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By J. Michael Stebbins
(Toronto: University of Toronto, 1995)
Theological Studies 57, no. 3 (September 1996): 542-543
Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 14, no.1 (Spring 1996): 112-116
THE DIVINE INITIATIVE: GRACE, WORLD-ORDER, AND HUMAN FREEDOM IN THE EARLY WRITINGS OF BERNARD LONERGAN. By J. Michael Stebbins, Toronto: University of Toronto, 1995. Pp. xxii + 399. $65 (Can.)
Stebbins provides a synthetic interpretation of Lonergan’s writings on the doctrine of grace from the late 1930s until about 1950. His chief focus is on the unpublished De ente supernaturali: Supplementum Schematicum (1946) and on other writings insofar as they illuminate or enlarge the meaning of the central text.
S. generally follows Lonergan’s development of theses in De ente supernaturali, though with two principal exceptions. Chapter 1 focuses on Lonergan’s cognitional theory; this tack is strategically important because Lonergan understands internal actual grace as consisting in conscious acts of understanding and willing. Chapter 3 explicates Lonergan’s "theorem of the supernatural"; and this move is critical because Lonergan’s theorem provides the explanatory framework for his dynamic understanding of the natural/supernatural relationship as it relates to the analysis of grace.
Lonergan’s theorem acknowledges a real distinction between the supernatural and natural orders. But he formulates the distinction in terms of a vertical finality through which lower-level realities enjoy the potentiality for dynamic sublation by higher-order realities in such a way that the intelligibility of the lower is maintained, even as it is incorporated into the higher order; e.g., the sublation of the chemical in beings existing on the biological level does not negate the intelligibility of chemical laws. This applies even to the strictly supernatural instances of vertical finality in which human beings are elevated to a created sharing in the divine nature (sanctifying grace) and the human intellect and will are obedientially, passively receptive to such actualizing operations as faith, hope, and love of God. These latter (actual graces) at once transcend the natural capabilities of intellect and will, without negating the laws to which human intellect and will as such are subject. S. rightly concludes that in his theorem Lonergan transcends two-story-universe explanations of the natural/supernatural distinction which end up extrinsically gluing together the two elements. He likewise eliminates the need for adding a third element, such as Rahner’s supernatural existential, which is hypothesized to serve somehow as a link between nature and grace in its sanctifying and actual forms.
The leitmotif of S.’s work is the interpretation of Lonergan’s understanding of internal actual grace. This grace consists in volitional and intellectual activities of the type that cause the occurrence of other acts of will/intellect in the same respective potencies; e.g., the movement of the will to desire growth in the love of God causes the willing of the means to realize this growth. These activities are supernatural because their motivation/goal is supernatural, e.g. the willing of a deepening of one’s faith. These activities are principally caused in us immediately by God without any exercise of efficient causality on our part; e.g., we find ourselves moved to desire growth on loving God. These activities are derivatively supernatural insofar as we are both moved and move ourselves to the willing of a means; e.g., we choose the means of praying more as a way of deepening our love. In the latter instance we have an example of actual grace as both operative and cooperative. S.’s exposition strikingly reveals the comprehensive, coherent, compelling power and intellectual beauty of Lonergan’s synthesis.
S. provides evidence that Lonergan underwent a profound deepening of his own religious experience shortly before he wrote De ente supernaturali (334). This may partly explain his stress in that work on the conscious nature of internal actual grace. S. adds a pastoral richness to his study in referring to an observation of Lonergan in his later years that for some there exists a profound awareness of the divine power at work in them. Others may need to recall their past and its religious high points and movements toward deeper holiness in order to discern the ongoing work of God’s grace in their lives (126). Here Lonergan joins Rahner in stressing the experiential reality of God at work in our hearts and minds.
In his culminating chapters S. brilliantly displays the power of Lonergan’s method in its ability to handle such complex issues as the Molinist/Baņezian controversies, divine and human causality, freedom, sin, and God’s transcendent providence. Lonergan extensively utilizes metaphysical categories throughout his early works. S. correctly observes that Lonergan’s later study of grace in terms of intentionality analysis does not basically negate his earlier metaphysical study. Rather, the two approaches validate one another.
S.’s overall work is excellent. Only rarely does he leave the reader hoping for greater clarity, more examples. He provides extensive footnotes and a superb index. The judicious user of these sources will discover overlooked observations in early chapters which clarify subtle discussions in later chapters and vice versa. Even the seasoned Lonerganian will find this study quite challenging; yet for the reader who sticks with it the rewards are immense.
Bernard J. Tyrrell, S.J., Gonzaga University, Spokane
The Divine Initiative: Grace, World-Order, and Human Freedom in the Early Writings of Bernard Lonergan. By J. Michael Stebbins. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995, xxii + 439 pages, $65.00.
Like Bernard Lonergan’s Grace and Freedom, to which it refers so extensively, J. Michael Stebbins’s The Divine Initiative is a rewritten doctoral dissertation. (Stebbins wrote the original in the Joint Doctoral Program of Boston College and Andover Newton Theological School, defending it successfully in 1990.) Perhaps its most fundamental category, introduced in the preface and employed throughout the book’s eight chapters and afterword, is that of intellectual synthesis. "A synthesis is not just a network of concepts; it is primarily an act of understanding, a master insight that, when it emerges, integrates some set, large or small, of insights whose precise interrelation had not previously been apparent" (xix). One goal of theology is the elaboration of just such syntheses. Like other disciplines, theology "aims at a grasp of intelligibility that, over time, develops in synthetic fashion as increasingly higher viewpoints unify increasingly broader ranges of what at previous stages resisted assimilation in a single perspective" (292). The distinguishing feature of theology is that what it aspires to synthesize is nothing less than the entire range of Christian beliefs and natural knowledge, in order "to shed as much light as it can on the universe of being as a whole" (292). Such was the enterprise of Aquinas. And such was the enterprise undertaken by Lonergan when, in an effort that began seriously in the late 1930s with his doctoral dissertation on Aquinas’s notion of operative grace, he attempted "to articulate certain crucial aspects of the remarkable synthesis that was the fruit of Aquinas’s project of ‘thinking out the Christian universe’" (294). By the late 1940s Lonergan had completed what in retrospect was an initial, theoretical, phase of his own synthetic effort; and the result of that initial phase is what constitutes Stebbins’s focus in the present volume. "The chief purpose of this book is to make available as a resource for Christian theology the synthesis that permeates Lonergan’s early writings on grace" (xix).
Stebbins judges that Lonergan’s early theological synthesis finds its fullest expression in De ente supernaturali (1946), a supplementary Latin textbook that Lonergan wrote for the course on grace he taught from time to time. Hence Stebbins makes this work his primary object of investigation and uses its scheme for organizing his consideration of the other materials from Lonergan’s early period. Moreover, he identifies his investigation as proceeding in the functional speciality interpretation. That is to say, his primary goal is simply to elucidate the distinctive features of the comprehensive theological understanding at which Lonergan had arrived by the late 1940s, not to trace its development, or defend its accuracy, or show its implications for today (xxi).
Stebbins distinguishes a general philosophical component and a properly theological component in Lonergan’s early synthesis. The general philosophical component is a metaphysics whose fundamental categories are (a) strictly explanatory, free of any intrinsic linkage to experiential data or images, and (b) critically based, performatively (if not yet explicitly) grounded in the recurrent features of concrete cognitional process. This explanatory and critically based metaphysics provides a highly nuanced general account of the relationship of God and the world. On that account, God is the principal cause of whatever exists or occurs. But this universal divine efficacy is utterly transcendent: only hypothetical necessity can be deduced from it, and the latter is compatible with contingence. Moreover, although the human will is indeed self-determining, its self-determination is not independent of other aspects of its activity that are directly or indirectly controlled by God. Consequently, there is no conflict between the universality of divine providence and the reality of human freedom. Among other things, this conclusion provides a framework within which the controversy over the character of actual grace (de auxiliis) is resolved by being dissolved (293).
The properly theological component of Lonergan’s early synthesis is "the theorem of the supernatural," an understanding of the supernatural order as totally transcending the natural order but nonetheless subsuming, extending, and completing it. This theorem allows Lonergan to extend natural analogies in controlled and fruitful fashion to the supernatural, thus genuinely (though always far from exhaustively) advancing our grasp of the latter. Specifically, it allows him to present grace as a created communication of the divine nature, a notion that "expresses a remarkably comprehensive synthesis: it suggests a link between the grace and union in Christ and sanctifying grace in us; it provides a way of relating the latter to the theological and moral virtues and to all salutary acts, whether these occur before or after justification; it accounts for the supernaturality, and hence the gratuity, of grace; and it suggests that through grace we share in the life of God precisely as triune, since the interrelation of the divine Persons are grounded in the uncreated communication of the divine nature from Father to Word, and from Father and Word to Spirit" (292).
In Stebbins’s view, the value of Lonergan’s early theological synthesis is permanent. "Lonergan’s recovery, adaptation, and development of Aquinas’s thought stand as an enduring achievement of theological understanding; and future theology of grace must find a way of embracing it, or give up any claim to comprehensiveness" (xix). Specifically, Lonergan’s early achievement is not eliminated by the disciplinary advance beyond theoretical to methodical theology. "[W]hat survives of the speculative synthesis outlined in this book when theology becomes fully methodical? The answer: practically all of it" (298).
It remains that the advance to fully methodical theology is not yet complete, and in his afterword Stebbins briefly recalls Lonergan’s contribution to that advance and sketches what still needs to be done. Following the initial, theoretical phase of his work, Lonergan devoted great efforts to elaborating the general philosophical component of methodical theology -- and this in two stages. From about 1950 to 1964, and especially in Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957), he showed explicitly and in great detail just how the threefold structure of explanatory metaphysics is grounded in the threefold structure of concrete intentional consciousness. From about 1964 onward, and especially in Method in Theology (1972), he elucidated an additional level of intentional consciousness, but without providing nearly the degree of detail about that level and its metaphysical correlatives that he had provided earlier about the first three. Moreover, in this later period Lonergan claimed that at least sometimes we experience ourselves as being in love without restriction, that this experience is the basic theological component of a methodical theology, and that it is really identical with what theoretical theology calls sanctifying (albeit notionally different from the latter). As with his account of the fourth level, however, he did not develop these claims in much detail. Consequently, the requirements for completing the transition to a fully methodical theology in general and a methodical systematic theology of grace in particular are two: (a) to develop a more detailed analysis of the fourth level of intentional consciousness; and then, within the framework of the latter, (b) to elucidate the systematic implications of the dynamic state of being unrestrictedly in love.
In my judgement, this book is wonderfully accurate as an account of Lonergan. Stebbins analyzes and synthesizes with great skill. In his treatment of the operations of intellect (in chapter 1), right through to his concluding remarks about Lonergan on actual grace (in the latter half of chapter 8), he is extremely sensitive to details and distinctions that others often overlook or misunderstand. Moreover, he not only explains accurately, he clarifies. He understands the material so thoroughly that he is able to link Lonergan’s claims in fresh ways, offer original examples, and thus teach the reader what Lonergan really is getting at. Given the challenging technical character of the material, this is a stellar achievement.
In particular, I was especially struck by Stebbins’ fine discussions of the role of understanding in theological speculation (chapter 1) and of the natural desire to see God (pp. 149-82). I found his focusing of the crucial points at issue in the Molinist/Bannezian controversy (chapter 6) quite helpful. His various charts (enumerated on p. x) are fruitful visual clarifications of complex relations and distinctions. These and similar contributions importantly augmented my own understanding of Lonergan, and not merely on the topic of grace.
Although his focal topic is limited to the theological synthesis present in Lonergan’s early writings on grace, the broad historical, philosophical, and theological perspectives Stebbins elaborates on his way to treating that focal topic make his work potentially valuable to a larger audience than theologians specializing in grace. I deem the book to include features of interest to systematic theologians in general, historians of theology, philosophers of religion, metaphysicians generally, persons interested specifically in Lonergan, and persons interested specifically in Aquinas. I commend it to them all.
Michael Vertin
St. Michael’s College
University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5S 1J4