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Jesuit Joseph Flanagan, a longtime Lonergan scholar, was much less surprised. For Flanagan, Lonergan's meth od "not only includes but demands interdisciplinary dialectic. We must learn from one another." To do otherwise, says Flanagan, simply contributes to "the pool of misunderstanding" that in Lonergan's thought lies at the source of so many of mankind's woes.
Major Catalyst. Some critics charge that Lonergan's thought is inhibited by his need to justify Catholic dogma. Charles Davis, British theologian who broke completely with the Catholic Church, admitted at the conference that "I should never have been able to leave the church had it not been for reading Lonergan. I did not have to destroy my past. I could grow out of it." Nonetheless, Davis said, Lonergan has always been an apologist for the church, and his search for a secure foundation for dogma still "governs the whole enterprise."
Others who have been influenced by Lonergan also see him, in a somewhat different focus, as a major catalyst in their thinking. Notre Dame's David Burrell and John Dunne, Chicago Divinity School's David Tracy, and Humanities Professor Michael Novak of the State University of New York, all studied under Lonergan at the Gregorian, and each attributes his own free-roaming theological method to Lonergan's influence. "Insight gave me the freedom to go on through trusting my own understanding," says Burrell. "It is not the system," says Dunne, "but what Lonergan does. He moves from one horizon to another while talking about insight. It is a voyage of discovery." For Tracy, whose book The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan will be published next month, Lonergan means: "You can't cheat. You know what is demanded of real thinking." Michael Novak finds Lonergan's importance in the fact that all education is the developing of insights. But "this is not a school of philosophy," warns Novak. "Nobody can have your insights for you. If you make a school out of Lonergan, you've missed the point."
Perilous Adventure. Lonergan himself insists that "there is no such thing as a Lonerganian"; by its very nature, he says, his method "destroys totalitarian ambitions." Insight is "a way of asking people to discover in themselves what they are." Yet the very openness of Lonergan's method, notes Utrecht University Theologian Henri Nouwen, makes his approach to self-realization a perilous personal adventure. The answer to intellectual blindness—or scotosis, as Lonergan calls it by its Greek name—is that each human being must lay himself open to the sheer terror of selfdiscovery.
Lonergan repeatedly emphasizes that self-discovery demands considerable individual responsibility. In a recent essay on "The Absence of God in Modern Culture," he points out that honest concern for the future of the world must begin with self-transcendence. "If it is not just high-sounding hypocrisy," Lonergan concludes, "concern for the future supposes rare moral attainment. It calls for what Christians name heroic charity."