Exploring Three Dialectical-Foundational Missing Links in Academia That Lonergan Retrieves

Abstract

Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Picasso—respectively pioneers of modern music and painting—were staunch friends. Stravinsky's “Rite of Spring” (1913) was intended to shock. Its “savage violence confronted head-on the aesthetics of impressionism—then at the apogee of Parisian musical fashion—just as the razor-sharp editing between phrases subverted the smooth, seamless flow of the Germanic symphonic tradition with pitiless efficacy. It has been said that the ‘Rite of Spring’ is ‘cubist music’—where musical materials slice into one another, interact and superimpose with the most brutal edges, thus challenging the musical approach and form that had dominated European ears for centuries.”

In some ways, Lonergan’s lifework parallels Stravinsky and Picasso's achievements in their fields. As is the case with the two giants of modern music and art, Lonergan’s method incorporates previous achievements while opening vistas able to guide the future. His method is able to integrate revolutionary efforts within various traditions while opening up paths to interfaith, interdisciplinary perspectives. His work offers us several dialectical-foundational missing links2 that can help connect the intellectual and spiritual facets of our lives both personally and multicultural endeavors. But opposed to this optimistic prognosis for Lonergan’s method, the effectiveness of his achievement is undermined if not vitiated by what Phil McShane calls the “darkness” affecting humans—a darkness that has not spared the efforts of Lonergan students. “That darkness gives us the possibility, even some slim probabilities, of a fresh start on the stumbling meaning of Method in Theology from Section 5 of chapter ten to the end of the book. That stumbling meaning has to become a precise lean-forward meaning”3 hinted at in Method in Theology’s chapter on history.