' in chapter 8 of Insight, is an instance of a dialectic of contradictories: of Yes and No, true and false, perhaps good and evil. Our concern here is radically with the dialectic of good and evil: with the human good, including that dimension of the good that is the higher synthesis of the dialectics of contraries; and with evil, including that dimension of evil that is the disintegration of the dialectics of contraries. While the integration and distortion of the dialectics of contraries set up a dialectic of contradictories, the very integrity of historical process is dialectical in the sense of a dialectic of contraries. In a dialectic of contraries each opposed principle of change is given its proper place in the unfolding drama of history. This distinction of two kinds of dialectic, I am convinced, can be grounded in Lonergan's texts, and chapter 3 is an attempt to make that grounding explicit. But that grounding could be made explicit, I think, only because of the prior insistence on psychic conversion. 19 5.4 The Scale of Values The notion of dialectic joins hands with the dynamic understanding of the scale of values offered in chapter 4, to provide a heuristic structure for the understanding of historical process, as well as of any given situation in that process. I derive the scale of values from several brief passages in Lonergan's work, but the understanding of the relations among the various levels of value and the positing of these relations as a key to understanding society and history represent my own responsibility. Moreover, at least three of the levels of value - social, cultural, and personal - are understood to be structured in accord with the refinement on dialectic presented in chapter 3. History is understood in accord with an analogy of dialectic, and precisely as such constitutes the context of many of the categories I would employ in systematic theology. Thus I would understand doctrines regarding grace, sin, redemption, revelation, church, incarnation, resurrection, and eschatology within the context provided by a theory of history centered around dialectic and the

11

Introduction

scale of values. The present volume offers an understanding, not of these doctrines, except in passing, but of the context within which I would understand the doctrines, the context of the structure of history. 5.5 The Dialectic of Culture Lonergan presents the social and personal levels of value as dialectical, and, I would maintain, his understanding of the relevant dialectics not only does not contradict the refinement on dialectic offered here, but demands it. However, the notion of a dialectic of culture is another independent contribution of the present work, and, I admit, it is the most precarious and tentative of all my suggestions. It obviously makes for systematic coherence, but its value as a hypothesis about reality remains to be tested. 5.6 The Ontology of Meaning Next there is the ontology of meaning. It is the subject of chapter 19. Twenty years ago I was haunted by the question of Lonergan's relation to the work of Martin Heidegger. Moreover, the encounter with Marxist analysis that enters into my argument has forced me to confront as well problems raised by Hegel. The result of this complex web of questions and incremental insights is the sketch of an ontology of the meaning that mediates the reality of everything else. In an ontology of meaning, I think, the Hegelian objection to a transcendental grounding of the ideal of knowledge can be met and, I dare say, overcome. But here, too, the Heideggerian hope for a new disclosure of being can perhaps be fulfilled, and so the Heideggerian potential for relativistic nihilism, a potential now witnessed in deconstructionist uses of Heidegger, can perhaps be laid to rest.13 Chapter 19 claims directly, though, not to meet the Hegelian and Heideggerian questions, but only to show the vantage point from which they might be confronted. 5.7 Praxis Finally, there is the question of praxis. From Marx we have learned that cognitive integrity is not only to understand the world; it is also to contribute to transforming the world. While I will register disagreements with Marxist analysis,14 it has forced me to confront the question of wherein lies the transformative function of theology. A theory of history is not only speculative but also practical. I want the systematic theology to which I hope eventually to contribute not only to be an analogous,

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Theology and the Dialectics of History

progressive, and fruitful understanding of the mysteries affirmed in Christian theological doctrines, but also to contribute to the meaning constitutive of Christian praxis. That praxis, of course, is itself in part intellectual, a matter of collaborative interdisciplinary research promoting the reorientation and integration of science and scholarship, of the superstructure of society. And it is also in part education, the formation and transformation of mentality. The praxis of theology, I have concluded, is proximately the transformation of culture, of constitutive meaning, as the condition of the possibility of the transformation of polities, economies, technological structures, and intersubjective communities. It is a self-emptying praxis, for if it builds up the church, it does so, not by assuming this task as an end in itself, but by viewing it as a function and instrument of promoting the reign of God in this world. A theory of history elaborated with a theological end in view would specify just what the reign of God in this world would be. Perhaps my suggestions in this regard constitute the most direct systematic-theological aspect of this book. I will register agreement with the basic options of the theology of liberation, and will attempt to ground them in transcendental analysis. 6

The Situation as Theological Source

Let us return to the issue of the situation as theological source. 'A theology mediates,' writes Lonergan, 'between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of a religion within that matrix' (M:xi). If this is the case, both the classic texts, persons, and events of the religious tradition15 and the situation of the cultural matrix will be sources of theology's reflective mediation.16 While Lonergan's Method in Theology, until the last chapter, is concerned almost exclusively with the methods for the retrieval of the data provided by the tradition and with methods for contemporary efforts to interpret, narrate, develop, transpose, hand on, and add to what one has retrieved, in the final chapter Lonergan indicates briefly how the theological method he proposes allows the situation that a theologian addresses to join the texts of the tradition as a theological source. I propose to bring this point to center stage. In the functional specialty of communications, then, the theologian makes the final transpositions of the Christian message to the concrete contexts determined by the nests of questions and answers to which the church would address the message of the gospel. In this sense the functional specialty of communications is a final step in theology, where theological reflection bears fruit and the earlier stages mature. But it is at the same time a beginning, for with the performance of its tasks the wheel

13

Introduction

of the functional specialties begins anew, notjust for some future age, but for our own as well: 'Questions for systematics can arise from communications' (Af:i4a). Lonergan does not emphasize that communications provides theology with one of its two main sources of reflection. But that the point is not lost on him is apparent from the two new uses of dialectic — a first-phase specialty — that are generated from the task of addressing a historical situation. The first of these is dialectic as a tool of social criticism; the second is dialectic as operative in disciplines other than theology. Of dialectic as a tool of social criticism, Lonergan writes: Now [i.e., at this point] ... our interest is not in dialectic as affecting theological opinions but in dialectic as affecting community, action, situation. It affects community for, just as common meaning is constitutive of community, so dialectic divides community into radically opposed groups. It affects action for, just as conversion leads to intelligent, reasonable, responsible action, so dialectic adds division, conflict, oppression. It affects the situation, for situations are the cumulative product of previous actions and, when previous actions have been guided by the light and darkness of dialectic, the resulting situation is not. some intelligible whole but rather a set of misshapen, poorly proportioned, and incoherent fragments. ... the divided community, their conflicting actions, and the messy situation are headed for disaster. For the messy situation is diagnosed differently by the divided community; action is ever more at cross-purposes; and the situation becomes still messier to provoke still sharper differences in diagnosis and policy, more radical criticism of one another's actions, and an ever deeper crisis in the situation. (M:358) Clearly, then, the tasks of communications generate an exercise of the functional specialty of dialectic that bears not on the texts of the tradition nor on their interpreters, but on the evaluation of the present situation with which theology would mediate the truth uncovered in and transposed from the tradition. The last chapter of Method in Theology thus comes full circle on the first sentence of the book's introduction, where theology is presented as mediating between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of a religion within that matrix. Now if there is a new exercise of dialectic, then research, interpretation, and history are also called into play by the exigencies of the second theological source, the situation. They will issue in a dialectical analysis that bears directly on the situation and, often enough, forces the foundational stance that not only

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Theology and the Dialectics of History

governs doctrines, systematics, and communications, but also objectifies the self that does research, interpretation, and history. Recognition of the situation as theological source will perhaps render more obvious than does acknowledgment of the tradition the theological significance and foundational status of psychic conversion in the objectification of the foundational self.17 For radical dialectical differences in the situation are derived from the presence and absence not only of religious, moral, and intellectual conversion, but also and with at least equal force of the affective integrity that enables genuine collaboration in the pursuit of the human good to go forward. Thus, for example, Max Scheler's analysis of ressentiment, which Lonergan cites several times as a description of the most basic and profound of all affective aberrations, makes quite clear the radical significance and necessity of the self-appropriation and decisive negotiation of specifically psychic dimensions of the subject if the dialectic of community is to be preserved in its integrity. My efforts here are to specify the heuristic structure of the exercise of dialectic called into play by the situation as theological source. Three dialectics will be discussed as constitutive of historical situations: a dialectic of the subject, a dialectic of culture, and a dialectic of community. Each of them will be understood in nuanced dialectical terms of contraries and contradictories. The relations among them will be established by appealing to the scale of values discussed by Lonergan in Method in Theology (Afrgi—32). The conjunction of the three analogous dialectics and a position on the scale of values will yield, I believe, a transcendental structure of history, and that structure will yield in turn the general categories of a systematics that would understand Christian doctrines in the light of a theory of history. So the movement is, first, from efforts at communication of the gospel to a recognition of the situation as theological source; second, from the situation as source to the situation as dialectical; and third, from the position on dialectic to an understanding of the scale of values as yielding a generalized heuristic structure of history as the general-categorial context for understanding Christian teaching, doctrines, positions. The second manner in which the situation becomes a source lies in the fact that the objective of a transformed situation demands that theology '[unite] itself with all other relevant branches of human studies' through 'a method that runs parallel to the method in theology' (M:g64). '... the functional specialties of research, interpretation, and history can be applied to the data of any sphere of scholarly human studies. [Moreover, t]he same three specialties when conceived, not as specialties, but simply as experience, understanding, and judgment, can be applied to the data of any sphere of human living to obtain the classical principles and laws or

15

Introduction

the statistical trends of scientific human studies' (^1:364-65). In both science and scholarship,18 'there is a place for dialectic that assembles differences, classifies them, goes to their roots, and pushes them to extremes by developing alleged positions while reversing alleged counterpositions' (.^365). Again, in either case, 'theological foundations, which objectify the horizon implicit in religious, moral, and intellectual conversion, may now be invoked to decide which really are the positions and which really are the counter-positions. In this fashion any ideological intrusion into scholarly or scientific human studies is filtered out' (M:365). It follows from the two new uses of dialectic generated from the situation as theological source that, 'corresponding to doctrines, systematics, and communications in theological method, integrated studies would distinguish policy making, planning, and the execution of the plans. Policy is concerned with attitudes and ends. Planning works out the optimal use of existing resources for attaining the ends under given conditions. Execution generates feedback. This supplies scholars and scientists with the data for studies on the wisdom of policies and the efficacy of the planning. The result of such attention to feedback will be that policy making and planning become ongoing processes that are continuously revised in the light of their consequences' (.^365—66). In this way theology is integrated with scholarly and scientific human studies 'to generate well-informed and continuously revised policies and plans for promoting good and undoing evil both in the church and in human society generally' (M:366), and this on many levels, following principles of subsidiarity and coordination. The second new use of dialectic joins hands with the first, in that the other disciplines with which theology unites itself are themselves a constitutive dimension of the situation itself. This will be argued in detail in the chapters that constitute the third and fourth parts of the book, where I will adopt a position on the structure of society that takes its stand on the independence and potential effectiveness of the cultural superstructure. The point I would make here, however, is that these new uses of dialectic and all of the methodological consequences here elaborated by Lonergan are possible only if the situation has been made a theological source in and through the very praxis of communications. That praxis aims at a communitarian alternative to societies informed by alienation, ideology, and structural injustice. The community of the church is for the sake of community as the ideal basis of the whole of society. And among the major contentions of this work will be that an earlier reflection on community by Lonergan greatly enriches the notion of dialectic so central

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Theology and the Dialectics of History

to these concluding remarks in Method in Theology. I would keep that potential enrichment from being forgotten, misinterpreted, or treated as a temporary but eventually superseded position or a coincidental residue in the corpus of Lonergan's writings. And I would do so by grounding it in the dimension of conversion that I have called psychic. I would also extend the structure of dialectic found in this earlier reflection, the seventh chapter of Insight, so that it becomes a principle for understanding as well the process of individual development and cultural constitutive meaning. I would relate the three dialectical processes to one another with the use of an understanding of the scale of values. And I would argue that the conjunction of the scale of values and the analogy of dialectic yields the heuristic structure of historical process. Such a structure grounds the derivation of general categories, and systematic theology understands church doctrines and theological doctrines by integrating the realities proper to theological study with the realities studied as well by other disciplines. Finally, because the effort at contemporary communication that makes the situation a theological source in the first place is ultimately responsible for the process that generated these conclusions, there will be references throughout to a particular understanding of the contemporary situation, and more precisely of both the situation to be addressed and the situation to be evoked by the systematics here envisioned.

PART O N E

Basic Terms and Relations

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1 Bernard Lonergan's Notion of the Subject

A presentation of the basic elements in Bernard Lonergan's notion of the human subject will be the starting point of this attempt to derive categories to be employed in systematic theology. It will also be the position to which the present work will constantly appeal for confirmation and verification. The notion of the subject constitutes both the central and the foundational position in Lonergan's work and achievement. From the position on the subject all else derives: proximately and quite directly, positions on being and objectivity, then on meaning and value, and on philosophical and theological method; more derivatively a metaphysics, an ethics, and both a philosophical and Christian systematic theology; and ultimately a programmatic heuristic structure for the reorientation and integration of scientific and scholarly research in many fields, and for the criticism of the forms of common sense embodying the meaning constitutive of the everyday world. At the root of all these operations is the operating subject, and so a clarification of the operations and states of the subject is foundational of everything else. In a brief chapter such as this I cannot develop the many implications of what Lonergan calls the position on the subject. Some of these implications will be developed as we proceed further. For now I must confine my attention to an exposition and interpretation of the basic elements in that position itself, and try to do so in such a way that the presentation prepares us for what is to follow. With the latter concern in mind, I will conclude this chapter with a particular application pertinent to my present concerns. I will trace the development of Lonergan's position on the subject through four stages. I will here give far more extensive treatment to the

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Theology and the Dialectics of History

first two of these stages, and will touch only briefly on the third and fourth, both of which will be amplified in later arguments. The stages unfold over several decades, but for handy reference we can set the major parameters of the discussion in the early 19505, when Lonergan was completing work on Insight, and 1975, when he wrote and delivered a lecture entitled 'Healing and Creating in History.'1 The four stages are the position on knowing, the position on existential and historical agency, the position on love, and the notion of two complementary vectors in consciousness. After saying something about each of these stages I will add a brief presentation of Lonergan's notions of bias and conversion, notions that cut through all of the stages and unify them. It will be clear, I hope, that these four stages are not separate and discrete units of thought, but intimately related moments in the organic unfolding of a consistent and ever more comprehensive understanding of the elusive and polymorphic reality to which each of us is ever present in all of our waking and some of our sleeping hours, but. which, by virtue of an immanent law, always escapes complete objectification: namely, the subject as subject. Implicit in my interpretation is the thesis that Lonergan has mediated the structure of the self to which we are always immediate, and in so doing has enabled a kind of second immediacy, one that is gained through mediation and that renders us asymptotically 'equal' to the polymorphic reality of our own consciousness. His achievement, if you want, is not the mediation of totality ambitioned by Hegel — an accomplishment that for Lonergan would be possible only by reason of the vision of God — but rather a heuristic structure for the totality of mediation of the immediacy of the subject to himself or herself.2 i

The Position on Knowing

The first and basic stage in the development of Lonergan's notion of the person, or position on the subject, comes to term in the pivotal eleventh chapter of Insight. The chapter is entitled 'The Self-affirmation of the Knower.' It begins the second part of the book, 'Insight as Knowledge,' and it invites the reader to affirm that what had been set forth in the first part of the book, 'Insight as Activity,' is in fact an explanatory objectification of what he or she is. The first part of the book presents a rigorous phenomenology of cognitional operations in mathematics, empirical science, and everyday common sense. The reader of the first part of the book is asked to withhold judgment, insofar as this is possible, until the phenomenology is complete. Then we are invited, each one singly, to the decisive and self-constitutive act of affirming that what has been presented in the phenomenology is what in fact one is.

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Bernard Lonergan's Notion of the Subject

What, then, am I asked to affirm about myself? I am asked to affirm that I am a knower, where this means that I am a conscious unity, identity, whole, whose consciousness unfolds on three levels: first, an empirical level of presentations through sense and imagination; second, an intelligent level that consists of inquiry, insight into these presentations in which I grasp an intelligibility immanent and emergent in the data, and conceptualization and formulation of my understanding; and third, a reflective and rational level on which I seek to verify my understanding, and on which I grasp that the conditions for positing and affirming the conceptual synthesis in which I have formulated my understanding either are or are not fulfilled. If I grasp that the conditions are fulfilled, I cannot withhold affirmation without being unreasonable; if I grasp that they are not fulfilled, I cannot reasonably proceed to affirmation; and if I grasp that I cannot yet discern whether they are or are not fulfilled, I cannot reasonably proceed in an absolute fashion either to affirmation or to negation, but must either withhold judgment or pass judgment, not assertorically but modally, not with certitude but only with the probability dictated by my grasp of the sufficiency of the evidence: 'perhaps, maybe, it could be, it seems, probably.' The fulfilment of the conditions for the particular judgment that Lonergan invites the reader to make in this chapter is given in consciousness itself. The judgment, again, is 'I am a knower,' where knowing entails operations on the three levels of experience, understanding, andjudgment, where the levels are united by the desire to understand correctly, leading us to raise ever further relevant questions, and where the pivotal moments are the events, first, of direct insight into data and, second, of a reflective grasp of the fulfilment of conditions for a prospective judgment. T has a rudimentary meaning from consciousness and it envisages neither the multiplicity nor the diversity of contents and conscious acts but rather the unity that goes along with them. But i f ' J ' has some such rudimentary meaning from consciousness, then consciousness supplies the fulfilment of one element in the conditions for affirming that I am a knower. Does consciousness supply the fulfilment for the other conditions? Do I see, or am I blind? Do I hear, or am I deaf? Do I try to understand or is the distinction between intelligence and stupidity no more applicable to me than to a stone? Have I any experience of insight...? Do I conceive, think, consider, suppose, define, formulate, or is my talking like the talking of a parrot? I reflect, for I ask whether I am a knower. Do I grasp the unconditioned, if not in other instances, then in this one? If I grasped the unconditioned, would I not be under the

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Theology and the Dialectics of History

rational compulsion of affirming that I am a knower and so, either affirm it, or else find some loop-hole, some weakness, some incoherence, in this account of the genesis of self-affirmation? As each has to ask these questions of himself, so too he has to answer them for himself. But the fact of the asking and the possibility of the answering are themseh'es the sufficient reason for the affirmative answer. (7:328) The conscious unity of the unfolding of cognitional process is a function of a spontaneously operating spirit of inquiry, or desire to know. Consciousness is not perception, not knowledge, not an inward look. It is self-presence, the self-presence that characterizes me as I am carried by the force of my questions from experience of the data of sense and of consciousness to understanding, and from understanding to judgment. Following Aristotle, Lonergan speaks of two kinds of questions. He calls them questions for intelligence and questions for reflection. Questions for intelligence ask, What? Why? How often? They are marked negatively by the characteristic that they cannot be answered Yes or No. They regard the immanent intelligibility of the data presented on the level of empirical consciousness. But questions for reflection follow upon answers, frequently upon formulated answers, to questions for intelligence. They ask, Is it so? They are characterized by the fact that they can be answered Yes or No. Thus they are the questions that terminate in judgment, where the synthesis formulated at the level of intelligent consciousness is sometimes removed from the realm of mere possibility - that is, when I grasp that its conditions are fulfilled — and posited as what in fact is the case, and so where I attain an increment, in the knowing of being, of the real, of what is. Let us try if we can to catch this process of inquiry in act. If you were holding this book in your hands, seeing the marks on paper, but neither understanding nor trying to understand what I am saying, if I might as well be writing in a thoroughly strange language, if in effect all you were seeing were marks, then you would be operating solely at the empirical level of consciousness. But if you are trying to follow and understand what I am saying, if my written utterances are presentations to be submitted to inquiry, if you are asking the question, formulated or not, 'What on earth is he talking about?' you are operating not only at the empirical level, but also at the intelligent level of consciousness. You are asking questions for intelligence. If from these questions there emerges an insight into the presentations that are my written words, you have an understanding of what I am saying. If that is the case, and especially if you are accurately understanding what I am saying — itself a matter for judgment — you may be moving to the third level of consciousness, which regards what you

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Bernard Lonergan's Notion of the Subject

have understood me to be saying. Here a different question is being asked: Is it true? Do I agree with what I understand him to be saying? You are marshaling and weighing the evidence, you are asking whether the conditions are or are not fulfilled for your own 'self-affirmation of the knower,' and, if you find that they are in fact fulfilled, you are making the judgment, 'I am a conscious unity, identity, whole, characterized by operations on the levels of experience, understanding, and judgment.' We can, of course, and often do, hasten to ask the question of truth before we have answered the question for understanding. We pass judgment on what we have not understood. But then we are not operating with cognitive authenticity or integrity. 'To pass judgment on what one does not understand,' Lonergan writes, 'is, not human knowing, but human arrogance.'3 It follows that the self-affirmation of the knower is not only a self-disclosing, but also potentially a self-constitutive, judgment. It affirms the self one knows one can be, and it opens the way to a reorientation of those patterns of experience, and to an overcoming of those biases, that are responsible for one's falling short of what one has judged one is capable of being. In the self-affirmation of the knower to which Lonergan invites the reader in the eleventh chapter of Insight, the operations that he displayed for consideration in the phenomenology of knowing that occupies the first ten chapters are brought to bear on themselves. That is to say, there is a direct mode of cognitional process that occurs with regard to the data of sense; these data are experienced and understood, and the formulated understanding is affirmed; but in the reflective mode of cognitional process that culminates in the self-affirmation of the knower, the objective is a true understanding precisely of the experience, understanding, and judgment that are involved in knowing anything at all. I can reach that true understanding only by performing precisely those same operations of experiencing, understanding, and judging, but now with regard, not to sense data that I experience, understand, and affirm, but to the very operations of experiencing, understanding, and affirming. I reach the self-affirmation of the knower by experiencing my own experiencing, understanding, and judging; by understanding my experiencing, understanding, and judging in their relations to one another; and by affirming that in fact my experiencing, understanding, and judging are related to one another in the specified manner. The self-affirmation of the knower is the judgment that I am a structured unity of empirical, intelligent, and critical or rational consciousness, where the unity is a function of the questions that promote consciousness from one level to the next, and where the questions issue in direct insight and the procession of concepts, and in reflective insight and the procession of a

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Theology and the Dialectics of History

judgment. The judgment of self-affirmation, finally, is confirmed by a retortion, a dialectic of performance and concept: if I were to deny that I am such a structured unity of empirical, intelligent, and rational consciousness, I would do so by appealing to some experience or set of experiences that I understood in a certain way, and by affirming that my understanding of the experience or set of experiences is correct; thus my performance of attempting to deny that I am a structured unity of empirical, intelligent, and rational consciousness would display the very structure that I was attempting to deny. Directly consequent on the self-affirmation of the knower are positions on being and objectivity. Being is the objective of the pure desire to know, the objective of the dynamically structured unity of inquiring and critical consciousness that moves me from experience to insight, and from insight to reflective understanding and judgment. Being is what I am after when I raise questions for intelligence and questions for reflection. I raise these questions because I want to know what is, and what is is being. Being is what I reach in incremental fashion when in fact I do reach a true judgment, when I grasp that the conditions are fulfilled for affirming the synthesis that I have formulated, and proceed by rational necessity to the judgment, This is the case. Consciousness as the desire to know raising ever further questions is a notion of being, where 'notion' means, not a concept or an idea, but an intelligent and rational heuristic anticipation of its objective. Being is all that is known and all that remains to be known. It is what would be known by the totality of true judgments, and what is known incrementally in each single true judgment. It is whatever can be intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed. Next, objectivity is the fruit of intelligent inquiry and critical reflection, of authentic subjectivity, of giving free rein to the desire to know. There is an absolute objectivity to every true judgment. Such a judgment rests on the grasp of the fulfilment of its conditions, and so is a de facto absolute or, in Lonergan's terms, a 'virtually unconditioned.' Because the judgment is endowed with an absolute objectivity, its content is 'withdrawn from relativity to the subject that utters it, the place in which he utters it, the time at which he utters it' (7:378). And yet the true judgment issues from a subjectivity, but a subjectivity that is authentic, that is 'opposed to the subjectivity of wishful thinking, of rash or excessively cautious judgments, of allowing joy or sadness, hope or fear, love or detestation, to interfere with' the exigencies of the unfolding of intelligent and reasonable consciousness (7:380). As absolute the true judgment, posited as true, is an achievement of self-transcendence. The problem of how one gets beyond oneself to a known is thus revealed as a misleading question. Cognitive self-transcendence is placed 'not in going beyond a known

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Bernard Lonergan's Notion of the Subject

knower, but in heading for being within which there are positive differences and, among such differences, the difference between subject and object' (7:377). One does not know oneself until one makes correct judgments about oneself. But other judgments, too, 'are equally possible and reasonable, so that through experience, inquiry, and reflection there arises knowledge of other objects both as beings and as being other than the knower' (7:377). It is difficult, probably impossible, to display in a brief summary the power of Lonergan's argument in the eleventh chapter of Insight. Yet this and the two chapters that follow it, treating respectively the notion of being and the notion of objectivity, are at the base of everything else that I will say in this book. These positions provide an alternative to at least two other positions on knowing that always seem to be talking past one another: those that, like Lonergan's, take their stand on the turn to the subject constitutive of the modern philosophic differentiation of consciousness, but that, unlike Lonergan's, cannot seem to work their way through and beyond idealism, subjectivism, and relativism; and those that reject the turn to the subject out of hand precisely on the grounds that it will involve one inescapably in such immanentism, but themselves end up in some variety of empiricism, naive realism, or dogmatism. Lonergan, I believe, has brought the turn to the subject to an initial completion, to a plateau, or, as we will see, a series of plateaus. He has been able to ground a philosophy firmly in the operations of the knowing subject without sacrificing knowing on the altar of idealism, immanentism, or relativism (see 7:xxviii). Lonergan was able to bring the turn to the subject to such a plateau because of two reorientations of the modern philosophic differentiation of consciousness. The first is his notion of consciousness itself. Consciousness is not representation, perception, or knowledge, including selfknowledge, but simply the self-presence immanent in all cognitive operations, as well as in acts of decision, in feelings, and in certain bodily movements. Consciousness as experience rather than consciousness as perception enables a turn, first, from the quest for certitude found in Descartes to a search for correct understanding, even as it reveals correct understanding to be the source of whatever certitude we are able to reach; and a turn, too, from the primacy of the epistemological question of Kant, What are the conditions of valid knowing? to the primacy of the question of concrete cognitional praxis that for Lonergan grounds all else, even epistemology, What am I doing when I am knowing?4 The second reorientation of the modern philosophic differentiation occurs in Lonergan's insistence on judgment, and so on the unconditioned not only as an ideal of knowledge, but also as a constitutive

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Theology and the Dialectics of History

component in full human knowing, a component that is quite distinct from understanding. 2

Existential and Historical Agency

In post-Insight writings Lonergan speaks, not of two but of three kinds of questions. I will quote a fairly lengthy passage from one of his later papers, where the transition to the third kind of question is discussed, and where there are listed the principal features of consciousness engaged in raising and answering the third kind of question. The passage is from a paper entitled 'Natural Right and Historical Mindedness.' I draw attention to this paper because its main purpose, I believe, is to mediate the concern with human nature found in classical political philosophy and in the writings of its contemporary proponents (especially Leo Strauss and his followers) with the historical consciousness of modern and specifically post-Hegelian thought, and so to argue that discussion of the three kinds of questions enables us to discover norms for praxis in the context of a full recognition of human historicity. This issue is quite central to the present book. At any rate, the passage in question reads as follows: ... the successful negotiation of questions for intelligence and questions for reflection is not enough. They do justice to sensitive presentations and representations. But they are strangely dissociated from the feelings that constitute the mass and momentum of our lives. Knowing a world mediated by meaning is only a prelude to man's dealing with nature, to his interpersonal living and working with others, to his existential becoming what he is to make of himself by his own choices and deeds. So there emerge questions for deliberation. Gradually they reveal their scope in their practical, interpersonal, and existential dimensions. Slowly they mount the ladder of burgeoning morality. Asking what's in it for me gives way to asking what's in it for us. And both of these queries become tempered with the more searching, the wrenching question, Is it really worthwhile? It is a searching question. The mere fact that we ask it points to a distinction between feelings that are self-regarding and feelings that are disinterested. Self-regarding feelings are pleasures and pains, desires and fears. But disinterested feelings recognize excellence: the vital value of health and strength; the communal value of a successfully functioning social order; the cultural value proclaimed as a life to be sustained not by bread alone but also

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Bernard Lonergan's Notion of the Subject

by the word; the personal appropriation of these values by individuals; their historical extension in progress; deviation from them in decline; and their recovery by self-sacrificing love. I have called the question not only searching but also wrenching. Feelings reveal values to us. They dispose us to commitment. But they do not bring commitment about. For commitment is a personal act, a free and responsible act, a very open-eyed act in which we would settle what we are to become. It is open-eyed in the sense that it is consciously a decision about future decisions, aware that the best of plans cannot control the future, even aware that one's present commitment, however firm cannot suspend the freedom that will be exercised in its future execution.5 This passage provides us with a summation of the principal dimensions of the position on the subject advanced in what I am calling the second phase of Lonergan's thought on the human subject. These features are feelings, moral self-transcendence, a scale of values, judgments of value, and decision. It is not to be thought that these items are absent from his earlier work, nor that their later clarification constitutes in any way a repudiation or revision of the position of Insight on knowing. But in this second phase these existential features emerge as constitutive of a distinct level of consciousness. First, then, feelings. Feelings are discussed in the context of an attempt to understand the notion of value. With the emergence of the third kind of question, the notion of being is sublated by a notion of value. Consciousness heads not only toward cognitional self-transcendence in true judgment, but also toward real or moral self-transcendence in decision. Fidelity to the notion of value involves the delicate and sustained negotiation of affectivity, until our feelings spontaneously respond to an ordered scale of values. Then and only then is there reached the relative stability of affective integrity. If there is any change in the second stage of Lonergan's position on the subject other than positive development, that is, if there is a correction of earlier views, it would be principally with regard to feelings and the level of consciousness on which they achieve integration. While there is plenty of evidence in Insight to support the view of a certain continuity in Lonergan's thought on feelings, nonetheless, when the crucial issues of insight, judgment, and decision are treated in Insight, there is emphasized the interference that our feelings can exercise with the unfolding of the exigencies of intelligent, critical, and deliberative inquiry. The later work is surely aware of the same problems, but in this work a positive account of feelings emerges, and in fact so prominently as to lead to the affirmations,

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first, that it is in feelings that we apprehend values,6 and second, that this apprehension is partly constitutive of a level of consciousness distinct from the levels of intelligent inquiry and critical reflection. Thus in the later work affective development is granted an importance comparable to that of operational development. In Method in Theology, which is the main work in this phase of Lonergan's thought, a distinction is drawn between intentional and nonintentional feelings. Nonintentional feelings, such as hunger and fatigue, arise independently of any perception or apprehension of an object. But intentional feelings 'answer to what is intended, apprehended, represented' (M:3o). They assume a quite momentous significance for Lonergan. They are treated in a manner that not only is harmonious with Insight's analysis of conscious operations, but also accounts for affective dimensions of cognitional process itself — dimensions of which any reader of Insight surely is aware while being invited to the self-appropriation of his or her own rational self-consciousness, but dimensions, too, that were left unobjectified in Insight itself. 'Feelings that are intentional responses regard two main classes of objects: on the one hand, the agreeable or disagreeable, the satisfying or dissatisfying; on the other hand, values, whether the ontic value of persons or the qualitative value of beauty, understanding, truth, virtuous acts, noble deeds' (M: 31). So we have the distinction that in the quotation above from 'Natural Right and Historical Mindednesss" is a 'distinction between feelings that are self-regarding and feelings that are disinterested.' Next, in the discussion of feelings there appears explicit mention of self-transcendence. What distinguishes what is really worth while from what is merely agreeable is that 'response to value both carries us towards self-transcendence and selects an object for the sake of whom or of which we transcend ourselves. In contrast, response to the agreeable or disagreeable is ambiguous. What is agreeable may very well be what also is a true good. But it also happens that what is a true good may be disagreeable' (Migi). Self-transcendence, moreover, is a notion that, is employed to understand and evaluate the entire unfolding of conscious process. In another late paper, entitled 'A Post-Hegelian Philosophy of Religion,' Lonergan speaks of five successive degrees of self-transcendence — successiv because they mark the cumulative stages of the process of human inquiry. Thus we see here precisely the levels of consciousness that we have already discussed. The first is the emergence of consciousness in the fragmentary form of the dream, where human substance yields place to the human subject. The second is waking when our senses and feelings

2g

Bernard Lonergan's Notion of the Subject come to life, where our memories recall pleasures and our imaginations anticipate fears, but our vitality envisages courses of action. The third is inquiry which enables us to move out of the mere habitat of an animal and into our human world of relatives, friends, acquaintances, associates, projects, accomplishments, ambitions, fears. The fourth is the discovery of a truth, which is not the idle repetition of a 'good look' but the grasp in a manifold of data of the sufficiency of the evidence for our affirmation or negation. The fifth is the successive negotiation of the stages of morality and/or identity till we reach the point where we discover that it is up to ourselves to decide for ourselves what we are to make of ourselves, where we decisively meet the challenge of that discovery, where we set ourselves apart from the drifters. For drifters have not yet found themselves. They have not yet found their own deed and so are content to do what everyone else is doing. They have not yet found a will of their own, and so they are content to choose what everyone else is choosing. They have not yet developed minds of their own, and so they are content to think and say what everyone else is thinking and saying. And everyone else, it happens, can be doing and choosing and thinking and saying what others are doing and choosing and thinking and saying.7

The notion of self-transcendence is the key, as well, to an articulation of the scale of values. This position, central to the developments I would propose here, is compactly stated in the earlier quotation from 'Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,' but it is given more ample expression in Method in Theology. Not only do feelings respond to values. They do so.in accord with some scale of preference. So we may distinguish vital, social, cultural, personal, and religious values in an ascending order. Vital values, such as health and strength, grace and vigor, normally are preferred to avoiding the work, privations, pains involved in acquiring, maintaining, restoring them. Social values, such as the good of order which conditions the vital values of the whole community, have to be preferred to the vital values of individual members of the community. Cultural values do not exist without the underpinning of vital and social values, but none the less they rank higher. Not on bread alone doth man live. Over and above mere living and operating, men have to find a meaning and value in their living and operating. It is the function of culture to discover, express, validate, criticize, correct, develop, improve such

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meaning and value. Personal value is the person in his selftranscendence, as loving and being loved, as originator of values in himself and in his milieu, as an inspiration and invitation to others to do likewise. Religious values, finally, are at the heart of the meaning and value of man's living and man's world. (71^:31-32) The fourth level of consciousness, the level of existential and worldconstitutive praxis, involves a great deal more than intentional affective responses to potential values, however. On the apprehension of potential values in feelings, there follow, under the pressure of questions for deliberation, both judgments of value and decision. Judgments of value either affirm that what has been affectively apprehended is truly or only apparently good, or 'compare distinct instances of the truly good to affirm or deny that one is better or more important, or more urgent than the other' (M:36). The criterion of the objectivity of the judgment of value lies in the self-transcendence of the feelings of the evaluating subject, who is now called upon to state, not what is or is not so, but what is or is not truly good or really better. Nonetheless, one does not reach the fulness of moral self-transcendence in the judgment of value, but only in decision and consequent action. Here there is exercised the commitment that Lonergan spoke of in the passage on the third kind of question with which I began the discussion of this second stage of his understanding of the person; commitment is, to repeat, an 'open-eyed act in which we would settle what we are to become. It is open-eyed in the sense that it is consciously a decision about future decisions, aware that the best of plans cannot control the future, even aware that one's present commitment however firm cannot suspend the freedom that will be exercised in its future execution.' 3

The Position on Love

We move now (and briefly) to a third stage in Lonergan's notion of the person. The position on the subject as existential and world-constitutive agent, and so on a fourth level of consciousness, was already compactly present in the narrower frame of the first stage's position on the subject as a knower. So too, the position on the subject as falling in love and being in love, and specifically the position on a dimension of love as constituting a fifth level of consciousness is already present, and far more than inchoately so, in the frame provided by the second stage's position on existential subjectivity. But only after Method in Theology, and so after 1972, is there mention, albeit brief and even somewhat offhand, in

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Lonergan's writings of a fifth level of consciousness. What is important, I believe, is not so much the question of an additional level, but the increasing centrality of love. The discussion of love constitutes one of the principal distinguishing arid unifying themes in the book A Third Collection, which contains some of Lonergan's most important post-Method essays. The importance of this distinct dimension of personhood, precisely in its distinctness, is evident in a short paragraph that follows the passage quoted earlier on the degrees of self-transcendence. Lonergan had spoken of the moment of existential decision in which we set ourselves apart from the drifters. The next paragraph reads: But this fifth stage in self-transcendence becomes a successful way of life only when we really are pulled out of ourselves as, for example, when we fall in love, whether our love be the domestic love that unites husband and wife and children, or the love of our fellows whose well-being we promote and defend, or the love of God above all in whom we love our neighbor as ourselves.8 So it is that in 'Natural Right and Historical Mindedness,' the three questions - questions for intelligence, questions for reflection, and questions for deliberation — are spoken of as 'but aspects of a deeper and more comprehensive principle,' of 'a tidal movement that begins before consciousness, unfolds through sensitivity, intelligence, rational reflection, responsible deliberation, only to find its rest beyond all of these.'9 And that point beyond, where the vertical finality of the tidal movement finds its rest, is 'being-in-love, a dynamic state that sublat.es all that goes before, a principle of movement at once purgative and illuminative, and a principle of rest in which union is fulfilled.'10 Self-transcendence, then, 'reaches its term not in righteousness but in love and, when we fall in love, then life begins anew. A new principle takes over and, as long as it lasts, we are lifted above ourselves and carried along as parts within an ever more intimate yet ever more liberating dynamic whole.'11 This love, again, is consistently spoken of as a threefold reality. 'Such is the love of husband and wife, parents and children. Such again, less conspicuously but no less seriously, is the loyalty constitutive of civil community, where individual advantage yields to the advantage of the group, and individual safety may be sacrificed to the safety of the group. Such finally is God's gift of his own love flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit he has given us.'12 4

Healing and Creating

The final stage in this reconstruction of the development of Lonergan's

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notion of the subject is a function of the recognition of the life that is rooted in love. In the first three stages that we have considered, the person is thought of as a creative conscious vector that moves, as it were, from below upwards: 'from experience to growing understanding, from growing understanding to balanced judgment, from balanced judgment to fruitful courses of action, and from fruitful courses of action to the new situations that call forth further understanding, profounder judgment, richer courses of action.'13 But there is a reverse vector that moves 'from above downwards.' Lonergan speaks of it in several contexts. The one most pertinent to our concerns is that of healing, but the common factor in all the contexts is the operation on the subject of the love of others. Lonergan describes the movement from above as follows: ... there also is development from above downwards. There is the transformation of falling in love: the domestic love of the family, the human love of one's tribe, one's city, one's country, mankind; the divine love that orientates man in his cosmos and expresses itself in his worship. Where hatred only sees evil, love reveals values. At once it commands commitment and joyfully carries it out, no matter what the sacrifice involved. Where hatred reinforces bias, love dissolves it, whether it be the bias of unconscious motivation, the bias of individual or group egoism, or the bias of omnicompetent, shortsighted common sense. Where hatred plods around in ever narrower vicious circles, love breaks the bonds of psychological and social determinisms with the conviction of faith and the power of hope.14 It is not to be thought, however, that this vector from above downward goes into operation only when the vector from below has failed. Development 'from above downward' conditions the emergence of our creative capacities for insight, judgment, and decision,10 as we will see in great detail in our treatment of personal values and the dialectic of the subject. And in the life of an integrated adult, each vector complements the other. The source of the most important developments from above downward is grace, and grace is universally accessible and permanent. 'It is,' writes Lonergan, 'as though a room were filled with music though one can have no sure knowledge of its source. There is in the world, as it were, a charged field of love and meaning; here and there it reaches a notable intensity; but it is ever unobtrusive, hidden, inviting each of us to join. And join we must if we are to perceive it, for our perceiving is through our own loving' (M:2go). Yet 'just as the creative process, when unaccompanied by healing, is distorted and corrupted by bias, so too the healing

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Bernard Lonergan's Notion of the Subject

process, when unaccompanied by creating, is a soul without a body.' Concretely, but on the broad and inclusive plane of human history, Christianity was able to heal much of what was unsound in the domain of the Roman empire, but was unaccompanied by a complementary creative vector, so that 'when the Roman empire decayed and disintegrated, the church... lived on, not in a civilized world, but in a dark and barbarous age in which, as a contemporary reported, men devoured one another like fishes in the sea.' And so too in our day, there is required from economic theorists 'a new and specific type' of analysis 'that reveals how moral precepts have both a basis in economic process and so an effective application to it,' and from moral theorists 'specifically economic precepts that arise out of economic process itself and promote its proper functioning.'16 In general, 'moral precepts that are not technically specific turn out to be quite ineffectual.'17 And 'when the system that is needed for our collective survival does not exist, then it is futile to excoriate what does exist while blissfully ignoring the task of constructing a technically viable economic system that can be put in its place.'18 With these remarks, though, we are into application. Perhaps they are helpful as an indication of the fact that the position on the human subject or notion of the human person is foundational of everything else in Lonergan's thought, including the basic orientation of the macroeconomic theory that he began to work out as a young man and to which he turned his attention again in his last years, and ultimately of a vast interdisciplinary collaboration that he would encourage, and that would reorient and integrate large portions of human science, philosophy, and theology. His aim, he said, was to seek a common ground on which people of intelligence might meet as they labored to confront and resolve the Herculean tasks of culture that lie before us in our time. And that common ground lies, he discovered, in the self-appropriation of the immanent and dynamic structure of our desire for intelligibility, truth, being, and the good, a desire that is effectively released to the extent that we transcend ourselves in love. 5

Bias and Conversion

While the two vectors operate simultaneously in our consciousness, there are also operative negative or dialectical features that call for those transformations of the subject called conversions, and so for a more pronounced operation of the vector that moves from above downwards to release a new movement from below. The natural spontaneities and inevitabilities that promote us from experience through understanding to judging and deciding are in conflict with other spontaneities and

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inevitabilities that, like the charged field of love and meaning but in conflict with it, are universally accessible and permanent.19 These other spontaneities and inevitabilities Lonergan refers to as aspects of bias. In the sixth and seventh chapters of Insight he discusses in some detail four varieties of bias. There is a dramatic bias due to psychological conditioning often largely beyond our own control. It is responsible for an orientation of the dramatic pattern of our everyday lives against the emergence into consciousness of images that would be material for insights we do not want. Thus it displays many of the features that Freud highlighted in his notion of the repressive censor, though, as we shall see, Lonergan suggests important modifications to Freudian theory. Next, there is an individual or egoistic bias. It is more subject to conscious control than is dramatic bias. It consists in an interference of self-centered spontaneity both with intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility and with normal intersubjective spontaneity. There is also a group bias that is bolstered by intersubjective spontaneity to acknowledge only the practical insights that are to the advantage of one's own group or class or nation, and to render other genuinely practical insights inoperative. There is, finally, a general bias of practical intelligence itself against theoretical questions, long-range consequences, higher integrations, and ultimate issues. For the moment, I will mention only briefly what I regard as the importance of Lonergan's treatment of bias. Then I will add a presentation of his notion of conversion. Far more extensive treatment will be given these issues in later chapters. Lonergan's discussion of dramatic bias enables him to point the way to a reorientation of psychoanalysis, and his treatment of the other three biases constitutes in effect a fairly sustained dialogue and dialectic with the Marxist and liberal theories of society and history. Central to the reorientation of psychoanalysis, as we shall see, is the insistence that psychic process is oriented proximately to insight, and so that repression is an exclusion of those images that would give rise to insights one does not want. The dialectic with Marx, as we will also see in greater detail later, would display at least four points of divergence from Marxist analysis: (i) the principal social dialectic is not between forces and relations of production, which are both functions of practicality in the arrangement of human affairs, but between the whole of practicality and a spontaneous intersubjectivity that precedes all such practical processes as production and politics, and survives their transformations, and is the ground of

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deliberately fostered interpersonal relations and of the communicative action through which central features of the 'lifeworld' are established;20 (2) politics belongs normatively not to the superstructure of society, where it would defend the interests of particular classes, but to the everyday infrastructure, where its task is to maintain intact the creative interdependence of social institutions and vital intersubjectivity, on the basis of genuine cultural values; (3) the possibility must be acknowledged of the development of a culture that can pass independent and autonomous judgment on social structures; and (4) a distinction must be drawn between shorter and longer cycles in history: in the shorter cycles, oppressive groups exploit the downtrodden only to be overthrown or replaced by their victims or the representatives of their victims, in a succession of oscillations in the realm of power politics; but the longer cycle can run through all of these oscillations, as a series of ever less comprehensive syntheses of human knowing and living, owing to general bias's exclusion of questions regarding theoretical, long-range, and ultimate issues. Against liberalism, Lonergan would argue, the fact is that the human person does not live an authentically intelligent, reasonable, and responsible existence that promotes progress, except to the extent that he or she is converted from the biased orientations that interfere with and distort the operations of the creative vector. Lonergan discusses conversion as religious, moral, and intellectual, and in his late papers he speaks of an affective conversion that is closely connected with religious conversion. Religious conversion normally precedes moral conversion, and religious and moral conversion usually precede intellectual conversion. In each case conversion is a process, not a single event, and it involves a radical about-face in which one repudiates characteristic features of one's previous horizon. Intellectual conversion, which Lonergan usually discusses first, is in its explicit philosophic form rooted in the self-affirmation of the knower that we discussed in the first part of this chapter. We tend spontaneously to regard the real as a subdivision, along with the apparent or illusory, in what is already out there now. We tend to regard knowing as something like taking a good look at what is already out there now. And we tend to regard objectivity as seeing only what really is already out there now, and seeing nothing that is not really already out there now. These tendencies, which develop in the emergence of the infant's notion of space, are extremely tenacious, and are reinforced by existential anxieties and needs, so that, even when we have moved into the far larger world mediated by meaning, which we do with the development of language,

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and in fact even after we have learned the use of formal operations, with their quite distinct criterion of truth, we tend to retain the explicit criteria of 'reality' developed in infancy. Intellectual conversion eliminates the myth that fully human knowing is to be conceived on an analogy with seeing, and replaces it with the affirmation of a self that knows because it understands correctly. There follows a series of developments leading to an integration not only of the cognitive subject but also of what one knows when one performs operations of understanding and judgment (see /, chapter 15). Moral conversion is a shift in the criterion of one's decisions and choices from satisfactions to values. The process of moral conversion involves uncovering and rooting out individual, group, and general bias; developing one's knowledge of human reality and potentiality in the concrete situations of one's life; keeping distinct the elements of progress and those of decline; continuing to scrutinize one's intentional responses to values and their implicit scales of preference; listening to criticism and protest; and remaining ready to learn from others (M:24o). Religious conversion is falling in love with God. Lonergan describes it as follows: It is other-worldly falling in love. It is total and permanent selfsurrender without conditions, qualifications, reservations. But it is such a surrender, not as an act, but as a dynamic state that is prior to and principle of subsequent acts. It is revealed in retrospect as an under-tow of existential consciousness, as a fated acceptance of a vocation to holiness, as perhaps an increasing simplicity and passivity in prayer. It is interpreted differently in the context of different religious traditions. For Christians it is God's love flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us. It is the gift of grace, and since the days of Augustine, a distinction has been drawn between operative grace and cooperative grace. Operative grace is the replacement of the heart of stone by a heart of flesh, a replacement beyond the horizon of the heart of stone ... Cooperative grace is the effectiveness of conversion, the gradual movement towards a full and complete transformation of the whole of one's living and feeling, one's thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions. (M: 240-41) Obviously, as conversion usually works in the life of the conscious subject, it is a movement 'from above downwards.' Thus Lonergan writes: ... from a causal viewpoint, one would say that first there is God's

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Bernard Lonergan's Notion of the Subject

gift of his love. Next, the eye of this love reveals values in their splendor, while the strength of this love brings about their realization, and that is moral conversion. Finally, among the values discerned by the eye of love is the value of believing the truths taught by the religious tradition, and in such tradition and belief are the seeds of intellectual conversion. For the word, spoken and heard, proceeds from and penetrates to all four levels of intentional consciousness. Its content is not just a content of experience but a content of experience and understanding and judging and deciding. The analogy of sight yields the cognitional myth. But fidelity to the word engages the whole man. (M:243) 6

Initial Application

What Bernard Lonergan means by the whole person engaged by the word has many more nuances and implications than I have been able to convey in one chapter. Some of these will be manifest later, as will a possible development of this position. I have tried here only to communicate the basic elements in his position, for they constitute the radical foundation on which is built the present attempt to derive categories for a systematic theology. Nonetheless, an initial application and nuancing of Lonergan's position is required if we are to move quickly to the concerns that will occupy us here. Theology is the mediation of religion and culture, and an essential and quite initial step in constructing a theology is to articulate just what that mediation entails in any contemporary situation. I attempt here only an initial specification, to be amplified as the work continues. The situation being addressed in our time is constituted by the option for the future that Lewis Mumford has called the option between post-historic and world-cultural humanity. 21 Post-historic humanity would involve the expansion of the imperialistic realities of our time into totalitarian exploits that would lock our psyches and imaginations and questioning spirit into ever more rigid straitjackets, so that 'one world' would be realized by the power of force and violence. World-cultural humanity would entail the building of a crosscultural communitarian alternative to imperialistic realities and totalitarian possibilities, so that 'one world' would be constituted by the conscious appropriation of the humanum and by conscious resistance to every deprivation of the human good. I envision this world-cultural alternative, not as a megaculture imposed on cultural particularities, but as a process of intercultural dialogue and mutual enrichment that enjoys the diversities and frees us to grow, precisely by the process of 'passing over'22 into the differences of

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others and returning to our own difference enriched by what we have learned in the process. Some of the differences involve culture and race, gender and sexual orientation, religious tradition and cultural heritage. But this 'passing over,' I am convinced, is possible only because there is a humanum. And so a theology that reflects on the role of a religion in such a cultural matrix should do its utmost to specify that humanum. I have begun with an account of Lonergan's understanding of the subject because I believe that he has made a quite foundational contribution to such a specification. He has disengaged some of the crosscultural constituents of the human. These will be further amplified in the next few chapters, but the amplifications all build on his work. The network of base communities that would be an alternative to post-historic imperialistic and totalitarian possibilities will be grounded in the crosscultural constituents of the human, in the universal offer of God's grace to the human, and in the hermeneutic privilege of the marginated and the preferential option for the poor emphasized in liberation theology. In later chapters I hope to argue quite rigorously in a transcendental fashion for the validity of the central insights of liberation theology. But for the moment I wish simply to place Lonergan's contribution into the context that defines my present concerns. Lonergan's emphases, then, can be further contextualized if we reflect on the maieutic of the liberation of consciousness that is reflected in the work of the educator Paulo Freire, in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.2^ It is not that Freire was influenced by Lonergan, or Lonergan by Freire, but that what Freire was actually doing with illiterate and oppressed peasants held captive in a system of economic and political oppression entailed helping them to claim as their own precisely the native capacities of human intentionality that Lonergan has disengaged in a more general heuristic fashion. It was also these capacities that the economic and political system would discourage people from acknowledging, for these capacities are the source of liberation from oppression. Pure experience, then, in the sense in which Lonergan uses the word experience is very rare. Our experience, except for surprising events, is patterned experience. The presentations that are made to consciousness through sensations, memories, images, emotions, conations, bodily movements, associations, spontaneous intersubjective responses, are patterned presentations, under the influence of some interpretation and some set of expectations and interests. Lonergan emphasizes the patterns that are governed by interests that we have made our own, such as the artistic and intellectual patterns or the practical pattern of someone who has to get a job done. He emphasizes well that my very way of seeing or imagining is a function of the pattern, and the pattern a function of some personal

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Bernard Lonergan's Notion of the Subject

equation. But what Freire would have us see is that the pattern can be a function not only of one's own self-determined interests and concerns, but also of psychological, social, economic, political, and linguistic conditioning; rather than being a function of autonomous artistic, intellectual, practical, interpersonal, or mystical orientations, it can be the product of psychological and social determinisms. And those determinisms can be such as to convey that this is the way it has to be, that there is no alternative. We can introject an oppressor from our cultural conditioning, to the extent that the very materials of our experience are presented to us in such a way as to inhibit any movement out of this pattern into one that is freely chosen. This is especially the case if the patterning is focused on survival. But an oppressor can also be introjected in the form of social or cultural or interpersonal exigences beyond which we dare not venture for fear of losing whatever life supports we may have been able to build, however tenuously. The essential movement beyond this condition, Freire found, is to exorcise the inner oppressor. He labored to help oppressed people recognize the patterns into which they were conditioned to allow their experience to fall. In Lonergan's terms their experience was under the control of a bias, but in this case the bias was not their own doing; it was a bias into which they were conditioned by primal experiences of fear, including the fear of death. This very recognition, Freire found, was an inchoate, potential liberation, for it occurred outside the pattern. It can initiate a reinterpretation that will lead to new patterns and to the appropriation of the power to establish one's own patterns of experience on the basis of interests that are one's own and not those of the introjected oppressor. Now this recognition is precisely what Lonergan would call a set of insights. The primary and indispensable feature of Freire's pedagogy entails helping people recognize that they can reach an understanding of their experience that is outside the conditioned pattern and that launches a possibility of a new interpretation and a new pattern by setting one on a process of further questions. Freire brings people to this insight into insight by raising the questions that would shake them out of the conditioned patterns. He brings them not only to the insight that their patterns of experience are the result of arbitrary conditioning, but also to the insight that by insight they are breaking these patterns. He brings them to own, to appropriate, the fact that latent within them, suppressed perhaps by cultural conditioning, is a power of raising questions that can break the patterns of their experience, that can lead to insight; and the fact that insight into experience is already in an inchoate fashion a liberation from a particular pattern of experience and the beginning of a

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reshaping that will be more under one's own determination and not a function of someone else's demands. Not only is understanding already a potential liberation from a particular pattern; the very power of understanding, when owned, is a source of liberation from patterns of oppressed consciousness. But what is the guarantee that the new insight is not simply the function of a new oppressor's will to power, of a new ideology? What is the guarantee that the new insight is not a further illusion, a new misinterpretation, establishing a new prison in which experience will be patterned in an equally arbitrary and falsifying way? I may have the power of insight, and through that power I can break previous patterns of experience, but do I have any guarantee that my insights are true? This is the liberating significance of the power of critical reflection that moves us, in Lonergan's schema, to a third level of consciousness.24 There is in the questioning spirit of our shared interiority a power of critical reflection on our own insights, a power by which we test our insights, weigh them against the evidence, marshal the pros and cons, verify or falsify them. Not only do we have the power of insight; we have also the ability to ascertain when our insight hits the mark, and when there are further questions to be met before we can give an unqualified assent to an insight. What Freire's work would help us add, then, to Lonergan's is a heightened recognition that the constitution of consciousness in its capacity for insight and reasonable judgment has a liberating potential, especially when it is not just exercised but also claimed as one's own, appropriated. Furthermore, to be deprived of this power by cultural conditioning and determinism is to be deprived of a constituent of the humanum. To claim and exercise this power is a source of liberation from other deprivations of the humanum as well. And to discover this liberative power of inquiry and criticism is to discover something that unites humans across cultures. Now in Freire's pedagogy, as in Lonergan's philosophy, there is an ulterior objective to the process, another element of the intentionality of the spirit to be appropriated - the owning of the ability to say, 'It does not have to be this way, we can take responsibility for our own destinies, make decisions on the basis of our own apprehension of facts and of values and our own judgments of what is good.' That is, we constitute ourselves and our world by our decisions as to what we want to be and do. We rise above the conditioned pattern of our experience, not only by insight and judgment, which after all constitute mere cognitional transcendence, but also by decision, in which through dialogue free from coercion25 we select what it is worth while to do, what kind of a world we want, what kind of people we want to be, and how we are going to move toward being that.

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Freire is helping to release, then, what Lonergan calls the creative vector in human consciousness, a vector that moves, as it were, from below upwards, from experience through understanding and judgment to decision. The fourth level, that of decision, involves the apprehension of possible values in feelings, the questions for deliberation and evaluation, the judgment of value, and the decision. But it is preceded by insight into experience and judgment regarding the correctness of one's insights. Decision entails, as it were, the embodiment of intentionality in the incarnate meanings of the self I constitute myself to be and of the world that together we decide to build. Moreover, people whose experience is as rigidly conditioned or patterned as Freire found to be the case with those with whom he worked cannot release themselves from the captivity of the determinisms that work on their experience. The creative vector has to be released by the power of a healing vector that moves from above. The healing vector begins in the experience of an environment permeated with the gift of love, for love alone releases one to be creatively self-transcendent. It is love that reveals values we would not otherwise see, commands commitment, dissolves bias, breaks the bonds of psychological and social determinisms, and so conditions the very emergence of the creative capacities for insight, judgment, and decision. The self-transcendence of intelligent, reasonable, responsible persons becomes a way of life, as Lonergan says, only to the extent that we are in love. Then life begins anew, everything changes, a new principle takes over, and as long as it lasts we are lifted above ourselves and carried along as parts within an ever more intimate and ever more liberating dynamic whole. Such is the experience of base communities today as they move to their own liberation from the various forms of oppression, and to the liberation of their brothers and sisters. And such is the atmosphere that must permeate the crosscultural communitarian alternative to all the forms of oppression - cultural, racial, sexual, economic, political, religious, or pseudoreligious - with which we must contend in the present situation addressed by a contemporary Christian theology.

2

The Notion of Psychic Conversion

In this chapter I will rely on Lonergan's position on the subject to ground the articulation of some of the basic elements in a notion of psychic conversion that I have developed in an attempt to relate Lonergan's work to depth psychology. There is a need to submit to self-appropriation another dimension of our interiority besides the intentionality that Lonergan enables us to mediate through self-reflection. Lonergan's intentionality analysis clarifies a great deal of what it is to be a flourishing and authentic human person, but the notion of psychic conversion is needed as a complement to his thought on the subject, and as a further dimension in the account of theological foundations. It is a dimension that is foundational of the positions that will be taken in this book regarding the structure of history, and so an attempt must be made at the outset to say just what it is. Moreover, the presence and absence of psychic conversion accounts, I believe, for many of the dialectical tensions and oppositions that characterize the theological source that is our specific concern, namely, the particular historical situation that a contemporary systematic theology is attempting to address. Later chapters will relate psychic conversion more fully to the integral development of the subject. The present chapter is methodological in orientation, showing the critical grounds in Lonergan's own work for the validity of the notion and for the possibility of a specifically psychic self-appropriation. Anticipating for a moment that later discussion, let us say that the notion of psychic conversion will enable us to make use of the resources of depth psychology as aids toward the emergence and clarification of the subject in Christ Jesus, that subject who, as theologian, is also the radical foundational reality in theology. Depth psychology would illuminate

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dimensions of consciousness in which there is experienced the very movement of life, the passionateness of being,1 in which it is our task to find direction. What the Christian tradition has called discernment is the search for direction in the movement of life. The experience of the movement provides data that, if we know how to interpret them, are indications as to whether or not we are finding or missing the direction. The ability to read those indications is obviously, then, a great help to discernment, and the science of depth psychology can be of great importance in helping us gain that ability. But first, I am convinced, this science must be placed on more solid foundations, and these foundations I have found by and large in Lonergan's position on the subject. In the light of the position on the subject, we can understand how depth psychology can be reoriented. The reorientation entails an extension of the movement of conversion to the elements of experience that depth psychology studies. This extension I call psychic conversion, and I will here try to show how an account of it can be grounded in Lonergan's work. I will divide my presentation into eight points. i

Self-appropriation

I begin with the notion of self-appropriation. Lonergan's position on the subject is not just another theory to be placed alongside or in conflict with alternative theories. He moves on a level that is beyond theory; more precisely, on a level that moves theory into a higher context where it becomes an aid to the concrete articulate self-possession of the human person in self-knowledge and self-constitution. His highly technical analysis of knowledge, deliberation, and religious experience has the purpose of enabling his readers to understand and constitute themselves as human subjects, and in this sense it is profoundly existential.2 It is in the context of self-knowledge and self-constitution that we will discuss as well those dimensions of ourselves that are studied by the depth psychologists. Depth psychology is a theory in aid of a praxis, and the praxis is the self-knowledge and self-constitution of the person. But Lonergan shows a path to self-knowledge that results in a differentiation of consciousness, and this differentiation is of crucial importance for the investigation of the psyche as well. Consciousness can be differentiated in various ways. We will examine some of them in greater detail later. For now we need only indicate the obvious, that beyond the common sense that is parceled out among the members of a given culture, there are differentiations or specializations

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that people cultivate by work of various kinds. There are scientifictheoretic, artistic, scholarly, religious differentiations of consciousness. Self-appropriation yields a further differentiation, one that Lonergan calls interiorly differentiated consciousness. The person of interiorly differentiated consciousness has developed a habitual understanding of the operations and states of his or her consciousness in their relations with one another. Lonergan has established the basic terms and relations that obtain in the realm of human interiority, and it is within this context that we must examine and understand that dimension of interiority that is the human psyche. This insistence expresses a basic and quite radical option. It is not an arbitrary option, but one that results from prolonged reflection on the question, How are we to relate what Lonergan has uncovered of human interiority with the discoveries of the great architects of the science of depth psychology? The conclusion that I arrived at is, like Lonergan's position on the subject, theoretically informed but not just a theory, in the sense that it claims also to be a function of at least some achievement of interiorly differentiated consciousness, and in the sense that its objective is a contribution to the praxis of self-constitution. Again, as with the self-affirmation of the knower, so too here, the answer one gives to such a question is of the utmost significance for one's own self-understanding and for the constitution of the self one will choose to be. My answer is that the data to be understood in depth psychology — images, emotions, conations, spontaneous sensitive responses to persons and situations, and especially all sensitive inclinations hidden in the obscurity of the undifferentiated movement of psychic process and requiring such techniques as the interpretation of dreams if they are adequately to be understood - can be accurately understood only in relation to one's understanding of other data of interiority, namely, precisely those that Lonergan has uncovered: the data on human insight and judgment, on moral deliberation and choice, on the love of intimacy, love in community, and the love of God. The significance and radical nature of such an option should be clear. One can choose either to interpret the data of which Lonergan speaks in the light of some depth-psychological theory, or to approach the psyche and depth-psychological theories and practices in the light of an analysis of intentionality. I have made the latter option, and the grounds of this option lie in the personal discovery that moments of insight, judgment, and choice, and the dynamic state of being in love with another person, being in love in the community, and being in love with God, are higher integrations of psychic process. They are not to be understood as functions of psychic process, nor reduced to the movements of the

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sensitive psyche, but are to be regarded rather as distinct operations and states that transform psychic process into a sensitive participant in those experiences of movement and rest in which we intend and achieve meaning, truth, the good, and authentic exchange with other persons, collaboration in social institutions, and relatedness to God. These operations are acts of meaning. Through the terms of meaning that are their objective, the real world is mediated and constituted. Thus whatever criticisms I bring to bear on the great architects of the science of depth psychology, such as Freud and Jung, are rooted in the basic option to assume our acts of meaning and their objectives as the radical ciphers for discovering what we are. For all the wealth of their discoveries, these great figures of twentieth-century thought did not always have a firm hold on the data of human cognitional and deliberative operations and on the movements of breakthrough and grace that effect our entrance into a state of being in love and that maintain us in a relative fidelity to self-transcendence as a way of life. These latter data are distinct from the data of depth psychology, and must be understood first, as a grounding or foundation of the adequate interpretation of psychic process. Life is experienced, says Eric Voegelin, as a movement with a direction that can be found or missed.3 Sensitive psychic process is the experience of the movement of life. But the operations that Lonergan has uncovered in their relations to one another - inquiry, insight, conceptualization, formulation, reflective understanding, judgment of fact, deliberation, judgment of value, decision, acts of love - are the acts through which we find direction in that movement. Without an articulate understanding of these acts and of their objectives - for they are acts that constitute, as we have seen, successive degrees of self-transcendence one cannot develop an adequate scientific appreciation of what constitutes a genuinely flourishing human person. And without such an appreciation, one's study of the data of depth psychology will eventually, sooner or later, go astray. Verification of this position can be found only in the data of consciousness themselves. But the position perhaps explains why Lonergan's relatively brief remarks on the psyche, both in Insight and in Method in Theology, are so illuminating. In chapter 6 of Insight, for example, psychic process is related so clearly to the development of the subject because it is placed in relation to insight. In chapter 17, symbolic productions are understood in relation to the differentiation of intelligence and rationality from the sensitive stream.4 The discussion of symbols in Method in Theology and the brief remarks made there about dreams were, as we will see, significant clues in the process that generated my understanding of psychic conversion.

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2

The Duality of Consciousness

I am suggesting, then, that the data of consciousness are twofold, and that at least an implicit correctness on one set, the intentional or spiritual, is necessary for the correct negotiation of the other set, the psychic. There is a set of data to be understood by depth psychology. It lies in the sensitive flow of consciousness itself, the polyphony or, as the case may be, the cacophony, of our sensations, memories, images, emotions, conations, associations, bodily movements, and spontaneous intersubjective responses, and of the symbolic integrations of these that occur in, indeed are, our dreams. These data constitute the sensitively experienced movement of life, the pulsing flow of life, the psychic representation of an underlying manifold of neural functions that reach a higher organization in sensitive consciousness. We will call this set of data the psyche. By the term psyche I mean precisely and only the complex flow of empirical consciousness, whether sublated by successively higher levels or not. If the reader were only seeing the black marks on white paper, and feeling whatever inner sensations his or her organic and sensitive rhythms were producing, but were neither understanding nor trying to understand anything being read, there would be consciousness only at the level of the psyche. But in fact more is going on. The reader is trying to follow the argument, wondering what I am talking about, reaching for understanding of the written words, and by that very reaching patterning the psychic data in such a way that they can give rise to insight. There are operations going on by which a direction is discovered in the movement of sensitive consciousness, and those operations are effecting a change in the experienced movement itself. As one engages in these operations, the sensitive flow undergoes changes. It is patterned, organized, rearranged, redistributed. Confusion gives way to clarity with insight, and clarity to assurance with judgment. The assurance may be an assurance that I am right or that I am wrong, and the feelings will be different in each case. The lead, then, is in a sense taken by the operations of question and answer, and the psyche follows suit. The operations of question and answer, as these unfold on the distinct and successive levels of understanding, judgment, and decision, constitute a dimension of consciousness distinct (though not separate) from the psyche or the sensitive flow. I will call these operations intentionality or the spirit. The first basic element in the exposition of the notion of psychic conversion was that the data of depth psychology have to be approached from some such context as that of self-appropriation established by Lonergan. The second element gives the reason: there are two distinct sets of data of consciousness, the data of intentionality and the data of the psyche, and the latter

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set, the sensitive experience of the movement of life, changes with the performance of the operations through which direction in that movement is found. This second element has an important corollary, however, in which what may seem to have been taken away from the psyche is in a way partly restored. Lonergan leads one to the self-constitutive act of affirming that one is a subject of certain intentional operations. The basic affirmation is the self-affirmation of the knower that occurs in reading chapter 11 of Insight. It and the immediately consequent positions on being and objectivity constitute an ever precarious intellectual conversion. The precariousness is a function, not only of erroneous assumptions as to what knowledge must be, but also of related psychic factors that must be adverted to if the self-affirmation of a consciousness that at once is empirical, intelligent, rational, and existentially self-constitutive is to result in the establishment of new schemes of recurrence in personal knowing and living, if a gradual refocusing of one's entire outlook, an expansion of one's horizon, is to take effect. Nor need the psyche's initiative be conceived as only negative. Insight effects a strictly cognitive therapy, which needs to be complemented by a psychological therapy of equal proportions and reach - an extension to the psyche, and indeed to the whole of living, of the self-transcendence of the notions of being and value that we are. As we will see, this sensitive transformation is particularly pertinent to the effective orientation of the notion of value, because of the intimate connection of value with feelings. 3

The Finality of the Psyche

If the operations of intentionality have a transforming effect on the spontaneities of the psyche, it is because the psyche is endowed with what Lonergan calls a vertical finality toward participation in the life of the spirit.5 Vertical finality is a relationship of orientation to an end higher than that resulting from what a thing is. The psyche's proportionate end is inner and outer sensation as a higher integration of underlying neural manifolds. But its vertical finality is toward participation in acts and terms of meaning and love: a finality to be the inner and outer sensation of a person who understands, who reaches being through correct understanding, who promotes the human good through authentic decisions, who is in love. And the psyche is endowed with this finality, not merely as an instrument of higher purposes - for example, we need sensations and images if we are to understand anything - but also as a participant in the clarity of insight, the assurance of judgment, the peace of a good conscience, the joy of love. Without the psyche, none of these states would

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be felt. The psyche not only serves the spirit, but also participates in its very life and functioning. It reaches a higher integration as a function of the operations of intentional consciousness. In itself it is a higher integration of neural process, but it would be this whether it were in itself unified or chaotic. Its own unity and order are a function of the two vectors of intentional consciousness. The affectivity of the infant is at the mercy of the movement from above. Thus, according to Erik Erikson it is in these tender years that there either is or is not established the sense of basic trust in the goodness of being that enables one to negotiate successfully the later stages in the formation of personal identity.6 But unity comes as well from the creative vector that moves from below, and even the sense of basic trust communicated from above is for the sake of the successful operation of the creative vector from below. Confusion gives way to clarity with the emergence of insight, but not just any old clarity will do. Clarity becomes assurance with the emergence of a reasonable judgment. Assurance becomes a ground for decision, and the contrary inclinations we sometimes experience in raising questions for deliberation give way to peace in the making and executing of a responsible decision. The psyche's higher integration of neural process is itself ordered by the psyche's participation in the yet higher integrations effected by the intentional processes of question and answer and by the experience of falling in love. The science of intentionality thus gives us the lead as to what it is to be well, even psychologically or affectively well. There are, then, two kinds of sickness with regard to the data of consciousness. There is a sickness of the spirit, a pneumopathology, and a sickness of the psyche, a psychopathology.7 And in the last analysis, despite the fact that there are very complex relations between them, pneumopathology is more radical than psychopathology, at least in the historical course of human events even if not in the biography of a given individual.8 It follows, again, that an adequate science of the psyche is dependent on a science of intentionality, and that existing psychologies not so grounded have to be subjected to the purification and refinement of reorientation. We saw in the first chapter some essential elements of what I would regard as an adequate science of intentionality or spirit. Intentional consciousness unfolds on the levels or spheres of experience, understanding, judgment, and decision; the unity of the levels is a function of inquiry, of the pure question that intentional consciousness is; that unity receives a certain integrity and consistency from movements that operate from above downward; and each successive higher level or more inclusive sphere in the creative vector sublates the level or levels that preceded it. 'Sublation' is a technical term, by which Lonergan means that the new

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level 'goes beyond [the previous], sets up a new principle and type of operations, directs them to a new goal but, so far from dwarfing them, preserves them and brings them to a far fuller fruition' (M:3i6). My interest here is with the successive sublations of the first or empirical level, and especially of that dimension of sensitive experience that we may call the felt self-presence of the movement of life itself. This self-presence, precisely as felt, changes as inquiry gives way to insight, again as reflection gives way to judgment, and yet again as deliberation gives way to decision. Thus Lonergan draws on Gerard Manley Hopkins to speak of 'the different self-taste, on the successive levels: the spontaneous vitality of our sensitivity, the shrewd intelligence of our inquiring, the detached rationality of our demand for evidence, the peace of a good conscience and the disquiet released by memory of words wrongly said or deeds wrongly done.'9 Our affirmations thus far are three: first, the psyche is to be understood within the context of the self-appropriation of the acts of meaning and love that constitute our intentionality; second, intentionality and the psyche are distinct, though not separate, dimensions of consciousness; and third, the changes of psychic experience with various intentional operations manifest that the psyche is endowed with a vertical finality toward participation in the life of the spirit. 4

Affective Self-transcendence

We saw in the first chapter that the successive operations of intentional consciousness are characterized by successive degrees of self-transcendence. To emphasize this point I will quote two further passages from Lonergan on self-transcendence. They are both taken from Method in Theology. The first reads as follows: There is a first step in attending to the data of sense and of consciousness. Next, inquiry and understanding yield an apprehension of a hypothetical world mediated by meaning. Thirdly, reflection and judgment reach an absolute: through them we acknowledge what really is so, what is independent of us and our thinking. Fourthly, by deliberation, evaluation, decision, action, we can know and do, not just what pleases us, but what truly is good, worth while. Then we can be principles of benevolence and beneficence, capable of genuine collaboration and of true love. But it is one thing to do this occasionally, by fits and starts. It is another to do it regularly, easily, spontaneously. It is, finally, only by reaching the sustained self-transcendence of the virtuous man that one

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becomes a good judge, not on this or that human act, but on the whole range of human goodness. (M:^^) Again, at greater length Lonergan writes: Man achieves authenticity in self-transcendence. One can live in a world, have a horizon, just in the measure that one is not locked up in oneself. A first step towards this liberation is the sensitivity we share with the higher animals. But they are confined to a habitat, while man lives in a universe. Beyond sensitivity man asks questions, and his questioning is unrestricted. First, there are questions for intelligence. We ask what and why and how and what for. Our answers unify and relate, classify and construct, serialize and generalize. From the narrow strip of space-time accessible to immediate experience we move towards the construction of a world-view and towards the exploration of what we ourselves could be and could do. On questions for intelligence follow questions for reflection. We move beyond imagination and guess-work, idea and hypothesis, theory and system, to ask whether or not this really is so or that really could be. Now self-transcendence takes on a new meaning. Not only does it go beyond the subject but also it seeks what is independent of the subject. For a judgment that this or that is so reports, not what appears to me, not what I imagine, not what I think, not what I wish, not what I would be inclined to say, not what seems to me, but what is so. Still such self-transcendence is only cognitive. It is in the order not of doing but only of knowing. But on the final level of questions for deliberation, self-transcendence becomes moral. When we ask whether this or that is worth while, whether it is not just apparently good but truly good, then we are inquiring, not about pleasure or pain, not about comfort or ill ease, not about sensitive spontaneity, not about individual or group advantage, but about objective value. Because we can ask such questions, and answer them, and live by the answers, we can effect in our living a moral self-transcendence. That moral self-transcendence is the possibility of benevolence and beneficence, of honest collaboration and of true love, of swinging completely out of the habitat of an animal and of becoming a person in a human society. (M:io4) Now our discussion of the two distinct but not separate - in fact,

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intimately interrelated - dimensions of interiority, the intentional operations that Lonergan has elucidated and the sensitive psyche, implies that there is required for human authenticity the self-transcendence not only of the operations through which we know what is and become makers of the real world, but also of the feelings that attend these operations and that change as the operations are or are not performed as they should be performed. If intentional operations have a constitutive influence on the quality of our feelings, it is also the case that the quality of our feelings has a great deal to do with the ease and alacrity with which the intentional operations are performed. Moreover, if we choose to go the way of self-appropriation, we will have to understand and affirm the selftranscendence not only of intentional operations, as we do for example in the self-affirmation of the knower that can represent the entrance into interiorly differentiated consciousness, but also of our sensitive psyches, especially in their affective dimensions. There is an affective selftranscendence that marks the consciousness of the person of integrity. It accompanies the self-transcendence of our operations of knowing and deciding, is strengthened by the authentic performance of these operations, but is also in a very definite way a prerequisite if the sustained fidelity to the performance of these operations is to become our way of life. On Lonergan's analysis we reach affective self-transcendence when we fall in love: '... when the isolation of the individual was broken and he spontaneously functioned not just for himself but for others as well' (M:28g). As we have seen, Lonergan distinguishes several kinds of love: 'the love of intimacy, of husband and wife, of parents and children; the love of mankind devoted to the pursuit of human welfare locally or nationally or globally; and the love that was other-worldly because it admitted no conditions or qualifications or restrictions or reservations' (M:28g). The significance of that last kind of love is for Lonergan momentous: 'It is this other-worldly love, not as this or that act, not as a series of acts, but as a dynamic state whence proceed the acts, that constitutes in a methodical theology what in a theoretical theology is named sanctifying grace' (M:28g). Affective self-transcendence must characterize one's habitual state if one's intentional self-transcendence is to be regular, easy, spontaneous, sustained, a way of life. The experiential flow, the movement of sensitive consciousness, must match the self-transcendence of intentional operations if the performance of these operations is consistently to proceed with ease.10 But as we know all too well, the experiential flow of sensitive consciousness can be quite different. For whatever reasons, there can be an opposite movement of sensitive consciousness, a movement that

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interferes with the performance of the intentional operations. There can be a felt resistance to insight, a flight from understanding, a desire not to judge, a psychic resistance against deciding and acting, a habitual lovelessness, as well as numerous other and more complex desires and fears, that affect to a greater or lesser extent the integrity of operations at the various levels of intentional consciousness. What Lonergan calls affective conversion is the movement away from this resistance toward a new way of life in which one's sensitive desires begin to reach out toward a condition in which they will match and support the self-transcendence of the pure desire that is the spirit of inquiring consciousness itself. Of this movement in its supreme moment Lonergan writes: ... at the summit of the ascent from the initial infantile bundle of needs and clamors and gratifications, there are to be found the deep-set joy and solid peace, the power and the vigor, of being in love with God. In the measure that that summit is reached, then the supreme value is God, and other values are God's expression of his love in this world, in its aspirations, and in its goal. In the measure that one's love of God is complete, then values are whatever one loves, and evils are whatever one hates so that, in Augustine's phrase, if one loves God, one may do as one pleases, Ama Deum etfac quod vis. Then affectivity is of a single piece. Further developments only fill out previous achievement. Lapses from grace are rarer and more quickly amended. (M:%g) And of the opposite movement he says: But continuous growth seems to be rare. There are the deviations occasioned by neurotic need. There are the refusals to keep on taking the plunge from settled routines to an as yet unexperienced but richer mode of living. There are the mistaken endeavors to quieten an uneasy conscience by ignoring, belittling, denying, rejecting higher values. Preference scales become distorted. Feelings soured. Bias creeps into one's outlook, rationalization into one's morals, ideology into one's thought. So one may come to hate the truly good, and love the really evil. Nor is that calamity limited to individuals. It can happen to groups, to nations, to blocks of nations, to mankind. It can take different, opposed, belligerent forms to divide mankind and to menace civilization with destruction. Such is the monster that has stood forth in our day. (M:3g-4o) These reflections have profound implications for the meaning of the

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psychotherapy that depth psychology is meant to promote. If the sustained performance of the operations of intentional consciousness in their normative pattern of inquiry and understanding, reflection and judgment, deliberation, decision and love is what makes for a flourishing human person, since it is through these operations that the direction is to be found in the movement of life, then a true healing of the psyche would be a process in which the emotional blockages to precisely that sustained performance are dissolved. It would be a matter of freeing the psychic energy bound up in what Jung called negative complexes,11 so that it is free to cooperate rather than interfere with the operations of meaning and love through which direction is found in the movement of life. But these reflections also enable us to understand precisely in what consists the negativity of these complexes. A real healing of the psyche heads toward affective self-transcendence, precisely for the sake of the intentional self-transcendence through which we can become collaborators in the constitution of a human world that is truly worth while. 5

Ordered and Disordered Affections

There follows a consequence that helps to link the process of psychotherapy with the dynamics of spiritual direction and spiritual growth. If what I have said to this point is basically on target, then we are in a position to discriminate the constitutive elements of ordered and disordered affections. Psychic disorder can now be understood in terms of complexes of psychic energy that interfere with, block, or prevent the sustained performance of the operations through which direction is found in the movement of life: the operations of intelligent inquiry and insight, of critical reflection and judgment, of responsible deliberation and decision, of love. Psychic order can similarly be understood in terms of contrasting complexes of psychic energy that match, and provide momentum to, the sustained performance of the same operations. Feeling, Lonergan says, ... gives intentional consciousness its mass, momentum, drive, power. Without these feelings our knowing and deciding would be paper thin. Because of our feelings, our desires and our fears, our hope or despair, our joys and sorrows, our enthusiasm and indignation, our esteem and contempt, our trust and distrust, our love and hatred, our tenderness and wrath, our admiration, veneration, reverence, our dread, horror, terror, we are oriented massively and dynamically in a world mediated by meaning. We have feelings about other persons, we feel for them, we feel with

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them. We have feelings about our respective situations, about the past, about the future, about evils to be lamented or remedied, about the good that can, might, must be accomplished. (M:3o-3i) These feelings can undergo development or aberration; but the criterion of development and aberration is the essential point, and I am suggesting that that criterion lies in the sustained and easy performance of the operations that Lonergan has disengaged in his position on the subject: operations of understanding, operations of critically informed judgment, operations of responsible decision, the operations of a person in love. But can we be more precise about such a quality of feeling? Can we specify what empirical consciousness is to be if it is to participate regularly and habitually in the life of the intelligent, reasonable, responsible, loving human spirit? What is the inner constitution of affective or psychic integrity? What is love as a way of life? What are ordered affections? When Lonergan talks about authenticity in everyday life, he turns to art for his paradigm. In Insight, he speaks of a dramatic pattern of experience in which we are oriented to making of our world, of our relations with others, and of our very own selves, works of art.12 In his as yet unpublished lectures on the philosophy of education, he amplifies these comments by devoting an entire lecture to art, but precisely to art as a guide toward an apprehension of concrete living in its concrete potentialities. In this lecture he speaks of the artist's capacities for abiding in a pattern of experience that excludes instrumentalization, that lets experience be for its own sake, that is a release, a letting be, a freedom for the emergence of the inevitability of form, a detachment that is ready to move into other patterns as these are required, but that governs these movements and controls them. Detachment is a condition in which one is not determined by instrumentalization, a condition that is capable of instrumentalized, means-end experience when the latter is appropriate, but that enables a person to be in charge of the course of one's own experience. As the artist who works with oils and clay, music and words, must be capable of this release of empirical consciousness from instrumentalization, so too the dramatic artist who would make a work of art out of his or her own life must be able to abide in an empirical freedom of consciousness that allows there to emerge from the materials of one's life an inevitability of form analogous to that of a painting, a work of sculpture, or a symphony. Would not this be the goal of psychotherapy? And for this kind of detachment to pervade one's living and to be in charge of one's movements into and out of other patterns of experience, including those that do instrumentalize experience for practical or theoretical ends, there is required, Lonergan says, the gift of charity, the

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supernatural habit that bestows a universal willingness through which our living is pervaded by the detachment and disinterestedness of the pure desire for intelligibility, for the true, for the good, for love, for God.13 This dramatically artistic affectivity is immanently constituted as a taut equilibrium or, perhaps better, creative tension, between the organic and the spiritual. The sensitive psyche occupies, as it were, a middle ground between the organism and the spirit. It participates in both, since it is both a higher integration of neural manifolds and the sensorium of selftranscendence through which we feel our participation in the intelligibility, truth, and goodness of being as these are reached in our acts of meaning and love. Affective integrity is an abiding in the creative tension of matter and spirit. The tendency to a breakdown of that tension through a displacement in either direction is what the Christian tradition means by the word concupiscence. The human person is a tension of opposites, and the tendency of our sinful nature is a tendency to the disintegration of that tension, a tendency to the displacement toward either the captivity of the spirit in the rhythms of mere sensitivity or the hubris that rejects our groundedness in the schemes of recurrence of the body on which we depend for the very images that are required if we are to understand anything whatever. Affective integrity is a habitual abiding in a tension of opposites, an aesthetic detachment that allows there to emerge the inevitability of form, an equilibrium that is no mere homeostasis, but rather the calm assurance and serenity of the woman or man who knows that faithful perseverance in the spirit of inquiry operating from below, sustained by the gift of divine and human love working from above, is the source from which there can authentically be constituted the first and only edition of oneself.14 6

Feelings and Values

We have already seen what Lonergan has to say about the deviations from affective integrity that accompany personal and social decline. When he speaks of aberrations of feeling, he says further that [p]erhaps the most notable is what has been named 'ressentiment,' a loan-word from the French that was introduced into philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche and later in a revised form employed by Max Scheler. According to Scheler, ressentiment is a re-feeling of a specific clash with someone else's value-qualities. The someone else is one's superior physically or intellectually or morally or spiritually. The re-feeling is not active or aggressive but extends over time, even a life-time. It is a feeling of hostility,

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anger, indignation that is neither repudiated nor directly expressed. What it attacks is the value-quality that the superior person possessed and the inferior not only lacked but also feels unequal to acquiring. The attack amounts to a continuous belittling of the value in question, and it can extend to hatred and even violence against those that possess that value-quality. But perhaps its worst feature is that its rejection of one value involves a distortion of the whole scale of values and that this distortion can spread through a whole social class, a whole people, a whole epoch. (M:33) This quotation and what we saw earlier of Lonergan's comments regarding the cumulative decline of individuals, nations, blocks of nations, and humankind suggest that the realm of the psyche, and especially of feelings, is of particular relevance to the constitution of the self as the psyche is sublated at the fourth level of intentional consciousness. At this level we are concerned with value, with what is truly good, with what is really and not just apparently worth while. Feelings have a special relationship to values, and so to the existential orientation of the subject. This relationship we must now examine in some detail. Feelings can themselves be intentional responses, responses to objects, even if strictly speaking they are not to be called operations. As we have seen, feelings that are intentional responses regard, on the one hand, the satisfying or dissatisfying, and on the other hand, genuine values; and the difference between an affective apprehension of genuine value and a response to what is merely agreeable is self-transcendence (see M:%i). Now the quotation we have just cited regarding ressentiment speaks of a scale of values, and, as we saw in the first chapter, Lonergan speaks of a normative scale, where the criterion of relative levels of value resides precisely in the degree of self-transcendence to which the object in question carries us. Thus the scale of values helps us to specify in what human development consists. There is a context of growth, 'in which one's knowledge of human living and operating is increasing in extent, precision, refinement, and in which one's responses are advancing from the agreeable to vital values, from vital to social, from social to cultural, from cultural to personal, from personal to religious' (M:39). We have already seen that the summit of that final advance lies in the 'deep-set joy and solid peace, the power and the vigor, of being in love with God.' To the extent that one's love of God is complete, again, 'values are whatever one loves, and evils are whatever one hates.' Two opposed paths, then, have opened for our scrutiny: one in which the result is that one's love of God is so complete that whatever one loves is

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truly a value, and whatever one hates is a real evil; the other in which the result is that one comes to hate the truly good and love the really evil. And both are connected intimately with the development or aberration of feelings, whose most important connection with the order of intentional consciousness lies in their role in the unfolding of the fourth level, where we respond to value. These two opposed paths represent one of the meanings of the term dialectic to be employed in this work. We will discuss a series of dialectics of contraries, and a basic dialectic of contradictories. In the opposed paths under consideration here, we see the orientations and goals of the opposites that are ultimately at play in the dialectic of contradictories. Regarding the relationship between feelings and values, Lonergan says that 'apprehensions [of value] are given in feelings' (M:^). There has already been much discussion of the meaning of this seemingly simple statement, and no doubt much more will ensue before agreement is reached as to precisely where in the process of deliberation and decision this apprehension of values in feelings occurs, and especially as to what precisely is its role in the process of arriving at good decisions. The apprehension of values in feelings is not the same as a judgment of value. The apprehension of values in feelings is 'intermediate between judgments of fact and judgments of value' (M:^j). But Lonergan leaves open, I think, the question as to precisely what is the relationship between the apprehension of values in feelings and the consequent judgment of value. I would offer a suggestion in this regard that relies on the counsel of Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises concerning the 'times of election.' He speaks of three times of election. The first involves an immediate apprehension of value in feelings in which there are no further questions and one knows there are no further questions. He gives as examples the conversion of Paul and the calling of Matthew. We could say, too, that Augustine's 'Love God, and do what you will' is speaking of a condition in which one's affectivity is so refined and integrated that one's apprehension of values in feelings can be trusted as a criterion for right action. But is this condition not rare? Precisely in the context of Augustine's phrase, Lonergan cites the statement of Abraham Maslow to the effect that self-actualization occurs in less than one per cent of the adult population (M :39). Most often we are involved in one of the other two times of which Ignatius speaks, and whether self-actualization occurs depends in part on what we do in those times. In the second time we find ourselves drawn in different and conflicting directions, or drawn in a particular direction, but without being in a state of equilibrium or creative tension. In this time our apprehension of values in feelings is an apprehension of possible values, and so its functioning is

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analogous to that of insight as we move toward judgments of fact. Insight is a grasp of a possible intelligibility in sensible or imaginable data. The intelligibility must still be subjected to a process of reflection in which we grasp that the conditions for affirming the intelligibility either are or are not fulfilled. In contrast, in the first time of election our apprehension of values in feelings is analogous to our grasp that the conditions for a prospective judgment of fact are fulfilled. There simply are no further questions, and we know there are no further questions; thus we can act. But when our apprehension is of possible values, we must pay careful attention to every moment of an inclination, watching its beginning, its entire process, and its end. Only if all are good is the inclination t,o be followed. In fact, even in the case of a grasp of the virtually unconditioned in the realm of value, there is the possibility that subsequent apprehensions are no more than the grasp of possible values, and thus require the same careful process of deliberation. The 'good' in question here, I think — that is, the good to which we must be attentive as we weigh the various moments of inclination - is precisely the condition of abiding in the tension of opposites that constitutes affective integrity. The third time discussed by Ignatius is one in which we are already abiding in that equilibrium, but without strong affective inclinations. In this case our process of deliberation is to be one of a rational weighing of the cons and pros of the various alternatives. Even here, however, our decision is confirmed by the continuation of the condition of abiding in the equilibrium of affective integrity and self-transcendence, just as our decision in the second time must be compatible with the criteria employed in the third time.15 7

Feelings and Symbols

As feelings are intimately involved in the apprehension of values, so too they are closely connected with yet another dimension of our conscious experience, the symbolic. 'A symbol is an image of a real or imaginary object that evokes a feeling or is evoked by a feeling' (M:64). If this definition of a symbol is brought into relation with what we have seen about the apprehension of values in feelings, we see that feelings are, as it were, a 'middle term' between values and symbols. That is to say, there emerges the important insight that the spontaneous or elemental symbolic productions of our psyches, such as our dreams, can often be manifestations of our existential orientations as world-constitutive and self-constitutive subjects. The process of affective development or aberration 'terminates in the person with a determinate orientation in life and with determinate affective capacities, dispositions, and habits. What such

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affective capacities, dispositions, habits are in a given individual can be specified by the symbols that awaken determinate affects and, inversely, by the affects that evoke determinate symbols' (M:65). So it is that 'affective development, or aberration, involves a transvaluation and transformation of symbols. What before was moving no longer moves; what before did not move now is moving. So the symbols themselves change to express the new affective capacities and dispositions ... Inversely, symbols that do not submit to transvaluation and transformation seem to point to a block in development' (M:66). But because of the relation of affective development to values, the progress or decline in question is of more than merely psychological significance. It is a matter of the development or backsliding of the subject as existential worldconstitutive and self-constitutive agent. The explanatory system that would interpret the symbol must appeal ultimately not only to the process of internal communication in the subject, that is, to associations of images and feelings, memories and tendencies, but also to the values that motivate one's performance on the dramatic stage of life. Thus the most significant approach to the interpretation of dreams is 'the existential approach that thinks of the dream, not as the twilight of life, but as its dawn, the beginning of the transition from impersonal existence to presence in the world, to constitution of one's self in one's world' (M:6g). 8

Psychic Conversion Defined

With the mention of the dream, we are in a position to say in what precisely psychic conversion consists. For the dream points to the area or dimension of our interiority most affected by psychic conversion. Psychic conversion is not the same as what Lonergan calls affective conversion. It is not the achievement of an affectivity that is of a single piece because one loves God with all one's heart and soul and mind and strength. Such unrestricted love is the goal of a complete conversion process involving the four distinct but related dimensions of religious, moral, intellectual, and psychic conversions. Religious conversion, the process of falling in love with God, and the dynamic state of being in love with God, affects proximately a dimension of consciousness - at times Lonergan called it a fifth level — where we are pure openness to the reception of grace; moral conversion affects the fourth level; intellectual conversion affects the second and third levels; and psychic conversion affects the first level. Psychic conversion is a transformation of the psychic component of what Freud calls 'the censor' from a repressive to a constructive agency in a person's development. The habitual orientation of our intelligence and affectivity exercises a censorship over the emergence into consciousness

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of the images that are the psychic representation and conscious integration of an underlying neural manifold. But that censorship can be either constructive or repressive. The censorship is constructive when one wants a needed insight and so is open to the emergence of the images required for that insight. The censorship is repressive when one does not want the insight and so excludes from consciousness the images required if the unwanted insight is to emerge. In Lonergan's words: Primarily, the censorship is constructive; it selects and arranges materials that emerge in consciousness in a perspective that gives rise to an insight; this positive activity has by implication a negative aspect, for other materials are left behind and other perspectives are not brought to light; still, this negative aspect of positive activity does not introduce any arrangement or perspective into the unconscious demand functions of neural patterns and processes. In contrast, the aberration of the censorship is primarily repressive; its positive activity is to prevent the emergence into consciousness of perspectives that would give rise to unwanted insights; it introduces, so to speak, the exclusion of arrangements into the field of the unconscious; it dictates the manner in which neural demand functions are not to be met; and the negative aspect of its positive activity is the admission to consciousness of any materials in any other arrangement or perspective. (7:ig2) The materials in question here consist of images and their concomitant affects. And since the images are easier to repress than the feelings, the affective component becomes dissociated from its imaginal apprehensive correspondent, and attaches itself to other and incongruous images, that is, to those that are allowed to emerge into consciousness. The result is a cumulative departure from coherence, a progressive fragmentation of sensitive consciousness (see /: 191—99). In writing about psychic conversion, I have emphasized the role of the dream and of dream interpretation. Some have understood me to be saying that it is only by 'dream work' that one can come to psychic conversion. This is not my meaning. But the point remains that in our sleep the censorship is somewhat relaxed, at least in comparison to the rigid control it can exercise in waking life, and so in our dreams we are given a more accurate presentation of 'how it is' at the level of the sensitively experienced movement of life itself. By developing the habit of interpreting our dreams and acting on the interpretation in such a way as to modify the sensitive flow in accord with a more self-transcendent orientation, we gain as well the capacity in waking life itself to allow there

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to emerge into consciousness the images we need for the insights through which we can begin to find the direction that can be discovered, but that also can be lost or missed, in the movement of life. I will conclude this chapter by indicating briefly the connection between psychic conversion so defined and, first, the context of self-appropriation that we discussed at the beginning of this chapter and, second, the notion of embodiment. Later chapters will build on these remarks. The point to psychic conversion, as far as self-appropriation is concerned, is that it allows access to one's own symbolic system, and through that system to one's affective habits and one's spontaneous apprehension of possible values. Some of the implications for theological method should already be clear. For so much of religious expression, both in the past that is mediated into the present in the first phase of theology, but also in the present mediations of religious meaning and truth into the future, are in the symbolic mode. Nor is this simply a manifestation of undifferentiated consciousness. No matter how sophisticated and differentiated consciousness becomes, the affect-laden images of the psyche will remain the primary field of expression of our orientation into the known unknown, the primary field of mystery (7:531-49). But the same images are the primary field also of myth, in the sense of the symbolic expression of counterpositions. The methodical discrimination of mystery from myth is undoubtedly the function of differentiated consciousness. But the differentiation of consciousness in the realm of interiority that begins with intellectual self-appropriation can be extended to cover the discrimination of psychic responses as well. A theological consequence is that work in the first phase of theology can proceed from interior differentiation in the realm of the imaginal. The interpretation of symbolic religious expression can proceed from the self-knowledge of a consciousness that similarly expresses its orientation into the known unknown in symbolic manifestations. And the mediation of religious meaning and truth in the present and into the future - theology's second phase — can be the work of a theological consciousness that can express its meaning in symbolic terms, not because it is undifferentiated, but because it is differentiated precisely in the realm of the imaginal. A mind that knows the terms and relations of its own symbolic productions can use symbols in an explanatory fashion, with a postcritical naivete that enables the clear differentiation of symbolic expressions of positions from symbolic expressions of counterpositions.16 The notion of embodiment, finally, can help us place our discussion of psychic conversion into the context of liberation discussed at the end of chapter i. The process of liberation from oppressive patterns of experience is ineffectual unless feelings are touched and stirred by the

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movement that brings healing insight. For the psyche is the locus of the embodiment of inquiry, insight, reflection, judgment, deliberation, and decision, just as it is the place of the embodiment of the oppressive forces from which we can be released by such intentional operations. As the psyche is oriented to participation in the life of the intentional spirit, so intentionality is oriented to embodiment through the mass and momentum of feeling. Patterns of experience are either the distorted and alienated, or the integral and creative, embodiment of the human spirit. To the extent that our psychic sensitivity is victimized by oppression, the embodiment of the spirit is confined to an animal habitat, fastened on survival, intent on the satisfaction of its own deprivation of the humanum. To the extent that the psyche is released from oppressive patterns, the embodiment of the spirit is released into a human world, and indeed ultimately into the universe of being. A true healing of the psyche would dissolve the affective wounds that block sustained self-transcendence; it would give the freedom required to engage in the constitution of a human world; but it would also render the psyche the medium of the embodiment of intentionality in the constitution of the person. As psychic conversion allows access to one's own symbolic system, and through that system to one's affective habits, one's spontaneous apprehension of possible values, so it makes of the psyche a medium of the embodiment of intentionality in the constitution of the human person. As the movement of consciousness 'from below' allows us to affirm the vertical finality of the psyche to participate in the life of the spirit, so the movement 'from above' enables us to affirm an orientation of the human spirit to embodiment in the constitution of the person. In the next chapter we will see the role of psychic conversion in grounding our notion of dialectic. But perhaps our initial discussion of precisely what psychic conversion is and how it can be grounded in Lonergan's work can be brought to a conclusion. I have been attempting to set forth the basic elements that inform the notion of psychic conversion. I have discussed eight such elements. In summary, they are (1) the context of self-appropriation discussed by Lonergan as the appropriate context within which to discuss depth psychology and psychic process; (2) the distinction (without separation) of psyche and intentionality and the effect of intentional operations on the sensitive flow; (3) the vertical finality of the psyche; (4) the self-transcendence of intentional operations, and the need for a corresponding affective self-transcendence; (5) the understanding of psychic order and disorder in terms of the psyche's cooperation in the intention of intelligibility, truth, and the good;

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(6) the particular relevance of the psyche to the fourth level of consciousness, and of psychic analysis to existential self-appropriation; (7) the role of symbols in existential consciousness and their significance for psychic analysis; and (8) the definition of psychic conversion as the transformation of the psychic component of the censorship exercised by our orientation as dramatic subjects - a censorship over images for insight and over concomitant feelings - from a repressive to a constructive role, thus enabling simultaneously the participation of the psyche in the operations of intentionality, and the embodiment of intentionality through the mass and momentum of feeling.

3

The Notion of Dialectic

In this chapter we turn again to Lonergan's work, but this time to ground the notion of dialectic that will be employed in this book.1 In my work on psychic conversion, I have been concerned with two successive and complementary movements of thought. In the first place, the science of depth psychology can be reoriented on the basis of Lonergan's intentionality analysis. In the second place, Lonergan's intentionality analysis can be complemented by this reoriented depth psychology. The basic argument regarding the reorientation of depth psychology was presented in the last chapter. There we also indicated the manner in which a reoriented depth psychology will provide access to a distinct set of data to be submitted to self-appropriation, and so give rise to a process of foundational objectification complementary to Lonergan's. Both concerns will be treated more amply in part two, where the principal category will be that of the dialectic of the subject. But first we must clarify what we mean by dialectic, since the grounds of both movements lie in the notion of dialectic. But this notion has further implications, too, and in fact it grounds all of the principal categories through which we will attempt here to understand the immanent intelligibility of historical process. We have already stated a position on psychic conversion as a dimension of theological foundations, and so as an aspect of the base from which categories are to be derived, and in this sense we have already begun to complement Lonergan's work with this notion and its implications. In the present chapter it will become clear that the notion of psychic conversion provides confirmation of the notion of dialectic. But this is so only because the process of psychic conversion strengthens the reality of dialectic in the

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consciousness of the person who submits the data of his or her interiority to self-appropriation.2 The most obvious systematic-theological impact of the claim regarding the expanded foundations is to the effect that symbolic categories and categories derived from authentic religious affectivity and sensibility can be employed in systematic theology without the latter losing anything in systematic rigor. For the base of these categories and the norms regarding their theological employment are found, not in the common sense of undifferentiated consciousness that was the ground of the original employment of symbolic categories in such sources as the scriptures, but rather in interiorly differentiated consciousness, which will be the base even for the interpretation of these sources. Interiorly differentiated consciousness is first reached, perhaps, by bringing the operations of conscious intentionality as intentional to bear upon the cognitive operations of conscious intentionality as conscious. But it can be extended and enriched not only through the self-appropriation of existential operations and religious experience, but also through an appropriation of the psychic dimensions of consciousness. Symbolic categories and categories derived from psychic conversion can be generated from this base with the same precision and differentiation that characterize the categories generated from the base that Lonergan proposes in intellectual, moral, and religious conversion and self-appropriation. A heuristic structure for the explanatory understanding and employment of symbolic categories can complement the heuristic structure that Lonergan offers in his hermeneutic theory for understanding the differentiations of consciousness and the orientations expressed in the constructions of the human spirit, and for speaking in pure formulations what one holds to be a true interpretation (see /, chapter iy). 3 A second, more subtle, but also more foundational and more far-reaching implication of psychic conversion can be discerned, however, and it is the implication that is most important for the present work. It has to do with the grounding of the notion of dialectic. This notion is itself the base that legitimates the methodical employment of symbolic categories in theology. For it is because consciousness is a dialectical process that categories expressive of sensitivity itself are legitimate theological categories. First, I want to show the grounds in Lonergan's work for my use of the notion of dialectic. i

Dialectic as Heuristic

Our discussion of psychic conversion implicitly added a further dimension of the subject beyond those discussed in chapter i. This further

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dimension lies in the unconscious. In presenting Lonergan's position on the subject, I concentrated on the structure of consciousness, on the various levels of that structure, and on the relations among the levels from above and from below. But the discussion of psychic conversion implies a position on the relations between consciousness and the unconscious. I defined psychic conversion as a transformation of the psychic component of the censorship over neural demands from a repressive to a constructive functioning in a person's development. But neural demands are demands precisely for conscious integration and psychic representation. In themselves, they constitute a part of the unconscious.4 This addition has important methodological implications, and Lonergan, from whom I take the notions of neural demands and the censorship, is quite aware of these implications. There is required for the methodical study of the relations between consciousness and the unconscious a factor different from those that were operative as long as one's attention was focused solely on the data provided by a single consciousness. Lonergan concludes his chapters on common sense in Insight by speaking of this further factor. He calls it dialectic. He says, first, that, since his purpose has been to direct attention to an event that occurs within consciousness, namely, the act of understanding that is the central feature of the second level of consciousness, his method has not been that of empirical science, whose data lie in sensible presentations, but rather 'a generalized empirical method that stands to the data of consciousness as empirical method stands to the data of sense' (7:243; emphasis added). The treatment of common sense brought to light the nature of this generalized method. When applied solely to the data of consciousness, it bears an analogy to classical empirical method, for then 'it consists in determining patterns of intelligible relations that unite the data explanatorily' (7:243). We saw an instance of this generalized method in chapter i, where the data of consciousness are explained by establishing their relations to one another. Another instance occurs in Lonergan's chapters on common sense, where various patterns of experience are discussed - patterns that are sets of intelligible relations among the data of conscious experience. But the data of human science extend beyond the data within a single consciousness, and one instance is found in the relations between a single consciousness and its unconscious neural base. These relations qualify Lonergan's self-affirmation of the knower: it affirms, surely, a fact, but also more than a fact; it affirms as well a task. It is a true judgment, but its truth is an affirmation of what one's authentic self would be, whether one's actual and habitual self matches this ideal or not. The selfaffirmation of the knower remains both foundational and not subject to

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revision, precisely as a judgment of fact; but it is also foundational and not subject to revision as an affirmation of what in part one should be, whether one is or is not in fact the subject of the cognitive integrity affirmed in this judgment. Here lies the key to the development I would here propose. Other instances of further data for human science are found in 'the relations between different conscious subjects [and] between conscious subjects and their milieu or environment' (7:243-44). When such data are to be understood, human science stands in need of a set of further methodological directives. And these directives are provided by dialectic. Even with the introduction of these procedures, however, there remains an analogy to empirical science. For 'dialectic stands to generalized method, as the differential equation to classical physics, or the operator equation to the more recent physics' (7:244). What does that mean? It means that dialectic is to function as a component 'from above,' as an a priori component in the heuristic structure of human science, when this science studies data that lie beyond those that are to be found within a single consciousness, whether these data have to do with the relations between consciousness and the unconscious, with the relations among different conscious subjects, or with the relations between conscious subjects and their historical milieu. As the classical physicist anticipates that the correlation that will provide an explanatory account of the relations among sense data will be the solution of a differential equation, so the human scientist is to anticipate that the relations between consciousness and the unconscious, between different conscious subjects, and between conscious subjects and their milieu will be some realization of dialectic. If this is so, and if one would 'take a professional interest in the human sciences and make a positive contribution to their methodology' (7:743), as Lonergan says contemporary theology must do, and if theology is to draw on the human sciences for some of its general categories, then it is extremely important that the contemporary theologian get straight just what dialectic is and how it is to perform its heuristic office. Just as one who studies physics without knowing the relevant mathematics is not really studying physics, so one who engages in human science without knowing how to use the procedures of dialectic will arrive at results that are less than scientific. Dialectic is obviously a major organizing principle of Insight, for the problem of empirical human science in its relation to theology 'in a large measure ... dictated the structure' of Insight (743-44). Clarity on the meaning of dialectic, then, is a necessary condition for understanding Insight, and, because Insight is an essay in aid of self-appropriation, in the

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last analysis understanding dialectic is necessary for understanding oneself, for appropriating those dimensions of the self to which dialectic is applicable - the relations of the consciousness of the self to the unconscious, to other conscious subjects, and to the social environment. The joker in the pack is that the term dialectic, as it is employed in Insight, can receive one of two possible interpretations, both of which can find support in the pages of Insight. The meaning of the term can be restricted to the narrow connotation of the concrete, the dynamic, and the contradictory that is usually associated with Lonergan's use of the word. But there is possible also a broader meaning, according to which the opposites in question in a process are either contradictories or contraries. There is textual evidence in Insight for both interpretations. In either case, Insight is interpreted correctly only if there is acknowledged a tension of opposites that is to be preserved in creative equilibrium and another tension of opposites whose only authentic resolution is through choice of one pole and rejection of the other. The tension that is to be preserved I call a dialectic of contraries, whereas the tension to be resolved by choice between the alternatives I call a dialectic of contradictories. Whether one accepts my terminology is in the last analysis not the most important point, since what counts is that one acknowledge the distinction between opposites that are contraries and opposites that are contradictories, and that in one's self-appropriation one negotiate these two sets of opposites in quite distinct ways. I have found it helpful toward this end to speak of two distinct forms of the realization of the pure form of dialectic, and I find this terminology supported by certain passages in Insight. 2

Consciousness and Knowledge

The notion of dialectic in Insight is a complex one. But the complexity can be controlled if we understand dialectic on the foundation of the important distinction between consciousness and knowledge. This distinction is more than implicit in what we have already said. For as we have seen, consciousness is not perception or knowledge, except that presentational kind of knowledge that is empirical self-presence. Consciousness is merely the presence of the subject to himself or herself in all the operations and states of which he or she is the subject. One can be conscious and ignorant, conscious and questioning, conscious and in error - conscious and not knowing. In all of these operations and states, one is aware of oneself operating and being disposed in such and such a fashion. This awareness is not reflexive. It is not self-knowledge. It is simply the experience of the self as self, the subject as subject. Knowledge, by contrast, including knowledge of oneself, is a function of conscious

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The Notion of Dialectic

operations at the three levels of experience, understanding, and judging. One can be conscious empirically, conscious intelligently, conscious rationally. One can also be conscious in an inattentive, stupid, and silly fashion. Consciousness is a prerequisite for knowledge, a necessary condition. But it is not a sufficient condition. If we bear this distinction in mind, I believe we can proceed to an understanding of the complex notion of dialectic that figures in Insight, a notion that will be one of the central categories in the present work. My appropriation of the notion of dialectic from Insight, then, does not entail the affirmation that there are several notions of dialectic in this work, inconsistently employed.5 There is, rather, one complex notion that can be reduced to some manageable clarity by grasping the distinction between consciousness and knowledge. The understanding of the diverse realizations of dialectic constitutes differentiations of one complex notion, not two or more distinct notions. But the differentiations are grounded in the quite sharp distinction to be drawn between consciousness and knowledge. 3

Dialectic as Pure Form

The most complete statement of the complexity of the notion of dialectic appears at the end of the treatment of common sense to which we have already referred. ... dialectic is a pure form with general implications; it is applicable to any concrete unfolding of linked but opposed principles that are modified cumulatively by the unfolding; it can envisage at once the conscious and the non-conscious either in a single subject or in an aggregate and succession of subjects; it is adjustable to any course of events, from an ideal line of pure progress resulting from the harmonious working of the opposed principles, to any degree of conflict, aberration, break-down, and disintegration; it constitutes a principle of integration for specialized studies that concentrate on this or that aspect of human living and it can integrate not only theoretical work but also factual reports; finally, by its distinction between insight and bias, progress and decline, it contains in a general form the combination of the empirical and the critical attitudes essential to human science. (7:244) Dialectic is a pure form, and nothing but that. That is, it provides 'no more than the general form of a critical attitude' (7:244). Nonetheless, it will be extremely helpful to the various departments of human science as

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they work out their specific criteria, for it will enable each department to distinguish between progress and decline in whatever element of human living it is studying. Dialectic constitutes an a priori element in the heuristic structure of the study of any processes that are characterized by the concrete unfolding of linked but opposed principles of change, where the principles are modified cumulatively by the unfolding (7:217). Now in the previous chapter we saw a set of linked but opposed principles when we discussed the distinction of the sensitive psyche from the spiritual dimensions of human intentionality. We argued that the psyche is affected by the operations of intentionality, and intentionality by the state of the psyche; the linked but opposed principles are modified cumulatively by the unfolding of the sequence of events that have their origin in these principles. But this is a dialectic, not between consciousness and the unconscious, but within a single consciousness itself. It is grounded in the more radical dialectic between consciousness and the unconscious, the censor and neural demands, but it is distinct from this latter dialectic. Lonergan calls the dialectic of the censor and neural demands the dialectic of the dramatic subject. But to acknowledge the dialectic of psyche and intentionality within consciousness is to differentiate the dialectic of the subject into a twofold dialectic: between consciousness and the unconscious, and within consciousness itself. In the chapters of. Insight devoted to common sense Lonergan speaks as well of a dialectic of the social community. We will focus for now on the dramatic subject, and later will suggest an analogy of dialectic that will enable us to understand both the community and culture along similar lines. And the dramatic subject, we now see, is constituted by a twofold dialectic. The dialectic of conscious orientation and the unconscious is the causa essendi, if you want, of the dialectic of psyche and spirit; but the dialectic of psyche and spirit is the causa cognoscendi, the cause of our being able to know the dialectic of consciousness and the unconscious. The dialectic of psyche and spirit is first for us, prior quoad nos, while the dialectic of consciousness and the unconscious is first in itself, prior quoad se. We also must call attention to the at least implicit mention in the passage just quoted of two quite distinct kinds of realization of the complex notion of dialectic itself. There is an unfolding of linked but opposed principles of change along the line of pure progress resulting from the harmonious working of these principles. And there is a distinction between progress and decline, rooted in a distinction between insight and bias, position and counterposition. Some opposed principles can work harmoniously with one another, and others cannot. The psyche and intentionality represent an instance of the first kind of opposed principles, as do consciousness and the unconscious. But insight and bias, position and counterposition,

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constitute an instance of the second. Another instance of the second is mentioned in Method in Theology when Lonergan speaks of religious development as being dialectical, and says, 'It is not a struggle between any opposites whatever but the very precise opposition between authenticity and unauthenticity, between the self as transcending and the self as transcended' (M: 111). The harmonious working of psyche and intentionality and more radically of consciousness and the unconscious sets up a line of pure progress in the development of the subject. I will call such harmonious working an instance of the pure form of a dialectic of contraries. When the two principles can work harmoniously with one another, the relevant choice is not between them, but of both of them in their creative tension with one another. But the interference of bias with insight, the opposition of position and counterposition, the struggle between authenticity and inauthenticity, constitute a different realization of dialectic, which I will call a dialectic of contradictories. Here the two principles cannot work harmoniously with one another. Rather, a choice is demanded between them, and the choice is precisely one that regards the integral dialectic of contraries or its displacement toward one or the other pole. A dialectic of contraries is a matter of both/and, a matter of choosing both generative principles of a given process in their functional interdependence.6 A dialectic of contradictories is a matter of either/or, of one principle or the other. But precisely this either/or bears upon the harmonious working of the internally constitutive principles of the dialectic of contraries: either the creative tension of the two principles (authenticity) or the displacement of this tension in one direction or the other (inauthenticity). 4

The Basic Dialectic of the Subject

The relations between consciousness and unconscious neural demands are spoken of by Lonergan in the context of his discussion of the dramatic pattern of experience. Sensitive experience, the first or empirical level of consciousness, is patterned in different ways, depending on the interests, concerns, and objectives of the subject. There are biological, aesthetic, intellectual, practical, mystical, dramatic patterns of experience. The dramatic pattern is the pattern in which we live the greater part of our lives, the pattern in which we relate to others on the dramatic stage of life, with the ulterior concern of making of our lives, our relations with others, our world, a work of art. I have argued elsewhere that with the emergence of Lonergan's differentiation of the fourth level of consciousness, or of what I called in chapter i the subject as existential and historical agent, the notion of the

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dramatic pattern of experience, of dramatic artistry in world constitution and concomitant self-constitution, must be given a more important position than was accorded it by Lonergan prior to this development in his thought.7 For the dramatic pattern is the pattern of experience operative in fourth-level operations, in existential, interpersonal, and historical agency, in praxis. In the present work I will amplify this contention into an artistic paradigm of praxis. But the notion of dialectic is the key to this paradigm, and so, again, we need to establish it clearly from the outset. While the dramatic pattern becomes the principal pattern, where before it played perhaps a subordinate role for Lonergan as constitutive of the world of undifferentiated Heideggerian Sorge, its own immanent constitution remains what it was in the sixth chapter of Insight. There the dramatic subject is shown to be constituted by the dialectical unfolding of the linked but opposed principles of neural demands for conscious integration and psychic representation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the concern of dramatically patterned intentionality and imagination for dramatic artistry in world constitution and concomitant selfconstitution. I will call this unfolding the basic dialectic of the subject. The consequent dialectic within consciousness I will call the derived dialectic of the subject or the dialectic of consciousness. As we saw in chapter 2, the dramatically patterned orientation of consciousness exercises either a constructive or a repressive censorship over unconscious neural demands. The radical contraries in the dialectic of the subject are neural demands for psychic integration, that is, neural processes that remain purely coincidental at the neural level but that would achieve integration if sublated by conscious representation, and the orientation of dramatically patterned intentionality itself as it exercises a censorship over these neural demands. If the censorship is constructive, one's dramatic self-constitutive concern becomes character, the restrictive shaping of one's possibilities in fidelity to the creative finalistic tension of consciousness between the limitations of its present development and an openness to ever fuller being. Lonergan calls this tension the law of limitation and transcendence (7:472). The dramatically patterned conscious subject is engaged in the responsible exercise of conscious finality, to the extent that the dialectic between one's orientation and the unconscious is an integral dialectic of contraries. One develops, and one does so along a line of progress, to the extent that the opposed principles of neural demands and dramatically patterned existential intentionality are working harmoniously with one another, from the same base, along the same line, toward the same objective. The development cumulatively modifies the opposed principles themselves, so that the underlying neural manifold becomes an ever more pliable support and instrument of artistic

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world constitution and concomitant self-constitution, and the censorship becomes character, habit, virtue. But if, for whatever reasons or conditioning occasions, the censorship is repressive - and among the most serious reasons is surely the flight from understanding, judgment, responsibility, and love - one's development becomes aberrant, and heads in the limit to the breakdown, disintegration, collapse of the failed artist, of the person who has not found, or has found and then lost, the direction that can be discovered or missed in the movement of life. One is dragged through life by the forces, now of Kierkegaardian 'shutupness,'8 now of the vengeful return of the repressed. The two opposed principles are not working harmoniously, and while the symptoms of the aberration are most manifest in 'the inertial effects and the interference of human sensibility and human nerves' (7:244),tne radical historical source is, as we will see in more detail later, a disorientation of intentionality or the spirit, a pneumopathology.9 This disorientation conspires with an oppressed imagination and affectivity, a psychopathology, in the exercise of an intrasubjective domination over materials that, were they to become conscious, would be data for insight into the discrepancy between the self one is and the self one could, might, should be, and can and must become. The disintegration is a cumulative modification of precisely the same two principles that develop along the lines of progress under the exercise of character. But the modification now follows the course of decline. Cumulative fragmentation of the neural manifold occurs as demands for affects are unhinged from their appropriate potential imaginal counterparts and cathected with incongruous cognitive elements; and the orientation of the dramatic pattern itself becomes ever more fixed in the schemes and determinisms of waywardness. In the limit one destroys oneself, and the roots of the self-destruction, though hidden in the mystery of the sin of the world known only to God, lie ultimately in some lack, on the part of some subject or subjects, of an antecedent willingness for insight and love, in the love of darkness, in the renunciation of the artistic constitution of the world and of the concomitant constitution of the first and only edition of oneself. Of the orientation that governs the exercise of the censorship, Lonergan writes elsewhere: ... in so far as [the] thrust of the self regularly opts, not for the merely apparent good, but for the true good, the self thereby is achieving moral self-transcendence; he is existing authentically; he is constituting himself as an originating value, and he is bringing about terminal values, namely a good of order that is truly good and instances of the particular good that are truly good. On the

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other hand, in so far as one's decisions have their principal motives, not in the values at stake, but in a calculus of the pleasures and pains involved, one is failing in self-transcendence, in authentic human existence, in the origination of value in oneself and in one's society. (M:§o) At the root this matter of orientation 'consists in the transcendental notions that both enable us and require us to advance in understanding, to judge truthfully, to respond to values' and to love (M:$i). Moreover, 'this possibility and exigence become effective only through development. One has to acquire the skills and learning of a competent human being in some walk of life. One has to grow in sensitivity and responsiveness to values if one's humanity is to be authentic' (M:5i). Such 'development is not inevitable, and so results vary. There are human failures. There are mediocrities. There are those that keep developing and growing throughout a long life-time, and their achievement varies with their initial background, with their opportunities, with their luck in avoiding pitfalls and setbacks, and with the pace of their advance' (7^:51-52). The 'direction of development' that is orientation undergoes a change for the better through conversion. Then 'one frees oneself from the unauthentic. One grows in authenticity. Harmful, dangerous, misleading satisfactions are dropped. Fears of discomfort, pain, privation have less power to deflect one from one's course. Values are apprehended where before they were overlooked. Scales of preference shift. Errors, rationalizations, ideologies fall and shatter to leave one open to things as they are and to man as he should be' (M:§2). The orientation of the dramatic subject is a response to the dialectic of contradictories that has to do not with any opposition whatever, but with the very precise opposition between authenticity and inauthenticity. But precisely that orientation, that response, is in dialectical tension with the unconscious, with neural demands for psychic integration, and here the dialectic is one, not of contradiction but of contrariness. The vertical finality of the unconscious is for participation in the life of the authentic person. The conscious and the nonconscious are to cooperate harmoniously in one's development. This is precisely ... the law of genuineness ... Every development involves a startingpoint in the subject as he is, a term in the subject as he is to be, and a process from the starting-point to the term. However, inasmuch as a development is conscious, there is some apprehension of the starting-point, the term, and the process. But such apprehensions may be correct or mistaken. If they are correct, the conscious

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and unconscious components of the development are operating from the same base along the same route to the same goal. If they are mistaken, the conscious and unconscious components, to a greater or less extent, are operating at cross-purposes. Such a conflict is inimical to the development, and so we have the conditional law of genuineness, namely, that if a development is conscious, then its success demands correct apprehensions of its starting-point, its process, and its goal. (7:475-76) This law is not only conditional, but also analogous, in that 'what it demands will be spontaneous in some cases and in others only obtained through more or less extensive self-scrutiny' (7:476). The need for self-scrutiny is spoken of in Insight as dependent on the extent to which 'errors have become lodged in the habitual background whence spring our direct and reflective insights,' so that 'if we relied upon our virtual and implicit self-knowledge to provide us with concrete guidance through a conscious development, then the minimal series [of apprehensions that make a development conscious] so far from being probably correct would be certainly mistaken' (7:476). An inauthentic orientation will exercise a repressive censorship over the neural demands that would achieve conscious integration in images and concomitant affects. Thus it would institute a distortion in the dialectic of contraries between consciousness and the unconscious. But an authentic orientation would exercise a constructive censorship regarding the same demands, so that the images required for developing selfunderstanding and self-constitution are permitted to find their way into consciousness joined with their appropriate affective complements. Thus it is that the dialectic of contradictories that affects proximately one's orientation will inevitably be resolved in a manner that makes of the dialectic of contraries between conscious orientation and the unconscious either an integral or a distorted dialectic. Psychic conversion is an extension, then, of the process of changing the direction of one's orientation through conversion, so that the psychic component of the repressive censorship becomes constructive. It thus establishes, or helps to establish, the integral dialectic of the subject. We will take this instance of dialectic as paradigmatic. There are grounds for doing so, not only because it is the first instance of dialectic discussed by Lonergan, but also because, as we will argue in some detail later, it is foundational of other instances. There is, as we will see, a dialectic of community that exercises a certain dominance over the dialectic of the subject, but that dominance is relative (7:si8), and distortions in the dialectic of community are reversed by the transforma-

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tion of subjects and by the contributions of converted subjects to the reorientation of culture and, through culture, of social structures and intersubjective spontaneities. We will later devote a far more ample discussion to the dialectic of the subject in its immanent constitution. The point that I wish to focus on here is simply that, if we consider the dialectic of the dramatic subject in the light of the passage we quoted above concerning dialectic as a pure form, we will see how this dialectic provides a heuristic guide for understanding the relations between consciousness and its neural basis. It is an instance of the pure form of dialectic as the pure form obtains in the relations between the conscious and the nonconscious in a single subject. The dialectic of the subject is 'adjustable to any course of events, from an ideal line of pure progress resulting from the harmonious working of the opposed principles, to any degree of conflict, aberration, break-down, and disintegration' (7:244). The linked but opposed principles that, viewed normatively, are to work harmoniously with one another are in this case neural demand functions and the exercise of the censorship. These principles are the sources of events of a determinate kind, namely, the contents and affects emerging into consciousness. The link between the two principles is that one (the neural) is what is patterned, and the other (the censorship) is what is responsible for the patterning. A potentially contradictory opposition lies in the fact that the censorship can be repressive, and the repression results in neglected neural demands forcing their way into consciousness in ways that disrupt the dramatic project of artistic self-constitution. But there is also an opposition that is to be reconciled in a higher synthesis, the synthesis of the incarnate spirit in whom the vertical finality of lower manifolds for participation in higher schemes of recurrence has been realized in a manner that is habitual, constant, effective. In either case, the changes that occur are cumulative, in that the exercise of the censorship and the neural demands to be met at any time depend on previous interactions between the two principles and provide the basis of their future workings (1:217). The opposition results in a distortion of the dialectic when bias governs the censorship, but 'the essential logic of the distorted dialectic is a reversal. For dialectic rests on the concrete unity of opposed principles; the dominance of either principle results in a distortion, and the distortion both weakens the dominance and strengthens the opposed principle to restore an equilibrium' (7:233). We can see in the dialectic of the subject, then, both a dialectic of contraries and a dialectic of contradictories. The dialectic of contraries is the unfolding of the changes resultant from the functional interdependence of neural demands and the censorship. The dialectic of contradic-

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lories is the conflict of bias with the desire for insight in the functioning of the censorship itself. The dialectic of contraries is integral or distorted depending on the resolution of the dialectic of contradictories. My interpretation of Lonergan's position on dialectic in the sixth and seventh chapters of Insight rests to a large extent on my understanding both of what he says concerning the 'logic of the distorted dialectic,' and of the methodological observations at the end of chapter 7 to which I referred earlier. In these two passages I find reason to suggest distinguishing contradictories from contraries and to advance the possibility of a realization of the dialectic of contraries that would not be distorted and of a realization of dialectic that is distorted. Clearly he speaks of the latter, for he writes that 'the essential logic of the distorted dialectic is a reversal' (7:233). But he also suggests the former, for he speaks of 'dialectic rest[ing] on the concrete unity of opposed principles.' It is not the opposition of these principles as such but 'the dominance of either principle' that 'results in a distortion.' The distortion undermines the dominance and 'strengthens the opposed principle to restore an equilibrium' (7:233). I* i§ possible, then, to speak of the equilibrium, or the creative tension of opposed principles, as an undistorted or integral dialectic of contraries, and of the breakdown of that tension as a distorted dialectic of contraries. The differential lies in the resolution of the dialectic of contradictories that obtains between insight and bias, position and counterposition, authenticity and inauthenticity. This interpretation receives further confirmation from the methodological observation at the end of chapter 7 of Insight. The pure form of dialectic is applicable to, can envisage, and is adjustable to both 'an ideal line of pure progress resulting from the harmonious working of the opposed principles' and 'any degree of conflict, aberration, break-down, and disintegration' (7:244). The first of these possibilities is what I have chosen to call an integral dialectic of contraries, the second what Lonergan calls a distorted dialectic. The distortion also affects a dialectic of contraries, but its root lies in a misplaced choice in the dialectic of contradictories that is the conflict of bias with the desire for insight. 5

Foundations

I said earlier that this interpretation can be grounded in the distinction that Lonergan draws between consciousness and knowledge. The distinction is particularly relevant to the differentiation of a dialectic of contraries from a dialectic of contradictories. The distinction of consciousness from knowledge was explained above. But what requires further elaboration is that there is a duality both of

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knowledge and of consciousness, and that the duality is to be negotiated in a different manner in each case. The duality of knowledge is a principal fact to be affirmed as a result of the reading of Insight: ... in each of us there exist two different kinds of knowledge. They are juxtaposed in Cartesian dualism with its rational 'Cogito, ergo sum' and with its unquestioning extroversion to substantial extension. They are separated and alienated in the subsequent rationalist and empiricist philosophies. They are brought together again to cancel each other in Kantian criticism. If these statements approximate the facts, then the question of human knowledge is not whether it exists but what precisely are its two diverse forms and what are the relations between them. If that is the relevant question, then any departure from it is, in the same measure, the misfortune of missing the point. But whether or not that is the relevant question, can be settled only by undertaking an arduous exploratory journey through the many fields in which men succeed in knowing or attempt the task but fail. (7:xvii) Again: ... the hard fact is that... there exist in man two diverse kinds of knowing, that they exist without differentiation and in an ambivalent confusion until they are distinguished explicitly and the implications of the distinction are drawn explicitly. (7:xxii) Now if consciousness and knowledge are distinct, which is explicitly established in Lonergan's work, and if there is a duality to both, which can also be documented from Insight, one way of departure from the relevant question, and so one instance of the misfortune of missing the point, would be to treat the duality of consciousness in the same way as one treats the duality of knowing, rather than adopting in its regard a different posture suitable to the difference between consciousness and knowledge. Moreover, it might be that the suitable posture in regard to the duality of consciousness is a necessary condition for the appropriate negotiation of the duality of knowledge. The appropriate negotiation of the duality of knowledge is spoken of by Lonergan in terms of 'breaking' it. 'Breaking' here means explicitly distinguishing alternatives, and drawing the implications of the distinction. ... unless one breaks the duality in one's knowing, one doubts

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that understanding correctly is knowing. Under the pressure of that doubt, either one will sink into the bog of a knowing that is without understanding, or else one will cling to understanding but sacrifice knowing on the altar of an immanentism, an idealism, a relativism. From the horns of that dilemma one escapes only through the discovery (and one has not made it yet if one has no clear memory of its startling strangeness) that there are two quite different realisms, that there is an incoherent realism, half animal and half human, that poses as a half-way house between materialism and idealism and, on the other hand, that there is an intelligent and reasonable realism between which and materialism the half-way house is idealism. (7:xxviii) To put the matter in terms familiar from our discussion of the position on knowing in chapter i, full human knowing is not taking a good look at the already out there now — Descartes's unquestioning extroversion to substantial extension — nor does it stop at understanding, as idealists claim, but it is the compound of operations of experiencing, understanding, and judging. The affirmation of such a position regarding oneself as a knower is the attainment of the critical, intelligent, reasonable realism between which and materialism the half-way house is idealism. The discovery and affirmation of oneself as a concrete unity, identity, whole characterized by cognitive acts on the three levels of experience, understanding, and judgment, along with the consequent positions on being as the objective of the desire to know and on objectivity as the consequence of authentic subjectivity, constitute intellectual conversion. The self-constitutive nature of that affirmation shows itself in part in the reorientation that it effects in other patterns of experience. By reason of the movement from above downward in consciousness, intellectual conversion is grounded in religious and moral conversion. But religious and moral conversion now sublate intellectual conversion, and are thus informed by a new, more precise, and more self-possessed orientation, not to what is 'out there,' but to what is good and to the mystery that transcends the concrete universe of proportionate being and the limitations placed upon this universe by the fact that its immanent intelligibility of emergent probability is an unfolding in the space-time continuum. That reorientation is also a transformation of common sense through its information by a new stance toward the universe of being and a new notion of objectivity. The duality of knowing is broken through the affirmation of critical, as opposed to naive, realism, as the position immanent in the very unfolding of one's intelligent and rational consciousness. Breaking the duality of knowing enables one to overcome,

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however precariously, the remnants of biological extroversion as these have uncritically survived in one's orientation to the real. The extension of this conversion to everyday living can be understood more fully when the insights of depth psychology into the dissolving of transference and the withdrawal of projections are removed from the counterpositional orientations to knowing, morality, and religion characteristic of much of this science, and reoriented on the basis of the positions on knowing, being, and objectivity. But an essential element in breaking the duality in one's knowing, in affirming that understanding correctly is fully human knowing, and in drawing the implications of that affirmation, lies not in breaking but in affirming, maintaining, and strengthening a certain unity in duality of consciousness, until it becomes a habitual genuineness in which one abides in the conscious tension of limitation and transcendence (7:472-79). Consciousness is dialectical, but with a dialectic that is not to be transcended but persevered in, not to be displaced but accentuated. This is the dialectic of intentionality and the psyche to which we attended in the last chapter. In itself, it is rooted in the dialectic of the censor and neural demands; but it is also the source of our knowledge of the latter dialectic. It too 'rests on the concrete unity of opposed principles; the dominance of either principle results in a distortion, and the distortion both weakens the dominance and strengthens the opposed principle to restore an equilibrium' (7:233). B°th the bog of a knowing that is without understanding and the understanding that sacrifices knowing on the altar of an immanentism, an idealism, a relativism, are consequents of breaking the dialectical unity in duality of consciousness, in the sense of opting for one or other of the alternative poles rather than for the concrete unity of the two principles. Lonergan speaks explicitly of the unity of consciousness, and maintains not only that this unity is given, but also that if it were not given it would have to be postulated (7:324—28). But this unity is a 'concrete unity of opposed principles' (7:233), both of which are T rather than one being T and the other 'It' (7:474). The duality of human consciousness is not the duality of two things, nor does it call for the choice of one pole and the exclusion of the other. It does demand discrimination of the two constituent elements, but for the sake of their harmonious cooperation, not for the sake of the elimination of one and the dominance of the other. The duality that is also a concrete unity of opposed principles is the duality of the sensitive psyche and spiritual intentionality or the pure desire. The position on knowing, where 'the self as affirmed is characterized by such occurrences as sensing, perceiving, imagining, inquiring, understanding, formulating, reflecting, grasping the unconditioned, and

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affirming' (7:319), implicitly acknowledges this duality as constitutive of full human knowing. The two general forms of the counterpositions on knowing break this unity in duality of consciousness; in empiricism there results 'the bog of a knowing that is without understanding,' and in idealism the understanding that sacrifices knowing. Breaking the duality of consciousness thus results in conflict, aberration, breakdown, and disintegration in the unfolding of the linked but opposed cognitive principles of psyche and spirit. Preserving the dialectic of consciousness results in the cognitive progress consequent upon the harmonious working of these principles. Preserving a certain duality of consciousness strengthens the unity of consciousness. More existential implications appear in the following passage, which I will interrupt with several parenthetical remarks that will indicate my meaning: Nor are the pure desire and the sensitive psyche two things, one of them T and the other 'It'. [To regard them as two 'things' is what I mean by breaking the integral duality, or concrete unity of opposed principles.] They are the unfolding on different levels of a single, individual unity, identity, whole. Both are I and neither is merely It. [To regard both as T is what I mean by affirming the duality of consciousness as a concrete unity of opposed principles.] If my intelligence is mine, so is my sexuality. If my reasonableness is mine, so are my dreams. If my intelligence and my reasonableness are to be thought more representative of me than my organic and psychic spontaneity, that is only in virtue of the higher integration that, in fact, my intelligence and reasonableness succeed in imposing on their underlying manifold or, proleptically, in virtue of the development in which the higher integration is to achieve a fuller measure of success. [Existentially, to cooperate with the finality that heads toward this higher integration is to affirm and strengthen the duality of consciousness]. But no matter how full the success, the basic situation within the self is unchanged, for the perfection of the higher integration does not eliminate the integrated or modify the essential opposition between self-centredness and detachment. The same T on different and related levels of operation retains the opposed characters. (7:474-75) As Insight proceeds beyond the discussions of dialectic in chapters 6 and 7, the notion of dialectic comes to be used more exclusively by Lonergan in the sense of the philosophic method that advances positions and reverses counterpositions, and so in the sense that we will refer to as a

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dialectic of contradictories. This use begins in chapter 8, with the contrast of things and 'bodies.'10 All other positions are rooted in the basic position on knowing, and all other counterpositions in some form of the basic counterposition on knowing. But what I would emphasize is that the basic position on knowing affirms the unity in duality of consciousness, while the basic counterpositions break that unity in duality. The philosophic use of the notion of dialectic as Insight proceeds regards 'conflict, aberration, hjk duality-as-integralbreak-down, and disintegration' (7:244) °f tne dialectic of consciousness. A distorted dialectic of consciousness yields a counterposition on knowing; dialectical method reverses the counterposition on knowing precisely by reversing the distortion of the dialectic of consciousness and appealing to the integral dialectic of consciousness as the latter is constitutive of full human knowing. The integral dialectic of consciousness, and so the concrete unity of linked but opposed principles that must not be broken but brought into consciousness and, as it were, abided in, involves the sublation and so enrichment of the sensitive psyche, not its elimination as a constitutive element of one's being, one's knowing, and one's self-understanding. 6

Applications

There are several important consequences of what we have been saying. 6. i Genuineness A first consequence regards what Lonergan has to say in his discussion of human development about the law of limitation and transcendence, and the constitution of genuineness. Genuineness involves allowing the tension of limitation and transcendence into consciousness, neither displacing it in either direction nor attempting to escape from it by arbitrarily brushing aside the questions that would challenge one to further growth (7:472-79). It does not brush questions aside, smother doubts, push problems down, escape to activity, to chatter, to passive entertainment, to sleep, to narcotics. It confronts issues, inspects them, studies their many aspects, works out their various implications, contemplates their concrete consequences in one's own life and in the lives of others. If it respects inertial tendencies as necessary conservative forces, it does not conclude that a defective routine is to be maintained because one has grown accustomed to it. Though it fears the cold plunge into becoming other than one is, it does not

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dodge the issue, nor pretend bravery, nor act out of bravado. It is capable of assurance and confidence, not only in what has been tried and found successful, but also in what is yet to be tried. It grows weary with the perpetual renewal of further questions to be faced, it longs for rest, it falters and it fails, but it knows its weakness and its failures and it does not try to rationalize them. QQ Jung's book Aion discusses the relations between the traditional Christ

34° Theology and the Dialectics of History

image and the natural symbols of wholeness or the self. His investigation 'seeks, with the help of Christian, Gnostic, and alchemical symbols of the self, to throw light on the change of psychic situation within the "Christian aeon.'"100 The volume interprets where we stand historically today as participants in what Jung read to be a major transformation occurring in our time. Symbols of unity and totality stand for Jung at the highest point on the scale of objective values, because they cannot be distinguished from the image of God in the human soul. They are invested with such value because they are symbols of order that occur principally in times of psychic disorientation and reorientadon. They bind and subdue the lawless powers of fragmentation and darkness, and they depict or create an order that transforms the chaos into a cosmos. How are these symbols related to the image of Christ? Jung is preoccupied by the saturation of Christian tradition with vague premonitions of the conflict of Christ and Antichrist. He finds contemporary parallels to this conflict in 'the dechristianization of our world, the Luciferian development of science and technology, and the frightful material and moral destruction left behind by the second World War.'101 Christ is still the living myth of our culture, 'our culture hero, who, regardless of his historical existence, embodies the myth of the divine Primordial Man.'102 It is Christ who occupies the center of the Christian mandala, and it is he whose kingdom is the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in the field, the grain of mustard, the heavenly city. Christ, then, has represented for Christians the archetype of the self, the true image of God after whose likeness we are made. But for almost all theologians, pastors, and faithful in both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant traditions, the image of God in us has not resided in the 'corporeal man,' but in the invisible, incorporeal, incorrupt, immortal rational soul. Jung is convinced that 'the original Christian conception of the imago Dei embodied in Christ meant an all-embracing totality that even includes the animal side of man.'103 Originally the recognition of the archetype of wholeness in the Christ image restored a primal state of oneness with the spontaneous God image in the human psyche. But the Christ image very early came to lack wholeness, since there was excluded from it the dark side of things. Everything dark was turned into a diabolical opponent of the God image. Christ became a symbol of the heroic ego rather than of the self. The figure of the redeemer became one-sidedly bright. The dark side of the human totality became ascribed to the Antichrist, the devil, evil. But, says Jung, ... the psychological concept of the self, in part derived from our

34 * A Clarification by Contrast

knowledge of the whole man, but for the rest depicting itself spontaneously in the products of the unconscious as an archetypal quaternity bound together by inner antinomies, cannot omit the shadow that belongs to the light figure, for without it this figure lacks body and humanity. In the empirical self, light and shadow form a paradoxical unity. In the Christian concept, on the other hand, the archetype is hopelessly split into two irreconcilable halves, leading ultimately to a metaphysical dualism.104 The dogmatic figure of Christ was made so sublime and spotless that all else turned dark beside it. It became so one-sidedly perfect that it demanded a psychic complement to restore the balance. This complement is found not in the Christ image but in the image of Satan as the Antichrist, which now came to be the archetypal image of matter and instinct, just as Christ came to supply the archetypal image of spirit. The perfectionism attending such an attitude Jung calls fatal. For it has led by a necessary psychological law to a reversal of its original intention. The portion of the totality that was excluded from the image of the self through the focus on Christ has not been integrated into the individual psyche of one who lives the Christian myth. Christianity, consequently, has functioned as an enemy of individuation. It has fallen prey to the same perversion that, in the Pharisees, led to the crucifixion of Christ in the first place. Christianity has crucified Jesus over and over again by rejecting the dark side from the totality. It has bifurcated the self, preferring like the Pharisees an ethic of perfection to an ethic of wholeness. In this perversion the excluded portion has necessarily taken its toll in the form not only of individual but more dramatically of collective psychoses. The German experience of Nazism is prototypical of the latter. When one comes to see that the self is not exclusively 'spiritual,' however, its dark side turns out to be not so threatening. It becomes on the contrary a source of vitality, energy, and wholeness. Individuation is a mysterium coniunctionis, a nuptial union of opposite halves. In this mystery the body plays a special and, to the traditional Christian, unexpected and initially alarming role. Matter in itself is invested with considerable numinosity. The failure to recognize the presence of the underground God splits the individual into two halves. The conscious half is identified with Christ, who then becomes an ego ideal rather than an archetypal image of the self. The dark side, whether suppressed or repressed, is then projected outside, so that the world is inflicted with the impossible task of acting out the conflict that can be resolved only in the individual psyche. The criterion of morality and religion, on Jung's account, is wholeness and not perfection. The criterion of the relative adequacy of images of

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Christ, of presentations of the Christian message, of invitations to Christian spirituality, is the same. The spontaneous images of unity, centeredness, and totality proceeding from the human psyche are the criteria against which all images of Christ and all spiritual doctrines are to be judged. Such is the radical contribution that Jung would make to a critique of the Christian aeon and to the 'new religion' that he held is coming into being in our time. Jung's Answer to Job may be understood as the testament of this religion. Jung begs his readers not to overlook the Preface, with its quasi methodological clarifications of what he is about. Religious statements, he says, are psychic confessions based on processes not accessible to physical perception, on unconscious processes that demonstrate their existence through the confessions. The statements resulting from these processes consist of images that point to something ineffable. We do not know how accurately these images, metaphors, and concepts correspond to their transcendental object. We do know that they are adequate reflections of the psyche from which they issue. We are asked to keep this outlook in mind regarding Jung's own religious confession in this book. The most immediate cause of Jung's writing Answer to Job is the same problem as is treated in Aion: the Christ image and its functioning in the Christian psyche of the West during the astrological age of Pisces, and its opposition in that same psyche to the image of Antichrist. Jung finds himself unable to accept the theological doctrine of evil as privatio boni, in that it does not agree with psychological findings and contributes to the dualistic Christianity that he criticized in Aion. He knows that the understanding of the Christian doctrine of redemption is at stake here. For Jung a redemption that is not a reconciliation beyond even the opposites of good and evil is no redemption at all. Christian theology simply continues to foster the moral conflict caused by the splitting of the opposites. The problem of the opposites in Answer to Job, however, affects the God image itself. The being of God is imaged in our psyches as paradoxical, and the scriptures are by and large faithful to the paradox. The totality of the God image that emerges out of the scriptures of Judaism and Christianity finds light and darkness together, creative power beside destructive will, goodness and love beside anger and injustice, love joined with arbitrary caprice. What are we to make of this image in the light of our own experience? Answer to Job is Jung's emotion-laden statement of his understanding of these problems, which had vexed him over a number of years, problems originating both in his own psychic experience and in the revelations of many of his patients. How can we speak any longer of an all-loving and

343 A Clarification by Contrast

good God, in the face of the terrible suffering of human history, of Job, of Nazi and Soviet concentration camps, of atomic warfare, of starvation, oppression, poverty, disease, and insanity? What is the meaning of the assertion, God is the Summum Bonum? How can we subscribe to this statement and still be committed to our suffering fellow humans? What does it mean to confess the love of God in the face of such monstrous suffering? The God image in the psyche bears a polarity that is reflected in the scriptures. The Jewish scriptures' emphasis on the power of a seemingly arbitrarily demanding God is compensated by the New Testament's treatment of God as a loving Father. The polarity is reflected as well in many other religious phenomena, thus giving rise to Rudolf Otto's characterization of the holy as a mysterium tremendum etfasdnans, a mystery to be feared, yet exerting an attractive, beckoning influence at the same time. The principal issue at stake in Answer to Job is the question of what the God images have done to the people who entertain them and what they are doing to us today. The book can be considered a sketch of a genetic religious anthropology of the West from the time of the writing of the Book of Job to the present. The results do not favor maintaining the God image that comes to us from any of the mainline traditions of Christianity. The image presented in the Book of Job is of an arbitrary and capricious God betting with Satan over the perseverance of a just man whom he chooses to lure into infidelity by the imposition of great suffering, a God, though, who also contains a counterpart of benevolent omniscience to which Job appeals. The Christian scriptural image presents a God who has consulted his feminine counterpart, his psyche, Sophia; who has been lured by her into repentance over his deeds to Job; who has chosen to become human himself and to suffer at human hands what human beings had suffered at his hands; but who still remains somewhat offhanded and aloof, in that he does not choose to become fully human since he insists on being born of a sinless virgin and on remaining sinless himself; and so who also wills still to be something other than human, something completely bright and light, innocent and spotless, a pure victim of human stupidity and ignorance, a creation of his own unwillingness to face and admit his own dark side. There is still no reconciliation of the opposites, then, in God's incarnation in Christ, since God is unwilling to admit a shadow problem and so chooses to manifest only the light side of the deity. Jesus' followers were lured into the same trap, and fell victim to the splitting of opposites. The Book of Revelation especially manifests this splitting; its venomous pronouncements are interrupted only with the compensatory vision of a future event that will occur after the war of the opposites has come to an

344 Theology and the Dialectics of History end: the birth of the new divine child from the sun-moon woman anticipated in Revelation 12. This event is to occur, according to Jung's interpretation, at the end of the second millenium of Christianity (c 2000 CE), the millenium that culminates in an indescribable worldwide catastrophe because of the appearance of the Antichrist. This event is to mark the ushering in of the age of Anthropos, where matter will be reconciled to spirit in the coming to consciousness of the total self beyond the opposites, in a complexio oppositorum that appears dark only when consciousness takes all the light to itself and lays claim to too much moral authority. The godhead thus possesses a terrifying dual aspect, which Jung describes in the following words: 'a sea of grace is met by a seething lake of fire, and the light of love glows with a fierce dark heat of which it is said "ardet non lucet" - it burns but gives no light. That is the eternal, as distinct from the temporal, gospel: one can love God but must fear him.'105 This dual nature of the godhead splits the individual human being and all of Western humanity into similar opposites, thus constellating apparently insoluble problems. But then, Jung continues, when we observe the individual contemporary person in pursuit of individuation, torn asunder by these inner conflicts, we observe that his psyche produces symbols such as an Anthropos figure or a mandala: symbols that unite the opposites and reflect the essence of the individuation process. These symbols of the self, when given — and their occurring is a gift, is experienced as grace — move the individual beyond the conflict into an unthought of, new possibility: beyond the moral conflict constellated by the opposites, by the imbalance and ambivalence of the God image. Only those who will take up the conflict within themselves and make it conscious can help the world avoid the total catastrophe that threatens, even awaits, all of us. One who waits with a listening attitude for the creative decision to come from the self and acts on it in spite of the danger of error will find a higher level of consciousness beyond the opposites. The moral problem today, as Jung conceives it, is a need for a widening of our reflective consciousness, so that we can be more clearly aware of the opposing forces within us and can cease trying to sweep evil out of the way by denying it or projecting it onto scapegoats. We must really see our shadow, our dark side, instead of mindlessly living it out. We have to learn to integrate it slowly into the totality, without living it out, and without projecting it. This process of individuation will lead to a transformation of the God image in our time. The opposites will be united in God as well as in ourselves, for the self is an image of God. These new manifestations of the God image are connected with a radicalized notion of God's desire for

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incarnation. The God image comes to its unity beyond the opposites when we realize that only we can reconcile the opposites in the God image, and that we can do so only by the emergence of the discovery of the self, which is the new image of God in human history. God wills to be incarnate in all of us, and this will is fulfilled in the individuation process, especially in its key moment of the experience of the self beyond the opposites. The individuation process is the process of the incarnation of God. Jung's speculative fancy moves him to try to understand the problem of God's wholeness from the standpoint of the Christian notion of the Trinity. Jung finds this symbol to reflect an incompleteness. At times he tries to fill the fourth place in God with the image of the devil, and suggests that the individuation process, by reconciling good and evil in the self, will simultaneously reconcile them in the God image that is identical with authentic symbols of the self. 3.6.2 Comments It was through his late reflections on the self, it seems, that Jung came to include good and evil among the opposites to be reconciled with one another in the process of individuation. The movement is not only unnecessary, but also incompatible with earlier statements on Jung's part. Our critique, however, is not from logic, but from theology. Theology's departure from Jung at this juncture will involve at least four steps. First, the imago Dei that human subjects are is to be located in human cognitional processes and in the procession of judgments of value and acts of love. Second, however, the body participates in the transformation of the person into an imago Dei, and this participation is sensitively experienced in the psyche and imaginally reflected in the psyche's symbols when the psyche has become, by God's grace, a sensorium of transcendence. Thus it cannot be denied that Jung is correct in his charge regarding the non-incarnational character of so much Christian thought and practice. His positive efforts in this regard can only help theology's rethinking of incarnation, resurrection, Eucharist, and so on, as well as the development of new theological doctrines regarding material creation, ecology, community, intimacy, and sexuality. In no way should my critique be construed as neglecting the cogency, even urgency, of Jung's reminders along these lines. Third, the self that is thus constituted as an imago Dei is both integrator and operator of its own developmental processes. As integrator, it is adequately symbolized in the mandala. But to cling to the mandala and the integration it represents when the process of development presents

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one with further questions for understanding and truth or for value and it is in the procession of operations from such questions that the imago Dei resides in us - is to refuse the self-transcendence through which we continue to find authentic direction in the movement of life. Fourth, the one-sided choice of the self as integrator over the self as operator of further development can become in the extreme a selfenclosure that not only would lock one in an epistemological idealism, but also would represent a refusal of the absolute or vertical selftranscendence toward the mystery of God that is our authentic destiny. I cannot here develop the first of these points, which is the material for a systematics of the Trinity. I would simply recall the psychological analogies for approaching an understanding of the mystery of the Trinity that are found in the works of Augustine and Aquinas, and in our time of Lonergan. These still represent the best Christian reflection on the imago Dei in the human subject. On the second point, we can summarize what we have said already, and add one further set of categories. The symbols that emerge from the psyche in our dreams of the morning are both reflective of the selves we have become and anticipatory of the adventures yet to come in the quest for direction in the movement of life. As reflective of what we have become, they will represent a bodily participation in the life of the human spirit. They will be invested with the beauty that is the splendor of truth. But as anticipatory of what is yet to come, they will be symbolic of the self as operator of further development. The mandala may well be a symbol of the self as integrating what one has become. It is not an adequate symbol of the self as operator of a higher integration. The theologian monitoring Jung will not negate, but will relativize, the symbol of the mandala. The further categories have to do with the varieties of transpersonal symbolism. The self that one has in part become and that one is in part still beckoned to become is not pure nature, but a self involved in the historical processes that are determined by the mysteries of sin and grace. We have seen that a distinction can be introduced in our understanding of transpersonal symbolism that would capture this feature of human development. We distinguish, then, between archetypal and anagogic symbols. Again, archetypal symbols are taken from nature and imitate nature, while anagogic symbols, however much they are and must be derived from nature and history, reveal the bondage of nature and history under the law of sin, and promise the transformation of nature and history by divine grace. The maternal symbol that is archetypal, and so that means not one's personal mother but the nourishing and/or destructive forces of the psyche, is archetypal. But the heavenly Jerusalem of the final chapter of the book of Revelation is anagogic. Its meaning is

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not cosmological, not even anthropological, but soteriological. Its meaning is a transformation of cosmological and anthropological elemental meaning under the force of the law of the cross and the mystery of redemption. With this comment we come to the third and fourth points of an adequate critique of these farther reaches of Jungian thought. Perhaps I can make my point best by interpreting a dream of Jung's. I wager that this interpretation will contain a more effective elucidation of my meaning than would further discursive argumentation. The dream that I wish to interpret is narrated in Jung's autobiographical reflections. It begins with Jung's father fetching from a shelf a heavy folio volume of the Bible bound in a fishskin. He opens the Bible to the Pentateuch and begins to deliver a profound interpretation of a certain passage. His interpretation, Jung admits, 'was so intelligent and learned that we in our stupidity could not follow it.'106 The 'we' to whom Jung refers are Jung himself and two other psychiatrists. In the next scene Jung's father takes him alone into a house that Jung's father says is haunted, and where loud noises were being uttered by the inhabitants. The house had thick walls. Jung and his father climbed a narrow staircase to the second floor. There, Jung says, ... a strange sight presented itself: a large hall which was the exact replica of the divan-i-kaas (council hall) of Sultan Akbar at Fatehpur Sikri. It was a high, circular room with a gallery running along the wall, from which four bridges led to a basin-shaped center. The basin rested upon a huge column and formed the sultan's round seat. From this elevated place he spoke to his councilors and philosophers, who sat along the walls in the gallery. The whole was a gigantic mandala. It corresponded precisely to the real divan-i-kaas. In the dream I suddenly saw that from the center a steep flight of stairs ascended to a spot high up on the wall - which no longer corresponded to reality. At the top of the stairs was a small door, and my father said, 'Now I will lead you into the highest presence.' Then he knelt down and touched his forehead to the floor. I imitated him, likewise kneeling, with great emotion. For some reason I could not bring my forehead quite down to the floor - there was perhaps a millimeter to spare. But at least I had made the gesture with him. Suddenly I knew - perhaps my father had told me - that that upper door led to a solitary chamber where lived Uriah, King David's general, whom David had shamefully betrayed for the sake of his wife Bathsheba, by commanding his soldiers to abandon Uriah in the face of the enemy.107

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Jung states that it was probably the book of Genesis that his father was interpreting in the dream. For Jung the fishskin is a symbol of the muteness and unconsciousness of fish. His father did not succeed in communicating his message, Jung says, because of the stupidity and malice of Jung and his companions. Uriah is a guiltless victim, a prefiguration of Christ. The significance of Uriah means Jung's own mission to speak publicly about 'the ambivalence of the God-image in the Old Testament.' Uriah also prefigures the loss of Jung's own wife in death. 'These were the things that awaited me, hidden in the unconscious. I had to submit to this fate, and ought really to have touched my forehead to the floor, so that my submission would be complete. But something prevented me from doing so entirely, and kept me just a millimeter away.'108 The result prefigured by the dream was Answer to Job, the one book Jung said he would not revise. I will risk an interpretation of this dream that runs counter to Jung's. His father is trying to communicate something important to him and his psychiatrist colleagues. 'It dealt with something extremely important which fascinated him.'109 But none of them can understand what his father is trying to say. The fishskin is a symbol, not of mute unconscious stupidity, but of salvation. It is the Ichthus. Jung's father is communicating the biblical message of salvation from God. The passage his father is interpreting, if indeed it was from Genesis as Jung seems to think, is allusive to God's 'answer to Job,' 'Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?' (Job 38.4). The dream does prefigure the writing of Answer to Job, but as a message not to write that book. Jung's father is communicating to Jung and to psychiatry the invitation to acknowledge a transcendent exigence, and to integrate that exigence with their knowledge of the archetypal sense of the unknown that they have discovered. Jung and his friends cannot understand the message. The second part of the dream is a further attempt to communicate the same message. The alternative to accepting the message is the haunted house, the occult realm where people try to achieve a position beyond all opposites, including even the contradictory opposites of good and evil. This is the Great Round as something to be transcended, the mandala as symbol of an integration, yes, but of a temporary integration that must be gone beyond. It is the Self chosen by the ego as supreme principle, but understood by Jung's father as something to be transcended in adoration of the Highest Presence. Even the fact that the invitation occurs on the second floor may be significant, for the second floor may be the second level of consciousness, the level of one's own ideas, the level that an idealist cannot transcend. Jung will not submit to the invitation to transcend the self. The symbol of such transcendence is the mystery of innocent

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suffering represented in Uriah. Jung does not submit to the relentless transformation of the integrator, the perfect mandala that becomes demonic when it is apotheosized, and the result is seen in the religious posture of Jung's alternative answer to Job, where the problem of evil is radically the problem not of human beings, but of God. The meaning of the dream is not archetypal but anagogic, not natural but supernatural, not simply psychological but religious. Jung is invited to rethink the position that was to come to expression in Answer to Job. He refused, and the dream catalyzed that refusal, appropriated it at the sensitive level of Jung's consciousness. This interpretation in no way is meant to deny the positive significance of the mandala as a symbol of integration. It simply adds to this emphasis the insistence on the relentless transformation of the integrator by the operator of consciousness as a notion of being, a notion of the good, and a notion of transcendent mystery. The essential theological critique and monitoring of Jung will lie in a distinction of different kinds of opposites, and of different ways of negotiating the respective conflicts. There are opposites that are contraries. Such are matter and spirit, consciousness and the unconscious, the masculine and feminine dimensions of the psyche, the ego and the personal shadow as victim of social and personal history. Between such opposites there can be established a dialectical integration, a creative tension that constitutes personal integrity. But there are also opposites that are contradictories. Western epistemology has for centuries formulated the opposition of the true and the false in the principle of contradiction. An analogous opposition of contradictories is that of good and evil. A dialectic of contradictories cannot be resolved by integration, only by choice. And the choice bears precisely on the negotiation of the various dialectics of contraries: either their dialectical and creative tension, or their dissociation and the consequent distortion of their relation with one another. The integral dialectic of contraries is good, while its distortion is evil. 4

Conclusion

I have tried to argue that Jung's work can prove of enormous benefit to a theology that takes its stand on interiorly differentiated consciousness, since Jung helps us disengage in self-appropriation a dimension of our inferiority that is a necessary and inevitable complement to the intentional dimension. But I have argued, too, that the latter dimension sets the context for the psychic self-appropriation that Jung renders available. If that latter and crucial point is accepted, then one is able to reverse the

35° Theology and the Dialectics of History

elements of Jungian thought that are theologically not acceptable. These aspects have to do almost entirely with the implications of Jung's later writings on the self, the Christ image, the problem of evil, and the image of God in the self. These unacceptable dimensions can be reversed through the distinction of a dialectic of contraries from a dialectic of contradictories, the specification of quite different ways of negotiating the distinct dialectics, and the insistence that the correct way of negotiating the dialectic of contradictories is at the same time the key to the appropriate reconciliation of those contrary opposites whose harmonious functioning is the immanent intelligibility of personal integrity and authenticity. The key to a critical appropriation of Jung on the basis of Lonergan's foundations lies in the distinction of two kinds of opposites. There is a dialectic of contraries, exemplified par excellence in the tension of spirit and matter, and there is a dialectic of contradictories manifest in the opposition of good and evil. The integral resolution of the dialectic of contraries is in every instance the path to the good, while the distortion of the dialectic of contraries is at the heart of the mystery of evil. Between the opposites of a dialectic of contradictories there can be only choice. But the choice of one pole is made when one pursues an integral reconciliation of contrary opposites, and the choice of the other when one succumbs to the tendency of our sinful nature to disequilibrium. With this distinction firmly in hand, the positions in Jungian thought are readily developed and the counterpositions easily reversed. The distinction, however, has both conditions and implications, and these bear comment. The conditions are philosophical, the implications theological. The philosophical conditions of grasping and affirming the distinction of different kinds of opposites lie, as we have seen, in differentiating consciousness from knowledge and in distinguishing the duality of consciousness from the duality of knowledge. The implications appear when one asks what concretely and existentially enables one, not to grasp and affirm the distinction of the opposites, but to live in the integrity of the dialectic of contraries. The source of this integrity is supernatural. It is grace as healing a distortion, and grace as elevating a person to habitual schemes of recurrence in one's inclinations and actions, schemes beyond the capacity of unaided nature. More precisely, it is grace that heals precisely because it elevates. It can be spoken of only in the special categories that constitute one's discourse as properly theological. Jung penetrated to the region of existence where the mystery of the supernatural is at work, but he not only failed to acknowledge the theological intelligibility of this realm, but, it seems, also chose to set up and establish an alternate intelligibility rooted in nature and in nature

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alone. Epistemological factors surely are part of the difficulty, for Jung never transcended his Kantian presuppositions. But more radical still is an existential factor that will not submit to a divinely originated resolution of the problem of human integrity. My intention here has been primarily to mine the resources in Jungian insights for a psychological complement to Lonergan's intentional self-appropriation. It was through exposure to a Jungian maieutic of the psyche that I was able to develop the notion of psychic conversion. That notion is fundamental to the position on dialectic that is so crucial to the argument of this book. But equally fundamental to that position are Lonergan's explications of intellectual, moral, and religious conversion, and these are what make it possible that a theological appropriation of Jungian psychology be, not wholesale, but critical, dialectical, and normative. If I have been able to establish such a conclusion, then the purpose of this chapter has been realized, and it remains only to indicate in brief compass the positive fruit of such an appropriation. First, then, Jung's flnalistic understanding of the psyche can easily be integrated with our position on the dual nature of the data of interiority. The sensitive psyche has a finality that is an upwardly directed dynamism to participation in the operations of inquiry and understanding, reflection and judgment, deliberation and decision, and in the dynamic state of being in love in intimacy, in the community, and with God. Second, the quality of psychic life also has an effect, positive or negative, on the ease and alacrity with which our intentional operations are performed; and, as we saw in previous chapters, Jung's notion of the complexes displays a quite accurate and effective understanding of the psychic component of human performance. Moreover, it can easily be sublated into a theology of moral impotence and the need for grace. Third, Jung's insights into the transformation of psychic energy through the catalytic agency of symbolic process can be employed theologically to enrich our understanding of the love that meets us'in our darkness, elevates us to new schemes of recurrence, and heals our contorted energies so as to make us God's work of art. Fourth, Jung's discussion of the archetypes specifies Lonergan's generic discussion of the orientation of sensitive consciousness to mystery, even as the latter discussion provides a criterion for distinguishing the archetypal from the anagogic and for discriminating in the realm of the transpersonal what is mystery from what is myth. Finally, Jung's locating of the psyche as mediating the tension of spirit and matter is of extraordinary significance for the resolution of the basic dialectic of contraries constitutive of the human subject. Moreover, it specifies not only the theological or superstructural but also the religious

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and infrastructural significance of the cultural phenomenon of psychotherapeutic praxis. For this dialectic is the set of processes intended by the theological special categories of integrity, concupiscence, sin, and conversion; and naming the psyche's participation in this dialectic specifies the manner in which psychic analysis can mediate something of an appropriation of the mystery of divine grace. Our purpose here has been to set forth the basic considerations pertinent to a critical appropriation of Jungian insights. We have concentrated throughout this discussion on the psychological complement to Lonergan's contributions. There is a potential psychological complement to Lonergan's intentionality analysis; it is a needed complement; it grounds the positions of this book. The intention behind this section of the book has been to set forth this complement as fully as possible. To meet that intention I have indicated the resources in Jung's thought relevant to the appropriation of this psychological complement. If I have also subjected Jung to dialectical criticism, it is only in the interest of clarifying what really is the integral dialectic of the subject in which my other systematic and hermeneutical positions are grounded.

PART T H R E E

Social Values and the Dialectic of Community

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11 Cosmopolis and the Dialectic of Community

i

Theology as Cosmopolis

Theology is an intellectual ministry to the church, evoking the church as servant of God in the world. But it is also a dimension of the church's ministry in the situation itself, and so in the 'world' conceived as a theological reality and understood in theological terms. In both capacities, as servant of the church and as a dimension of the church's servanthood before God in the world, living theology, which is coincident with the Christian thinker growing to the reflective and self-appropriating stature of'the subject in Christ Jesus,'1 will itself be marked by the sign of the servant, exercised under the standard of the cross, carried out within the horizon constituted by the theologian's own assent to the invitation to participate in the divinely originated solution to the problem of evil. Thus it will be a function of redemptive love at work in the situation, mediating the transition to an alternative situation that approximates more closely the rule of God in human affairs. The theologian, no less than any other minister of the new covenant in the blood of Jesus, stands under the injunction to 'proclaim the message and, welcome or unwelcome, insist on it. Refute falsehood, correct error, call to obedience — but do all with patience and with the intention of teaching' (2 Timothy 4.10-2). Thus the personal developments discussed in the preceding part of this book are incumbent in a particular manner on the theologian. Moreover, a methodical theology grounded in the concrete but explanatory selfappropriation of the theologizing subject would provide foundations for a reorientation of the human sciences, and such a reorientation would be

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an integral component in the movement from the present situation to an alternative state of affairs. The personal developments at the root of our discussion thus are relevant also to the practitioners of human science. By a methodical theology I mean one whose practitioners 'submit their cognitive, affective, moral, religious, and Christian consciousness to explanatory differentiation in the mode of interiority, thereby recovering with structural precision the path and the immanent intelligibility of their own search for direction in the movement of life, and [whose practitioners] ground their theology in the discoveries they have made and verified along that path.'2 The preceding part of this book presented a complement to Lonergan's contributions to such self-appropriation. But I want to take a further step and to argue that a methodical theology should be regarded as foundational of the church's intellectual ministry as a whole in the world. The present part of this book is devoted to presenting this argument, and it will do so in the context of a discussion of the dialectic of community. Intellectual ministry, like all other ecclesial ministries, will be constituted by the law of the cross. More specifically, it will be a theologically and religiously transformed exercise or implementation of the mentality, the development of consciousness, that Lonergan calls cosmopolis (7:23842); and Lonergan says of'the chief characteristic of cosmopolis': 'It is not easy. It is not a dissemination of sweetness and light, where sweetness means sweet to me, and light means light to me' (7:241). The origins of resistance to the standpoint of cosmopolis lie in that distortion of personal development that Lonergan calls general bias, and so a study of general bias must be central in our present argument. 'It is by moving with that bias rather than against it, by differing from it slightly rather than opposing it thoroughly, that one has the best prospect of selling books and newspapers, entertainment and education' (7:241—42). One of the allies in offsetting the implications of general bias is said to be 'dialectical analysis' (7:242), and our present purpose is to contribute precisely to this agent of resistance to decline. '... the refusal of insight betrays itself; the Babel of our day is the cumulative product of a series of refusals to understand; and dialectical analysis can discover and expose both the series of past refusals and the tactics of contemporary resistance to enlightenment' (7:242). But cosmopolis undergoes a religious and theological transformation (see 7:633) because, among the dimensions of the divinely originated solution to the problem of evil, and so among the constitutive features of a new law on earth liberating humanity for an existence that both transcends the vicissitudes of imperial order and disorder and transforms the situations to which the law of empire gives rise into the conditions for

357 Cosmopolis and the Dialectic of Community

an alternative form of existence, is an intellectual collaboration committed to an understanding of the whole of reality in the light of the accepted solution. Christian and theological transcendence of imperial vicissitudes is not to be understood as withdrawal from historical responsibility, but as quite the opposite. Cosmopolis 'is concerned with the fundamental issue of the historical process. Its business is to prevent practicality from being short-sightedly practical and so destroying itself (7:239). It ... has to witness to the possibility of ideas being operative without [the backing of pressure or force] ... The business of cosmopolis is to make operative the ideas that, in the light of the general bias of common sense, are inoperative. In other words, its business is to break the vicious circle of an illusion: men will not venture on ideas that they grant to be correct, because they hold that such ideas will not work unless sustained by desires or fears; and, inversely, men hold that such ideas will not work, because they will not venture on them and so have no empirical evidence that such ideas can work and would work. (7:239) Theology, then, belongs to an intellectual collaboration that would understand the whole of reality, and especially 'the fundamental issue of the historical inprocess' (7:239) solution to the problem of evil. The divinely originated solution does not, of course, change the fact: the intellectual committed to a reversal of personal, cultural, and social distortion can indeed figure on suffering injustice. And the same intellectual will agree with the fundamental Platonic insight that it is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice.3 But beyond these realities already known to the pagan mind (as Eric Voegelin has seen more clearly than any other) through the divine grace of the theophanic events that lie at the foundations of Greek philosophy, there is the specific uniqueness of the law of the cross, through which one moves from the hell of private suffering through the bliss of the day whose light cannot be extinguished, to the night of the suffering of compassion and forgiveness. Everyone called to the ministry of the community of the suffering servant of God, including the Christian intellectual, is invited to share in this privilege of grace, to exercise this redemptive love through which alone the problem of evil is transcended. It is to this enterprise of redemptive love that theology itself belongs, and it is to an intellectual collaboration that would understand all things in the light of the divinely originated solution that theology makes its proximate contribution. In the present chapter, we will attempt to understand why such an intellectual collaboration is a necessary constitutive dimension of ecclesial

358 Theology and the Dialectics of History

ministry, and what are the major responsibilities of such a collaboration in our day. We will do this in the context of an interpretation of what Bernard Lonergan means by the dialectic of community. In setting forth an understanding of this dialectic, which is our major objective in this chapter, we are here providing the heuristic structure not only for understanding the vocation of Christian theology, but also for deriving a set of general categories within such a theology, categories that would enable that theology to understand Christian doctrine in the light of an understanding of history. *

Dramatic Artistry and the Search for Direction

We begin with a fundamental assumption already argued fairly extensively in the previous part of the book, namely, that the deepest desire of the human person, the desire whose fulfilment would bring one the greatest contentment with having had the opportunity to live at all, no matter what the cost in personal suffering, is the desire to succeed in the drama of existence by finding and holding to the direction that can be discovered in the movement of life. I wish to unite this assumption with the notion of dramatic artistry. The successful prosecution of the fundamental task set by human existence, that of finding and holding to the direction that can be found but also missed and lost in the movement of life, entails so forging, or more precisely so cooperating with God in God's forging, the materials that constitute one's life, as to make of one's world, one's relations with others, and concomitantly oneself, a work of art, God's work of art (Ephesians 2.10). The notion of dramatic artistry (/: 187-89) is central to my understanding of the humanum. I do not claim that it has the same centrality in Lonergan's work, though in fact it may.4 So deep is the desire for dramatic artistry that the most offensive characteristic of an oppressive set of social structures is that, by depriving people of the basic vital values meeting vital needs, such structures remove the conditions of the possibility of satisfying the deeper desire and pattern experience in such a way that the prosecution of this desire becomes impossible. For this desire is fulfilled by discovering through insight and following with resolve the direction that is to be found in the movement of life; and this direction can also be missed, and missing the direction may be a function radically, not of one's own doing, but of the dominance of distorted dialectics of culture and community (see 7:218). Now society constitutes the context for the project of dramatic artistry, and is as well the recipient of the results of this project. And so we must move from our discussion of the dialectic of the subject to the related

359 Cosmopolis and the Dialectic of Community

dialectic of community, and we will do so by disengaging the constitutive elements of society. 3

The Elements of Society

'Society' is a broad generic term encompassing several more specific features or dimensions. David Tracy has discussed three such components: the technoeconomic order, the polity, and culture.5 I would offer several qualifications to Tracy's discussion. First, while we do commonly speak of a technoeconomic order that is concerned with the organization and allocation of goods and services and with the occupational and stratification systems of the society,6 this language is not precise enough for our present purposes. We have learned from Karl Marx that technological institutions (the 'forces of production') should be differentiated from the economic system (the 'relations of production'). The term, technoeconomic order, conflates two dimensions of social reality that should be distinguished. Second, however, my affirmation of Marx's distinction does not extend to his maintaining that the tension between forces and relations of production is the constitutive dialectic of social process.7 We will develop this point at length later, but by way of anticipation let me say that, to the extent that the dialectic of the forces and relations of production, or of technology and the economy, is a reality, it is a dialectic within practicality, and that there is a more basic dialectic between practicality as a whole and a more spontaneous and indeed primordial intersubjectivity. Third, this dimension of intersubjectivity must itself be added to the list of the constitutive elements of society. It is particularly crucial for, because partly constitutive of, the dialectic of community itself. As Jiirgen Habermas has argued in a brilliant essay on Marx's relationship to Hegel, Marx neglected the constitutive function of non-instrumental interaction in the formation or distortion of the basic social dialectic. 'Marx had rediscovered [the] connection [posited by the young Hegel] between labor and interaction in the dialectic of the forces of production and the relations of production ... However, a precise analysis of the first part of the German Ideology reveals that Marx does not actually explicate the interrelationship of interaction and labor, but instead, under the unspecific title of social praxis, reduces the one to the other, namely: communicative action to instrumental action.'8 This neglect, as will be argued in some detail below, decisively amputates Marx's understanding of the structure of society, and accounts in large part, I believe, for the social distortions that have been erected on the basis of adherence to and interpretation of Marx. Spontaneous human intersubjectivity will never

360 Theology and the Dialectics of History

be adequately understood in terms of 'class,' nor even by understanding the relations among the other elements of society here enumerated: technology, economic systems, politics, and culture. It is a distinct dimension, and is in fact the primordial base of all human community, including that of classes. When approached in general terms, it seems, Lonergan says, almost 'too obvious to be discussed or criticized, too closely linked with more elementary processes to be distinguished sharply from them.' Lonergan describes it as follows: The bond of mother and child, man and wife, father and son, reaches into a past of ancestors to give meaning and cohesion to the class or tribe or nation. A sense of belonging together provides the dynamic premise for common enterprise, for mutual aid and succour, for the sympathy that augments joys and divides sorrows. Even after civilization is attained, intersubjective community survives in the family with its circle of relatives and its accretion of friends, in customs and folk-ways, in basic arts and crafts and skills, in language and song and dance, and most concretely of all in the inner psychology and radiating influence of women. Nor is the abiding significance and efficacy of the intersubjective overlooked, when motley states name themselves nations, when constitutions are attributed to founding fathers, when image and symbol, anthem and assembly, emotion and sentiment are invoked to impart an elemental vigour and pitch to the vast and cold, technological, economic, and political structures of human invention and convention. Finally, as intersubjective community precedes civilization and underpins it, so also it remains when civilization suffers disintegration and decay. (7:212) Intersubjective spontaneity, then, must be acknowledged as having an autonomously constitutive role in the set of fundamental processes from which social events take their origin. The developments that flow from this particular ground of human affairs must be understood in more differentiated terms than any class theory of society would permit. Again, Lonergan has shown us how to appeal to the dialectic of performance and concept, to the inconsistency of theory and praxis, as a way of bringing a corrective to bear upon inadequate theory. From this standpoint, then, the very praxis of those operating from a class theory, the way in which they appeal to intersubjectivity as an autonomously cohesive bond of groups that they would unite also on the basis of common practical interests, convictions, tasks, and problems, is not adequately accounted for by the class theory itself. There is a dimension of human togetherness that is more basic than practicality, and that

361 Cosmopolis and the Dialectic of Community

operates in dialectical tension with practicality. The very success of practical endeavors depends in the long run on the successful negotiation of the autonomous source of social events that is found in primordial intersubjective responses. The praxis of Marxist revolutionaries can easily be seen to appeal to this autonomous factor, while their theory does not acknowledge it in its autonomous dynamics and laws. Furthermore, to attempt to implement a narrowly conceived class theory of society in the constitution of a human social order is only to further the very distortion of the scale of values from which such an attempt originates in the first place. Sooner rather than later it will lead to a neglect of the intersubjective as an autonomous source of social reality that must be included in social planning, and from this neglect, more than from anything else, we can account for the monstrous destructiveness that seems to attend many Marxist transformations of social structures, no matter to what extent the transformation may also introduce needed changes in the more practical, institutional dimensions of society. Only to the extent that such a distortion is effectively operative in the minds and hearts of both theoreticians and managers can any society be understood exclusively in the terms provided by a class theory. Moreover, only a society that itself is sick at the core will understand itself exclusively in terms of class struggle, ignoring the autonomous, independent dynamics of intersubjective spontaneity. Now it is a fundamental principle of the reorientation of human science that we would promote by implementing the integral heuristic structure of proportionate being that reaches articulation in Lonergan's work that one must begin not by understanding diseased entities but by conceiving what would make for human flourishing in the diverse areas that the human sciences study. On the basis of this option, we must say that, unless we wish to risk the fundamental mistake of converting facts, which in the social order always are partly intelligible and partly absurd (7:230), into normative grounds for further procedure, thus rendering each successive synthesis less comprehensive than its predecessor, we had better get straight from the outset what are the essential constitutive elements of the social reality whose structure will form a major set of categories in our attempt to construct a contemporary systematic theology. Finally, then, society is composed of five distinct but interrelated elements: intersubjective spontaneity, technological institutions, the economic system, the political order, and culture. Culture, moreover, has two dimensions: the everyday level of meanings and values informing a given way of life, and the reflexive or superstructural level arising from scientific, philosophic, and scholarly objedifications.9 In either instance it is a matter of the meaning constitutive of a way of life. Our task now becomes one of understanding the manner in which these

362 Theology and the Dialectics of History

five elements would be related to one another in the conion of a healthy society. 4

Dramatic Artistry and the Structure of Society

The first step in answering the question of how the elementsslated to one another involves establishing the relation between tldividual project of dramatic artistry in the constitution of the hi world, human relations, and the self, on the one hand, and the stre of the society in which the individual must operate, on the other htiow the five elements constitutive of social reality are in fact related t 359. 364-86, 390; and of subject, 75-76, 179-80, 185-86, 204, 23!-39, 358-59. 362-67, 4!5. 459, 501, 518, 521; and injustice, 97, 101 — 103; and Marxism, 387— 417 Dialectic of culture, 11, 89, 118, 145— 47. !49> 295-98, 382, 419-2Q, 43639. 459, 478-79, 500-26, 649-53 Dialectic of subject, 70—77, 93, 145— 47, 179—85, 204, 211; and conversion, 654; foundational, 147-49, 161, 466-67, 648 Differentiations of consciousness, 43— 44, 171-72, 402, 529-36; and conversion, 171—76; and culture, 536—40, 551—52; and modes of constitutive meaning, 540—48; and realms of meaning, 581 Discernment, 43, 84, 87—88, 92, 201, 29!-94, 549. 557; and depth psychology, 43, 215, 221, 230, 358-59 Dramatic artistry, 54-55, 71-73, 105, 181-84, 206, 358-59, 362-64, 399-402,517,652-53 Dramatic bias, 34, 182, 233—35, 241 Dreams, 46, 58—60, 85, 184, 219, 237, 260—62, 266—76, 288, 299—302, 319-20, 324, 346, 635, 654-57, 666-78

Duality of consciousness: and duality of knowledge, 77—82, 350, 44142; and hermeneutics, 566—68; and reorientation of human science, 636-37; and reorientation of Marxism, 94 Dulles, A., 120-21, 689 Dunne, J., 114, 244, 682, 685, 689, 6 97-98, 7°4 Ecological crisis, 511,516 Ecological differentiation, 533, 543, 545-46, 552 Economic system, economy, 95, 99, 101—106 Election, times of, 57—58, 87-88 Eliot, T.S., 230, 245, 289, 697—98, 700-701 Embodiment, 61-63 Emergent probability: in nature and history, 511 — 12, 658, 668; of meaning, 594, 597, 658 Erikson, E., 48 Evil: and scale of values, 113; Jung on, 332—49. See also Dialectic of contradictories Expression, levels and sequences of, 576-84, 587, 590, 628 Feelings: and authenticity, 85; and intentional operations, see Operations; and symbols, see Symbols; and values, 27-28, 55-59, 86-87, 94, 209, 248-49, 252, 260, 261, 634, 667; development of, 54, 56, 5859; intentional, 28, 56, 209; nonintentional, 28; self-transcendence of, 50—53. See also Affections Finality, 620-23 — vertical, 31,47; of psyche, 47-49; of unconscious, 74 Flanagan,]., 715

725

Index

Fletcher, F., 683, 718 Foundations: aesthetic dimension of, 167—69, 257; and categories, 7-9, 140, 143-44, 45!~57. 647-53; and conversion, see Conversion; and interiorly differentiated consciousness, see i.d.c.; and method of correlation, 452—57; and psychic conversion, see Psychic conversion, foundational; and religiously differentiated consciousness, see r.d.c.; and situation, 15, 139, 141 — 43; and systematics, 7—8, 140, 149; for Lonergan, 9, 161-62; in theology, 6; theological, of interdisciplinary collaboration, 6, 635— 36; twofold, 140, 143-44, 637-47; of psychology, 212, 257. (See also Depth psychology, reorientation of) Freire, P., 38-41, 685 Freud, S., 34, 59, 101, 156, 158, 161, 213, 231, 234, 265, 270-71, 298304, 306-307, 309-13, 315-16, 318, 328, 338, 395-96, 466, 635, 644—47, 650, 652, 660, 664, 693 Frye, N., 280, 297, 701—702, 714, 719

67. 373-74. 422-23. 433' 437-38. 459. 467. 473. 477-78, 495-96, 500-502, 504, 506, 525, 556 Good: and being, 263, 481, 491, 555— 56; and evil, see Dialectic of contradictories and Dialectic of contraries; human, 10, 176, 207—10, 214, 667—68; transformation of notion of human, 485—92 Gouldner, A.W., 393, 416-17, 708, 709 Grace: and development from above, 32, 636; and dialectic of subject, 146-47, 186, 242-53, 521-24, 654; and intelligibility of history, 144, 521—24; and interiorly differentiated consciousness, 95; and religious conversion, 36—37; and reorientation of human science, 636— 37; and soteriological constitutive meaning, 90, 486, 546-48, 55658; and unity in tension of consciousness, 9; communication of willingness, 198-99; sanctifying, and love, 51 Group bias, 34, 94, 102, 105, 182-83, 233-35. 37°. 391. 393-94. 4°6, 410 Gutierrez, G., 710

Gadamer, H.-G., 707 Habermas, J., 359, 414—15, 684, 685, Gandhi, M., 678 705, 706, 707, 709 General bias, 34—35, 94, 102, 105, 6 Haight, R., 689 181-83, 208, 233-35, 35 -57. Haughton, R., 682, 684, 685, 686, 366-67, 370-77, 384, 391, 393-94. 689-90 410,417,434-35,474,513 Healing: of psyche, 53, 62, 238—39; of Genuineness: and dialectic, 82—85; subjects and community, 176. See and duality of consciousness, 80, also Healing and creating, Vector(s) 83; and feelings, 87; law of, 74-75, Healing and creating, 31-33, 174—76, 188—89; norms of, and postmod242—53, 676. See also Vector(s) ern option, 6. See also Authenticity Hegel, G.W.F., 11, 20, 156-57, 264, Gilkey, L., 285, 701, 706 Global context of situation, 97-98, 299. 31Q. 462-63, 465, 592-93, 597-98, 615, 660 125, 158, 169-70, 275-76, 365-

726 Index Heidegger, M., 11, 213, 295, 597, 670, 672, 701, 702, 717, 719 Held, D., 706 Hengel, M., 133, 690 Hermeneutics: as ontology, 592—629; Lonergan's, 561—91, 615-28 Hillman,J., 698 Historical consciousness, 26, 154,48991; and transposition of Catholic theology, 4-5 Historicity, and norms, 26, 460—65, 490-91 History: and anthropological meaning, 510—12, 516; dialectical, 10, 11, 14, 144, 158, 369, 443; loss of, as form of order, 515-18; systematics as theory of, 5-7, 10—11, 14, 358; transcendental (heuristic) structure of, 14, 16; two types of (Voegelin), 393-94 Hobbes, T., 520, 715 Hope, 203, 517-18 Hopkins, G.M., 49 Horkheimer, M., 706 Human science, reorientation of, 366— 67. 377-86, 495, 505, 636-37. See also Theology, interdisciplinary involvement of Humanum, 37—38, 40, 358, 515, 661 Ideology, 474, 476; and scale of values, 436 Ignatius Loyola, 57-58, 87-88 Imperialism, 37, 97, 112, 116—18, 146, 172, 203, 206, 365, 373, 390, 397, 412-15,422,432-33.459.474.477. 479. 513. 539-40, 650-51 Individual bias, 34, 182—83, 233—35 Individuation, 274, 296, 308, 310, 313, 315-16, 318, 324, 327, 330, 336, 344-45. 5°9. 663

Infrastructure of society, 95, 97-99, 101 — 103, 1 5^> 17°» 206, 210, 365-67, 394-98, 434, 474, 494-95. 505. S37-38 Insight, 21-24; and liberation, 39-40; and social change, 103-105; core element in primary process, 646 Instrumentalization of life and reason, 98, 105-107, 146, 234-35, 366~ 6 7. 369-70' 377. 39°. 392, 401. 415-16, 474, 482, 497-98, 505, 510, 513-17, 519-20, 539. 542-43. 545 Integrator and operator, 280-81, 297, 345—46, 442—43, 663. See also Operator Integrity: and authenticity, 93; and foundations, 162; affective, 55, 58 Intellectual conversion, 35—37, 47, 59, 79, 141-42, 162-64, 249-50, 508, 549, 596 Intentionality: and psyche, 46—48, 170—71, 211—21, 263—66, 284, 508, 510, 522-24, 636—37; and transcendence, 89; defined, 46, 214, 225 Intentionality analysis: as ground of psychic analysis, 44—45, 48, 278, 514, 664-80; complementing and complemented by depth psychology, 64, 171, 263-66, 508-509 Interiorly differentiated consciousness, 43—45, 65, 98, 111, 140—42, 144, 173, 213, 218-19, 367, 441, 452-57. 464. 480, 5°4-5°5. 5°7. 514, 526-28, 530, 532, 535, 540, 543. 552, 657, 660. See also Selfappropriation Intersubjectivity: and basic social dialectic, 34-35, 94-95. 97-99.

727 Index 101-106, 359-61, 364-67, 379, 390, 415. See also Dialectic of community Jacobs, J., 695 Jaspers, K., 487, 531, 533, 625, 715 John of the Cross, 336 Judgment, 21—25; and liberation, 40; of value, 30; true, and objectivity, 24 Jung, C.G., 53, 222, 228, 231, 240, 241, 270—72, 274—81, 283, 288, 294» 295-352, 635, 650-51, 655, 658-69, 671, 675-78, 686, 697, 700-705, 718, 719 Kant, I., 25, 167, 455, 660—61 Kierkegaard, S., 142, 279, 296, 660, 690, 698, 700 Knowing: knowledge and looking, 35—36; Lonergan on, 20—26, 3536 Kohut, H., 693 Kojeve, A., 156-57, 465—66, 712

77-78, 80-82, 84-89, 94, 102-103, 106, 114-15, 120-24, 134, 13940, 149-63, 165-67, 170-71, 17375> 177, !79> 185, 189, 193, 197, 199, 207, 211-13, 2 2 1 — 2 2 , 226-28, 232-34, 239, 254-60, 262-64, 273, 276, 278-79, 285-86, 288, 295-96, 298-99, 302-305, 310,

332,346,350-52, 356' 358, 360-61, 364, 366, 373-75, 377, 379, 381, 384,391-92, 394,406,410-11,415, 422, 427, 440-41, 444, 447, 46064, 466, 468, 470, 481, 483, 485, 49°, 5°2, 5°6> 5°8, 520, 525, 529-3°, 535, 537, 539, 544- 549552-53, 56i-93, 595-98, 608, 611-12, 615-38, 640-45, 647-50, 652, 656-65, 667-69, 672, 676— 77, 680-701, 704-706, 709—19 Love: and belief, 164-65; and grace, 51; and healing, 31—32, 41, 140, 238-39, 242—53; and the word, 164—65; dialectical attitude of, 202; Lonergan on, 30-33, 41, 51, 87

Lamb, M., 687, 690, 699, 700, 707 Machiavelli, N., 383-84, 707 Lasch, C., 693 Manifestation, prior to proclamation, Lawrence, F., 494, 693, 707, 714 165 Lernoux, P., 710 Marx, K., Marxist analysis, 11, 34, 93— Liberalism, 474-76 94, 101, 103-107, 117, 156, 158, Liberation: aesthetic, 181-83; theolo208-209, 359, 361, 374, 387-417, gy of, 12, 38, 421-39, 467-68 427-28, 466-68, 474-77, 481Limitation and transcendence, 72, 82— 82, 484, 552, 555-56, 647, 652 Maslow, A., 57 84, 86-87, 89-91, 95, MS- i?1. 180, 183, 186-88, 266-67, 284, May, R., 635 McMurtry, J., 398, 413, 708 288-91, 293, 379-80, 397-98, 400-401, 415, 442-43, 484, 503, McShane, P., 690 Meaning: acts of, 298, 300-301, 566— 511-12, 545, 595, 637, 645, 64953, 663-64,671, 673 67, 573-75' 594-99, 601-602, 612-14; carriers of, 485, 579-80; Loewe, W., 689, 695 Lonergan, B., 3-5, 7-16, 19-41, 42constitutive, 4, 11—13, 446-52, 57, 59-60, 62, 64-68, 70-73, 75, 567, 574, 601, 612—14, 667, 677;

728

Index

control of, 213, 216—17, 659, 661; core of, 575-76' 594. 599' 601—602, 608; elemental (potential), 165, 298-301, 303-304, 566, 573, 612-14, 632-33, 635, 65380; formal and full, 566—67, 57374, 601, 612—14, 667, 677; functions of, 259, 544-45. 574-75' 582, 638; realms of, 267, 531, 552, 581—84, 664; sources of, 572—73; stages of, 581—84, 597, 600, 657— 63; terms of, 298, 566, 575, 596-99, 601—602, 612—14; world mediated by, 163 Mechanomorphic constitutive meaning, 146, 505, 511-13, 520, 54143 Mediation: of immediacy, 263—66; theological, from present to future, 3 Merleau-Ponty, M., 466 Metaxy, 150—51, 167, 520 Methodical exigence, 581 Ministry, 108—35, 153> theology as, 355-58, 377, 385-86, 418-21, 437-38, 457, 469-7°. 525 Modern scientific differentiation of consciousness, 534 Moore, S., 682, 695, 698 Moral conversion, 36—37, 59, 140, 142, 248-49, 549 Moral impotence, 140, 177, 197—98, 201, 227-28, 239-42,331 Mumford, L., 37, 661—62, 685, 707, 714,718 Mystery, 61, 123-24, 192-95, 285, 325, 512-13, 568, 620-26, 63132 Myth, 91, 123-24, 192-95. S^-iS, 568, 626, 631—32 Narcissism, 235, 693

Neo-Thomism, 154 Neumann, E., 531, 715 Nietzsche, F., 156, 158, 213, 218, 463, 466, 494, 555, 652 Nihilism, 5, 11, 459-67, 543, 555, 652 Notion of being, differentiations of, 295-98, 594-602, 608, 625—28 Obediential potency, 200, 564 Objectivity: absolute, 24; of judgment of value, 30; and looking, 35; position on, 24—25 Ogden, S., 119, 689 Ontology of meaning, 11, 568—69, 592-629, 657-80 Operations, intentional, higher integration of psychic process, 44— 49. 53-54. 83-84, 214, 222-26, 302,510,645 Operator: of intentional development, 567, 631-32, 659, 663, 676; of linguistic development, 578, 58084; of psychic development, 56768, 631, 659, 663-64, 676; psychic, differentiations of, 631-32, 654, 656-57, 659. See also Integrator and operator Opposition, two kinds of, 9-10, 68, 70-71 Orientation(s): and dialectic of subject, 73-75. 180-85, 196-97; and feelings, 209; psychology of, 212, 214, 218-20, 281-84, 286, 667 Otto, R., 343 Partnership, 275, 518-21, 535, 547 Pattern(s): of experience, 38—39, 267, 566, 664, 668; dramatic, 54, 71—73, 171, 180-85 Paul, St, 509 Perry, J.W., 702, 703

729

Index

Person: threefold constitution of, 267, 276, 282-83, 288-89; unity of, 191-92 Personal value: and differentiations of consciousness, 536—37; and postmodern option, 464; dialectical, 10, 11, 88, 93—95; foundational, 162, 527, 556; not self-grounding, 177— 79; social and cultural context of, 97-99, 160, 477-78, 494, 522-26 Plato, 6, 292, 357, 373, 438, 478-79, 485-88, 494, 496, 512, 626, 659, 679 Pneumopathology, and psychopathol°gy. 4g. 73. *i4-*5> 234-35' 281-84,514,519,522 Political philosophy, 474-84 Politics, 35, 95, 101-106,422-23,434, 436, 497 Popper, K., 388 Positivism, 411,416—17 Post-historic humanity, 37, 155—56, 217-18, 376, 466, 482-84, 49798, 504, 512, S^-1?. S^-ao. 531. 539-4°. 543' 55*, 661-62 Post-interiority mentality, 98, 170, !73. 213, 367, 381-82, 484, 498, 5°5. 536. 54° Postmodern option, 5—6, 153—58, 459-67. 660 Potency-form-act, 593—94, 609—15, 620, 622—27, 658, 660—63 Practicality: and social dialectic, 34— 35. 95. 98-99. 101-106, 364-67, 371—77, 379. See also Dialectic of community Praxis: and culture, 367—71; and technique, 390, 415—16; artistic paradigm of, 72, 101, 369-70, 390, 415, 652; conversion and socialtransformation notions of, 475, 481; Lonergan on, 444—45; norms

for, 26; of meaning, 602—609, 678— 80; of reign of God, 108-11, 119, 123, 125,417,457; theology as, 3-5, 11-12,444-70, 647 Prehistoric consciousness, 531-32 Progoff, I., 212, 695 Psyche: and grace, 123-25, 204, 211; and limitation, 89; and spirit, 211-21, 225, 263-66, 295-98, 30910; finality of, 47—49, 302, 310, 351; Lonergan on, 45; defined, 46, 214, 219, 225; in relation to organism and spirit, 55 Psychic conversion, 8-9, 42—63, 75; and affective conversion, 9; and the beautiful, 140; and categories, 640—42; and dialectic, 9, 16, 42, 64-65, 440-44; and the Enlightenment, 142; and grace, 160, 247; and hermeneutics, 303—304, 638— 47. 653-57; and intellectual conversion, 142—43, 164—69, 483— 84, 508, 661; and knowing, 86; and liberation, 61—62; and postmodern option, 466; and selfappropriation, 9, 42-43, 61, 65, 140—41, 160—61, 252, 262—63, 443. 5°8; and theology, 61, 65; and third stage of meaning, 661—63; and world culture, 650—53; as defensive circle, 142-43, 643, 654; defined, 9,59—61,85,142,185, 211, 251, 268, 646; foundational, 9, 14, 42-43, 89-90, 140-41, 637-47; twofold, 549—50 Psychic energy, 228—29,663-64,66671,677 Psychotherapy, goal of, 54, 61, 230— 31, 282 Question(s): for intelligence and reflection, 22, 24, 50; for delibera-

730 Index tion, 26—27, 30, 50; in primary process, 645-47 Rahner, K., 86, 123, 237,489, 688-89, 694-95,698,714 Rank, O., 660, 695 Reductionism, 101, 395—98 Reign (rule) of God, 4, 12, 99, 108-10, 119, 125, 133-34,447,451-52, 457, 469-70 Religious conversion, 36-37, 59, 140— 42, 164, 247, 548-49 Religious values: and integrity of historical process, 90, 93, 94, 99, 378, 380, 477—78; and world culture, 98, 478; as ground of personal value, 177—79, 186, 527—28, 537 (see also Value, relations among levels of) Religiously differentiated consciousness, 140—42, 452—57, 5*4 Repression: of complexes, 237—38; of search for direction, 515-20. See also Censorship Ressentiment, 14, 55—56, 175, 206, 389-9°, 5*7 Revelation, 546—48, 556—58 Revolution, 363—64 Ricoeur, P., 124, 288, 298-304, 310, 328-29, 395, 661, 664, 689, 701702, 708 Sala, G., 703 Scale of values, 10—11, 26—27, 29—30, 56,87,88-90,93-114, 117-19, 148-49,174-75, 206, 209-10, 37677. 387. 39L 394. 417. 433-34. 436,444,451-52,468,474,513-14, 522—24, 557—58; and categories, 10-11,93, 387,461; and dialectic, 5, 10-11, 14, 16, 118; and history,

10—11, 14, 93, 552—58; and option for poor, 421-24; and selftranscendence, 29—30, 56, 94, 209— 10, 476; and structure of society, 94—95. See also Value, relations among levels of Scheler, M., 14, 55 Schemes of recurrence, in nature and history, 511-12 Schillebeeckx, E., 108, 119, 133, 388— 89, 678, 688, 689, 690, 708, 719 Scholarly differentiation of consciousness, 534, 543 Schumpeter, J., 116, 413, 689 Schwartz-Salant, N., 693 Scotus, Duns, 455 Search for direction in movement of life, 43, 45-47, 53, 61, 161, 17174, 214-21, 230, 236-39, 260, 26566, 274-75, 282, 284—85, 291 — 92, 296, 346, 358-59, 362, 419, 422-23, 486-89, 505-31, 53335, 541-5°. 554-57, 645~47, 65253,667 Second immediacy, 20, 263—66 Segundo, J.-L., 421, 424—37, 710 Self, for Jung, 337-49 Self-affirmation of knower, 20—26, 535; and intellectual conversion, 35-36; as self-constitutive, 20, 23, 44, 47, 66-67, 79 Self-appropriation: and hermeneutics, 563, 570; and ministry, 170; and postmodern option, 459-67; and psychic conversion, 9, 43-45, 65, 140-42, 160—61, 508, 647; and task of culture, 33, 364; and world culture, 98, 169—70, 172-73, 505, 527-28; moral and religious, 262; a function of grace, 524-28. See also Interiorly differentiated consciousness

731

Index

Self-transcendence: cognitive, 24-25, 50; degrees of, 28—29, 49—50, 226—27; moral, 28—30, 50; of feelings, 29-30, 50-58, 94, 227-31, 239—42, 309. See also Authenticity Servant (suffering), 108—35, 203—206, 210, 292, 384-86, 437, 488, 55758 Shadow (Jung), 240, 313-14, 332-33' 344 Sin: and dialectics of community and culture, 521—24; and dialectic of subject, 73, 238, 240, 243-44, 331, 380,521-24,654 Situation: addressed and/or evoked by theology, 3-5, 37-38, 107-10, 139, 158, 275-76, 365-67, 383, 385-86, 422-23, 433, 451, 46970, 494, 501, 504-505, 513, 51516, 518, 528, 557-58; as theological source, 8, 12-16, 140, 143-44, 453-58 Social values: and postmodern option, 465; as dialectical, 10, 11, 88-89, 93-95 Society, structure of, 94—97, 359—64 Soteriological constitutive meaning, differentiation, 90, 147, 173, 175, 213, 215—16, 227—28, 247, 272—73, 292-93, 419-20, 438, 478-79, 484, 486-92, 502, 504-505, 50910, 514-18, 534, 541-44, 54648, 552,556-58, 648 Sources of theology, 8, 12-16, 453— 58, 561—62 Strauss, L., 26, 461, 463, 489-90, 712, 714 Subject: Lonergan on, 19-41,633-34; position on, foundational, 19, 33; turn to, 4, 25—26, 154—58 Sublation, 48-49, 83-84, 442-44, 663; of dream, 274, 668, 676-77

Suffering, 108-35; and healing love, 244—45, 516—17, 542; two forms of, 114—15, 125, 244—47, 357 Superstructure (of society), 6, 12, 15, 95-99. !56' 172. 206, 365-67, 381, 394-96, 398, 416-17, 434, 448-49, 474, 476, 505, 537-38 Suspicion, hermeneutics of, 154-58, 161,466,644-47,652-53 Symbols: 286-88; and feelings, 5859, 252, 260-61, 286, 634-35; and systematics, 65, 641; Freud and Jung on, 310—16; Ricoeur on, 299—304. See also Dreams Systematic exigence, 581-82 Systematics: and contemporary constitutive meaning, 158, 468—69; and doctrines, 7, 10, 16, 458; direct discourse, 7, 157-58, 447, 470; function of, 5, 7-8, 147, 457-58, 470; a theory of history, 5-7, 10, 14, 16, 108-10, 458, 468; proximate and ulterior objectives of, 46067, 469-70 Terrorism, 155-56, 465-66 Theology: and constitutive meaning, 5, 418—21; and praxis, see Praxis; and philosophy, 486—89; cooperation with God, 134, 524—26; interdisciplinary involvement of, 3, 6-7, 11-12, 14-15. 355-58, 378-79. 381, 385-86, 447-48; methodical, 356; phases of, 4, 7-8, 157-58, 256, 447, 470, 561-63, 637-47; transformative of culture, 500— SoG-SiS

Theoretic differentiation of consciousness, 511-12, 534, 543, 549 Time: and limitation-transcendence, 289; experience of, in cosmological

732

Index

and anthropological horizons, 510-12; psyche and, 670-74 Totalitarianism, 37, 117 Toulmin, S., 152—53, 159, 691 Tracy, D., 4, 119, 152-53, 285, 359, 385, 425, 450, 469, 681, 683, 689, 691,701,705,711,713 Tradition: and special categories, 449-50; as source in theology, 12, 140, 143-44, 453-575 horizon of retrieval of, 422-24; psychic conversion and appropriation of, 638-47 Transcendent differentiation of consciousness, 504—505, 516, 533— 34. 543-44. 546~49 Transcendent exigence, 581 Transcendentals, 99, 101, 529—30 Unconscious, 66, 305, 665 Universal viewpoint, 570—76, 584—89, 593. 627-28 Universal willingness, 55, 146, 185210, 486, 502 Value(s): and symbols, 260—63, 635; apprehension of, in feelings, see Feelings; notion of, 27; relations among levels of, 88—89, 95—97. 99-101, 109, 148-49, 178, 195-98, 209-10, 372, 422-24, 444, 467, 476-78, 495, 522-24, 556; terminal, 208-209. See also Cultural,

Personal, Religious, Social values, Scale of values Vector(s): from below (creative), 32, 41, 48, 55, 62, 162, 174-76. !78, 195—96, 221-26, 676; from above (healing), 32-33, 36, 48, 55, 62, 162, 174-76, 178, 195-96, 227-28, 242-53, 639, 676 Victimization, 177, 232-44, 523-24 Vision of love, 164—69 Voegelin, E., 45, 89, 99, 127-32, 21213, 156, 273-74, 282, 302, 357, 369, 39L 393. 394. 402, 459. 478-82, 484-85, 487-88, 504, 506, 512-13, 520-21, 534, 649, 685, 686, 687, 688, 690, 691, 695, 696, 701, 702, 706, 707, 712, 713, 714, 715, 716, 7!9 Von Balthasar, H.U., 155, 162, 16769. 4*9. 641. 692-93, 695, 709 Von Franz, M.-L., 704 Wellmer, A., 708 Woolger, R., 277-79, 7°°> 7O1 World-cultural humanity, 37—38, 98, 130—31, 156, 158, 160, 169, 173, 218, 259,305,365-66,373-74, 385, 418-39, 459, 464, 466, 477-84, 497-98, 5°5, 5*3. 527-28, 530, 536-38, 540, 547-48, 550-52, SS8, 650-53, 662 Zeller, M., 662,675,718