Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: Lonergan über den Unterschied: Einsicht (Insight) - Methode der Theologie

Kurzinhalt: In Insight the good was the intelligent and reasonable. In Method the good is a distinct notion. It is intended in questions for deliberation: Is this worthwhile?

Textausschnitt: 276a A principal source of the difference between these two works is that I was transferred from Toronto to the Gregorian University in Rome in the summer of 1953. For the first ten years I was there I lectured in alternate years on the Incarnate Word and on the Trinity to both second and third year theologians. They were about six hundred and fifty strong and between them, not individually but distributively, they seemed to read everything. It was quite a challenge. I had learnt honesty from my teachers of philosophy at Heythrop College. I had had an introduction to modern science from Joseph's Introduction to Logic and from the mathematics tutor at Heythrop, Fr. Charles O'Hara. I had become something of an existentialist from my study of Newman's A Grammar of Assent. I had become a Thomist through the influence of Marshal mediated to me by Stefanos Stefanu and through Bernard Leaning's lectures on the unicum esse in Christo. In a practical way I had become familiar with historical work both in my doctoral dissertation on gratia operans and in my later study of verbum in Aquinas. Insight was the fruit of all this. It enabled me to achieve in myself what since has been called Die anthropologische Wende.1 Without the explicit formulations that later were possible, metaphysics had ceased for me to be what Fr. Coreth named the Gesamt- und Grundwissenschaft. The empirical sciences were allowed to work out their basic terms and relations apart from any consideration of metaphysics. The basic inquiry was cognitional theory and, while I still spoke in terms of a faculty psychology, in reality I had moved out of its influence and was conducting an intentionality analysis. (Fs) (notabene)

277a The new challenge came from the Geisteswissenschaften, from the problems of hermeneutics and critical history, from the need of integrating nineteenth-century achievement in this field with the teachings of Catholic religion and Catholic theology. It was a long struggle that can be documented from my Latin and English writing during this period and from the doctoral courses I conducted De intellectu et methodo, De systemate et historia, and eventually De methodo theologiae. The eventual outcome has been the book, Method in Theology. (Fs)

277b In Insight the good was the intelligent and reasonable. In Method the good is a distinct notion. It is intended in questions for deliberation: Is this worthwhile? Is it truly or only apparently good? It is aspired to in the intentional response of feeling to values. It is known in judgments of value made by a virtuous or authentic person with a good conscience. It is brought about by deciding and living up to one's decisions. Just as intelligence sublates sense, just as reasonableness sublates intelligence, so deliberation sublates and thereby unifies knowing and feeling. (Fs)

277c Again, in Insight the treatment of God's existence and nature, while developed along the lines of the book, nonetheless failed to provide the explicit context towards which the book was moving. In Method the question of God is considered more important than the precise manner in which an answer is formulated, and our basic awareness of God comes to us not through our arguments or choices but primarily through God's gift of his love. It is argued that natural and systematic theology should be fused in the manner of Aquinas' Contra Gentiles and Summa theologiae. (Fs)

277d Finally, what is perhaps novel in Insight, is taken for granted in Method. The starting point is not facts but data. Development is a gradual accumulation of insights that complement, qualify, correct one another. Formulation sets the development within its cultural context. Marshalling and weighing the evidence reveals judgment to be possible, probable, and at times certain. (Fs)