By Dr. Jeff Mirus Jun 15, 2015 (from his posting of De Lubac's "
(...)
"De Lubac (1896 - 1991) is a pivotal figure in
Catholic theology in the mid-20th century, a man unwillingly locked in a battle
on two fronts. On the one side were the largely misguided systematic Thomists
who dominated the Roman Curia, expending great energy to secure condemnations
of every insight that did not fit conveniently into their own excessively
abstract system—almost a philosophy rather than a theology, and increasingly
divorced from the sources of theology in Scripture and the Fathers. On the
other roamed the Modernists, rapidly rising to leadership in the Jesuit Order
and elsewhere, who for many good reasons distrusted the narrow establishment in
Rome, but who spiraled into an unbridled secularism which has seriously
undermined the Faith.
"I have already traced in the introduction the
broad outline of the theological controversy which afflicted the Church for a
generation or two before the Second Vatican Council. This was an age of
religious formalism, very frequently affecting not only theological thought,
but a common attitude toward the life of faith, personal piety, and liturgy. As
an historian, I would suggest that three powerful influences contributed to the
problem.
A purely theological influence would be the
tendency of the followers of St. Thomas Aquinas to devote themselves to
extending his theological system through logical reasoning on previously
established points, rather than taking the kind of fresh look at the Christian
sources which always characterized the method of St. Thomas himself. This
insistence that everything be derived from and fit into a particular system was
rendered even more problematic by the fact that much of the system building was
based on the initial commentaries by major early figures like Cardinal Cajetan,
who—on a number of key points—simply misunderstood Thomas’ thought.
A more immediate historical influence might be
attributed to the two world wars of the twentieth century. Throughout the West,
people came to have a profound respect for military precision and obedience,
and all the habits of thought associated with soldiering. Those who can
remember the 1950s will remember a society still interested in precise dress,
short military hair cuts, and punctilious manners when it came to rank, not to
mention the need to concern oneself primarily with one’s own duties, while
accepting unquestionably the larger decisions of authority. This lent the
entire culture a quality of systemic formalism.
A far broader influence was the long, slow
secularization of Western civilization, so that by the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, much had been drained away from the heart of the Christian life.
Increasingly, this life consisted of a series of virtuous habits shored up not
so much by interior conviction as by social expectations devoid of active
spiritual judgment. Every period has its own problems; remember that I am
talking here about pervasive cultural trends. A common approach to the
spiritual life in those days has been famously captured in a stock question
which really was often asked: “Just tell me what I need to do to get to
purgatory.” The first half of the twentieth century has been justly described
as a period in which Catholicism tended to be lived “prescriptively”, with
little immersion in the mystery of God’s life within.
False Understanding of "Natural - Supernatural"
"Interestingly, some of the world’s best theologians from the 1930s through the 1950s began to see quite clearly that this prescriptivism was partly a response to the false view of the natural and the supernatural which characterized the reigning Thomist school. This school, which had enormous power in Rome, had concluded that there was a state of pure nature in which man was created and placed. Adherence to this concept was considered essential (which it was not) to protecting the idea that salvific grace is always gratuitous—that man cannot claim it as something he is owed.
"It was actually de Lubac himself who struck
the death blow to this naturalist error, and he did it partly through bypassing
the schoolmen and going back to St. Thomas himself. De Lubac insisted (rightly)
that the natural order must be understood not as a separate order but as a part
of the overall order created by God, that is, as a component or aspect of a
single supernatural order. Thus human nature is not in its essence cut off from
grace; it is not isolated in a fundamentally different order of being. Rather,
human nature has been created and formed such that each person who possesses it
tends toward God, depends upon and is designed for receptivity to grace, and
finds fulfillment in Divine union.
"De Lubac advanced his thesis in one of the
more famous theological treatises in any age of the Church, simply
entitled Supernatural, or as it is always referred to in the
original French, Surnaturel. One of the results of the reigning
error, which ties in closely with the rest of the background I have presented,
was that this strict division between the natural and supernatural orders had
led to a vast theoretical framework defining a whole separate set of ends
natural to man, while categorically refusing any possible intrinsic orientation
to God. (I can actually recall this excessive
insistence upon separate natural ends in my youth in the 1950s and early
1960s.)[ Blogger: so can I].
Far from attempting to weaken the concept of
the supernatural, De Lubac saw this unwarranted separation as a clear theological
cause of secularization—the same secularization which was already reducing
religion to a kind of formalism, devoid of interior life, rather like a suit of
clothes draped over our real natures. Once this happens, of course,
Christianity is easily swept away altogether.
Ever since the 1960s we have been hearing how
the Council caused this or that tragedy of secularization, but this is a gross
distortion of causation. In fact, good bishops were already mentioning from the
start of the Council that their priests had fallen out of the habit of prayer,
and that Catholicism was increasingly being lived mechanically, with little or
no inner substance. Already the better bishops were hoping that the Council
would find a solution—a renewal. We now know that many bishops were themselves
spiritually ennervated, which makes very striking the difference between what
they decided at the Council and how they allowed those decisions to be derailed
after they returned home. (This may be taken as a practical proof of the work
of the Holy Spirit in an ecumenical council.) Still, a good and by no means
isolated example of the better type of bishop can be identified in the
auxiliary bishop from Krakow, Karol Wojtyla (who became Pope John Paul II).
In any case, the critical shift in theological
perception argued by de Lubac (and others) was ultimately embraced by the
Council. But for that to happen, the Council fathers had to reject the many
preparatory documents created by the Curia, dominated as it was by
commentary-based Thomists of the strict secondary observance—narrow system men.
Thus the Council fathers found it necessary to redraft just about everything,
and those theologians who had long advocated what is called resourcement—the
return to the sources in Scripture and the Fathers for fresh insights and a
more secure foundation—finally came into their own.
De Lubac was one of these. Throughout the
1950s, he had been subject (and obedient) to a censor and other limitations on
his teaching and writing because of the distrust of the dominant Roman
Thomists. It was not until Pius XII died and John XXIII became Pope that de
Lubac was called back into the light. He was invited to serve on the committee
doing preparatory work for the Council, right along with men who had condemned him,
who had circulated vicious rumors about his lack of faith, and who had brought
about his not atypical but decidedly unjust censure.
De Lubac himself rarely permitted himself to
express bitterness. But the bitter fruit of these years was ripening in many
others who would end by vomiting up the faith along with the sour system of
petty curial control. To take just one example, consider the rebellion
against Humanae Vitae in 1968 at Catholic University in
Washington, DC. This became the dominant trend of the immediate post-conciliar
period as chanceries, universities and religious orders fell into the hands of
previously-secret Modernists, basking in the secularist glow of post-1960
culture, who had rooted themselves not in the faith but in worldly ideals. It
meant that de Lubac would soon have as many powerful enemies on the “left” as
he had once had on the “right”.
By the time Henri de Lubac, SJ was made a
cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 1983, the great theologian had charted a truly
ecclesial course between the Scylla and Charybdis of the modern world. But we
need go no further here, since almost everything of continuing interest
reported in his Council notebooks can now be understood. These notes begin with
his unexpected summons to Rome" (where he was to be a peritus in the Second Vatican Council).
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