In these reflections on Karl Rahner, SJ and Bernard Lonergan, SJ, among the most influential Jesuit theologians of the twentieth century, we share the fruits of a year-long conversation. To enhance our community’s appreciation for the intellectual traditions behind Ignatian spirituality and that inform Catholic Social Thought, the Lane Center asked us to lead discussions on these foundational theologians for interested faculty and staff. The strong and engaged response encouraged us to share some of what we learned.
Both Lonergan and Rahner lived from 1904 to 1984, during which time their work contributed greatly to the Second Vatican Council’s attempt to open the church to the modern world. Their writings drew from many sources to provide theoretical structures for what became known as Catholic Social Thought, but they also shared the practice of Ignatian spirituality. As part of this practice, they prayed for love and sought to be grateful to God for all they had been given. Through grace, they were able to maintain some measure of the radical openness and commitment that comes from the Ignatian motto of “finding God in all things.” In these remarks, we highlight the influence of Ignatian spirituality on the theologies of both men.
We began our conversations discussing Bernard Lonergan, a Canadian Jesuit priest and scholar. Lonergan is best known for his works on method: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding and Method in Theology. While his thoughts can be complicated and abstract, his goal is simple and practical—to promote a more wise, just, and loving human community.
He sought “a framework for collaborative creativity.”[1] That framework was his “transcendental method.” It is transcendental in that (1) it is used by all people, at all times, in all fields; (2) it is the way we transcend or “go beyond” ourselves; and (3) each level of the method builds on and goes beyond any previous level(s). Lonergan’s method is like the scientific method, but it acknowledges the roles of culture, belief, and emotions in making judgments and decisions.
The method has four levels of consciousness that flow “upward” and “downward”: experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding. The way upward begins with the first, most basic level of consciousness, experience, whereby we gain raw data from our physical senses and our broader consciousness. This data is raw in the sense that it is unrelated, unpatterned, and unintelligible. Understanding, the second step of Lonergan’s method, provides the relationships, patterns, and intelligibility. For example, if one did not understand a written word, one might see the lines, curves, dots that comprise letters, but they would have no meaning. Knowing may begin with experience, but it requires the intellect to understand it. Lonergan’s third step is to judge one’s understanding. Our ideas, hypotheses, and theories can be incorrect. We judge our understanding as true when it is backed by data. After knowing the truth, we then spontaneously wonder about its goodness. What should I do? What does it matter? So what? In the fourth level of consciousness, decision, Lonergan’s method moves past knowing to choosing and loving. It becomes existential.
This movement through four levels of consciousness—experience, understanding, judgment, and decision—is driven by our natural, unrestricted desire to know, and by particular questions that manifest this desire. It is a way upward that is fulfilled, not by knowing or doing everything, but by loving everything. “Just as unrestricted questioning is our capacity for self-transcendence, so being in love in an unrestricted fashion is the proper fulfillment of that capacity.” [2]
This unrestricted love not only fulfills the process of transcendence, it reverses the flow “downward”. It is “the gift of God’s love [that] occupies the ground and root of the fourth and highest level of man’s intentional consciousness. It takes over the peak of the soul, the apex animae.”[3]
Any kind of love creates commitments and shapes the decisions we make. But when that love is divine love, charity, it allows us to love everyone and everything God loves, including sinners and our enemies. On the third level of consciousness, judgment, God’s infinite love brings faith, which Lonergan calls “the knowledge born of religious love.”[4] Such faith allows us to make truthful judgments that are informed by transcendent value. In other words, we become able to find God in all things. Then on the second and first levels of consciousness, this love and faith provide a transformed horizon for our ideas to develop, and a transformed way of experiencing the world.
The way to heal the world for Lonergan is collaboration through a transcendental method that finds its fulfillment in God’s infinite love, a love that is an end but also a new beginning. For when we find that love, or are found by it, we may find God in all things. After being given the gift of God’s love, we might affirm, along with Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Or we might practice what Ignatius proposes in the “Presupposition” at the beginning of his Spiritual Exercises, “That both the giver and the receiver of the exercises may be of greater health and benefit to each other, it should be predisposed that every good Christian ought to be more eager to put a good interpretation on a neighbor’s statement than to condemn it.” Similarly, as Dostoevski in The Brothers Karamazov advises through the monk, Zosima,
“Brothers, do not be afraid of man’s sin, love man also in his sin, for this likeness of God’s love is the height of love on earth. Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing. If you love each thing you will perceive the mystery of God in things.”[5]
Karl Rahner, who was born into a German Catholic family, also applied Ignatian spirituality to his theological work. After he joined the Society of Jesus, Rahner went through the stages of Jesuit formation while also earning doctorates in philosophy and theology. Like Lonergan, Rahner, in the words of Karen Kilby “tried to show that everything was not so neatly tied up as it seemed in this system, that there was scope for new ideas, and need for new thinking, and room for engagement with the modern world.”[6]
According to Rahner’s Transcendental and Anthropological Method, human knowledge is not occupied so much with the objects of knowledge themselves, but with the mode of knowledge made possible by the transcendental ground, which the knower experiences. The two key terms here are transcendental and experience. The term transcendental signifies that human knowledge transcends mere sensory impressions, and the term experience indicates that human knowledge must be grounded in sensory evidence.
Rahner employs the term a priori, meaning something which we cannot acquire simply from the world of experience. We would not have any knowledge of the sensory world if we were not intellectually endowed with this a priori element, or innate capacity to know.[7] Knowledge is given to our original, pre-conceptualized, and unthematic mind, prior to our reflection, conceptualization, and communication. Rahner insists that we be attentive to our transcendental experience for this is when we are most in touch with our knowledge of self, God, and the world around us.
Rahner acknowledges the deep influence of the Spiritual Exercises when he states, “The spirituality of Ignatius himself, which one learned through the practice of prayer and religious formation, was more significant for me than all learned philosophy and theology inside and outside the order.”[8] Ignatius taught that God communicates directly to the human soul, “It is more appropriate and far better that the Creator God communicates himself directly to the human soul.”[9] Rahner endorses this direct experience of God, coining the term mediated immediacy to distinguish transcendence from dogmatic or logical approaches. Our experience of God’s presence is a “direct” experience, because God desires to reveal God’s self to us and God does so directly in and through grace which is God’s own self.”[10] In other words, God is always present as the background of our cognitive operation and enables us to understand finite things anew. We do not experience God first, and then as a result, experience other things in God. Rather, we experience God in other things because God’s grace exists and is operative in our transcendental experience of other things.
In the Contemplation to Attain Love at the end of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius helps us realize that all created things are bestowed upon us as gifts from God. Recognizing this, we are moved to collaborate in God’s ongoing creation by offering our gifts and talents to the love and service of others. This orientation towards service is also a tenant of the Catholic Social Thought that informs the work of the Lane Center with faculty and staff as it continues the work inspired by Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner.
Mark Miller is an Associate Professor of systematic theology in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at the University of San Francisco. His interests focus on anthropology, soteriology, political theology, Trinity, and Christology. His PhD is from Boston College with the dissertation title of “Why the Passion?: Bernard Lonergan on the Cross as Communication.” His undergraduate degree concentrated on “Humanities in International Affairs” at Georgetown University.
Joseph Nguyen, SJ is an Assistant Professor of systematic theology and Christian spirituality. He is a Jesuit priest of the U.S. West Province of the Society of Jesus. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of San Francisco in 2020, he taught courses in Catholic Christian foundations, Christian spirituality, and Ignatian spirituality at Gonzaga University. His research focuses on Christian spirituality with an emphasis on Ignatian spirituality. Professor Nguyen received a doctorate in sacred theology from the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University in 2015. His dissertation focused on the theology of divine union in Maximus the Confessor and Ignatius of Loyola.
[1] Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, vol. 14, ed. By Robert Doran and John Dadosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 3.
[2] Ibid., 102.
[3] Ibid., 103.
[4] Ibid., 111.
[5] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 318-19.
[6] Karen Kilby, Karl Rahner: A Brief Introduction (New York: Herder & Herder, 1997), xvii.
[7] Karl-heinz Weger, Karl Rahner: An Introduction to His Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1980), 19.
[8] Hubert Biallowons & Paul Imhof, ed. Karl Rahner in Dialogue: Conversations and Interviews, (New York: Crossroad, 1986), 191.
[9] George E. Ganss, trans. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius (Saint Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1995), 25.
[10] Karl Rahner, “Experience of Self and Experience of God,” in Theological Investigations, vol. 13, trans. David Burke (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 123.
