It is easy for a historian to write about the papacy indifferently but very difficult to write about it very well. It is even more difficult to write well about individual popes. If we console ourselves for the inadequacy of the current biographers of Pius xii or John xxiii with the thought that the passage of time will mend matters our optimism is misplaced. There is no outstanding biography of any pope. The first known original literary composition by an Englishman was a Life of Gregory the Great: in the thirteen hundred years since he wrote it he has been surpassed but not by very much. Gregory VII is a household name in every ecclesiastical history seminar but there is no modem scholarly biography in any language that I know of. The standard work, Martens’ Gregor VII, is a collection of foot-notes of incredible pedantry to which the author never provided a text. Even the basic facts of the life of Peter had to wait until 1952 before they were established on a scholarly basis. There is, however, a basic scholarly consensus about the papacy as an institution, a consensus expressed in a brilliant and compelling book, Professor Walter Ullmann’s Growth of Papal Government. There are, of course, dissenting voices, and distinguished ones, over this or that issue, but most of what is written and taught about Church history still does not stray far from the guide-lines laid down by Dr Ullmann.

Reading Fergus Kerr’s article “Lonergan’s Wake’ (New Blackfriars, July 1975) as well as the book which inspired it leaves one with a whole new insight into the plight of Jairus. Containing as it does many misleading comments about Lonergan’s thought (for instance on p. 308 Kerr identifies the very common and ordinary occurrence of having an insight with the quite distinct and extremely rare event of self-appropriation) as well as totally destructive criticism it requires a reply. The criticisms given in Looking at Lonergan’s Method are held to be irreparably damaging, mark a watershed, and make Lonergan’s work seem ramshackle. Method, Kerr concludes, is a gross error. However, Kerr’s own uncritical acceptance of the accuracy of the interpretations of Lonergan by the contributors, of the soundness and significance of their arguments and comments, as well as the severity of his own conclusions are not themselves beyond criticism.

It is claimed (p. 307) that firstly Lonergan has never engaged in even the most elementary analysis of the central concepts of his method, understanding and knowing; secondly, that he systematically misunderstands these concepts and makes all the mistakes that Wittgenstein warned us to avoid in his Philosophical Investigations. The first of these claims is preposterous. Lonergan has both written and lectured on Aristotelian, Medieval, Rationalist, Empiricist, and Idealist theories of concepts of knowledge and has worked out a highly sophisticated dialectical technique for choosing between conflicting theories. Granted that his starting point is not the analysis of concepts of understanding but of the more basic human performance of understanding itself. To simply study concepts of understanding without relating them to the experience of understanding, theological or otherwise, is to build castles in the air.

Once Wodehouse transported Mike to Sedleigh from Wrykin and Mike hated it on sight, the god appeared. And from the very first the god began to send up not only Sedleigh but public schools and the public school story:

Perhaps Fr Weisheipl rather labours the point that it isn’t enough to see St Thomas in a ‘speculative perspective’, that he should be studied with ‘historical method’ as well as ‘philosophical acumen’. Surely, that can be presumed. Can it, on the other hand, be presumed right from the start that to us readers as well as to the author St Thomas’s doctrine seems ‘sublime’ and his insights ‘transcendental’ (pp. 1-2)? Such encomiums would surely come better further on in the book. Fortunately there is, in fact, far more sense than rhetoric in this work, and far more history than exercise of philosophical or theological ‘acumen’; neither of which is really Fr Weisheipl’s forte. And as a historian—or better, as a biographer—he has done a very good job. Indeed I would say that he has written the best biography in English, and probably in any language, of our greatest theologian.

His aim was the large one of presenting ‘a rather full picture of the life, thought, and works of Thomas’, but his special achievement is to give the most complete and reliable account so far available of Thomas’s external existence, including in this of course the chronology and circumstances of his writings. And this is a great achievement. The subject bristles with problems and difficulties. To be sure, the background and setting of Thomas’s life are fairly well documented, intertwining as this does with the history of three great institutions whose official records are preserved: the Dominican Order, the University of Paris, and the Papacy. But such records do not, of course, interpret themselves except to the scholar’s eye, and it is often a very delicate matter to assess the exact meaning of this or that technical term (studium, for example, in its various official or semi-official connotations) or the relative importance—relative to St Thomas—of this or that contemporary movement or event or series of events.