Per Caritatem

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

By Michael Deem

In this, my final installment on the Ressourcement movement in Catholic theology, I wish to briefly sketch the impact and historical endurance of the movement. While Henri de Lubac may rightly be described as the centerpiece of Ressourcement, he most certainly was not alone in infusing its spirit into Catholic life and thought. Rather, he was flanked by a number of confreres in theology and philosophy which ensured that this spirit remained embodied in theology and philosophy alike.[1]

As has been mentioned, the spirit of Ressourcement may be succinctly described as a return to the first interpreters of Christian revelation, the Church Fathers, so as to rediscover and revitalize the essence of Christianity in the midst of Europe’s modern crises of faith. Therefore, contrary to the perception of many of its detractors from both within and without Catholic theological circles, Ressourcement was neither a simple exercise in some sort of theological archeology nor a nostalgic admiration of bygone eras. Ressourcement was responding to two chief trends in 20th century Europe: 1. the ossification of Catholic theology due to the manual tradition of Neo-Scholasticism, which had a. deemed itself the only proper philosophical response to modern philosophy’s preoccupation with subjectivity and ideas, and b. claimed that, through Thomas Aquinas and the commentary tradition, it had extracted and unified the best teachings of the Fathers and Scholasticism, establishing itself as science; 2. the increasing disappearance of the sense of the sacred in European consciousness due to a. secularizing post-Enlightenment trajectories, b. the increasing irrelevance of the Christian worldview on account of liberal Protestant theology and Catholic Neo-Scholasticism.

The earliest efforts of that loose band of theologians whom we call Ressourcement thinkers have proven to be among the most enduring in Catholic theological studies. As early as 1942, the French Jesuits Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou had inaugurated the Sources Chrétiennes project, which sought to make available to the Francophile world fresh translations and critical editions of the writings of the Western and Eastern Fathers of the Church. The project continues today, having published its 500th translation and critical edition in May 2006.

It was the early recovery and reappropriation of the genuine Thomistic and Augustinian theologies of nature and grace through the efforts of de Lubac[2] and Henri Bouillard[3] that set the terms of the debate with Neo-Scholasticism on the one hand, and with ‘transcendental Thomism’ on the other. This latter debate continues today, though it appears that the theology of grace and nature as developed by Rahner and his disciples is beginning to fade due to its marked Suarezian base and its haphazard—or should I say schizophrenic—oscillation between Neo-Scholasticism and a poor interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s ‘existential’ phenomenology. On account of the efforts of de Lubac and Bouillard, the theology of grace has not gone out of style in Catholic theology and continues to be of interest to contemporary theologians.[4]

In 1946, Ressourcement had become a well recognized and, depending on who was asked, a rather notorious force in Catholic theology. If de Lubac’s Catholicisme (1938) may be called Ressourcement’s programmatic essay, Jean Daniélou’s 1946 essay “Le orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse” was its manifesto.[5] In this remarkable essay, Daniélou discussed three areas in current theology: 1. The spirit of Ressourcement as a return to early Christianity so as to revive biblical, historical and liturgical studies; 2. The need for Catholic theologians to dialogue with modern philosophy on the latter’s terms, employing the tools and ideas recovered through Ressourcement; 3. The gross need to move beyond the prevailing Neo-Scholasticism and its ahistorical and hermeneutically irresponsible attempts at systematization. Needless to say, the thinkers associated with the early Ressourcement movement, especially de Lubac, Bouillard and Daniélou, drew the ire of many Neo-Scholastics of the day, most notably that of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange and Marie-Michel Labourdette. It would be Garrigou-Lagrange who, expressing both disapproval and dismay, would coin what would become the lasting caricature of Ressourcement: “la nouvelle théologie”.[6]

The talk of a “new theology” fermenting among the French Jesuits no doubt left many in the Roman Curia uneasy. The prominence of Garrigou-Lagrange in Rome ensured that Pope Pius XII would catch word of the development. In 1950, the encyclical Humani Generis was promulgated in response to a number of troubling scientific, political, philosophical and theological trends in Europe. The encyclical made a cryptic reference to a “new theology” and the effort of some to destroy the gratuity of grace. While Humani Generis made no explicit reference to de Lubac and his confreres, many ecclesiastics and academics interpreted (wrongly) the encyclical as a condemnation of their efforts. After the promulgation of Humani Generis, the Superior General of the Jesuits ordered the removal of all of de Lubac’s books from Jesuit libraries and asked him to step down from his teaching position. Many others mistakenly took the encyclical as a censure of de Lubac’s positions and kept their distance from him. Daniélou and, to a lesser extent, Bouillard were also looked upon with suspicion. However, de Lubac would be vindicated when he was called by Pope John XXIII in the late 1950’s to help prepare the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).[7]

During the Second Vatican Council, the bishops voted overwhelmingly to scrap the various schemata prepared by the preparatory councils due to their archaic tone and stark dependency on Neo-Scholasticism’s outdated language and thought-forms. New constitutions were drafted under the aegis of a number of theological experts who had felt the heavy-hand of the Curia during the 1950’s: Henri de Lubac, Yves Congar, Edward Schillebeeckx and Hans Küng. What marked these drafts was a historical awareness of the development and pluralism of Catholic thought and liturgical practice across 1900 years. The Council began heading in a new direction, re-grounding the theology and liturgical life of the Church in the earliest Christian traditions stemming from the Fathers. The intention was to fortify the Church’s understanding of its foundations in order to respond to the modern world in terms that were both relevant and coherent. Thus, the work of the Second Vatican Council was largely shaped by the very spirit of Ressourcement. Ressourcement became virtually synonymous with the theme of the Council, aggiornamento—retrieval, restoration and renewal in the Church.[8]

After the Council, Neo-Scholasticism all but disappeared from the theological scene. At the risk of over-generalization, it may be said that Catholic theology largely followed two post-conciliar trajectories. On the one hand were a number of thinkers who interpreted the Council as sanctioning a thoroughgoing grounding of theology in the methods and manners of modern philosophy and/or historiography.[9] On the other hand was a number of thinkers who aligned themselves with the Ressourcement movement, and by extension, the truest spirit of the Council. These included, of course, the original members of the movement such as de Lubac, Daniélou and Congar, as well as a younger generation of thinkers who had been greatly influenced by their works. Most famous among them include Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Louis Bouyer and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II).[10]

If there is any doubt that the Catholic Church did not favor the Ressourcement movement in its theological and liturgical life after the Second Vatican Council, one need only point to the ecclesial honors bestowed on its greatest proponents. Three of the Ressourcement thinkers who were pivotal in forming the theology of the Second Vatican Council were made Cardinals: Jean Daniélou in 1969, Henri de Lubac in 1983 and Yves Congar in 1994. Rarely are theologians elevated to the College of Cardinals. Ressourcement movement has proven itself to be far more enduring than other twentieth-century movements in Catholic theology. While many of the post-conciliar theological trends continue to lose their abilities to provide answers to the questions of contemporary philosophy and society, Ressourcement thought continues to exert a strong influence in contemporary theology and Christian life. A few examples of this will suffice.

Since the early 1970’s, the pioneering Catholic theological journal Communio, which was founded by de Lubac, Ratzinger and Balthasar in order to aid in the interpretation, implementation and expression of conciliar theology, has been a major force in contemporary scholarship. Not only does the journal publish articles by contemporary theologians influenced and marked by the Ressourcement style, but it also reprints a number of short and scarce pieces by the major thinkers associated with the movement.

Henri de Lubac continues to be read and studied by specialists and non-specialists alike. In recent years, many of his ideas have been appropriated by the Radical Orthodoxy movement due to their recovery of the Neo-Platonist, Origenist, Augustinian and Scotist themes in the history of Christian thought that were typically forgotten or ignored by Neo-Scholasticism’s triumphalism and over-confidence.

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s recovery and development of the primacy of beauty among the Scholastic transcendentals has provided Catholic thought with a certain resiliency in the face of post-modernity’s sweeping critiques of modernity and its (dis)contents. Balthasar has become a pivotal figure in contemporary theological and philosophical discussions within and without Catholic circles.

Finally, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, has ensured the incorporation of Ressourcement theology in the Catholic doctrinal tradition. Less speculative than Balthasar and more philosophically and politically conscious than de Lubac, Ratzinger’s theology has been a constant address to, and discourse with, modern and contemporary philosophy and politico-social theory.

To conclude, it is worth repeating that Ressourcement never meant to remain an exercise within academic theology. On the contrary, Ressourcement was a spirit that found haven in a number of independent, diverse men of deep Christian conviction who possessed the understanding that Catholicism needed to rediscover its very core in order to survive in the shifting boundaries of Europe’s intellectual and political landscape. This necessitated a theology that was informed by its past so as to address the present, and a theology that was nourished simultaneously by its intellectual merits and its spiritual heritage. Ressourcement theology is a theology can be lived in prayer, in society and in academia. For this reason alone, it exposed the inadequacies of arid Neo-Scholasticism, it outlives its post-conciliar peers, and it will continue to inspire the whole of Christianity in a post-modern, post-religious world.

Notes:

[1] Abutting Ressourcement theology was the work of Maurice Blondel, Marie-Dominique Chenu and Étienne Gilson, all of whom possessed an acute sense for historicity and hermeneutics in philosophical investigation.

[2]Among Henri de Lubac’s major works on the nature/grace debate were Surnaturel (1946) [no English translation], Augustinisme et théologie moderne (1965) [ET: Augustinianism and Modern Theology, trans. Lancelot Sheppard (1969; reprint New York: Crossroad, 2000)], Le Mystère du surnaturel (1965) [ET: The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (1967; reprint New York: Crossroad, 1998)], and Petite catéchèse sur nature et grâce [ET : A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, trans. Richard Arnandez (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1984)]. It may be worth noting that, in his recent book on de Lubac and the ‘debate on the supernatural’, John Milbank does not once reference de Lubac’s last word on the issue, Petite catéchèse sur nature et grace. See John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).

[3] Among Henri Bouillard’s major contributions on the question of grace were Conversion et grâce chez S. Thomas d’Aquin (1944) [no English translation] and Blondel et le Christianisme (1961) [ET: Blondel and Christianity (Cleveland: Corpus, 1969)].

[4] Three recent books on this very topic are worth mentioning here: Stephen J. Duffy, The Graced Horizon: Nature and Grace in Modern Catholic Thought (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992); Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters (Dissertationes, 3; Rome: Edizioni Università della Santa Croce, 2001); John Milbank, The Suspended Middle.

[5] Published in Étudies 249 (1946): 5-21.

[6] The term was first used by Garrigou-Lagrange in his inflammatory and polemical essay, “La nouvelle théologie, où va-t-elle?”, Angelicum (1949): 126-45.

[7] De Lubac was joined by another theologian whose work was likewise suspect during the pontificate of Pius XII, Yves Congar. After the Second Vatican Council, both de Lubac and Congar would speak of the contempt and alienation they experienced prior to the Council’s proceedings due to the Neo-Scholastic dominated preparatory commission.

[8] The impact of Ressourcement is most acutely evidenced in the conciliar documents Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World) and Nostra Aetate (Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions).

[9] This is not to suggest that these thinkers comprised a monolithic trend in Catholic theology. Under the single banner of “pluralism” these thinkers followed a number of different paths in theology.

By Michael Deem

Henri de Lubac—French priest, scholar and cardinal—stands at the center of the Ressourcement movement in Catholic theology. While he certainly was not the progenitor of Ressourcement, there seems to be little doubt that de Lubac is its most important and influential exponent. When one attempts to lay hold of the very heart of Ressourcement, one can do no better than to begin with de Lubac’s theological enterprise. Remarking on the manner in which de Lubac’s first book, Catholicisme (1938), affected his own theological orientation, Pope Benedict XVI—then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger—wrote in 1988: “(De Lubac) makes visible to us in a new way the fundamental intuition of Christian Faith so that from this inner core all the particular elements appear in a new light…Whoever reads de Lubac’s book will see how much more relevant theology is the more it returns to its center and draws from its deepest resources.”[1] Indeed, one can extend this sentiment to the whole Lubacian corpus.

What characterizes Ressourcement is that which characterizes the entirety of de Lubac’s thought: the conviction that the treasury of Patristic theology does not wear thin along the historical terrain traversed by Christianity and that Christianity cannot meet the exigencies of modern times without rediscovering its essence through a return to its sources in the Church Fathers.

Henri de Lubac entered the Jesuit order in 1914 and immediately gravitated toward a study of the Church Fathers, particularly of Origin and Augustine, during his formation. He was also quite drawn to the works of Rousselot and Blondel, and to a lesser extant Maréchal, all of whom he read alongside the staple Neo-Scholasticism of the religious reformation. What these authors addressed and assailed in the largely theoretical sphere became for de Lubac a concern in the practical and social sphere: the gradual disappearance of the sacred in every element of human existence. In a rarely quoted essay from 1942, de Lubac writes: “Now, basically, this world is not by itself either sacred or secular, for it receives its significance only through man. It can become one or the other according to the way in which man behaves in its regard.”[3]

At the heart of de Lubac’s theology is a concern to re-establish in the consciousness of humanity the Christian principle that the sacred—the presence of God’s saving activity—is not some foreign, invading force in an otherwise mundane, secular world. Rather, nature is always incomplete and unfulfilled without the gratuitous sanctification wrought by grace, and it is peculiar to human nature to release the full splendor of the grace given to it. For de Lubac, as for the Fathers, anthropology and ecclesiology are fully intelligible only in light of one another.

Marking de Lubac’s first two works (which can rightly be described as a sort of the programmatic for the Ressourcement movement) is his utter dismay for the utter secularization of modern European society. His first book, Catholicisme (1938), was published in Yves Congar’s Unam sanctam series. Illumining the historical, social and personalist understandings of the Church with constant reference to the Fathers, it contains the seeds for all of de Lubac’s subsequent thought, and was extensively read and translated throughout Europe. While primarily an historical study on the social character of the ecclesiology postulated and developed by the Fathers, it is undeniably clear that in it de Lubac is seeking to underscore the pervasive presence of grace in the world and the corresponding destiny of all humanity in Christ through the Church.

With the 1946 publication of his Surnaturel and its criticism of the neo-Scholastic theory of “pure nature”, de Lubac became the eye of the theological storm turning throughout Catholic Europe. De Lubac took issue with the hypothetical model of pure nature, which postulated a hypothetical natural end or telos for humanity in the absence of grace, in part due to its absence from the patristic and medieval traditions of the Church. He also noted what he saw as an increasing separation between the secular and sacred, the root of which was not modern philosophy or political circumstance, but the dry, logic based polemic of neo-Scholasticism against Baianism on the one hand, and ‘Cartesian’ rationalism on the other. Neo-Scholasticism, claimed de Lubac, was implicitly sanctioning the efforts of post-War Europe to banish religion and faith from the public sphere! In portraying nature as an autonomous system capable of attaining its end by means of its resources, Catholic theology was conceding nature—and humanity itself—to secularism.[4]

The Ressourcement movement, therefore, was not simply an effort to recover the riches of the Church Fathers so as to counter an impending ossification of Catholic theology. The Ressourcement movement was a valiant attempt by a number of theologians, de Lubac taking the lead, to breathe new life into the soul of Catholic theology so that it might simultaneously rediscover the very essence of Christianity through a return to its sources and respond to the needs and trends of modern, secular European society. Ressourcement restores relevance to theology by means of connecting with, and developing from its roots in the living reception and exposition of the revelation of Jesus Christ by the Fathers.

Notes:
[1] Joseph Ratzinger, “Foreword” to Henri de Lubac, Catholicism, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard and Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 11.
[2] In typically dramatic fashion, Hans Urs von Balthasar writes: “With Surnaturel, a young David comes onto the field against the Goliath of the modern rationalization and reduction to logic of the Christian mystery. The sling deals a death blow, but the acolytes of the giant seize upon the champion and reduce him to silence for a long time.” The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview, trans. Joseph Fessio and Michael M. Waldstein (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 63.
[3] “Internal Causes of the Weakening and Disappearance of the Sense of the Sacred,” in Theology in History, trans. Ann Elgund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), 232.
[4] I have a paper on the Surnaturel debate online at: http://henridelubac.blogspot.com/2006/03/supernatural-and-supernature-nature.html

Suggested Reading:

Henri de Lubac, At the Service of the Church: Henri de Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that Occasioned his Writings, trans. Anne Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).

Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Henri de Lubac: An Overview, trans. Joseph Fessio and Michael M. Waldstein (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991).

Susan K. Wood, Spiritual Exegesis and the Church in the Theology of Henri de Lubac (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998).

John Milbank: Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).