Thomism, Transcendental

views updated

THOMISM, TRANSCENDENTAL

Speculative thought on the verge of the 20th century confronted the traditional rational foundations of Christian faith with a formidable array of adversaries, primary among which was kantianism and positivism. Two Catholic thinkers pioneered the radical rethinking called for: Cardinal mercier and Maurice blondel. Désiré Mercier inaugurated the movement known as neoscholasticism. He assumed in 1882 the chair of Thomistic philosophy, established at the insistence of Leo XIII, and later in 1889 founded the Institut Supérieur de Philosophieboth at the University of Louvain. From the beginning, the movement was preoccupied with the epistemological problem that Mercier preferred to call "criteriology." Seeking a rapproachment with modern thought and science, he began with a sharp critique of earlier dogmatism; this found sympathetic echoes in the Institut Catholique at Paris and in the Italian neo-Thomist school represented by Agostino Gemelli and Giulio Canella.

Mercier, opposing on one hand the universal methodical doubt of Descartes and on the other the naive realism of the tradition, sought a new criterion of truth to ground the objectivity and the certitude of knowledge, one moreover intrinsic to the activity of the intellect itself. He concluded that the certitude of indemonstrable truths rested on a reflex act of the intellect grasping the relationality of its own act to reality. This amounted to an inferencei.e., the intellect could, after recognizing sensations in a psychologically irresistible experience as passive impressions, and through invoking the principle of causality, infer the existence of extra-mental reality. Some influence of the German Joseph Kleutgen can be detected here; its weak point is perhaps the failure to do justice to experience (as over against reason) and the empirical judgment. As a reaction against kantianism it represents a limited success largely because Mercier, like all his Catholic contemporaries, interpreted Kant psychologically, viewing his thought as subjectivism rather than as the transcendentalism intended by Kant himself. In the end, the contribution was the traditional answer but presented in a newly critical way that opened up the problem to more radical rethinking, soon to come in a younger colleague of Mercier's at LouvainJoseph marÉchal.

Maurice Blondel confronted this same skepticism in an independent and decidedly distinct way, working from assumptions not explicitly Thomistic. In his L'Action (first published in 1893) he sought an answer to the problem of truth from the quite distinct province of human actionnot in the pragmatist sense of altering the world but, emphasizing immanent action, more in the Aristotelian sense of consummating thought in achieving selffulfillment. The wellspring of such action was the will, which Blondel saw as energized by an instinctual drive to the Absolute (la volonté voulue ) which underlay in an unconscious way every instance of actually willing a concrete good (la volonté voulante ). Openness to this a priori in free decision constituted a dynamism toward truth, ultimately to faith in Christian truth. Blondel's approach, accused of an implicit "theologism," did recapture the domain of experience and, in spite of the intellectualist alternative to it proposed by the French Dominican Ambroise Gardeil and by Joseph de Tonquédec, was decisive in opening the way to transcendental Thomism.

Confrontation with Kant. More than any other, it was the shadow of kant that lay upon the early 20th century, heralding the movement of Western philosophy into the unexplored realms of subjectivity, temporality, and relativity. His critical philosophy called into question the realist foundations of thought and the receptive character of knowledge. In their place, Kant introduced what he called "transcendental philosophy": a search for the unknown presuppositions underlying all knowledge, for its a priori conditions. Kant himself was content to conclude to the rejection of metaphysics, but the question refused to go away, and his endeavors only pushed deeper the problem as to the origin of human understanding and the kind of being affirmed thereby. fichte opened the era of German idealism with recourse to a self-positing Ego; schelling retreated further to an Absolute, prior to both Ego and non-Ego, and explaining both; and hegel carried the project to its conclusion by viewing the activity of Ego or Mind as mere moments of Absolute Spirit, i.e., of an all-embracing subject-intentionality.

Joseph Maréchal (18781944), a Belgian Jesuit at the scholasticate of his society in the environs of the University of Louvain, and working to a degree in collaboration with Pierre Scheuer, took the challenge of critical philosophy seriously; and his original and profound endeavors gave rise to the movement that has come to be loosely known as transcendental Thomism. Earlier, a fellow Jesuit at the Institut Catholique in Paris, Pierre Rousselot, had published in 1908 L'Intellectualisme de saint Thomas, a clear effort to root the ideas of Blondel in Thomas Aquinas. This mediated Blondelianism offered Maréchal the fresh starting point he was searching for, and later the same year he published the first installment of "Le sentiment de presence chez les profanes et les mystiques" [Revue de Questions scientifiques 64 (1908) and 65 (1909)], in which he attempted a repudiation of phenomenalism by first distinguishing the representational from the existential character of knowledge, and then locating the latter in the judgment as the intellect's activity not of receiving its object but of "structuring" it from sense data. Knowledge was here a dynamism of projecting conceptual contents onto the domain of the real through the judgmental act; the grounds for this was an innate tending of the intellect toward intuition of the Absolute.

But it was Maréchal's masterwork, Le point de départ de la métaphysique (the first of five cahiers appeared in 1922), that seriously initiated his efforts to rehabilitate metaphysics. Opposition to his sympathetic treatment of Kant in the early cahiers led him to put off Cahier 4 (later published posthumously) and to attempt a direct confrontation of Thomism with Kantianism in Cahier 5, entitled Le thomisme devant la philosophie critique (Louvain and Paris, 1926; 2d ed. 1949). Here, Maréchal accepts Kant's own starting pointthe immanent objectbut insists that this constitutes the juncture between the subject and the real world. Kant was content to remain with a static and purely formal critique of knowledge, whereas his own starting point in fact leads one into realism (2d ed. p. 4). At the outset, Maréchal denies intellectual intuition: the mind neither has innate ideas nor simply contemplates the extra-mental thing (p. 351). He equally disallows a realism based on experience, denying that the intellect is aware of a passivity induced within itself by the thing known; rather intellection is immanent activity attaining an intelligible object not to be confused with the external, material object of sensation (pp. 440441). At the same time, Maréchal thought it necessary to temper the voluntarism that lay at the root of the kind of dynamism toward the real proposed by Blondel. He found a substitute in the act of judgment as an affirmation of absolute reality, at least implicit and necessary in all intellection, which formed the logical presupposition of there being any finite objects at all (p. 346 ff.). Underlying this was the distinction between the intellect's form (concept) and its act of judgmental affirmation (p. 519). Affirmation is a dynamism that objectifies the form and so grasps it as being, i.e., beyond the finite determinations of the representation, the intellect is made aware of a further intelligibility precisely by its own tending, in a dynamism unleashed by the concept itself, toward something infinite and absolute. The intelligence is enabled to grasp its forms as the forms of an act (existence), but only in virtue of its own finality to such an actbut not the concrete act of existing of the thing, rather the infinite act of existing which is in fact God (pp. 307315). In this way, the intellect "constitutes" its object as belonging, in a finite and participatory way, to the realm of the real.

intentionality as such then, i.e., formally as cognitive and representative, bespeaks the real order. By real here is meant not actually existing (this calls for a further and different kind of judgment) but necessarily able to exist. Maréchal is talking about essences, not about existence, but real essences, i.e., possible realities which he understands as grounded in prior actually existing realitynot finitely existing, however, but infinitely existing. In this there comes to light Maréchal's conviction that the possibility of God is in fact the argument for His existence: "affirmer de Dieu quil est possible, c'est affirmer purement et simplement quil existe, puisque son existence est la condition de toute possibilitié" (p. 450).

Critically, Maréchal grounds all of this in evidence. The evidence, however, lies not in the thing known, nor in the intellect's reflex grasp of its own relationship to reality (Mercier), but in the very judgment itself; i.e., an analysis of judgment shows that to refuse the affirmation of reality is to fall into a contradiction, namely, that of affirming that there is no affirmation (p. 496 ff.).

An initial charge of cryptic idealism was rather convincingly repudiated by Maréchal in a 1931 article: "Le problème de dieu d'après M. Edouard Le Roy" [Nouvelle revue théologique 58 (1931)]. It cannot be denied, however, that he did throw a pronounced emphasis upon the subjective, a priori conditions to knowledge; moreover, he reduced these conditions to a noncognitive factor, sc., the innate élan of the intellect to its end. Of even greater influence was the direction of his thought from an ontology of being as naively objective to an ontology of being as realized within consciousness. Among Maréchal's immediate disciples are Auguste Grégoire, André Marc, Joseph de Finance, and Andre Hayen. In reaction to his work was the newly critical development of a more traditional Thomistic epistemology by such thinkers as the Dominicans M.D. Roland-Gosselin and R. garrigou lagrange as well as Jacques maritain and Etienne gilson.

Dialogue with Heidegger. Post-Kantian and post-Hegelian thought attempted to rethink being not, however, as traditional metaphysics but rather as a philosophy of man in his historicity. This reintroduced the tension between idealism and realism, much of the latter being of Thomist inspiration. The effort to surmount this resulted in a new transcendentalism originating with Edmund hÜsserl (18591938) called phenomenology. Hüsserl, however, bracketed (epoché ) the question of real existence and concerned himself with a reductive analysis of what "came to appearance" on the horizon of consciousness, which he saw not as mere phenomena but as reality itselfthus developing an eidetic science of pure essences. Martin heidegger (18991976) rescued this method from Sartrean existentialism and transposed it into a philosophy in which Being (Sein ) confers its beingness upon the beings (Seiendes ) by a "lighting up" process which comes to pass within human consciousness (Dasein ); an ontology of existence in which Being is clearly finite and historical.

A new generation of Catholic thinkers brought Maréchal's innovative understanding of Thomism to bear upon this new Heideggerian outlookshared differently by W. dilthey, K. jaspers, M. merleau ponty, etc. Heidegger's appeal to contemporary theology (expecially Protestant) lay in what he saw as his "overcoming" of metaphysics; the project of the new Maréchalians was the structuring from within a modified phenomenology of a neoclassical metaphysics in which Being would reappear as absolute and infinite, explaining finite and historical being. The achievement came principally from two sources: one German, the other Anglo-Saxon. In Germany the preeminent name was that of Karl rahner (19041984), who, however, received considerable support from the more purely philosophical endeavors of two fellow Jesuits: Johannes B. Lotz ("Die Unterscheidung von Wesenheit und Sein," Der beständige Aufbruch, Przywara Festschrift, 1959) and Emerich Coreth [Metaphysik (Innsbruk, Vienna, Munich 1961); available in a shorter English version by Joseph Donceel, Metaphysics (New York 1968)].

Rahner's prodigious output began with a basic philosophical work, Geist in Welt [(Innsbruck 1939); 2d ed. by J. B. Metz (1957); English translation Spirit in the World, by W. Dych (New York 1968)], which he saw not as a study but as a linear development of St. Thomas's metaphysics of knowledge, and culminated in his ongoing Schriften zur Theologie [(Einsiedeln, Zurich, Cologne); Eng. tr. Theological Investigations (London and Baltimore, 23 v.)] extending to all areas of theology. A significant alternative to this approach is to be found in the Canadian Jesuit Bernard J. F. lonergan (19041984) in whose work the direct influence of Heidegger gives way to that of studies in modern science (e.g., Herbert Butterfield) and in the philosophy of history (e.g. R.G. Collingwood). Noteworthy too is the work and spirit of Newman, whose role in Lonergan's thought parallels that of Blondel in the Continental thinkers. Beginning with genetic studies of St. Thomas on operating grace and later on the problem of knowledge (both published in Theological Studies in 194142 and 194649, respectively; each now available in book form) and progressing to Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (London 1957; New York 1965) and Method in Theology (New York 1972), Lonergan's consuming interest has been the detailed construction of a critical cognitional theory.

From Rahner and Lonergan has come a new metaphysics in which the being investigated is that which occurs within consciousness. They tend to view being as more phenomenal in kind and closely assimilated to meaning and knowledge. Coreth writes of "an immediate unity of being and knowing in the very act of knowing" (Metaphysics p. 70). From this being there is extrapolated the being of the cosmos. Lonergan, e.g., looks upon being as "whatever is to be known by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation" (Insight p. 391) and progresses from the structures of consciousness as sensation, concept, and judgment to the structures of extra-mental being as matter, form, and existence [cf. "Isomorphism of Thomist and Scientific Thought," Collection (New York 1967)]. Phenomenology had effected the decisive turn to subjectivity (better expressed in Heidegger's term "subject-ness," Subjektitat, precluding individualism), making man a "co-constitutor of his world of meaning" (Merleau-Ponty). This occasioned a subtle transformation of metaphysics into philosophical anthropology, which when the Christian implications of Maréchal's thought are brought to bear upon it can be made to function as a fundamental theology. Thus the work of Rahner and Lonergan brings the work of Maréchal to full flower as theological syntheses.

The decisive factor in thiscommon to all the transcendental Thomistsis the finality of consciousness. Analysis of the performance of the human spirit discloses at its very core an innate drive to being as absolute and really existing; this is the very nature of man as "spirit in the world" or finite transcendence. On this basis, the judgment (as an affirmation, however, and not merely as the enuntiabile ) asserts the real beingness of the finite object, represented in the concept, and is a situating of it on the spectrum of real analogical being. In affirmation the spirit "performs" beingin contrast to more traditional realists theories in which intelligence "discovers" being; a performance Rahner locates in the activity of the "intellectus agens " (Spirit in the World pp. 187226). The underlying finality is non-cognitive and appears in the early writings as rooted in the will (following Maréchal), though Lonergan of late prefers to speak only of distinct moments of knowing and loving unified in human spirit, eschewing the Aristotelian faculty theory of the soul. Nonetheless all transcendental Thomists afford a certain primacy to the conative and the volitional; for Rahner, "human spirit as such is desire (Beigie rde ), striving (Streben ) " (Spirit in the World p. 281); for Lonergan, "Being is the objective of the unrestricted desire to know" (Insight p. 348).

Rahner explains the implications of this by recourse to his notion of the Vorgriff, i.e., a prehension or anticipation by the soul of being which, while conscious, is preconceptual, nonobjective, and unthematic in kind; all a posteriori knowledge is an objectification an thematization of this (Spirit in the World p. 142). Somewhat differently, Lonergan allows that man can think about being before knowing it; the former bespeaking "notions" of being and its transcendental properties but not the concepts realized in objective and explicit knowledge: "prior to every content, it [being] is the notion of the to-be-known through that content" (Insight p. 356). The being in question throughout all of this is unlimited, unconditioned, ultimate-absolute being as the unrestricted horizon of the pure desire to know, not, however, the Absolute Being which the believer can come to recognize (in faith) as its ground. This is not ontologism because the being objectified in the affirmation is not God but finite being as it points to the divine.

At the heart of this kind of thinking lies the "transcendental method": first, attention is directed not to objects to be known but to the intentional acts of subjects in their very knowing; secondly, what is sought thereby in a reductive (rather than inductive or deductive) analysis are the a priori conditions for the very possibility of knowing finite objects in any objective way. This represents an epistemological move beyond moderate realism into critical realism. Its starting point is the "question": man is ceaselessly driven to question everything except the very fact of his questioning. But this heuristic character of consciousness is inexplicable unless one admits some sort of a priori "awareness" of what it is that the question seeks. One cannot ask "what is it" without betraying some sort of nonobjective prehension of the range of being; being (not "for us" but "in itself") is the horizon of the question (Coreth, Metaphysics p. 64). From within a more detailed gnoseology Lonergan offers a distinct explanation of this phenomenon: reacting against an older conceptualism in which understanding was reduced to the formation of the concept, he views it rather as the occurrence of "insight" allowing for a "higher viewpoint" on which basis concepts, as subsequent objectifications of insights, undergo constant revision. This brings into play his original theory of judgment in which the at least partial truth value of concepts is verified by assuring that the judgments involving such representations are "virtually unconditioned"i.e., the intellect judges reflectively that the conditions for the verification of the affirmation have been reasonably met (Insight pp. 549 ff.,672). The resultant intelligibility is not one of rational necessity but, in an abandonment of the Aristotelian model of science, that of "emergen probability" (ibid p. 121 ff.). Differing from Coreth, however, Lonergan delimits metaphysics to the objective pole of the horizon of being, denying its extension to the subjective pole, sc., the method of performing, which has to be sought in a transcendental doctrine of methods [cf. Lonergan, "Metaphysics as Horizon," Collection, and Coreth's reply in Language, Truth and Meaning, ed. Philip McShane (Notre Dame, Indiana 1972)].

Doctrine of God. Transcendental Thomism reaches the traditional God of Catholic theism, and by an act of intelligence, but one rooted in love. The intellect in fact is "the faculty of the real only because it is the faculty of the divine" (Pierre Rousselot, L'Intellectualisme p. v). Due to its orientation to the Beatific Vision, it is enabled in this life to "perform" being, which is to say that every performance of being is at least an implicit and anonymous attaining to God. In this perspective, Rahner maintains that every human consciousness grasps the reality of God in an unthematic, preconceptual way as Absolute Mystery. The authentication of this in reflection is not probative but ostensive; the believer does not strictly demonstrate God's existence but interprets ordinary experience, common to himself and nonbelievers, as grace and thematizes them accordingly. But only in love, as man's response to God's prior loving of him, does man come to this nonobjective awareness of the Absolute Mystery; which love of God "as the deepest factor of knowledge is both its condition and its cause " [ Hearers of the Word, tr. by M. Richards (New York 1969) 101]. More painstakingly, Lonergan reasons that man's capacity to know reality demands as its condition the infinite identity of being and knowing, who is God. If consciousness has an unrestricted horizon which is absolute being, this demands reasonably acknowledging the Absolute Being as an unrestricted act of understanding. This rests upon the virtually unconditioned judgment that unless God exists, reality is not fully intelligible (Insight p. 672). Again, the insight whence the argument proceeds is rooted in love, in Lonergan's term "conversion," i.e., it results from an intellectual conversion to a higher viewpoint explained by "horizon shifts" arising from prior religious and moral conversions [cf. Method in Theology (New York 1972) pp. 23745; Doctrinal Pluralism (Milwaukee 1971) p. 34 ff.].

Theological Themes. Rahner's theory of man's openness to the divine means that man "stands before the possibility of the free action of God upon him, thus before the God of a possible material revelation" (Hearers of the Word p. 91). Should God choose not to speak, then that very silence would be His revelation; but through faith the believer finds this revelation publicly and historically in the Christ event. This undergirds several theological themes: The "anonymous Christian," sc., man as the recipient of a transcendental but not yet categorical revelation; the "supernatural existential," in which prior to the state of justification man is not in a state of pure nature but in an already graced state existentially, i.e., due to the ontological, not ontic, structures of consciousness; the historically conditioned character to the formulas of public revelation and its transmissionbeneath which however the preconceptual remains as a transcultural element. More specifically theological are Rahner's important doctrines on Christ as the "real symbol" of the Father, on Uncreated Grace, and on the identity of the "economic" and the "immanent" Trinity.

Lonergan, apart from earlier Latin treatises on Christ and the Trinity, preoccupied himself with the nature and method of theological science, gradually working out in detail a new ideal of science, empirical rather than logical in Aristotle's sense, in which fixity gives way to the ongoing process, certitude to probability, necessity to verifiable possibility, knowledge to hypothesis. Here theology becomes itself method rather than, as for St. Thomas, theory. Among the fruits of this, Lonergan hoped for some overcoming of theological pluralism, a position Rahner viewed with reserve, condsidering pluralism as irreducibly given.

As a school, transcendental Thomism has clearly entrenched itself. Disciples are legion: foremost in Rahner's case is perhaps Johannes B. Metz [e.g., Christliche Anthropozentrik (Munich 1962)]; among Lonergan's many followers are his fellow Canadian Jesuit, also his editor, Frederick Crowe, and the American David Tracy [The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan (New York 1970)]. In the United States, the editings and writings of Joseph Donceel have contributed notably to advancing the movement.

Critique. Probably no significant Catholic thinker in the West fails to feel the influence of transcendental Thomism; nonetheless reaction to it has been constant since its birth. Hans Urs von balthasar (especially in Cordula oder der Ernstfall (2d ed. Einsiedeln 1966) has insisted at length that the movement gives an ultimacy to autonomous human freedom alien to Catholic theology in general. While some express doubts on its transcen dentalism, seeing it as precritical (e.g., S. Ogden, H. Holz, R. Heinz), the more insistent question has been the genuineness of its Thomism. Leslie Dewart insists that "when Thomism takes a 'transcendental turn' it abrogates its title to Thomism" [Foundations of Belief (New York 1969) app. 2, p. 501]. Certainly, both Rahner's and Lonergan's notion of consciousness marks a radical departure from the Weltanschauung of Aquinas; with the latter viewing being in itself and not in the condition of luminosity it gains within human spirit. J. B. Metz, though probably overstating his thesis that this Denkenform is potentially in the thought of St. Thomas, does point the way to a resolution. Transcendental Thomism is not historical Thomism if one means by that unreconstructed Thomism. For one thing it never intended a linear development of Aquinas but a critical confrontation of his thought with modern questions. Still that thought in its depth and originality is creative in a way that challenges to a continual rethinking of being; this is something that lies less with the explicit content of his thought than with the contact of intelligence with the real that it allows. Thomas's doctrine on being, e.g., while itself ahistorical, does in its emphasis on act (esse ) point the way toward appropriating its historicity.

Granting that Thomism is at least the matrix of this new world view, more to the point is the charge that the latter amounts to an idealistic interpretation of Aquinas. This stems largely from the neo-Thomist school of Garrigou-Lagrange, Gilson, and Maritain, all of whom advocate an abstractive intuition of the intelligibleas an alternative to spirit's "performance" of being. Agreeing with the transcendentalists in resting the objectivity of knowledge upon the judgment, they understand the latter not as a virtually unconditioned affirmation of reality after the conditions demanded for such intelligibility have been met (Lonergan), but as the act ("knowing") of intelligence living in its own order of intentionality, the act ("being") of the extra-mental thing (Jacques Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge ). James Reichman ["The Transcendental Method and the Psychogenesis of Being," Thomist (October 1968)] has underscored this same criticism, stressing that the human intellect has as its proper object the quiddities of material things. Metaphysics needs a rational not a transcendental method, since "as chthonic, as a fromand-in-this-world science," it appropriates being from singular sensible things and not through an inner vision of its own potentiality as the faculty of being (p. 506, ff.). For the new Maréchalians, being seems to inhere in the mind of the knowing subject rather than in things known, and this raises the question of metaphysics as a science of the real. Also, it is not clear how such being, achieved in a grasp of the intellect's illuminative power, is anything other than potential being. Again, since being so viewed is not abstracted from existing essences on distinct levels of reality, why is not its commonness univocal in kind rather than analogical? Interpreting metaphysical finality in terms of an innate presence of being to the mind from the very dawn of consciousness (even granting that this is nonobjective in kind) also reduces considerably the sense in which abstracting the intelligible species from the plantasm can be said to be strictly necessary. The question can at least be asked if full justice is being done here to the bodily dimension of human spirituality. While not discrediting the direction set out upon by transcendental Thomism, these are at least serious reservations to which it will have to address itself.

One viable alternative to the premises of transcendental Thomism on one hand, and neo-Thomism on the other, has been worked out philosophically by Dominic De Petter ["Impliciet intuitie," Tijdschrift v. Phil. 1 (1939) pp. 84105] and appropriated theologically by Edward Schillebeeckx ["The Non-Conceptual Intellectual Dimension in our Knowledge of God According to Aquinas," Revelation and Theology v. 2, tr. by N. D. Smith (New York 1968) pp. 157206]both Flemish Dominicans. This theory of "implicit intuition" conceives knowledge as a dynamism, but one entirely objective in kind rather than subjective as in the case of that inspired by Maréchal. It derives not from any unrestricted desire to know but from strictly cognitive elements. Here concepts as such are denied any value of the real, and knowledge is basically a nonconceptual awareness of realitybut one inseparable from concepts which, while not grasping the real by themselves, do refer to reality and so possess truth value, by supplying the objective determination within which alone the intuition can occur as something implicit. In this theory, a dynamism of the knowing subject gives way to a dynamism of the contents of knowledge.

Bibliography: g. van riet, L'Epistémologie Thomiste (Louvain 1946), English tr. Thomistic Epistemology, 2 v., by g. franks, d. mccarthy, and g. hertrich (St. Louis, London 196365). Mélanges Joseph Maréchal: Oeuvres et Hommages, 2 v. (Brussels 1950). j. donceel, ed. and tr., A Maréchal Reader (New York 1970). e. dirven, De la forme à l'acte (Paris 1969). m. casula, Maréchal e Kant (Rome 1955). On Karl Rahner: a detailed bibliography of his writings from 1924 to 1964 arranged chronologically and systematically by g. muschalek and f. mayr can be found in Gott in Welt, Festgabe für Karl Rahner. Hrsg. von Johannes Baptist Metz [et al. Schriftleitung: Herbert Vorgrimler] 2 v. (Freiburg 1964) 29.00941. Two prestigious editorial achievements of Rahner are Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 11 v. including index with j. hÖfer (Freiburg 195767), three additional volumes since 1967 with others; and Sacramentum Mundi, a theological encyclopedia, 6 v., with 13 other ed. (New York 1968), published simultaneously in six languages. d. gelpi, Light and Life: A Guide to the Theology of Karl Rahner (New York 1966). l. roberts, The Achievement of Karl Rahner (New York 1967). On Bernard Lonergan: a complete bibliography of his writings up to 1964 prepared by f. e. crowe can be found in Spirit as Inquiry: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, Continuum 2 (1964); the later writings up to 1969 have been added to this list by d. tracy, The Achievement of Bernard Lonergan (New York 1969) 27178. p. mcshane, ed., International Lonergan Congress, v. 1 Foundations of Theology, v. 2 Language, Truth, and Meaning (Notre Dame 1972). o. muck, The Transcendental Method (New York 1968). k. baker, A Synopsis of the Transcendental Philosophy of Emerich Coreth and Karl Rahner (Spokane, Washington 1965). w. j. hill, Knowing the Unknown God (New York 1971). c. bent, Interpreting the Doctrine of God (Glen Rock, New Jersey 1969). g. mccool, "The Philosophical Theology of Rahner and Lonergan," in God Knowable and Unknowable (New York 1973).

[w. j. hill]

About this article

Thomism, Transcendental

Updated About encyclopedia.com content Print Article