Per Caritatem

Commentary on Moorman’s Essay
by Dan McClain

Mary Moorman begins her erudite essay with a three point outline of Augustine’s use of the nuptial metaphor in his ecclesiology (about which I admit to knowing little). I was fascinated to learn that Augustine links his nuptial imagery not only to the cross but also the creation of woman. Following this logic Augustine states that, like Eve from Adam, the Church proceeds from the side of Christ toward a marital commitment to Christ that includes contractual and liturgical elements indicative to a marriage.

Moorman’s transition to Balthasar recognizes that Balthasar, like Augustine, sees the nuptial model as a helpful launching point for exploring the Church’s relationship to Christ. However, he goes further than Augustine in introducing the language of obedience as essential to the marriage between Christ and Church. “Von Balthasar insists that it is the obedience of the Church which is constitutive of her nuptial identity and purpose.”

Like de Lubac, Balthasar sees the Church as the vessel through which the whole world will be redeemed.  “There is but one turning wherein earth becomes heaven, and this turning point is the Church.” The Church’s public faith and obedience to Christ is not only a witness of Christ, but is primarily that for which the world was created. “The bond of our love is the meaning of the world.” Moorman suggests that here in the public nature of marriage, especially in the bride’s naked assent to the groom, we see the most explicit link between Augustine and Balthasar.

Moorman concludes with a reflection on Mary, the mother of Christ. She says, “if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent…The only condition- that the Church accept her bridegroom’s proposal- has already been met by the Marian fiat, and the fruits of this union wait to be enjoyed by all who constitute the Church through their participation in Mary’s own obedience.”

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece, not only for the interaction with Balthasar and de Lubac, but also for the opportunity to read more about Augustine’s ecclesiology. However, as my expertise lies more in former, I beg Cynthia’s and Mary’s forgiveness in limiting my comments to reflections on issues surrounding Balthasar’s use of the nuptial model. I’d like to offer just three critical reflections in conclusion, all of which stem from prelimenary concerns about what to me seems to be Balthasar’s deficient idea of marriage and, more generically, his use of typology.

First, it is dubious whether marriage includes all of the aspects that Balthasar imports into his nuptial ecclesiology under the concept of marriage. Most disconcerting to me is that his model of marriage presupposes mortifying obedience on the part of the wife. The Church as the Bride is called to total obedience, EVEN to the point of death: “Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death.” I am not sure how the marriage metaphor leads to this kind of mortifying obedience. Likewise, the nuptial relationship shared by Christ and the Church leads to the Church’s adherence to her husband’s totalizing agenda, and thus to the virtual disappearance of her identity, to be replaced by her husband’s: “Be for the world my embodied obedience, shown forth visibly and sensibly throughout all ages. Be so obedient that to say ‘Church’ will be to say ‘obedience’.”  Moreover, in losing her identify, the wife becomes the visible identity of the husband’s invisible kingdom: “My kingdom is invisible, but I want to establish you, my Bride, before the eyes of men so visibly that no one will be able to overlook you.” While I don’t dispute that the Church is to have this kind of obedience, I have serious misgivings about whether the marriage relationship is an appropriate or beneficial metaphor for getting at this obedience. Roman marriage, as Moorman rightly acknowledges, is the reference point for Balthasar and Augustine. But is this Christian marriage?

Secondly, in borrowing from marriage to talk about ecclesiology, Balthasar risks a reciprocal interpretation or re-presentation of Christian marriage. Moorman points to the influence on Balthasar of De Lubac’s incorporation of the Augustinian cosmology – union with God as the fulfillment of the cosmos’ identity. But de Lubac’s notion of fulfillment does not look like the one-sided image of marriage with which Balthasar is working, although he is therein attempting to expand de Lubac’s (and Augustine’s) idea of cosmological fulfillment precisely through employing the marriage model: “The bond of our love is the meaning of the world. In it all things reach fulfillment.” Yet, the insinuation of Balthasar’s nuptial cosmo-ecclesiology is that there is something inferior or unfilled about the concept of “bride,” and conversely something  superior about the concept of “husband.” Balthasar exposes Christian marriage to a reciprocal reinterpretation by employing the marriage model to explain the relationship of the Church to Christ, indeed the world’s fulfillment in and through the marriage relationship between Christ and the Church. Christian marriage, in light of nuptial ecclesiology, begins to look not like two people engaging in a life long commitment to one another of mutual love and submission, but rather of wives submitting to husbands in order to be fulfilled by their husbands (analogously?) as the Church submits to Christ and is thereby fulfilled. As the Church relinquishes her identity, wives too ought to lose their identity in order to manifest the their husbands’ identity, they ought to mortify themselves in obedience to their husbands. These conclusions are ramifications of what appear to be an unsystematic or unrestricted use of typology. How should one judge the direction and the extent to which the typology is to be employed?

Finally, bringing Marian doctrine to bear upon nuptial ecclesiology, Moorman says, “if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent.” De Lubac and Balthasar are both fond of calling Mary the mother of the Church (see especially de Lubac’s commentary of Lumen Gentium in The Church: Paradox and Mystery). Mary in many ways could be described as the first fruit of the Church, demonstrating proleptic faith in her complete yes to the Christ-child – although it is clear that Balthasar would like to go further by equating constituency in the Church as participation in Mary’s yes. Moreover, I have concerns with how much being part of the church is repeating Mary’s yes versus imitating Christ. Nonetheless, the metaphors of Bride and Mother become distorted when Mary is both the Mother of the Church and the archetype of the Bride. How can she be both Christ’s mother and Christ’s bride? I confess bewilderment as to what it means to embrace both metaphors simultaneously when each refers to something antithetical to the other. De Lubac doesn’t engage the two quite as systematically as Balthasar does. Neither offers a satisfactory solution. As long as the two function typologically the way that Balthasar employs them, it seems unlikely that there’s a middle ground to be had by balancing between the two as the two can neither be equivocal nor dialectically opposed. They are, rather, metaphors that seem to be best when left unmixed.

Quando Tu and The Nuptial Creation:
St. Augustine’s Enduring Influence on Contemporary Ecclesiology
Mary C. Moorman, Ph.D. candidate, Southern Methodist University

Historians such as David Hunter have proposed that one of Augustine’s favorite popular metaphors for the Church, as we find in his sermons, is that of a virgin bride, contracted in marriage to her husband by the tabulae matrimoniales of ancient Roman jurisprudence.[1] Thus, although various scholars have held that Augustine’s concept of the Church must always be regarded rather tentatively, since his ecclesiology is constituted by a complex and dynamic nexus of interconnected distinctions, historian Peter Brown proposes that Augustine portrays the Church in the commonplace legal imagery of a legitimately contracted bride when it became most necessary to delineate a clear ecclesiology for his parishioners against the separatist movements of his day.  Brown urges that “the atmosphere of a courtroom will follow Augustine into Church when he preached against the Donatists… with the same unnerving confidence as Monica (when displaying) her own marriage contract, Augustine would now produce the marriage contract of Christ and His Church.”[2]

Augustine’s “nuptial” ecclesiology may be summarized in three key elements. In the first place, Augustine teaches that the bridal Church was born from Christ’s suffering body:

(Just as) God sent a deep sleep upon Adam, in order to fashion a wife for him from his side…in Christ’s case, a bride was made for him as he slept on the cross, and made from his side.  With a lance his side was struck as he hung there, and out flowed the sacraments of the Church.[3]

From various Ennarationes such as in Psalmos 30, Augustine continues that Christ speaks for the members of the ecclesial bridal body to which He has joined Himself, as its Head, because “by a great sacrament (the Incarnation) these two were united in one flesh…out of two people, one single person comes to be, the single person that is Head and body, Bridegroom and Bride.”[4]

Secondly, Augustine also holds that the bride of Christ is not merely born from Christ; she is also contracted to Christ in a mutual exchange of marital vows.  In this regard, Augustine describes the bridegroom at the wedding feast of John 2 as a metaphor for Christ the bridegroom in Tractate 26 on the Gospel of John:

For (even virgins) together with the whole Church, attain to a marriage, a marriage in which Christ is the Bridegroom…For the bridegroom in that marriage, to whom it was said, “You have kept the good wine until now,” represented the person of the Lord.

Finally, the content of the nuptial vows exchanged between Christ and the Church stipulate their binding relationship to one another, as Augustine describes in an Easter octave sermon of AD 400:

The sacred reading of the Gospel, year after year, points out to us the true Christ and the true Church, to make sure that we are not mistaken in either of them, (as) by introducing the wrong bride to the holy bridegroom, or by presenting the holy bride with someone other than her true husband.  So, to be sure we make no mistake about either of them, let us listen, as it were, to their marriage contract in the Gospel.[5]

On closer inspection, the content of Augustine’s metaphors relate in imaginative ways to key excerpts of modern ecclesiology. We note in particular that the procedural family law of the classical Julian age required extensive negotiations between the father of the bride and the prospective groom, which ultimately culminated in the body of the bride. While the social context on which Augustine drew for his metaphor excluded the bride from the negotiations in anticipation of her wedding, Roman law did require the expectant bride to signify her public and free consent to the contract arranged between her betrothed husband and her father. She showed her legal consent in multiple and recurring ways. She would have worn her betrothed’s bronze rings, symbolizing the durability and frugality of the empire that would be constituted in part by her future household. She would have clasped her betrothed’s hand publicly, face- to- face, in symbolic declaration of fidelity. Finally, following the ratification of the detailed deed of purchase by which she was bestowed upon her husband at his wedding, she had to pause one last time on the threshold of her husband’s home for her final and free public act of consent to his nuptial invitation, without which no legal marriage could take place. She said “Quando Tu, Ego”: “whenever and wherever you are, I am then and I am there; wherever you are, I am.”[6]

Against this context, the nuptial images from several of Augustine’s ecclesiological sermons might indicate that a key assumption in the grammar of Augustine’s ecclesiology is that the true bride and true groom, as true Church and true Christ, are identifiable from the content of their legal vows, with the groom being the one who offers, and the bride being the one who assents. In other words, against those who would supplant her, the true bride may be identified as the one who is already familiar with the terms of her betrothed’s marital contract, by which she had been purchased as a bride, and to which she has manifested her free and binding consent.

If we transition imaginatively from this paradigm for Augustine’s ecclesiology, we find that Hans Urs Von Balthazar’s chapter entitled “The Conquest of the Bride” in his Heart of the World of 1979 highlights an ecclesiological theme which strikingly resounds with Augustine’s implicit theme of the nuptial Quando Tu.[7] Here, as elsewhere, Von Balthasar unequivocally appropriates the Augustinian notion of the Church as sponsa Christi:

Our covenant – our blood-wedding, the red wedding of the Lamb – is already, here and now, the white bridal bed of divine love… You ought, in this way, to be my Bride and my Body, and it is my will to redeem the whole world in you…Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death.[8]

From this understanding of a nuptial union between Christ and the Church that is characterized by obedience, Von Balthasar depicts Christ commissioning the Church in a sense which imitates the ancient nuptial formula: “Where I am, there you too are to be. What I do, that are you to do in me.”[9] Von Balthasar insists that it is the obedience of the Church which is constitutive of her nuptial identity and purpose:

You ought, in this way, to be my Bride and my Body, and it is my will to redeem the whole world in you, exclusively in you. Be my handmaid. Renounce your will and nestle, like Ruth, at my feet. Become obedient even to death… Be for the world my embodied obedience, shown forth visibly and sensibly throughout all ages. Be so obedient that to say “Church” will be to say “obedience”; for redemption is found in obedience, and whoever proclaims me must depict my obedience even to the death on the cross…So it is that I wish to teach you my obedience: a blind obedience leading you to abandon your every insight, your every love, your every faith, and through this obedience they will recognize who has my Spirit and who belongs to my Body. But this obedience will be but the pledge of my love for you and of your love for me.

Von Balthasar continues that this nuptial union is thus properly one that is publicly enacted and publicly ratified by acts of consenting faith:

My kingdom is invisible, but I want to establish you, my Bride, before the eyes of men so visibly that no one will be able to overlook you.”…I want to raise you up like the brazen serpent in the desert, like the rock against which hell itself is dashed to pieces… So there you stand, my Bride, truly a sign over the peoples at which fingers point, a widely known but little loved sign. Your failure redounds to me, since on your account my name, too, is blasphemed among the heathen…. in spite of everything, you will be my sign among the nations.

At this point we note that Augustine’s notion of the nuptial Church, as the corporation which performs public signs of faith to ratify her nuptial covenant, might also contextualize DeLubac’s contemporary description of the entire universe as a nuptial creature formed for the enjoyment of union with its creator. Citing Gregory of Nyssa’s references to o anthropos bios, DeLubac explains that “(the Fathers) seemed to witness (human nature’s) birth to see it live, grow, and develop, as a single being” both with regard to its origin, salvation, and eschatological end:

With the first sin it was this being, whole and entire, which fell away, which was driven out of Paradise and sentenced to a bitter exile until the time of its redemption.  And when Christ at last appeared, coming as ‘one bridegroom’, his bride, once again, was the whole human race.[10]

In brief, DeLubac’s sense of a nuptial consummation which recapitulates the entire creation is affirmed by Von Balthasar’s description of the Church as the one who can “gather up all humanity in order to present it to (Christ) as the one fruit in the libation-cup of (her) prayer.”[11] For Von Balthasar, the Church can unify and embody the world for Christ in as much as she is joined to Christ, who is Himself “the whole…the Head of the Body and the soul which unifies it.”[12] Von Balthasar elaborates further on the purpose of the Church’s nuptial union- as the consummation of the entire creation- in a manner which accords with DeLubac:

I have died once, and only once does my Body, my Church, pass over from death to life. This is the one turning. Each of your members must make it a reality in union with me, each in his own place, in his own century, but in the unity of the one change, in the transubstantiation of this world into the other world…There is but one turning wherein earth becomes heaven, and this turning point is the Church…Here the old man is replaced by the new. Here the world dies and another world rises… To you, my Church, have I entrusted this fountainhead…You yourself are the holy heart of the nations, holy because of me, but unifying the world for me, making my Blood circulate throughout the body of history. In you my redemption ripens, I myself grow to my full stature, until I, two-in-one with you, and in the bond of the two-in-one flesh – you, my Bride and my Body – will place at the feet of the Father the Kingdom which we are. The bond of our love is the meaning of the world. In it all things reach fulfillment.[13]

Von Balthasar’s contemporary references to the nuptial bond of love between Christ and the creation, through the Church’s responsive obedience qua nuptial assent, returns us to the implications of Augustine’s ecclesiological imagination, wherein the Church responds, with faith and public signs of assent, to Christ’s offer to all of creation. On Augustine’s metaphor, the Church does so in the same way as a Roman bride would have complied with the rituals of nuptial law by signifying her assent through public acts of compliance with her bridegroom’s offer. In this way, the Church signifies on behalf of the world the nuptial assent and faithful obedience that is required for its consummation.

What might we make of Augustine’s nuptial ecclesiology and the modern appropriations which emphasize the Church as the assenting creature who seals her nuptial contract on behalf of the entire world by her obedience to Christ? I would suggest that the strain examined here might turn modern ecclesiology towards a renewed consideration of Mary of Nazareth and the tradition in which she, as mater ecclesiae, is honored as the definitive nuptial agent who utters the consenting, responsive Quando Tu, Ego for the redemption of the world. In the mind of the tradition, long before the Holy Spirit hovered over the Pentecost community to inaugurate the life of the Church, the same Holy Spirit had once hovered over the first fruit of the Father’s promises to the Son, when a timid teenage girl in Nazareth paused at the threshold of her spouse’s household, and, to conclude the long series of free acts of assent made by the symbolic gestures of her ancestors, gave consent to the terms established: may it be to me according to your word. Thus, if we trace a nuptial reading of ecclesiology back to the earliest tradition, we find that the nuptial covenant between God and humanity is somehow already completed in Mary’s joyful obedience at the Annunciation, such that it remains for the rest of humanity simply to echo her binding act of consent. Thus, with her own definitive “let it be to me according to your word, wherever you go, I will go,” we simply join in: “Amen.” It is in this way that Von Balthasar’s modern ecclesiology rejoices that in Mary, the archetype of the Church, the door to the Father’s household has already been opened, the nuptial covenant has been ratified, the word has been made flesh in the body of the bride, their marriage has been consummated on the cross, and its procreative purpose is already unfolding in the weary world as humanity is gathered, more and more, into Christ’s nuptial embrace of His Church. The only condition- that the Church accept her bridegroom’s proposal- has already been met by the Marian fiat, and the fruits of this union wait to be enjoyed by all who constitute the Church through their participation in Mary’s own obedience.

Notes

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[1] David G. Hunter, “Augustine and the Making of Marriage in Roman North Africa,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 11.1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

[2] Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

[3] Augustine, Ennaratione in Psalmos 56.11.

[4] Augustine, Ennaratione in Psalmos 3, 4.

[5] Augustine, Sermon 238.  The Works of St. Augustine.  Sermons, Vol III.7 “On the Liturgical Seasons,” trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (New Rochelle: New City Press, 1980). See also Augutine, Sermons 37 and 293,  Ennarationes in Psalmos 45 and 72, Tractate 26 on the Gospel of John, and On Marriage and Desire I.11.

[6] Susan Treggiari,  Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

[7] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Conquest of the Bride,” from chapter 12 in Heart of the World (Ignatius Press, 1979).

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Henri de Lubac, Catholicism:  Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (Ignatius Press, 1988) p. 27.

[11] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, “The Conquest of the Bride,” from chapter 12 in Heart of the World (Ignatius Press, 1979).

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

By Daniel W. McClain

IV. Creation as Gift: moving forward with nature and grace

If de Lubac proposes a recovery of Thomas’ teaching on the desiderium naturale that is sensitive to the concern to maintain an intrinsic end to human nature, he is also aware of the concern presented by those who initially adopted the pure nature hypothesis. We need a way now to move beyond the dead weight of pure nature that is also able to address its substantial concerns. We have to be able to talk about the supernatural finality of this human nature without either lessening the gratuity of the supernatural or the integrity of human nature in receiving that finality. We need to be able to hold both that “grace perfects nature” and “the total transcendence of the gift.”[1]

Part of de Lubac’s brilliance rests in his use of the analogy of gift over and against the hypothesis of pure nature. He begins with the two parallel movements in the creation of human being: first, the gift of “me to myself;” and second, the “imprint[ing] on my being a supernatural finality.”[2] These two movements, which de Lubac calls “formulas,” do much more to demonstrate divine gratuity than “pure nature.” The first moment shows the paradoxical and gratuitous beginning of human existence, that there is no phrase that can ever really get at the act of instantiating a me in order to receive the gift of myself. This movement helps to demonstrate the distinct character of both essence and existence. For the human being, God’s gratuity goes to the bottommost depth of human nature, so much so that it escapes any and all systematic explanations inasmuch as they imply a subject that is first created and, only after creation, given a supernatural finality. All such explanations that would ontologically separate my being from my supernatural finality are erected upon a “fictitious presupposition.”[3] In fact, we ought to affirm these explanations, yet in the same breath refuse to rest on them as if they were adequate. Rather, all of our postulations on nature and grace need to guard against any reification of an hypothetical order, of conceiving of the human relation to God only from analogies within nature.[4] De Lubac sees the solution to this error in a better understanding of the gift of grace which holds together the “twofold ontological passage” of existence and supernatural finality. The donum perfectum illuminates both the impassable distance between God and creation and the fact that “this gift constitutes for nature a real sublimation… a real deification” although “there is not… the least supernatural element in [nature].”[5] Thus, God’s call to being, the awakening of the desire for the end in Him, and the grace which instantiates both requires that we hold fast to both the “heterogeneity” of nature and that the connection which “the spiritual creature has… to God… comes from its origin.”[6]

The gift of the desire for the supernatural finality is unique. De Lubac argues that it cannot be explained by resorting to any kind of analogy to natural relationships. It demands the clear distinction between “the gifts of grace” and “the gifts of nature.”[7] The mystery of grace requires us to hold in tension the distinction between nature and supernatural with the natural desire for the donum perfectum, which, quoting Pascal, de Lubac calls the “new world” we receive in Christ when we behold God as he is.[8]

V. The Paradox of “the completely free gift”

What is important to keep in mind is that the desire for a supernatural finality neither enables the human to achieve that finality by natural impetus nor gives ownership of that finality.[9] The desire for the beatific vision is not the same as knowing what will be entailed in that vision or possessing the vision itself. Nor does the desire entail that we are owed the vision: “It is the free will of the giver which awakens the desire. This is incontestable.”[10] The mystery of this is only problematic to those that have accepted a rational univocity. The Word itself presents a mystery, that

“is baffling to a philosophy of pure rationality but not to a philosophy which recognizes in the human mind both that potential absolute that makes it declare the truth, and that abyss of darkness in which it remains by that fact of being both created and bodily.[11]

But even bound to mystery and its own limits, human reason is unbounded. It can criticize itself and the concepts it has accepted. Some are too quick to accept solutions, analogies, “clear cut harmonies and explanations” in theology where a sense of mystery should have been retained.[12] Because of a lack of historical and doctrinal knowledge of the desiderium naturale, many theologians adopted positions that seemed the “safest” but which actually “lessened” the gratuity of the supernatural, making it “superficial.”[13]

De Lubac offers a corrective to the apparent contradiction in the call to supernatural finality by correlating “the offer of grace… in the sphere of moral liberty… [to] the call to the supernatural… in the ontological sphere.” Insofar as the offer of grace enables moral freedom, a formula already accepted in moral theology, de Lubac argues that simultaneously the call to the supernatural finality enables the natural desire for that end. The difference between the two is only logical. By dialectically maintaining divine initiative in both cases via his form of intrinsicism, de Lubac holds the supposedly opposed orders of nature and gratuity together in a way that neither compromises nature nor lessens gratuity.[14]

Whereas de Lubac argues that God, of his own good will, orders within us a supernatural finality toward which we desire, others have gone so far as to assert that this supernatural finality, as opposed to a natural finality, would be tantamount to making our natures themselves supernatural. The consequences of this would indeed be contrary to Thomas’ teaching. However, need a supernatural finality entail a supernatural human nature, an idea as obviously illogical as it is heterodox? To the extent that Augustine, Thomas, Bonaventure, and Scotus – to name a few – contribute to the trajectory and consensus of the first fifteen centuries of the Tradition, it has certainly not been foreign or untenable to the Tradition to hold that natural human wonder and desire reaches beyond itself. Further, we have also seen in St. Thomas that true happiness for humanity only consists in the ultimate rest in God of that wonder and desire in the after life. In this regard, Feingold’s premise is dubious: “According to St. Thomas, the natural inclination of our will is directed to the end that is proportionate to our nature…”[15] At stake here is not necessarily the notion of proportionality, but what he means by nature and natural. Has he already accepted the premises of pure nature? Besides, Feingold is also misguided by his own equivocations in his criticisms of de Lubac. Consider the following: “the addition of a supernatural principle….”; “…determined by a supernatural finality…”; and “…a supernatural finality inscribed upon it…”[16] His very terminology is constrained by his extrinsicism. He seems to miss the point of de Lubac’s recovery of not only the natural desire, but also his emphasis upon and recovery of an intrinsic finality, and therefore anthropology.

Another way of looking at the issue is to ask with de Lubac if it is contradictory to assume that man could have a purely natural finality which was at some later time replaced with a supernatural one. What is wrong with the notion that God’s grace is imparted to human nature in the act of giving a different finality? Does not this notion bind God to the natural law of a hypothetical order? “God is in no way governed by ‘prototypes’… In the Word all is ‘reason’; all the ‘intelligible world’ is concentrated in Him…”[17] As such, it is rather illogical to talk about humanity having two ends without losing the integrity of the creature as God knows the creature. “My destiny is an ontological thing, which I can not change as an object changes in destination.”[18] Although it must be maintained that he could have indeed done this, God’s love as Creator for his creatures would imply that God would not divert the end of his creation after creating it, as if it were a channel of water. Diverting the end of the created order would, in de Lubac’s analysis, essentially and ontologically change the identity of the created order. In other words, one could ask: if my ontological being has to be swapped for another, then is it really me experiencing the beatific vision?

Furthermore and more importantly, this second act of ordering to the beatific vision restricts God’s love. “It is… important to get rid of any idea of a God who, though free in theory, is basically morally determined by the perfection of a certain possible universe to create that universe.”[19]  Drawing from Romano Guardini and von Balthasar, de Lubac declares that freedom in the divine life needs to be radically reinterpreted in the light of love. God’s love is both the object of his freedom but is also the entirety of the divine life. Inasmuch as that divine life is everything, there is nothing external to God’s life that constrains him. Thus, the all-encompassing Love is also that which encompasses and redefines liberty.[20] Love, thus understood, loosens the tight grip we are often tempted to have of notions which otherwise seem stable and from which we might put any constraint, restriction, or demand on God.[21]

It is fitting, then, that de Lubac ends with a reflection on Ephesians 1:3-6 in which love is the principle that call us to our destiny, a destiny which no longer serves our purposes but a new doxological purpose. God calls us to love him as a lover calls the beloved. Both God and humanity desire love that is freely given, love which is subject to no demand or claim, but is given and received as a free gift. Yet, so great is His love that, to His praise, he freely gives us His grace in both the very origin of human nature and then “chose us in [Christ]” to be his sons. Thus, the very advent of Christ frames the meaning of human nature and finality in a radical light that can only lead to a profound sense of mystery.[22] Eventually, however, this mystery must give way to worship: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… to the praise of his glorious grace…”

Notes

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[1]    The Mystery of the Supernatural, 23.[2]    “The Mystery of the Supernatural.”, 300.[3]    The Mystery of the Supernatural, 79.

[4]    “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” 304: “Hence their habit of thinking strictly of the relation of the spiritual creature to God by means of analogies draw from what happens within nature… Thus one comes to lay down as law that all being must have its connatural end, proportioned to its nature and of the same order as it.”

[5]    Ibid., 302-303.

[6]    Ibid., 304.

[7]    The Mystery of the Supernatural, 89.

[8]    Ibid., 91.

[9]    Ibid., 96; cf. 99: “His sovereign liberty encloses, surpasses and causes all the bonds of intelligibility that we discover between the creature and its destiny;” cf. 155-156, against Cajetan, de Lubac argues (with Matthew of Aquasparta, Soto, Bonaventure, Alexander of Hales, Gregory of Velencia, and Scotus) that it is man’s desire for that which is higher than himself which he can not attain on his own that “it is a mark of superiority.”

[10]  Ibid., 207.

[11]  Ibid., 171.

[12]  Ibid., 177; “Longing for a clear solution on the immediate level of understanding, they have allowed themselves to be guided uncritically by analogies drawn from social relationships or even from the material universe” (176); “It is in any case certainly true that theology is not, or ought not to be, a buildup of concepts by which the believer tries to make the divine mystery less mysterious, and in some cases to eliminate it altogether” (178).

[13]  Ibid., 178.

[14]  Ibid., 183; cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory: The Action, vol. IV (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 145: “[M]an’s inner, Faustian restlessness is resolves at its real, destined goal, that is, in the God who has taken the initiative in revealing, proclaiming, disclosing and giving himself. For man, fashioned by the Logos, is essentially constructed along dia-logical lines: any mono-logical interpretation is bound to destroy him.”

[15]  Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters (Rome: Apollinare Studi, 2001), 534.

[16]  Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God, 534 (emphasis mine).

[17]  The Mystery of the Supernatural, 230-231.

[18]  “The Mystery of the Supernatural,” 294.

[19]  The Mystery of the Supernatural, 230; cf. 232: “For such philosophy will no more allow the slightest moral necessity to influence God’s action that it will any metaphysical necessity…”

[20]  Ibid., 228-229.

[21]  Ibid., 235: “God is Love in person, love which freely, and not because of any law or inner determination, creates the being to whom he wills to give himself, and gives himself freely”; cf. 236: “He is a God of whom it would be blasphemy and madness to suppose that any demand of any order whatsoever could be forced upon him, in whatever hypothetical situation one may mentally place oneself, or whatever concrete situation one may imagine creatures to be in… The gratuitousness of the supernatural order… remains gratuitous in every hypothesis. It is forever new.”

[22]  This may what von Balthasar is getting at when he says, “no man will ever hit upon the solution God has in store, that is, the Incarnation of the Logos and his atoning death upon the Cross on our behalf” (Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory: The Action, vol. IV, 143.

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.

By Daniel W. McClain

II. Thomas 2: The Vision of God in the Summa Theologica

Having demonstrated in the Summa Contra Gentiles that happiness is humanity’s end,[1] he  elaborates on the desiderium naturale in the Summa Theologica I-II. He launches into it by demonstrating the incoherence of a person having several “last ends.” The desire a person longs for is “his ultimate end, that which he desires as his perfect and crowing good.” It makes little sense to talk of a last end that does not comprehensively satisfy the appetite. Moreover, the “principle” of the last end is “that which is naturally desired. Now this must needs be one: since nature tends to one thing only.”[2] Thomas’ understanding of the end being one will be particularly relevant when we explore criticisms of de Lubac’s thesis below.

From the onset of question 3 (“What is Happiness”), Thomas declares that happiness, understood in both its senses as that which God gives the creature in the gift of himself and that which the creature derives from the attainment of its end, is the final end of human nature, thus it is both uncreated and created.[3] Nevertheless, by the end of question 3, Thomas determined that only the vision of the divine essence itself could satisfy the natural desire for happiness.  He reviews what he has thus said, that the end is only properly had when 1. the person’s desire is at rest (there is nothing left to seek), and 2. it has reached the object of desire in its essence. How is this tall order realized? “[I]t will have its perfection through union with God as with that object, in which alone man’s happiness consists…”[4]

Therefore, Thomas is unequivocal in his affirmation that humanity naturally desires happiness as the end of human nature.[5] He is equally as emphatic that this naturally desired happiness is one which is ultimately and finally fulfilled in the vision of and union with God.[6] In his response to the first objection stated in question 5, article 5, Thomas repeats that this happiness is only imparted gratuitously, that it therefore cannot be attained via human agency. However, through free will, a person may “turn to God, that He may make him happy.”[7] There is thus an opening in human nature to divine initiative, in and through the human desire for God and free will to act on that desire. There is also a corresponding dependence on God’s grace, without which the Divine Essence’s vision is impossible. Thomas’ teaching on the desiderium naturale visionis dei consists not only in an intellectual grasp of God as First Cause, but also something more profound, a desire beyond grasping the final cause that wishes to know the cause in its essence.[8]

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[1]    SGC III.48.3[2]    ST I-II.1.5[3]    ST I-II.3.1[4]    ST I-II.3.8

[5]    ST I-II.1.5

[6]    SCG III.57.4

[7]    ST I-II.5.5

[8]    ST I-II.3.8: “[F]or perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause…”

This begins a multi-part series on de Lubac by Daniel W. McClain.  Daniel is a doctoral student of theology at the Catholic University of America and blogs at The Land of Unlikeness.  

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By Daniel W. McClain

Henri de Lubac is one of a few rather unique Thomists of the twentieth century in that he produces a reading of themes in Thomas Aquinas in sharp contradistinction to the major current in Thomistic thought of his time. His Mystery of the Supernatural is both a rehabilitation and revolutionary extension of St. Thomas’ teaching on the desiderium natural visionis dei. It is an historical and exegetical resuscitation of Thomas’ synthesis of the natural desire for the supernatural. But, following Thomas’ two principal insights that led to this synthesis, it is also an original rethinking of the problematic of nature and grace. Emerging from the controversy over the desiderium naturale, de Lubac produces a new way of understanding and holding together Thomas’ synthesis of the natural desire to see God, namely through the analogy of gift.

However, Thomas’ synthesis presented other theologians with two severe difficulties. Often, they accepted the premises, but rejected the conclusion. Some alleged that affirming a natural desire for the supernatural makes the natural somehow supernatural. Others complained that a natural desire places a demand on the supernatural to fulfill man’s perfection. Both criticisms are important to de Lubac, evidenced by the length and thoroughness of his response to them. In order to thoroughly appreciate de Lubac’s contribution to reading Thomas and his response to the critics, it is fitting that we first understand St. Thomas’ proposal of the natural desire to see God and the problems successive theologians faced in holding together the tensions inherent to that proposal, for it is their rejections of Thomas’ synthesis that de Lubac is primarily responding to in Mystery of the Supernatural. Thus, as the debate turns on Thomas’ teaching of the natural desire for the supernatural, I begin with an exposition of his two principles of humanity’s end and God’s gratuity in the relevant sections of the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Summa Theologica. Second, I argue that de Lubac’s recovery of Thomas’ teaching on the natural desire re-presents Thomas’ two principles and synthesis in a way that gives a robust answer to the ciriticisms. Third, I conclude with de Lubac’s extension of Thomas’ thought via the analogy of gift.

I. Thomas 1: The Vision of God in the Summa Contra Gentiles

In all of his writing on the desiderium naturale, Thomas affirms two principles. First, there is only one thing that can satisfy human longing, wonder, curiosity, and desire. Previously, philosophy had asserted that it was knowing God as first cause. However, Thomas argues that it is seeing God as He sees Himself in His own essence. Second, this beatific seeing is never something that humanity can attain by its own ability. Rather, it is only in God freely giving Himself to humanity that we can ever hope to see Him. It is with the desiderium natural visionis dei that Thomas holds the two principles together. In other words, humanity has a natural desire for a supernatural end, that is, the Beatific vision.

In book III, chapter 48 of the Summa Contra Gentiles, Thomas, following Augustine, is quite straightforward that man has one end which can not be achieved in this life.[1] It is natural that human intelligence is never at rest in this life; rather, we are always seeking more, and  consequently, are never satisfied. Thus, the restlessness itself being natural, so too the desire for the rest is also natural, although what the desire seeks is not known naturally.

Happiness, according to Thomas, is the end which human nature desires. However, for a human to achieve this happiness, she would have to be in a total state of rest, desiring nothing and seeking nothing. Seeing that a state of complete rest is impossible in this life, the kind of happiness that is afforded on this side of death is a shadow of the kind sought by human desire. As such, Thomas repeats that “man’s ultimate happiness can not be in this life”; yet, human desire can not be “in vain,” leading him to conclude that the desire will be filled in the next life.[2]

In chapter 50, Thomas further establishes that the natural desire to know God is not satisfied in this life when he points out that knowledge of God in this life is imperfect because it can not comprehend God’s substance. Yet, that lack in our knowledge results in a desire to know more, indeed to know as we are known.[3] “Therefore, the desire for knowledge naturally implanted in all intellectual substances does not rest unless, knowing the substance of effects, they know also the substance of their causes… their natural desire does not rest, unless they see God’s substance also.”[4] However, human nature is not now capable of seeing God as such. Thus, Thomas in the next two chapters explores how it is possible that human nature will be able to see God “face to face.”

So, paradoxically, while “we must conclude that it is possible for the divine substance to be seen by means of the [human] intellect,” it is at the same time true “that the divine substance can not be seen by the intellect in any created species.”[5] As such, the human intellect will see the divine substance only when “in that vision the divine essence is both the object and medium of vision.” In this new vision we will truly know God as we are known by him because we will “become most like unto God,” knowing God as he knows himself, which knowledge “is His bliss.”[6] And yet, while this is our natural desire, it is by no means naturally attainable, that we should attain God’s essence so as to see God as God is. Only God in His own action can bring this about. Thomas makes this clear in 52.1-2. Nevertheless, he states, “we have proved that man’s happiness consists in seeing God, which is called life everlasting: and we are said to obtain this by God’s grace alone, because that vision surpasses the faculty of every creature… and it is impossible to attain thereto except by God’s gift…”[7]

Notes

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[1]    Confessions, Book 1, Chapter 1: “tu excitas ut laudare te delectet, quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te.”[2]    Summa Contra Gentiles, III.48.3[3]    SGC III.50.1-2[4]    SGC III.50.8

[5]    SGC III.51.1-2

[6]    SGC III.51.6; 1 John 3:2

[7]    SGC III.52.6