The Method of Theology 1:1

CD/mp3 301, part 1 of first lecture in the 1962 Institute 'The Method of Theology.' Sponsored by Msgr. Peter Schonenbach. The first lecture on Monday, July 9, moves immediately into territory that displays Lonergan's development since he completed work on Insight. Thus method becomes a problem because of the need to add the dimension of time to medieval theology. Adding the dimension of time entails acknowledging not only the distinct worlds of common sense and theory, but also the world of interiority. It is through interiority that one brings the world of common sense, in which revelation and religion by and large take place over time, and the world of theory, which in itself tends to be atemporal. Method fundamentally is a matter of focusing not on objects but on the operations of the subject, and so on the world of interiority. A key student of operations from whom Lonergan learned a great deal is Jean Piaget. Piaget analyzed the differentiation of operations through assimilation and accommodation, the combination of differentiated operations, and their integration into groups. His distinction of immediacy and mediation also enabled Lonergan to develop his own distinctions: not only of immediate operations and mediation, but also of three kinds of mediation: through symbol and ordinary language, through technical language, and through interiority. Mediation by the experience of the operation itself is the work of method. The lecture distinguishes the Thomist and Scotist theories of knowledge, in order to isolate a fundamental structure of cognitional operations that enables one to consider both common sense and science as different ways of using a fundamental structure that can be mediated by the study of interiority. From operations Lonergan proceeds to the fundamental notions of the subject, the subject's horizon, and conversion: intellectual, moral, and religious. Slowly he is assembling the building blocks of a consideration of method. This first lecture also introduces, in the context of the discussion of the subject, the notion of inauthenticity. A distinction is drawn between relative and absolute inauthenticity (what later would be called minor and major inauthenticity), and the concluding discussion in this lecture is of relative inauthenticy, the divergence between what the subject really experiences, understands, and affirms and the characteristic mode of experiencing, understanding, and judging of a given group or of a given doctrine. This discussion will be continued at the beginning of the next lecture, which follows shortly after on the same day. The two lectures have to be viewed as a unit, and when they are published, they will form one chapter.

Database and descriptions © Copyright 2017 by Robert M. Doran

 

Audio restoration by Greg Lauzon