Word: lonergans
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Since the publication of Insight, Lonergan has been absorbed in the question of intellectual method, particularly for the theologian. He believes that Christianity is essentially a historical religion, borrowing many of its concepts from secular disciplines. The development of theology demands both an adherence to the truths of the past and a transformation in light of new scientific ideas about what science is, post-Freudian insights into the nature of the psyche, changing ideas of the nature of history...
...next book, Lonergan intends to outline a method for theological investigation that is analogous to the methods of modern science-thereby opening anew the possibility of mutual comprehension between Christian and secular thinking on ultimate questions of man. Lonergan admits that theology has not kept pace with man's intellectual evolution; the artists, he says, have become the true moralists...
...Spanish Steps. A shy, pale, hulking figure, "Bernie" Lonergan is a much-storied underground legend among Catholic intellectuals. Born in Buckingham, Quebec, near the Ontario border, he decided to enter the Jesuits at 17, studied at his society's Heythrop College near Oxford and at Rome's Pontifical Gregorian University. He spent 13 years teaching theology at Jesuit seminaries in Canada before moving to "the Greg" in 1953. There he follows a life as precisely organized as his thought. He teaches or writes from 8 until lunch, and after his siesta takes an hour-long walk that never...
...Lonergan's new students start by tittering at his singsong voice and unmelodiously flat Latin pronunciation, and end by despairing at his blithe unconcern for the frailties of lesser intellects. Once, after failing to get a philosophical point across to his class, Lonergan brightened, said: "I think this will make it clear," proceeded to cover the blackboard with differential equations. During a World War II discussion about the loss to mankind in bomb-gutted libraries, Lonergan argued that the important things were in people's minds, not in books. In answer, someone cited Shakespeare...
...Second-Rate Minds. Lonergan is a lonely figure inside the church, an ignored one outside it. The unfashionably Thomistic starting point of his vision repels non-Catholic thinkers grappling with the same issues; yet his unconventional revision of Aquinas outrages many doctrinaire Thomists. He has steered clear of ecclesiastical controversy, except once to blister an Italian theologian whose criticism, Lonergan believed, made him out to be a heretic. Moreover, he steadfastly refuses to popularize, or to publish applications of his theories to specific problems: a systematic Lonergan theology, he half-jokingly insists, should be left for second-rate minds...