In this volume Ormerod brings his considerable gifts to the task of comparing Etienne Gilson and Bernard Lonergan on the possibility of a Christian philosophy. Ormerod bookends his three chapters on Gilson and Lonergan with introductory and concluding chapters that put the debate in the context of wider, contemporary concerns about the compatibility between faith and reason, the rise of militant atheism, and the emergence of certain neo-Augustinian Christian projects (especially John Milbank's) that drive a wedge between rationality and Christian belief.
Among contemporary Lonerganians, Ormerod stands out as one who has not only grasped the deepest insights of Lonergan, but also put them into conversation with other leading thinkers and topics. He is perhaps most noted for moving forward conversations in ecclesiology and in the interpretation of the Second Vatican Council. In Faith and Reason, he aims to correct Gilson on Christian philosophy through Lonergan, whose accomplishments in his Insight: A Study in Human Understanding, Ormerod lays out with a deft touch in chapter 3. Indeed, those cowed at the prospect of Insight will appreciate Ormerod's account of Lonergan's philosophy of cognition, and its relation to belief in God (75–118).
Ormerod focuses on Gilson's writings from the 1930s to the 1950s, especially surrounding the debate about whether there could be a specifically Christian philosophy. Ormerod situates Gilson's historically oriented Thomism within the orbit of competing Thomisms, “neo” and “transcendental.” Questions about the rationality of faith have only increased, witnessed by the contributions of both John Paul II (Fides et Ratio encyclical) and Benedict XVI (“Regensburg Address”). Ormerod also notes, with disappointment, the prominence of both the New Atheism and Milbank's Radical Orthodoxy.
Gilson located the proton pseudos in any kind of idealism; once one starts in the head, one never gets back out to reality; Kant's turn to the subject yielded only the appearances, not things in themselves (37–45). Gilson singled out the Louvain Thomists, especially his contemporary Maréchal, who advocated a “transcendental” Thomism that would update Aquinas through the idealist philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This move downgraded metaphysics for the sake of epistemology, and Gilson determined it to be an egregious error. Gilson lumped Lonergan's stab at cognitional theory into this odious project (he would be neither the first nor the last to do so).
Not surprisingly, for those acquainted with Lonergan, Ormerod focuses on Gilson's insufficient account of judgment as the defective component in Gilson's account of human cognition. Lonergan's project attended to the process of understanding (what am I doing when I'm knowing) and, through a rich reading of both Aquinas and Newman, came to emphasize the centrality of judgment (Is it so?) in order to correct a naïve realism (akin to Hegel's “sense certainty”) that reduced knowing to taking a look. Ormerod sides with Lonergan and highlights Gilson's naïve realism: “Lonergan would then counter Gilson's claim to idealism with the suggestion that Gilson himself is not completely free from a counter-position that the real is to be found in the already-out-there-now of extroverted consciousness” (128), while also noting Gilson's failure to incorporate judgment as an active, human process (133).
Ormerod is at his best in this book when he shows how Lonergan's appreciation of science charts a path that protects one against the temptations of secular atheism, which disparages religion as irrational and violent (150–61), and Radical Orthodoxy, which dismisses scientific discourse as dressed-up narrative, as if science were not describing reality but merely telling a story (161–71). After these pages I was left wondering whether a better book might not have been one opposing Lonergan and Milbank, which would build on Ormerod's brilliant 1999 article, “It Is Easy to See: The Footnotes of John Milbank.”
Reading Ormerod's work is always an occasion for learning, but a few complaints can be registered. Despite much talk of being and God, Ormerod omits any discussion of Heidegger and Marion, whose roles in the development of Christian metaphysics in the past and current centuries are unquestionable. The book's title could have hinted more directly at the subject matter. Gilson is not in the same philosophical league as Lonergan, and nothing in the book convinces me that pairing the two yields the kind of mutual reinforcement that these pairings should ideally generate. Those quibbles aside, it is a book that most theologians will learn from.
