Understanding Bernard Lonergan on the incarnate subject and the question of God

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation shows that Lonergan's intentionality analysis reveals how the dynamism of the human spirit toward authenticity and self-transcendence is naturally open to the God-question. Lonergan’s transcendental method fundamentally entails the appropriation and practice of the transcendental precepts—or the inquisitive and deliberative exigencies of the human spirit—namely, attentiveness, intelligence, reasonability, responsibility, and the gift of being-in-love poured out in the human heart by the Holy Spirit. The main thesis advanced is that the incarnate subject—not as the source of being but as the ground of intentional being— does not tire in raising knowledge-able, value-able, and love-able questions and that, ultimately, the emergence of the question about the unknowable God becomes more real the more the incarnate subject genuinely inclines his or her mind and heart to understanding. In short, the quest for the incomprehensible God is a journey of personal conversion, or a metaxic process rooted in one’s existential condition. The Deus semper major occasions, for Lonergan, a conscious and intentional ‘arpeggiato’ exercise of ongoing self-perfection. To be converted and the God-question are implicitly correlated, evoking Augustine’s motif in the Soliloquies, “let me know myself; let me know You.”