Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: A Second Collection

Titel: A Second Collection

Stichwort: Bewusstsein; Liebe Gottes (Geist): Datum der Erfahrung, aber nicht des Wissens; Rudolf Otto; Ignatius, Rahner: Tröstung ohne Grund

Kurzinhalt: Because that dynamic state is conscious without being known, it is an experience of mystery. Because the dynamic state is being in love, the mystery is not merely attractive but fascinating:

Textausschnitt: 2. The Spirit

170b I have said that human authenticity is a matter of achieving self-transcendence. I have said that such achievement is always precarious, always a withdrawal from unauthenticity, always in danger of slipping back into unauthenticity. This is not a cheerful picture, and you may ask whether ordinary human beings ever seriously and perseveringly transcend themselves. (Fs)

170c I think they do so when they fall in love. Then their being becomes being-in-love. Such being-in-love has its antecedents, its causes, its conditions, its occasions. But once it has occurred and as long as it lasts, it takes over. It becomes the first principle. From it flow one's desires and fears, one's joys and sorrows, one's discernment of values, one's vision of possibilities, one's decisions and deeds. (Fs)

171a Being-in-love is of different kinds. There is the love of intimacy, of husband and wife, of parents and children. There is the love of one's fellowmen with its fruit in the achievement of human welfare. There is the love of God with one's whole heart and whole soul, with all one's mind and all one's strength (Mk. 12: 30). It is God's love flooding our hearts through the Holy Spirit given to us (Rom. 5:5). In it was grounded the conviction of St. Paul that "... there is nothing in death or life, in the realm of spirits or superhuman powers, in the world as it is or the world as it shall be, in the forces of the universe-nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:38-39). ... (Fs)

171b Being in love with God, as experienced, is being in love in an unrestricted fashion. All love is self-surrender, but being in love with God is being in love without limits or qualifications or conditions or reservations. It is with one's whole heart and whole soul and all one's mind and all one's strength. Just as a total openness to all questioning is our capacity for self-transcendence, so too an unrestricted being in love is the proper fulfilment of that capacity. (Fs) (notabene)

171c Because that love is the proper fulfilment of our capacity, fulfilment brings a deep-set joy that can remain despite humiliation, privation, pain, betrayal, desertion. Again, that fulfilment brings a radical peace, the peace that the world cannot give. That fulfilment bears fruit in acts of love for one's neighbor, a love that strives mightily to bring about the kingdom of God on this earth. On the other hand, the absence of that fulfilment opens the way to the trivialization of human life in the pursuit of fun, to the harshness of human life that results from the ruthless exercise of power, to despair about human welfare springing up from the conviction that the universe is absurd. (Fs)

172a The fulfilment that is being in love with God is not the product of our knowledge and choice. It is God's gift. Like all being in love, as distinct from particular acts of loving, it is a first principle. So far from resulting from our knowledge and choice, it dismantles and abolishes the horizon within which our knowing and choosing went on, and it sets up a new horizon within which the love of God transvalues our values and the eyes of that love transform our knowing. (Fs)

172b Though not the product of our knowing and choosing, it is not unconscious. On the contrary, it is a conscious, dynamic state, manifesting itself in what St. Paul named the harvest of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control (Gal. 5:22). (Fs) (notabene)

172c To say that this dynamic state is conscious is not to say that it is known. What is conscious, indeed, is experienced. But human knowing is not just experiencing. Human knowing includes experiencing but adds to it attention, scrutiny, inquiry, insight, conception, naming, reflecting, checking, judging. The whole problem of cognitional theory is to effect the transition from operations as experienced to operations as known. A great part of psychiatry is helping people to make the transition from conscious feelings to known feelings. In like manner the gift of God's love ordinarily is not objectified in knowledge, but remains within subjectivity as a dynamic vector, a mysterious undertow, a fateful call to a dreaded holiness. (Fs)

172d Because that dynamic state is conscious without being known, it is an experience of mystery. Because the dynamic state is being in love, the mystery is not merely attractive but fascinating: to it one belongs, by it one is possessed. Because it is an unrestricted, unmeasured being in love, the mystery is out of this world; it is otherworldly; it evokes awe. Because it is a love so different from the selfish self it transcends, it evokes fear and terror. Of itself, then, and apart from any particular religious context in which it is interpreted, the experience of the gift of God's love is an experience of the holy, of Rudolph Otto's mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Again, it is what Paul Tillich named a being grasped by ultimate concern. Again, it corresponds to Ignatius of Loyola's consolation without a cause, as interpreted by Karl Rahner, namely, an experience with a content but without an apprehended object. (Fs)

173a I have distinguished different levels of consciousness, and now I must add that the gift of God's love is on the topmost level. It is not the sensitive type of consciousness that emerged with sensing, feeling, moving. It is not the intellectual type that is added when we inquire, understand, think. It is not the rational type that emerges when we reflect, weigh the evidence, judge. It is the type of consciousness that also is conscience, that deliberates, evaluates, decides, controls, acts. But it is this type of consciousness at its root, as brought to fulfilment, as having undergone conversion, as possessing a basis that may be broadened and deepened and heightened and enriched but not superseded, as ever more ready to deliberate and evaluate and decide and act with the easy freedom of those that do all good because they are in love. The gift of God's love takes over the ground and root of the fourth and highest level of man's waking consciousness. It takes over the peak of the soul, the apex animae. (Fs) (notabene)