Matthew L. Lamb

Fr. Giovanni Sala, S.J., Philosopher and Theologian

During the night of March 14–15, 2011, Fr. Giovanni Sala, S.J., passed through the portals of death to meet the Lord Jesus, whom he had followed so faithfully as a Jesuit scholar. He ranks high among the insightful and productive philosophers and theologians renewing Catholic intellectual life and culture in our times. Most of his many books and even more articles and essays have appeared in German or Italian. They explore the intellectual and scholarly coherence and brilliance of Catholic philosophical and theological traditions, as well as the intellectual indigence and mediocrity of those dissenting from the teachings of the Catholic Magisterium. Only a very few of his essays have been translated into English. In this retrospective, I shall first sketch the orientation of Sala’s exposition of Fr. Bernard Lonergan’s explanatory articulation of human experiencing, understanding, knowing, and willing—what Lonergan calls the third stage of meaning: interiority. Secondly, I shall outline how important this interior orientation is for doing genuine Catholic theology up to the level of our times.

Towards a Synthetization of the Sciences

The rapidity with which new sciences are being formed and the older ones are becoming further specialized calls for a complementary effort to interrelate the sciences. A genuine synthetization must be completely open to all future discoveries and developments within science. Such an openness would be possible only if scientific understanding possesses certain invariable patterns according to which the synthetization could be constructed. Lonergans Insight (New York, 1958) seems to have uncovered these basic and irrevisable patterns. Not only do they demonstrate the complementarity of classical and statistical methods but the isomorphic Emergent Probability operative in world-process may well provide the framework for an open synthetization. In the present essay this possibility is demonstrated by interrelating, according to it, certain generic fields of the scientific endeavor, from physics to cultural anthropology.