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Lonergan and Systematic Spiritual Theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Daniel A. Helminiak
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Popular enthusiasm for spirituality has mushroomed in the past two decades. The analyses of the human sciences and the impact of secular self-help programs have challenged the religious basis of spiritual pursuit. The influence of gurus from the East has transformed the problematic. The need for a systematic spirituality that can sort out the issues and relate them insightfully grows more urgent. In different ways, the thought of Bernard Lonergan, summarized in Method in Theology, speaks to the present need. Here I shall suggest some of those ways.

Introduction: The Need for Theory

Spirituality is a broad field. It entails many practical issues. These include: prayer and how one does it, from vocal prayer and lectio divina to discursive meditation and contemplation and mysticism; the possible physiological correlates of religious experience: postures, breathing, fasting, sensory and sleep deprivation, sexual abstinence, anatomical and neuro-chemical bases, and even drug ingestion; spiritual direction and questions of discernment of spirits; the social dimensions of public prayer and liturgies, group prayer, and group psychic and religious experience; prescriptions for ‘holy’ living; and study of the various traditions, both Western and Eastern, and of modern psychology. These all have to do with practice, and they are not to be minimized. If spirituality has any real significance, it must be in the practice. This field can less tolerate mere thinking and talking about the subject than can other fields of theology as currently conceived.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 67 , Issue 788 , February 1986 , pp. 78 - 92
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Lonergan, Bernard J.F., Method in Theology (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972)Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 170. 267. 331, 355.

3 Cf. Lonergan, Bernard J.F., The Way to Nicea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Murray, John Courtney, The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964, 33–60Google Scholar.

4 Lonergan, Method, 140.

5 I have in mind here especially Lonergan's seventh functional specialty, systematics, and his eight functional specialty, communications. Cf. Method.

6 Cf. Lonergan, Bernard J.F., insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., Ltd., 1958). 10–13Google Scholar on ‘implicit definition’ and Method, 82–83 on the ‘systematic exigence’.

7 Cf., e.g., Aumann, Jordan, Spiritual Theology (Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1980)Google Scholar; Poulain, Auguste, Des Graces d'Oraison (Paris, 1901)Google Scholar; Tanquerey, Adolphe, The Spiritual Life: A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology (Tournai, Belgium: Desclee and Co., 1930Google Scholar); van Kaam, Adrian, In Search of Spiritual identity (Denville, New Jersey: Dimension Books, 1975)Google Scholar.

8 Cf. Crowe, Frederick E., The Lonergan Enterprise (Cowley Publications, 1980)Google Scholar; Doran, Robert M., Subject and Psyche: Ricoeur, Jung, and the Search for Foundations (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1977)Google Scholar and Psychic Conversion and Theological Foundations: Towards a Reorientation of the Human Sciences (Chico, California: Scholars Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Tracy, David, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970)Google Scholar.

9 Cf. Insight.

10 Method, 6–7, 13–16. 95, 262, 265, et passim.

11 Helminiak, Daniel A., ‘Meditation‐Psychologically and Theolopically Considered’, Pastoral Psychology, 30 (1981): 6–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘Consciousness as Subject Matter’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 14 (1984): 211–230CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Method, 81–99, 257–262, 302–305.

13 Helminiak, ‘Consciousness’.

14 Cf. Ibid.;‘Meditation’; and Helminiak, Daniel A., ‘How is Meditation Prayer?’Review for Religious, 41 (1982): 195–209Google Scholar.

15 Ibid., 76–77; Lonergan, Bernard J.F., ‘Dimensions of Meaning’, in Collection, ed. Crowe, Frederick E. (Montreal): Palm Publishers, 1967), 252–267Google Scholar.

16 Helminiak, ‘Consciousness’, 220–222.

17 Johnston, William, The Inner Eve of Love: Mysticism and Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1978), 15–16Google Scholar and note.

18 Lonergan, Method. 271–293. For two eleborate applications of Lonergan's thought on this question, cf. James Robertson Price (Georgia State University), ‘Lonergan and Contemporary Spiritual Theology’, (Paper delivered at the Lonergan Center, Regis College, Toronto, December 16, 1982). and ‘Lonergan and the Foundations of a Contemporary Mystical Theology’, Lonergnn Workshop 5, ed. Frederick Lawrence (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985). 163–195.

19 Lonergan, Insight, 13–19. Lonergan, Bernard J.F., Grace and Freedom in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Burns, J. Patout (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971). 13–19Google Scholar. gives an historical account of how the medieval discovery of a higher viewpoint solved many problems about grace. This discoveiy is the source of the‐now generally misunderstood‐distinction between the natural and the supernatural.

20 Lonergan, Method, 241: ‘I would use this notion (sublation) in Karl Rahner's sense rather than Hegel's to mean that what sublates goes beyond what is sublated, introduces something new and distinct, puts everything on a new basis, yet so far from interfering with the sublated or destroying it, on the contrary needs it, includes it, preserves all its proper features and properties, and carries them forward to a fuller realization within a richer context’.

21 Ibid., 235–237, et passim.

22 For a more elaborate and popular presentation of this system of viewpoints, cf. Daniel A. Helminiak, ‘Where Do We Stand as Christians? The Challenge of Western Science and Oriental Religions’, Spiritual Life, 28 (1982): 195–209. For complete technical treatments, cf. Daniel A. Helminiak, ‘One in Christ: An Exercise in Systematic Theology’ (Ph. D. diss., Boston College and Andover Newton Theological School, 1979), 361–400, and ‘Four Viewpoints on the Human: A Conceptual Schema for Interdisciplinary Studies’ (to appear in The Heythrop Journal shortly).

23 For applications of this system to particular spiritual issues. cf. the papers by Helminiak cited above and Helminiak, Daniel A., ‘Neurology, Psychology, and Extraordinary Religious Experiences’, Journal for Religion and Health, 23 (1984): 33–46CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Dunn, Patricia J. and Helminiak, Daniel A., ‘Spiritual Practices for the Elderly’, Spirituality Today, 33 (1981): 122–136Google Scholar; Chaviz‐Garacia, Sylvia and Helminiak, Daniel A., ‘Sexuality and Spirituality: Friends, Not Foes’, The Journal of Pastoral Care 34 (1985): 151–163CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 For a full treatment of this issue, cf. Helminiak, ‘One in Christ’.

25 Lonergan, Method, 76–81.

26 Scheler, Max, The Nature of Sympathy, tr. Heath, Peter (Hamden, Connecticut: Shoe String Press, Inc., 1970), 8–12, 238–257Google Scholar.

27 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, ‘The Natural Desire to See God’, Collection, 84–95; Helminiak, ‘One in Christ’, 398–405.

28 Cf. Lonergan, Bernard J.F., De Constirutione Chrisri Ontologica et Psychologica (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1958)Google Scholar; De Deo Trino: II: Pars Sysrematica (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1964), 153–161Google Scholar; ‘Christ as Subject: A Reply’, Collection, 164–197.

29 Bernard J.F. Lonergan, ‘Cognitional Structure’, Collection, 221–239; Method, 9: '… different levels of consciousness … have to be distinguished.… There is the empirical level on which we sense, perceive, imagine, feel, speak, move. There is an intellectual level on which we inquire, come to understand, express what we have understood, work out the presuppositions and implications of our expression. There is the rational level on which we reflect, marshal the evidence, pass judgment on the truth or falsity, certainty or probability, of a statement. There is the responsible level on which we are concerned with ourselves, our own operations, our goals, and so deliberate about possible courses of action, evaluate them, decide, and carry out our decisions'.

30 Lonergan, De Deo Trino, 161 ‐ 171.

31 Lonergan, Bernard J.F., De Verbo Incarnato (Rome: Gregoria University Press, 1964), 235–243Google Scholar.

32 For another explicit example of Lonergan's thought applied to spiritual theology, cf. Price, James Robertson, ‘Conversion and the Doctrine of Grace in Bernard Lonergan and John Climacus’, Anglican Theological Review, 62 (1980): 338–362Google Scholar.