This book is a gift to the entire global community of Lonergan scholars. For many years, the outstanding question among these scholars has been whether Lonergan recognizes a fifth level of consciousness in his interiority analysis. Jeremy Blackwood writes to take on this precise controversy. He proposes to address the problem by asking two questions. First, did Bernard Lonergan understand love to be a sublating operator, operation, or set of operations that fulfills or is fulfilled by other operators, operations, or sets of operations? Second, did Bernard Lonergan understand that sublating operator, operation, or set of operations to be conscious (14)? He then expands his purpose by two additional questions: Was Lonergan correct in his understanding of love with respect to sublation? And, was Lonergan correct in his understanding of love in respect to consciousness (17)? Blackwood will answer these four questions in the affirmative, and therein lie the data for this exciting read.

The reader is taken on an interpretive developmental journey. Unlike those who have approached these questions before him by research into Lonergan's written works, Blackwood adds to these resources a careful exploration into the recently gathered audio files of Lonergan's recorded lectures and audience conversations. He carefully notes the development of Lonergan's thought on love throughout three distinct periods, noting not only written statements, but comments and replies from his audience exchanges.

With this interpretive task laid as a foundation, Blackwood's fourth chapter addresses “what was going forward” in the development of Lonergan's thought on love. The following points emerge. When we are grasped by love, the new beginning is given to us; it is not achieved by individual subjectivity working under its own power (149). The resulting new relationship is a shift not so much in individual acts as it is a changed state of the whole being of the subject (151). The changed state results in a horizon that is higher than any other human horizon (152). This new state is conscious in such a way that its contents are mysterious (152). Lonergan explicitly wanted at this point to leave behind the spatial metaphor of “levels” and use instead the more explanatory term, “sublation” (152). By 1972 Lonergan seems to have realized that love did not provide a new intentional operation in the intentionality-context sense but was instead found in the changed manner of experiencing, understanding, judging, and deciding following on the changed interpersonal relations (167). Thus, love is an operative state, the function of which is a sublation that fulfilled the vertical finality of the lower levels.

What follows in chapter 5 is a masterful analysis of the post-Lonergan scholarly discussion on love and the fifth level of consciousness controversy. The work of Robert M. Doran, Michael Vertin, Patrick Byrne, Tad Dunne, and Christiaan Jacobs-Vandegeer is comparatively analyzed, ending with a presentation of Blackwood's own entrance into the controversy. No one, it seems, has addressed exactly just what occurs in the elevation of the central form and consequent enlargement of the horizon (198), and Blackwood offers a possibility.

Finally, in his sixth and concluding chapter, Blackwood offers a final evaluation of what he has uncovered. He offers a concise but comprehensive systematic statement on the fifth level of consciousness, incorporates significant post-Lonergan developments, and moves us beyond the controversies presented by the past twenty years of secondary development (209). He also addresses the need to clarify how a natural or proportionate fifth level might be conceptualized as distinct from a supernatural or disproportionate fifth level (214). Most importantly Blackwood leaves the reader with a challenge based on his work. What has been achieved as a comprehensive statement on the fifth level of consciousness affords a systematic-theological position from which future development may move forward (227). Agree or disagree, this work offers a significant contribution to that future development.