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It seemed a stretch at first. A philosopher of religion presenting at a Lonergan Conference on Ethics and the Bible. The topic of Lonergan was not at issue. Generalized Empirical Method has informed my configuration of philosophy of religion.[2] The connection with Ethics and the Bible, however, was not as straightforward. Some improvisation was necessary. Neither is my specialty but specializing in Bible as an undergraduate allowed me to be serviceably parsimonious. I would discuss a fundamental concern of what I call philosophy of religious studies, reworked from Lonergan’s “foundational methodology of religious studies”[3] and indirectly, though profoundly, facilitated by the hermeneutics of biblical scholar Sean McEvenue.[4]

The moment of insight came as I attended to the data of my experience and the coincidence of the conference announcement. I personalized the topics – incidentally an integral pole of my philosophy of religious studies – endorsing their value for a conference while commandeering them to my ends. It allowed me to be “my little self,” as Lonergan was in the habit of doing.[5]

Insight, as Lonergan[6] states, “is a function not of outer circumstances but of inner conditions”; it “passes into the habitual texture of one’s mind.” The outer circumstance here is the topics that incited, I am wary to call, the habitual texture of my mind to birth the current preoccupation. Wedded to this are the convenience and nostalgia that combined to inspire the conditions of release insight brings to “the tension of inquiry” by presenting at a conference held in my hometown and at my alma mater.

To reiterate, the insight was to recognize how Lonergan and the study of the Bible furnished my aims as a philosopher of religion in religious studies. Although our fields and objectives are different, our phenomenological aims run parallel. They pivot, as Lonergan writes of insight, between the concrete and the abstract. The concrete will mean here what McEvenue,[7] endorsing Lonergan’s system, describes as “the outrageous proclamation of subjectivity.” The abstract connects with this and consists of my preoccupation to develop a philosophy of religion for religious studies. I have been obsessed with this project for over a decade, extracting as much as Lonergan’s system permits in such an environment. Returning to my alma mater, after a hiatus of almost twenty-five years, has provided an opportunity to expand on this vis-à-vis the contributions of McEvenue who taught me how to read the Bible. “Concrete,” then, comes to mean autobiographical reflection on the personal dimension, “the outrageous proclamation of subjectivity.” This, in turn, has contoured my “abstract” concern, which I adumbrate as philosophy of religious studies.

Both Lonergan and McEvenue impressed upon me the utter importance of awareness of self in academic inquiry. While it is no longer popular to refer to this normative dimension as a “structure of cognition,” “self-reflexivity” being the preferred term, I have been thoroughly unsuccessful at shaking this “mineness” (Heidegger’s Jemeinigkeit) that attaches to inquiry. It is as though the union we call soul and body depends on it, a body that is body only as soul, a soul that is soul only as body. The accuracy of the image is unimportant. Like St. Paul’s “spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:44), the point is to imagine things otherwise and to avoid the ghoulish alternative screened in a Cartesian theater.

Earlier I said that subjectivity functions as the concrete in my abstract aim. Of course, discussion of subjectivity can be highly “abstract,” which Lonergan’s “little book” demonstrates well. However, by concrete I mean both personal and practical, which is a principal aim of Lonergan’s “abstract” concern in Insight christened in terms of “self-appropriation.” It is, I dare say, the linchpin in his philosophy for reorienting humanistic studies – what makes it unique, in my opinion. It is also a principal concern in McEvenue’s program of reorienting biblical studies for theology, which pivots for him on the related functional specialties of ‘dialectic’ and ‘foundations.’[8]

As is common knowledge to his readers, Lonergan leads the reader to a decisive moment of potential epiphany in Insight in which readers are invited to affirm themselves as knowers. All his so-called abstract thoughts in the book’s first part lead to that moment, as a result of which all subsequent abstract thoughts in the second part, including Lonergan’s “proof” of God’s existence, can make sense. McEvenue similarly points to a decisive moment in interpreting texts, which he describes in terms of “elemental meanings” in the Bible. These elemental meanings house the foundational stances, horizonal values, in scripture.[9] “With Lonergan, we enter into dialectic with the foundational stances of biblical authors, in a situation in which they are converted and we the readers are unconverted, or inadequately converted.”[10] This portends a field of interaction with elemental meanings that highlights normative engagement in an environment that appears, but is most certainly not, “purely” academic or merely “abstract.”

Both discourses, Lonergan’s and McEvenue’s, are guided by the importance of engaging personally, self-critically, in what we come to discover and decide upon, whether we will embrace or reject, confound or re-found, our newly constituted self-in-dialogue. I hyphenate self-in-dialogue to highlight the self’s constitution as affected by this experience. I also hyphenate it to signal the normative as part and parcel of objective, academic, abstract, if you will, inquiry. There is no escaping this, whatever Enlightenment hopefuls would have us believe. Lonergan’s motto is apropos: “[g]enuine objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity.”[11] The projects of Lonergan and McEvenue, while facing challenges of their own, concerning the inclusion of the normative into the academic, are naturally, historically, tied to hauling this cart. It is true, as Lonergan states in Method[12], that scholarship has built “an impenetrable wall between systematic theology and its historical religious sources.” He hoped to resolve this by inviting “philosophy and theology to migrate from a basis in theory to a basis in interiority.” McEvenue often cites this formulation of the problematic[13], offering his hermeneutics as a means by which biblical scholars can trounce it. And yet such a task is native to their fields, McEvenue’s and Lonergan’s, more than it is to my own. Since at least the nineteenth century, the livelihood of scholars of religion has depended on fencing off discourses warming up to interiority concerns. Indeed, they often label such concerns derogatorily as “theological” and “foundationalist,” self-authorizing even.[14]

I refrain here from commenting on how ‘interiority’ and ‘foundations’ need not imply foundationalism, that ailing project that harks back to René Descartes through David Hume and Immanuel Kant to Edmund Husserl. I have argued this elsewhere and I suspect that most of those reading this have made peace with it. However, I would like to indicate how I have mediated this migration tactic, from theory to interiority, in religious studies. Allow me to begin with Lonergan.

My cue, as an aspiring philosopher of religion, came in a study I published years ago concerning Lonergan’s philosophy of religion.[15] The most salient point of the book is that philosophy of religion for Lonergan is more properly philosophy of religious studies. It includes philosophical theology, as one finds it, for example, in chapters 19 and 20 of Insight, the controversial chapters on general and special transcendent knowledge respectively. It also includes an appreciation of the foundational element of religious experience in such endeavors, chapter 4 of Method, Lonergan’s model of religion, serving as our example. However, philosophy of religion, unlike these, is, to quote Lonergan again, “foundational methodology of religious studies.”[16] He turned to this endeavor more intently after Method. “Foundational methodology” is another term for ‘transcendental method’, Lonergan’s later designation of Generalized Empirical Method. In the guise of philosophy of religion, it becomes a matter of how it relates “to the various branches of religious studies.”[17] It boils down to Lonergan’s normative notion of the self and how self-awareness, self-understanding, and self-knowledge, premised on self-affirmation, self-appropriation, relates to the ‘positional’ and/or ‘counterpositional’ in oneself and the other.

Part of my challenge was to discover in Lonergan’s normative theory an aspect of self-knowledge aligned with the positional in current thinking conveniently dubbed “postmodern” and post-foundationalist. Such an orientation was necessary to gain a hearing in a context where the reflex of undifferentiated polymorphic consciousness reflexively shuts down the positional, as advocated by Lonergan, as “counterpositional.” I found what I was looking for initially in a lecture Lonergan delivered in 1959 entitled “Art.” In that lecture, Lonergan equates the thinking of Heidegger with an artistic pattern of experience concerned with elemental meaning. I admit into this artistic pattern a formal intelligence often reserved to the intellectual pattern.[18] This process of intellection is, as Robert C. Solomon[19] says about feeling in Kant’s third Critique, more visceral than systematic. It “has its own intelligence; it is akin to judgment, not just a biological reaction.” Placing these two terms together, visceral and intellect, subverts run-of-the-mill definitions of intellect that oppose the visceral, as instinct or “deep inward feeling,” to thinking. As a thinking, visceral intellect is a certain kind of intelligence, one orienting and suffusing thought. It is thought as rhythmically distinct from what usually passes as such. The connecting insight here, which binds judgment to sensory experience, is far more artistic, visceral, than intellectual or systematic in nature.

What all this means, in effect, is that the formal conditions of this kind of intelligence are of an order that sidesteps the formulation of foundational methodology as one finds it beautifully expressed in Insight. Doing so can be counterproductive in philosophy of religious studies and may actually produce contrary results to the stated aims of Insight. The discourse Lonergan obliquely flags as artistic is not partial to the language of “a fixed base, an invariant pattern” that provides for “understand[ing] the broad lines of all there is to be understood.”[20] In seeking, as Lonergan outlines in his lecture on “Art,” to present something “other,” something elemental, “different, novel, strange, new, remote, intimate”[21]; in trying to “present the unpresentable,” as Lyotard puts it, artistic thinking, visceral intellect, relinquishes the view that the invariant is to be invariantly, let alone systematically, stated, an orientation well-represented by the sciences. Thus, artistic thinking expresses the normative in terms of a function of being, an interstice of becoming, rather than a structure of determinate operations. More pointedly, artistic thinking is not system in the sense that a hyper-transcendental contours its orientation, a hyper-transcendental many identify in terms of a “singularity,” an irreducibly personal, individual, condition of knowledge.[22]

Enecstasis is my term for this function. I coined it for reasons that I have detailed elsewhere.[23] For the sake of brevity, suffice it to say that enecstasis is my means of connecting ‘interiority’ with contemporary appreciations of engaged agency governed by what I consider to be an ‘artistic’ rather than ‘intellectual’ sensibility. A diversion, enecstasis deflects unnecessary focus on problems that attach to the language of ‘foundational methodology’ qua the form Lonergan uses as exemplary of the intellectual pattern. The appeal to enecstasis does so while encouraging an environment that takes ‘foundations’ seriously. Up until now I have addressed this in largely negative terms, that is, how thinking about foundations artistically is to be distinguished from thinking about foundations intellectually, that is, à la foundational methodology, transcendental method. I turn now to a more positive application.

Currently in religious studies a form of theorizing exists that is in critical tension with phenomenology of religion. Phenomenology of religion is a founding methodology in the field of religion that incidentally informs Lonergan’s model of religion. New materialism, as it is called, bases itself on a mélange of so-called postmodern thinking whose methodologies are categorically anti-theological, anti-phenomenological, as it claims to be postfoundationalist. The ideological divide that these approaches represent, the phenomenological and scholarly new materialism, is a modern iteration of traditional methodological disputes between humanists and social scientists respectively. Enecstatic reflection provides students of religion with an opportunity to engage in the normative issues to which Lonergan points that divide scholars of religion methodologically. It does so, too, in a way that aligns with the artistic philosophical inclinations that constitute much of students’ being-in-the-world today. Why do it this way? Students, in religious studies at least, where formal philosophy is not prioritized, can appreciate “dialectical engagement” of new materialist bias in terms of an artistic negotiation of the disruptive potential of certain forms of theology.[24] But they would be hard-pressed to accept formalizations of it in terms of foundational methodology. In the interests of having students and colleagues feel the force of negotiating the normative in religious studies, I refrain from making transcendental method requisite to the task. I turn now to McEvenue from whom I learned to do exactly that.

I did not know at the time, but McEvenue’s tactic of migrating from theory to interiority embodied what I now call an enecstatic preoccupation. He did this by involving readers to interact with the elemental meanings of biblical texts. Our post-biblical mindset, he argues, is inclined to confuse simple biblical meanings, which are not easily retrieved, with modern theoretical meanings of culture:

In current culture, serious questions are formed in philosophically precise language, and are answered within philosophically complete systems. Religious truths in the Bible cannot be found in that manner of thinking. The fact is that theological questions have been asked within Western tradition which forms all of our thoughts whether or not we are believers. It is a tradition which begins with the Bible but continued through an evolution in which philosophically accurate modes of thought have translated biblical (and other) meaning into systematic meaning, have translated elemental preconceptual meaning into conceptualized meaning.[25]

He suggests a kind of shock treatment of engaging the real concerns expressed in the Voice of biblical texts.[26] Should one share in the worldview inspired by that Voice, one can be jolted to engage with its “original meanings,” distinguishing them from “effective” ones (Wirkungsgeschichte) that disrupt participant joy – even if the study of effective meaning is crucial to understand acquired meanings and the consciousness it has effected.

In McEvenue’s stylistic analysis of the Pentateuch, which draws heavily (though not exclusively) on the source-critical insights of the Wellhausen school, the elemental meanings of specific biblical traditions are openly and clearly stated. The political dimension, for example, fascinates the Yahwist (J) as the revelatory arena in which God acts. For the Yahwist, “God is passionately involved in preserving the larger social political order, and the order of nature. We must then accept and trust these things, and actively cultivate communal awareness of social unity and common values.”[27]

An emotional lacuna left open by J is sparsely filled through the charged narratives of the Elohist (E), for whom God is revealed in the realm of feeling and interpersonal friction: “Salvation occurs where the heart is torn by conflict of personal values (family love versus ‘fear’ of God), by misunderstanding between friends (Abimelech), by alienation between family members (Hagar, Jacob and Esau and Laban), by death (Jacob, Joseph, the infants with the midwives)[;] God is revealed in the feelings, not only of the great leaders of ancient Israel, but also in everyone’s feelings,” foreigners’, readers’, etc. God is revealed also in holy places: Bethel and Beer Sheva.”

The Priestly writer (P), on the other hand, is concerned with the faithful religious observance of the liturgy amid a people’s hopelessness and despair. The showdown is not one between science and faith, but between darkness that threatens to overwhelm and light that will not allow it: “God saw all that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Gen. 1:31a).

In the Deuteronomic source (D), we find a revelatory expectancy given to ethical, social, and economic realms. Unlike J, who expects God to bless and curse other nations to secure Israel politically, leaving her free to take responsibility for herself, D reverses the roles. God directly blesses and curses Israel for her ethical, social, and economic conduct.[28]

This involves a delicate subversion of “surface details” of the Bible, miracles, historical facts, etc.[29], which tend to preoccupy the undergraduate student as well as understandings of the Bible as a book of propositional truths, which can preoccupy the sophisticated but undifferentiated mind.[30] McEvenue also uses elements of the very scholarship that barricade engagement with biblical truths to pave a way to newfound appreciations of these truths in terms of elemental meaning. This resembles my context of negotiating social-scientific, new-materialist presuppositions enecstatically whose reflex it is to bar normative reflection, anything that smacks of theology, from religious studies. But whereas McEvenue does this in a literary-critical context to ascertain the foundational stances of biblical authors, I do it in religious studies to negotiate the foundational stances of theorists of religion. McEvenue asks the question, “[I]n what realm of human meaning or activity does this text expect meaning, revelation, salvation to occur? In war? In family life? In obeying the law? In prayer? and so forth?.”[31] I ask the question, what philosophical presupposition in this theory or method in religion masks a foundational stance that invites development or necessitates reversal? However different, both questions promote a personal negotiation of the values and worldviews compactly or systematically expressed in individuals and/or their texts – again, a normative preoccupation.

I am not in a position to evaluate McEvenue’s taxonomy of elemental meanings culled from Yawist, Elohist, Deuteronomic, and Priestly texts, whether, for example, it begs the larger question of the documentary hypothesis. I leave that to scholars of the Bible. My only concern here is to flag an approach that has informed my creation of a philosophy of religious studies. In many respects, and ironically, McEvenue has had a greater impact on it than Lonergan and for the rather pedestrian reason that McEvenue wrestles with elemental meaning, an issue of artistry qua dialectic and foundations in a manner that moves from transcendental method to hermeneutics. Incidentally, philosophical hermeneutics is described by its founder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, as an art. To be sure, foundational methodology informs McEvenue’s approach; he is unabashed about this. But foundational methodology is a premise in the development of McEvenue’s larger argument and specialized biblical concerns. In this way, he is not worried about philosophical issues surrounding the formalization of interiority, whether, for instance, interiority is best expressed as an intellectually patterned achievement in the categories and language of Insight and Method in Theology. McEvenue simply assumes that it is. Effectively, foundational methodology takes a backseat in McEvenue’s principal aims. He can worry about interiority qua the negotiation of biblical elemental meanings without worrying about the philosophical challenges presented to a philosophy of religious studies. Put otherwise, I could learn about interiority in McEvenue’s classes without learning a thing about foundational methodology. I learned the latter by reading Lonergan. I did not recognize, in other words, that, in facing the aforementioned challenges, I was birthing a similar tactic, evoking the exigencies of interiority through philosophic elemental meaning qua enecstasis.[32] An artistry of interiorly differentiated consciousness summoned by the aforementioned challenges – in a word: the proclamation of subjectivity that seems outrageous, even more so today. I could not shrug the importance of self-discovery impressed on me by Lonergan in the terms and categories that informed his personal struggle with the flight from understanding.[33] Nor could I shrug the importance attached to this awareness in McEvenue’s manner of solicitation, which paralleled my situation of coping with an “impenetrable wall” but one built between normative reflection and scholarly new materialism.

Another part of this enecstatic latticework are important developments in culture studies and poststructuralism whose “artistic” aims are governed by a political, issue-based attention to “socio-economic disparities, environmental degradation, and ongoing biases linked to race, sexual orientation, or colonial exploitation.”[34] These developments are contributing to a dismantling of the wall behind which new materialism barricades religious studies, which is odd given that new materialism is in alliance with such issue-based orientations. The blind spot here seems to be the politicization of academic inquiry as object-constitutive, issue-based, rather than subject-constitutive, interiority-based, as in the discourses of Lonergan, McEvenue, and others. Still, it masks a level of normative reflection in scholarly new materialism that new materialists themselves, in their theory selection, have a vested interest to protect. However, as many are now arguing (Paula Cooey, Sheila Davaney, Rosalind Shaw, Kathryn Tanner, Tyler Roberts, Hent de Vries, Jack Caputo, Carl Raschke, etc.), the university is no longer a bastion of high culture over against so-called low culture, so-called objective knowledge, historical-materialist/naturalist knowledge, over against subjective knowledge, true belief over against false belief, and whatnot. As Shiela Greeve Davaney writes,

[…] the university is not a neutral site but one that does embody all sorts of values and commitments, including commitments to open inquiry, critical reflection, and public argumentation. These are indeed not impartial values. They have emerged within human history (including from within human religious history) and represent certain cultural values and options over others.[35]

If the only prerequisite is, as Davaney continues, “those who are willing to enter the sphere of public argumentation in which they make their case in conversation with their fellows,” then, it seems to me, new materialists of the religious studies variety have no reason to disqualify normative discourses as theology in mediating knowledge of religion, unless, that is, they want to be perceived as offering a new self-authorizing discourse! I develop this train of thought elsewhere.[36] In closing, however, I will simply note how these developments are useful extrinsic sources for the programmatic that I have been discussing. The concern, as I understand it, is explicitly subject-constitutive, interiorly differentiated. Because of them, it should be less scandalous to understand normative engagement as integral to academic theorizing in the study of religion. Formalizing the activity in terms of subjective engagement – not simply imaginative involvement[37]– need not labor under the assumption that such a procedure is outrageous.