Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age.

This book confronts a situation well known within the Lonergan movement: On the one hand, the brilliant contributions to twentieth-century thought of the late Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan could ground "the new age envisioned in the Christian Scriptures." On the other hand, the richness of that thought is almost totally unknown outside a small circle of theologians and philosophers. The question: How can the import of Lonergan's fundamental work be communicated to a sometimes hostile, but more often indifferent, world? The answer this volume offers is: by focusing on "communication."

By choosing communications, or rhetoric, as a theme, the editors hope to offer a fresh approach to Lonergan's work, and at the same time make a contribution to the newfound interest in rhetoric. The volume is dedicated to Walter Ong, who initiated the two editors into their own interest in rhetoric.

Given the protean nature of Lonergan's work, it is not difficult to show its significance to communication and rhetoric. Unlike all other studies, rhetoric, or the study of speaking and writing, Thomas Farrell points out, concentrates not on content, but on process. Lonergan exhibits the same priority of process over content. "Thoroughly understand what it is to understand," Lonergan wrote, "and not only will you understand the broad lines of all there is to be understood but also you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding."

In this volume, John Campbell "situates Lonergan's thought in the context of rhetorical theory." Farrell shows that a writer, in a Lonerganian mode, must appropriate his own intellectual processes. Carla Mae Streeter applies Lonergan to preaching--another form of persuasive rhetoric. Frederick Crowe surveys Lonergan's contributions on "communications," from the inter-Trinitarian life to transcultural situations. Geoffrey Williams "argues that any act of communication is a manifestation of literary history"; in a sense, then, we are all "literary historians." In the last analysis, any rhetorical expression attempts to convey a meaning; and the heart of Lonergan's project is precisely "the meaning of meaning."

A Foreword by Robert Doran identifies the "common ground" Lonergan provides for a contemporary communication. Farrell and Paul Soukup introduce Lonergan's work and the study in the Preface. Farrell, Crowe, Hugo Meynell, and Frederick Lawrence each contributes two essays, while John Campbell, Streeter, William Rehg, Williams, Francisco Sierra-Gutierrez, and J. J. Mueller have a single entry. A glossary, an extensive annotated bibliography, and an index complete the volume.

In many ways this is a splendid piece of work, a model of how this kind of broadening communication should be attempted. It also has the limitations almost endemic to this sort of collection: the pieces don't always mesh. Most articles make fresh attempts to communicate briefly the gist of Lonergan's work, which seems at once repetitious, and yet probably too elliptical to help those not already familiar with the language.

To return to the initial problem, Lonergan offers an answer in his dialectic. The world the authors would communicate with is especially the world of the academy. But that world, represented in the late-Enlightenment university, is one in which God has largely disappeared. Lonergan, however, is a Catholic theologian. Hence there is a gap between religious conversion and the academy's secular biases. What is interesting to observe is how the authors attempt to bridge that gap.

One strategy is simply to call for conversion. Lawrence comes closest to this. "My own sense is that conversion and repentance are crucial to the process of learning Lonergan's foundational language precisely because the languages of liberalism and nihilism are so dominant in our culture."

A second strategy is to focus on what believers and nonbelievers have in common. As Catholics used to appeal to natural law, so Mueller, like Doran, points to a "metaphysical" human capacity for understanding. Another approach is to express the Christian viewpoint in other languages. Farrell outdoes himself here, relating the Lonergan insights in the language of Eric Voegelin, Plato, and contemporary psychologists like Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, Jung, and Thomas Patrick Malone and Patrick Thomas Malone, a father-son team. Lawrence makes a particularly notable effort to enter into the preoccupations of deconstructionists and postmodernists.

A more radical possibility would be to adopt the program of the world, and express it in Christian terms. If, as Lonergan says, theology mediates between a religion and a culture, then there is something here for everyone: the culture will recognize its program, and religion will recognize its language.

The last two essays, by Sierra-Gutierrez and Mueller, basing themselves on Doran's work, verge in this direction. The program is to create a new world culture. That is not far from the original Enlightenment project: having put aside sectarian disputes, to create a kingdom of reason. But the language will be religious: the symbols of the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

"The project of building the future cannot be done within the ecclesial communion itself, but must be done openly within the entire human community of cultures and religions," Mueller writes. Though Mueller affirms that only God can save, there still seems to be something slightly Pelagian here. It also may be noted that Jesus already envisioned a worldwide strategy. "I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must lead them, too, and they shall hear my voice. There shall be one flock then, one shepherd" (John 10:16). Again, "Full authority has been given to me both in heaven and on earth; go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations" (Matt. 28:18).

Of course, the new situation of the "global village" does require fresh thinking and tactics; but the church has always aimed at a world mission, and has almost two millennia of experience in communicating with other cultures. In Mueller's formulation, however, the church seems to recede into the background. "At the same time, theology has recognized that it cannot concern itself exclusively with ecclesial problems." Where theologians once served the church, they have increasingly become "free agents," burdened with the responsibility of devising a strategy to save the world. "Theology has a wider, inclusive responsibility for cultural problems as a new challenge," according to Mueller.

This volume may be highly recommended to all deconstructionists and post-modern thinkers. More realistically, however, it will probably appeal mostly to those already interested in Lonergan's though or, perhaps in lesser degree, to those following recent developments in rhetoric.

The above comments are offered more as observations than criticism. The problem is pressing, the gap is huge; all kinds of strategies of communication need to be tried. Would that every attempt were as polished and authoritative as this. In the end, no one can well stand outside and criticize: for the attempt of the Lonergan movement to communicate with the academy is but a subset of the problem every believing Christian faces today in communicating with a sometimes hostile, but more often indifferent, culture.