Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: Lonergan -> 3 Kennzeichen unserer Zeit: Modernität, Säkularismus, Selbstzerstörung (Zerstörung des Glaubens, reduktionistische Sicht des Menschen, Diktat der Erfolgreichen)

Kurzinhalt: A third feature of contemporary society is the consequence of secularism ...
A second distortion occurs in man's apprehension of man ... A third distortion is in the realm of technique. Applied science and consequent inventions ...

Textausschnitt: 6. The Jesuit Today

183a A principal function of the Society of Jesus, in its original conception, was to meet crises. There is a crises of the first magnitude today. For a principal duty of priests is to lead and teach the people of God. But all leadership and all teaching occurs within social structures and through cultural channels. In the measure that one insists on leading and teaching within structures that no longer function and through channels that no longer exist, in that very measure leadership and teaching cease to exist. The sheep are without shepherds: they are disoriented, bewildered, lost. Indeed, what is true of the sheep, can also be true of the shepherds as well: they too can be disoriented, bewildered, lost. (Fs) (notabene)

183b Perhaps the best I can attempt will be to outline three fundamental features of our time: modernity, secularism, and self-destructiveness. (Fs)
183c By modernity I do not mean just anything that exists or functions today. I mean the basic developments out of which has come the modern world. Of these the first is empirical science. It is something quite different from the notion of science set forth in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. Not only is it a new notion but also it admits application, and its application has resulted in industrialization, urbanization, automation, a population explosion, mass media, instantaneous world news, rapid transportation, guided missiles, and thermonuclear bombs. (Fs)

183d Next, despite the Renaissance ideal of speaking Latin, writing Greek, and reading Hebrew, there developed the modern languages and literatures. In the nineteenth century new conceptions and procedures were introduced into philology, hermeneutics, and history by a phalanx of investigators following the lead of Friedrich Wolf, Friedrich Schleiermacher, August Boeckh, and Leopold von Ranke. The classicist, normative notion of culture was replaced by an empirical notion: a culture came to denote the set of meanings and values inherent in a way of life. Human studies, Geisteswissenschaften, set about investigating, understanding, depicting the cultures of mankind. All were found to be man-made, contingent, subject to development, propagation, alteration, decay. All were found to have their good points and their weaknesses and, when to knowledge of them was added respect for them, there resulted pluralism. The new methods, applied to Hebrew and Christian religion, made it plain that one had to dilute conciliar statements about quod tenet atque semper tenuit sancta mater ecclesia. Not only was development a fact that had to be acknowledged, not only were previous theological positions to be reversed, but the whole conception and method of theology has had to be overhauled. (Fs)

184a The natural sciences and the new human studies have had their repercussions on philosophy. Positivism would drop philosophy and make sociology the queen of the sciences. Kantians offer a foundation for science, absolute idealists set forth a super-science, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Blondel, American pragmatists, and European existentialists turn to decision and action. The Catholic decision, promulgated by Leo XIII in Aeterni Patris, was "Back to Aquinas " While this movement flourished in the early part of this century, in the last decade it has completely collapsed, first, because historical studies of the medieval period made any accurate statement of Thomist thought enormously complicated and permanently open to revision and, secondly, because the infiltration of the new types of human studies into theology necessitated a far more sophisticated type of philosophy than the medieval world could furnish. However, as yet there is no generally accepted up-to-date philosophy and, until there is, we can only expect a theological pluralism far more radical than the old-style pluralism of Thomists, Scotists, Suarezians, and so on. Such pluralism is the first item on the agenda of the recently formed International Theological Commission. (Fs)

184b The problems that Catholics finally are facing have long existed. In his book, The Moden Schism, Martin Marty has them splitting the West into a religious minority and a secularist majority between the years 1840 and 1870. Further, he distinguished three types of secularists. In continental Europe secularists considered religion an evil and aimed at extirpating it. In Great Britain they considered it a private affair of no importance. In the United States religious leaders themselves tended to adapt religion to the secularizing trends of the times. But where religion is persecuted or ridiculed or watered down, there is unbelief, and unbelief is contagious. When everyone believes except the village atheist, doubting is almost impossible. When few believe, doubting is spontaneous, and believing is difficult. (Fs)

185a A third feature of contemporary society is the consequence of secularism. It was Newman's theorem in The Idea of a University that to suppress a part of human knowledge has three effects: first, it results in ignorance of that part; secondly, it mutilates what of itself is an organic whole; thirdly, it causes distortion in the remainder in which man endeavors to compensate for the part that has been suppressed. On this showing, one is to expect that secularism not only leads to ignorance of religion but also mutilates knowledge as a whole and brings about distortion in what remains. Consider a few instances of such distortion. (Fs)

185a Human knowledge results from a vast collaboration of many peoples over uncounted millennia. The necessary condition of that collaboration is belief. What any of us knows, only slightly results from personal experience, personal discovery, personally conducted verification; for the most part it results from believing. But the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was not content to attack religious belief. It prided itself on its philosophers. It set up a rationalist individualism that asked people to prove their assumptions or else regard them as arbitrary. In effect it was out to destroy not only the religious tradition but all tradition. Such rationalist individualism in the twentieth century seems to have infected our educationalists. Students are encouraged to find things out for themselves, to develop originality, to be creative, to criticize, but it does not seem that they are instructed in the enormous role of belief in the acquisition and the expansion of knowledge. Many do not seem to be aware that what they know of science is not immanently generated but for the most part simply belief. (Fs) (notabene)

186a A second distortion occurs in man's apprehension of man. Positivists, naturalists, behaviorists insist that human sciences have to be conducted on the same lines as the natural sciences. But the resultant apprehension of man, if not mechanistic, is theriomorphic. Nor is this view of man as a machine or as an animal confined to some rarefied academic realm. It is applied. The applications reach out into all departments of thought and into all walks of life. They have the common feature of omitting advertence to human dignity and respect for human morality. (Fs)

186b A third distortion is in the realm of technique. Applied science and consequent inventions have given us our vast industrial, commercial, financial, adminstrative, educational, military complex. Technicians are the people with the task of figuring out the most efficient use of currently available hardware. The more successful they are, the greater is the domain that they organize, and the less the domain under the control of old-style decision-makers, of managers, directors, mayors, governors, presidents. Again, the more brilliant they are, the less is it possible to explain to the uninitiated why things are done the way in which they are done. Finally, the more thorough the application of the principle of efficiency, the more must men adapt themselves to its dictates in all their labor hours and in all the goods and services they purchase from the technological establishment. Yet we must bear in mind that anything less than the most efficient procedures threatens the survival of the mass of mankind. (Fs)

186c If I am correct in assuming that the Jesuits of the twentieth century, like those of the sixteenth, exist to meet crises, they have to accept the gains of modernity in natural science, in philosophy, in theology, while working out strategies for dealing with secularist views on religion and with concomitant distortions in man's notion of human knowledge, in his apprehension of human reality, in his organization of human affairs. How such strategies are to be worked out is, of course, an enormous question, and I must be content to offer no more than the briefest suggestions. First, any such strategy is not a conclusion from premisses but a creative project emerging from a thorough understanding of a situation and a grasp of just what can be done about it. Secondly, it is not some static project set forth once and for all but, on the contrary, it is an ongoing project constantly revised in the light of the feedback from its implementation. Thirdly, it is not some single, ongoing project but a set of them, constantly reported to some central clearinghouse with the twofold function (i) of drawing attention to conflicts between separate parts and (2) of keeping all parts informed both of what has been achieved elsewhere and what has been tried and found wanting. Finally, all such projects must be in Christ Jesus, the work of those who take up their cross daily, who live by the Spirit in the Word, who consecrate themselves to loving, who banish all tendencies to hatred, reviling, destroying. (Fs)