Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Third Collection

Titel: A Third Collection

Stichwort: Lonergan über Voegelin (Vernunft; inneres Licht, metaxy, In-Between); Newman (notional assent)

Kurzinhalt: here is an inner light that runs before the formulation of doctrines and that survives even despite opposing doctrines. To follow ...;

Textausschnitt: 59/13 Dr. Eric Voegelin has explained that he got into problems of religious understanding one winter when, at an adult education institute in Vienna where he grew up, he followed weekly lectures by Deussen, the philosopher who translated the Upanishads. Dr. Voegelin is author of a work in many volumes on Order and History; but his parerga include incisive essays on Greek philosophy and the New Testament. He has set aside the common but strange assumption that reason, for Plato and Aristotle, was much the same as the deductivism of late medieval Scholasticism, seventeenth-century rationalism, nineteenth-century idealism. His contention has been that reason in the Greek classic experience was moral and religious; in Athens the appeal to reason was the appeal of men in an age of social and cultural decay seeking a way to recall their fellows from darkness and lead them towards the light. His account of religious experience centers on the struggle in the soul and it draws freely on both Plato and the New Testament. He acknowledges pulls and counterpulls. To follow the former puts an end to questioning. To opt for the latter leaves questions unanswered and conscience ill at ease. The former alternative is what Voegelin means by a movement luminous with truth, or again by existing in the truth, or again by the truth of existence. The latter alternative is existence in untruth. As he contends, this luminosity of existence with the truth of reason precedes all opinions and decisions about the pull to be followed. Moreover, it remains alive as the judgment of truth in existence whatever opinions about it we may actually form. In other words, there is an inner light that runs before the formulation of doctrines and that survives even despite opposing doctrines. To follow that inner light is life, even though to worldly eyes it is to die. To reject that inner light is to die, even though the world envies one's attainments and achievements. (219; Fs) (notabene)

60/13 Voegelin holds that such experiences, while valid symbols and legitimately made the basis of a "Saving Tale" to guide our lives, are not to be handed over to hypostatizing and dogmatizing. (219; Fs)
There is no In-Between other than the metaxy experienced in a man's existential tension toward the divine ground of being; there is no question of life and death other than the question aroused by pull and counter-pull; there is no Saving Tale other than the tale of the divine pull to be followed by man; and there is no cognitive articulation of existence other than the noetic consciousness in which the movement becomes luminous to itself.
A little later we read: (220; Fs)
Kommentar eg (3/10/2004): cf. Voegelin, Evangelium
Myth is not a primitive symbolic form, peculiar to early societies and progressively to be overcome by positive science, but the language in which the experiences of divine-human participation in the In-Between become articulate. The symbolization of participating existence, it is true, evolves historically from the more compact form of the cosmological myth to the more differentiated forms of Philosophy, Prophecy, and the Gospel, but the differentiating insight, far from abolishing the metaxy of existence, brings it to fully articulate knowledge. When existence becomes noetically luminous as the field of pull and counter-pull, of the question of life and death, and of the tension between human and divine reality, it also becomes luminous for divine reality as the Beyond of the metaxy which reaches into the metaxy in the participatory event of the movement. There is no In-Between of existence as a self-contained object but only existence experienced as part of a reality which extends beyond the In-Between.
61/13 Let me now attempt to say what I make of this. First, I shall quote and comment. I quote: "[...] there is no Saving Tale other than the tale of the divine pull to be followed by man." What is this divine pull? We have explicit references to John 6:44: "No man can come to me unless he is drawn by the Father who sent me," and to John 12:32: "And I shall draw all men to myself, when I am lifted up from the earth." The context then is not only biblical but Joanine. (220; Fs)
62/13 Next, I quote: "[...] there is no cognitive articulation of existence other than the noetic consciousness in which the movement becomes luminous to itself." I ask: What is the movement of noetic consciousness and when does it become luminous to itself? For Voegelin "nous," whence the adjective, noetic, is in the classic experience moral and religious. But in the present context the religious component becomes far more emphatic. For in this movement of consciousness there is "[...] a mutual participation (methexis, metalepsis) of human and divine; and the language symbols expressing the movement are not invented by an observer who does not participate in the movement but are engendered in the event of participation itself. The ontological status of the symbols is both human and divine." So Voegelin appeals both to Plato who claimed that his myth of the puppet player was "an alethes logos, a true story," whether "received from a God, or from a man who knows" (Laws 645B) and, as well, to the prophets promulgating their sayings as the "word" of Yahweh. In brief, we are offered an account of revelation or, perhaps, inspiration. (220f; Fs) (notabene)
63/13 It is, however, an account of revelation or inspiration that can meet the needs of a philosophy of religion. For as Voegelin further remarked, "The symbolization of participating existence [...] evolves historically from the more compact form of the cosmological myth (the reference is to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia) to the more differentiated forms of Philosophy, Prophecy, and the Gospel, but the differentiating insight, far from abolishing the metaxy of existence, brings it to fully articulate knowledge." (221; Fs)
64/13 One may ask whether one is not to confuse this differentiating insight with its fully articulate knowledge and, on the other hand, the repudiated dogmatizing and doctrinization. There are grounds for such an interpretation for later Voegelin speaks of "[...] the loss of experimental reality through doctrinization." Now the luminous experience of existing in the truth is indeed an instance of experimental reality, and a doctrinization that abolishes the one also is the loss of the other. In that case doctrinization seems associated with what Newman would have named merely notional apprehension and merely notional assent, which do imply an exclusion of real apprehension and assent. (221; Fs)
There remains the repudiation of "hypostatization." It seems to me fully justified if applied to Gnostic constitutions of the ple-roma through the designation of abstract names, or even, if anyone wishes, applied to the Hegelian dialectical deduction of the universe through an interplay of opposed Begriffe. But behind such applications there is a far deeper issue, and on it I can now do no more than invite you to an examination of Giovanni Sala's comparison of my cognitional theory with Kant's, and of William Ryan's comparison of my intentionality analysis with that of Edmund Husserl. The seminal work seems to me to be Le Blond's Logique et methode chez Aristote. (221f; Fs)