Bernard Lonergan

Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian, regarded by many as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.

Lonergan's works include Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957) and Method in Theology (1972), as well as two studies of Thomas Aquinas, several theological textbooks, and numerous essays, including two posthumously published essays on macroeconomics. The projected 25-volume Collected Works with the University of Toronto Press is now complete. Lonergan held appointments at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Regis College, Toronto, as distinguished visiting professor at Boston College, and as Stillman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University.

By his own account, Lonergan set out to do for human thought in our time what Thomas Aquinas had done for his own time. Aquinas had successfully applied Aristotelian thought to the service of a Christian understanding of the universe. Lonergan's program was to come to terms with modern scientific, historical, and hermeneutical thinking in a comparable way. He pursued this program in his two most fundamental works, Insight and Method in Theology.

The key to Lonergan's project is self-appropriation, that is, the personal discovery and personal embrace of the dynamic structure of inquiry, insight, judgment, and decision. By self-appropriation, one finds in one's own intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility the foundation of every kind of inquiry and the basic pattern of operations undergirding methodical investigation in every field.

He is often associated—with his fellow Jesuits Karl Rahner and Joseph Maréchal—with "transcendental Thomism", i.e., a philosophy which attempts to combine Thomism with certain views or methods commonly associated with Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism. However, Lonergan did not regard this label as particularly helpful for understanding his intentions.

Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan was born on December 17, 1904, in Buckingham, Quebec, Canada. After four years at Loyola College (Montreal), he entered the Upper Canada (English) province of the Society of Jesus in 1922, and made his profession of vows on the Feast of St Ignatius of Loyola, July 31, 1924. After two further years of formation and education, he was assigned to study scholastic philosophy at Heythrop College, then at Oxfordshire, in 1926. Lonergan respected the competence and honesty of his professors at Heythrop, but was deeply dissatisfied with their Suarezian philosophy. While at Heythrop, Lonergan also took external degrees in mathematics and classics at the University of London. In 1930 he returned to Canada, where he taught for three years at Loyola College, Montreal.

In 1933, Lonergan was sent for theological studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1936. After a year of Jesuit formation ("tertianship") in Amiens, France, Lonergan returned to the Gregorian University in 1937 to pursue doctoral studies in theology. Due to the Second World War, he was whisked out of Italy and back to Canada in May, 1940, just two days before the scheduled defence of his doctoral dissertation. He began teaching theology at College de l'Immaculee Conception, the Jesuit theology faculty in Montreal in 1940, as well as the Thomas More Institute in 1945–46. In the event, he would not formally defend his dissertation and receive his doctorate until a special board of examiners from the Immaculee Conception was convened in Montreal on December 23, 1946.

Lonergan taught theology at Regis College (a theological school attached to the University of Toronto) from 1947 to 1953, and at the Gregorian University from 1953 to 1964. At the Gregorian, Lonergan taught Trinity and Christology in alternate years, and produced substantial textbooks on these topics. In 1964, he made another hasty return to North America, this time to be treated for lung cancer. He was appointed again to Regis College from 1965 to 1975, was Stillman Professor of Divinity at Harvard University in 1971–72, and distinguished visiting professor at Boston College from 1975 until 1983. 

He died at the Jesuit infirmary in Pickering, Ontario, on 26 November 1984.