Abstract
For Bernard Lonergan, to explain rather than merely to describe is to account for parts in relation to one another, and thus for why something unfolds as it does. In this wonderful book, at once systematic and pastoral, Lucas Briola draws on Lonergan to explain the overarching vision of integral ecology achieved in the encyclical Laudato Si’. B. retrieves Lonergan’s thought on redemption in history and develops it along ecclesiological, liturgical, and ecological axes toward an account of the church’s social mission that reflects “exactly how eucharistic praise catalyzes social transformation” (16). This promotes a complete reception of the encyclical and answers a significant need in academic theology by accounting for the relation of liturgy to social ethics.
As a systematic reception of Laudato Si’ and a decidedly Catholic work of ecological theology, this book is a major contribution. Part I (chaps. 1 and 2) traces the development of recent papal teaching on care for creation in a lucid, focused, generous analysis that could be read with students. These chapters locate the contribution of Laudato Si’ in its attention to liturgy: while in John Paul II there remains a certain separation between human and natural ecology and between liturgical cosmology and care for creation, in Francis (through intermediate forms in Benedict XVI) we receive a precisely eucharistic integration of human and natural ecology. The liturgical and doxological aspects of Laudato Si’ are not accidental to its way of relating “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” (§49), nor can its invitation to praise be shed as a meaningless Catholic overlay to the “real” message.
Ironically, B. observes, reception of the encyclical has tended against precisely this achievement, forgetting its liturgical aspects and unlinking human and natural ecologies. To avert such fragmented reception, Part II (chaps. 3 and 4) explains the relation of liturgy and social concern in the church’s mission by developing Robert Doran’s retrieval of Lonergan’s uncompleted theology of history. Part III (chap. 5) sets out to read Laudato Si’ within the account of the church’s mission developed in part II, and along the way it productively (if sometimes implicitly) settles certain ambiguities found in Lonergan and Doran. While it remains for specialists to evaluate B.’s use of Lonergan, the argument of parts II–III is illuminating, compelling, and accessible to a general scholarly audience.
In Laudato Si’, Francis employs a more immediately Augustinian framework drawn from Romano Guardini. Yet B.’s appeal to Lonergan is justified by many poignant correlations to Laudato Si’, and B. makes specific, creative extensions of Lonergan’s thought that seem productive well beyond the scope of the encyclical per se. For example, Lonergan’s theory of history intends to comprehend our existence at all levels of complexity and recognizes “the gravity of human responsibility” in history (121)—both essential to understanding the crisis. On the other hand, since Lonergan did not consider ecological issues, B. adds to Lonergan’s framework what he calls “elemental values,” that is, the integrity of biological and chemical processes (natural ecology) that are fundamentally inseparable from higher-order values that emerge, such as meeting basic human needs (“vital values” or human ecology). Since disruption at this “elemental” level could, in a Lonerganian account, result only from decline at higher levels like culture, it makes sense why the cry of the earth and of the poor becomes a privileged indicator of the need for cultural conversion. As to the cause of the crisis, B. argues that the technocratic paradigm instantiates what Lonergan means by “general bias.” If the cause of the crisis is cultural, and culture cannot heal itself, then technical solutions alone will not suffice, and conversion must come from beyond culture. Here B. develops Lonergan in accord with Laudato Si’, adding that liturgy affords precisely this integrating, transformative conversion with respect to the whole “scale of values,” from culture to natural and human ecology. This is why eucharistic praise can heal the myopia of general bias: divine love, exchanged eucharistically, relates all things to a reality beyond the immediately practical. As “a redemptive scheme of recurrence” in history (185), liturgical praise relativizes and transforms this technocratic paradigm from above, gradually restoring what Francis has called a “culture of care” that can support human and natural ecology (221–25).
Liturgy and social ethics are thus united in theory, yet in practice the technocratic paradigm stirs fear that the Eucharist may be “useless” vis-à-vis the ecological crisis. Since the same general bias causes the mixed, partial reception of the encyclical in the West, B. argues that the Eucharist can also make whole, or Catholic, our reception of the encyclical, grounding the prophetic power of a social ethic in its eucharistic source (4, 14–15). Those of us charged with integrating Laudato Si’ at Catholic institutions would do well to let this book—and the Eucharist—deeply inform our work. Especially since the technocratic paradigm questions the usefulness of liturgy, however, the argument of this book would be improved further by a more robust account of the sacramental efficacy of the Eucharist, perhaps in terms of the unity of the church as the grace (res tantum) of the sacrament. An account of the efficacy of the church ad extra in history eventually needs to explain the nature of this ecclesial unity, how it is effected historically, and what it has to do with praise. This development could also suggest a reading of the cry of the earth and the poor not only as phenomenologically antithetical to praise but also as theologically antithetical to the unity of the church and her mission as sacrament of this saving communion (see Vatican II, LG §9).