The Lonergan Reader, Part 2, Chapter 2: Openness and Religious Experience

Lonergan states that a philosophy of religious experience includes a material component and a formal component-the experience and philosophy of.

He thinks there can be a philosophy of religious experience.

Lonergan asserts, "Openness as a fact is the pure desire to know" which is what his book, Insight, is about.This pure desire to know is related to Aristotle's idea that wonder "is the beginning of all science and philosophy" (377). Aquinas says it is to know God "by his essence" (377).

Openness is not only a fact, but is also an achievement. Lonergan says it has two aspects. In it central element it concerns the subject, the act of understanding. It is achieved when the knowledge is matched with the pure desire to know.

Openness as achievement also concerns the object, the understood object. Lonergan writes, "For the pure desire to function fully, to dominate consciousness, there are needed not only precepts, methods, criticism, but also a formulated view of our knowledge and of the reality our knowledge can attain" (377).

He thinks that the philosophies that emerged since the Enlightenment "are not open to revealed truths because they possess no adequate account of truth" (377).

Openness as a fact "is an intrinsic component in man's makeup;" but it does not control human consciousness (378).

He thinks that the history of religion, science, and philosophy shows openness a s an achievement.

In addition, there is openness as a gift, "as an effect of divine grace" (378).

Lonergan states, "Man's natural openness is complete. The pure desire is unrestricted. It inquires into everything, and asks everything about everything. The correlative to the pure desire is being ... at once completely universal and completely concrete" (378).

Lonergan thinks there does exist an opposition between openness as a fact and openness as an achievement, "for the primordial fact is no more than a principle of possible achievement, a definition of the ultimate horizon that is to be reached only through successive enlargements of the actual horizon" (378).

It is problematic that the successive enlargements will happen continually. Philosophy will not convert the world. Therefore, there is a need for openness as gift, "as an effect of grace, where grace is taken as ... healing grace" (378).

The successive enlargements falls into two groups. "There are the enlargements implicit in the very structure of human consciousness, the enlargements that are naturally possible to man. But there is also an ultimate enlargement, beyond the resources of every finite consciousness, where there enters into clear view God as unknown, when the subject knows God face to face, knows as he is known. This ultimate enlargement alone approximates to the possibility of openness defined by the pure desire; as well, it is an openness as gift, as an effect of grace", both healing and elevating (378).

Lonergan states that the three types of openness are "related". He says that openness as fact "is the inner self, the self as ground of all higher aspiration" (379). Openness as achievement, "is the self in its self-appropriation and self-realization" (379). Openness as gift is the "self entering into personal relationship with God" (379).