Augmenting Lonergan's Attentiveness and Interiority with Teilhard de Chardin's Cosmic Depth

Discussion

Ilia Delio:

"Bernard Lonergan built a method of theology not on doctrines received from outside but on the movement of the mind itself: the fact that a human being is aware, attends, questions, understands, judges, and decides. His insight was to notice that consciousness has a structure, and that this structure is the ground beneath every act of knowing. To do theology well, he argued, you must first become attentive to your own attentiveness. Everything begins in interiority.

Lonergan mapped that interior movement in detail. He traced how consciousness actually moves—from attentive experience, to insight, to reasoned judgment, to responsible decision—and how a person is transformed as that movement deepens. Intellectual conversion comes when we grasp how we ourselves come to know; moral conversion, when we begin to choose the truly good over the merely satisfying; religious conversion, when the whole restless dynamism is caught up and carried by a love we did not manufacture. He called the owning of this process self-appropriation: learning who we are as a conscious process and being faithful to it. None of it is information a system could hand us. It is the labor of becoming a self, and it culminates not in knowledge but in love—which is why, in his reading of history, love poured back into the world is the one thing that reverses decline.

That is a profound starting point. But it can leave interiority looking like a specifically human possession—as though awareness switched on, late in the story, with us. Teilhard de Chardin invites us to widen the frame. What if interiority is not a human phenomenon at all, but a cosmic one?

Teilhard proposed that everything that exists has two dimensions: a without and a within. The without is the observable aspect of things—the face reality turns toward measurement. It is the realm of physical processes, biological forms, measurable structures, the whole domain open to empirical investigation. This is the world science describes and describes superbly.

The within is something else. It is not a second substance hidden behind matter, nor a supernatural element smuggled in from outside nature. It is the intrinsic depth of reality itself—the interior dimension through which existence possesses an inside. Wherever there is relationship, Teilhard held, there is also interiority, however faint its expression. The within names the latent capacity of reality for experience, a capacity that deepens as relationships grow more integrated, differentiated, and unified.

But what is this “depth”? The word is elusive, and worth pausing on, since it carries the argument. It does not mean size, or distance, or something concealed behind the surface. It names a surplus—the way a unified center is always more than the elements that compose it. Teilhard reduced it to a formula: to be more is to be more united. Depth is that “more,” the increase of being that appears wherever things are joined center to center rather than merely heaped together. Wherever that surplus exists, existence has acquired an inside."

(https://iliadelio.substack.com/p/intelligence-was-never-the-point)