If the only Jesuit you ever met was the subject of a biography in a library collection, what would this individual tell you about Jesuit life?

In this series, IgNation blogger Kevin Burns, who is not a Jesuit, takes a look at some of the works that come up in a large urban public library he entered the search term “Jesuit” and filtered it through the genre of “Biography”. The books that popped up include some familiar names and some not so familiar but still very real Jesuits.

Today: the Canadian scholar whose influence on contemporary theological and philosophical scholarship is as international as it is both foundational and transformative – Bernard Lonergan SJ 

Writing about Bernard Lonergan makes people nervous. They tend to approach their subject through a filter of insecurity. They are understandably cautious because of the international Lonergan “academic machine” that is well oiled by scholars and reputation-protectors who have spent decades analysing and parsing every line of the thousands of pages that Lonergan published in his lifetime and, increasingly, in the years after his death 30 years ago. Lonergan is serious academic business and not for the un-credentialed or the nervous.

One approachable exception to writing about Lonergan is the 2010 work of Pierrot Lambert and Philip McShane, Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas. They present a kind of affectionate Lonergan scrapbook, filled with photos and letters, and diagrams of and by Lonergan, as well as reminiscences of colleagues and others who took courses from him. In their book they present Lonergan’s remarkable output of published work in the context of his life as a Jesuit. His Jesuit career spans a period of obvious change within the Church. He entered the Society in 1922, served as a peritus (expert) during the Second Vatican Council, and was still writing at the time that Peter Hans Kolvenbach SJ assumed leadership of the Society (1983) after the final and difficult years of Pedro Arrupe’s term as Father General.

They introduce Lonergan as boy who grew up in the shadow of the First World War and in a kind of single-parent household as his father spent long stretches of time away from the family home in Buckingham, Quebec, not in military service but as a land surveyor. Initially educated by Christian Brothers, Lonergan established an early and lasting connection with Jesuits who taught him from the age of 13. He describes his early Jesuit education in Montreal as “organized pretty much along the same lines as Jesuit schools had been since the beginning of the Reformation, with a few slight modifications.” (p. 43)

He observes the effects of the Great Depression on two continents, first as a student at the Jesuit Study Centre at Heythrop in England and then back in Canada. “When I came back to Canada in 1930, the rich were poor and the poor were out of work. The rich were trying to get money selling apples in the street.” (p. 44).

One of his Jesuit colleagues, Paul Kennedy, recalls the young Jesuit Lonergan as an awkward mix of intelligence and shyness that resulted in “a difficulty of access in conversation, but also something of a harsh sense of humor and a bluntness that could hurt. … A strange mixture, then, of brilliance, bluntness and inaccessibility.” (p. 36)

Lonergan the university student is a pragmatist, advising a colleague who was concerned about academic credentials: “It is just a union card. … Find out what your man wants, and figure a way to give it to him.” (p. 39).

Lambert and McShane trace Lonergan’s intellectual journey through Plato (“I don’t think he has the answers but certainly he can build up interest and start one into serious questions” (p. 45); then Augustine, who “was so concerned with understanding, so unmindful of universal concepts, that I began a long period of trying to write an intelligible account of my convictions” (p. 46); and then John Henry Newman: “I left Heythrop a votary of Newman’s.” (p. 146). 

Lonergan pursues his graduate studies in Rome at the Gregorian University from 1933 to 1937, a period in which Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia), supported Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and was cozying up to the Nazis in Germany. He is ordained there in 1936 and safely back in Canada by 1940 and awarded his doctorate in 1946. By this time he is a polyglot, capable of working in English, French, Latin, Greek, German, and Italian. This is the decade of Lonergan the demanding teacher and challenging philosopher: “…there is an answer and the answer has to be found out.” (p. 51). And: “Give me someone I can speak to plainly and bluntly, that I can attack not only by argument but with the important ally of some well-deserved ridicule, and there is little difficulty in making him see the light.” (p. 51)

              In 1940 his mother dies but his Jesuit superiors do not allow him to return home to attend the funeral. “I did not speak for three days. I guess I was in a minor state of shock.” (p. 64) Not long after, his father is also dead.

In 1947 Lonergan experiences a major period of depression and, years later, writes about his restlessness: “so prolonged has been my search, so much of it has been a dark struggle with my own flight from understanding, so many have been the half-lights and detours in my slow development.” (p. 55)

Lonergan next teaches at Regis College in Toronto and then at the Gregorian before becoming a peritus at the Second Vatican Council. The enormous range of his teaching responsibilities drives his writing: “It was because of teaching obligations that I was led to write the book and not because I had nothing else to do.” (p. 74) And: “I worked at Insight from 1949 to 1953. During the first three years my intention was an exploration of methods generally in preparation for a study of the method of theology.” (p. 93)

In the 1950s he suffers from stomach ulcers and in the 1960s with lung cancer –  this after years of smoking.  Even then an ironic sense of Jesuit discernment surfaces: “I thought of thinking to put an end to it [smoking] but wisely compromised.” (p. 48)

His approach to writing is developmental: “You want to write a book. And before you have written it, you do not know exactly what is going to be in it, but you are totally dedicated to it, ,,, And it is only in writing and rewriting that you find out what you wanted to do. … You slowly work out what is in your inspiration.” (p. 94-5) Insight – A Study in Human Understanding, written from 1949-53, and Method in Theology, published in 1972, frame Lonergan’s remarkable legacy.

Lambert and McShane paint Lonergan in his final years as a vulnerable Jesuit/genius.

Lonergan, always reserved in regard to his personal life, nonetheless manifested now more evidently his difficulties of being: the after-effects of cancer surgery, the reduction of his energy, his insomnia, his alcoholism, his sense of not being understood. Still, as he said in the mid-1930s, ‘I am no tragedian.’ Indeed, he was on the contrary a man who loved to laugh and to tell comical anecdotes. So, too, he loved baseball, hockey, bridge, the novels of Evelyn Waugh, the films of Peter Sellers and of Goldie Hawn.” (p. 100)

Writing in 1935, shortly before his ordination, Lonergan offers a prescient perspective on his life as a Jesuit, challenged often by the constraints and demands of obedience within a pre-Second Vatican Council approach to religious life.

I should add that I am substantially a Jesuit with no difficulties about obedience on this matter. Naturally, I think this is my work, but I know more luminously than anything else that I have nothing that I have not received, that I know nothing in philosophy that I have not received from the society. I do not say that I am a Stoic or that I don’t care… . I do care enormously about the good of the church but I also know that what I do not do through obedience will be done better by some one else. God can raise up from stones children to Abraham. To produce philosophers is simply a matter of the natural order. (p. 153)

An essential aspect of Lonergan the Jesuit is his tireless pursuit of God in all things, as captured in the phrase from Romans 5,5 about God’s love that he quotes often in his work: “… and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

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Bernard Lonergan: His Life and Leading Ideas, Pierrot Lambert and Philip McShane was published in 2010 by Axial Publishing of Vancouver.

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Next in this series we step away from library collections and “biography” to seek out contemporary Jesuits for their first-person and current observations on their experiences of life in the footsteps of St. Ignatius of Loyola. Coming up: Keyword: Jesuit, Genre: Autobiography