Per Caritatem

By Daniel W. McClain

III. De Lubac: the Loss of Man’s Natural Desire for a Supernatural Finality

Henri de Lubac writes in the first chapter of The Mystery of the Supernatural that despite Thomas’ clarity that humanity naturally longs for one end – that it is a supernatural one, without so much a reference to a “hypothetical necessity” – commentators have managed to confuse the issue.”[1] While they have accepted Thomas’ two principles, they have rejected the synthesis as such.[2] Instead of affirming the natural desire, they often posited a pure nature, free of any non-natural end, which (following Pius XII), demonstrates God’s freedom in giving the desire for the Beatific vision. Apropos to this, de Lubac charged in 1942 that there had been a distinct evacuation of the Sacred in church teaching, manifesting itself in both the laity and the theological faculty. To some extent it was the initial loss in theology that resulted in confusion over Thomas’ teaching about humanity’s supernatural end. De Lubac aptly sums Thomas:

[F]or Saint Thomas, there is in human nature as such, because it is spiritual, a desire, a natural appetite, a sign of an ontological ordination, which could not remain ever unsatisfied without the work of the Creator having failed and which could be satisfied in no way but through the very vision of God, face to face.[3]

Not only does de Lubac say this is Thomas’ teaching; indeed, “One could say that the unanimous Tradition, for fifteen centuries, is summed up on this important subject by the famous exclamation of Saint Augustine…”[4] The natural desire for a supernatural finality is thus an ineluctable aspect of the Tradition. Despite its rightful place, however, it is replaced by a dualism between the natural and supernatural orders. This dualism, de Lubac observes, tragically underwrites secularism, the desacralization of the world,[5] the demystification of revelation,[6] and a “shriveled rationalism.”[7]

His 1949 article, “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” and monograph The Mystery of the Supernatural (1965) both continue the recovery began in the 1942 article and Surnaturel (1946) but with a greater emphasis upon the theological implications.[8] While maintaining the continuity of the desiderium naturale in the Tradition, “the idea that the ancients have transmitted to us about our basic relation to our supernatural end,” he begins both the article and the book by stressing the Augustinian and Thomist aspect.[9] Whereas St. Albert criticized St. Augustine’s understanding of natures, de Lubac and St. Thomas both stress Augustine’s interest in beatitude. Thomas sees, however, that the supernatural is best guaranteed by a thorough “respect” for the natural. As such, de Lubac adopts Thomas’ approach in order to elucidate the end of human nature in such a way that does not obliterate nature, but rather grants the supernatural to the natural as a “transforming union.”[10]

He attributes the rise of pure nature to wrong interpretations of Thomas and, ironically, a zealous rush to aid the gratuity of God. He confirms that the radical otherness of the supernatural has, of course, been central to traditional teaching. However, pure nature goes too far in defending the supernatural, especially in its elevation from an hypothesis to a reified teaching, by asserting that, despite traditional church teaching, human nature qua natural has a purely natural end. Whereas he is willing to concede that it is tenable as a hypothesis vis-a-vis Pius XII’s Humani Generis, pure nature fails to account for this nature: it is “a big X that responds to nothing.”[11]

Two aspects, or “tendencies,” seem to crop up from the incorporation of the pure nature hypothesis. First, it exhibits hubris; it assumes more than what is rightfully due to it.[12] This is not a helpful notion because, strictly speaking, as hypothetical, it only really speaks about possible realities, and therefore fails to address this natural order.[13] Moreover, what it does to the supernatural is worse: gradually the supernatural shrinks into something just barely more than nature, no more than a superfluous order, a “double,” only realized in the beatific vision.[14] Nature and the supernatural become two species of the same genus.[15]

Secondly, and rather opposite in action to the first tendency, pure nature places a demand of justice on God to give the supernatural in order to complete man and bring him, out of his natural end, to “perfection.” Whereas the hypothesis of pure nature was posited in the first place to safeguard the heterogeneity of the two orders, in an ironic twist “man now becomes aware that he cannot completely eliminate God’s action if he is to perfect himself.”[16] Obviously, man  “demands” the supernatural, making “the supernatural… something ‘natural by requirement’.” In any event, “all idea of God’s free gift is lost.” [17] Man’s nature, under this second tendency, is regarded as changeable. As yet another consequence of that era’s loss of an inherent teleology, pure nature, under those like Baius, does less to protect the gratuity of God’s gift than it does to wrestle that grace from God for human nature. It is apparent that beatitude, articulated as that “which the creature requires and which God owes him,” fundamentally compromises any notion of gift in God’s constitution of human nature or the supernatural ordering.[18]

De Lubac charges that in this sterilized world, adrift of an inherent and stable end, there is no place for “gratuity.” For, in positing a hypothetical pure nature, we have forced ourselves into a corner of possible worlds where all relationships between the natural and supernatural orders can only ever be hypothetical. Similarly, insofar as the end of this hypothetical nature is posited post-creation, it follows that humans no longer necessarily share in the same end. It also follows that they no longer necessarily share in the same nature. Holding to an Aristo-Thomistic concept of nature, de Lubac sees this form of extrinsicism as disastrous and plainly illogical to the extent that a nature is known because of its end. Indeed, this is what is meant philosophically by an end. Theologically, humans qua spiritual creatures are known by their supernatural ordering. Such an ordering is “constitutive” of human nature.[19] There is but one human nature which was, analogically speaking, given at creation. Therefore, there was only one end given. In other words, following the Tradition, and especially Thomas, a being not ordered to the Beatific vision is, de facto, not human. The extrinsicist confusion over ends demonstrates how something like “pure nature” could only have arisen following the loss of teleology, where “[f]inality was considered only as a rather extrinsic thing… a destination received more or less from outside and after the fact.”[20] So, the assertion is made that man could have a “superadded” destiny other than his happiness as the end of his desire. Here the departure from Thomas, to whom such an extrinsic manner of imparting an end would be enough to talk about a completely different being, could not be more apparent.[21] Something more intrinsic is needed to secure human finality and the gratuity of God.

Notes

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[1]   The Mystery of the Supernatural (New York: Herder and Herder, 1998), 6 f.25; Hans Urs von Balthasar,  The Theology of Karl Barth (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), 269.[2]   The Mystery of the Supernatural, 10: “Most people… have given up making St. Thomas responsible for the dualist theory which would deny all natural desire to see God – a theory which used commonly to be fathered upon him, owing to quite untenable interpretations.”[3]   ”Internal Causes of the Weakening and Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred,” (henceforth “Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred”) in Theology and History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996): 230.

[4]   ”Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred,” 230.

[5]   Ibid., 232.

[6]   Ibid., 233.

[7]   Ibid., 236.

[8]  Both the article and book proceed along similar trajectories. As such, I will consider them together in this section.

[9]  ”The Mystery of the Supernatural,” in Theology and History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996): 287.

[10]  The Mystery of the Supernatural, 22 and 28.

[11] ”The Mystery of the Supernatural,” 289; cf. The Mystery of the Supernatural, 207: “[I]t ultimately neither explains nor justifies anything… that part of modern western theology which we have had to criticize… is grasping at shadows rather than the reality.”

[12]  Ibid., 289: “it is difficult, in fact, to press it at all without being led to transfer to it more and more, one after another, all the attributes and all the privileges which our present humanity enjoys in its relation to God;” also in The Mystery of the Supernatural, 35-36: “[It] can not help our thinking along very much, without our ending up by gradually attributing to it more and more of the qualities and privileges which attach to our present human nature in relation to God.”

[13]  Ibid., 291: “One can not, if one uses one’s mind… refuse to respond to the real problems in the form in which they present themselves.”

[14]  Ibid., 289.

[15]  The Mystery of the Supernatural, 37.

[16]  Ibid., 47.

[17]  Ibid.

[18]  Ibid., 48.

[19]  Ibid., 55: “For God’s call is constitutive.

[20]  “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” 296; The Mystery of the Supernatural, 68.

[21]  Ibid., 296-297.