Proof as Sign, Conversion as Condition: A Lonerganian Meta-Apologetics After Insight 19

Lonergan’s chapter 19 “proof”, in Insight, for God is typically assessed as a putative demonstration whose success rises or falls with the minor premise that “the real is completely intelligible.” Yet both the structure of Insight (proof as a “set of signs” requiring the reader’s self-performance of rational judgment) and Lonergan’s later methodological turn (proof presupposes a horizon that cannot itself be proved) suggest that the apologetically decisive contribution of Insight 19 is not a freestanding inference but a meta-apologetic, that is, an account of the normative conditions under which any natural-theological proof can function as evidence. This article argues that Lonergan offers a two-level model of apologetic rationality: (1) proofs operate as instruments of clarification and as invitations to grasp a virtually unconditioned; but (2) their cogency is conditioned by intellectual, moral, and (ultimately) religious conversion, since objectivity is the fruit of authentic subjectivity. Interpreted this way, Insight 19 is not discarded by later Lonergan but re-situated. It becomes a diagnostic and constructive tool within method, capable of exposing counterpositions and stabilizing conversion, without pretending to generate a horizon ex nihilo.