Word: lonergans
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...effort, nonetheless, began with Lonergan's theology. As a teacher of seminarians for 25 years - including twelve years at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University - Lonergan recognized that a persuasive theology could only be based on a thoroughgoing study of how theologians think. This led him to immerse himself deeply in epistemology, the study of man's knowing process...
Ultimately, his studies produced what is thus far his masterwork, Insight, published in 1957. In this book and in later papers, he develops an all-embracing theory of knowledge that includes every area of human understanding, not least of them the awareness of God. Though Lonergan grafts from the scholastic tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, he has long since gone beyond Thomism, much as Aquinas transcended Aristotle. His particular distinction is that he shares modern philosophy's concern for each man's uniqueness, and sees man's own self-understanding as the key to understanding the universe...
...Lonergan insists that his method is rigorously empirical. His Insight devotes some 750 pages to a closely reasoned demonstration that the same process of understanding that applies to "insights" in mathematics and the physical sciences also applies to theology. To a neophyte, he will patiently explain that it all boils down to three questions: "What am I doing when I am knowing? Why is that knowing? What do I know when I do that...
...Lonergan's method is his own, but he clearly owes a debt to the phenomenologists, particularly to German Philosopher Edmund Husserl. For the phenomenologist, the material evidence of a perceived object is screened by the dynamic (and very personal) phenomenon of the act of knowing. Husserl developed this into the idea of "horizon" - the vastness or narrowness of the world a man perceives. For Husserl, a man's horizon is limited by his per spective: his environment, his loves and fears, his interests and prejudices...
Adapting this idea of horizon, Lonergan makes it part of his theory of knowledge. A man can alter his horizon by recognizing it as a limitation on his ability to know - indeed, as a limitation on the very questions that he must ask in order to know. He can open himself to information from out side his horizon, use that information to formulate new questions, and continue to grow. By thus transcending his limitations, a man undergoes "conversion," which may be moral, intellectual, social or religious. In Lonergan's approach to theology, which he will spell out in detail...