Ideas - The ultimate to-do list for living a good life

Episode Date: April 2, 2026

The guided principles on this list are based on Jesuit Bernard Lonergan's philosophy. His thought will likely shape the world for centuries to come, according to John Dadosky who has studied and taught Lonergan’s work for decades. It’s a bold statement to make, but as he points out, Lonergan’s talking about YOU. The prolific thinker dedicated much of his life's work to understanding human consciousness. In this podcast, IDEAS explores how his insights can play a role in our every day lives.On our website: Five principles to lead a good life.

Life changes fast. One thing shouldn't. Your storage price. At XYZ storage, lock in your rate for a full year with our industry first locked in pricing promotion. No surprises, no sudden increases. Just secure, affordable storage you can count on. Whether you're storing a little or a lot, now's the time to make your move. Visit XYZ Storage.ca or your nearest location today. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. is meaning as true. And when we add to me the act of will, what we will, what we choose, we affect the transition to deliver a human living. In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle mapped human experience in a way nobody had before,

from perception to politics and from art to ethics. Aristotle reduced all questions to four types. Is it, is it so? What is it? Why is it? Sixteen centuries later, St. Thomas Aquinas took Aristotle's work and broke it open for a medieval European audience. If we look at what St. Thomas,

did we find that he spent most of his time asking and answering questions? He too considered questioning. and answering to be human knowing. His system called Thomism would become the philosophy of the Catholic Church. In the 20th century, a third figure took up the work of Aquinas and Aristotle. His name Bernard Lonnergan. Pope Leo the 13th had encouraged a resurgence of studies in St. Thomas Aquinas, and Lonigam was inspired by that.

Let's update Aquinas in this context of modern philosophy, and Lonergan took that to mean the turn to the subject. He adapted it for the dawning age of cultural upheaval, global integration, and pluralism. He wasn't going to get into debate as to whether there is truth. If I don't believe there's truth, then I should just stop listening. If I say there's no truth, you should just cut off this interview right now, because anything I say is just going to be gibberish.

Like Aquinas, he was a Catholic priest and scholar, and he was Canadian. The warmer climate one can lie on the beach and watch the clouds go by without any concern for anything whatever. At least of all, any intellectual concern, one can have that even in a classroom. In fact, he may just be the most important Canadian thinker you've never heard of. You can't take his word for it. He says in the beginning, this is an exercise. You explore your own consciousness and tell me if this is how you come to know. John Dadosky says that right about now would be a great time to introduce Bernard Lonergan to a broader public.

On one hand, Lonergan is not for everybody. Not everybody has to learn it. On the other hand, Lonergan is for everybody if you're committed. to authenticity and want to know something about how to be authentic in your knowing and doing. John Dadosky has studied, taught, and written about Bernard Lonergan's work for decades. There's something more of some Milan V. Tao that is in charge than just our, you know, will. Sorry, this is silly. I have an alarm that doesn't seem to. Okay, I'm going to turn this off. I'm turning everything off, John.

If you're listening, I was just getting ready to tell the secret of life. And the phone went off. Sean Foley, an amateur Lonergan scholar himself, sat down in our studio with John Dadosky for a reasonable introduction to Bernard Lonergan. Okay, all right. So we're rolling. Wonderful. All right. Go for it. Hi, I'm John Dadoski. I'm a professor of philosophy and theology at the Regis. St. Michael's Faculty of Theology, which is located on the St. George campus of the University of Toronto. And you are the author most recently of.

The Wisdom of Order, which is Volume 1 of an overview of Bernard Lonergan's famous text, Method and Theology. He's one of the most prolific, he is the most prolific Roman Catholic theologian in Canadian history. He's kind of an unsung intellectual hero in many ways because his thought is certainly not insular to one tradition, but he was trying to contribute to philosophical issues that we have that are still quite burning today. But he was also towards the end of his career quite interested in other religious traditions. And if you think of the church intellectually going through a paradigm shift with Vatican 2, say, in the early 1960s to mid-1960s, he was basically one of the quiet forerunners of that paradigm shift. He knew the church needed to be updated in a lot of ways. And that's what he was striving to do.

But his contributions are wider than that. Yeah, so how would you describe his philosophical project kind of off the top of your head? He wanted to identify how human beings naturally want to know the truth and want to do the good. And he was basically arguing for that in a philosophical text called Insight, which came out in 1957. And by the way, he wrote it right down the street here on Wellington at where Regis College was originally located. And it was his attempt to respond to a philosophical tradition that they call the turn to the subject, which basically starts with René Descartes, makes its way up through various Western philosophers. and people turn to their consciousness in order to find the basis for why we can know anything. The problem is a lot of people got confused.

Very brilliant people left us with what Michael Polanyi, the philosopher, calls a doctrine of doubt. So you go from Descartes all the way up to Kant. And, you know, they tell you how you can know something, but then when you apply their philosophy, you find, well, you can't know anything. We can't say it. So, Lonergan wanted to respond to that. So I think that he does so successfully, and so it will be his contribution to Western philosophy if we take it, right? Because you can't take his word for it.

He says in the beginning, this is an exercise. is you explore your own consciousness and tell me if this is how you come to know. He wasn't going to get into debate as to whether there is truth. So if I don't believe there's truth, then I should just stop listening. If I say there's no truth, you should just cut off this interview right now because anything I say is just going to be gibberish, right? So he says, I'm not going to get into the debate on whether truth exists. We're human beings.

You know, blood flows through our veins. We come to know in generally the same pattern, everybody, right? We ask questions into the data. So, I mean, standing on one foot, Lonergan's philosophy is be attentive to your experience, be intelligent in your understanding, be reasonable in your judgments, be responsible in your decisions, and then be in love with your family or close people to you, those you're committed to your community, and to transcendent value, however you define that in your own spiritual faith tradition.

Right, right. So he kind of calls it a being in love with God. That's what he calls it being in love in an unrestricted manner. And that's where you start to get into the theology. of Lonnergan. Right, which we will do. But attentive, intelligent, reasonable, responsible. Yeah.

And you mention a story in the book that kind of floats around about this structure that comes from Frederick Crowe, who sort of was one of Lonnergan's, I guess, mentees or worked with him. Yeah. Fred Crow was a Jesuit, one of the early Canadian Jesuits that saw what a genius, the Canadian Jesuits had in Lonegan. And he was effectively Lonergan's secretary. He was so convinced that eventually this philosophy will take that he foresaw, you know,

us teaching this to children and children playing hopscotch experience, understanding, judging, deciding. Now, children probably can't do what Lonergan's asking to do till they get to the age of reason. but at least they'll be primed for it. And so this philosophical position, Lonergan calls it critical realism because he was navigating between the empiricist who say, no, what you know is out there, and the rationalists that would say, no, the real is the idea.

He would say, no, there's a further element to a judgment. And Kant was trying to get there. But with Kant, you still don't get to know. And it's funny because, you know, we all know, like I tell my students, you got to class today. You know, you're a knower. But it's important to articulate how we know. This is a general method of how we come to know. But there's specific methods that the engineer and the scientist and the psychologists are all going to have their specific methods,

but they're all going to be wanting to be attentive to the data, intelligent, and their understanding they're going to want the correct hypothesis and solve the problem to make the correct judgment and to be responsible. And the system can break down anywhere in that pattern. But the fuel of this whole thing is questioning, which he takes back to Aristotle, so notion of wonder. So, you know, my parents grew up in an age of the church where you don't question. Then you get Lonnergan saying, no, the whole everything starts with questioning.

And it was, in fact, shutting down questioning that comes from one's genuine curiosity. Questions that come from our genuine spirit, shutting those down could be what in the to to mystic tradition following Lonergan could be a basic sin. Right. Philosophically, it's called obscuritism, you know, where you just shut down questioning. Now, having said that, there's a sense where we all resist questioning that some extent, but when it gets shut down, you're shutting down the framework that leads to truth. There are all sorts of questions, and there are limited.

You're an obscurantist, if you draw the line here and say, Any questions beyond this point are ruled out of court, without any consideration, without any reasons. And any answers, no matter how many answers you give to the questions that are raised, they just provide a springboard for further questions. Questions are unlimited. Questions arise from wonder, from inquiry, from reflection. according to Aristotle wonders the beginning of all science and philosophy.

This idea that one can know the truth, you know, I think that might be something of a controversial idea today. Yeah. How would you say that Lonergan could defend the idea of the true as true? That was one of the things when I discovered Lonergan as a graduate student. I just thought, oh, we get to know. The reality of it is you do know, just like you have two hemispheres of your brain,

just like the blood is flowing through your veins, just like you're breathing. Try to hold your breath, you know. There's something more, some Ilan Vitao, that is in charge, but right now we're in a context where philosophy as a love of wisdom is a discovery of truth and then from there to discern the good, to do the good, that's not in favor right now.

Philosophy has been embedded more into the practical well. It'll help me get into law school or something like that, which it can. But, you know, I go back to the example of the White Rose Society. The first German citizens to resist the Nazis were philosophy students and their professor. all ended up being killed by the Nazis as as German citizens. And they were the first to resist the Nazis. Now, what was it about their philosophical training that helped them to see beyond the decadent ideology that was sweeping their nation at the time? So philosophy is very, very powerful.

This turn to consciousness is huge. We just don't think about it because a lot of pragmatism has embedded North American, I mean U.S. and Canada when I say that, that you study to get a job, right? You don't study the humanities. And Lonergan was recovering what he would later call a scale of values where the humanities in terms of cultural value were essential in reflecting to correct the abnormalities in the good of order, the structure of society. You know, and I think of Hegel, he was finishing his philosophy of mind, so to speak,

the phenomenology of the spirit, when Napoleon's troops come into town, and a few days later they ransack his office. And Hegel's influence, his dialectics, influence on the young Marx, would conquer. much more territory than Napoleon. And that was just an examination of consciousness that Hegel was doing in a phenomenology of spirit, which led to his notion of the dialectic, very powerful tool that Marx picked up.

The idea that these oppositional viewpoints, there's a synthesis that can come from having that tension. Right, which gave birth to this thing. this tension between the haves and the have-nots, right, and which leads to social reform. The recordings you're hearing of Bernard Lonergan date from the 1950s through the early 1980s. The oldest known recording was made on Halloween 1950 and broadcast on a Montreal radio station. These are all available online at the Lonergan Archive of Marquette University.

So earlier you were you were talking about the tomist, sort of, so to say, Tomist means a person who studies the work of Thomas Aquinas, whose work was built on Aristotle to a large degree. It seemed to me that Thomas Aquinas' work into the 19th century was kind of like had become this almost rigid-seeming thing. Yeah. He didn't step outside of it. Correct.

Well, theology was done deductively. So that was the residual Aristotelian logic where you've got these premises. And if you have a question, you just follow the deduction down to the context. But with the development of science, which was much more empirical, we start to shift. And eventually theology and philosophy will catch up, starting with the empirical rather than these premises that you deduce from. Well, that's quite revolutionary in a lot of ways. But what Lonnigan finds when you turn to the subject and you say, well, how do I come to know? I come to know because I ask a question, you know, what's the quickest way to get to the subway?

What's the meaning of life? Or Heidegger, who asked, he actually borrowed this question from two other thinkers. Why is there something and not nothing? Those questions are what animate our further discovery of knowledge. He did the, how do I know? I always get this mixed up because the word no is in this sense. sentence about a million times. So,

Lonegan starts out and he says, what am I doing when I'm knowing? Why is doing that knowing? And what do I know when I do that? Okay, so what am I doing when I'm knowing? I'm asking questions that arise from my experience. So I'm being attentive to my experience and the questions arise. From that,

I seek to answer those questions through intelligent understanding and then, you know, that may just yield an idea, a good idea, or a hypothesis, so I need to take that scrutiny a little further. And I ask the question, is this so, which is the level of judgment. If I answer all the relevant questions, then I can come to a definitive judgment. On the one hand, what Lonergan's doing is not that significant in the sense that you get to be a knower, but because there's so, still so much doubt. And even now with the mass social

media in the manipulation of truth and the doubting, it's even become more important that people scrutinize data. Yeah, there's almost a degree of, even just in my own lifetime, if I'm looking at it through the

lens of Hal Lonergan's talking about our consciousness and our way of knowing, there's degrees of increase in intensity from me growing up with three television channels and a radio to being where we are today. You got a lot of choices today. Yeah, and voices. Voices and choices.

Yeah, yeah. So I think that's one of the reasons I'm so attracted to it. And I find even when I'm trying to read, Lonergan, even if I'm not fully understanding, I actually feel this sense of consolation. because I'm reading the work of someone who is working to like, not to make sense of things, but to help me make sense of things, if you know what I mean, and help others make sense of things and help societies make sense of things because there's very much this macro level that he gets to around progress and decline, right?

Yeah, yeah. And so maybe you could give me just a sense of how we get to that level, that societal level of progress and decline from our interiority, how would you characterize that magnification? What I tell my students, when they try to understand Lonergan and it can be challenging, I remind them he's talking about you. And the most important thing is not being a Lonerganian. The most important thing is to be an authentic person. So his claim is that if you are attentive to your experience, if you are intelligent and your understanding, reasonable in your judgments, responsible in your decisions, then the fruits of your discovery are

true and good. So that's authenticity for him. Now, he also talks about bias. He doesn't really use the term sin. He talks about bias, where bias is anything that can interfere with that desire for truth and goodness. So you could have a dramatic psychological wound, which would be a, he calls that dramatic bias. The other ones, the bias of egoism or egotism, which is selfishness. And for Lonergan, selfishness is not just a moral issue. It's, it's unintelligent, right? If you and I start helping ourselves to the marketplace and stealing, then that's going to erode the trust in the economic good of order. So it's not intelligence. The egoist is someone who makes decisions based on their own well-being and doesn't consider that of the others.

The group bias is just a collective egoistic bias, you could say. Okay. So one group makes decisions based on what's best for their group and not the others. So there you can start to see an avenue of social critique for Lonergan and the various groups. But the most serious bias that he talks about and the one that people know the least about is general bias. And general bias is the bias against theory, the bias against long-term solutions. So don't, you know, the purpose of education is for a person to get a job only. Certainly we want our children to get jobs. Sure.

And we want their education to be a good investment. But if that's the only reason, if that's the only criteria, that could be a reflection of general bias. And this makes its way into policy. But for Lonnergan, the role of cultural value, which a good humanities education brings about, is to be able to critique, you know, Eanescu's play, the rhinoceros, right? Basically, everybody in the play is turning into a rhinoceros. And it's a reflection on fascism and how it can spread. And it, and not just fascism, any ideology, and how it becomes very difficult not to turn into a rhinoceros,

as ridiculous as that may sound. There is a division of labor in man's coming to know, and human knowledge is a common fun. One draws in it by believing, one contributes to it by cognitive operations. There develops a common sense, common knowledge, common science, common values, common planet of opinion. there are, of course, oversights, biases, errors.

But they are eliminated, not by rejecting all beliefs, but by discovering, finding out when one has been mistaken in one's beliefs, and then finding all the things that can be associated with that mistaken belief. And also examining a bet the mistaken believer. For Lonegan, you get a collective of people, and it can begin with what he calls a creative minority of authenticity. You know, imagine the power of one authentic leader can have significant, significant power, significant influence. And Lonnergan makes this distinction between authority and power.

So if you got somebody in a position of influence who is not committed to authenticity, then they will have power, but not the authority. And that becomes a significant liability to the society. This is his dialectic of authority, right? Yeah, yeah, his little article dialectic of authority. Right, yeah. And with the implication that a person holding power, their role in a sense is limited or you're not actually quite capable.

of, let's say, building up the society. Yeah, so you rely on, you risk a police state because people aren't following you because of your integrity. They're following you because you're in power. And they start to rebel and you can only appeal to force. Right. Whereas authority is in some sense, coming from the person's authenticity, that's almost like that's almost contagious in a good way in the sense that people invest themselves in

that authentic leader. Is that not the source of that deeper sense of authority where you're really leading people? Well, I mean, collaborating with people. Right. You can be trusted. Mm-hmm. I just find a really interesting idea between authority and power. And I don't know that that's a way we actually.

actually talk about these things. We just talk about what the powerful person is doing and how that's bad and scary. Right. I mean, you can think of a Nelson Mandela. He had an authority. Right. He was in prison. And what happens? He comes out and he becomes the head of state. So there's that. I also like the example of the medieval mystic, St. Catherine of Siena. So she was in this mystical communion for three years. by herself in her room. Jesus tells her, you're going to go out and do all this work outside now. And she ends up telling popes what to do.

She had no official status in that medieval church. She had her authenticity. She had the power of her mystical experience. And she would wave her fingers at popes and sometimes they'd listen. And so that's an authority of someone that didn't necessarily have any power position. John Dadosky is a professor at the Regis St. Michael's Faculty of Theology at the University of Toronto. He's the author of several books about Canadian Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonnerkin, including Image to Insight and The Wisdom of Order.

This is Ideas on CBC Radio, I'm Nala Ayyed. Life changes fast. One thing shouldn't. Your storage price. At XYZ Storage, lock in your rate for a full year with our industry first locked in pricing promotion. No surprises, no sudden increases. Just secure, affordable storage you can count on. Whether you're storing a little or a lot, now's the time to make your move. Visit xyzstorage.ca or your nearest location today.

Accessibility is making your education work for you, regardless of circumstance. At Athabasca University, we have no entrance requirements for undergrad programs and automatic acceptance. If you have the desire to learn, AU is a great option. Open your options with a more accessible online degree and choose an education that works for you, not the other way around. Find out how at Athabaskyu.c.c.u.com.com. When a young Bernard Launergan returned home from studies in the UK, Canada was in the grip of the Great Depression. and he wondered if God was calling him to do something about it. So he worked on economic theory for several years,

and eventually he set this work aside for a while and dug into a more essential idea. What does it mean that human beings are knowers? So for Lonnigan, there's history is unfolding in three modes, you could say. There's progress. which is basic humans' natural abilities applying their intelligence, developing things. Certainly, if you look at the leaps in technology over the last 100 years and we're involved with right now with AI, that's all progress, human beings adverting to their own natural abilities and letting them unfold.

Then there's decline which comes about as a result of bias. and human frailty, you know, and this could be quite significant. I was reading a few years back the history of the United States and I think it was five stock market crashes. You know, the Exxon Valdez had an indirect role to play in what ended up being the 2008 financial crisis. So the big oil spill. Yeah. Off Alaska. So the way they had to fight.

fund that, as I recall, they created these new financial instruments, and out of that people started taking debt obligations on. And that got overdone, right? So you've got egoistic bias at work, you've got group bias at work, you've got these complicated financial instruments that only specialists can understand. And before you know it, they're doing the irresponsible thing by giving house loans to people that aren't worthy of credit. And so there's this ripple. And then credit arrangements that are going to punish them anyway. Right.

But you see how it's, that was a decline, but that's kind of a shorter cycle of decline because it, you know, they enacted some laws, which hopefully they still follow and to try to prevent that thing from happening again. But the longer cycle of decline is that of general. bias. So this eroding of the need for theory, you know, just tell me how to turn the lights on. I don't want to know about the laws of thermodynamics or just make sure I'm warm at night. I don't need to know those laws. Right. Yeah. Somebody's got to know those laws. So this eroding valuing of the arts and humanities is significant. And you see this

in a lot of places when they dismiss the university as the ivory tower. Oh, you people, you're cut off from the real world. We don't need you. Well, I mean, there are probably some people living in an ivory tower.

I hope I'm not one of them. But the reality of it is you have to have a reflective, you have to have a structure of reflection in a society that are thinking through these issues that other people don't have time to think through, right?

That things are moving so fast. And certainly now there's a lot of reflection on AI. And I'm not sure what Launergan would make of all of that. He would probably make a joke. I know a lot of people with artificial intelligence. You know, he'd probably make a joke. like that. But it's a significant paradigm shift for us, for sure.

What I was describing was different senses of the word, meaning, you don't go above the street smiling at everyone. People would misunderstand you. The meaning of the smile. There's a smile of welcome, a smile of recognition, The smile of friend of us. The smile of a person is pretty tired of it. The smile of resignation.

The enigmatic smile. The erroneous smile. And so on. Indefinitely, smiles have a meaning. They all have a meaning. And those meanings are multiple. To sort them out, you have to go on. To an entirely different type of meaning,

the meanings of understanding and conception. I mean, if I could think of what, Lonergan might be concerned about today is that the leaps in technological development have not been matched by leaps of commitment to authenticity. It's not AI itself that's the threat. It's the irresponsible use of it that's the threat. Because it's going to be impossible not to use it, just like it's impossible not to use other technology. And to that end, I think you kind of come back to that idea of progress and decline because what... Because I haven't talked about the third part, which is redemption. Uh-huh. So, you know, progress decline in redemption.

We can't solve the problem of evil, according to Lonergan. We need help. We need God's grace. And that's the redemption. Now, for Lonergan, all three of those are... are going on all the time. So right now you've got progress going on. You've got decline.

You've got redemption. And there can be a cynicism that goes out. They says, no, we just got decline. Right. But, in reality, if you look around, we got progress, we got decline, we got redemption. And so what do I need to do to manage, not to manage, that's the wrong word. How do I keep walking with that sense of a global situation that's deeply troubling? Yeah, and that's where authenticity has to give way to the recognition of our limits.

So you be attentive, you be intelligent, you be reasonable, you're responsible, you be in love. But we're not in control. But the good news is those leaders that you think are in control or not in control either. It's the transcendent value for Lonergan that's in control. There's a movement to history in this progress, decline, redemption. History is moving towards a goal. And there is especially the later Lonergan, such a priority on love, love of, I'll say transcendent value for your listeners, but whatever your spiritual

faith tradition expresses that in, but also to people. He was oriented toward human beings. In 2002, when Pope Francis was here for his visit to apologize to the indigenous peoples, at one of his evening prayers, he made. mentioned Lonergan and he said he singled out Lonergan to what he called a theologian without borders and specifically his reflection on the Good Samaritan. So he saw Lonegan as somebody who was valuing, reaching out to the rejected and the marginalized. Decline multiplies and heaps up the abuses and absurdities that breed

resentment, hatred, anger, violence. It is not propaganda or argument, but religious faith that will liberate human reasonableness from its ideological prisons. It is not the promises of men, but religious hope that enable men to resist the vast pressures of social decay. If passions are to quiet and down, if wrongs are to be, not Not ignored, not just palliated, but removed. Human possessiveness and human pride have to be replaced by self-sacrificing love. Men have to come to acknowledge their individual and group sinfulness, to accept their real guilt, to amend their ways,

to learn with humility that the task of repentance and conversion is lifelong. When we were chatting earlier in preparation for this interview, You said to me that the paradox, one of the paradoxes of Bernard Lonergan is that he may be well known in a very particular realm. He's not really broadly known, and yet his work will probably be relevant and helpful and useful for centuries to come. I believe so, yeah. So, yeah. So maybe give me a couple examples of how either, you. You see that prescience involved in what he's talking about or even ideas that he has that you think still have yet to be.

Well, one of them that's most relevant is his critique of what's called a classicist notion of culture, which was the belief that there was really only one culture, and of course it was European. And of course, we've seen the devastation of that classicist notion of culture has had on the indigenous peoples. The classicist's notion of culture was used to justify residential schools because it was a uniform education and it was assimilation. And Lonegan was challenging that. And that critique of proselytizing imperialism matches with the Truth and Reconciliation's critique of cultural genocide. Lonergan was asked by a Vatican official in advance of the Synod on evangelization in the modern world for his opinion on evangelization and updating what it meant. It's not forcing faith on people, right?

And Lonergan said, evangelization enlightens and unifies cultures inasmuch as it does not destroy or uproot them or replace them by some other alien culture. The Truth and Reconciliation Report defined cultural genocide as the destruction of those structures and practices that allow a group to continue as a group. So insofar as this proselytizing imperialism was part of that. Lonergan was criticizing that very early on. He was ahead of the time of a lot of the post-colonial critique and anti-colonial critique. He was ahead of that. But he was also a product of his time. But when you look at these statements like he makes in 1974,

I don't find many Catholic or Christian thinkers making analogous comments. And the second topic, there's a little known notion of Lonergan. There's a theory of evolution which he calls emergent probability. He works it out in early on in the book Insight. Emergent probability is different from Darwin because Darwin accounts for the preservation of the species. But Lonergan's emergent probability is the accounts for the emergence survival and even extinction of a species. But it actually is applicable to everything. So the whole world order operates through this notion of emergent probability of these,

underlying schemes of recurrence that give way to these divergences, which now could become something new. And, you know, I remember back in the pandemic, I'm not a scientist, but studying emergent probability, I thought if Lonergan's correct, then the virus is going to have to, it can't kill its host. It's going to have to mutate into a more benign form. And, you know, then there was the Omicron version. Now, I get it that even some of those mild forms could be quite deadly for people, depending on what their biological histories are. But in general, you know, we're not all wearing masks anymore. Emergent probability also accounts for how God's grace can also shift the probabilities.

where there's a context of evil, the probabilities could be shifted through love and what Lonergan calls the law of the cross. So this is applicable to everything. And so miracles are not just these bending of classical laws. That just makes people think, well, no, that's impossible. But what if miracle was a shifting of probabilities? Well, I think in the imagination, that makes it a little bit more tenable. Very interesting. Sometimes people are fascinated by, especially the modern saints like Padre P.O.

Who were like, oh, he bilocated or he had the stigmata or he. And this is my own sense of doubt. Because they happened in the modern era, you almost think, okay, it was fine for there to be these nutty miracles back in the Middle Ages when nobody knew about science and reality. But, like, how do you explain these modern miracles? Well, I think the explanation for the stigmata would not be a scientific explanation. It would be a theological explanation of somebody who's been gifted to participate in the life of Christ in persona Christi to such an extent. that they get the wounds.

Right. And that didn't make Padre Pio's life much easier either. No, no, it didn't. That's true. It was not like a make t-shirts. Yeah. It was a claim to fame, but maybe a claim to infamy. Because, I mean, they really had to contain him in a sense.

All the saints in a way. Well, you know, the wonderful thing about the saints is, you know, their life on this planet can be actually quite short. And it's kind of like their life on this planet is like an acorn. But the centuries later that people continue to go to them and they have this influence that just pervades history. You know, I tell my students, you know, don't get discouraged about individuals not making a difference. Just study someone like someone has a mystical experience. Whether you accept it or not, that can be quite transformative.

The reality of it is that individuals can have a significant impact on civilization. Being in love with God is a fount of joy that remains despite failure and humiliation and privation and pain. It is peace the peace the world cannot give. the peace into which one may enter almost palpably when one prays to be heavenly father in secret such love, joy, peace transform a man or woman they banish the emptiness,

the unrest, the alienation, the flight from one's deaths that haunt lives lived without God full love, joy, peace enhance all one's virtues, press against all one's defects. They make a man a power for good, zealous in achieving. Relating man to God, they also relate him to all mankind, and to the whole cosmic and historical process.

On all persons and things, on all events and deeds, they shed a new dimension of meaning, significance, value. Was there a moment where you realized I've got to work on this guy's stuff? Oh, yeah. It was like love at first sight. I was in a Catholic seminary for a brief time. I was looking for a thinker. I was looking for some kind of intellectual framework. I had a lot of different interests.

And I wanted a thinker that could help me synthesize and did these different interests I had intellectually. I read this article called Theology in Its New Context by Bernard Lonegan. It was assigned in this course by Sister Carmel McEnroy, who was a graduate of St. Mike's, who introduced me to Lonergan. And I read it and I realized, oh, there's no turning back. There's no putting the toothpaste back in the tube. we're going forward philosophically, theologically, intellectually,

in church and in the future of religious living, which is going to be interreligious too. There's a big interreligious dimension to it. And yeah, I just, I never looked back. So you remember where you were when you read that article? Yeah, I was in a cornfield in southern Indiana, I believe it or not. Wow.

Yeah, it was a beautiful autumn day. and I thought, okay, this is the person I've been looking for to study. When I was going through Lonergan's archives, the archives have now moved from the University of Toronto to the Jesuit archives in Montreal. But when they were in Toronto, I basically cataloged most of them myself as a doctoral student. It was like I was given privileged access to really get a sense of who this. person was. A very committed Jesuit lover of humanity. I found a clipping in the archives that

from the star, where it was the Globe and Mail from back in the 60s, he was quite disturbed that people were going into the library and vandalizing books. And so he clipped this article. And I remember, you know, he was so concerned about our love for knowledge. and the importance of libraries.

So there were little moments like that where I got to glimpse into who he was. Because you would not have met him. No, I never did meet him. How would you feel? Would you want to? This is pretty personal, but I did have a dream one time

where it really felt like it was him. Wow. It was like towards the last days of his life, He died in Pickering, Ontario. But I was with him, and he was asking us to get rid of some of his things, because he knew he wasn't going to be around much longer. And then he sits down. Now, when people got FaceTime with Lonnergan, they would ask him questions,

and he did not always have the patience to answer questions. So in this dream, I kind of stooped down to him in his chair, I say, hey, Father Lonergan, and he goes, do you have a question? I said, no, I don't have a question. I just want to tell you, I think you're one of the greatest Catholic thinkers that's ever existed. And that was the dream. But, you know, it really felt like it was him. What did he say to you when you told him what you wanted to tell him?

He was surprised. He was surprised that I didn't want. to ask him something. I didn't want something from him. I just wanted to express my appreciation. That's beautiful. It's a beautiful thing.

Yeah, I've never... I think I've only told that to a couple of people, so... Okay, all right. Didn't expect to bear my soul today. Well, we'll see if it makes the final cut. I think it's pretty beautiful. It says a lot.

You're the expert. I'll leave that up to you. Yeah. Well, thank you. very much, John, for this. Thank you. And that was a reasonable introduction to Bernard Lonergan, featuring John Dadosky, professor at Regis St. Michael's Faculty of Theology at the University of Toronto. This episode was produced by Sean Foley. Technical production, Emily Kiarvesio. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer is Nicola Luchic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyed.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.