Complicating the Reception of Lonergan on ‘Sacralization and Secularization’

Lonergan’s Fourfold Distinction

Lonergan’s fourfold distinction is designed to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of sacralization and secularization. ⁸ According to Lonergan, the differentiation of the ‘really’ or authentically sacred and secular from their aberrational expression is a product of fidelity to three interrelated criteria: personal, communal, and historical. ⁹ The first criterion is correlative with the individual’s authenticity or her personal fidelity to the transcendental desire for intelligibility, reality, and value. ¹⁰ Roughly correlative with what Lonergan in Method in Theology terms ‘major authenticity,’ the communal criterion highlights the relative authenticity of the individual’s tradition that is the source of her socialization. ¹¹ Finally, the historical criterion refers to the way in which religion, society, and culture develop such that ‘what is authentic at one stage of religious development may no longer be authentic at another.’ ¹² From this perspective, positional negotiations of social and cultural development, including the ‘liberation of a secular domain from the once but no longer appropriate extension of the sacral,’ are a function, at least in part, of individual and communal authenticity. ¹³

Lonergan draws a parallel between the social infrastructure constitutive of intersubjective communities whose ‘schemes of recurrence are simple prolongations of prehuman achievement,’ and what he terms religions of the infrastructure that cling to the ‘world of immediacy.’ ¹⁴ This tendency to objectify religious experience in the world of immediacy contributes to primitive religion’s fixation on sacred objects, places, times and rites. In the absence of a superstructure constitutive of what Lonergan regards as the ‘outer word’ of religion, the focus of primitive religion is ‘not belief but action, and the test of conformity is not assent to a creed but participation in ritual performance.’ ¹⁵ Within infrastructural forms of religion the ‘sacral and the secular may exist and may operate but they will be implicit rather than explicit, acted out but not named.’ ¹⁶ This initial interpenetration or indistinction of the sacred and the secular precedes subsequent efforts to ‘discern the proper sphere of each.’ ¹⁷

Lonergan argues that the initial shift from infrastructural to superstructual forms of religion is present, for example, in the Jewish prophetic tradition’s rejection of idolatry and subsequent embrace of monotheism. ¹⁸ He also highlights early Christianity’s incipient differentiation of the sacred from the profane captured by Jesus’ call to ‘render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s’ (Mark 12:17). ¹⁹ The latter distinction prevailed until Constantine ended Christian persecution and subsequently established an ‘alliance of church and state’ that intensified in the wake of the Roman Empire’s breakdown. ²⁰ Christendom’s sacralization of ‘social arrangements’ was matched by a corresponding sacralization of culture that found expression in, for example, medieval theology’s tendency to regard philosophy and science as ‘subordinate parts’ of a sacralized worldview. ²¹ If the Constantinian dyarchy of throne and altar was gradually dismantled by a series of ‘secularizations in the body politic,’ medieval theology’s sacralized view of the universe was challenged by the work of authors such as Descartes, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and Freud. ²² According to Lonergan, the institutional Church’s initial reaction to these social and cultural developments was uniformly negative. Lonergan highlights how this antagonistic relationship vis-à-vis modernity—the Church’s ‘persistent age-long rearguard action’—contributed to the rise of secularism’s ‘outraged and outright rejection of religion as the futile champion of a dead and lamented past.’ ²³

It was not until the Second Vatican Council that the Church affirmed a distinction between the secularist’s oversight and her positional achievement, between pejorative forms of secularism—the secularization to be resisted—and legitimate or benign forms of laicization. In his discussion of the debate between Marie Dominique Chenu and Jean Cardinal Danielou outlined by Claude Geffre in Concilium, ²⁴ Lonergan highlights the connection between the sacralization to be dropped and the secularization to be welcomed. Inspired by Aquinas’s efforts to affirm the ‘reality of human nature and the legitimacy of its proper sphere of activity,’ Chenu calls for the Church to dismantle the ‘mental and institutional complex of Christendom.’ ²⁵ According to Chenu, the passage from Christendom to Christianity enables the future Christian to be a ‘missionary of the Gospel’ rather than a ‘protector of a civilization he himself has organized.’ ²⁶ Far from ‘jeopardizing the domain of grace,’ Chenu argues that the ‘progress of natural and profane forces’ in human history frees both the world and the Word of God to be more themselves. ²⁷ Chenu’s point of departure for the new form of sacralization to be fostered is a series of developments or ‘signs of the times,’ including: ‘man’s becoming more human, his socialization, peace among nations, the rise of conscience among the peoples of the world.’ ²⁸ Since grace builds on, elevates, and perfects human nature, the function of the Christian in the modern world is not to reject these authentic human values but to ‘lift them up,’ to view them as a ‘new kind of praeparatio evangelica leading to the ultimate destiny of man.’ ²⁹ The goal here is to differentiate that which is ‘correct and valuable’ in the secularist’s position from the latter’s oversight, to use the former to purify religion, and, by extension, to resacralize that which ‘never should have been secularized.’ ³⁰

Notwithstanding these careful distinctions, the ‘abrupt and fragmentary’ nature of these social and cultural changes, along with the tendency of some Catholics to indiscriminately jettison the past, generates fear and anxiety in certain circles. ³¹ By contrast with Chenu’s optimism, Danielou’s response to the process of secularization is more ambivalent. Although Danielou has abandoned the ideal of medieval Christendom, he contends that the Gospel should have ‘other securities than God’s Word alone.’ This call to retain ‘certain zones where sacred and religious elements are preserved’ may be interpreted in ways that view secularization, not as a long overdue withdrawal of sacrality, but rather as an undesirable form of desacralization. ³² The tension between Chenu’s and Danielou’s positions continues to mark debates concerning the nature of secularization in the post-conciliar church. This basic outline of Lonergan’s fourfold distinction sets the background for my discussion of Dadosky’s and Doran’s work that follows.

Dadosky on Sacralization and Secularization

I would like to begin my examination of Dadosky’s work by focusing on connections between the sacralization to be dropped and the secularization to be resisted. One way to get in on these two mutually reinforcing extremes is to focus on the relationship between ‘general’ and ‘specific-identity’ focused interpretations of Christianity constitutive of what Dadosky calls the ‘dialectic of religious identity.’ ³³ Concerned primarily with ‘establishing’ and maintaining communal ‘boundaries,’ those who are specific-identity focused tend to highlight Christianity’s distinctiveness vis-à-vis the broader ‘cultural matrix.’ ³⁴ By contrast, general-identity focused Christians are keen to ‘expand . . . boundaries’ by integrating insights from new contexts and other disciplines. ³⁵ Unlike a ‘dialectic of contradictories’ that regards these two linked but opposed principles as mutually exclusive options, Dadosky conceives their relationship along the lines of a ‘dialectic of contraries’ that demands a ‘higher synthesis.’ ³⁶ Since theology is a discipline that ‘mediates between a cultural matrix and the significance and role of religion in that matrix,’ ³⁷ an authentic negotiation of the dialectic of religious identity demands what Lonergan terms ‘mutual self-mediation.’ ³⁸ Mutual self-mediation refers to the process by which individuals and communities constitute themselves, not apart from but always in dialogue with ‘the other.’ ³⁹ From the perspective of the dialectic of religious identity, mutual self-mediation refers to the dialogical character of the relationship between religion and the broader culture, a relationship that is marked by mutual learning, challenge, and enrichment.

According to Dadosky, an inauthentic negotiation of this dialectic can result in one of two extremes: (a) specific-identity motivated forms of ‘triumphalism’ and (b) general-identity motivated forms of ‘accommodationism.’ ⁴⁰ Dadosky correlates these two positions with Lonergan’s distinction between a ‘solid right that is determined to live in a world that no longer exists’ and a ‘scattered left captivated by now this, now that new development.’ ⁴¹ Both of these polarized options represent variations of what Dadosky, following Lonergan, labels ‘strict self-mediation,’ the process whereby individuals and communities mediate their identities ‘without consideration for the other.’ ⁴² When strict self-mediation is combined with a tendency to conceive the relationship between the community and the other in exclusively dialectical or antagonistic terms, the results are a variety of fundamentalisms on the right and left.

In my judgment, the tension between these two poles may be fruitfully correlated with a sacralization to be dropped and a secularization to be welcomed, respectively. In several places, Dadosky correlates the former with at least two interrelated elements. The first is a broad gestalt that includes a pejoratively ‘dogmatic’ style of theologizing and related classicist conception of culture whose opposition to modern developments contributes to what Avery Dulles describes as an ‘institutional’ model of church. ⁴³ In a short article entitled ‘Theology in its New Context,’ Lonergan connects this deductive and defensive form of theologizing with the late medieval rise of classicism and closely related oppositional reading of the church–world relationship. ⁴⁴ The result is a sectarian and isolationist posture that animates what Lonergan describes as the church’s ‘persistent age-long rearguard action.’ The second element includes those ‘negative features of the fusion of church and state’—the Constantinian era’s dyarchy of throne and altar—that contribute, in the limit case, to ‘atrocities’ committed ‘in the name of God,’ such as the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. ⁴⁵ On the flipside, Dadosky correlates secularism with the rise of ‘hyperculture’ and the interrelated emergence of what John Paul II calls the ‘culture of death.’ The former refers to the modern West’s culture of individualism and ‘consumption’ whose pretensions to universality have led—via globalization—to the ‘homogenization’ of cultural-religious identities. The latter includes the negative effects of religious indifferentism and moral relativism in contemporary liberal democracies. ⁴⁶ Both components of modern secularism have contributed to the rise of reactionary forms of religious fundamentalism.

By contrast with these two mutually reinforcing extremes, the secularization to be welcomed would appear to constitute a middle-ground between the solid right and the scattered left. Dadosky echoes Lonergan here in calling for the dismantling of the ‘mental and institutional complex of Christendom’ and for a correlative embrace of ‘democracy, religious tolerance and freedom.’ ⁴⁷ According to Dadosky, this passage from Christendom to Christianity, from the church as a power in the world to the church as a presence in the world, finds expression in, for example, Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council’s ‘Declaration of Religious Freedom.’ ⁴⁸ Although this is the least developed element of Dadosky’s account of Lonergan’s fourfold distinction, his reference to a benign form of laicization does appear to be a clear instance of the Church’s movement beyond antagonistic forms of self-mediation. The secularization to be welcomed—one example of the Council’s broader shift to a more dialogical and critical reading of the church–world relationship—is an integral component in authentic negotiation of the dialectic of religious identity. This initial reference to mutual self-mediation is a helpful segue into Dadosky’s discussion of the sacralization to be fostered.

Since the secularization to be welcomed must differ dialectically from the secularist aberrations highlighted above, a fully critical embrace of modern politics must include reference to some alternative form of sacralization. Enter Dadosky’s account of what he calls the ‘fourth stage of meaning’ and its relations to Lonergan’s discussion of the evolution of human meaning in Method in Theology. ⁴⁹ In the undifferentiated world of common sense, ‘explanations’ of the created order are supplied by a community’s constitutive myths. The transition from the first to the second stage of meaning is correlative with the ‘Greek discovery of mind.’ This differentiation of consciousness—the shift from the ‘mythos of Homer to the logos of Plato’s dialogues’—is made possible by the emergence of a ‘systematic exigence’ that aims to differentiate the realms of common sense and theory. ⁵⁰ The second stage emphasis on theory gives way to a third stage of meaning correlative with the emergence of the modern ‘turn to the subject’ and the rise of ‘interiorly differentiated consciousness.’ The transition to the third stage of meaning is keyed by what Lonergan regards as a ‘critical exigence’ or modern philosophy’s efforts to relate and ground the distinct realms of common sense and theory in human consciousness. According to Dadosky, Lonergan’s account of self-appropriation aims to overcome earlier ‘aberrant and incomplete’ negotiations of the modern turn to the subject that result either in skepticism or post-modern forms of subjectivism and relativism. ⁵¹

Just as Lonergan correlates systematic and critical exigencies with the emergence of the ‘Greek discovery of mind’ and the ‘turn to the subject’ respectively, so too Dadosky associates his novel fourth stage of meaning with a distinctive ‘transcendental exigence.’ ⁵² The negotiation of the latter gives rise to a religious differentiation of consciousness that complements the birth of theory and interiority. ⁵³ According to Dadosky, Lonergan’s early work on the third stage of meaning focused on the ‘subject as present to self as a knower’ and, by extension, on self-mediation of oneself to others. The fourth stage of meaning moves beyond self-referential forms of self-knowledge to include knowledge of the self constituted by the dynamics of mutual self-mediation. ⁵⁴ This distinctive ‘turn to the Other’ has both vertical and horizontal dimensions. On the one hand, the emergence of religiously differentiated consciousness broadens the third stage of meaning’s focus on self-knowledge to include knowledge of the subject’s relation to the transcendent, including knowledge of the self’s ‘moral limitations.’ ⁵⁵ On the other hand, the experience of God’s love enables an expansion of spontaneous intersubjectivity that finds expression in concern for others on the horizontal plane of human existence. ⁵⁶

The result of this turn is what Dadosky terms ‘non-biased, mutual self-mediation,’ an ‘ethic of mutuality’ ⁵⁷ that has a ‘two-fold effect, one on culture . . . and the other on religion.’ ⁵⁸ In his discussion of the former, Dadosky references Doran’s account of ‘world-cultural humanity,’ a ‘crosscultural communitarian alternative to imperialistic realities’ centered on a ‘process of intercultural dialogue and mutual enrichment that enjoys the diversities and frees us to grow.’ ⁵⁹ Dadosky notes that the emergence of a world-cultural humanity is predicated upon ‘personal authenticity’ and is linked, at least in part, with a ‘creative minority of subjects’ who have achieved ‘interiorly differentiated consciousness.’ ⁶⁰ At the same time, Dadosky also argues that this new focus on mutual enrichment and challenge may facilitate the emergence of new forms of interreligious cooperation. Dadosky correlates the initial stages of the latter in Roman Catholic circles with Vatican II’s embrace of what he calls an ‘ecclesiology of friendship’ that encourages inter-religious encounter and dialogue. ⁶¹ Essential for overcoming both bland forms of tolerance and intolerant forms of fundamentalism, such cooperation may give rise to a form of ‘convergence’ that differs from both syncretism and ‘conformism.’ ⁶² This shift in the Church’s self-understanding ad extra is matched by a corresponding shift ad intra. More specifically, the shift to a fourth stage of meaning demands an effort to differentiate authentic from inauthentic elements of one’s own religious tradition. Just as the third stage of meaning demands a ‘critical appropriation of one’s consciousness,’ so the fourth stage of meaning demands a ‘critical appropriation of one’s own faith tradition.’ ⁶³ Together, both elements represent genetic stages in the emergence of what Lonergan calls ‘cosmopolis’ and the Christian tradition labels the Kingdom of God. ⁶⁴

Doran on Sacralization and Secularization

Robert Doran’s approach to these same issues is shaped in distinctive ways by his engagement with the work of Rene Girard. Much of Doran’s discussion of Girard centers on Lonergan’s distinction between two ways of being conscious. ⁶⁵ Lonergan argues that we are conscious in one way through our ‘sensibility’ insofar as we ‘undergo rather passively what we sense and imagine, our desires and fears, our delights and sorrows, our joys and sadness.’ ⁶⁶ Doran correlates this first way with the sensitive-psychic dimension of consciousness constituted by the subject’s ‘sensations, memories, images, emotions, conations, associations, bodily movements and spontaneous intersubjective responses.’ ⁶⁷ Developing Lonergan’s work on the sensitive-psyche, Doran connects the first way of being conscious with Girard’s reflections on the mimetic or triangular nature of human desire. ⁶⁸ By contrast with the ‘romantic lie’ that conceives human desire as something autonomous or self-selected, Girard contends that desire is always elicited or mediated by models that individuals mimic or imitate. ⁶⁹ The result is what Girard describes as a ‘interdividual’ psychology that emphasizes the intersubjective dimensions of identity formation. ⁷⁰ Whereas Girard’s critique of liberal individualism tends to go ‘all the way down,’ ⁷¹ Lonergan argues that we are also conscious in a second and more ‘active’ way through what he describes as our ‘intellectuality.’ ⁷² Lonergan correlates the latter with the subject’s orientation to self-transcendence, a non-elicited or innate and spiritual or non-psychic desire for intelligibility, reality, and value that is source and norms of concepts, judgments, and their ongoing revision. ⁷³ This natural desire finds unique expression in the spontaneous and ‘virtually endless’ questioning of children but it also plays an essential role, as Doran notes, in Girard’s own innovative scholarly work. ⁷⁴

According to Doran, Lonergan’s two ways of being conscious are not separate but rather intimately interrelated. Following Lonergan, Doran argues that the sensitive-psychic dimension of consciousness permeates—‘underpins, accompanies, and overarches’ ⁷⁵ —the ‘intentional operations that constitute the second way of being conscious.’ ⁷⁶ According to Doran, these sensitive and psychic spontaneities are in themselves neutral. The mimetic dimensions of human consciousness may support or conflict with the subject’s orientation to self-transcendence. ⁷⁷ At the same time, the negotiation of such spontaneities is itself a function of the second way of being conscious. The latter can proceed in authentic or in inauthentic ways. In his discussion of the former, Doran argues that authentic negotiation of the first way of being conscious closely resembles elements of what Jung and Freud term ‘individuation.’ ⁷⁸ In his discussion of the latter, Doran connects Lonergan’s notions of psychic aberration and dramatic bias—the bias of ‘unacknowledged motivation’ ⁷⁹ that is the source of distorted mutual self-mediation—with Girard’s account of negative mimesis. ⁸⁰

In the background here is Girard’s distinction between external and internal mediation. ‘Relatively stable and uncontroversial,’ external mediation occurs when there is sufficient distance between the subject and her model or mediator such that the latter is unlikely to become a rival of the former. ⁸¹ By contrast, internal mediation occurs in cases where the distance between subject and model is reduced such that the latter becomes an ‘obstacle to the fulfillment of desires that they have awakened in us.’ ⁸² When two people desire the same object that cannot be shared the possibility of conflict and envy increases. The rise of internal mediation accounts for the movement from ‘acquisitive’ or ‘appropriative’ forms of mimesis where the contested object remains in view to ‘conflictual’ forms of imitation where the subject shifts her attention from the object to the model or mediator as rival. ⁸³ According to Girard, the ‘contagious’ nature of conflictual mimesis can stimulate group-wide competition that culminates in the war of all against all. ⁸⁴ The result is a ‘sacrificial crisis’ that can only be resolved by what Girard calls the ‘single-victim mechanism,’ the ‘murder or expulsion’ of a scapegoat, an individual or group whose ‘exclusion’ unifies members of the community. ⁸⁵ Girard correlates the latter with the birth of sacrificial forms of religion that aim to perpetuate the socializing effects of the founding murder through myth and ritual.

According to Girard, this mechanism is progressively exposed and dismantled by a series of biblical texts, most especially the Deutero-Isaian vision of the suffering servant and by the passion narratives of the New Testament. ⁸⁶ Jesus’ nonviolent acceptance of the cross—his renunciation of mimetic rivalry—reveals the possibility of a positive form of mimesis or imitation that finds expression in his invitation to ‘be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matthew 5: 44–45). ⁸⁷ Doran connects Girard’s treatment of biblical revelation and positive mimesis to Lonergan’s Law of the Cross. ⁸⁸ He describes this law as a ‘precept of utmost generality’ that invites humans to overcome the ‘evils of the human race,’ not through force or power, but rather by ‘absorbing them in a loving surrender that returns good for evil done.’ ⁸⁹ Fidelity to the Law of the Cross transforms those evils into what Lonergan regards as the ‘supreme good.’ Doran correlates the latter with the birth of a ‘a new social reality,’ a ‘community of friendship with the three divine persons and among ourselves.’ ⁹⁰ Although this law is anticipated in the Hebrew Bible and finds unique realization in the visible mission of the Word, Doran argues that it is found wherever evil is overcome via nonviolent resistance, both in other religious traditions and in secular society at large. ⁹¹

The result is a new form of interdividuation that is a function of ‘created participation in and imitation of the trinitarian relations of active and passive spiration,’ ⁹² and of the related gifts of sanctifying grace, faith, and the habit of charity. Doran associates participation in active spiration with sanctifying grace—‘the recalled reception’ of the gift of God’s love—and with faith, knowledge of value born of God’s love that finds expression in an ‘ineffable assent’ to the gift that has been given. ⁹³ This participation in the relation of Father and Son to the Holy Spirit establishes a ‘special relation to the indwelling Spirit.’ ⁹⁴ Just as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, so charity proceeds from the ‘transformed radical disposition of our being’ and from the ‘knowledge born of that disposition.’ ⁹⁵ Proceeding from participation in active spiration, charity is a ‘created participation in passive spiration, that is, in the Holy Spirit.’ ⁹⁶ This participation in passive spiration ‘establishes a special relation to the indwelling Father and Son.’ ⁹⁷ Doran argues that these gifts are transcultural realities linked to the universal missions of the Word and Spirit that find unique fulfillment in the visible missions of the same.

These imitations of the trinitarian relations find expression at the horizontal level of human living in what Doran calls social grace, the flipside of what the tradition categorizes as social sin. ⁹⁸ More specifically, Doran argues that ‘our created relations with the three divine subjects . . . establish the state of grace as an interpersonal situation whose formal effects extend to the establishment of a genuine community of meaning and value among human beings.’ ⁹⁹ Social grace foregrounds the way in which the gift of God’s love conditions the possibility of ‘the integral functioning of the scale of values,’ and, more specifically, of those cultural and social values that ensure an equitable distribution of primary goods. ¹⁰⁰ Such functioning is roughly correlative with Jesus of Nazareth’s explicit proclamation of the Kingdom of God.

I would like to conclude my discussion of Doran’s work by highlighting the connections between these various elements and Lonergan’s fourfold distinction. First, Doran argues that Girard’s account of mimetic rivalry and of sacrificial religion helps flesh out the meaning of a sacralization to be dropped. Doran correlates the latter with ‘all attempts to employ the name or word of God or any other sacral trappings to justify . . . persecution, exclusion and scapegoating.’ ¹⁰¹ Second, Doran links Girard’s emphasis on positive mimesis with fidelity to the Law of the Cross and both with the sacralization to be fostered, the real or genuine sacred. ¹⁰² Third, Doran conceives secularism as a secularized variation of the false sacred to be dropped that continues the practices of sacrifice without appealing to ‘sacral justification.’ ¹⁰³ More specifically, secularism refers to ‘any and all attempts . . . to condemn or scapegoat carriers of the genuine religious word, and any consequent efforts to locate human “coming of age” as a human perfection to be attained exclusively in this life and exclusively on the basis of human resources.’ ¹⁰⁴ Finally, Doran links ‘any legitimate freeing of a domain of life from the realm of sacrality’—Lonergan’s secularization to be welcomed or the genuinely secular—with ‘growth in fidelity to the transcendental precepts’ that is itself the fruit of grace. In his rather brief remarks about this final category, Doran draws a connection between the secularization to be welcomed and Lonergan’s ‘creative minority’ constitutive of what he calls the ‘not numerous centre.’ ¹⁰⁵

Complicating Dadosky and Doran on Sacralization and Secularization

What I would like to do in this paper’s final section is ‘complicate’ several of Dadosky’s and Doran’s most significant insights. My own approach begins with the ambiguity that characterizes Dadosky’s characterization of the third stage of meaning. On the one hand, Dadosky speaks of the ‘critical exigence’ and the closely related modern turn to the subject in broad terms as a project inaugurated by Descartes. On the other hand, he also links the third stage of meaning in very specific ways to Lonergan’s account of self-appropriation and its capacity for overcoming truncated or distorted variations of the modern turn. In both cases he appears to be arguing that the modern turn to the subject is deficient vis-à-vis a subsequent turn to alterity. In my judgment, if the former tends to neglect the role that mutual self-mediation plays in self-constitution, the latter need not preclude an at least incipient ‘turn to the other.’

Frederick Lawrence argues that the limitations of late medieval classicism, together with the birth of empirical science, triggered the ‘epistemological turn’ in early modern philosophy. ¹⁰⁶ The negotiation of this turn in, for example, the early modern liberalism of Hobbes and Locke yields a ‘bourgeois’ subject whose profile connects well with Dadosky’s reference to self-referential forms of self-possession. ¹⁰⁷ Influenced by the nominalist rejection of premodern teleology, both authors characterize human beings as self-interested monads who utilize reason in calculative ways to satisfy their insatiable desire for money and property. This conception of the person as homo economicus counsels the establishment of a minimal state whose primary responsibility is the maintenance of a limited set of civil-political rights that enable individuals to pursue their idiosyncratic conceptions of happiness without interference. Closely related to what Dadosky regards as ‘hyperculture,’ liberal individualism’s truncation of the human good is a prime example of what Lonergan describes as the ‘general bias of common sense.’ General bias arises when self-interested distortions of practical intelligence threaten culture’s independence or its capacity to pass critical judgment on the character of institutional frameworks and the primary goods whose satisfaction they serve. ¹⁰⁸ This aberrational ‘adaptation of theory to practice’—the co-opting of culture to help manufacture the ‘conviction that other forms of human knowledge are useless or doubtfully valid’ ¹⁰⁹ —is central to what Lonergan terms the ‘longer cycle of decline.’ ¹¹⁰ This cycle progresses through a series of stages that culminates in the ‘totalitarian viewpoint’ that demands ‘total subordination to the requirements of reality,’ where the latter refers to the ‘economic development, the military equipment and the political dominance of the all-exclusive state.’ ¹¹¹

Although both Hobbes and Locke call for the privatization of sacrificial forms of religion, their efforts to quell mimetic rivalry and violence through the creation of a political authority functions as a secularized form of the katechon. ¹¹² According to William Palaver, since the deconstruction of the scapegoat mechanism ‘destroys the cultural restraints which prevent the unleashing of mimetic violence,’ Christianity has the potential to usher in the apocalypse. ¹¹³ A term with biblical roots meaning ‘to hold back, to hold fast, to hold in possession, to bind [or], to restrain,’ the katechon is a person, force or structure that keeps the ‘Antichrist’ or the end of the world at bay. ¹¹⁴ Seen in this light, modern secularism has not so much broken with sacrificial religion as it has fostered a migration of the primitive sacred from ‘religion’ to ‘the state’ and ‘market’ in ways that scapegoat the religious and non-Western other. ¹¹⁵ William Cavanaugh’s work is especially helpful here. He highlights how commitment to the secular state functions as a ‘sham common good’ that serves to unify an otherwise unconnected collection of individuals against illiberal enemies. ¹¹⁶ He further demonstrates how the so-called ‘myth of religious violence’ functions as a cover story used to justify sacrificial forms of violence committed in the name of the nation-state. ¹¹⁷ Hence Doran’s claim that the secularization to be resisted is in fact a permutation of Girard’s sacralization to be dropped.

This is the conception of liberalism that the Catholic tradition has always rejected. In the wake of the breakdown of the Thomistic synthesis the church adopted an increasingly defensive and antagonistic posture vis-à-vis extra-ecclesial cultural developments. For nearly 150 years after the French Revolution liberal democracy was effectively equated with a pejorative form of secularism. Although there are glimpses of the distinction between ‘doctrinaire’ and ‘moderate’ or benign forms of laicity present, for example, in the Christmas Addresses of Pius XII, it is not until John XXIII’s Pacem et Terris that the Church moves to embrace liberal democracy. Keyed by John XXXIII’s call for the Church to adopt a more dialogical relationship with the modern world, the Council Fathers would go on to affirm the value of democratic institutions while denying liberal individualism’s standard justification for them.

One way to get in on the distinction between pejorative forms of secularism and benign forms of secularity that lie at the heart of the Council’s shift is to focus on what has come to be known as the liberal-communitarian debate in political philosophy. ¹¹⁸ The communitarian deconstruction of liberal neutrality and consequent embrace of what Alasdair MacIntyre calls ‘tradition-dependent’ rationality is roughly correlative with what Lonergan regards as the contemporary crisis of meaning. ¹¹⁹ According to Lonergan, the rise of probabilistic science and historical consciousness led to the breakdown of classicism in both its premodern and modern forms and to the consequent emergence of an empirical notion of culture. ¹²⁰ In several places in his work, Lonergan argues that the key to resolving the contemporary crisis lies in identifying an alternative control of meaning compatible with cultural and religious diversity. In closing one version of ‘Sacralization and Secularization,’ Lonergan highlights ‘four degrees of cultural development.’ ¹²¹ He connects the second and third with the rise of classical and empirical culture respectively, and the fourth with a ‘philosophy and theology’ capable of responding to the ‘relativism and agnosticism’ that are the ‘prima facie’ implications of the shift from the second to the third degrees. The key to this resolution lies in self-appropriation and in the subsequent articulation of a ‘contemporary cognitional theory’ that identifies those transcendental norms that structure reason-exchange within and between different traditions. ¹²²

Lonergan correlates these presuppositions with the subject’s three-fold desire for intelligibility, reality, and value, the source and norm of cultural-linguistic frameworks and their ongoing development. ¹²³ Reference to the subject’s orientation to self-transcendence specifies a thin or heuristic form of metaphysics distinguishable, at least in principle, from thick metaphysical or comprehensive frameworks that represent answers to the question that is the human spirit. In my judgment, the shift in control of meaning from thick to thin that is a product of self-appropriation yields a historically conscious account of natural law capable of forming the focus of an overlapping consensus in contexts marked by pluralism. Since cognitive and existential self-appropriation set important conditions of possibility for genuinely post-conventional dialogue, Lonergan’s negotiation of the modern turn to the subject is a necessary if not sufficient component in the embrace of horizontal alterity. Self-appropriation, far from something disconnected in principle from a subsequent ‘turn to the other,’ sets important conditions for the ‘ethic of mutuality’ that sits at the heart of Doran’s world-cultural humanity. Self-appropriation, in this sense, constitutes the source and norm of the secularization to be welcomed and, by extension, invalidates the classicist dimensions of the sacralization to be dropped.

This last point helps shed light on the connection between human dignity and human rights that remains somewhat underdeveloped in both Dadosky’s and Doran’s work. One way to flesh out their broadly heuristic accounts is to articulate a two-level approach to democratic norms that distinguishes between remote and proximate elements. ¹²⁴ The former refers to the subject’s orientation to knowledge and value that is the transcendental source of human dignity. Human rights further thematize Lonergan’s thin or heuristic conception of the good by specifying those proximate norms—embodied in social practices and institutional frameworks—that support and sustain the shared search for meaning, truth, and value. These conditions include both those civil-political rights that guarantee personal and associational liberties and those socio-economic rights that ensure citizens’ basic needs are met. Reference to the remote foundation of proximate norms in human consciousness provides a critical basis essential for navigating contemporary debates concerning the meaning and implementation of both sets. When human rights theory and practice is disengaged from its source and norm in the natural law, the results are a variety of aberrations that reflect the sacralization to be dropped and or the secularization to be resisted.

Examples of the ‘solid right’ abound in today’s political climate and include at least three trends in contemporary Catholic social ethics. The first trend finds expression in integralist aspirations for the return of a Catholic monarchy or state. The second finds expression in the work of certain radical Catholics such as Cavanaugh whose tendency to construe liberal democracy in exclusively negative terms may be interpreted in ways that sanction political disengagement or withdrawal. Whereas these first two trends tend to collapse the distinction between pejorative and benign forms of liberal democracy, a third trend common among proponents of the communio-school, such as David Schindler, aims at providing a more robust defense of human rights. ¹²⁵ Although this group’s efforts to reconnect truth and freedom are to be commended, Schindler tends to conceive the former in classicist terms that threaten to foreclose democratic debate. At the same time, proponents of this approach are especially critical of extrinsicist readings of the relationship between nature and grace that overemphasize the natural order’s autonomy. In his efforts to avoid neoscholastic dualism, Schindler foregrounds Gaudium et Spes 22’s claim that ‘only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light.’ In the absence of appeals to the universal gift of the Spirit, this Christocentric approach risks returning to the very integralism it explicitly aims to overcome. Elements of this communio approach might be fruitfully correlated with Danielou’s position in Lonergan’s lecture.

Examples of the ‘scattered left’ also figure prominently in contemporary politics and range from strong forms of anti-religious secularism to at least two different forms of accommodationism in Catholic social ethics. The latter includes social justice oriented forms of Catholicism that tend to immanentize the Kingdom and or the tendency among some ‘progressive’ Catholics to deny central elements of the faith and or the role of magisterial authority. Accommodationism also finds expression in the work of neoconservative authors such as Michael Novak and George Weigel. Catholic neoconservatism combines a classicist conception of truth in matters of sexual morality and bioethics with a rigid conception of magisterial authority, elements that are typical of the ‘solid right.’ At the same time, Catholic neocons tend to accommodate the Gospel to free market economics and advocate a limited state that, in downplaying the legitimacy of socio-economic rights, resembles what Lonergan describes as general bias. ¹²⁶

By contrast with these examples of both the ‘solid right’ and the ‘scattered left,’ the detailed account of the secularization to be welcomed I developed above is centrist in the Lonerganian sense. My approach aims to avoid the solid right’s tendency to reject the distinction between pejorative and benign forms of liberalism while affirming its efforts to maintain the distinctiveness of the Christian tradition and its prophetic dimensions in particular. It also aims to avoid the scattered left’s tendency to water down or accommodate the Christian tradition to liberal ideology while affirming its efforts to adopt a more positive outlook vis-à-vis extra-ecclesial movements and developments.

If reference to the distinction between remote and proximate democratic norms provides a critical basis for distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic institutions and practices, it also highlights the historically contingent nature of human rights discourse. Some critics of distorted forms of Western universalism—think hyperculture—argue that the project of universal human rights is no longer defensible. Others, such as Richard Rorty, concede that human rights discourse is a social construction whose historical emergence is linked with certain distinctively Western developments yet continue to advocate for its worldwide adoption. A Lonerganian-inspired position shares Rorty’s efforts to peel apart the Enlightenment’s political project from those dubious philosophical foundations that are the target of legitimate criticism. Although Lonergan would likely accept the tradition-dependent dimensions of human rights discourse, it is unlikely that he would deny the possibility of grounding such norms via reference to a common desire for knowledge and value. Since the commitment to authentic forms of mutual self-mediation requires a global dialogue that entails mutual teaching and learning, efforts to articulate a common ethic must attend to the particularities of diverse cultural and religious traditions. Reference to the common desire for knowledge and value that makes cross-cultural dialogue possible does not guarantee agreement but it can provide a shared criterion to which conversational partners can appeal.

The bulk of my engagement with Dadosky and Doran has focused on teasing out an account of the secularization to be welcomed, and with complicating Dadosky’s account of the turn to alterity. It is clear, however, that the vision of democratic health that human nature at its best commends is one thing and fidelity to that vision is another. I agree with both Doran and Dadosky that the experience of vertical communion grounds an expansion of fellow-feeling that enables authentic forms of mutuality. The turn to vertical alterity, as Dadosky notes, sets important conditions of possibility for the turn to horizontal alterity and, more specifically, for an integral scale of values that Doran associates with social grace. Doran’s emphasis on the social dimensions of grace is essential to sidestepping the charge of extrinsicism. Since progress is not purely a function of citizens’ relative self-possession, the supernatural cannot be marked out as a realm separable from the ‘natural’ world of politics. Unlike communio-school authors who tend to collapse the distinction between general and special revelation, Lonergan’s reference to the universal gift of God’s love allows him to identify a middle-term between nature and the visible mission of the Word. This contention allows Lonergan to affirm the presence of grace beyond the confines of the institutional church and within democratic practices and institutions in particular. At the same time, Doran’s account of social grace stands to be fleshed out by a more detailed account of politics and human rights.

All of this is no doubt compatible with Dadosky’s account of the fourth stage of meaning and yet I would like to close with one final suggestion that may complicate this picture. There is a sense in which Dadosky speaks about the fourth stage as a genetic development that is subsequent to cognitive and existential self-appropriation. But as Lonergan and Doran both note, grace is a transcultural reality present at prior stages in the development of human meaning. ¹²⁷ One way to affirm this last point while maintaining the uniqueness of the fourth stage would be to correlate its emergence with a new stage in the ongoing unfolding of the Kingdom of God. This new level of interreligious relating would also seem to require critical appropriation of one’s faith tradition and, more broadly, religious self-appropriation in general. From this perspective, the fourth stage of meaning could include a focus on helping religious believers identify the transcultural dimensions of religious experience essential to inter-religious cooperation. But it may also focus on assisting those exclusive humanists who are committed to authentic vital, social, and cultural values to connect their commitment to the common good with the transcendent.

Conclusion

The exploratory ideas in Lonergan’s lecture on sacralization and secularization have inspired scholars such as Dadosky and Doran to develop systematic interpretations of this work. The two central elements of Dadosky’s interpretation of Lonergan’s fourfold distinction are the dialectic of religious identity and his closely related account of the fourth stage of meaning. The heart of Doran’s development of Lonergan’s fourfold distinction is his appropriation of Girard’s interdividual psychology; its connections with Lonergan’s notions of dramatic bias and the Law of the Cross; and his development of the latter in the concept of social grace. My own approach to Lonergan’s fourfold distinction does not challenge either author’s work so much as it aims to complicate it. On the one hand, I have clarified Dadosky’s account of the fourth stage of meaning by distinguishing between two different negotiations of the modern turn to the subject. A clear instance of strict self-mediation, liberal individualism’s negotiation of the modern turn is a secularized form of Girard’s false sacred that remains deficient vis-à-vis the fourth stage of meaning’s embrace of alterity. By contrast, I argued that self-appropriation’s resolution of the contemporary crisis of meaning specifies transcendental norms that represent necessary but not sufficient conditions for an ethic of mutuality. This allowed me to expand upon Dadosky’s and Doran’s accounts of the secularization to be welcomed—the least well-developed element in their interpretation of Lonergan’s fourfold distinction—and to bring this approach into dialogue with broader trends in Catholic social ethics. On the other hand, I argued that since self-appropriation is one thing and fidelity to one’s desire for knowledge and value is another, the turn to horizontal alterity that finds expression in what Doran calls social grace is a function of friendship with the three divine persons. Doran’s detailed accounts of human participation in the Trinitarian relations is essential to avoiding both extrinsicism and Christomonism. Together, these reflections constitute a modest attempt at fleshing out the political dimensions of Lonergan’s emphasis on a ‘not numerous center.’

Contemporary debates concerning the relationship between the church and liberal democracy in post-conciliar Catholic theology have grown increasingly polemical. Recent years have seen the rise to prominence of right-wing populist reactions to the globalization of liberal individualism and hyperculture. Catholic-inflected expressions of right-wing populism typically combine xenophobic forms of nationalism with integralist interpretations of the church–state relationship. ¹²⁸ Motivated in part by a strong fear of relativism, contemporary proponents of integralism often cling to excessively pyramidal models of the church and to classicist conceptions of natural law that focus disproportionately on questions of sexual morality. Proponents of this novel expression of the sacralization to be dropped are especially critical of Pope Francis whose embrace of migrants and focus on ‘accompaniment’ read as accommodations to globalism and relativism, respectively. By contrast with this tendency to interpret Francis’s pontificate along the lines of Lonergan’s ‘scattered left,’ it is my contention that Pope Francis is, at least implicitly, calling the church to occupy Lonergan’s ‘not numerous center.’ More specifically, I contend that Pope Francis’s call for the development of a ‘culture of dialogue’ ad extra and his closely related embrace of a ‘synodal’ conception of the church ad intra are prime examples of what Dadosky describes as the turn to horizontal alterity. Far from extrinsicist, Pope Francis’s embrace of what Doran labels ‘world-cultural humanity’ highlights how the genuine or real sacred, far from underwriting exclusionary politics, is essential to the ongoing formation of a culture of solidarity that finds expression in social grace. Although Pope Francis does not refer explicitly to Lonergan’s work, the former’s effort to construct an inclusive form of populism stands to benefit from the latter’s invitation to self-appropriation and his emphasis on the universality of the Spirit. On the one hand, self-appropriation’s resolution of the contemporary crisis of meaning sets important conditions of possibility for the ethic of mutuality that Pope Francis champions. On the other hand, Lonergan’s emphasis on the transcultural dimensions of the gift of God’s love can be used to support Francis’s interpretation of the Council’s ‘ecclesiology of friendship.’ Both connections highlight the potential fruitfulness of an ongoing dialogue between Francis’s pastoral priorities and Lonergan’s fourfold account of sacralization and secularization.