Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: Christentum - Realität: Zusammenfassung; Nizäa (Nicea) und folgende Konzilien: implizit -> Realität durch Urteil und Glaube

Kurzinhalt: ... that the reality of the world mediated by meaning was known not by experience alone, not by ideas alone or in conjunction with experience, but by true judgments and beliefs.

Textausschnitt: V. Conclusion

260a It is time to conclude. We have been discussing the origins of Christian realism. We began from an account of the ambiguity of realism with one meaning relevant to the world of immediacy and the other relevant to the world mediated by meaning. Between these extremes we intercalated the confusions of naive realists, empiricists, critical idealists, absolute idealists, and subsequent philosophies of pessimism, faith, conscience, power, life, action, will. (Fs)

260b Turning to Christianity we noted that both the world of immediacy and the world mediated by meaning were vital to it: the world of immediacy because of religious experience, because of God's love flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us (Rom. 5:5); the world mediated by meaning because divine revelation is God's own entry into man's world mediated by meaning. (Fs)

260c It remains, however, that the ambiguity of realism was not among the revealed truths. Christians had to find out for themselves that it was a mistake to assume with Tertullian that the criteria for the world of immediacy also held for the world mediated by meaning and so to conclude that what was incorporeal also was nonexistent. They had to find out for themselves that it was a mistake to assume with Origen that the meanings relevant to the world mediated by meaning were ideas, the contents of acts of understanding, and so to arrive at the conclusion that the Father was goodness itself and divinity itself while the Son was good and divine only by participation. At Nicea and in the numerous subsequent synods and decrees that kept multiplying as long as Constantius was emperor, there did emerge in some implicit fashion that the reality of the world mediated by meaning was known not by experience alone, not by ideas alone or in conjunction with experience, but by true judgments and beliefs. For that became the presupposition not only of their preaching and teaching but also of their deliberations, their decrees, and their anathemas. They wrote, explained, defended, impugned; they invented distinctions and used technical terms; they laid the foundations for the medieval endeavor in systematic thinking. In brief, they employed the criteria relevant to the world mediated by meaning, but they did not thematize the fact they were doing so. (Fs) (notabene)

261a Such, I conceive, were the origins of Christian realism. Implicit from the beginning in preaching and teaching, through mistakes and the correction of mistakes the implication gradually took shape in modes of procedure ever more elaborate and ever more refined in a long series of crises, debates, deliberations, decisions. (Fs)