Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: Moderne Kultur - Kirche, Theologie; moderne Wissenschaft - Frage nach Gott -> Lonergan: Einsicht

Kurzinhalt: But only belatedly has it come to acknowledge that the world of the classicist no longer exists and that the only world in which it can function is the modern world ... Since the beginning of the eighteenth century Christianity has been under attack.

Textausschnitt: 93f Always in the past it had been the Catholic tradition to penetrate and to christianize the social fabric and the culture of the age. So it entered into the Hellenistic world of the patristic period. So it was one of the principal architects of medieval society and medieval thought. So too it was almost scandalously involved in the Renaissance. But only belatedly has it come to acknowledge that the world of the classicist no longer exists and that the only world in which it can function is the modern world. (Fs)

94a To a great extent this failure is to be explained by the fact that modern developments were covered over with a larger amount of wickedness. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century Christianity has been under attack. Agnostic and atheistic philosophies have been developed and propagated. The development of the natural and of the human sciences was such that they appeared and often were said to support such movements. The emergence of the modern languages with their new literary forms was not easily acclaimed when they contributed so little to devotion and so much, it seemed, to worldliness and irreligion. The new industry spawned slums, the new politics revolutions, the new discoveries unbelief. One may lament it but one can hardly be surprised that at the beginning of this century, when churchmen were greeted with a heresy that logically entailed all possible heresies, they named the new monster modernism. (Fs) (notabene)

94b If their opposition to wickedness made churchmen unsympathetic to modern ways, their classicism blocked their vision. They were unaware that modern science involved quite a different notion of science from that entertained by Aristotle. When they praised science and affirmed the Church's support for science, what they meant to praise and support was true and certain knowledge of things through their causes. (Fs)

94c But modern science is not true and certain; it is just probable. It is not fully knowledge; it is hypothesis, theory, system, the best available opinion. It regards not things but data, phenomena. While it still speaks of causes, what it means is not end, agent, matter, form, but correlation. (Fs)

95a Further, this new notion of science introduced radically new problems in philosophy. In Aristotelian physics one ascended from the earth to the heavens and beyond the heavens to the first mover. There was no logical break between knowledge of this world and knowledge of ultimate causes. (Fs)
95b But modern science is specialized. It is knowledge of this world and only of this world. It proceeds from data and to data it adds only verifiable hypotheses. But God is not a datum of human experience for, in this life, we do not know God face to face. Again, between this world and God there is no relationship that can be verified, for verification can occur only between data, only with regard to objects that lie within this world and so can present us with data. (Fs)

95c Now no one will be surprised that modern science, precisely because it is methodically geared to knowledge of this world, cannot yield knowledge of God. But we come to the catch when we ask the further questions. How do we know about God? What do we mean by God? Anything else we know or talk about is known or meant through experience, understanding, and judgment, where judgment rests on some type of verification. Knowledge of God, then, is a singular case. It is not immediate knowledge: there are no data on the divine itself. It is not verifiable knowledge: there are no verifiable hypotheses or principles without data. What kind of knowledge, then, is it?

95d Now I believe that question can be answered and I attempted to do so in a book, Insight. But I wish to draw your attention to the nature of the question. It is not a question that could be asked about knowledge at any time or place; on the contrary it is a question that arises only after modern science has been developed. So, if one wishes to meet that question, one will not talk metaphysics and, muchless, will one talk medieval metaphysics. But the classicist did not advert to the real novelty of modern science, and so he could not conclude to the real novelty in modern philosophic problems and, particularly, in the problems concerning God. (Fs)

96a There was a further blind spot. I have already noted that the classicist conceives culture not empirically but normatively and that this approach leads him to exaggerate the stability and the universality of his culture. Now this exaggeration had the gravest consequences for theology, for it precluded any proper sense of history and, indeed, it did so precisely when historical studies of religion and theology were undergoing their greatest development. (Fs)