ABSTRACT

Davies summarises: It is quite a different thing to speak of 'The Passion of Christ' rather than of 'The Emotion of Christ', for the former involves numerous theological ideas of suffering and self-sacrifice while the latter is ideologically neutral. Bernard Lonergan's religious thought looks like a striking theology of emotion, for Lonergan came to hold that the essence of religion, as a phenomenon of human salvation, lies in an affective disturbance and motivation transcendently gifted to individuals. Lonergan himself never used the word emotion' to describe this allegedly fundamental human experience. And yet Lonergan understood it to communicate a dynamic state of being that takes up and transfigures the relational sympathies and feelings that are natural to human beings. Lonergan also wondered whether the alleged atheism of Buddhism' to him a defect might actually stem from a jealous love of mystical solitude' that prefers to stay simply within this non-objectivized' religious experience.