Getting to the Roots of Modern Culture: On Lonergan Part II

Bernard Lonergan, SJ

In my previous post, I fairly sprinted through a number of theoretical distinctions that Bernard Lonergan made with regard to culture, ending with a discussion of how the shift from the “classical” or “classicist” notion of culture to a modern, empirical notion has occasioned a crisis about belief, which is by extension a crisis of culture. I will try to spell out the depth and breadth of this crisis below.

Beliefs allow common living to transpire in a shared world. As we grow from childhood into adulthood, parents, teachers, mentors, pastors, and others induct us into this world by investing their cherished beliefs and values in us. In the economy of culture, there are no self-made men or women. Their wealth was seeded from the common fund of insight and evaluation that Lonergan has called culture. Still, just as surely as the community that forms us has made withdrawals from this fund, so too have they contributed to it from the revenue of their experience and their best judgment. The patrimony of a culture is not a buried talent unless that culture is dead and buried with it. No less than our formative community, we too have the chance to make deposits in the common fund of knowledge and evaluation out of our own accumulation of practical wisdom.

If I may extend the financial metaphor, one might say that a cultural superstructure serves both to audit the common fund of beliefs and values, but also to contribute to it in a new, reflexive way. Prior to the advent of the modern, empirical view of culture, the classicist cultural superstructure responded to the suspicion that knowledge guiding common life was mere myth, that its practical projects were founded on magical thinking. It meant to shore up, in other words, the concern that the shared world was merely a conventional world and that it need not be the way it happened to be. Thus, Socrates’s hunt for essential definition has proved paradigmatic for how the classical superstructure set out a theoretical and, then with Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, a specifically logical ideal as the guiding criterion of credibility. By its light, the superstructure could set down universal definitions and reduce what was defined to their necessary principles. Fallacies, non sequiturs, and otherwise fanciful propositions could be rooted out. It thereby added to the fund of prudential wisdom a valuable annex of contemplative wisdom, generated by dialectic and logical inference. Moreover, it changed the operative ideal of wisdom: practical wisdom now counted only as a vague approximation of the theoretical ideal. 

But there was a deeper crisis out there waiting to appear. At first blush, the advent of the modern, empirical notion of culture can seem like no more than the reappearance of the classical anxiety about convention and “opinion.” Consequently, a cottage industry exists attempting to stem the multicultural tide by propping up the classical scientia in its path. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. is probably the most imposing and subtle proponent of the contemporary relevance of the medieval ideal of science. He has argued forcefully that scholastic notions like “substance” and “analogy,” as well as the logical techniques of reduction from which they draw their significance, are essential for the continued coherence of the cultural superstructure. Steven A. Long is also a prominent neo-scholastic voice calling for the permanent and basically unmodified significance of medieval and renaissance expressions of the logical ideal of science. He has also, with the likes of D. C. Schindler, made clear that an empirical view of culture is ultimately a departure from reality.  

However, as I noted at the end of Part 1, because the cultural superstructure is no less culture than expressions of culture in its immediacy, the superstructure’s guiding judgments and evaluations (if not its core logical operations) are revealed as also potentially arbitrary and certainly contingent conventions. In theology, once it was enough to extract locutions from authorities as ostensibly certain premises for a deductive enterprise that came to be called “Conclusions Theology.” Hence there was found the billowing historical data accumulated by the likes of Henri de Lubac showing how nigh-identical propositions meant sometimes very different things in successive historical situations. More generally, genealogy (and its skeptical cousin, “archeology”) came to replace the treatise in modern culture’s reflection on culture.

Roots by Jamie Wyeth

This deeper and more general crisis of belief has called forth a new guiding ideal for our modern cultural superstructure. It consists, Lonergan thinks, in a new ideal of science. The profound success and expansive reach of the modern natural sciences provides a paradigmatic instance of this new ideal. Logical necessity, Lonergan writes, “was a central notion for Aristotle, but today it is quite marginal.” So too with causality, universality, certitude, substances, and essences. In their place the modern natural sciences have installed verified possibilities, repeatable correlations, revisable typologies, prospective probabilities, and experimental control. In brief, theoretical and logical criteria of credibility have been replaced by methodical criteria of the kind thematized in school-age lessons on “the scientific method.” Natural scientists are enabled to make cumulative and progressive contributions to the human fund of knowledge not by refusing to rely on belief, but by believing the testimony of those who have generated their results under the proper methodical controls. Then, scientists may endeavor to answer those further questions that arise according to the same controls, so that they may be believed in turn.

But, Lonergan notes, the natural sciences provide an ambiguous model for the needed transitions in the modern cultural superstructure. On the one hand, modern Geisteswissenschaften, or modern human sciences, will likewise need to respond to the contingency and concreteness implied by a modern notion of culture by being empirical and methodical. Their results, in other words, need to founded in the relevant data and generated by a credible procedure. On the other hand, the data in the human sciences are not merely given, but are data for these sciences at all “only inasmuch as there attaches to them some common-sense meaning.” Positivism in the humanities, to the extent it can be achieved at all, is doomed to the obscurantism that decides in advance that the data on human meanings must be excluded because they are difficult to corral. Instead, Lonergan thinks, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and history “will assume basic importance.”  

Still, the phenomenologies, the hermeneutics, and the histories produced will, as elements of the cultural superstructure themselves, consist in testimony to be believed and evaluations to be affirmed. They will inevitably have recourse to some founding philosophical outlook when their credibility is called into question by skeptics, genealogists, archaeologists of power, or simply devotees of competing philosophical schools. However, these philosophies similarly consist in beliefs and values that populate the cultural superstructure, and we possess no more clarity about or agreement on the criteria of credibility in philosophy than in the Geisteswissenschaften at large. In the simplest possible terms, the modern notion of culture recognizes a multiplicity of cultural superstructures, and even if there could be a super-superstructure, it would be subject to the same crisis of contingency and plurality.

Now, this crisis of belief that Lonergan has described is radical, but it is also—as I mentioned in Part I—idiosyncratic. It is a crisis that, because it afflicts the modern cultural superstructure, afflicts theology. But, Lonergan insists (invoking Newman), ten-thousand difficulties in theology do not equal one doubt about one’s religious faith and commitment. Christian faith, Lonergan thinks, is a knowledge born of the love of God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit and manifest in the transformation of human living and community testified to by (among other sources) the texts of the New Testament. As Hans Urs von Balthasar argued, love alone is its proper criterion of credibility. “Difficulties in economic theory,” by analogy, Lonergan writes, “are no reason for business firms immediately declaring bankruptcy.” If there exists a crisis of faith in the modern world (and I am not at all sure how one would even discern such a thing), Lonergan would distinguish this crisis of belief and culture from it. Still, if Christian living and its attendant community would engage, penetrate, and Christianize a culture and society like ours, one that possesses a robust and developed superstructure, Lonergan thinks it must develop a theology of comparable robustness in the face of contemporary questions. It did so at least once in the Patristic period, and Lonergan is confident it can do so again. However, in the essays from the late 1960s on which I have been drawing for these posts, Lonergan argues this will mean in our case the development of an adequately modern method in theology that rests on foundations capable of adjudicating between basic philosophical differences.  

Tree Roots by Vincent van Gogh

Lonergan thought that his 1957 book, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, indicates a basic path through the philosophical thicket. He made his own contribution to the need for an adequately modern method in theology with the aptly titled Method in Theology in 1972. Both evince Lonergan’s core strategy for facing the modern crisis of culture: at once to identify the variable that gives rise to cultural and historical variations and at the same time to discern the norms (“finality,” he called it early on) embedded therein that distinguish authentic variations from inauthentic aberrations. Lonergan believed that the cumulative, progressive, and open-ended investigations of every culture in its every aspect, including its religious aspect, would remain daunting and fraught, but could always regain their confidence by returning to that platform from which they were launched. But the identification of this principle and its governing élan cannot serve the modern crisis if its own procedure follows a merely logical ideal. Instead, Lonergan directs those who see the crisis in its depth and breadth to begin to address it by empirically and methodically investigating that most modern of objects: themselves. For at the root of every culture is a community of persons learning, believing, testifying, evaluating, deciding how we will live, what it will mean, and whether what we have made together is any good.