478 - Understanding and Being: An Introduction and Companion to Insight

Understanding and Being:
An Introduction and Companion to Insight
By Bernard Lonergan
Ed. by Elizabeth A. Morelli and Mark D. Morelli
New York and Toronto, Mellon, 1980. 356 pp. $24.95.

As I was reading these Halifax Lectures, I was reminded of two anecdotes. One of them comes from David Tracy of the University of Chicago about the days when he was a curate at a suburban parish in Connecticut. He had recommended to William F. Buckley that he read Lonergan's Insight. Some time later Tracy asked Buckley what he thought about the book. Buckley replied, "Wonderful! It's like going back to school!" The second anecdote comes from one of Hans-Georg Gadamer's early years in sojourn for a term at Boston College. He had been having a lot of contact with students of Lonergan at Catholic University, McMaster, B.C., and on his many speaking trips on this continent. One day as I was accompanying him on foot from his residence to the Faculty Dining Hall, we were talking about the devotion of these students to Lonergan, and Gadamer exclaimed with some emphasis: "He must have been quite a teacher!"

Now Gadamer may have been suggesting that whatever might be said of Lonergan as a philosopher, he still must have been a remarkable teacher. Well, leaving to history the ultimate judgment, I can only say that for me Lonergan is an extraordinary teacher. And, aside from the boon this work will be for those who are interested in anything he has done, I think the overwhelming merit of the present work is that it affords-as well, perhaps, as may be possible in the medium of print-a suggestion of what it is like to be taught by him when he is in full form.

The contents of this book correspond in structure and order to all but chapters 4, 5, and 20 of his formidable magnum opus, Insight. (The editors have provided a helpful key to the structural correspondence on p. xi.) The book is subtitled, "An Introduction and Companion to Insight," and that is apt to the extent that this work, more than any other by him, fits that bill most nearly. The lectures transcribed in it were delivered one year after the publication of Insight, but five years after he had finished writing it. Its subject matter, the project of appropriating one's own structured dynamism of knowing and acting, was still quite fresh on his mind. But different ways of making his points had occurred to him in the meantime, and they make the book rather novel and not at all just a rehash of familiar matter. Moreover, if Insight derives much of its formidable character from its author's having reached well nigh "lapidary formulation" (to quote Tracy again) on so many of its issues, this difficulty is very much alleviated by the ex tempore quality of his style in lecturing from notes (vs. reading from a finished text).

So while there is a welcome brevity, a freshness, and at times, perhaps, even greater clarity about this work's treatment of issues dealt with in Insight, it is still rather dense and demanding. It is more a companion to Insight than an introduction.

A fascinating feature of the present work, remarkably absent from Insight due to his scrupulous observance of the strategy of the moving viewpoint, is the repeated use of theological examples from the history and systematics of, e.g., the Trinity and grace. Though they may alienate some secular readers, they also serve as reminders not merely of the make-up (in terms of the sociology of knowledge) of his original audience, but of the raison d'etre of his vocation to be what Time has called a "thinker's thinker."

Anyone with a germinal, a budding, or a "hardy perennial" interest in the work of Lonergan will be grateful

479 - Understanding and Being: An Introduction and Companion to Insight

indeed to the team of editors who have done such a first-rate job in bringing out these lectures.

Frederick G. Lawrence
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, Mass.