Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: Lonergan über: Verhältnis seiner Methode zu seinen frühen Werken (De Verbo Incarnato, De Deo Trino)

Kurzinhalt: I was developing there also what I consider something permanently valid, namely this type of interpretation that is concerned with things that the thinkers themselves didn't think about.

Textausschnitt: The Classic Treatises

211d Questions were raised as to the relation of Fr. Lonergan's Latin treatises De Verbo Incarnato and De Deo Trino to this method. (Fs)

"Well-those things are practical chores, that you have to do if you're teaching a class of 650 people. They're not going to get it on the wing out of lectures. One of the techniques of getting them to come to the lectures and get something out of them is to provide them with a thick book so that they'll be glad to have some map as to what's important in it and what you can skip. It belongs to a period in which the situation I was in was hopelessly antiquated, but had not yet been demolished-it has since been demolished. But to be a professor in dogmatic theology was to be a specialist in the Old Testament-not just in the Pentateuch or something like that-the Old Testament, the New, the Apostolic Fathers, the Greek Fathers, the ante-Nicene, Greek and Latin, the post-Nicene, the medieval Scholastics, the Renaissance period, the Reformation, contemporary philosophy and so on. There's no one who is a specialist in all that; but that was the sort of thing you had to handle. And you did what you could-(as Damon Runyon's characters put it: 'How are you doing?' 'I'm doing what I can.'). (Fs)

212a "It was a matter of doing that-and also of introducing what I could. For example my analysis of the ante-Nicene period on trinitarian doctrine: I was developing there also what I consider something permanently valid, namely this type of interpretation that is concerned with things that the thinkers themselves didn't think about. Tertullian has a stoic background, Origen has a middle Platonist background, Athanasius' account of Nicea is something totally new that you can't reduce to anything Platonic, Aristotelian, Gnostic, or Stoic and so on; a new situation is created. It's second-level thinking, the sort of thing that is possible within a Hellenistic culture. But that comparison of all three, revealing their different backgrounds-the different ways in which they conceived the Son to be divine, totally different ways-is an understanding of the process from the New Testament to Nicea. That, I think, is something valid. There are chunks in those books that I think are permanently valid. But having to write the book at all was totally invalid-yet necessary concretely. (Fs)

212b "Doing method fundamentally is distinguishing different tasks, and thereby eliminating totalitarian ambitions. Systematic theologians for a couple of centuries thought they were the only ones who were theologians, then, positive theologians thought they were the only ones. This other stuff was all out. (Fs)

213a "What I want is eight different tasks distinguished. It isn't that one can't do all eight. One extraordinary person may very well do all eight-but he's doing eight different things, not just one and the same thing over and over again. That's a fundamental concern for method, eliminating totalitarian ambitions. On the other hand, it's making tasks not intolerably difficult. If you're trying to do one thing, and people are asking you why aren't you doing the other seven, and you're constantly explaining, you never get anywhere. And that's the way things were. My De Deo Trino comes in two parts. In the first part I manage to separate what I call systematics from doctrines. In the second I manage to separate what I call systematics and doctrine on the one hand and on the other positive studies, positive research, historical research. Well, I've moved on from those three to eight entirely different tasks."