There are several reasons for undertaking a comparison of Lonergan and Hume. It is my intention to move the discussion on to the realm of philosophy of religion and as the author of the most powerful critique of religion ever written in English, Hume lays strong claims for inclusion. It will, I trust, be interesting to see how Lonergan’s argument for the existence of God copes with Hume’s famous objections and to see further how a Lonerganian response might be fashioned to meet the various facets of Hume’s critique.

But before going on to philosophy of religion it will be necessary and profitable to compare and contrast the epistemologies of the two philosophers since these underpin and are presupposed by their respective positions on religious belief. Besides, there is a growing awareness today that the dispute about religious belief is at heart a dispute about rival conceptions of human rationality. It is surely significant that philosophy of religion, as a subject, dates back to the rise of empiricism. Before then there had been, to be sure, disputes, frequently acrimonious, over interpretations of religious doctrines and so forth, but it was not until then that men were affected by a profound unease surrounding religion as a phenomenon. For the first time since the classical age the legitimacy of religious belief of any kind was called in question. From the vantage-point of the twentieth century it is becoming increasingly clear that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the importation into philosophy of what was believed to be the method of science, there arose a new and revolutionary conception of human rationality that rendered religious belief problematic.

Parents are desperate bores about the cute things their children have said but the Aquinas family preserved a story about young Thomas of a rather different kind. They complained that he was always bothering people with the question: What is God? I expect the story is quite true and totally trivial; it only becomes interesting if we see it as a sort of premonition of his whole life, of what his life was to be like and of what his sanctity was like. The first interesting thing is that it was not a statement, an affirmation, but a question.

Some people are saints through their heroic work for the poor, some through their courage in dying for the faith, some through their indefatigable preaching of the gospel; sanctity takes all sorts of forms: the sanctity of St Thomas lay in asking questions.

We (and I mean especially his Dominican brethren) regularly get him wrong by thinking of him as someone who provides the answers. He does, I think, provide more and better answers than most, but what makes him central and vital to our tradition (which is quite an important one for the whole Church) is his conviction, which he hands down to us, that there is always a question to be asked to which an answer is either true or false.

What on earth is Dr Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party all about? Can it really be, as one reviewer believes, ‘a bitter little parable about the subservience of the rich to riches; about the despair that deepens so much every day one lives, that death in the end seems to lose its point; about the ephemerality of happiness; and about the way in which a man may finally come to despise himself so much that life becomes intolerable for him’. Seen like this, Graham Greene’s story-parable — for it certainly cannot be considered an orthodox novel — is remarkably thin and — in many respects — uninformative. There is, for example, very little serious discussion of the attitude of wealthy people to money: that gradual debilitating disease of judgment and balance which leaves the victim convinced of imminent poverty, or the stealthy atrophying of every generous impulse. It is hard to find anything to do with money that could not have been more adequately examined in a normal domestic setting of the type found in Bennett or Galsworthy, or the opening chapters of Sense and Sensibility. Neither, I am sure, would it be useful to assume that Mr Greene constructed his parable with the object of indulging his well-known interest in Russian roulette — a version of which forms the prize-winning entertainment at the last of Dr Fischer’s parties. There is a sense in which the explanations and commentaries do not seem to be able to account for the material, and yet given the brevity and apparent simplicity of the text this adds what can reasonably be regarded as a further curtain of bewilderment.