LONERGAN WORKSHOP Volume 12 LONERGAN WORKSHOP Volume 12 edited by Fred Lawrence Copyright © 1996 Boston College ISSN 0148-2009 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper DEDICATION This volume of essays on the theme, In Tune with the Divine Ground, is dedicated in honor of the life and work of our esteemed colleague and dear friend, Ben F. Meyer, who has died after a long and heroic struggle with cancer. The rhythms of Ben's life to and fro between Canada and Switzerland meant that he could not come to the summer Workshop, and the ebbs and flows of his illness kept him from being featured at the Fall and Spring weekend Workshops. It seems like yesterday that on a visit to his room in St Mary's Hall at Boston College, Bernard Lonergan handed me Ben's The Aims of Jesus and enthusiastically explained how Ben had used Collingwood's insights to carry out the intent of the title in his fine book. Amazingly, during his providential remissions, Ben was able to publish a veritable stream of books and essays for which we will always be in his debt. Ben Meyer was one of the few Lonergan students whose field was biblical studies, and whose critical realism made a discernible difference to his scholarly work in the functional specialties of interpretation, history, and dialectic. He was a presiding presence for most of us. Soon after hearing of Ben's death, we came across the following letter, and it occurred to us that it gives such a glimpse of him that we should share it. iii August 5, 1991 Dear Fred, It has taken me till now to face the fact that I don't and in all probability shan't have the energy to accept what I regard as a most attractive invitation. For the past months I have actually felt quite well, and did finish the book I have been working on. Do you remember Voegelin's image of authority "seeping out" of the old theses that he thought had previously blocked him and his ambitions? Well, there has been a seeping out in my case, too. Only, it's energy. Though I would like to think that this is temporary, I have recently started to settle into the condition of a deflated balloon. So, while I thank you heartily for your kind invitation, I decline with regret. Under separate cover I'll send you the hermeneutical offprints I referred to on the phone. One is on "ascription," or the ascribing of new meaning to old texts; the other attempts to say what works well and what not so well in reader-reception work, theoretical and practical. Let me recommend a book I have been reading while in the state of minimal energy described above. It is Jane Kramer, Europeans, Penguin, 1988, pieces taken from the New Yorker. Most rewarding entertainment. Maybe the wittiest & wisest is "Zurich: Zwingli's Gold," which I also clipped ten or eleven years ago from the New Yorker. All the best wishes to you and to Sue. As for your translation work as penance for impinging on your kids, hurrah for the translation, forget the penance. They're damn lucky to have you two for parents. Philip Larkin has a funny poem on how parents screw up kids; it seems to me, though, that that's like howling against being, a most wonderful divine gift. It's worth being screwed up to have any hold on it at all. Ben In a living Festschrift for Ben at Canada's MacMaster University, this erudite and literate man quoted a favorite line from Rilke's Sonnette an Orpheus (Erster Teil, n.12): Ohne unsern wahren Platz zu kennen handeln wir aus wirklichen Bezug. (Without knowing our true place we act out of genuine relatedness.) IV EDITORIAL NOTE It may seem odd that a Workshop with the theme In Tune with the Divine Ground: Cultural and Social Conditions for Political Order should have a paper entitled "Metaphysics of Form, Matter, and Gender." As we know, all gender issues are controversial these days, and usually they are treated in a politicized way. When Prudence Allen, who already has done a good deal of distinguished philosophical work on woman and gender, selected this paper topic, it was a boon for the Workshop. It is rare to see light cast on such a topic by the pure, detached, disinterested, and unrestricted desire to know. Framing the issues of sex and gender in terms of the mind's integral heuristic structure­ metaphysics-is the ambitious task Sr. Prudence has given herself. Her paper is clear, economical in its expression, and illuminating. More obviously in keeping with the Workshop theme is the paper meditating on Lonergan's social and political thought during the 1930's, which R. Michael Clark also used extensively in his doctoral dissertation on pacifism directed by Matthew Lamb. This is a fascinating adumbration of the young Lonergan's sense of the connection between social and cultural crisis and what in Thesis XVII of De Verbo Incarnato thirty years later he called 'the Law of the Cross.' Longtime collaborator, Professor Mary Ann Glendon, established a link between the Workshop and two lawyers using Lonergan's thought to elaborate an idea of descriptive equality ('descriptive' meaning factual versus normative as in current parlance, rather than descriptive in Lonergan's technical usage). John Coons is the nation's leading legal expert on school vouchers, and his collaborator, Patrick Brennan, was exposed to Lonergan in Louis Dupre's course at Georgetown. This paper summarily rehearses main lines of an argument set forth in a roughly 500-page typescript to appear in the future. As an intellectual sounding it is most intriguing in its statement and implications. J. Leon Hooper can always be counted upon to give an adventuresome reading of the thought of his mentor, John Courtney Murray, SJ. In this provocative presentation of the development of Murray's thinking on pluralism, with special attention to the experience v of plurality within the Roman Catholic community, Hooper meditates on our need to listen to all quarters for what our gracious God may be teaching us. In her discussion of contemporary debates concerning justice in the family, Paulette Kidder uses the contrasting reflections of Susan Moeller Okin and Michael Sandel to clarify the central issues in the debate. Paulette shows how the genuine strengths of each side of the argument can be integrated in a possible higher viewpoint suggested, yet never before quite worked out and applied in this way, by Lewis Hyde and Lonergan. Those familiar with the important work, The Crisis of Philosophy, will be happy to know that Michael McCarthy has been working on another volume devoted to the thought of the German emigre political philosopher, Hannah Arendt. How can the tradition of civic republicanism salvage the normative notion of the common good within liberal democracy? This is perhaps the question bedeviling political philosophy today. In aid of a solution to this question Michael enlists the thought of such disparate figures as Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Constant, Michael Walzer, and Charles Taylor, along with that of Lonergan and Arendt. Like Paulette Kidder and Prudence Allen, Michael shows his talent for presenting the salients of complicated matters in a lucid way. In a recent interview, Anglican bishop and theologian Rowan Williams includes Sebastian Moore, OSB, among thinkers he esteems highly because they drill wells rather than build systems (the others mentioned are Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Balthasar). In no contribution to the Workshop journals is this quality more evident than in this one. Sebastian uses Lonergan's breakthrough to critical realism in exploring an illuminating possible breakthrough to symbolic realism made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge himself is a notoriously turgid well­ driller, but Sebastian's exegesis is packed with aperfus, and the application of his Coleridge-inpired insights into symbolic realism to the case ofthe Eucharist is breathtaking. In a conference devoted partially to Voegelin and Lonergan, participants would ideally be invited to place their respective encounters with the works of those two thinkers within their own struggle for direction in the flow of existence, their own processes of experience and symbolization, their own asking and answering of questions in search of vi self-appropriation and conversion. Such a task would require long years of meditative exegesis and self-correction, and then it would be nearly impossible to express compendiously and in a manner that was not merely extrinsic to the fruits of such demanding labors. But Mark Morelli's paper upset such expectations by expressing in a rigorous and engaging way his own dialectical enactment of an encounter between the thought of these two great philosophers, a proximate model for all of us. Voegelin's thought is only retrievable as reenactment, which is not surprising, since, as he himself insisted repeatedly, this is true of any serious philosophic or revelational work. Again, his thought is so comprehensive that it is well-nigh impossible to suggest its breadth in the space of a normal-length paper. Yet by focusing upon religious experience and the key theme of immortality, Michael Morrissey has indeed managed to convey in a remarkably clear and concise way the profoundest tendencies and virtualities ofVoegelin's enterprise, both as to what it is not, and as to what it is. Because of his astonishingly wide-ranging knowledge and deep sympathies for persons suffering in the "modern cultural grotesque," Dublin philosopher Brendan Purcell has been pursuing a hermeneutics of universal humanity. Schooled early on in Lonergan's philosophy and theology, and later versed in Voegelin's massive philosophy of order, Brendan shows the remarkable complementarity in the concerns and orientations of both these seminal thinkers when it comes to confronting the crisis of our time.