Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Third Collection

Titel: A Third Collection

Stichwort: Erfahrung der Gnade; Verschränkung zw. Kognitivem und religiösem Fortschritt

Kurzinhalt: three stages in the inner life: purgative, illuminative, unitive way; relationships between religious development and cognitive development

Textausschnitt: () ... to ask in what manner God's love flooding our hearts is a human experience and just how it fits into human consciousness. (125; Fs)

33/8 First, then, it is an experience, not in the broad sense that refers to the coming together and compounding of many conscious elements, but rather in the technical sense that refers to a single element and so constitutes not a structure but an infrastructure. (125; Fs)

34/8 Secondly, consciousness is like a polyphony, or like a concerto that blends many themes in endless ways. So too religious experience within consciousness may be a leading voice or a middle one or a low one; it may be dominant and ever recurrent; it may be intermittently audible; it may be weak and low and barely noticeable. Again, religious experience may fit in perfect harmony with the rest of consciousness; it may be a recurrent dissonance that in time increases or fades away; it may vanish altogether, or, at the opposite extreme, it may clash violently with the rest of experience to threaten disruption and breakdown. As the metaphor from music offers an enormous variety of suggestions, so too the lives of men and women present every degree and shade in the intensity of religious experience, in the frequency of its recurrence, in the harmony or dissonance of its conjunction with the rest of consciousness. (125; Fs)

35/8 Thirdly, as religious experience is found to vary when one compares one individual with another, so too it may be found to develop in the lifetime of this or that individual. Hence there was long repeated the traditional distinction of three stages in the inner life. Beginners were said to be in the purgative way, for theirs was the initial task of reducing and, as far as possible, eliminating the conflict between their religious commitment and the other themes recurrent in their consciousness. Next came the illuminative way in which the significance and implications of religious commitment were ever more fully apprehended and understood. Finally, there was listed a unitive way in which potential conflicts were under control, the full significance of religious commitment was understood and accepted, and in mortal beings there could be verified the harvest of the Spirit catalogued by St. Paul: "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control" (Gal. 5:22). (125f; Fs)

36/8 Lastly, there are the somewhat intricate relationships between religious development and cognitive development in man. In its spontaneous unfolding cognitive development may be characterized as from below upwards: it proceeds from the data of experience through the unifications and relational networks spun by understanding towards a process of verification that ends with a verdict of acceptance or rejection. Moreover, there is a certain necessity to this order of development: