Lonergan Workshop, Vol. 18
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LONERGAN WORKSHOP Volume 18 LONERGAN WORKSHOP Volume 18 edited by Fred Lawrence Copyright © 2005 Boston College ISSN 0148-2009 Printed in the United States of America EDITOR'S NOTE Volume 18 begins with two poems by poets who originally came to the Workshop because of their interest in one of the few poets among Lonergan's students, Sebastian Moore, OSB. They shared them at the Annual Banquet, and here they make them available to readers of Lonergan Workshop. Paul St Amour of St Joseph's University in Philadelphia completed his dissertation on Kierkegaard at Fordham University. Students of Lonergan are familiar with his references in Insight and in Topics in Education to Kierkegaard regarding radical changes in orientation or conversion. Besides giving us a splendid brief account of Kierkegaard, Paul's paper lets us assess the affinities between these two philosophers of conversion and appreciate the differences between them. Recently appointed to a Systematics position at Regis College, Toronto, John Dadosky's dissertation was on the relevance of Lonergan for interreligious dialogue and dialectics. Once again, those interested in Lonergan became used to multiple references (in his notes on method and theology) to the works of Mircea Eliade, the influential professor of comparative religion at the University of Chicago. Here John suggestively relates Eliade's approach to religion with the later Lonergan's philosophy of God. Master of the intriguing title, Boston College colleague Charles Hefling has been slowly, carefully, and painstakingly clarifying for himself and the rest of us an entire series of technical systematic issues in Lonergan's theology in preparation for his own personal work on Christology. In this paper he continues along this path by reflecting on the theology of grace. Charles may consider himself to be skating 'over thin ice' here, but readers of this paper are sure to disagree. In her paper, Christine Jamieson, Director of the Lonergan Centre for Ethical Reflection at Concordia University in Montreal (now also on the Board of Directors of the Thomas More Institute for adult education and life-long learning), tackles the thorny issue of the psychological conditions for the exercise of genuine freedom. Christine enters into 111 serious dialogue on this issue with the renowned French-speaking psychologist from Romania, Julia Kristeva. Christine clarifies Kristeva's fascinating contribution of to an appropriation of oneself as in radical need ofliberation. Our former Boston College graduate student in philosophy, Paulette Kidder, is now an Associate Dean at Seattle University. She enters the list of those who are putting Lonergan's thought into the unlikely context of deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida. With her hallmark clarity and concision Paulette demonstrates how this apparently odd couple of philosophers who are open to the religious manifest common concerns in coming to terms with the mysterious reality of gift in spite of important differences. Another Boston College philosophy graduate abandoned a successful law career to pursue a doctorate in philosophy-Michael Maxwell. He has become a Dean at Marian College in Indianapolis. Those interested in understanding Lonergan's regularly repeated, lapidary contrasts between Aristotle's notion of science and that of modern empirical science will appreciate Maxwell's elaboration of it in this paper because of its detailed and scholarly mastery of Aristotle's own account in his own terms. As a teacher of undergraduates in philosophy at Maryland's Salisbury College, Jerome Miller has inspired a large number of talented students to pursue graduate and teaching careers in philosophy. Whenever he speaks at the Summer Workshops, we always get a taste of the tremendous existential appeal of his philosophic thought and speech. Here, in terms of a phenomenological ontology of the "throe," he confronts what happens to the vexed issue of normativity once one takes seriously the way Lonergan's acknowledgment of the contingency of humanly attainable truth affects our ability decisively to face life's precariousness. Sebastian Moore has contributed a long series of explorations of desire to the Lonergan Workshops since the 1970s. These forays into uncharted territory are always deeply conditioned by the frequent ineptitude demonstrated by the Catholic Church's handling both of the issues surrounding sexuality and of the discussion of these issues in theology. Hence, Sebastian's apparently extreme arguments are to be carefully contextualized in dialectical opposition to that institutional clumsiness. They are provocative soundings. IV Although we have already published an article by James Pambrun (systematician at St Paul University in Ottawa), this paper is his first to be presented at the summer Workshop. Jim is a Ricoeur scholar, and student of both French scripture scholar Paul Beauchamp and distinguished Catholic philosopher of science and of language, Jean Ladriere (whose magnum opus Lonergan read in preparation for his lectures on mathematical logic). His paper shows him to be a fascinating writer and presenter of the Lonergan-oriented themes of theology and philosophy as grounded in the experience of more or less converted interiority. For those for whom those topics have been forbidding, Jim makes them more accessible; for those already steeped in them, he brings to bear an original perspective. Thanks to all the authors for their patience in waiting for the publication of their papers. Gratitude again to Kerry Cronin and all those who help to make the Workshop papers available. Fred Lawrence Editor v LEAPING, falling from the tower, did he see himself a child at Montauk throwing a beached crab back into the waves? or sulking in his new school at Mamaroneck when he put the stars in upside down and Miss Traynor said We don't draw that way here - or hurtling over handlebars at the corner of Dekalb as the grey van smashed into his bicycle? or did he see, far below the canyons of Manhattan, beruffled Dutchmen bowling on the village green- VI and further still, slender Pohatma, copper skin glistening in the morning light, fishing on the river bank? -Dorothy Judd Hall 9-11-2001 VII THE POET Passions of the mind! W ordfire, notions of arrows, Jolting insights, swift, in flight, Torments of cognition, Frenzy of words - The vertigo of it! Spilling over time now, Time before, time unknown, Time that is not time and I, slave to these passions Spin out of control, In lust with words. Over and over I harness These apocalyptic nags Whinnying madly for the dash, The prize, the printout. In the beginning and forever The fever of the word Electric, relentless. In the bristling early hours The demonic need to write The blessed curse of the word! The hand, the lamp, the pen, the paper Alert to serve the beast, My urgent, raging bounty, My genie, my dowry. -Patricia Benzmiller Vlll Lonergan Workshop Volume 18 CONTENTS Editor's Introduction iii "Leaping" a poem by Dorothy Judd Hall vi "The Poet" a poem by Patricia Benzmiller viii Kierkegaard and Lonergan on the Prospect of Cognitional-Existential Integration Paul St. Amour The Sacred as Real: Eliade's Ontology of the Sacred and Lonergan's Philosophy of God 63 John Dadosky Over Thin Ice: Comments on 'Gratia: Grace and Gratitude' 87 Charles Hefting To Begin Anew: Reflections on Freedom, Destiny and Ethics in the Work of Bernard Lonergan and Julia Kristeva 121 Christine Jamieson Derrida and Lonergan on the Gift 139 Paulette Kidder Lonergan's Critique of Aristotle's Notion of Science 155 Michael Maxwell Historicity and Normative Order 189 Jerome Miller A Word for Sexual Desire 203 Sebastian Moore, OSB Theology, Philosophy, & Interiority: Experience Speaks to Experience 225 James Pambrun Lonergan Workshop 1812005 KIERKEGAARD AND LONERGAN ON THE PROSPECT OF COGNITIONAL-EXISTENTIAL INTEGRATION Paul St. Amour St. Joseph University PART I: THE DIALECTIC OF THOUGHT AND EXISTENCE 1. Introduction In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard challenged the completeness of the Hegelian System by arguing that a merely conceptual dialectic can not possibly comprehend the totality because it remains incapable even of comprehending what it means for a single individual to exist in a genuinely ethical or religious manner. Employing a dialectical method of his own, Kierkegaard attempted to demonstrate that the Hegelian System does not grasp the identity of the rational and the real, as it claims to, but in is fact ironically sublated by a more comprehensive dialectic, by an existential dialectic that extends beyond the merely rational. By clarifying this more ultimate dialectic of thought and existence, Kierkegaard sought to demonstrate how the existential dimension lies stubbornly outside the System and contradicts its claim to totality. I would like to suggest that Kierkegaard's discovery of the dialectic of thought and existence in the context of his polemic against Hegel marks a truly pivotal moment in the history of philosophy and an important advance in what Lonergan termed the "third stage of meaning." The third stage of meaning, we recall, emerged as 2 St. Amour developments in modern empirical science called forth a "critical exigence" to raise foundational questions concerning cognitional theory, epistemology, and the possibility of a critical metaphysics. I In the third stage of meaning "the modes of common sense and theory remain, science asserts its autonomy from philosophy, and there occur philosophies that leave