Transcendental Philosophy and the Study of Religion 13

CD/mp3 493, seventh lecture in the 1968 Boston College Institute. Sponsored by Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini. The lecture considers religious expression, faith, and conversions and breakdowns. Whenever we move beyond the pure kernel of religion, there is a danger of corruption. There is a distinction of total religious expression and partial religious expression. Total religious expression is an imitation of divine love, loving all that God has done, is doing, will do. It is religious in its source but secular in its term, love of neighbor. Partial religious expression for Christians is ecclesial, local, temporal, in some ways fixed and others variable. It can be authentic or a source of decline. But it cannot be dropped entirely in favor of a religionless Christianity. Faith is the knowledge born of religious love. Lonergan describes such live again, in some detail, and elaborates how faith can take on the dimensions of belief. He returns again to the topic of God as object, and clarifies further what he had said earlier. But God is also subject. The difference between a philosophic and a religious speaking of God is the difference between speaking of God as intended on the first three levels and of God as a subject in a relationship. Conversions are intellectual, moral, religious. The two-way relation between the three conversions is discussed, and each of them is matched by forms of decline.