Bernard Lonergan on Modern Culture and the Crisis of Belief: Part I

Bernard Longergan, SJ

Bernard Lonergan is not alone in suggesting that modernity poses to Catholic theology a crisis of belief, but—perhaps unsurprisingly to those familiar with his thought—his characterization of this crisis is both idiosyncratic and quite technical. I will do my best to present its basic terms, their basic relations, and their basic orientation below.

Following Lonergan, we may speak of “modernity” in at least two ways. There has been a transformation—a series of transformations, really—of technology, polity, and economy into a way of living that he would call modern “society.” Such were the material conditions of common life against which, for example, European colonizers measured indigenous people to determine how “civilized” they were, and which have since matured into our present global-capitalist, liberal-international circumstance. But people made such a society on the basis of a) shared ideas guiding their cooperation and b) sufficient agreement that the enterprise was worthwhile. Thus, in addition to modern society, there is modern “culture”—that is, the fund of ideas and values people living a modern life hold in common. Indeed, to the extent they are not held in common, the project of living together becomes an ever more fragile proposition.

A society’s shared ideas and values are embedded immediately in its living, but—much as a love lived but not avowed is not yet love fully alive—people also commonly express the meaningfulness and value of their living. So, then, culture in general and modern culture specifically consist not just in the meaning of a community’s practical enterprises, but also in the artifacts produced in that community’s effort to avow to itself and others the passion of living. Thus, we may speak of modern art, modern music, modern novels, modern drama, modern cinema, modern poetry, modern architecture, etc. 

Lonergan, who never really ceased to be a Thomist (even as he transposed his Thomism into phenomenological and hermeneutical registers), conceived of the materiality of society’s material conditions in a basically hylomorphic way. Culture is not extrinsic or epiphenomenal to technology, polity, and economy, but rather formally constitutes them. To borrow Lonergan’s own example, a courtroom is a courtroom because of what it means to the people who travel through it each day, because of how they understand it. Transformations of a society’s common understanding of what a courtroom is for, of what is supposed to occur there, change what the courtroom means and so change what the courtroom is in that society. Thus, the distinction between modern society and modern culture is an abstract one, delineating functionally discrete but related elements in a unitary reality.

In addition to his distinction between society and culture, Lonergan further distinguishes within culture the immediacy of culture and its expressions from what he calls the “cultural superstructure.” The cultural superstructure is no less a part of culture, but its significance and purpose are second order:

To art and literature there are added criticism. To artisans and craftsmen there are added inventors and technicians. To common sense there is added science. To the proverbs of wise men there are added the reflections of philosophers. Industry and commerce are complicated by economics, togetherness by sociology, the state by political theory, the law by jurisprudence, man's body by medicine and his mind by psychiatry, schools by educational theories, and religions by theologies.

As a community takes the practical prosecution of their social order in hand through a common fund of meanings and values, so they may in turn take both their society and their culture in hand through elaboration, explication, reflection, evaluation, criticism, and deliberation about those shared meanings and values.

Again, for Lonergan, the cultural superstructure constituted by these activities and their products is not something other than the culture, but rather a spontaneous, dynamic, and autonomous outgrowth of it. Once we have discerned and decided how we will live together, we may further ask whether the life we have made in common is any good, whether it makes sense, or whether we could aspire to higher values, live by brighter lights. To ask such questions and answer them renders culture no longer merely immediate and transparent to the community. Instead, it becomes an object of self-mediation and so more readily an object of shared attention, then shared inquiry, and ultimately shared evaluation and decision. Thus, by means of this superstructure, a community may make open-eyed revisions to its way of life in accord with its cultural commitments.

The distinctions we have so far considered can, Lonergan thinks, serve as a heuristic for thinking about any human community of any period or place. Here I have merely been using modern communities as an example. But by now you may be wondering: what does all this have to do with the distinctly modern crisis of belief I mentioned at the outset?

Giorgio de Chirico The Song of Love

Part of the modern cultural superstructure has included, Lonergan thinks, a change in the operative notion of culture. Christendom was not obtuse to the reality that its common life was constituted by shared beliefs and values. They would not have bothered to burn heretics if they were. Nor was Christendom bereft of masterful expressions of those beliefs and values in the many media of art, literature, music, etc. Nor was Christendom lacking in a cultural superstructure that reflected in a critical and evaluative way on those beliefs, those values, and their many expressions—otherwise they need not have invented the university. But it did, in large part, consider other cultures to be capital-C “cultured” to the extent that the meanings and values holding together their community resembled Christendom’s own. To the extent others did not, their culture was not merely different, but no culture at all. To become cultured in the normative sense was to be indoctrinated and habituated to Christendom’s bedrock ideas, its virtues, and its manners. Lonergan calls this normative notion of culture “classicist.”

Modern revulsion at such chauvinism evinces how the modern evaluation of culture has changed and how the notion of culture has changed with it. Modern culture recognizes not one culture, but many. Its notion of culture lacks the classicist’s specificity. It has become general:

It denotes something found in every people, for in every people there is some apprehension of meaning and value in their way of life. So it is that modern culture is the culture that knows about other cultures, that relates them to one another genetically, that knows all of them to be man-made . . . The classicist was aware that men individually are responsible for the lives they lead. Modern man is aware that men collectively are responsible for the world in which they lead them.

Catholicism, Lonergan thinks, largely sheltered itself from this transformation prior to Vatican II. But when the council tore open the shutters and the threw up the sash of ecclesial life, in blew modern culture like a cold wind, and this new modern notion of culture with it.

 At one level, the modern, empirical notion of culture is but another belief, and so it has become a point of debate within the Catholic cultural superstructure that reflects upon and evaluates such things. At another level, the modern notion of culture is a belief about beliefs themselves, about their place in culture, about the criteria by which they are to be reflected upon and evaluated within the superstructure of modern culture(s), and ultimately about the common way(s) of life they render meaningful. Modern culture, therefore, occasions a crisis of belief not just about this belief or that belief, or even the aggregate of beliefs and correlated values in Catholic life, but about believing itself. 

Is it not a contradiction, in other words, to say that my unconditioned assent to the truth in an act of believing (“I believe . . .” as the Creeds begin) is at the same time a demonstrably contingent, culturally constructed factum? Although Lonergan ultimately judges that the Church, especially in the century or so before Vatican II, had been mistaken in so long forestalling a turn to face modern culture and its notion of culture with it, he can sympathize with the effort to avoid the encounter. The significant and laudatory advances of modern culture came admixed with both errors and evils. Though he points to modernity’s atheism(s) and technocratic horrors, we might add from our vantage the recent scholarly appreciation of its built-in racism. But the wheat and the weeds grow up together, and so Lonergan nudges Catholic theology towards carefully discerning and effecting some needed transitions.

Nor does Lonergan think this is the first time the Church has developed itself through strategic cultural commerce with the wisdom of an age and a place. It entered the Hellenistic world of the patristic period, he notes, to “penetrate and christianize the social fabric and culture of the period.” Even if Catholics might assent to the aptness of the analogy, still we know it is only an analogy and the differences that make a difference are profound. Again, the modern, empirical notion of culture is a belief about the significance of beliefs themselves, and so when it comes to culture, there’s nothing this notion does not touch, and in touching transform. Where beliefs are changed, they may be reconsidered and revaluated. Where the very meaning and value of believing is changed, the criteria by which one will reconsider and revaluate becomes a rather sticky question.

Giorgio de Chirico Melancholy and Mystery of a Street

This anticipates what I will discuss in the sequel to this post. For the crisis of and so challenge to belief that modern culture occasions for Catholicism will be matched by a corresponding crisis and challenge pertaining to the ideal according to which a modern cultural superstructure should reflect upon and evaluate the credibility of beliefs. In other words, the transition to a modern notion of culture is further complicated by the transition to a modern notion of science.

But more on this next time.

Jonathan Heaps, PhD, draws on twentieth-century Catholic philosophy and theology to write about cognition, embodiment, and pluralism. Recently, he has been exploring what contemplative prayer practices can offer the verification crisis in the humanities.