Bernard Lonergan

Bernard Lonergan was born on the 17th of December 1904 in Buckingham, Quebec. Coming from an Irish background, his family had settled on a small farm in a French-speaking community. His family attended St. Gregory Nazianzen Catholic church and Bernard was instituted into a Catholic boys school named St. Michael’s. He was later sent to a boarding school named Loyola College that was situated in Montreal. Lonergan entered the Society of Jesus on July 29th 1922 at age 18. He then taught at Jesuit seminaries in Montreal and Toronto and in the summer of 1933 taught theological studies at the College de l’Immaculee-Conception in Montreal. He went on to teach philosophy and theology in Rome and was ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood on July 25th, 1936. One year later he would receive his master degree in Sacred Theology and then pursue a doctorate on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Through his teachings that became worldwide he “recognized that the crises of modernity call for a thoroughgoing and profound recasting of the ‘method’.”

As he became aware of “knowing,” he realized that it just meant repeating something like robots from a textbook when talking and meeting with other professors. Something was missing; something that Lonergan figured out was “insight,” “the notion of development and the personal dimensions of understanding”(Creamer 53). Lonergan wrote his most well known book, Insight in 1957 which was a study of human understanding and a conquest to “transpose St. Thomas’ position to meet the issues of our own day”(Creamer 53). The book is about the intended reader and ways to discover “oneself in oneself.” Lonergan wanted to explain how people think and arrive at their conclusions whilst knowing how their methods of reasoning came to those conclusions. He was determined that the ability of individuals to confront and understand themselves is the origin of a more comprehensive knowledge. The truths of the world do not come from science or religion, he argued, but from ourselves. The point of Insight “is to discover, to identify, [and] to become familiar with the way in which we use our intelligence.” What Lonergan discovered is that every person has to become aware and familiar with how we use our intelligence and how we can maximize it and use it better.

Health problems arose which brought Bernard Lonergan back to Canada in 1965 to the Jesuit Seminary. When he was diagnosed with cancer he would never again return to Rome and turned to what he knew best, research and writing. Lonergan wrote his second most famous book that he called Methods in Theology in which he completed in 1972. It was a sequel to Insight in which he applied all his understanding of understanding to religion, culture, and Christian faith. “If Insight is Lonergan’s answer to questions about the possibility and nature of human knowing, Method is his answer to a second problem having to do with the inadequacy of intellectual methods in the discipline he knew best, theology”(Creamer 57).

When Lonergan was teaching in both Canada and Rome he realized that the Roman Catholic philosophy and theology needed to be reconstructed. He based this on the fact that the old Roman Catholic tradition was obsolete and outdated in the new and modern world. To remedy this situation he put forth his two main books, Insight and Method and Theology, to complement and enhance the traditionalist way of thinking with the “new learning.” Lonergan’s passion was to answer the question: ‘What does it mean to know?’” In his first book he laid out answers to four of his main questions; “What am I doing when I am knowing? (cognitional theory), Why is doing that knowing? (epistemology), What do I know when I have done that? (metaphysics), and How am I do decide what to make of myself? (existential ethics)”(Creamer 66).

Lonergan believed that our human consciousness had intentional operations that were simply experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding. Within the operations a subcategory of another four levels dealing with how these operations are “objectified by the conscious subject.” An example would be someone who can experience himself experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding. Likewise, another example would be someone that can understand his experienced experience, understanding, judging, and deciding. What Lonergan expresses is the fact that the old, “seeing is believing” saying is only partially true. If you see something with your own eyes your view is not wrong, it is just incomplete because it only has one of the components of knowing, which is experiencing. People who base whole arguments on what they see are taking one component of knowing, yet believe it to be the whole of knowing.

Lonergan has opened the world to a whole new and