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Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas, Volume 2 (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan)

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"To perfect the old by means of the new" Lonergan took the task of determining what the old really was. 'Verbum' is the result from the long years reaching up to the mind of St. Thomas. Not to the concepts used by St. Thomas but to the acts of thinking in him to revive his thinking mind again for today.

Intelligence and reason are proper capacities of human being in Greek tradition. Understanding and Judgment are unique characteristics of imago Dei in christian tradition. 'Verbum'(inner word) is the key to the self-understanding of human being. Who am I as a human being? Grasp the acts of understanding and judgment! Then you will know what truth is, what being is, and what metaphysics is all about.

Those who wish to know what the old key in Thomistic tradition was, read 'Verbum' and 'Grace and freedom'. Those who wish to know how we can add to and perfect the old by means of the new, read 'Insight' and 'Method in Theology'. These two couples show separately old things and new things in the order of nature and supernature.

Humans are always the same in their natural potencies. Internal acts are always something like "?" then "!" then "..."

We ask, we understand, we conceptualize what we understand. we reflect, we judge, and we assert that it is so. We deliberate, we love, and we will act.

There are some books to help us to act properly. And 'Verbum' is surely one of them.

This new edition of Bernard Lonergan's Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas is meant for readers who are not too familiar with Latin but who can now easily read Lonergan's lengthy quotations of Aquinas in English. The work had been written originally in the 1940s to correct a mistaken theological tradition which had spoken about acts of human understanding in terms of forming concepts and definitions. To understand was to articulate words that one speaks or writes. But, in Lonergan's carefully researched analysis of both Aquinas and Aristotle, understanding presents itself as a preconceptual event which is not really produced by the human intellect, but is in fact received by the human intellect as apt images suggest intelligible relations which are grasped by acts of the mind. Lonergan's analysis of Aquinas on human understanding reveals how Aquinas's theology cannot be properly understood if a scholastic, conceptualist notion of understanding is retained as one's primary hermeneutic.

Review by Br. Dunstan Robidoux OSB