We should have questions on everything, about everything.
— Bernard J.F. Lonergan
CANADIAN Jesuit Bernard J.F. Lonergan is considered by many intellectuals to be the finest philosophic thinker of the 20th century. This month, 77 of the best minds in Europe and the Americas — critics and admirers, Protestants, Roman Catholics and agnostics — gathered to examine Lonergan's profoundly challenging work at rural St. Leo College near Tampa, Fla.
Many of the names were celebrated: English Philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, smoking her trademark cigar, Radical Poet Kenneth Rexroth, Expatriate Catholic Theologian Charles Davis, Biblical Scholar John L. McKenzie, Protestant Theologian Langdon Gilkey, U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy. As McCarthy said of the assemblage, which included mathematicians and scientists as well as theologians and philosophers: "You would have to spend ten years going around the world to find all these people."
All-Embracing Theory. Such a constellation of scholars attested to a renewed and heightened interest in Lonergan, who is now writing extensively again after recuperating from a 1 965 operation for lung cancer. That they came from so many disciplines demonstrated that Lonergan's influence has gone far beyond his original field of theology. In fact, says Fordham Jesuit Bernard Tyrell, Lonergan has become a true "phi losopher of culture": in his grasp of the process of understanding that un derlies every science, he is the 20th cen tury counterpart of a Renaissance man.
The 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 around him. He thus echoes the Athenian exhortation yvwi aeavrov—know thyself.
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?"