AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast

Why So Many Scholars Love Bernard Lonergan, SJ with Jonathan Heaps

There is a list of Jesuit giants through history you hear over and over. That list starts with Saint Ignatius and his companions, of course, then includes to other Jesuit saints and blesseds to more modern Jesuits who are often called by just one name: Rahner. Hopkins. De Lubac. Teilhard. Arrupe. Dulles. Ellacuria. Bergoglio. And today’s episode is about one more on this list: Lonergan. Bernard Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian who lived from 1904 to 1984. And to be honest, his work is intimidating. He was pretty clearly a genius and wrote volumes on volumes of work on topics like epistemology, the philosophy of science, economic and political theory, and so much more. His most significant work is a 1957 book called “Insight: A Study of Human Understanding.” Whatever Lonergan was up to during his life was so important that there are scores of scholars who devote their careers today to studying and responding to his work. Today’s guest is one of these scholars: Jonathan Heaps is the director of the Bernard J. Lonergan Institute at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, and the author of the recent book The Ambiguity of Being: Lonergan and the Problems of the Supernatural. Host Mike Jordan Laskey asked Jonathan to introduce Lonergan to us and explain why there is this whole cottage industry around Lonergan’s thought and why he’s still important today. Jon did a great job translating some of Lonergan’s big ideas into language even Mike could understand. We think you’ll enjoy the chance to get this accessible introduction to one of the most influential North American Jesuits ever. Jonathan Heaps: https://www.jonathanheaps.com/ Lonergan Institute: https://www.shu.edu/lonergan/ AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. www.jesuits.org/ www.beajesuit.org/ twitter.com/jesuitnews facebook.com/Jesuits instagram.com/wearethejesuits youtube.com/societyofjesus www.jesuitmedialab.org/

Duration:: 52m
Broadcast on:: 24 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

[Music] From the Jesuit Media Lab, this is AMDG. I'm Mike Jordan-Lasky. I've been working with the Jesuits for five and a half years now, and I've learned that there is a list of Jesuit giants through history that you hear over and over. The list starts with Saint Ignatius and his companions, of course, and then it includes other Jesuits, saints, and blessings. People like Saint Peter Kinesius and Saint Aloysius Gonzaga. It moves up to more modern Jesuits, who are sometimes just called by one name, like Hopkins, the poet, Bronner, Dulubak, Teard, theologians, Arupe, Dalis, church leaders, Eyekoria, Martyr, Bergoglio, he's the pope. Anyway, today's episode is about one more on this list, Lonergan. Bernard Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian who lived from 1904 until 1984, and to be honest, I find him extremely intimidating. He was pretty clearly a genius and wrote volumes upon volumes of work on topics I will never understand, stuff like epistemology and the philosophy of science, economic and political theory, and so much more. His most significant work is a 1957 book called Insight, a study of human understanding. Anyway, whatever Lonergan was up to during his life was so important that there are scores of scholars today who devote their careers to studying and responding to his work. My guest today is one of these scholars, Jonathan Heaps, and he's the director of the Bernard J. Lonergan Institute at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. He's also the author of the recent book, The Ambiguity of Being, Lonergan and the Problems of the Supernatural. I asked John to introduce Lonergan to us and explain why there is this whole cottage industry around Lonergan's thought and why he's still important today. I think John did a great job of translating some of Lonergan's big ideas into language even I could begin to understand at least. I enjoyed the chance to get this accessible introduction to one of the most influential North American Jesuits ever. You can subscribe to AMDG wherever you get podcasts, and thanks for joining us. Well, Dr. Jonathan Heaps, welcome to AMDG. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you? I'm good. Thanks so much for having me. I'm really excited to ask you about Bernard Lonergan S.J., who's this Jesuit I've heard about a lot since I started working for the Jesuits five years ago. I have Wikipediaed him, and I've seen that he seems like he's a smart dude who is important in philosophy and theology and even economics and a lot of stuff. I've been trying to read about him but struggled to find a way to get in. I even asked you, "Hey, is there a good primer I can read?" You said, "No, none of them are good." I said, "Okay." Sorry all my colleagues who've tried to write primer. No, he's just like a dense, he's clearly like a guy again who's like, as you said before, we started recording a jet engine brain or just a lot going on. They are dense, can be challenging. I've heard him so much. He seems like he's worth kind of learning about, and I thought maybe our listeners would also be interested. We're going to try, despite the fact that he's obviously challenging to introduce people to in a limited way, we're going to do that in like a 45-minute podcast, at least hopefully get people interested, and then maybe they can pursue that interest. Yeah, came on. Yeah, so maybe we could start just like with a little, who is this guy, a little biographical sketch, and then we'll kind of get into kind of his ideas and why he's important. So tell us a little bit about Bernard Lonergan. Yeah, Lonergan was born in Canada in 1904, and he ultimately enters the Jesuits and is, even from a young age, you know, we have a couple people who've written some some biographical works on Lonergan, and it was clearly enormously until actually gifted. And he, sort of skipping over a little bit, he gets sent to Haythrop College to do scholastic philosophy basically. And he didn't love the stuff he was learning there, but he was game and was working on it. But again, he was just one of these people who the intellectual part of his person was really geared up. And so he, while he was getting his degree in philosophy, he also took outside degrees in mathematics and in classics at, I think, King's College in London. So I mean, this is the kind of guy we're dealing with, right? Voracious reader, voracious mind. After he finishes that, he goes back to Canada for a little while. And his superior essentially says, Hey, look, I know you want to do philosophy, but we really need people to teach theology. And so you're going to the Greg and Rome, and you're going to get a PhD in theology. And at the time, he wasn't super pleased about this. But in retrospect, he said it was a really wonderful thing, because it really forced him to engage more substantially with with Aquinas directly. Before that, he had been big into Newman. He liked a certain line on Plato, he was really into. And he, he sort of is forced to engage with Aquinas and not just engage with Aquinas on the sort of usual philosophical topics he would have had at that time in that context, but in a wider array of things. And so he writes his dissertation on grace and freedom in Aquinas. And the wild story there is he's almost got it done, or I should say he has it done. And he's, I think, scheduled to defend. And the Axis powers declare war on the crown. And he's a he's a subject of the crown because the Canadian so they hustle him out of Rome on a boat back to Canada. And he doesn't defend it for like maybe another five years or something until well after the war. And he does it by proxy with a bunch of members of the faculty at the seminary race teaching, I think immaculate conception. And he teaches there for a little while, he publishes a handful of articles on the inner word as an analogy for procession in the Trinity, which is this kind of pretty technical thing that he felt like a lot of people got wrong. And those have now been collected into a book called verbum word and idea in Aquinas. And he, after a while teaching in Canada, they ended up sending him back to the Gregorian to go teach theology. And he stays there for about 10 years, I think more or less 55 to 65. One of the limits in this part of the conversation is how bad I am with dates. And he teaches Christology and Trinity back and forth one year than the next one year than the next. And he makes some sort of scholastic textbooks. Classes were taught all in Latin at the time. So all his sort of ideas that he was thinking in English had to get worked out in Church Latin. And if people find him a little hard to get into now, they should know there's a long precedent for that because I think the stories were that his lectures would be really full the first class and then a little less full the second class and then a little less full. And about the fourth class, he would go, okay, we're ready to begin now. The few and the proud and the chosen had stuck it out. And he taught there for a while, but then in 64, so he's there for the start of the Second Vatican Council. But in 64, he has to hustle back to North America again, this time because he had given himself lung cancer, smoking cigarettes. In fact, we have a letter to his superior from earlier in his career where he sort of apologizes and he says, look, I'll try and quit these things if you want me to. But if if it's okay, I'd like an increase in my cigarette budget. He was getting kind of deep with him. So that that bill comes due in the mid 60s and he goes back to North America and has pretty serious surgery. I think he'd take a long out. And he thought he was going to die. And so he really hustles to get his the work folks probably have heard of method in theology, which I think came out in 72. That that comes out. And it's really something that he hustled to get finished because he thought he was at the end of his life. And Providence being weird, he ends up living another decade. And so there is this interesting kind of collection of works we have as well, of papers and things he wrote at the very end of his life. After method of theology came out, including when he had been a younger man during the Great Depression, he started tinkering with macroeconomics. He read as much as he could. He, you know, this is the time of the index. And so he had to get approval to get certain to get marks and things like that. And so he'd written this essay in macroeconomic analysis early in his life. And he sort of returned to the topic again at the end of his life. And so we have these kind of idiosyncratic macroeconomic models he wrote both in the 1930s and then again at the end of the 1970s. And then he spent the last few years of his career at Boston College. He did a stint as well at Regis College in Toronto, I should mention. But then he died in 1983 in Pickering, Canada, which is where the Jesuit infirmary was. And in the interim, a lot of people noticed his work and really liked it. He had a lot of students who came back from the Greg to US and Canadian institutions talking about the stuff they learned from this guy. And so they're popped up a kind of cottage industry of centers devoted to Lonergan. There's one at BC. We have one at Seton Hall. There's one at Toronto. I, as a graduate student, was involved with the Lonergan stuff at Marquette University. And so there's been a kind of, people in the Lonergan world will talk about it as an enterprise. There's kind of big cooperative thing of trying to both get one's arms around his thought. And then also to keep it in the conversation as time goes on. Sure. So as you're describing, he's working in philosophy, theology, economics, in a wide range of topics. So if we wanted to start getting our arms around some of his stuff, what's the first or what's A first way in? Or what was your way in? What grabbed your attention? I'm trying to think like, what's a good path for us to as we start to think about him? Okay, it was like that that career sounds like, okay, that sounds like a, you know, if people could go, judgements go and they go teach and they write papers and they do cool things like that. But not all of them have multiple centers dedicated to their work. So why, why him? Yeah, why him? You know, biographically for me, it was, I had an undergraduate professor, a guy named RJ Snell, who works with the Witherspoon Institute now. He put methodology under my nose. And I didn't understand a lick of it. I mean, I just had these notes that were just lists of things he said with no understanding of why he said them. I had no idea what's going on. And in retrospect, I think method is can be kind of method in theology can be a hard book for people to start with. I think it's a little underwritten because he thought he was, he was going to die and he was moving quickly. But this thing grabbed me because he kept talking about the dynamism of the question that, that in our questions, there is operating, there is driving, what in his Thomas works he talks about as a created participation in uncreated light, which is to say, there's some contact with God that is kindling our desire to understand our lives, our world, our cultures, other people, God, what God has done in history through Christ and the Holy Spirit. And that that idea that more than a set of propositions that you can kind of logically deduce from, or a particular set of kind of images that you need to arrange and constellate or something, that the kernel of questions is the thing to get in touch with. And that grabbed me. And I think when people feel either embattled because they're on one side of some ideological struggle, or if people feel embattled because they're on one side or the other of some ideological divide, or if they just feel a drift because they feel like everybody seems really certain and everybody seems opposed by someone who's equally certain. The idea that the expression of not knowing but wanting to know can be something that itself is orienting, that was really attractive to me. That I could be honest about, I don't really know, I'm not really sure, but I'd sure like to know. And so I think that is still a very live thing, that Lonergan has this kind of technical term, the pure and unrestricted desire to know, that this is something that's in you and you can get in touch with it. And if you're sort of genuinely in touch with it, it'll point you in the right direction. And yeah, so for me, that was it. And I think for a lot of people, that's the thing that they discover and stick with. So he did a lot of work on what it means to know, how we know the processes of living and pursuing? Absolutely. So in 50, I'm going to get myself in trouble trying to say dates, in the early 50s, he publishes a book called Insight, A Philosophy of Human Understanding, which is another book people maybe have heard of. It's just a big monster of a book, it's like almost 800 pages. And it's very intimidating. And it's even more intimidating because I think Lonergan was probably a genius in the sort of technical sense of having an IQ that's above whatever. And a very common thing for people who are classified as sort of you know, Mensa type geniuses, is they really struggle to intuit what other people need to get the point, because they get the point so easily. And so some of his early stuff is tough because he's clearly on, he's on a line, he's got something, but he doesn't stop and tell you like, why are we talking about this right now? What are we doing with this? And so you have to work pretty hard to keep up with them. But if you do, it's pretty rewarding. But anyway, in Insight, he starts out and he's like, well, I'm going to give you some examples of understanding. And then his examples are from algebra, and then they're from physics, and then they're from like really relatively high level physics. And he'll talk about like he'll invoke like Rymani in geometry. And you're like, hold on, let me Google that. So anyway, but yeah, so that book is big and intimidating. But the sort of payoff of it is, is that he thinks, if you can understand what understanding is, and you can make a kind of correct judgment about what understanding is, well, now you've got both sort of skeptical worries can be pushed aside, right? Because now we've got an instance of knowledge. So the question of is knowledge possible is settled, right? Because I, because I know at least this, I know what my knowing is. But also, he thinks it can give you the kind of contours and outline of what knowing will be in any case. And so if you want to know about something, right, if you've got questions, and you want to get going on, okay, I want to know about this thing, but like, how do I start? If you are, if you're in touch with what goes on in your own mind when you're coming to know stuff, when you're learning, right, we say knowing it's a fancy philosophical kind of way of speaking, but we're just talking about learning. It can keep you from getting disoriented in the process of, of learning. And so you can take that, that kernel of desire to understand that's orienting generally, and you can start to specify it, right? So for Lonergan, that's, it's a kind of, it's a kind of pathway, right? I think one of the things that people should know about Lonergan is that for all of the math and science and philosophical rigor and theological speculative heights, it really, it's a kind of spirituality. It's a kind of interior, attentive practice, a kind of, in a way, a kind of meditation or mindfulness, but aimed at specifically the kind of intellectual part of your life. Which again, I think is needfully, you know, my students will be talking about some hotly debated thing, and they'll say, well, yeah, but how do you know? And I'll say, that's a great question, right? They mean it is this kind of like, yeah, yeah, but like, skeptically, who can be sure? But when you phrase it is, how do you know? Well, part of what Lonergan offers is, is an answer, right? He makes that question not just rhetorical. Um, anyway, I'll stop there. Yeah, so kind of curious about that, that sense of a kind of a spirituality or an interior disposition geared toward knowing or learning. And some of the words or phrases that I see pop up around Lonergan concepts, including ones on Seton Hall's Lonergan Institute website, things like self appropriation, or authenticity, conversion, again, big like kind of words that meant something specific within his own thought. Are there any of those that kind of help us go a little bit deeper into what you mean by the kind of this kind of spiritual interiority you're describing? Yeah, you know, Lonergan is, you know, we were talking about sort of the middle 20th century context. And a lot of focus in theology, especially, especially folks who aren't just in Jesuit thought, is on French and German folks. And the French and German conversation, people look on Ridulubak or Carl Rauner, Hans deus von Balthasar, Swiss guy, but wrote in German. There's a can be a fairly shared idiom, right? They're reading each other stuff. And so you can get kind of, you can kind of glide through having a general sense of what they're on about because they're using terms the way you kind of expect. And one of the challenges, I think people sometimes have with Lonergan is that he has his own idiom that he developed in an effort to express what he was talking about in a way that wouldn't get it confused with what other people were talking about. And so yeah, you get these terms like self appropriation. He has a unique way of using conversion bias is a kind of important technical term as well. Authenticity is something he kind of borrows from existentialism, but tweaks and changes a little bit. The one that to me that's the most important is self appropriation. And what he means by self appropriation is realizing that you are, I was talking about sort of questions and the process of learning as being orienting. And self appropriation is realizing that you yourself as a he talks about in terms of subjectivity, right, as a subject, or I mean, if we could do it in personal terms, right? You as a person, you are that kind of weather vane. And so if you're alienated from yourself, right, if you're always distracted, or always indebriated, or, you know, too busy, or if you have some ideology, right, that sort of tells you a bunch of lies about what you are and who you are, you're not going to be able to get oriented in the universe by getting in touch with that core of desire to know and understand and, and love what's good. And so self appropriation really is, is about an attentiveness to, all right, when when when things are going well, when I'm being myself, what kind of stuff happens? And when I'm just kind of drifting, or when I'm faking it, or when I'm, you know, kind of pretending to be somebody I'm not, what, what are the dynamics that go on there, too? And so the first level of it is just a matter of attention of just noticing that you have an inner life, right? This is what I think a lot of us in humanities classrooms are trying to invite our students into. You have an inner life, you have thoughts and desires, and those things influence the way you live. And, and part of that inner life, if you're in a Christian context, is that God is involved in your inner life somehow is present to your inner life. And so you can, you can get in touch with something that's transcendent and meaningful and orienting. But then, you know, just being conscious of it isn't enough for Lonergan. For Lonergan asking questions is really important, right? It's having those experiences of your inner life and then going, okay, is this going well? Do I really understand this? Are these ideas I'm acting as if are true really are true? If I have questions about whether or not they're true, what would I do to find out if they're true, right? Do am I operating on the basis of like really sufficient good evidence or am I kind of pretending I know and actually don't? And so those are all elements of self-appropriation, that it's this kind of cyclical ongoing process and project of making sense of yourself, of your experience of being yourself. And I don't know if other people have this experience, but I find being myself frequently befuddling. I get into situations, I'm like, why am I like this? Who is this person? And then if you spend any time paying attention to your own thoughts, you think, gosh, how did I get into this bad neighborhood? And so being able to both pay attention to what's going on in there, but then also, as I keep saying, right, getting oriented, right, getting pointed towards, okay, this is how I get at stuff that's true. This is how I get at stuff that's really worthwhile and not just passing the time. That's the kind of molten core of self-appropriation. Then connect to his work, say, on the Trinity or some of those big theological things, or even, I know, again, concerned with that context of mid-century Second World War, and he did some kind of work on community society as well, kind of social ethics, I guess you could say. Yeah, so how are those things I connect for you, those things that unite those really kind of different directions he went? How would that like, how are those being dialogue together? Yeah, good. So let me take those in the opposite order. I mean, one thing I sort of hinted at very quickly when I gave the biographical sketch is that Lonergan was in Rome during the rise of Italian fascism. And the way he talked about it, he said, you know, I saw people respond with intense emotion to utter nonsense, just stuff that was just hollow, empty, and stupid, but they allowed it to sort of grab hold of their passion and organize their whole lives to disastrous consequences. And that was part of, for him, what was mobilizing and writing insight, was that if you don't know what understanding is, you can mistake things that aren't understanding for understanding. You can think you know, and actually be sort of been taken for a ride by very, by, you know, demagogues and things like that. And so for Lonergan, he's very interested in the way in which what makes up a community is its culture. And for him, a culture is the set of meanings or understandings and the values that are shared in common. And so, you know, if people throw their community weight behind stupidities and evil, things are going to go poorly. And so he talked about that in terms of, sometimes he talked about it in terms of sins, sometimes he talked about it in terms of decline, that there's a kind of compounding effect that when your moral reasoning has stupidities and absurdities as its premises, you're never going to get sound conclusions out of that moral reasoning. Sure. It's just impossible. And so then you get into this death spiral. He's got a great line in method. He says a civilization in decline digs its own grave with relentless consistency, which is heavy. But you look around and you go, gosh, you know, you read your history books or or sometimes you read the newspaper and you go, there's a certain plausibility to that. Which gets me to the other piece, which is, but Lonergan thought that wasn't the only kind of vector at work or the only force at work, that just people who God made to be intelligent and reasonable and loving in the world choose to be stupid and irrational and irresponsible instead. But he, partly because of his reading of St. Thomas on Grace, he thought about history and communities as having a kind of another vector, another force moving through them that he usually talked about in terms of redemption, that the way I'll tell it to my students sometimes is much like God made the world from nothing, Kriatsuak's knee hello. In redemption, in the kind of destructive nothingness that we make of our lives and our communities through sin and evil, God engages in a kind, another kind of creation from nothing where God brings some good out of that. And Lonergan's prime example of that is the cross, that in humanity's sort of giving itself over to sin and evil in a way that produces the greatest evil humans can commit, which is torturing and murdering an innocent person. That the cross itself as a crucifixion is an evil and an absurdity, but that God brought the greatest good out of that through the resurrection of Christ and the redemption of the whole world. And so Lonergan thought that you could read the economy of salvation and sort of pick out the kind of deep intellectual structures, not just of human minds and human experience, but of reality, that if God knowingly and lovingly creates reality, then the core of reality is the understandableness and the lovableness of those things. And we know that they're understandable and lovable because God knows them and God loves them. And so defects in understandableness and defects in loveliness and worth that we bring about through our evil, that's one way you can talk about what God affects in salvation. And so then, right? Okay, last step, you talk about, well, how does God do that? And so this is where his Trinitarian theology comes into it, which is through the, he uses St. Thomas's language all the time, the the sending of the mission of the sun into history and the mission of the Holy Spirit into history. And so what is the invitation of the Christian life for Lonergan? It's a chance to participate in the eternal divine life of God, to get in touch with the love of the spirit poured into your hearts. He loved Romans 5, he quoted it all the time and threw the spirit to come to Christ and to imitate Christ and to participate in the redemption of the world by the willingness to bear the sins of the world. He's something, he has this phrase, he uses, he talks about the just and mysterious law of the cross where people are, people are, for the sake of God's kingdom, people are willing to suffer even though it's not fair. So in your own journey with Lonergan from that time in which in college you were handed a book and wrestled with it, to now in which you've just published your own book, The Ambiguity of Being, which just came out right this year. Yeah, just in April, yeah. Yeah, okay, so hot off the press, Lonergan and the problems of the supernatural. I know that's like a big academic book from Catholic U press. So what prompted that for you? What can you tell us about it in terms of again, your own kind of taking this to a new place and to something that hadn't been done before? Thanks, yeah. You know, I started like Lonergan, I started out in philosophy. I did a master's in philosophy at Boston College, what feels like a long time ago now. But I was always interested in theological and religious questions. And so it's kind of in the hinterlands between disciplines. And I ended up going to Marquette and working with the Lonergan scholar Robert Dorn, who passed a couple of years ago now. And somewhat like Lonergan, you know, Bob put some of Lonergan's scholastic manuals, his tomah scholastic manuals under my nose, which is not something I ever would have read on my own. It's the sort of rhetoric of them is very forbidding to a contemporary person, right? It's like you get your, you have your terms and they're defined and then they, you know, exposition of the terms and then they're put into syllogisms and then you have exposition of the syllogisms. I mean, it's a very clunky way of doing things. And I just sweated bullets over them, but discovered some really amazing philosophy of God and theology in them, some really, and I noticed some implications that Lonergan was able to draw out of these texts on grace, on God's knowledge and will, that seemed to me to be kind of overlooked in what at the time was a very hot discussion. It's sort of cooled down now, but there was a kind of resurgence of the debate over the natural and the supernatural over nature and grace in the early 2000s. And I felt like, man, there's really some ideas here that could reframe this debate in a way that could keep it from going around in a circle again. I mean, you know, the debate in the early 21st century was a kind of rehashing of a debate in the 1940s. It was happening kind of parallel to Lonergan. You know, Lonergan's has written this dissertation on grace and the French, you know, Jesuits, Henri du Lubac and some others are kind of getting into trouble for the way that they're reading Thomas on grace. And Lonergan mostly kind of stayed out of it. He's kind of parallel to the whole thing. And so his name pops up occasionally in the literature, but kind of infrequently and mostly to not much effect. And so the book is me trying to bring Lonergan more seriously into that debate. And to say, hey, if we follow Lonergan, the way this debate has been sort of framed, which is sort of, to do it briefly, is a kind of scholastic metaphysical argument about how grace works in human nature. But in the in the 40s and in the early 21st century, people tend to operate as though, well, if but if we work out the metaphysics, then we can deduce what kind of culture and what kind of politics we're supposed to have. And so this very dry metaphysical fight is charged with these like hot button, kind of culture, war, divisions. And in my argument, the reason that the title has the plural problems of the supernatural is really that these are related, but they're distinct problems that even if you kind of perfectly and pristinely work out the metaphysics, which I try to do using the way Lonergan reads Thomas, you still, you have a kind of good solid platform to start asking these other questions about culture and politics and stuff. But you can't just deduce it. It doesn't solve the problem for you. It's a really, it's a separate thing. And it's a kind, it's a different kind of question and a different kind of problem that needs different kinds of intellectual tools. And yet solve the metaphysics. I'm kind of a big nerd now. I've been totally metaphysics pilled by Lonergan's scholastic textbooks. So I've liked that stuff, but it doesn't do as much work as that debate has sort of acted like it will. And so, like I said, that debate kind of pops up and down as trends go by. But if people are interested in that topic, and I think there are people for whom it's still a kind of live question, they might be interested to see a kind of a different angle on it, a kind of a reframing that maybe can help get past some of the sticky points. Sure. But the fact that you mentioned some of those kind of hot button things, I don't think of Lonergan is like someone who I see claimed by like kind of either like character, like a character like left or right within theological or political circles. He seems like he doesn't quite fit. Is that fair? Does he have like, I think that's right. I mean, I think there are there were students of Lonergan who went very different directions after the council. And I think that's actually a kind of testimony to, well, really what Lonergan means by self appropriation, right? That those people felt like they got from Lonergan a method or a set of tools or a framework to take responsibility for their own mind and their own place in the unfolding of their moment in Catholic life. And they took a stand on that and they sort of followed where they felt like their hearts and their consciences and their minds led them. And I think it made them more sophisticated representatives of the various camps and schools and partisan whatever as a result. And you know, one of the things I say sometimes, it's a very kind of Lonerganian point is it's a good thing for your cultural or political opponents to make better arguments that because if they're making better arguments, they're closer to the truth. And the thing that should be mobilizing us that should be orienting us is a love of the truth and a love of what's good. And so I might have a really deep disagreement with you, but I want both of us as we hash out our disagreement to be making the least stupid arguments that we can. I keep using that word and I think people maybe hear it only as a kind of pejorative, but I mean it in a kind of technical sense, right? That all the other things that can be animating in an argument, the sense of self and sense of the stakes and my own strong feelings, they can sort of lead you away from the real criterion in an argument, which is does this make sense and is it true? And so to be stupid in that sense is to relinquish that criterion is to lose hold of the thing that even in a debate where you and I are really diametrically opposed, the thing we ought to share is our orientation towards what's true and what's good. And so to lose hold of that is to become stupid and to become irresponsible. And if you lose that, then there's no point in even arguing, right? Because then it's just who has more power, who can coerce the other person to their will. And that's a tragedy. So the resistance to easy classification and easy answer, I wonder if that's connected in this quote of Lonergan, you have on your own website, I feel like people's website sometimes like you have to choose what you're going to put up there. And so you have like your own like a little about me, but then you have a Lonergan quote right there. And I wonder why you included that. So I'm going to read it and then ask you to say why you have it there, which he says this, but what will count is a perhaps not numerous center big enough to be at home in both the old and the new painstaking enough to work out one by one the transitions to be made strong enough to refuse half measures and insist on complete solutions, even though it has to wait. So yeah, why that one? Why that one. Because I think that the Catholic Church has always been intimately involved in the cultures that it's been embedded in. And there was a stretch between this is this is sort of lazy history. So people who will have to forgive me for the caricature, but in really basic, maybe oversimplified terms, you know, between the first Vatican Council and the second Vatican Council, there was a kind of stretch where the attitude was circle the wagons, plug your ears, sing of a Maria really loud. And maybe the challenges of the change in culture and the kind of advent of a modern culture, maybe it'll blow over and go away and will have sort of kept the flame lit here within the kind of fortress church. And that proves unsustainable. And the church compromised itself in a number of ways. I mean, in particular, when one can think of some, you know, the Second World War or any other number of things. But and so the the Second Vatican Council and the call to open the windows, the call for a giornamento, but also the kind of parallel call for a resource mall from the New Val theologians created an opportunity to make a big transition to get reengaged with modern culture, but not in a way that is everything modern is great, and everything traditional is bad, or alternatively, right, to resist modern culture by saying, well, everything quote unquote traditional is good, and everything modern is bad, but to engage in the discernment of spirits, right, to engage in a kind of sifting out of those things in modern life, which are real achievements, right, one can you can regot him at spes and it's great at this. Here's all these things that are really great. Here are these things that are really bad. Here are some things that are powerful and so dangerous. And to then develop Catholic culture in a way, and really Catholic culture is plural in a way that it can involve itself intimately in the wider modern culture in a way that the modern culture so desperately needs. You know, I really I had my quibbles with this part of that, but I really liked the new DDF document, Dignitas Infinida, because I think that idea of the infinite dignity of the human person is like a really important, needful thing for modern culture still, that we're still really willing to compromise the the dignity of particular persons for political goals, economic goals, cultural goals, right, we're really willing to sacrifice people on the altar of of those things. And for the church to to get engaged and to lean forward with those values and to use language, you know, language, not just dignity, but also of rights, which is a language that the church adopted and adapted from the wider modern culture. I think those things are good. And so but but so so why is it a not numerous center and why might it have to wait? Modern culture is really big and really complicated, and modern life is really big and really complicated. And like I started off talking about in terms of questions, we're going to have way more questions than we have answers. And so the idea that we can just sort of reach into the bag full of answers and throw our answers at the world, we're going to come up with empty hands really fast. And so what we really need are people who are able to discern what the needful questions to ask are can articulate them really well, and then can know how to go about the sometimes slow and painful and arduous work of getting reliable answers to them, and then sharing those answers, right? You can't short circuit that if if you have new circumstances, new moral circumstances, new cultural circumstances, but you fail to understand them, the odds that you'll do the right thing are going to go down, because you're going to be guessing. So that's that's what that's about that. I hope there's a kind of Lonergan-like Toynbee's idea of a creative minority, the idea that there might be some people who are willing to get together and resist the push and pull of partisan whatever to to kind of get down to the work and making sense of all right, where are we at and what do we need to do? Seems like in some ways you're answering my last question, which is like, you know, you have an institute with Lonergan's name in it. So I think essentially like a witness to say, you know, this guy is still worth, you know, talking about digging into extrapolating from now. You know, the world is different than it was when he died, certainly, but so speaking into the present moment, it sounds like in some ways, like his own process and the way he is is something an important part of the legacy. So just any other reflections on why Lonergan now, why keep that up, why should your institute, you know, exist, I guess? Yeah, I think if you're listening to donors. There's a kind of general answer and a more specific answer. I mean, there's a there's a general answer, which is, you know, one thing we've mentioned a couple times is that just Lonergan was really smart. And, you know, our our human family gets these people who have really profound intellectual gifts. And people have all kinds of gifts. But and it's important that they be valued and held up in the various arenas. But in terms of intellectual gifts, Lonergan really got a double dose. And I think it's good for people to to hang on to those to those kind of maybe this is maybe this is too elevated language, but to sort of remember intellectual saints as as people who embody a certain kind of intellectual virtue and to to find inspiration in them by trying to reach up to the level of their their minds to think. And and and partly that gives a person a gift, right, to think, all right, this person's really, really smart. But you know what, it didn't come as easy to me as it came to them, but darn it, I got in the library and I figured it out and I and I can I can hack this I can do this. And there's a kind of and that's valuable, I think, you know, whether you're talking about Bonaventure or you're talking about Hildegard of Bingen or you know, all these sort of figures from the Catholic intellectual tradition, having little little kind of communities that hold them up as their kind of patron intellectual saints is is I think worthwhile just generally. More specifically, you know, I think Lonergan was really in touch with a question that that is still a live question has not yet been answered. And that is okay. In the high medieval period, right, what why did scholasticism hang on for so long? Well, it's because in the high medieval period, there was a real intellectual achievement, a sort of using this kind of metaphysical logical set of techniques and tools that have their advent kind of in, you know, Aristotle's Pasteur analytics or something. And they were able to to really achieve this impressive integration of Christian life and thought with a kind of Greco-Roman intellectual patrimony to create a beautiful and effective picture of the universe and God's relation to it. And that's that's something that's worth keeping around. But with the modern period came a new ideal of knowledge, a new set of intellectual practices and procedures and expectations that were less logical and more empirical, that were less reductionist. That's usually people talk about modern science as being reductionist, but they forget that metaphysics is literally about the reduction of contingent things to necessary principles. So it's also reductionist. And modern science has this aim of complete explanation of all phenomenon. And for Catholic thought in general and Catholic theology especially, how it is that Catholic theology can be a real field of knowledge according to this new modern ideal of knowledge, this kind of empirical one, this kind of globe and history, spanning desire to explain all Catholic phenomenon everywhere, all Christian phenomenon everywhere. And in so far as it's really Catholic sort of all of human history and all of the history of creation in relationship to God, according to this new ideal, how the heck we're going to do that in a way that isn't just kind of grab, bag, ad hoc, random, chaotic, little investigations here and there, but in a way that's organized as a science that can yield cumulative and progressive results. Not only do I think people mostly don't know, mostly I think people don't aren't asking the question. And so for there to be a kind of achievement that is on par with what they were able to achieve from the 10th to the 14th century, we got to get going. And so that sort of my specific answer is for Catholic theology, I think what Lonergan's turned to method, to sort of intellectual cooperation as the key to having a kind of integrated picture of the whole again in this new modern frame, which is so much wider and so much bigger than the video one was, I think that's really needful. And in some ways, what I hope I'm able to communicate to people is not even a set of answers to that question, but just the force of that question, that it's a question worth asking. Well, Jonathan Heaps, thank you so much for this introduction to Bernard Lonergan. I've really enjoyed it. We could probably do another hundred episodes or more, but for now, this is a good start and I'm curious to keep poking around. So yeah, thank you for this intro and for making it accessible. And thank you for all the work you're doing. Thanks so much for having me on, I really appreciate it. AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, a project of the Jesuit conference of Canada and the United States based in Washington, D.C. The show is edited by Marcus Bleich. Our theme music is by Kevin Lasky. The Jesuit conference communications team is Marcus Bleich, Eric Clayton, mega-enleeped, Becky Sindelar, and me. Connect with the Jesuits online at Jesuits.org, on Instagram at wearethejesuits, on X at Jesuit news, and on Facebook at facebook.com/jesuits. Sign up for weekly email reflections at Jesuits.org/weekly. The Jesuit Media Lab offers courses and resources at the intersection of Ignatian spirituality and creativity. If you are a writer, podcaster, filmmaker, visual artist, or other creator, check out what we have going on at Jesuitmedialab.org. If you or someone you know might be called to discern a vocation to the Jesuits, connect with a Jesuit vocation promoter at be@jesuits.org. You can drop us an email with questions or comments about the show at media@jesuits.org. And subscribe to AMDG wherever you get podcasts, including iTunes or Spotify. And as St. Ignatius of Loyola may or may not have said, go and set the world on fire. (gentle music)