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Lonergan on the Person and the Economy: “reaching up to the mind of Aquinas,” in view of responding to Pope Leo XIII, vetera novis augere et perficere
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Given the reputation of Bernard Lonergan as a thinker, whose philosophical discourse is about intentionality and the seamless connection of cognitional theory, epistemology, and metaphysics, and whose self-confessed role in theology is to generate a method that meets the exigencies of a world that is on the move and culturally diverse, the article tells the story of his contribution to economic theory, and how this effort occupied both the beginning and the end of his mind's journey. There occurs, of course, the question about how these interests are related, and the key to the answer is found in the motto of Leo XIII, where the vetera imply especially Aquinas’ clear vision of the meaning of being human, and the nova include responses to the two-fold challenge emergent in both the object (to promote genuine development in the economic order) and the subject (to work out a coherent explanation of the structure of the human good).
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- © 2011 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2011 The Dominican Council
References
1 This manuscript was put together gradually and brought to a fine point in 1944, only to be set aside, as Lonergan gave his attention to other matters. It is to Philip McShane that we owe the collection and organization of all the fragments, which are presented in vol 15 of Collected Works, For a New Political Economy (University of Toronto Press, 1998). In describing his work McShane writes, “This volume of Bernard Lonergan's economic writings contains almost the entirety of the fragments of typewritten work on economics prior to, and including, the 1944 version of the Essay on Circulation Analysis” (Editor's Preface, xv)
2 Operative Grace in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, initially published as a series of articles in Theological Studies (1941-’42), then in book form as Grace and Freedom (vol 1 of Collected Works). Cf. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I II, 111, 2.
3 Insight: a Study of Human Understanding, first published in 1957 (NY: Philosophical Library). Fifth [critical] edition, vol 5 of Collected Works, etc.
4 Method in Theology (1972). NY: Herder and Herder.
5 First published in Theological Studies (1946-’49), finally in Collected Works as Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas (vol 2).
6 Incidentally, of course, as he brought his work to term, he also discovered that the brilliant Jesuit Luis Molina's antagonist in the controversy, De auxiliis, namely, Domingo Banez (distinguished Dominican and spiritual mentor of Teresa of Avila), was as far away from a real resolution of the problem of divine grace and human freedom as was Molina. In the end by appropriating St. Thomas’ development of the notion of gratia operans, and employing a penetrating analysis of Aquinas’ own grasp of the mystery of God's eternity, he accomplished the resolution that had escaped and even confounded both Molina and Banez.
7 Eventually Lonergan will combine these to kinds of development in the lecture/article, “Healing and Creating in History,” which found a place as required reading in the course he gave in Macroeconomics at Boston College, from 1978 to 1983.
8 This impending necessity explains perhaps the panic that Lonergan experienced, when the ailment from which he was suffering was diagnosed as lung cancer, and he had to anticipate his life ending without the publication of Method, which by that time was present to his mind, perhaps somewhat as with Mozart the whole symphony was present in a single moment.
9 Editors’ Introduction, Lonergan, Macroeconomic Dynamics: an Essay in Circulation Analysis (Collected Works, vol 15), University of Toronto Press, 1999, xxvi-xliii.
10 For this part of the story see also Crowe, F., Lonergan, (Outstanding Christian Thinkers Series, ed., B. Davies). Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press 1992, 12–17Google Scholar.
11 Lawrence. ibid., xxviii.
12 The “other engagements” included the aforementioned regency at Loyola College, in Montreal, then his theological studies in Rome, which culminated in the writing of the doctoral thesis under Charles Boyer, and then more teaching at home in Canada.
13 Lawrence, ibid., xxxi.
14 Ibid., xxxi f.
15 97–106; also to be found in A Third Collection (NY, 1985), 100–109.
16 For a foreshadowing of this position see Insight, 729.
17 See Lonergan, 1957, 618–620, having to do with the Possibility of Ethics, where the author introduces the Notion of the Good, distinguishing particular goods that can be experienced, intelligible goods of order, and values that can be chosen. Cf. Lonergan, Method 1972, 48, where these distinctions govern the Structure of the Human Good.
18 For a compendious but complete analysis and synthesis of this process in its cognitional aspect see “Cognitional Structure” (Lonergan, 1967, 205–221), an analysis which is complemented by the ¶¶ on the notion of value and judgments of value in Lonergan, 1972, 34–41.
19 Method in Theology, 48.
20 Lonergan, 1972, 231f.
21 1957, 218–242.
22 Lonergan's original formulation of this notion is to be found in Insight, 144–148.
23 Insight, 238.
24 Ibid. (49a, emphasis added).
25 ibid.
26 Method in Theology, 48. Cf. this very page for an concise explanation of the terms and the relations.
27 We may speak dismissively of the “re-invention of the wheel,” without acknowledging that before the wheel can be reinvented it has to be invented.
28 1999, 29, inter alia.
29 Insight, 619.
30 All this suggests the notion of cosmopolis as a supervening and comprehensive good of order in which the integral scale of values is being approximated (Insight, 263–267(238–242).
31 Insight, 115–128.
32 “It remains that transcendental method is only a part of theological method. It supplies the basic anthropological component. It does n ot supply the specifically religious component” (Method in Theology, 25). Cf. the caveat about the order in which conversion normally occurs, ibid., 243.