Search for a command to run...
Owing to a grant from the Lonergan Institute at Boston College, J. Michael Stebbins's trenchant 1995 study of Bernard Lonergan's early works on grace and freedom is once again in print. The reader quickly discovers that the breadth of Stebbins's text exceeds its ostensibly narrow scope: a presentation of the early Lonergan's synthesis of Aquinas's synthesis of grace and freedom, with particular reference to the de auxiliis controversy's long shadow (e.g., Molinism and Bannezianism). Stebbins's methodical examination of Lonergan's De ente supernaturali (1946; developed for his seminary course on grace) has historical, speculative-theological, and performative aims. Historically, it relays the fruits of Lonergan's constructive retrieval of Thomas Aquinas, demonstrating the ‘enduring achievement’ (p. xix) of Aquinas's attempt at ‘thinking out the Christian universe’ (p. 294). As an enterprise in speculative theology, it endeavours ‘to explain, to interrelate, [and] to reconcile the affirmations of dogma’ in a spiritually enlivening mode (p. 3; pp. 27–29)—here, those pertaining to divine sovereignty, the gratuity of grace, and human freedom. Lastly, the text is performative: it expounds Lonergan's distinctive intertwining of human cognition, metaphysics, and theology through analysing his early enactment of it. This culminates in Lonergan's reduction of the theological impasse between Molinists and Bannezians over grace and freedom to shared metaphysical missteps that are ultimately rooted in more fundamental errors regarding the nature of knowledge (pp. 212–237). Indeed, ‘all these results hinge…on the methodological issue of how the human mind operates’ (p. xviii). Stebbins commences with a compendious summary of Lonergan's theory of cognition (later termed ‘cognitional structure’ or ‘transcendental method’), with specific reference to its roots in Aquinas. Theological speculation seeks theological understanding, so the theologian must first understand what it is to understand, and this requires attending to our mental acts, their objects, and the desire to know impelling us onwards. ‘Understanding develops towards synthesis’, which is not the addition of new data but the attainment of a more integrated and comprehensive view of already familiar data. A synthesis grasps a ‘unifying pattern, order, interrelationship, structure, [and] coherence within some field of theological data’ (p. 17). For the topic at hand, Lonergan's ‘synthetic, explanatory principle of the economy of salvation’ is the following: grace is a strictly supernatural created communication of the divine nature (p. 34). The bulk of the work explores Lonergan's development of this simple yet supple principle as a means to facilitate a better explanatory grasp of dogmatic data; to recast and thereby resolve ‘the hopelessly stalled de auxiliis controversy’ embroiling Catholic theology for centuries (p. 183); and to capture Aquinas's own position. Curious as it may sound, Lonergan finds in the little-known Parisian Philip the Chancellor (d. 1236) ‘a watershed in theological method’ (p. 92). He credits Philip with devising the ‘theorem of the supernatural’, which, for the first time in systematic fashion, entitatively distinguished the orders of nature and grace through delineating the radical disproportion between the capacities and operations of the former and those afforded by the latter. Grace is not only psychological, but ontological; not only healing, but elevating; not only gratuitous because of sin, but gratuitous because of human nature's creaturely limitations (pp. 78–83). By grace, humans perform acts of knowing and loving whose object is God as he is in himself, something utterly disproportionate to the intellect and will's proper, finite objects. It is relatively supernatural for a plant to walk or an ox to read; it is strictly supernatural for a human to know and love God uti in se est. Stebbins anticipates concerns that such a distinction can—and, in historical fact, did—become a separation, whether through positing a ‘merely entitative supernaturality’ eluding all conscious experience (pp. 122–126), or through the construction of a ‘two-story universe’ wherein the relationship between grace and nature is extrinsic (one of ‘mere non-repugnance’, pp. 161–176). Lonergan forcefully rejects the former, arguing that the experience of grace in ‘conscious acts cannot be coherently denied’ (p. 138). In response to the latter, he develops a notion of ‘vertical finality’. Although the universe is aptly understood as ‘a series of horizontal strata “ordered in a hierarchy of increasing perfection”’ (p. 43), there is simultaneously a self-transcending dynamism born of diverse beings’ concrete interactions within the complex whole, wherein ‘lower’ grades of being condition, subserve, and are incorporated into higher grades of being (pp. 56–58). The possibility of this dynamic, integrative ‘upthrust’ (p. 58) is what Lonergan means by vertical finality, and it differs from the absolute finality whereby all things are oriented to God as their ultimate end and the horizontal finality whereby natures seek proportionate ends. ‘By analogy, then, the supernatural order transcends the natural not by obliterating or negating it, but rather by assimilating it into a higher unity. Grace builds on nature’ (p. 142). Vertical finality implies neither that the lower is owed to the higher nor that it has a natural exigence for sublation into it; yet, it is nonetheless perfected by it. Thus, to describe humanity's obediential potency for the beatific vision is to refer to vertical finality: our relation to it is ‘more’ than that of non-repugnance (pp. 171–172), but ‘less’ than something for which we have a natural capacity or an exigence which God must fulfil. We are left with a ‘paradox’: ‘the beatitude natural and proportionate to a finite nature is imperfect’ (p. 169). Yet, vertical finality is unthinkable and a two-story universe inevitable for a ‘static essentialism’ that makes ‘individual finite natures’, considered in the abstract, ‘logically and ontologically prior to the world-orders that relate them to one another’ (p. 171). In this schema, grace cannot but be an extrinsic additive subsequently bestowed upon a self-contained human nature. Motivated by his theory of cognition, Lonergan enacts a reversal: he makes the unitary and dynamic cosmic order as conceived by God—and constituted by a web of concrete interrelations—prior to finite natures, which are ‘derivative possibilit[ies]’ (p. 176). Only if the concrete whole is prior to individual natures can ‘the natural and the supernatural orders [be] intrinsically related parts of a single cosmic order’ (p. 176). Stebbins then turns to Lonergan's related intervention in debates over grace and freedom—debates that, today, are often considered needlessly recondite and passé. How does properly ‘appreciat[ing] the fundamental role of passive potency in the Thomist metaphysical scheme’ (p. 219), or determining that obediential potency is a ‘remote essential passive potency’ (p. 147), contribute to a theology of grace? Stebbins expertly unwinds Lonergan's dense web of terms and relations to argue that a ‘comprehensive systematics of grace cannot do without metaphysics’ (p. 298), so long as that metaphysics is grounded in the activity of the human mind and remains sufficiently theoretical. In Lonergan's determination, the centuries-long debate between Molinists and Bannezians ‘bespeaks a radical failure of theological method’ (p. 289) which, mutual recriminations notwithstanding, stems from ‘faulty philosophical assumptions’ shared by both parties (p. 212; pp. 186–187). These are: a notion of ‘efficient causality’ as ‘the emission of an influx’ understood in an imagistic and physical way (p. 235; ‘physical premotion’); a similarly pictorial notion of ‘immediacy’ as necessitating the presence of one supposit to another, even for God (p. 229; ‘divine concourse’); and a failure to ‘correct our spontaneous way of conceiving the relation of time to being’—of God's eternity to the human future—and thereby dispel ‘childhood images’ (pp. 263–264; God's ‘scientia media’). Consequently, their notions of divine transcendence and efficacy, of instrumentality, and of secondary causality are muddled. As an alternative, Lonergan proposes a suitably conceptual, theoretical, and explanatory theology and metaphysic that is on guard against the ‘illegitimate “intrusion of the imagination”’ (p. 229). It knows that the limit of the real is not what can be imagined, but what can be understood and affirmed in judgement. This demands a ‘purification’ of thought (p. 293): of conception from imagination, of metaphysics from physics, and of theory and explanation from ‘common-sense’ descriptions (pp. 288–290). In the end, this—what Lonergan later calls ‘intellectual conversion’—was the key to resolving a centuries-old theological stalemate. (Unfortunately for those unfamiliar with Lonergan's work, his definitions of ‘explanation’, ‘common sense’, ‘description’, and ‘theory’—concepts vital to Stebbins's argument for the superiority of Lonergan's method and synthesis—are presented quite briefly [pp. 12–13] and not reconsidered or reviewed subsequently.) There is a certain amount of irony in the fact that Stebbins effectively demonstrates Lonergan's unique genius and the bounties of his method at the same time that he (indirectly) suggests reasons for his inconsistent reception. With his metaphysical rigour and tireless multiplication of distinctions, Lonergan is more scholastic than the scholastics—but to the effect of ‘undercut[ting] the very premises’ on which they operate (p. 293). With his convictions in the natural desire to see God, in the ‘paradox’ at the heart of human existence, and in the shortcomings of ‘two-story’ Thomism's grace-extrinsicism, he arrives at many conclusions typical of the ‘nouvelle théologie’—but with a starkly different method and rationale. And, with his concrete exploration of the one world order's self-transcending dynamism, he eschews ‘static essentialism’ and ‘conceptualism’—but all while insisting on an ontological hierarchy of diverse grades of perfection. In short, Lonergan falls neatly into no particular ‘camp’, but this is likely to his credit. In this spirit, I recommend Stebbins's study to theologians of all stripes desiring a systematic inquiry into the gracious dealings of the creator with his creatures, especially those interested in Lonergan's development, in contemporary receptions of Aquinas, or in theological method. We can be grateful to Stebbins for working to ensure that Lonergan's early writings remain neither confined to their original context nor detached from his subsequent development. Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.