In this paper I speculate about the idea of personal moral discovery. These speculations occur, however, only at the end, for my object is to present genuine, not rhetorical, questions. The substance of this paper concerns moral weakness and self-deception. These topics are relevant because the analyses of moral weakness and of self-deception throw light, in different ways, on what is meant by and also on what obstacles there are to the discovery for oneself of a moral point of view.

Briefly the light they throw is this: self-deception is one sort of obstacle to self-knowledge. Insofar, then, as discovering a personal morality is the process of discovering something about oneself—and I merely assert for the moment that it is in part this—self-deception is one kind of obstacle to personal moral discovery. It may follow from this that the contrary process of detecting one’s own self-deceptions is one form of self-discovery which is relevant to moral discovery. If so, it will be important to be clear about how we do discover that we have been deceiving ourselves. I try to solve some of the difficulties there are about how this self-detection occurs in the second part of this paper.

The relevance of moral weakness to the topic of self-discovery is more complex. Again briefly, there are two main assertions which I make. The first is that any self-ascription of moral weakness is problematic. This is to say that the subjective evidence immediately available to the moral agent himself on any putative occasion of moral weakness is never sufficient evidence that he was, genuinely, morally weak on that occasion. We do not know, in other words, just from what is going on in our minds at the time, that our failure to act as we think we ought to be acting is moral weakness rather than something else.

Looking at Lonergan’s Method is a collection of thirteen papers issuing from a conference held at Maynooth in the spring of 1973 at which scholars from differing traditions and disciplines gathered to assess the significance of the recent work of Bernard Lonergan.

These are not the papers written for the meeting; they represent the authors’ reflections after it, in the light of the discussions that took place. Perhaps the momentum for the book was the convergence of fundamental doubts about the viability of Lonergan’s method. At any rate, for all the respect and gratitude that some of the Catholic contributors voice for what Lonergan has done over the years to loosen the hold of a certain way of doing theology, it is very striking that all but one or two of these papers make what seem such irreparably damaging criticisms of his recent work that it becomes very difficut to regard it any longer as a promising trail in the reconstruction of Catholic theology which is now so urgent a task. The book thus marks a watershed in the history of Lonergan congresses.

That Bernard Lonergan is the only figure in the English-speaking world whose achievement in Catholic theology ranks, in influence and reputation, with that of the leading theologians of our time, cannot be disputed. The years he spent lecturing at the Gregorian University in Rome (1953-1965) afforded him a unique opportunity to reach the minds of a whole generation of candidates for the priesthood—either directly or through the countless future seminary professors whom he must have taught (he sometimes had classes of 650 students!).

The first of these quotations was written by Newman in 1845 in his famous Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. The second was written by Marx and Engels three years later in The Communist Manifesto.

Newman’s essay can be seen as the beginning of a genuine sense of history in the world of Catholic Theology. The Communist Manifesto can be seen as having a similar role for the history of ideas. Catholic Theology could never be the same again after Newman’s essay and secular history could never be the same again after the Communist Manifesto.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore more than a few of the implications of the Marxist view of history as class struggle for Newman’s view of doctrinal development. I am not aware that anyone has ever given a Marxist analysis of Newman’s famous essay. There are, however, a number of Marxist treatments of the history of the Church and of Christian doctrine—notably by Engels and Karl Kautsky. These treatments are all written from the point of view of a rejection of belief, both in God and in any meaningful degree of historical certainty about the existence of Jesus Christ.

The reasons for Marxist atheism are well known and can be found in the philosophical background of the young Marx. The reasons for the extreme scepticism over New Testament origins can be traced to early nineteenth century biblical criticism and to the work of the bosom friend of the young Marx at Berlin in the 1830s, Bruno Bauer.

Antony Archer rightly suggests (‘Dismantling the Sacrament Machine’, NB January 1975) that present Church structures impede the preaching of the Gospel, and that the laity must begin to do tasks from which they have hitherto been cut off, in particular that ‘it is urgent that the laity take preaching into their hands’. He points to the inadequacy of much present-day priestly preaching, and discusses the possibility of such a move as forbidding the clergy to preach, but concludes : ‘However, such a move as forbidding the clergy to preach, superficially attractive though it is, would only compound the present distortion. After all the priest is ordained to preach the Gospel and attempts to change the Church should be in accordance with its theology’. It is this last point that I wish to develop.

Nobody would deny that there are many lay people who have the gift and vocation of preaching the Gospel, and are able to do it better than most priests. But preaching remains an inalienable part of Christian priesthood. You can be a preacher without being a priest, but not a priest without being a preacher. If we stress the sacramental functions of the priest at the expense of his preaching role, or vice versa, we distort our picture of his office. Though individuals may be more suited to one task than to the other, priests must be trained for both, and both must be expected of them. To train a man to administer the sacraments without training him to preach is like teaching a violinist to stop the strings with his left hand, without showing him how to wield the bow in his right. The reason for the interdependence of the two roles lies deep in the nature of the Gospel itself. Christ came both to speak and to act: he both utters, and is, the Word of God. Indeed, it is hard to conceive what is meant by administering the sacraments without preaching, since all human gestures reveal something about those who make them, and so every sacramental act communicates, proclaims, preaches, though it may do so very badly. Bro. Antony has fallen into a trap when he says ‘By preaching is meant here verbal communication’, since the verbal is inseparable from other forms of communication.