Tell It How It Is, Do It How It Should Be: Tasks and Messages from Fr Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan, S.J. (1904-1984)
by Bernard Mageean
Those of us lucky enough to know Bernard Mageean are able (if I may use a word Bernard never would) to grok his more sophisticated musings on embodied consciousness and the work of learning. If the final sections of this essay are difficult (and they are) then I can only offer the reader my firm confidence that Bernard (and his namesake too) is dealing in authentic insights, however obscure. - Sean Haylock
The clock says 5am. It is dark, and a cool November morning, so I sit swaddled in layers of clothing, drinking hot tea and with more than enough chocolate biscuits to hand. Sleep deserted me at 4am. Self-instructions came and went, sustaining the wakefulness. The danger of losing the thread forced me to sleep no more and obey the summons to take up the pen. The task now is at hand. On with it, words on paper now. Title, ok. That will do. I write for one who asked for this. Now for the slogans to be recollected, unfurled and recommended, recalled to life.
We all know how it is. The problem is talking about it, telling it, demonstrating it. Knowing and talking, understanding, means simplification. The initial move of human intelligence is towards abstraction. A word is abstract, words have a false fixedness, though when they seek some clarity, and achieve it, it helps. It avoids a mess and does a (for now) necessary task. However, we cannot live in the abstract for long. The business of living is activity, and words are just a wayfarers permit, so to speak. Sometimes such permits have to be renewed.
Typically human beings must do a lot of talking before we can tell ourselves much of these goings-on. We have to learn to talk to ourselves, first usefully, to make necessary distinctions, and then instructively, effectively, to blur the boundaries. St John Henry Newman had a way of putting it: what occurs is ‘saying and unsaying, to positive effect.’ Does that not make it all clear? He also had a slogan derived from some contemporary author in his youth: ‘Change is the only sign of life.’ Stability to move was to be gained by a dynamism that preserved life and living it. The active mind discerns the forms in the flux of experience, and what we say must abide this, and develop accordingly.
Talk of Newman reminds me that we hear a lot of other people talking, typically, before we tell ourselves much that is of vital importance, or even just useful. Some of the voices come from the dead. If they are remembered they usually have something to say. Other people, dead or alive, may or may not, of course, be talking sense. If it is sense, we can easily learn to adopt and adapt their talk for our purposes. If it is nonsense we can learn what to avoid by using it as a countermodel. One of the best ways of putting talk to the sense/nonsense test is to watch what the speakers do. This can take a while, as sense and nonsense may well be mixed together. In the interim, watch what you yourself say and do.
Bernard J.F. Lonergan was born 120 years ago, on December 17th 1904, in Buckingham, Quebec, Canada. French was spoken in the district, and his early schooling may have had some French-speaking tuition. He later attended the Jesuit college in Montreal, which he regarded as teaching in the light of the old (16th century) tradition of the Jesuits. When he left the school in the early ‘20s he joined the Jesuits, and the 2-year novitiate followed. It was again a traditional pattern, based on the ‘spiritual exercises’ of St Ignatius. Then he was sent to England, where he studied philosophy ‘manuals’ for some years. These manuals were written to reflect Rome’s 19th century adoption of St Thomas Aquinas as the model philosopher and medieval scholasticism as the overall viewpoint.1 They were often written in Latin, and the scholastic teaching set out in ‘question and answer’ form ripe for memorisation, rather than discussion. The English Jesuits in the ‘20s had written newer manuals in English, but the titles were traditional (logic, principles of knowledge, metaphysics, ethics, natural theology, etc.).
During his English studies Lonergan also developed a great interest in Newman, an appreciation of Chesterton, and a good acquaintance with the English empirical and realist philosophic tradition (represented by H.W.B. Joseph’s comprehensive volume on ‘Logic’, which Lonergan got to know well). He took a degree at the university of London at the same time. It had solid emphases on both classics and mathematics. His interest increased in history and in economics also.
As his Jesuit ‘practical training’ he spent some years teaching in Jesuit schools. Finally, in the mid-‘30s, his superiors sent him to the Gregorianum (the Jesuit University in Rome) to complete theological studies leading to ordination, and a doctorate in philosophy. He thought at first that philosophy of history would be of interest, but decided that the field was too underdeveloped. Then his instructions changed: he was to prepare to teach theology at the Gregorianum after obtaining a doctorate in theology.
To this moment he had studied very little of Aquinas, and maybe little more than the manuals had reflected in piecemeal fashion. He discussed the topic of his doctorate with his academic advisor, who told him there was a useful study to be done on Aquinas’s theological exploration of grace. Lonergan accepted this advice, embarking on his first real exploration of Aquinas’s original texts. To his surprise he found three systematic treatments of grace in three major texts, and they were quite different. The ‘official’ philosopher-theologian had changed his thinking on a key matter (an accounts of how God’s grace works upon human free will) not once but twice.
When Lonergan embarked on this study of ‘What Aquinas really thought’ he was commencing more than a dozen years of immersion, of ‘reaching up to the mind of Aquinas’ through the authentic original texts, first of all in the thesis eventually published as Grace and Freedom, and then with a study of Aquinas on thought and truth (Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas), a study with massive implications, because of the accumulation over centuries of inaccurate accounts of many of the views Aquinas held on key issues.
The 1930s were a disturbed (and disturbing) time. Lonergan was ordered back to Canada at the outbreak of World War II, and managed to get one of the last boats out from Italy, clutching Grace and Freedom (his newly-completed doctoral thesis) as he fled home. It was examined by a special arrangement in Canada in wartime. He did not return to the Gregorianum to take up teaching duties till the early ‘50s. What happened then was that the Church progressively relaxed its stance on modern theology, and Aquinas was no longer seen as the key theologian. However, throughout his Gregorianum period, until 1966 when Lonergan returned to Canada (a sick man, destined to remain in America), he had to teach in Latin, from student textbooks he wrote himself, but in the old pattern of theses and proofs, on topics such as the Trinity, the Incarnate Word, and the Redemption.
After the years of ‘reaching up to’ the restless and dynamic mind of Aquinas, and after the work had been published as a series of journal articles on ‘Grace and Freedom’ and ‘Verbum’, Lonergan took a key step. He had been teaching some Catholic ‘adult education’ courses in the evenings, as well as his Canadian seminary teaching during the day. He was approaching 50, and he decided to find a larger audience for the results of his Aquinas studies, particularly the ‘Verbum’ series. It would be in English, would be for the general reader, and was to be about changing your mind, more or less.
He started at the end of the forties. It was nearing completion when he was to be shipped back to the Gregorianum. By a supreme effort it was finished before he set sail. Eventually published in 1957, it became Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Some people thought it a magnificent, world-changing achievement. One of them was my Salesian older brother’s philosophy lecturer. He loaned me a copy. It was a big book.
I was 18. I told myself it was a book about maths, science, evolutionary and social theory, philosophy, ethics, and natural theology (the seminary philosophy course, in fact). I had not understood what the author was doing and, most importantly, what he was telling the reader to do, which was tell yourself what you are doing, because you are knowing, but maybe don’t know you are! It was an invitation to understand your participation in all the understanding going on. At 18, I still thought the answers would be in the book. Wrong. They are in yourself, in your knowing, and this in anything you do.
Re-readings of Insight, study of psychology, teaching about teaching and learning as a lecturer at Flinders University, all contributed to my eventual insight into Insight. But it was a two-way process. Echoes from reading Insight were part of my homing in on psychological topics like ‘inner speech’, ‘self-talk’, and ‘self-instruction’ when theorising teaching and learning. I was already primed by Lonergan’s chapter on ‘The Self-Affirmation of the Knower’, when he suggests how to ‘appropriate your own rational self-consciousness.’ It took at least two readings to react to this invitation, and maybe another reading to give it due weight. Then I did it.
Insight is a very distracting book. Even the title is distracting. In the text Lonergan dismisses the idea that knowing is like ‘taking a look at what is there to be seen.’ And the Archimedes ‘Eureka!’ anecdote with which the book begins - ‘a dramatic example’ - is misleading. Most insights (acts of understanding) are humbler, though they still have an unexpected, a probabilistic, nature. Lonergan later said they are ordinarily ‘a dime a dozen’, but that was not in Insight. He explains how they pattern, link and cluster into maps and networks. It is a constant incremental progress towards confirmations, formulations and definitions. The ‘inner word’ of the understanding arising from sense experience (Lonergan says ‘the data of experience’) tells you what has been understood (what this thing is, what is going on here). This first ‘verbum’ is hypothetical, a mere idea. Lonergan calls it ‘direct’ understanding. The subsequent ‘verbum’ is ‘reflective’ understanding, a final ‘yes’ to the idea being true and certain. This is not from one judgment, but an adjudication of a pattern of judgments, each arising from its own data of experience and direct understanding. The basic scheme is from experience to understanding to judgment.
It is highly abstract of course. Lonergan counters this by stressing the dynamism, the organic and self-constructing nature of mental activity, of inquiry and its resolution. But do true judgments occur? Only when further inquiry into relevant matters is not needed, says Lonergan. It’s then that the self-affirmation question is posed: Do I do these things - have experience, start inquiry, gain ideas/understanding, seek evidence for certainty? The reader says “Well, I am reading this book - that’s experience. I think I have some understanding - that’s understanding/hypothesis. I am looking for certainty, some conclusion, certainly.” So the question is answered: I do these things; so I know I am a knower! (And that is a true judgment). It is hard to believe that the vast canvas of human understanding, from Euclid’s maths to modern social theories, boils down to a couple of sentences at the crux of the book. The text after concerns itself with surveying and guiding understandings in philosophy, hermeneutics, ethics and natural theology. But it constantly refers back to the reader’s developing knowledge of their own activity and knowledge, as a basic move, self-changing, self-affirming.
In quite a recent re-reading of Insight’s later sections, I stumbled a bit over the chapter modestly titled ‘The Possibility of Ethics.’ Lonergan derived three ‘transcendental precepts’ (overall instructions) from his basic scheme of the mind in action. We should be attentive in experiencing, insightful in understanding, and rational in judgment. In the ‘ethics’ discussion I was puzzled when he introduced ‘be responsible in decision-making’ and seemed to imply that judgment would close off the ‘What to do?’ question prior to a decision. You as actor had only then to decide to do it (follow the judgment) and get on with it.
But then it dawned on me that I had my answer already. As noted above, my work on teaching/learning had taken a ‘self-talk’, ‘self-instruction’ turn. Hans-Georg Gadamer, at 100 years old, in a published lecture informally delivered, supported this emphasis: ‘All education is self-education.’ By way of adding communication theory to behavioural analysis/task analysis, I started telling students: there are in human performance, and its closely associated training and teaching, only tasks and messages; messages are for tasks and tasks are for messages.
In Lonergan’s account he clearly schematises ‘knowing’, but equally clearly it is knowing in action that is the thing that you experience in your own activity - ‘I do these things.’ So I had already added to my slogans another version of the tasks-messages one: knowing is for doing and doing is for knowing. Now the problem of a hiatus between judgment and decision vanishes, because the judgment may not be final, but you still have to decide what to do (i.e. what you are doing). The dynamism is always a couple on the move. We know how it is, we know what we are doing. It’s the talk, the telling ourselves what is going on, and what to do to make things better, that is effortful and time-consuming. On the other hand, we are always practising this and we can tell ourselves that real living is like this, which is a judgment in action. I would change Lonergan’s last precept to ‘Make responsible judgments in action.’ That is rational, and releases knowing into the real world. It’s what you do, stupid.
After he finished Insight, Lonergan used to say that he was asking these questions in that book:
What do we do when we are knowing?
Why is doing that knowing?
What do we know when we do that?
Bearing in mind that the incremental and interlocking activity of knowing (of experiencing, understanding and judging) accompanies any human activity, I would answer the first question by simply saying that you do whatever it is you are doing.
Why doing these things is knowing is because whatever you are doing calls forth appropriate and coherent stages and sequences of the general scheme involving inquiring into data of experience to generate a suggested understanding of what a thing is, or what is going on, and to seek further and wider evidence relevant to saying the suggested understanding is true, partially true, or false, thus partially or completely closing the inquiry and satisfying the general moving and guiding desire to know fundamentally operative in the dynamic of being human active inquirers.
And what we know overall in doing inquiry is first of all ourselves as knowers doing the things mentioned above, and as collaborators with other human persons in getting and communicating knowledge, becoming an active participant with these others in a world that is a ‘known world’ actively ‘speaking’ and ‘presenting’ itself as it is to human knowers for acceptance as a reality fostering their own.
So what is the task? In Lonergan’s case, the task of theology. I might finally note that Lonergan felt teaching theology in the years before Vatican II was impossible, as it demanded specialism in scripture, history, doctrine, systematics and catachetics. In Method in Theology he presented a useful updating of aspects of Insight, while subjecting theology teaching to an eightfold task analysis for collaborative operation, suggesting to me that Lonergan’s precepts - be attentive to relevant data of experience, be insightful in inquiring into the data, and judge responsibly in action - give the overall task analysis of all task analysing.
Some educational cross-currents of that time can be sensed from comments of Fr R.F. Clarke, S.J, in his manual Logic (1933): on Aquinas, ‘If there is any departure from the doctrines of St Thomas in these pages, it is there without the knowledge of their writer,’ and on the old manuals, ‘The author has sought to write what would have been useful to himself 20 years ago, when he made unsuccessful endeavours to master the principles of Catholic philosophy from inscrutable Latin text-books.’