Michael Vertin has had a distinguished academic career as both a lecturer at St Michael's College, University of Toronto, and as a Lonergan scholar. This Festschrift has been put together to celebrate Vertin's achievements by two of his former students.
One of the most stimulating contributions to this collection of essays by Lonergan scholars is on Lonergan's Christology by Charles Hefling. Hefling's paper, exemplary in its clarity and precision, outlines central features of Lonergan's writing on Christ's divine self-consciousness and knowledge, at the same time as throwing light on the notion of Christ as Revealer, on the relationship between Method in Theology and Lonergan's ‘Latin theology’, and on the notions of ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ as these appear in Insight and Method. As Hefling very ably demonstrates, Lonergan's explication of the Church's teaching that Christ had the beatific vision while on earth is subtle and persuasive. Given the recent reaffirmation by the magisterium of this doctrine, in the CDF censure of Sobrino's Christology, what Lonergan has to say is very relevant to current theology.
I detect a common theme running through three of the other contributions to the collection that I would like to especially commend here: those by Matthew Lamb, Fred Lawrence, and Mark D. Morelli. All three authors are concerned, in one way or another, with showing how Lonergan's thought is an invitation to an intellectual, moral and religious personal appropriation which points the way beyond both the great philosophical ‘systems’ of modernity and the existential or anarchic deconstructive reactions to the same. Such self-appropriation is at once an appropriation of the heritage of the tradition of Aristotle, St Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas and later thinkers, such as Newman. Thus, Morelli shows that the existentialist and personalist dimensions of Lonergan's philosophy acknowledge the anti-Hegelian protests of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, while inviting the ‘protestor’ through, among other things, the dialogue of friendship, to acknowledge his or her underlying intellectual and moral ‘commitments’. Matthew Lamb issues a challenge by underlining how an hermeneutic appreciation of what Lonergan is really up to becomes ever more difficult insofar as there is a failure, a failure evident in much theological education today, to read what Lonergan read: Aristotle, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. Fred Lawrence begins his essay with an appreciative evaluation of Charles Taylor's analysis of both the strengths and weaknesses of the modern view of the self. Taylor is positive about the modern stress on subjectivity yet indicates the inconsistency of the moderns and post-moderns in their refusal to specify ontological and cultural values that the self may aspire to. Lawrence goes on to show how Lonergan's work as a whole can do justice to both sides of the coin.
Bob Doran's contribution to the volume is important for the ways in which it draws our attention to possible misreadings of Lonergan's ‘level of experience’ in the process of coming to know. That Lonergan does not espouse some version of the ‘raw data’ idea attacked by Wilfred Sellars, in his critique of the ‘myth of the given’, is evident right from the beginning of Insight. In addition to the texts Doran highlights, I would also draw attention to Lonergan's phenomenology of perception, in his discussion of the idea of ‘data’ (Insight CWL, pp. 96–7), and to his analysis of insights regarding the data as these occur in our experience of advertising and literature (Insight CWL, pp. 592–3).
While the theological motives behind Fred Crowe's piece exploring the possibilities of a third way between affirming God's freedom in creating, on the one hand, and the non-necessity of God's doing so, on the other, are laudable, I found the results less than satisfactory. For one thing, Crowe's discussion seems to be conducted solely as an exercise in systematic theology, attempting to find in Lonergan's theology some finite, limited analogies for the divine creative act on the basis of both the necessary and free aspects of human willing, so as to throw light on the dogma of Vatican I. However, the absence of any discussion of or reference to the critically validated metaphysics of chapter 19 of Insight results in Crowe's failing to bring into the discussion what Lonergan thinks can be established in purely philosophical terms concerning God as free and creation as non-necessary. Chapter 19 is crucial in helping us discern the scope and limits of any created analogies used in systematic theology. Crowe wants to point to a possible tertium quid between divine freedom and necessity and in so doing suggests that we be agnostic regarding possible world scenarios in which God does not create. But in this context talk of possible worlds is only another way of saying what chapter 19 of Insight establishes, what it does not leave indeterminate: that (among other things) creation is a possibility – for it is a fact – and that creation is non-necessary. Crowe invites us to think of the saint in whom the outpouring of good acts is an habitual ‘compulsion’, and affirms that such a good must surely be predicated of God. But by making such attributions without the necessary qualifications (dependant upon the metaphysics of chapter 19), one ends up with all manner of anthropomorphisms, based upon the finite human goods of moral and cognitive growth, such as to compromise divine transcendence.
S.J.McGrath's essay, ‘The Imaginal and Indirect Communication in Methodical Philosophy’, has a number of interesting points to make. However, I found the discussion somewhat lacking in its appreciation of what, in fact, Lonergan has to say on the issues McGrath treats. McGrath is critical of Lonergan's separating off the sphere of reality that is the mysterious, the numinous, that of the aesthetic and mystical experience, from the world of the everyday (p. 64). But a few lines on from the passage in Insight McGrath quotes to illustrate Lonergan's distinction, Lonergan himself points out that these realms can combine and interpenetrate in our conscious daily living, as in Wordsworth's poetic celebration of the apparently ‘ordinary’ (Insight CWL, p. 556). Nor is it the case that on Lonergan's view the aesthetic dimension is absent from our ordinary language use (see Insight CWL, p. 567).
Finally, among the pieces in the collection I found less impressive was Margaret O’Gara's evaluation of the CDF's response to ARCIC's report on authority in the Church. I found that it did little to dent my adherence of mind and heart (at the appropriate level) to that Vatican document.
Space does not permit me to mention all of the contributions to this Festschrift. As my remarks above indicate, I found some of the essays in the collection to be of a very high quality, others I thought problematic and others somewhat bland. However, all in all the collection is, given its strengths, a fitting tribute to Michael Vertin and is certainly a significant and valuable contribution to the ever-expanding secondary literature on Lonergan.
