Lonergan
Bernard Lonergan, S.J., in an undated photo. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

“Great teachers in the church, like Augustine, Aquinas, Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux, have been named doctors of the church,” Msgr. Richard M. Liddy wrote in a 2004 essay in America. “They have combined holiness with the ability to teach others and help others find their way in the world. In a day when English is the lingua franca of the world, there are still no English-speaking doctors of the church.”

“I await with eagerness the naming of John Henry Newman as such a doctor,” he continued (he  will see that day in the coming months), but added a coda: “[A]nd I hope that Bernard Lonergan will not be far behind.”

Why Bernard Lonergan, the 20th-century Canadian philosopher and theologian who, in the words of the Rev. John P. Cush in Church Life Journal, is “all too often looked at askance” these days, and the study of whom “is largely limited to Anglophones with only a few non-English speakers demonstrating a real interest in his thought”? Why Lonergan, the Jesuit scholar who was not a peritus, or theological expert, at the Second Vatican Council, even though he was living and working in Rome?

Fans of Lonergan (Father Cush among them) point instead toward Lonergan’s attempt to make sense of our ways of knowing in a postmodern world, one where the old certainties of scholasticism and revealed truths are no longer so easily accepted. Monsignor Liddy, a former student of Lonergan in Rome, wrote as much in his 2004 essay: “The key to the mystery of Lonergan’s appeal is that he has provided a language that makes it possible for persons of faith to move through the welter of contemporary movements toward an understanding of themselves, the universe—and God.”

I have my own Lonergan story. Loyola Marymount University, where I studied philosophy as an undergraduate, had two Lonerganians on the philosophy faculty, so I found myself trying to puzzle my way through Lonergan’s 700-page masterwork Insight: A Study of Human Understanding soon enough in college. A few years ago, I ran into a fellow graduate of the program whom I had always thought would become a philosophy professor. (He is a lawyer now in California.) I asked him why he hadn’t gone into academia. His answer? 

“Lonergan.”

He didn’t mean that Lonergan was so difficult to understand that he had abandoned the study of philosophy. Oh no. “After I took that Lonergan class,” he said, “I felt like all my questions had been answered. There wasn’t much left to wonder about.”

Such moments are (thankfully) rare in life, and he was only half-serious. But if you’ve worked in Catholic theology or philosophy (or, indeed, Catholic journalism), you have surely run into a Lonerganian or two who really does seem that dyed-in-the-wool about the man and his insights.

Born in Buckingham, Quebec, in 1904, Bernard Lonergan entered the Society of Jesus at Guelph, Ontario, in 1922. He spent four years of his Jesuit formation at Heythrop College in London, where he became fascinated with the work of the aforementioned Cardinal John Henry Newman (in part because he found himself largely dissatisfied with the neo-Thomist philosophy and theology commonly taught at the time). After teaching for three years at Loyola College in Montreal as part of his Jesuit formation, he studied at the Gregorian University in Rome from 1933 to 1940, earning a doctorate in theology (which he would not actually receive for many years due to World War II). He was ordained a priest in 1936. 

From 1940 to 1947, Father Lonergan taught at the College of the Immaculate Conception and the Thomas More Institute in Montreal. In 1947, he moved to Regis College at the University of Toronto, where he taught for six years. The university remains one of the leading centers of Lonerganian thought today.

A teaching position back at the Gregorian University from 1953 to 1964 coincided with some of Lonergan’s most important work, including the 1957 classic Insight. By the time the Second Vatican Council began, he was turning 58 and an established theologian already—and was teaching theology to more than 650 students a semester. One former student, the theologian Bill Shea, remembered Lonergan’s teaching style:

[H]e was not what one would expect a great teacher to be. He had none of the sense of theatrical drama, no flash, no bamboozle, none of the Great Man aura. He had a monotonous voice; his hands shook distractingly; he looked overweight, not at all prepossessing in his physical appearance, and he had little physical grace. Oddly, then, it was a pleasure listening to him and watching him. I think it was because he was very smart and clear about what he was doing, and he did it with pleasure. In the academic world one does not often run into really smart people, though one regularly does run into intelligent and capable people. I had the conviction, both from the time I read Insight and from the first time I listened to him lecture and answer questions, that he was the smartest person I had run into.

While we often think of the famous Vatican II periti as all being of the same generation, they were in fact of significantly different ages. Lonergan was the same age as Karl Rahner, Yves Congar and John Courtney Murray when the council began (1904 was a hell of a birth year for theologians!), and Hans Urs von Balthasar was a year younger. The senior of the periti was Henri de Lubac at 66. At the other end of the spectrum were Edward Schillebeeckx at 48—and then Joseph Ratzinger at 35 and Hans Küng at 34. 

A bout of lung cancer caused Lonergan to return to Canada in 1964. He then taught again at Regis College from 1965 to 1975 and at Boston College from 1975 until 1983. He was also the Stillman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University in 1971–72. He died at the Jesuit infirmary in Pickering, Ont., in November of 1984, leaving behind a massive body of work in art, economics, history, literature, natural science, philosophy and theology (his Collected Works have surpassed two dozen volumes) as well as legions of graduate students and intellectual disciples around the world. 

It is beyond the scope of this column (and still far beyond my ken, sorry Prof. Morelli) to give a succinct account of Lonergan’s intellectual contributions to the church and the world. Those looking for more profound explorations of his thought can try one of the many Lonergan institutes that have flourished in the four decades since his death, including at the University of Toronto, Seton Hall University, Boston College, Loyola Marymount University and elsewhere. And of course, America has a wide range of articles on Lonergan, including one comparing and contrasting him to Jordan Peterson, another by Cardinal Michael Czerny on what Lonergan can teach us about digital mission, another linking him to Pedro Arrupe, S.J., as a fellow mystic and much more. 

But beyond the engagement with Thomism or the theories of conversion or the investigation of cultural dynamics, my own primary takeaway from Insight three decades ago holds up, I think. At least, I still believe it and imagine that I use it: While it is impossible to have unified theories of knowledge or mastery over any subject, it is indeed possible to know intimately what it is to know something. In other words, feelings and judgments and experiences and insights follow a pattern, no matter what the subject or genre of human experience, and we can understand to a significant degree the method by which they come to be. In Method and Theology, one sees the same conceptual framework applied to the world of religious study and practice.

In that sense, Father Lonergan also offered to the modern world a way of proceeding, intellectually and otherwise, that included something probably every modern believer seeks: authenticity. “Few outside theological circles might recognize the impact that Lonergan accomplished in his lifetime, most especially through his works, Insight and Method in Theology, but in his own self-actualization, Lonergan offers all who strive to practice the science and art of theology the challenge of the Delphic oracle: ‘Know Thyself,’” Father Cush wrote in 2021. “Only through a four-fold conversion, intellectual, moral, spiritual, and psychic can one truly offer to the Church and the culture a theology that is authentic and true.”

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Our poetry selection for this week is “Digital Vespers,” by Bianca Blanche. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection. 

In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.