[Lonergan_l] WHERE IS HOME? WHERE IS HERE?

[nichola...@utoronto.ca]

Dear Folks,

Are we jumping the gun by indulging ourselves in such refined
speculations about Lonergan as we see in the comments of Phil and
Catherine? Some time back Catherine asked me why I was so opposed to
theory and my only answer could be
INSIGHT 547/570: "But explanation [theory] does not give man a home"
To reach home, which is here and now" we must radically transcend the
physical universe and begin to explore the verbal universe. Remember,
the word "universe" is a metaphor no matter how we try to embrace it.
In reading Proust it is well to remember we are in a literary context
and any chemical or physical references must be seen as metaphors,
like the bones in Ezekiel. It is the study of myth and metaphor, not
linguistics and semiotics, that is the proper study of language and
its future and which can lift us from theory to vision, to our true
home, the anagogical perspective that St. Thomas mentions.

Every breakthrough in education is a breakthrough in vision, to quote
Frye, ON EDUCATION. The study of Scripture, literature,the verbal
universe, and not mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.,is the right
direction is the true reward we find in studying Lonergan and St.
Thomas.

Article 10: Does Sacred Scripture have multiple senses underlying a
single passage?
Here St. Thomas gives an orderly account of the different senses of
Scripture. The foundational sense is the literal or historical sense,
though even here we have to be careful about how we identify this
sense. (See reply to obj. 3 on parabolic speech.)

Given this basic sense, the other (so-called spiritual senses) fall
into place:

When something in the Old Testament is understood to be a type or
figure of something in the New Testament, there is the allegorical
sense. So, for instance, many things that happen to Joseph in the
book of Genesis are figures of Christ; the passover is a figure of
Christ's sacrifice and of the Mass, etc.
When something in either Testament is put before us for imitation in
our lives, this is the moral or tropological sense.

When something prefigures eternal glory, this is the anagogical sense.
(Take, for instance, the promise of a land flowing with milk and
honey)

--NWG

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[Jeremy Blackwood]

If the only true point of discourse is to "give man a home" in that
sense, then the very book whose depths of wisdom you plumb (Insight)
ought not have been written.

Whence the either/or? Neither a soulless mind NOR a mindless soul is
the answer. What counts, after all, is the authenticity of the whole.

Jeremy W. Blackwood
Doctoral Student
Marquette University
Theology Department

[nichola...@utoronto.ca]

Dear Jeremy,

What counts is the intellectual imagination, whose purpose is to
create not to understand. You are right in recognizing that it is not
a question of either/or but rather both/and. Like the mind/body split
the failure to recognize the intellectual imagination is the source of
much of our misery. "The imagination is the bosom of God", as Blake
says. God does not sit around trying to understand and, since we are
made in God's image" we should strive to be artists and to create.

--NWG

[Catherine B. King]

Hello Jeremy and NWG:

First, thank you (NWG) for (in education's classroom-poetical terms) the
"reminders."

Second, of course I think Jeremy is right to wonder where either/or became
an essential division. I think I mentioned to you (NWG) before that a
method of discussion towards understanding is better based mostly in
dialectics rather than in polemics (either/or). Further, I don't see how my
question to you--about why you are so opposed to theory--is answered clearly
by quoting Lonergan that "...explanation [theory] does not give man a home."
The quote doesn't call for a rejection of theory (as your discourse seems to
imply) but rather, as Jeremy suggests, a regard for it as a part of human
discourse--in relation to other kinds of discourse.

The further issues point to more serious problems, I think, and emerge in
your later note to Jeremy. Below I have added (in the interest of time and
brevity) a few comments in [parentheses] within your quote:

"What counts is the intellectual imagination ...

[yes--this speaks to Phil's openness to meaning--or 'be adventurous' in this
case, in our thinking and pondering, etc, and then in speaking and doing],

... whose purpose is to create [yes] not to understand ..

[NO--are you saying that artists and anyone engaging in the imaginative
elements of intelligence do not understand their content or what they are
doing?]

You [Jeremy] are right in recognizing that it is not a question of either/or
but rather both/and.

[Yes, and this both-and applies to the intellectual imagination and its
relationship to understanding also. I think we are generally talking about
the same thing using different concepts and focusing on different nuance:
Intellectual and understanding.]

Like the mind/body split the failure to recognize the intellectual
imagination is the source of much of our misery. 'The imagination is the

bosom of God,' as Blake says. God does not sit around trying to understand

[and you know this how?]

and, since we are 'made in God's image' we should strive to be artists and

to create." END QUOTE

But not to understand? First, I infer, from your references above to the
mind/body split, that you did not get much into what Lonergan means by naive
realism or the difference between (1) knowing as looking and (2) knowing as
reflective understanding. My guess is that many of the more topical
differences of views expressed here are based in that difference in
understanding Lonergan's writings, at least.

My second guess is that your understanding of "intelligence" (imaginative
and/or as related to understanding) is couched in an assumed positivist view
(I have noticed in several of your posts); and, again, your interpretation
of Lonergan's work about intelligence and understanding is offered through
that same lense--which would account for your apparent rejection of
theory--rightly, in my view, IF theory and intelligence is understood as
positivist. But Lonergan's work is not developed with positivism as its
basis. It's the positivist view that needs rejection, and not theory or
theoretical discourse.

What made the hair on the back of my neck stand up in your first and second
notes is the implied collapse of a hard-won regard for theory and
theoretical discourse (and differentiations of mind) and for what can be a
transcultural base employed for mutual understanding among quite diverse
peoples and provinces, and their expressions. You say to Jeremy: "Yes,
both-and," However, I'm having trouble believing it.

Regards,

Catherine

[Joe F]

I have some difficulty understanding how one can differentiate between
an 'either, or' approach and a 'both' (or dialectical approach. One
can't have a relation without first a distinction. How can there be a
distinction without a sense of 'either,or'. I get a general
understanding that one is not supposed to dictate one's opinion, ever.
But I don't want to cloud the intellectual imagining of the
possibility of an 'either, or' which i feel is necessary to admit real
distinctions.

Joe

[Doug Mounce]

An anti-creationsit biological structure faculty once complained about my
using religion in the classroom after I made a little joke from the Joseph
Campbell Power of Myth series. "A computer is like an Old Testament God,
lot's of rules and *very* unforgiving!"

In any case, I am reminded now of Voegelin's presentation of history in
the classical experience that suggests a relation with the anagogical.
Lonergan seems to put myth at the second level of method where intelligent
interpretation yields ideas and meaning, but notice that Lonergan and
Voegelin seem to agree with Aristotle on the foundation of wonder.

"It is on the occasion of the aetiological argument that Aristotle pushes
his analysis so close to the limit of objectivization, that the relation
of the truth of the ground to the dimensions of luminosity and of history
remains not wholly clear. The confrontation of noetic philosophy with the
myth develops textual formulations well known to historians of philosophy,
but their character as insights into the historicity of consciousness has
hardly been noticed.

"All people are equally excited by thaumazein (wondering) but they can
express their wonderment either through the myth or through philosophy.
...philosophos side-by-side with philomythos. The philosopher eliminates
the thaumasia of the polytheistic myth but retains the knowledge of the
philomythoi about the divinity of the ground. He clearly recognizes the
difference in grades of truth between the primary experience for which the
divine is the ground of the cosmos and of man. In spite of this, the myth
is so fascinating that Aristotle confesses: "The more solitary and retired
I become, the more I love the myth" (philomytheros)." Anamnesis

[jaray...@aol.com]

Nick,

you say,

"God does not sit around trying to understand and, since we are made in God's image" we should strive to be artists and to create."

Further questions arise: Are we to play God, pretending?" or "Are we to recognize the first Commandment that there is only one God, that we are not be deluded?" Let us not confuse the image that we are for the creative reality that God is.

God does not need to "sit around" anthropomorphisms, true. But we do need to understand what God has done, what God enables us to keep on doing using the imagination given us in and through the further anthromorphic "bosom-of-God" image. To authenticate the "both/and" should we not say that only God creates; we piggy back on that creative power--never able to dispense w. a basic understanding of God's creation? Poe and the impressionists were still within the trying-to-understand, reflective frame of mind. Unlike Verlaine or Rimbaud, Einstein understood his limitations. Are not even the postmodernists (who disclaim so much) trying to make us "understand"? Or does Frye have a different view on such matters?

In another email, you yourself answered such questions by reflecting on thaumazetein, wonder etc as interpreted by Aristotle, Vico, Voegelin, Lonergan. Better not play these giants against Blake or Frye--two other giants. Being artists, it seems to me, and trying to "create" is for us MADE in God's image a mere weak derivative ability for we, unlike God, first have to try to understand. Or could one say that for great artists the creative-understanding faculty is a single, comprehensive function? Lonergan needed interpreters to help him understand and discourse on symbols, myth and the "creative" process in humans. In which way was BL misguided in following Susan Langer?

John

-----Original Message-----
From: nichola...@utoronto.ca
To: Lonergan <loner...@skipperweb.org>
Sent: Mon, Nov 23, 2009 12:26 pm
Subject: Re: [Lonergan_l] WHERE IS HOME? WHERE IS HERE?