Bernard Lonergan’s theory of knowledge is not yet very well-known among social scientists. But it seems to me that it has implications of fundamental importance for the central problems with which they are concerned. In what follows, I shall try to explain why.

What is the nature of the explanation of human behaviour sought by the social scientist, and what relation does it have to the explanations which agents give of their own actions? It is characteristic of the sociological view which one might call ‘positivist’ that it eliminates as quite irrelevant to the scientific explanation of human behaviour the accounts given by the agents themselves. This is justified by the claim that the agent’s point of view is by its very nature individual and subjective; whereas science aspires to a form of explanation which is objective and publicly verifiable. Completely opposed to the positivist view is that which takes the agent’s explanation of his own behaviour as uniquely privileged. On this account, social science is pursuing a chimaera if it looks for any explanation of an action other than that which the agent gives or at least is capable of giving himself. This is a central contention, I think, of the ethnomethodologists; it has also been defended by Peter Winch.

A third view is the Marxist one, which differs from that just alluded to in that it insists that what human beings are up to on the one hand, and the justifications which they give of what they are doing, are two very different things ; but does not aspire to the kind of ‘reductionism’ which is practised by the positivist.

During this Twentieth Century, more human lives have been lost as a result of warfare and political strife than have been taken by famine or any natural disaster. Not only have two world wars inflicted unmeasured misery and suffering upon millions of people, but also atrocities have been committed in the pursuit of political freedom or the protection of human rights throughout the five continents. In Vietnam, war was a fact of life for thirty years; relations between the countries of the Middle East are strained to the limit by violence and acts of war; in Northern Ireland, the deaths and injuries of the last five years, with the many who have been unjustly imprisoned or ill-treated, have ensured that it will be some considerable time before the hostility which has characterised the troubles finally disappears.

In this Holy Year, with its theme of reconciliation, Christians can use the Old Testament to discover the contribution they can make to a world which is desperately searching for peace. The Jewish understanding of peace is characterised by the prophet Isaiah, who looked forward to the Messianic Age as a time when the swords and spears of destruction would be converted into the ploughshares and pruning-hooks with which men could sustain life (Isaiah 2 :4). Such a positive vision of peace inspired the composer of Psalm 72 to pray for the establishment of the Messianic Kingdom, where ‘Justice will flourish, and peace, until the moon fails’. The poor and the weak will be freed from oppression and material well-being will characterise the times as corn ‘is abundant in the land’ and men flourish in the cities ‘like grass on the earth’.

The Catholic Church is the only Church in England to have had in recent times any substantial following among working class people. Now, as the Church loses this following, it is worth asking what exactly the attraction was. Evidently at one time working class people found something in the Church, and now they do not.

For all practical purposes the Catholicism we have now dates from the later half of the nineteenth century. The situation at the time is well known. There were a few, mostly well off ‘old’ Catholics, some pockets of the country where Catholicism had never entirely disappeared, a trickle of converts and the vast number of Irish immigrants working in the new industrial centres. A kind of Catholicism prevailed that found its inspiration in the Counter-Reformation. In Ireland it had been imposed by the Irish hierarchy in the power vacuum which followed the loosing of the English hold on what had not been destroyed of Irish Catholicism. In England it had been adopted after the restoration of the hierarchy in 1850.

Certainly there were objections to this kind of Catholicism. The ‘old’ Catholics grumbled at the rococo devotions introduced by Italianate converts and joined their bishops in resisting the ultramontane extravagances of Manning and his friends. To the Irish immigrants, however, ‘Counter-Reformation’ Catholicism had from the beginning a great deal to offer.

It is not just that Catholicism was ‘their’ religion, something the English had tried, but failed, to crush. Counter-Reformation Catholicism had the added attraction of its essentially alien nature.

The average car-owner is usually unaware that he could safely put twice as much pressure in his tyres than that stipulated as ideal in the manufacturer’s manual, without having them explode in his face. What would happen where he to be appraised of this possibility? He would probably be less apprehensive of his tyres bursting when he sees a lackadaisical garage boy nonchalantly filling them. He would certainly not exceed the specified norm each time he had occasion to put some air in his tyres.

What they (mis)take for the Maker’s absolute norm regarding Christian marriage, fascinates many Churchmen as fearfully as the tyre manufacturer’s presumed upper limit. The average pastor assumes that one cannot sacramentalise beyond monolithic monogamy without destroying dogma if not the natural ideal of the family itself. Yet too neat a notion of what the Natural Law allows, coupled with a naive understanding of Revealed Truth, can block an adequate and adapted pastoral approach to marriage in the same way that a literal reading of the maker’s instructions can prevent a suitably supple attitude towards tyre filling. In both instances a perspective is urgently needed which will liberate people’s minds. Both the pastor worried about polygamy and the car-owner concerned with his tyres would benefit from a point of view which would free them from false fears. But in neither case would these new horizons automatically entail practical excesses. The car-owner’s new-found knowledge would not lead him to put twice as much air in his tyres at the first opportunity. Likewise a priest’s new awareness that customary marriage is perhaps already really sacramental, and therefore sacramentalisable, would not normally lead him to impose his insight regardless of pastoral common sense.

In plotting the artistic course of Alexander Solzhenitsyn the two texts which may be taken as datum points of particular importance are the first short novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The Gulag Archipelago. Writing previously on Ivan Denisovich I proposed an interpretative model which saw the book’s empirical and ‘valueless’ character as having twofold importance: it represented a clean break with previous official ‘illustrating literature’ and simultaneously reflected central characteristics of Soviet society atomised and depoliticised by the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracy. This duality I saw as a threshold which could pave the way for a new and radical, analytic, Soviet literature and yet could also remain tied to an empirical and static reportage of phenomena subsumed under a structure of concepts constituted of abstract, superhistorical, and in the end desperately reactionary values. It is this latter possibility, the rehearsal of the terrible facts of Soviet history organised in the service of a retrogressive ideology, that is realised in The Gulag Archipelago.

The book appears to be a history of the repressive apparatus and of ‘that amazing country of Gulag’, but most editions of it (although not the English language version) are subtitled ‘An experiment in artistic investigation’ which has, as I shall show, a quite different and less authoritative epistemological status. It extensively and repetitively catalogues the entire repertoire of the Stalinist atrocities from the moment of arbitrary arrest, through the process of interrogation, mental and physical torture, to trial or extra-judicial sentencing; it recounts the intermediate stays in the transit prisons, the MVD internal prisons and the ‘boxes’ in which prisoners en route were kept at railway stations.

Attitudes towards sociology displayed by some leading authorities in the Catholic church today are, to put it mildly, ambivalent. They vary from suspicion and sometimes overt hostility to feelings of relative pleasure depending on whether or not the findings of sociological research can be used to support their pastoral intuitions. Pope Paul, for instance, has been reported as claiming that the turbulence and dissent in the Roman Catholic church today ‘tends to be produced with a new method, that of the sociological survey’. At the same time that he made this remark he was sponsoring one of the largest socio-religious surveys to date within his own diocese of Rome. In England, in his address to the Church Leaders’ Conference in 1972, Cardinal Heenan viewed with alarm the number of university students now opting for courses in sociology and what he saw as the almost certain consequence of requests for fresh surveys. He continued by doubting the value in planning future pastoral strategy of such surveys as that recently completed for the Church in West Germany. In the same year he was accepting one of the ‘findings’ of an extremely unrepresentative survey carried out by the Laity Commission on behalf of the hierarchy, that priests working in parishes should make themselves more available to their parishioners. Yet he was not reported as welcoming another ‘finding’ in the same survey that the laity accepted the principle of optional celibacy for priests. Thus it would appear that some church leaders are selective in their acceptance of sociological findings.

We would now like to suggest there are at least four reasons for the suspicion of sociology. In the first place it is quite possible that sociology is connected in the minds of many with revolutionary social change. The student unrest of the late 1960s which was thought to be seeking such change occurred in universities such as Berkeley, Nanterre and tlw London School of Economics, all with strong faculties of sociology.

Anyone who cares about getting rid of racism in Britain is accustomed to massive difficulties. The disastrous immigration policies of governments of both parties since 1962, the institutionalised racial discrimination built into public and private organisations, the tragedy of human potential lost and destroyed in our educational system, the insensitivity and ignorance of many people in the news industry, racism in entertainment and cartoons, public indifference and private malice, are all too bitterly familiar. But the anti-racist, as if he had not trouble enough with enemies, needs more and more protection from his friends. Government money for ‘community relations’ has recently become more plentiful, but practised hands are holding the purse-strings and know just how and when to draw them tight. Job opportunities brighten a little for specialised social workers, charged with containing the discontents of the young and black : their job opportunities are less than ever. Various groups on the Left are eager to help in the racial struggle, but usually on their own terms. And now we have Women’s Lib as well.

‘Women’s Lib’ is a vague and disputed term; it is more usual to hear of ‘the women’s movement’ now in this country. This includes some formal organisations, some informal groups and some individuals, all in some way or another concerned with women’s rights. These groups and individuals vary in beliefs and in action. Some are old-established reforming organisations, some new community action groups, and so on; their work often overlaps, but there is a marked difference, all the same, between the new ideology of liberation and the old ideology of equal rights for women. The difference is in mood and style rather than in a set programme; the new mood and style can conveniently be called ‘anti-sexism’.

The Problem

It is not difficult to show from the New Testament that dialogue is built into the structures of the Christian community. Ep. 4:11-16, for example, ‘proves that in the New Testament there is no opposition between ministerial authority and an emancipated laity. Rather the relation between the two is the fact that the first gives rise to the second.’ Other texts (for example, Rm. 1 :12; 2 Co. 1 :24; 1 Pt. 5 :3) show that the apostles’ authority over the local communities was not all one way: the latter had something to give the apostles. The same conclusion follows, too, from the fact that the Word of God has been committed to the whole community. As Augustine once said, God speaks to every member of the Church ‘from the bishops right down to the last of the faithful’. There is thus a pooling of experience, a fruitful interchange of opinion.

Now there is a sense in which this dialogue in the Church between ministers and laity takes the form of preaching on one side and obedience on the other. The official proclamation of the Gospel in the community provokes a response which Paul calls ‘the obedience of faith’ (Rm. 1 :5; 16:26) and Peter ‘the obedience of truth’ (1 Pt. 1 :22), so that to genuine exposition of the Gospel message the people respond by accepting the Word in faith. However, no human dialogue can be totally active on one side and totally passive on the other. Every form of communication involves a giving and a receiving on both sides if it is not to degenerate into monologue and silence.